WRITING PROMPT

Choose an image from the ones above to inspire a story or poem.
 

Flash! Bang! What a picture!

 

                                  

I have a confession. A few days ago, in the lovely, brightly-lit ladies’ ‘rest-room’ of a local cafe, I spent several minutes taking selfies of myself. The woman waiting outside probably thought I was constipated! And it isn’t the first time I’ve engaged in this suspect behaviour.

 You see, I have very few photos of myself from the past two decades, which coincides (for some reason…) with my getting older, fatter and less photogenic. P is incapable of taking a flattering picture of me – it might be deliberate mischief on his part, though it’s more likely just incompetence and age-related poor eyesight. I’m always mid-squint or half-turned away, or my hair is fluttering in a gale-force wind as if I’m wearing a wig that’s about to blow off. Or my glasses are skew-whiff so I look like I’m going for a bad  impersonation of Eric Morecombe.  Or I appear to have no neck, or three double chins, or an arse the size of Texas.

 I’m not kidding. If you saw any photo of me from the past two decades, taken by P, you’d think I made a living providing those ‘before’ photos for companies advertising exercise regimes, groundbreaking diets or wonder-drugs.

Or maybe P's pictures are what I look like...😦

                                 

Anyway, when I get married in December, I’m going to need some photos to mark the occasion, and it’s one of the aspects of getting married that I most dread. I’m short, fat, wear glasses and have uneven teeth – I’m aware this makes me sound like a character in a Seth Macfarlane cartoon, but it’s true. So I’ve been trying to take some selfies of myself to prove that I can look relatively normal. Large toilets in cafes are often well-lit and you can guarantee not to be disturbed, as long as you don’t take too long. They’re a perfect opportunity.

                               

I can see why people take selfies. When I was a teenager, my friend and I were obsessed by those Photo-Me machines. In our town, there was one in Woolworths and one at the back entrance to Boots. When we did A Levels at our local FE college, we were forever hanging round these machines, checking our change to make sure we had the appropriate coins, Once inside, we’d sometimes try to sit together on the tiny swivelling stool, designed for one person, and pull faces into the camera, sabotaging each other’s attempts at looking good. Or one of us would sit behind the curtain for the first two of the four shots the machine took, and then quickly duck out so the other could take her place for the final two shots. Alone in the intimate space, we’d both rehearse our sexy pouts and significant glances, our mean-girl frowns or our goth-girl grimaces (funny, we never tried out a 'pleasant girl-next-door smile' or a 'kindly-great-aunt expression'). We’d experiment with monochrome and colour options (I think one machine only did black and white photos – they were always flattering and made us feel like Ingrid Bergman or Greta Garbo). Our self-conscious waits for the damp strip of images to emerge from the slot in the side of the machine is an evocative memory of those years: the whole experience made us far more excited than you’d think it would.

My photo albums contain loads of these strips of teenage faces – though later ones, taken for passports or official documents, are much less interesting, showing serious, emotionless faces beneath a series of mostly unflattering hair-dos and different styles of glasses, which change over the years like a flickering zoetrope. Those teenage ones, though, are full of exaggerated life – huge grins, tongues sticking out, thumbed noses, waggled fingers, hugs with cheeks pressed together. Our faces look like they ought to have three or four exclamation marks after them.

                                   

Young people these days aren’t much different, even though the notion of someone putting hard copies of photos into a photo album would mystify the average teenager. Yes, kids, I used to take pictures with my Kodak Instammatic and send the spool of negatives away to be developed. I’d wait a fortnight for the pictures to arrive and it was always a thrill. Once, we had a second-hand polaroid camera which developed its photos ‘instantly’ (in reality, it took several minutes), but the film was very expensive. I later moved on to much more expensive ‘proper’ cameras and I currently have a digital SLR one which cost a fortune and does all sorts of fancy tricks – but, guess what, I mostly now take photos on my phone, like everyone else.

 Digital photography, and particularly the brilliance of mobile phone cameras, has transformed our attitude towards photographs. When I was a teenager, we couldn’t imagine not having to pay for film and developing costs, and being limited by the number of exposures you could take before you needed to replace the film. Now you can snap dozens of pics and discard 90% of them if you wish. You don’t have to spend ages mulling over what images to capture for eternity. And teenagers can use photo booths for what they were designed for – passport photos, illicit sexual encounters and drug deals.

