Annie Clarkson is a writer from north west England, currently living and working in Manchester. A writer of intense honesty and sensitivity, her blog 'Forgetting the Time' contains some really superb writing.
Annie's work focuses on the edges of life, the places where the sweet, sad things happen. The writing is raw, but not in the sense of blood pouring from wounds and people fighting in the street, or taking drugs in public toilets. The rawness comes from the emotions evoked, and there is often a quite delicious sense of unease in the reader when she is at her best.
Recently, Annie has been throwing herself into a new sport, that of roller derby. As someone who is keen to explore the links between writing and sport, it seemed to present a perfect opportunity for me to do interview Annie about her experiences with a new sport, and how it might have changed her writing.
Roller derby looks very violent and fast to me, to whom it looks something like something out of a sci-fi film. It looks like it combines the intensity of ice hockey with the thrills of short track speed skating. There is a strong team element, and the team uniforms are often personally adapted into stylish, scary and quite sexy forms.
Firstly, I asked Annie what had sparked her interest in such a physically demanding sport.
"Roller derby is a fast and tough sport, on quad roller skates, where two teams compete against each other to score points, and it’s a full contact sport," she explained.
"But to start playing the sport you don’t need to be fast or tough. I definitely wasn’t. I was never really interested in competitive sport, even at school. I wouldn’t call myself an athlete, but through playing derby I’m faster, tougher and more confident than I was.
"I discovered roller derby about eighteen months ago. A friend of mine from my school days started playing – Abby Dasher.
"She invited me along and I watched a training session. I instantly thought, 'Nah, this sport is not for me, too tough and I’m not fit enough...'
But I followed her progress over the following months, and she was so excited by it. Her skills developed really quickly, and she kept saying, 'Come on Annie, you will love roller derby.'
"I decided to try it, and signed up for the ‘Zero to Hero’ training for beginners run by Manchester Roller Derby (http://www.manchesterrollerderby.co.uk/). I instantly loved being on skates and over the course of the training course, I fell in love with the sport."
The costume aspects of the sport always look like
they are very important to me. Players also change their names and give
themselves pseudonyms. These often seem like the names from a punk band.
Despite that emphasis on costume and looking great, Annie is
keen to stress that the sport is very much not just about dressing up.
"The most important aspect of derby is playing the sport," she said.
"But, yes, the image side of derby is fairly unique to the sport, I think.
"A
lot of players have derby names which are puns, plays on words, or show
the personality or alter-ego of the player. They can be intimidating or
witty, clever and fun.
"Some of the names I love are Cleo
Fracture who plays for Rainy City Roller Girls, Marty McDie, Psycho-Sis,
and Kate Push from Manchester Roller Derby (MRD), and Raw Heidi (London
Rollergirls)."
"I love the fact that roller derby encourages
personality, individuality and persona. As well as being part of a team
and a league, we can be ourselves on the track or who we want to be.
"Some
players put on the ‘war paint’ like stripes on their cheeks or paint
their face for example as a skull like Skulldozer from MRD.
"Some
players like sportswear. Others wear crazy tights, patterned socks, or
colourful hot pants. There are many styles, and roller derby allows us
to express ourselves on the track, be bold or alternative or whatever we
want to be. Men’s Derby has its own styles as well."
The
transformative aspect of the sport, where aspects of personality can be
explored which are normally suppressed, is something which is important
to Annie though.
"I guess it appeals to me, because I can be a different self when I train and play," she mused.
"Aggressive,
more fearless, and it gives me permission maybe to access parts of
myself that are not appropriate for my everyday life. Little Miss Mayhem
can be a trouble causer, can deliberately set out to disrupt, she can
shove people out of the way, be cocky and cheeky, wear clothes that I
would never wear in my non-derby life."
Annie's writing often deals with people and events at the edge of things. She seems to relish her status as an outsider, despite it often being a lonely experience. Roller derby is a team sport, so I wondered how playing had affected her sense of self, whether she found the team ethic hard to absorb, and also whether it had changed her feeling of being an 'outsider'.
"Yes, it has, to some extent," she admitted.
"In life I often feel like an outsider and on the edges of things. I was never into team sports or team activities at all, preferring to rely on myself, and not feeling as if I belonged in a lot of groups that I joined, or that I was on the periphery of groups.
"I’m not sure whether this is part of my personality or not. But school sport was always a nightmare for me, people expected me to be rubbish, and therefore I never tried, I was always last to be picked for teams, and my confidence in any team or competitive sport was rock-bottom.
