SEPTEMBER 2022 

God Bless Our Gracious Queen

 On Thursday the 8th of September, 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral, aged 96, just a day or so after meeting outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his successor Liz Truss. 

You wouldn't want your own nonagenarian grandma to meet either of them, would you?

I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I'm not a monarchist. I think most of the Royal Family are a waste of space and money, and ought to get proper jobs. However, I've always had a sneaking admiration for the queen herself. Being born into wealth and privilege is just as much an accident of birth as being born into poverty and destitution, and neither makes you automatically deserving or undeserving. It's not as if you get a choice in the matter, is it? And there are vanishingly few people who would willingly relinquish their fortunes for the good of mankind.

So, yes, the queen was an immensely privileged woman. She had the best of medical care, the best food, servants and carers and helpers, multiple properties with a full staff to run them, as much foreign travel as she desired with the most convenient and luxurious methods of transport; she had horses, dogs, hairdressers, specially-designed clothes. She also married a handsome, dashing young man and had four healthy children. Her life was, in many ways, blessed in a way that 'ordinary people' can barely imagine.

However, she had her share of personal tragedies too. Her beloved father died young, and in a life of almost a century she lost many others close to her. Even rich people feel grief, despite what many poor people seem to think! She experienced the soap opera that has been her children's adult lives, including the whole 'Diana Debacle' and the discovery that her second son is probably a sexual predator with questionable friends. 

But more than anything else, she has existed within the confines of a system of protocol and tradition, of inflexible expectations, of ritual and duty that the rest of us can't really imagine. Queen Elizabeth always seemed to me to take her Royal duties very seriously. Whatever you think of the Royal Family, Elizabeth was always hard-working, highly-conscientious, and believed in fulfilling her role in the best way she could. When I think of her, words like 'tireless' and 'devoted' spring to mind. She had no real material power to change anything substantial, but she was nevertheless expected to be our ambassador, a diplomatic host for foreign dignitaries whether she liked them or not, always our charming and dignified representative. She wasn't able to express her true opinions on anything. We all recognised her, seeing her face on bank notes, coins and stamps all our lives, watching her wave from carriages and on walkabouts, wearing those distinctive pastel-coloured outfits that many found funny, unflattering or outdated, but which seemed apt - slightly out of touch, slightly off-kilter, as befits a woman who lived such a strange and off-kilter life.

She travelled the world. She met famous people. She rode her horses and walked her dogs and played Christmas games at Balmoral with her family. She watched TV. She interacted with fourteen different Prime Ministers of Great Britain, starting with Winston Churchill and ending, in an example of wincing bathos, with Liz Truss. She was by all accounts a bit of a philistine, a woman of action rather than intellectualism, a woman who had a sense of humour despite her sometimes dour outward appearance. 

I could not have done her job. I don't care how many huge mansions and foreign holidays I was given, I could not have spent so much of my time waving and smiling, small-talking strangers, attending tedious formal dinners and nonsensical rituals, remembering I was always on public display and so were the rest of my closest family. And not being able to retire! I don't have it in me to devote my existence to this type of life. But Queen Elizabeth believed in 'Public Service' and that this was what she had dedicated her life to, when taking on the role of queen. She might have been deluded in this. Her religious faith and her upbringing might have led her to a false idea of what being a monarch was about. But we must surely admire her dedication, her quiet conscientiousness, her hard work.

There are of course much worse ways to live than the life lived by our deceased queen, but let's be honest - in this country, most of us don't live in those ways. Most of us aren't starving or freezing or homeless (not yet, anyway), and we can choose what we want to do, most of the time, within reason. We can slob around in our night-clothes all day if we want, when we're not at work - we can be rude to the neighbours if we're feeling pre-menstrual - we can get drunk and snog a strippagram without fear of it being splashed over the front page of the papers next day. We don't have to spend hours in the company of people we don't like, being nice to them, except occasionally (at Christmas, for instance!). We don't have to live in ridiculously large, draughty houses or wear clothes chosen for us by other people. And we don't have to work until the day we die. 