Attitudes towards self-portraits have been transformed in recent years. The sense of embarrassment we used to feel seems to have vanished, as taking selfies has become simply an everyday activity which everyone does. In the early eighties, our visits to the photo booths were covert affairs: we’d feel vaguely uneasy, waiting outside the booth, and would glance around furtively to check that no one was watching us, as if people might see us as vain or self-obsessed, or wasting time and money. When I first got a camera with a delayed shutter-release function, I used to painstakingly set up the shot in the privacy of my bedroom, and I suspect I’d have felt just as horrified, if anyone found me doing this, as I would if they’d found me snogging my teddy bear. But, these days, our natural desire to capture what we look like has become commonplace and unworthy of comment.

                           

Many of us feel an overwhelming compulsion – whether we’re at a beach, nightclub or a well-lit ladies’ room – to snap ourselves in various attitudes of hyperbolic emotion and stick the results on social media, presumably to prove we’re fully engaged in life. It’s part of a general obsession with our outsides. When I first started going for interviews, I was always told I had to be very conscious of my appearance – wear the right clothes, look clean and tidy, have an appropriate hair-style, make sure my body language exuded confidence but not arrogance, friendliness but not smarminess. However, later, when I interviewed people myself, I always found myself distrusting those overly shiny young people, scrubbed up to perfection, who shook my hand with the right degree of firmness and maintained eye contact like robotic sociopaths. Fair enough, we all need a bit of coaching on how to present ourselves in interviews and other such formal occasions – but, these days, people seem to feel it’s necessary to choreograph their every facial expression. A friend told me that, when her teenage granddaughter was visiting her recently, the girl spent hours in the bathroom. My friend eventually asked her what she was doing in there all that time, and the girl’s reply was ‘Oh, I’m just working on raising my eyebrow properly’...

                             

I’m not immune, however. And I can understand this urge. We all want others to like us, to think we’re cool or fun or intelligent or sexy, and we all suspect we aren’t any of these things. So a snapshot of ourselves at least exhibiting the outward signs of coolness, good humour, intelligence or sexiness can seem like proof that – at least for one second of one day in our lives – we really were. And sometimes, of course, it’s true.

 I’m just hoping I don’t look like Eric Morecombe in drag on my wedding photos…

                      

WRITING NEWS

 My story 'The Tall Man' will appear in the next edition of North American literary magazine, Goat Milk.

BOOK REVIEW: A Writer's Opinion

 Eoin Colfer

I have read and thoroughly enjoyed all Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl novels since I bought the first one in WHSmiths on Orpington High Street in the 1990s, though I’m told the recent film adaptation was less than successful. As a writer of action-adventure tales for young teenage readers and young adults, I think he deserves his superstar writer status. The Artemis Fowl series are amusing, exciting, ingenious and have interesting characterisation. It is significant, however, that a friend’s teenage son to whom I lent one of the novels didn’t enjoy it because he found all the ‘technical details’ boring. Personally, I enjoyed the ‘technical details’ and they enriched the stories for me, but I can see what this young reader meant.

               Colfer has a distinctive style, full of flamboyant similes and metaphors, jokey and lively, with lots of direct address to the reader. Reading the Artemis Fowl books is like being told a complex story by a particularly articulate and witty Irish uncle. I felt that his foray into writing a new addition to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy series was less of a success, however, as he didn’t really capture the ineffable sparkle of comic and fantasy genius of Adams himself. Nevertheless, I have read one or two other Colfer novels over the years and found them generally entertaining.

 

           


This year, during a lull in my reading, I decided to take another dip into the Colfer bookverse. Firstly, I read the first two of his new Fowl series, this time based on Artemis’s younger twin brothers, Beckett and Myles. These were acceptably lively novels for the younger teenage market, capturing some of the verve and humour of the Artemis Fowl novels but suffering from the lack of Artemis, Butler, Holly, Mulch, Foaly and, of course, Artemis himself. I wasn’t as enthusiastic as some of the many positive reviews of the series I’ve read, though I enjkoyed the contrasting personalities of Myles and Beckett, and I particularly enjoyed Book One. They weren’t as good as the original series however and I doubt I will read the third in the new series when it comes out.

RATING: The Fowl Twins & The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges ***

Having revived my Colfer appetite and still not ready to face anything more challenging, I took a look at the trilogy for older readers based on WARP (the FBI’s Witness Anonymous Relocation Programme). This is a time-travel story, featuring twentieth-century teenage FBI consultant, Native-American Chevron Savano, and nineteenth-century London teenage stage magician, Riley. I am often drawn to time-travel stories, but equally as often find them ultimately a little irritating. Colfer gets round the time paradoxes by inventing a ‘wormhole’ which turns out to be sentient and which interacts with those who go into it in a way that, frankly, I found confusing and mystifying. It might be that I wasn’t reading closely enough, but I increasingly found myself failing to follow the ‘logic’ of this wormhole, though that certainly didn’t make the stories unreadable.