"Plus, being a writer can be isolating. It's a very individual, internal kind of experience for me, and I've explored aloneness, loneliness and being on the edges over and over in my writing. I indulged myself in this for a long time.
"Roller derby is very different. It's been an education for me and at first, it was a huge step out of my comfort zone. It has involved a lot of challenges in training, as I learned to trust team mates, work together, and play as part of a pack. I’ve been tested a lot, and sometimes found it hard.
"But I’ve been drawn into it, not just on the track but off-track as well. There is a lot of support and encouragement within the roller derby community, and nobody has ever made me feel rubbish as a player. I am learning. We are all learning. And, it’s taken maybe more time for me, than other people, but I feel very much a part of the team."
Annie also admitted that the sport has had an effect on her writing. Certainly, the sense of overcoming obstacles that sport can bring has seemingly brought about something of a change in aims and purpose in her writing.
"My poetry and short fiction has always tended to verge on the darker side of life," she said.
"It’s gritty and explored perhaps more complex and undesirable sides of life. I was working on a collection of fiction, but roller derby (and other things) have stopped me in my tracks.
"I want to write more uplifting stories, stories that might explore struggle, difficulty and darkness, but show more fight and survival. Roller derby is influencing what I want to write about, the kinds of characters and subjects, and the way I write. I’m still working through these changes.
"I’ve written a few derby inspired fictions, and will probably do so again, not necessarily using the sport as the subject matter but exploring some of the experiences, emotions and characters I’ve discovered through playing derby."
Annie is very clear about whether artists and writers can benefit from an understanding of sport, and how participation can offer new insights and perspectives, not least on the writer themselves.
"Roller Derby has become hugely inspiring to me in many different ways," she explained.
"It has brought me new ways of expressing myself as a person, access to a new community of people and experience, lots of endorphins and drive. It gets rid of tension and stress and the crap that can get in the way of being able to sit down and write, or get out there and live.
"I would encourage any writer or artist to get involved in some kind of sport or exercise. Any writer who has gone for a long walk and found some kind of inner stillness, or has observed things in a new way, or had an epiphany or realisation will already know this.
"I guess a more competitive or physical sport can have a similar impact. I come away from training, full of adrenalin and ideas and thoughts, and I want to communicate and express myself. It fires me up.
"Sport also gives the balance that I need between sitting at a typewriter on my own and getting out there and skating round a track with team mates.
"There is a similar dynamic of performance. Good writing can fill me with adrenalin, ideas and thoughts as well.
"Sometimes I have good sessions at training, sometimes I feel I could have done lots better, I get similar frustrations and excitements. Sometimes, I want to give up, sometimes it is all I want to do. Writing and roller derby are similar in that sense, although I think they belong to different sides of myself."
At an age where most athletes consider hanging up their boots, or skates, Annie has an inspiring determination to be the best she can be at roller derby, which is still a very new sport to her.
"My goals for 2013 are to make it into Furies, the B team at Manchester Roller Derby, to continue my training as a roller derby referee, keep developing my skills, stay fit and have fun.
"I guess what I’m saying is that the future isn’t widely ambitious or competitive. I’m nearly 40, and love roller derby because there’s plenty of room for people to be involved for different reasons: to have fun, to get or keep fit, and/or to compete.
"I had no experience of roller derby a year ago, and I was welcomed in as a new skater. Most leagues teach people to skate and even lend you the skates, helmet and pads at first. Manchester Roller Derby has a ‘Zero to Hero’ training course that teaches all the basic skills needed to play roller derby, and it’s a great way to try out a sport you know nothing about.
"Watching a roller derby bout is a real experience too, and I recommend it to anyone. It’s fun to watch, there is lots of interaction with the crowd, and it’s easy to pick up what’s going on.
"Roller derby is very much a growing sport, and the BBC wrote an article saying just that."
Annie's writing is on a little bit of a sabbatical at the moment, sadly for her readers. She is sure that a rich return to form is not far away though.
"I was working on a collection of short fiction, but it’s come to a halt as I re-think and re-explore what I want to write," she explained.
"I think this is one of those fallow periods where the ideas become really rich through not working at them. My plan is to come back to some old stories with a fresh approach, and eventually get back to finishing my short fiction collection. I think it will be richer and diverse a collection for giving it some time."
One thing she is in no doubt about is the transformative power of sport, whatever it is, to build communities and bring people together.
"YES, it can! Roller derby offers sport, fitness and skating, but it is also socially vibrant," she asserted.
