August 2008 Archives

Well, that's summer dusted off.

Hay Festival was bloody good.  I got to meet up with Jayne Evans, Hay's uber-librarian and someone I hadn't seen since college days in Derby, oh, ummm, duh, twenty-five years ago.  She said last time we met we were in a pub and I called her an "armchair Socialist", and she hadn't forgotten.  Jayne, it's what I called everyone on the left who didn't happen to agree with me.  It was designed to make me sound much more of an activist than anyone else when in truth what I was, by contrast, was probably a "languish-all-morning-in-bed Socialist". Anyway we met up and had a fun lunch to catch up after I'd done my festival appearance.  Later she twisted the arms of a few of her friends to come down to the library to give me a further good listening to, and it was great to see her.

We stayed in a pretty cottage near Hay owned by the Robinsons and when we arrived there was a lamb that had got itself stuck in the fast flowing running stream outside their door.  Sue, action woman and farmgirl, jumped out of the car, pulled on her boots and paddled upstream to shepherd it towards Sophie Robinson, who had splashed into the stream on the other side.  Sophie emerged from the stream with a dripping, tiny lamb in her arms to say, 'Hello, are you staying in our house?'  Sophie is an illustrator and Bruce Robinson, amongst many other things, wrote the scripts for Withnail and I and The Killing Fields.    What a great couple.  And Sophie, with that lamb in your arms you had us on hello. 

The Festival itself was a quagmire.  Actually with all the sandbags you had to step around it was reminiscent of the Somme.  The savages of course were rather bored and superior as usual, dodging introductions to this or that author, until that is we encountered Dr Who's assistant! in the green room.  Suddenly I went rocketing up in the savages' miserly esteem, because now we could rub shoulders with Dr Who's assistant!  Yes!  Catherine Tate, there to do a talk (just like your Dad is, I tried to point out to the savages, but they were too busy staring, hypnotised by the mere proximity in relative time and space to Dr Who's assistant!  Joe at the time has his arm in a cast (bit of unfortunate goalkeeping, on the back lawn, with me) and we asked Dr Who's assistant! if Dr Who's assistant! would possibly sign it.  Catherine Tate was very obliging and funny and suddenly the savages thought all this crashingly dull literary festivals routine might not be so bad after all.

Well, the quagmire that was Hay was merely a foreshadowing of what was to come.  If you didn't leave the greensward of these sceptred isles then you'll know that summer came for about three hours before creeping off into the chilly Autumn night about mid August.  Anticipating thus, we hauled the savages off to France for a bit of necessary solar top-up.  'What's that bright object in the sky?' Joe wanted to know.  'It's mythological,' said Ella, who is chomping through twelve books a week on average and collecting words bigger than she is.  'It's the Sun,' I said, 'and you're going to have to rub this warp factor 20 cream into your pale English skins.'

Alf from down the road had generously loaned us his gonflable boat and we slung it in the back of the truck and did a brace of fortnights in Britanny and the coast of Aquitane before the inevitable long drive back to the gloom and murk of the sun-cheated homeland.  (I think it's because Great Crested Orcs have been elected as mayor of London and in parliament that we're having such dismal weather.)  We're even deprived of a good crisp snowy winter these days: England soldiers on under one year-long mizzling grey blanket.  So, a near lethal skin-crisping solar assault on the skin follicles was just what the doctor might have ordered.

On a beach in Brittany the children encountered a delightful polpikin - which is the local word for a kind of spirited elfin or pixie creature - in the form a little girl called Marguerite - who danced into their lives, led  them a merry chase across the sands and insisted they go home with her.  Before that, with the waves looking a little threatening, Joe and Ella had to ride shotgun, making sure that the delightful Marguerite came to no harm.  I watched as she danced her way into the water and Joe gently led her out; only to see her go back in again and for Ella lead her gently out; only to see this repeated eight or nine times.  Joe ran up the beach, looking a bit sweaty.  'What do you do when a little kid won't do what you tell them?' he seriously asked me.  I felt like that ancient and white-bearded sage who sits cross-legged on a mountain peak, blinking at least twice before offering some impenetrable or gnomic answer.  'Ah,' I said to him, holding one finger aloft.  'A good question.'

Her parents, Bertrand and Edith, invited us back to their extraordinary house stuffed with art, carvings and musical instruments, and turned out to be charming and inspirational.  Marguerite, who is three, gamely announced that she would like to marry Joe, so we look forward to that.

Meanwhile I learned that my story "An Ordinary Soldier of The Queen" published in The Paris Review has won an O.Henry short story prize in the US.  That's all right then, because the story forms part of my forthcoming novel.  And here's the thing about my forthcoming novel.  It has two titles and two authors.  Here in the UK the novel is titled Memoirs of a Master Forger under the pseudonym William Heaney.   The US edition from Nighshade Press will be How To Make Friends With Demons by, in case this is boring you to the point of narcolepsy, Graham Joyce.  It's the same book.  Yes.  So why the pseudonym?

 'Ah!  A good question.'

Well amongst the themes of the novel are matters of faked papers, forged books, fraudulent poetic persona, plagiarised publication, demon-infested manuscripts... and so on.  Further, so much of what is written today as memoir (all the misery memoirs) turns out to be fraudulent or gross exaggerations, so it is also a comment on all the faked books and ghost-written crap in publishing today.  Fake memoir, which is really fiction, outsells fiction.  So it seemed a wizard prang to use a pseudonym, to add to the layers of forgery, as it were.  But then none of us wanted Memoirs of a Master Forger to be a truly fake memoir (the subject matter is too outrageous anyway) and I also wanted everyone to know it's by me.  But Jeremy at Nightshade in the US didn't go for it, and though I love him like a brother he's a tough guy to argue with.  So in The US it's a Graham Joyce book with the title How To Make Friends With Demons. 

I never claimed to be an uncomplicated person.

On a completely different note I've sold a footballing memoir to Mainstream.  It's about goalkeeping.  No it isn't fake: in the book I let lots of goals in.  Anyway it's called Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular and I hope it's a laugh.  The thing was inspired by the England Writers Football team, and if you want to know more about that you can look here: http://writersteam.co.uk  The book should be out later in 2009.

Finally, that Catherine Tate signature on Joe's plaster cast.  Shortly after the Hay festival in an episode of Dr Who the Catherine Tate character Donna was returned to her original life, and had her memory of her travels with Dr Who wiped from her mind.  We were all a bit sad about that in the Joyce household.  Anyway Joe went to bed that evening, and overnight the Catherine Tate signature mysteriously faded from his cast.

Ooh-yah!  As they say in Leicester.