I was much more upset by the death of Queen Elizabeth than I expected to be. It is the end of an era. Her demise, though expected, has saddened even a staunch republican like myself, and I'm not afraid to admit it. She was tough, competent, determined and devoted to what she saw as her duty, and those qualities are not often seen these days.

Tales From The Madhouse

Deep-fried lettuce, anyone? 

Yesterday, I saw a video on Facebook with the eye-catching title: ‘Omelette Pockets: perfect for surprising your guests’. 

The idea was that you dipped a spatula into the whisked-up eggs, then into boiling oil. Once cooked, the egg mixture could be slipped off the spatula, producing rectangular omelettes with a pitta-like opening at one end so you could fill them with cheese and peppers.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I have friends round for dinner, I don’t generally serve them omelettes, and, if I did, they wouldn’t be deep-fried omelettes, and they wouldn’t be the shape of the pockets on the back of my jeans – they’d look like conventional omelettes, because I’m old-fashioned that way. So, yes, if I served my guests ‘omelette pockets’, it would definitely be a surprise for them, though not one I think they’d appreciate.

My husband pointed out that these videos were aimed at ‘young people’, not boring old farts like us. I’m not wholly convinced of this, as everyone I know who watches this sort of thing is in their fifties, though it’s certainly true that I know quite a few people in their teens and their twenties who seem to prefer food presented in a novel manner. We have also noticed the influence of these videos on the menus of cafes we frequent – there seem to be far more burgers, hot dogs and flatbreads around, usually garnished with deep-fried gherkins or fennel coleslaw. You know you’re getting old when all you want is a cheese and pickle sandwich, but the closest the café comes to this is a Padana pizza covered in tiny spheres of gelatinized basil oil. And have you noticed how every dessert has to come with its own little tent made out of caramel filigree - I think they must have passed a law about this when I wasn't looking.

Anyway, I‘ve spent more time than is healthy watching You Tube videos this summer. To be fair to myself, it's mostly been Walter Santi cat videos (and I defy anyone to deny the psychological benefits of  watching the adventures of D’Artagnon, Princess and the rest of the gang) and Silver Sneakers Exercises For Seniors videos (I sometimes even do them!). However, I have also been watching LOTS of other stuff. The internet has this effect, doesn’t it? – it sucks you into its arcane world of crafting, after-the-pub-recipe ideas, celebrity gossip, lists of the twenty best one-liners from Frazier or the ten best dance moves from the 1940s, films of people being genuinely stupid or else setting things up to look like they’re being genuinely stupid, and accounts of kittens being rescued from down wells and neglected dogs having their matted, overgrown fur shaved off, accompanied by generic poignant music.

Once you start watching, you can’t stop. These videos are usually short but the next one usually follows automatically without your intervention. Quite soon, you find yourself growing bored, thinking ‘I’m wasting time here’, but somehow you just can’t drag yourself away…

And, sooner than you might imagine, a five second advert break feels like a major intrusion on your viewing pleasure, and you start to wonder how you ever tolerated the advert breaks on ITV.

So, I’m thinking to myself, what do all these videos tell us about the modern world? What would aliens think of us if the only evidence they had was You Tube? What kind of world do kids think they’re growing up in, when most of their information comes from the internet?

Well, I can see why Type 2 diabetes is on the rise, for one thing. I’ve yet to see a ‘fabulous food idea’ on YouTube that doesn’t involve the essential food groups: sugar, saturated fat, and condensed milk. You’d think YouTube was in partnership with Nestle, the number of times condensed milk makes an appearance. In my youth, it was an old-fashioned canned product used by old men in their tea, but now it's had a You Tube renaissance and people seem to be making everything out of it. They’ll be weaving it into bullet-proof vests next.

After you’ve watched a few of these videos, you start to think that the bacon and brie sandwich you ate for lunch was essentially health food.