      


These three novels have some definite strengths. One strength is Colfer’s creation of a superbly hideous villain, Albert Garrick, who seems simultaneously utterly plausible and preternaturally terrifying.  Garrick features prominently in books one and three, but is replaced in book two by another villain, Colonel Box, a psychopath with a military background who uses the wormhole in an attempt to create a world-wide Boxite religious dictatorship in the twenty-first century, providing an opportunity for Colfer to comment on such bullying and stifling tyrannies. Colfer gives the books international appeal by having US and British characters, and there are a number of vividly-drawn secondary characters who help keep the narrative alive. My particular favourite was the leader of the criminal guys, the Rams, who first appears in Book One and becomes a bigger character in Book Two.

               I have to say, however, that although the books were clever, action-packed, with amusing and convincing dialogue, plot twists right, left and centre, likeable heroes, and a magnificent array of appealing minor characters, I became ultimately rather bored by the seemingly non-stop action-sequences. I felt some were stretched out far beyond the point where my mind was wandering, particularly in the third book. In fact, I thought the novels would be substantially improved by being reduced in length by about a quarter. They did have the remarkable magic of Colfer’s imagination and creativity, but I grew bored with what began to feel slightly repetitive conversations and slightly over-described action scenes. I felt they could have been tightened up a bit more. However, presumably readers who are fans of Colfer’s style appreciate the length and complexity of these stories. And it is always nice to have a feisty if slightly implausible heroine.

RATING: The WARP trilogy: The Reluctant Assassin, The Hangman’s Revolution, The Forever Man ***

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way

BOOK REVIEW: A Writer's Opinion

 Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is the second novel I have read by Susanna Clarke, which means I have read most of her published novels! Following the spectacular success of her magnificent epic Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was made into what I thought was an excellent TV adaptation (though I know others disagree), Clarke produced a collection of stories (The Ladies of Grace Adieu) based roughly in the same pseudo-regency world she’d created, but then she spent a long time ‘retired’ from the world due to illness. She returned triumphantly with Piranesi, which was nominated for several prizes including the Women’s Prize in 2021.   

The fact that Clarke has been herself isolated from the world for an extended period of time due to ill-health makes it no surprise that her new novel is about isolation, solitude and loneliness. What is a surprise is that it is so different from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was written in a genre-breaking style The Guardian referred to as ‘magical archaism’ – a kind of historical fiction/fairytale hybrid, with notes of Austin, Thackerey and Swift, laid over an atmospheric and compelling fantasy world that seemed simultaneously excitingly innovative and satisfyingly familiar. I was a definite fan of that book, in all its complex, wordy strangeness, but whenever I have picked it up to re-read, I have found myself stalling very quickly.

            Piranesi, by contrast, is short and pared down in its style. I had downloaded it onto my Kindle some months ago but was reluctant to start reading, expecting it to be like Strange & Norrell, but in fact once I started reading it I found it utterly compelling and bewitching. Clarke is the real deal when it comes to literary talent. Whatever you think about fantasy, I defy anyone to claim that Susanna Clarke can’t write absolutely beautifully. Her writing gives me the same deep thrill that works by David Mitchell and Kate Atkinson often do, though she is quite distinctive (and clearly versatile). It is true that the theme of fantastical ‘other worlds’ existing somewhere mysteriously alongside our own mundane world is common to all her work, but the world she creates in Piranesi is spectacularly imaginative and quite different from what I have read before.

            I don’t want to risk giving away the plot of the book as one of the things that makes it so gripping is the mystery of Piranesi’s identity. Piranesi is not the central character’s real name and I have read many reviews which suggest the name comes from an engraver with that name who was famed for his images of complex prison-worlds. I am sure this is true to some extent though I remember listening to Clarke interviewed on a radio programme soon after the novel was published and she was vague about the inspiration for the character’s name. The novel’s Piranesi is the story’s narrator, and we meet him when he lives in a peculiarly entrancing world consisting of a vast labyrinth of interconnected rooms full of staircases, vestibules, and a huge array of statuary – statues of all sizes depicting all manner of creatures both real and mythical, and in particular all manner of humans. These rooms are considered by Piranesi to be the entire world as he believes he has never seen anything beyond them. The lower storeys of this building are underwater and the tides flood some floors regularly; the higher storeys are in the clouds. The only living creatures Piranesi comes across are the sea creatures he fishes and forages, a multitude of birds, and The Other, a mysterious figure whom he considers to be his friend but who he only sees once a week. Piranesi lives in this world entirely alone except for his brief weekly meetings with The Other, living off seaweed and seafood, recording his experiences in a series of journals, conducting surveys of the halls for The Other.

