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Monday, June 16, 2003 Just returned from a wonderful few days in Dorset. Sue and I took the savages to Lyme Regis, where the sun beat down and we had days on the beach hunting for fossils and fishing for crabs in rock pools. I can't remember he I last had such a wonderful week. We made a fire on the beach one night, something I haven't done since we lived on the Greek Islands, and it immediately plunged me back. Then on the last evening with a sky on fire I tapped open a rock picked at random and found two golden ammonites nestling inside.And I know it just means that two million years ago these creatures were compressed inside the Jurassic rock. I know all that. But I'm looking at these two miraculous ammonites and going >What does it mean? What does it mean?< Heck I think I needed a break. I re-read my last posting on this site and it sounded like the demented baying of a moonstruck wino outside the locked and barred Salvation Army shelter. But I felt so good at the end of this week I wanted to put a plaque up somewhere: in memory of a truly glorious week. But I wouldn't be sure where to hang it, and anyway I've got the ammonites to be a rough alphabet of all the fun. Sometimes I think I need someone to tap my head with a geological hammer, and then I could see if I were Cretaceous in origin, or an ammonite or a belamnite or a nautilus. (Prefer the sound of the last one.) Then I could know why I keep making the same foolish and meaningless mistakes over and over in my life. But talking of Greece reminds me of the time Sue and I spent camping in the wilderness up near the Albanian border. It was bear and eagle country and there were these eerie glades and bizarrely formed boulders, and it was the most atmospheric - not to say perturbing - place I've ever been to in my life. Then In Dorset we drove up to an Iron Age hill-fort overgrown with trees and bushes. What made it remarkable was that although it was a very hot day, a sea mist came roiling in. Joe called it steam. It was magical and unsettling to be so hot and yet to feel this cold mist condensing on your skin. Eerie and beautiful. Ella meanwhile saw the trademark Alwyn & Bone on a shop window somewhere and I heard her repeating the words in an underbreath. After a while of doing this she had a eureka like moment in which she exclaimed >If you say it over and over, it begins to sound like something.< Then she insisted that I try it for myself. Joe had his moments, too. The following is exclusively for male readers. Nothing that follows is of interest to female readers and I thank you for valuing this gender distinction by skipping this paragraph and going onto the next. All this girls gone now? Okay. Anyway this concerns male micturition. I was caught short in a Dorset field and while relieving myself I felt this little presence at my side. I looked down and there was Joe, joining in as it were, forming a pleasing (so he thought) cross-stream. >This is good, isn't it Dad?< he said. >Huh? Errr.. sure.< >Girls can't do this, can they Dad?< >Huh? (deep voice here) Why, no son, they can't.< >This is why girls get mad all the time, isn't it Dad?< >Huh?< >Because they can't do this together. It makes them really mad.< And that explains that. (By the way I would just like to take this moment to thank all the female readers of this column for allowing us boys a moment of privacy there. I'm glad you respected my request. It's heartening to know that I have readers of high integrity, because I know that female readers of other author's column might have just read the preceding paragraph anyway. Spying on us boys in a private moment as it were.) Oh, thank you for various music recommendations for dealing with the savages in the back of the car. In particular musicologist Melissa who suggested Sandy Denny singing Where The Time Goes from her Strawbs era. Now I need little persuasion to get hold of a Sandy Denny recording, and this works incredibly well. Calming or sleeping. First hint of a squabble from the savages, on with Sandy, and out they went like a light. Worked on the way to Dorset, and then on the way back too. Melissa you're a genius. Every parent should know this. The Facts Of Life is published in the US this month. I'm told there is to be a feature review in both the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post. Meanwhile I've finished the first draft of the new book. It's not right. Dammit. Maybe I've been too distracted lately with Hollywood and other stuff, but it needs a big fix. I'll probably junk about 25% of it, and write a lot of new stuff for the second draft. This is not unusual for me. The book was at one time going to be called Listening To The Hare. Now it's called Green Onions, the Booker T instrumental playing even as a I type. Yes, the Partial Eclipse collection of short stories. It's coming Real Soon Now (RSN). The signature sheets have actually gone back to Subterranean Press anyway. On a different front, in San Francisco to be precise, definitely lined up for the autumn is the Nightshade Press publication of The Stormwatcher. Jason at Nightshade has commissioned the brilliant John Picacio to come up with the cover art, and that makes me very excited. Someone managing a scouting website sent me a piece of junkmail asking me to link my site. They'd obviously done a web search for anything mentioning the word >scouts<. Sharp-eyed readers of The Tooth Fairy will recall certain turgid scouting scenes, though I don't think they were what Lord Baden-Powell had in mind. Certainly not enforced sodomy in the dark heart of Warwickshire anyway. Maybe I should just cheerfully link. The scouting reference this reminds me of a time when, aged 12, I went on a scout camp. While we were puttering about as you do on these time-wasting things, twanging tent ropes or gazing glumly into the middle-distance, this furnace-faced, white-haired scout leader from another troop came up and roared at us - and I mean roared - >GET YOUR SHOES AND SOCKS OFF LADS! IT'S YOUR HEALTH WE'RE WORRIED ABOUT!< With that he marched away through the tents with an air of high dudgeon and a sense of great purpose. Every now and then throughout the rest of the weekend you would hear him in the distance, going off like enemy gunfire, roaring at some hapless scouts. >GET YOUR SHOES AND SOCKS OFF ETC< That sort of middle-England high-weirdness - even more than the vague threat of enforced sodomy by the patrol leader - was what put me off the scouts. Get your shoes and socks off? Though if you say it over & over and it begins to sound like something. Try it. You know you want to. Graham Joyce can be contacted by emailing graham@grahamjoyce.net | |
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