YouTube amateur chefs love food that comes in a can, in powder form, or is ready-to=bake dough in a cardboard tube. It’s more like construction than cookery. Sooner or later, everything ends up deep-fried. I haven’t seen them deep-frying trifle yet, but give it time. All you actually need to do if you fancy becoming an internet ‘chef’ is to deep-fry an apple, cover it in melted processed cheese and sprinkle crumbled nachos or graham crackers on top. Nailed it.

I know, I know. It’s just fun. These ideas are creative, amusing, and no worse than making parmesan tuiles or melting boiled sweets to make the windows of gingerbread houses, or sprinkling crunched-up cheese and onion crisps on top of a cottage pie (all things I’ve done more than once).  Just harmless entertainment.

But are they really harmless? Surely they must be influencing people’s eating habits to some extent? After all, aren’t people who get lots of followers on the net known as ‘influencers’? These ubiquitous videos normalize high-calorie, low-nutrient foods, giving the impression that it’s fine to stuff your face regularly with empty carbs. And the number of overweight cats I’ve seen online suggests that we don’t stop with ourselves – we inflict our dreadful eating habits on our pets too. I used to worry that my own cat was overweight, but he was actually a svelte cat-about-town compared to some of the poor cats I’ve seen on You Tube videos, waddling around looking like they’ve swallowed a sofa cushion.

And as for the craft videos…Well, I admit, there are some that are fabulous, but these tend to be the ones created by actual artists and craftspeople. You know, those experts in wood-turning and glass-blowing, furniture-making and house-building, oil painting and embroidery, who make fabulous videos showing off their terrific skills.

But, come on, we’ve all seen the others, haven’t we? The people who take a perfectly nice glass jar, line it with wallpaper off-cuts, handwrite something trite on the front in felt-tip, and tie a bit of old sacking round its neck, then triumphantly place it on a windowsill with a self-satisfied smile and the words ‘There, see how easy it is to make a vintage swear jar?’ Or they decoupage an old chair until it’s an eye-crossing mess of sub-Laura Ashley/Cath Kidston chintz, then paint the spokes of the chair-back silver, edged with rhinestones ‘for that finishing touch’.

I have absolutely no objection to these people doing these things.  If people want to fill their houses with tat, if it makes them feel good, in the privacy of their own homes, then I say gild away, Modge-Podge to your heart’s content, cover every inch of your walls in stencilled cats and every item of furniture in covers made from old nighties. Go ahead, buy a glue-gun. And I don’t even have a problem with you videoing yourselves while you’re at it, if that’s what gets you up in the mornings.

I just object to the videos being put on You Tube where I find myself being drawn into this world where everyone seems to have too much time on their hands. I’m enchanted by their optimistic tone of voice, by the promise of magical transformation, by their assurances – against all my prior experience – that they will create something valuable out of something valueless. Then I’m horrified by what they actually produce and how much time I’ve wasted watching them produce it.

I mean, I saw someone make a pair of earrings the other day out of two slices of pepperoni encased in a circle of resin. Yes, really.

The worst ones are those who are actually quite skilled and who make something that seems to be a great idea for recycling old products that would otherwise be thrown into landfill. These are the videos that make it look both easy and worthwhile. I could do that, you naively think. I once watched someone make an attractive, sturdy bowl for storing knitting paraphernalia, out of a pair of old jeans and a cardboard shoe box, but when I had a go at making it, it took me three weeks and looked like a hat that had been trodden on by a carthorse then worn by a hobo for three years. And I don’t even know how to knit, so I have no use for a knitting storage bowl anyway.

It seems to me that for every gifted sculptor or astonishingly talented artist showing off their skill, there are twenty-four videos of Mrs Smith from number 23 hot-glueing an old ice-cream carton to a strip of Weetabix box. For every Walter Santi video of the fabulous Indie, cat goalkeeper extraordinaire, or Porthos, Master of Parkour, there are fifty videos of morbidly obese felines getting stuck in cat flaps. And for every Jamie Oliver recipe or Gordon Ramsay masterclass, there are eighteen idiots deep-frying custard, or stuffing squashes with scrambled egg and smoked salmon (which actually doesn’t sound that bad, now I come to think about it. I might get my video camera out and give it a go…)  

 Here are three versions of a painting I did recently of a friend's beagle, in the order in which they were painted:

First version:

Second Version:

Third Version:

Which do you like best?