Piranesi is an expert on this weird environment, and he also loves and reveres it. Part of Clarke’s genius lies in the way she can make dry academic elements, such as bibliographies and indexes, seem completely fascinating. The increasing sense that Piranesi is an unreliable narrator, not because he is lying but because he doesn’t know the truth, is both unsettling and intriguing. His feelings of loyalty towards The Other, for example, highlight his naivete. He is an oddly innocent character, and also an oddly admirable one – uncomplaining, honourable, intelligent. He also seems surprisingly content with a life which by normal standards seems desperately tragic.

The world Clarke creates has any number of metaphorical interpretations, and one strength of the story is that Clarke never explains or makes explicit its purpose, source or function. It simply exists, though it is not a simple thing – it seems to interact with the minds which inhabit it, causing Piranesi to lose his memory of how he came to be there and even of his own identity. And this is not a straightforward tale of someone’s possible escape from a cruel prison: Piranesi is deeply ambivalent about leaving the place. The novel examines academic arrogance, human kindness and cruelty, the interface between the real and the fantastical, and the nature of solitude, belonging, ritual and worship.

I was captivated by this book and I know it will stay with me for a long time. It’s beauty, its imagination, its characterisation – all are utterly compelling in themselves, beyond even the excellence of the plot. It is both simple and complex, both uplifting and depressing, and it is always thought-provoking. I would recommend it to anyone who likes both fantasy and literary fiction, and who likes intelligent writing that is also crystal-clear and a thing of beauty in itself.

RATING: Piranesi *****

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way

         

 

Thoughts from the bunker

 

Wobbly in white

Brides are supposed to wear white frilly frocks and a veil, and carry flowers. It’s virtually the law. But when you’re 57, five foot two inches tall, and basically spherical, any sort of floor-length frock in ivory lace makes onlookers inevitably think of tea cosies and those antimacassars old ladies throw over the backs of their settees.

As for the symbolism of white, I’m just not going there. Suffice it to say, I’m no maiden.

A shorter kind of wedding dress would be more suitable for a Town Hall ceremony in winter (I’m thinking of the weather – I can just imagine me saying my vows while everyone stares at the filthy wet tidemark round the hem of my long dress, not to mention the half-torn veil wrapped tightly round my neck and twisted into my hair by the Yorkshire gale-force wind that will inevitably be blowing on 21 December), but a shorter dress would reveal the extensive eczema rash on my legs. This is just one of the many surprises middle-age has sprung on me (along with hot flushes, a nasty temper and an unanticipated tolerance for Jensen Ackles). The eczema doesn’t itch, and is completely non-contagious, but my lower legs and feet look like they’ve been splashed with dark-pink paint and have the texture of sandpaper in places. I don’t want to reveal such shins in public as I find it hurtful seeing people wince and shy away (obviously thinking I have leprosy or scrofula), even if it is just in my imagination.

So a trouser suit is looking like the best option. But even then, I’ll look like a grossly inflated Sandy Toksvig, with glasses. 

You see, I’m just not losing weight fast enough.

As you know, I've shed some of my excess fat, having been diagnosed as pre-diabetic last year, but it’s such a slow process. In the past, my various weight-loss regimes have quickly resulted in a steady but noticeable decline in poundage. However, this time the weight-loss doesn’t seem to be actually visible to the human eye. A friend who hasn’t seen me for a few months recently said she could tell I’d lost weight – but the evidence she cited (that my neck and face looked saggier, basically – she put it more diplomatically than that, but I knew what she meant) wasn’t particularly uplifting! I’m also losing weight in fits and starts: my weight constantly fluctuates and the downward trajectory has a very shallow slope.

