November, 2007

Say anything and you’re dead.

Thank you, merci and asante sana to all the good kind folk who emailed me after my last whining update. Quite apart from surprising me that anyone actually reads these things it was a heart-warming response. Meanwhile the news on Dad is very positive. Chemo is rough and he complains that the process has loosened fifty years worth of the accumulated internal silts of coal slack, but the early prognosis is good. Meanwhile I'm collecting some of Chairman Bill’s sayings; in fact I gave them a little airing in my recent visit down under. Many of my new Australian friends now seem to think Chairman Bill should be Guest of Honour at next year’s convention in Australia, so well did I misrepresent him.

‘You’re making me look a bloody idiot on that flaming interweb,’ he complains again, in anticipation of my telling the superglue story. ‘Come off it Dad, do you think I’d tell that story what with you having cancer and all?’ ‘You bloody would. You’d sell your bloody Grandma for three-ha’pence.’ I’m not sure what three-ha’pence is but if I’m to be accused of such a terrible thing I’d better get on with it.

If Dad ever took a minor injury while working down the pit he would prefer to improvise rather than come to the surface for treatment (because you lost a day’s pay if you clocked off early). So he got in the habit of treating any cut that might need a stitch with Superglue. Anyway, one day after he’d retired he was doing a bit of DIY around the house when he gashed his finger. It needed a stitch or two, but as I say, Chairman Bill is not one to clutter up the Accident & Emergency unit at the local hospital. No fear. Out with the superglue!

Now I don’t know about you but I always find superglue to be completely crap unless you want to bond own skin, in which case it works with the Devil’s might. An when he accidentally touched his thumb to the finger wound, thumb and forefinger of right hand became passionately conjoined. Drat, he thinks, but nor worries: a bit of spit will sort that out. His first spit missed the mark. so for accuracy he lifted his commingled digits to his mouth. And touched his lip.

So now he’s got finger and thumb wedded to his bottom lip. Yet what makes him really cross is the fact that I happen to walk into the house to find him with head under the cold faucet, trying to sluice the superglue away. ‘Shay bloody noshing,’ he mumbles at me, ‘or you’re dead.’

Dad doesn’t ride the interweb, so please, nobody grass me up.

Anyway, before I went to Oz was the Wicker Man week-end. A pagan festival held in the dark heart of central England, where I was invited to speak by my old friend and clever neighbourhood witch Anna Franklin. Seriously, the Mercian Gathering as it was billed did climax with the flaming of a twenty-foot tall Wicker Man, ignited with burning arrows, and presumably empty of sacrifice. What a great evening it was. The savages were a bit bemused by the preceding ritual of the flaming labyrinth, through which everyone was invited to shuffle for the putative purposes of general wellbeing. The burning spiral was spectacular and impressive; but the smoke brought tears to the eye and the savages, closer to the ground than I was, inhaled about sixty ciggies worth of the old lung-cracking Woodbine variety. Talk about passive smoking. After recovering from that Ella wanted me to jump the Wicker Man bonfire with her (after the Viking re-enactors and the Native American Shaman and the Crystal Dowsers and, well, pretty much everyone had had a go) but I’d gone over on my ankle and had to disappoint. Yet for me the strangest thing about the festival week-end is that its location is kept secret until very late and then turned out to be the very location of my novel the Tooth Fairy, just a couple of miles from where I was dragged up.

There you are then, I say to that. Proves that pagan festivals can be held on the red earth where I grew up.

Of course this caused great interest and a waggle of the eyebrow and an exercise of the jaw around the hearth of the extended Joyce clan. Wry and off-colour comments from Chairman Bill had to be tolerated; plus a stream of jolly text messages from the fun-loving fraternals, enquiring when the sacrifice of virgins would commence, and could they join in, and could they bring beer? Who needs Viking re-enactment troupes with my family at large in the district? Look you dunderheads, it’s not Dennis Wheatley, it’s just a burning Wicker Man. A what? A burning Wicker Man… oh forget it.

You can imagine.

Somewhat by way of contrast the following week-end I found myself in the twilight of Berlin and being driven from the airport in an open-topped military Traban (the kind of East European vehicle you used to see casually employed in the machine gunning of dissidents clambering over the Berlin Wall during the Cold War). Also in the truck were Patrick Neate and Jake Wallis Simons, and we’d been issued with army-surplus overcoats to ward off the cold as our driver, Falko Hennig, waltzed the Traban through the Berlin traffic, tunelessly serenading us with the Streets of Berlin, all sung in doleful German of course. We’d gone to play football but we couldn’t stop giggling.

Oh the result: England 4 Germany 4. I didn’t feel great about that score-line since I only had five shots to stop. Moreover the dastardly Hun equalised with a late and clearly offside goal from the charming Ralf Bont, who had generously hosted Nick Royle and me in his East Berlin flat. I’m afraid the emotional spillage from the summer (see last update) got the better of me and I roundly abused the (German) referee. It doesn’t matter that he was a purple-faced alcoholic, thirty five yards behind the play and ridiculously biased towards the host team. He’d given up his afternoon to referee the ludicrous football fantasy of chubby middle-aged men, and I hereby apologise. That’s football, though: there’s always plenty of opportunity to make a raging, roaring fool of yourself. I was very lucky not to get sent off.