Book Reviews: What I’ve been reading since the last review

The Quantum Curator series by Eva St John

The Quantum Curator and the Faberge Egg is the first in an ongoing series, and I've read all four published so far, which shows both how short and how entertaining they are.

These are fast-paced and funny novels, reminiscent of Jodi Taylor’s St Mary’s chronicles, in that they have a feisty heroine and involve time travel. St John’s novels explore the notion of multiple earths and are mostly set on Alpha Earth, a much more civilized place than our own Beta Earth. On Alpha Earth, Neith is a Quantum Curator based in the sparkling modern city of Alexandria where everyone is polite and friendly, and there is virtually no crime. Or at least that’s what they think.

Back on grubby Beta-Earth, academic Julius Strathclyde – young, handsome, clever and charming – finds himself caught up in one of Neith’s adventures. She and her team are trying to save a Faberge egg from destruction, but unknown to Neith there is a traitor in their midst. As the series progresses, we learn that the treachery goes much deeper than a single team and threatens the entire foundation of Alpha-Earth.

I particularly enjoyed the time-travel sections of the books where our heroes travel into Beta-Earth’s past, and I enjoyed the appearance of the gods in book two. These books move quickly and are quite short so you can read them swiftly. They are lively and imaginative, though sometimes implausible and sometimes the characters feel under-drawn. Though the stories progress at a rapid pace, there are long sequences where very little seems to happen, which is an odd phenomenon. The plots take unexpected turns, but occasionally I found myself thinking they could have saved themselves a lot of time by just communicating better with each other. What I mean here is that, occasionally, the plotting seems rather contrived.

Nevertheless, overall, I would recommend them as light reading if you enjoy Jodi Taylor. 

*** [quite an entertaining way to use up some spare time]

 

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The Unhappy Medium Book One by T.J.Brown

 

I'd never heard of T.J.Brown before he popped up on my Kindle as a recommended read based on my previous reading, but I thought I'd give him a go, as I had nothing else to read at that moment. And I’m glad I did. His humour in places reminded me of Douglas Adams - and, to a lesser extent, Tom Holt - though he is more maximalist in his style and not as original in his ideas.

This is a genuinely funny novel, with a whimsical plot and eccentric characters. Dr Newton Barlow is a sceptical scientist who discovers, much to his horror, that the afterlife exists. He is hired by the ghosts who run Purgatory, as a kind of Indiana Jones, minus the hat but with the cynicism fully present and correct. On my MA in Writing course, we were told constantly that we should always ‘show not tell’, and Brown is pretty good at showing – there are some excellent action sequences in the story, including a wonderful car chase through Spain, and a terrifying journey through the night-time horrors of a derelict psychiatric hospital. The characters are vividly drawn and memorable – I particularly enjoyed the ninja C of E vicar, and the ghost of Professor Sixsmith. But Brown does also do a great deal of ‘telling’ and I can imagine the tutors on my MA course moaning about this – however, he does it generally very well. This is where he reminded me most of Douglas Adams, as he adopts a similarly wry, humorous tone of voice. I found his lengthy exposition generally very readable and done well, and I suspect that ordinary readers [ie, not those studying or teaching on Masters courses] quite like this sort of thing.

A more serious issue is the fact that Brown does at times over-write. Some of his set-piece scenes could be shorter. At times, I felt his humour would be funnier if he adopted a lighter touch. For instance, at one point Dr Barlow has his gun confiscated and Brown comments that he ‘was now armed only with his sarcasm’, which felt like over-explaining to me. There were occasional mis-steps like this, though Newton’s actual sarcasm is usually very funny and doesn’t require any highlighting. But I did feel that some judicious editing here and there would sharpen up the funnies. This is a writer with a great sense of humour, a dry wit that is also often silly, but his writing would benefit from a little paring down. Do we really need Newton’s full life story prior to his encounter with the ghost of Professor Sixsmith? Do we really need such detail about the village of Langton Hadlow? Many readers might well answer these questions with a resounding ‘yes’ and I can see good reasons for why Brown includes this material, but I just felt it might be made a little more succinct. I thought the novel might benefit from being a bit shorter.