People often assume that fat people have no idea about good nutrition. However, like every person who has ever been on a diet, I know precisely what I should be eating. If you want to know how many calories there are in any given food item, ask a fat person. We’re experts. I rarely eat fast-food – it must be twenty-odd years since I had a Macdonalds or a KFC chicken fillet burger. We are both good cooks and we generally cook our meals from scratch using fresh veg, farm-shop meat, and good quality fish. We cook with olive oil, have embraced the joy of kale, eat small quantities of fresh fruit daily, drink semi-skimmed milk, try to stick to three modest meals a day. I try to eat several portions of fish a week, despite P being allergic to fish which means cooking two separate meals each time. I’ve cut back a lot on my consumption of bread and bread-products, and I’ve started changing the way I cook things to reduce my intake of fat and sugar. For instance, I’m now making fat-free scrambled egg in the microwave – it tastes like rubber, but, hey, it's low calorie. We’re buying reduced-sugar chilli sauce, reduced-fat cheese and coleslaw, and I’m cutting back significantly on my mango chutney habit (honestly, if left to my own devices I could happily eat mango chutney with EVERY meal).

But the problem is that, though I’m cutting down on my daily food intake most days, and doing more exercise, I do tend to allow myself one or two treats at the weekend. As many of you know, I’ve been going through a baking phase in recent weeks, but most of what I bake is given away to family members or put in the freezer. I only eat a small quantity of it myself which is a kind of masochism I realise makes people think I've lost my marbles. Since lockdown ended, we've started going out for lunch at the weekend to nice cafes that have tempting cakes and scones displayed in arcane ways designed to make them appeal to our inner glutton, and I am finding it increasingly difficult to ignore their siren call. And P does a great bacon, brie and cranberry baguette which he perfected during the first lockdown and which I find impossible to resist, to the point where I have now put a formal ban on having brie in the house. We went to my sister’s for a barbecue last weekend and she had a bowl of nachos and dips open on a table in front of me! I defy anyone to resist the lure of crisps with creamy dips. Pringles are the worst – I have long suspected that they are impregnated with class A drugs, they are so addictive. I just don’t buy these things at home because they are too easy and irresistible to eat once opened.

There are a lot of things we no longer buy, in fact. Biscuits, for instance. Before I started dieting, I never really liked biscuits much. I could definitely take or leave them. Now I'm cutting out such things, a humble pack of chocolate digestives or even plain rich tea fingers have become a torment worthy of Dante's inferno. So we now buy only biscuits I hate (basically, shortbread, Jammy Dodgers, Bourbons, Fig Rolls, Custard Creams, Jaffa Cakes), and they are kept in a sealed plastic box just for visitors. Putting things inside boxes, preferably with other boxes on top, is a great way of stopping me nibbling as I am also famously lazy. 

And, yes, before you say anything, I know virtually everyone in the world loves Jaffa Cakes but – though I like both orange and chocolate individually – I hate them in combination. I don’t think citrus fruit goes well with chocolate – I draw your attention to those hideous lime-and-chocolate-flavoured boiled sweets South Yorkshire grandads always seemed to have in their pockets in the 1970s (I think it was a local by-law).

My exercise programme keeps stalling due to injuries and fibromyalgia pain, though I’m still battling on. Most days, I do twenty mins of yoga and about an hour of gentle aerobics. Or I go for a walk, though the hay fever is making the walks unpleasant. It’s no fun sneezing constantly and getting a blocked nose, itchy throat and watering eyes, and it’s no fun for my friends either – I mean, no one likes listening to their walking companion snorting and grunting like a feral pig, and people quickly grow weary of holding my arm so I don't walk into trees while rubbing my itchy eyes. One reason I opted for a winter wedding was to avoid hay fever season. However, I’m also allergic to dust so, if the Town Hall is dusty, I can forget about looking elegant and dignified on my wedding day. 

So, my efforts to get into shape for the wedding are so far not achieving much – except irritation, frustration and stress. I just don't seem to have the necessary level of will-power to be a proper grown-up. One evening soon, P is going to find me sitting on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, wearing an old net curtain with a doily on my head  - Jaffa Cakes in one hand, custard creams in the other, face covered in jam - moaning ‘Come to me, my precious!’…

NB: Nothing says 'Congratulations on your wedding' like a crate of Mango Chutney.

UPDATE ON RECENT PUBLICATION

 My story 'Tattoo' was accepted by Makarelle for publication later in the summer.

I have had poems accepted by Jaden and Failbetter.

My story 'Seahouses' was accepted by Bandit for publication in Summer.

My poem 'Rattled' appeared in English Review in April.

Two of my poems, 'Buttercups' and 'A Walk Beside The Canal', were published in POTB in the spring.

A poem of mine appeared on 'The Haar' section of Lydia Popowich's literary blog 'The Purple Hermit' on the theme 'Under The Mask'.