May 2008 Archives

I'll be doing two events at the Hay Festival this year, one on the official programme and one on the Fringe programme.  Come to both, why don't you.  The first is on Sat 31May in the morning, in conjunction with Sue Gee.  Then in the afternoon I'll be making an appearance at Hay Library at 2.00pm.  Hay festival usually has a good children's programme, so I'll try to entice the savages along.  Last time I took them with me to a lit festival it was in Brittany. We were invited to the St Malo mayor's reception in the quadrangle of the town hall.  Very posh, with oysters and champagne and crowded out with famous authors.  And less famous ones it has to be added.  Anyway even though it was the hottest ticket in town, the savages though it was all a bad joke.  I'd told them they were on holiday in France and yet there they were, imprisoned with dozens of deeply boring writers.  They kept yawning theatrically and doing rude impressions of oyster sucking, champagne guzzling authors and journalists.  I don't expect they'll want to be introduced to Ian McEwan then.  Nor me actually.

Ella:      "It's really just a lot of very greedy people, isn't it?"

Me:      "What??  What is?"

Ella:       "This so-called party"

Me:      "What do you mean so-called?  It is a party!  What do you expect: jelly and ice-cream?"

Joe:      "No it's not.  It's just people drinking and pretending to go Ho Ho Ho."

Me:      "Look, I won't bring you again!"

Ella and Joe: "Thanks Daddy!"

I've done something to make Ella profoundly unimpressed with writers and the writing game.  'Not be a writer,' is how she answers anyone who asks her what she'd like to do on leaving school.  It doesn't seem to make any difference that everyone else under the sun seems to want to be a writer, especially the super-famous.  Madonna: writes children's stories.  Paul McCartney.  Ditto.  Ginger Spice.  Ditto.  Wayne Rooney's girlfriend - and this is true - has just signed a five book deal with Harper Collins, for five adult novels.  How can she write adult novels?  She's only, what, seventeen or something like that.  Not that she will be writing them in the sense of arranging words in the best possible order, of course, but what do you we tell aspiring writers?  That you need to be a footballer's girlfriend or a grotesquely rich pop star to be a writer?  Let's change the subject.  I feel a haemorrhage coming on.

Oh no, haemorrhages everywhere you look.  I was a bit shocked to see Boris de Pfeffel Johnson win the race to become mayor of London.  What with the fact that his old Etonian chum David Cameron is now ten points ahead in the opinion polls I wonder if it all flags the re-emergence of forelock-tugging deference voting and the restoration of the glorious toffs.   Boris has arrived in his position as mayor not because of his demonstrable political ability but the very opposite; and not for his accomplishments but for his gaffes.  His is indeed funny.  He's like the twentieth century never even happened.  He talks like he has a mouth full of pebbles, like the permantly-sozzled old ventriloquist dummy Lord Charles and he actually calls black people picaninnies.  Boris has got everythinng except the monacle.  He even helped his friend the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy try to get a journalist beaten up, and that didn't work against him in the polls!  He's such a toff he is on Youtube showing that he doesn't know the difference between rugby and football.  And the people have lapped it up and voted for him, because he's a "character".  Boris is something like the original member of the Raving Monster Loony Party.  Even a middle name of de Pfeffel didn't put people off.

Democracy is in big trouble.

Meanwhile the Labour party bye-election campaign in Crewe has been criticised because they've been portraying the Tory candidate as a Top Hat Toff.  He is indeed a Toff millionaire but for some reason they're not allowed to say that and it has been suggested that the campaign might work in his favour.  The trouble is that Labour Party can no longer claim to represent the aspirations of the Working Class.  There is no longer any such party.

Though of course we're not allowed to say that there is still a class war raging, either.  Even though the rump end of the old Working Class (I mean the strata who buy but can't afford 54 inch plasma TV screens) are either despised and ridiculed on those same plasma TV screens as Chavs or sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.  I watched on (my much smaller) TV the Duchess of York going into a housing estate in Hull "to help fat people".  I had to view it all from behind the sofa.  To be truthful, Fergie has had some terrible abuse, and the family and the Duchess bonded over a history of shared misery.  But the class system of the UK was presented here stark, shivering and naked.  The Hull family, living on the breadline, were overcome with gratitude that someone appeared to care about them.  They responded to the Duchess as if she were a fairy godmother who might turn a pumpkin into a royal coach and mice into liveried footmen.  This "ordinary" family were all on the edge.  They joked and laughed, but when asked to talk about their situation, every one of them dissolved into tears.

I think a lot of people are living on the edge.  And there is no longer any political aspiration left in the country.  Even the Tories have copied the Labour Party and given up on ideology.  Perhaps they know that ordinary families from Hull and elsewhere will either not vote at all or they will happily vote for a joke candidate.  Give it the buffoon.  With professional buffoons elected to office, and footballer's WAGs contracted as novelists, from where I'm sitting today it all feels like the last days of Rome.

In an appropriately titled anthology about super-heroes called Who Can Save Us Now? I have a new short story.  The anthology is edited by Owen King and John McNally, out in the US in July.   My effort is called The Oversoul.  Apart from my recent Seamus Todd story in The Paris Review, which was a stand-alone extract from my forthcoming novel Memoirs Of A Master Forger, this is the first short story I've turned out in years.

I hope I don't go the whole hog and retreat back into writing poetry.  I cringe to confess that I was a poet in my twenties, and one of my really bad poems earned me the George Fraser poetry award, which was judged by Monica Jones, mistress and muse to Phillip Larkin.   I have this fun fantasy of her and Larkin sipping sherry in their flat and having a great time slagging off my poem.  So it must have been a bang to the head that made me kick around an idea for a new poem recently.  Luckily for me some local friends of mine, Damien and Lydia, encouraged me to attend Word, the slam poetry event in Leicester.  Recent headline-guest poets at the venue have been astonishing and mind-numbing, acting on me like a timely, homeopathic antidote to the idea of continuing with poetry at all. 

Though I do subscribe to the idea that writers should be able to turn their hands to all forms and all genres.  I was trying to say something like this recently while on a panel at the excellent alt.fiction event in Derby.  Trouble is we'd been aggressively forced to drink red wine from mid-day onwards and by 6.30 - when this panel took place - the mood of some of the panel (well, this one anyway) - had become rather excitable.  "We are writers; we are writers; we are writers" I might have said, thumping the table.  "I didn't quite get your third point," said either Phillip Palmer or Mike Marshall Smith, who were my fellow panel-beaters.  I think I'll have to behave better at the Hay festival, which is a much more gentile environment.

I thought I lived in a gentile environment in my leafy suburb of Leicester until there was a drive-by shooting on our street the other night.  Shots were fired from a speeding car at another vehicle in some kind of Al Capone style raid.  Suzanne and Joe crossed the intersection where this took place twice, a couple of minutes either side of the event but without seeing anything.  Shudder

Anyway, never mind that the drugs gangs are taking over the streets; never mind that democracy is eating itself, I'm off to Hay-on-Wye literature festival to listen to Wayne Rooney's girlfriend talk about narrative structure.