Anyway I was better behaved when I went to Oz! My first visit to the land down under and it was thrilling and rather full of Australians. Great people, who call a spade a shit-shoveller. I was guest at the Conflux convention in Canberra and I got to meet dozens of Australian writers over the course of the long week-end. The banquet was particularly fun. I found myself seated next to a delightful and clever individual who half way through the dinner announced that he was out of prison on license where he’d be spent the last eighteen years for the crime of murder. On the other side of the table was a man who had been trained in a seminary. He wasn’t actually a clergyman, but he had been theologically trained. What was odd was that the seminary-trained chap seemed to aggressively want me to apologise for a) the bombing of Dresden b) the Dardanelles campaign c) Winston Churchill d) the English national anthem and e) the odd looking pudding we were served up for dessert. All this while the convicted homicide – it’s not for me to name him - regaled me and other members at my table with intelligent, literary, sophisticated and charming discussion.

Well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs, as Chairman Bill might remark.

Truly the Ozzies were great fun and lively hosts. I got to have dinner with many of them all over again in Sydney. Thanks Deb, Cat, Rob, Terry, Nick, Garth et al. for thrilling Ozmosphere and ambience. Though while I was in Oz I had a few odd moments of… (and here I pause, because I was about to use the phrase cognitive dissonance to mean no more than high weirdness, which says more about the linguistic factions at war in my own brain than it does about the value of fine nuance). Anyway I want to attribute these moments to things that are strange, exciting, different in the Ozmosphere. The first was when I was on my way to spending a few days staying in the bush with my sister-in-law Jan. My very first sight of a kangaroo was of a dead one lying by the side of the road. Okay road kill in England usually tends to be no larger than a fox or a stoat, but the spectacle of this extraordinary creature that looks like a dog at the top and a cow at the bottom was deeply perturbing. It wasn’t the death of the thing: it was the incongruence between its alien cadaver and the presence of a tarmac road. The two things shouldn’t be in the same place.

It was the first intimation of many feelings to come about Australia. That it is somehow a more shockingly primal place even than Africa; that its flora and fauna are more primal; and that it’s aboriginal people (only recently officially re-categorised as people rather than fauna for goodness sake) are still in touch with that thing they call the dreaming than are human beings anywhere else, even though you instinctively feel it’s a shared memory. And part of the heady Ozmosphere is the notion that the land and the people and the fauna and flora are infinitely old while “Western civilisation” is no more than this super-thin sheet of steel and concrete rolled out over only small pockets of the land. The Ozmosphere made me feel, as an outsider, that visiting Australia is the closest experience we can have to the science-fictional notion of terra-forming, or visiting a colonised planet.

Perhaps I’m in danger of romanticising. But another thing I liked very much about Australians is the absence of those social-class codes and values that sometimes cripple and sabotage British or European culture. Of course there are economic classes and divisions, but something felt lighter, and I quickly realised that what was gone was the barrage of elaborate secret language, nuances, hints and insinuations that exist only just within the visible and acoustic social spectrum. White noise, suddenly gone. Extraordinary.

Oh yes, the report wouldn’t be complete without the extreme spider experience in the bush, which is essential. Australians seem to relish these conversations quite as much as do the whinging Poms, though the phrase fatal neurotoxins does tend to rattle around a bit too often for comfort. Anyway, at my comfortable digs in the bush I was away to my bed one night and there on the wall next to my pillow was a spider the size of a small dog. I’d been informed if I saw anything that big it was “probably just” a Huntsman even though they do look a bit like a Tarantula in a foul mood. Don’t worry about them, I was told, since although they do bite, it’s not fatal. Leave them be, I was advised. (Traumatised footnote: I’m seeing the damned things at the periphery of my vision even as I type this back in England where the arachnids do nothing more sinister than suck off a greenfly’s head.

Right. So there’s a thing like Shelob’s ugly daughter next to my pillow, a thing that might want to spend the night gnawing on my face-bone and I’m expected to make friends with it. No. Shoe off; take aim with heel; splat. Some horrible stuff, like half a pint of pesto-sauce-coloured neurotoxin came out the thing. It took me half an hour to wipe down the wall. Then another half an hour to sing myself to sleep with soothing nursery rhymes.

We have a new dog, an apricot coloured puppy from the Evesham Lurcher Rescue centre. Her name is Cassie. It was Muffin, but frankly there was no way I was going over the park bellowing Muffin, or particularly any foreshortening thereof. I wanted to call her Cleo on account of the fact that she has, like, eyeliner: but the savages prevailed with Cassie. She’s lovely. Walks resume. Inspiration must follow.

Graham Joyce can be contacted by emailing graham@grahamjoyce.net