Though The Unhappy Medium was first published in 2014 and is set roughly in the modern world of mobile phones and computers, there are some hints that Brown is a middle-aged man, mostly in his portrayal of women. Sister Wendy is intended to be a comic character, but even before she is taken over by the spirit of La Senza’s beloved ‘evil nun’, the receptionist Miss Dyer is a Carry On film archetype of the over-sexed older woman which made me feel uncomfortable. Similarly, Newton’s ex-wife Rowena is a cliche of numerous sitcoms, a ball-breaking, self-centred, greedy, cold-hearted woman with no redeeming features except her looks.  Newton's daughter, Gabby, and his girlfriend Viv are drawn more fully and are definitely more likeable, but I felt that female characters perhaps weren’t Brown’s forte, though I have to say that there are cliched male characters in the novel too, such as Chris Baxter the misogynistic super-salesman.

I really enjoyed the discussions about science versus superstition, however, and I loved the fact that Viv lives in Greenwich, a place I used to live myself. I also thought the creation of the bonetaker was inspired, and the description of him was excellent. I think the book is worth reading for this character alone!   

You would think that the very least you should expect from a novel is that it is written in full, correctly punctuated sentences and correct grammar, with no spelling errors, but it is surprising (or maybe not) how many novels I read these days on Kindle that are written very badly, from this technical point of view. Commenting on such things often feels reductive – surely, it’s the artistry  that counts, the creativity and literary flair, the plots and characters?  However, I have read many novels on Kindle where the ‘technical’ aspects have rendered them unreadable, in my opinion, though I have to admit that my own standards and expectations in this regard have been lowered over the years so I can now tolerate far more errors than I would have tolerated in a print book. Therefore, the fact that I was impressed that Brown can write in full, often elegant sentences says something about modern publishing.  I found it refreshing to read something written in a confident style that didn’t make me feel insecure as so many novels I read on Kindle do these days. You know that feeling, when the author doesn’t seem to know what constitutes a sentence and can’t use punctuation properly, so you find yourself re-reading ‘sentences’ to try to work out their meaning? There were some errors – he doesn’t seem to know that he needs to mark off the names of characters in dialogue, when they are being addressed, with commas: ‘Hey, Bill, come over here’ rather than ‘Hey Bill come over here’. But this is a minor failing, and sometimes he does it right! There were a few other – occasional and unimportant – errors such as spelling ‘wuss’ as ‘woos’, but they were genuinely minor compared with a lot of stuff I read these days.

**** [an excellent way to pass a few hours if you enjoy comic fantasy]

Publication News Sep 2022

My flash fiction piece, 'Choose', came Third in the Fosseway Writers Competition 2022 (theme: Equinox). The judge's report said: 

'I was drawn into the sense of mysticism in this piece. The writer paints the backdrop to the story in vivid colour and there is a real tension at the heart of the story. The writing is woven with original choices (like “vice versa” used as a verb), and I was left with a powerful image that lingered for a long time in my mind.'

My story 'Basil' was nominated by the editor of Parakeet for the Best Of The Net competition.

 My story 'Pigs can't swim' has been accepted by Fairlight Books for inclusion on their website. It will appear on 15 September 2022.

My poems 'Dead Batteries' and 'Shy' have been accepted for the Bindweed Winter Anthology 2022.

My story 'Crimes and Misdeameanours' appeared in the summer edition of Makarelle.

So far, in 2022, I have had 14 poems accepted for publication or winning competitions and 9 stories accepted for publication (some of these being flash fiction). Dark Matter literary journal shortlisted my story 'Report on the Case of Edward Overdice' and, though it wasn't ultimately chosen, they said they thought it was 'publication-ready' and that I would get it published somewhere else eventually.