"People can be involved in different ways. I've socialised with my team and made many friends. I’ve been to karaoke with derby friends, eaten food, been to the pub, been to people’s houses.
"I’ve skated as a volunteer for Cancer Research, made cakes, roller disco’d, and within our league there have been clothes swaps, car boot sales, some players skated as part of the Pride parade for George House Trust.
"There is an awful lot of love and support within the league, and I know it sounds like I’m just blowing roller derby’s trumpet, but it’s for really good reason.
"I’ve seen people help others to move house, babysit for each other, dog-sit, give lifts, advice, hugs and a whole lot more. It is a growing community, and leagues are cropping up throughout the UK for women and men.
"MRD has people taking part from all parts of Greater Manchester and beyond, and what I most love is that it’s welcoming to anyone...the sporty, the non-sporty, men, women, people of all shapes, sizes and levels of fitness, and people from all kinds of backgrounds.
"I guess the commonality is that everyone wants to skate and learn and play roller derby. But there is so much more to it than just sport.
"I loved the Olympics and Paralympics. It was so inspiring to watch and, like many people, I started to think I wanted to be fitter, expand my experience of sports.
"I think seeing the athlete’s warm up and compete, hearing about their training regimes, and seeing them push themselves beyond their own limits to achieve new personal bests, it made a lot of us think, maybe I can push myself further as well, maybe we can all play sport."
Annie Clarkson was talking to Zack Wilson, the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Friday, 11 January 2013
Friday, 21 December 2012
The Best Christmas Ever
This is a reading from 'Lescar 2', which Blackheath Books were going to publish, and then didn't. Oh well. It's a good story anyway...
Zack Wilson is the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
It should provide some Christmas cheer...
Zack Wilson is the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Zack Wilson is the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
It should provide some Christmas cheer...
Zack Wilson is the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Thursday, 13 December 2012
Stumbles and Half Slips: VISIBILITY
Here's another reading from my novel, 'Stumbles and Half Slips' (Epic Rites Press, 2012, available from Amazon.com). This is where Ray meets some people who jealously protect their coffee and health and safety...
Zack Wilson, the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Zack Wilson, the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Sunday, 2 December 2012
UNITED KINGDOM
This is a story I'm quite proud of, but it has never received an especially wide audience. It was originally published online, at an arts mag called Smallfish Online (it's not still there, so don't bother looking for it). I thought it might make interesting reading in the light of some other stuff that's been up here recently, including the poem 'Plantations'.
Zack Wilson's debut novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' is out, from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
They see me on the bus and can't help it. "No surrender! No surrender! No surrender! To the IRA!" they chant. Two lads and a girl who looks like she knows better. Students probably, full of cooking lager and disappointment because England could only draw. They've seen the green flicker of my football top through the gap at the top of my jacket and made assumptions. I turn and stare at the taller of the two males. They're sitting in the sideways seats normally reserved for the disabled and I'm standing up at the front because I'm only on for the two stops.
My stare shuts them up for a bit. The girl's hands fumble with the scrunchy holding her blonde hair back, as she half giggles, "Don't, he's getting angry, don't." Her accent is southern and exclusive, as are those of her friends when they remark, "So what. Stupid paddy cunt," and, "fucking terrorist."
I decide it's time to speak. "Have you three got a problem?" I ask.
I think my Sheffield accent throws them. They were probably expecting Kerry or cartoon Belfast. The girl replies, giggling again and avoiding my sharp glare. "No…no," then her friends start chanting "No surrender" again, briefly. I shake my head and leave it. My stop's coming up.
There's a kind of quiet hostility on the bus. The other passengers seem to be trying to work out whom to hate most and can't quite decide, so they fear and mistrust me as much as the students. I can hear my three antagonists muttering and laughing, there's some kind of joke being told. The girl can't help her giggling, she keeps saying, "Shut up, shh!" then snorting and laughing again.
My stop arrives. The bus doors hiss open. I turn to the students and challenge them. "If you three twats want to make something of this then we can get off the buys now and sort it." I thought the lass would be flattered to be included.
"Just banter, mate. Just banter," the tallest of the three says from underneath his NY Yankees baseball cap. There's an expectant hush from the other passengers. I can feel their slight approval now. Taking control is something they can admire.
"T'int funny then," I reply. I stand and wait. The driver, a butch woman with boy's hair and nasal piercings, has left the doors open. I glance across at her. She's placid, waiting, looking ahead with no sign of irritation at all.
The students mumble. I lose patience, shake my head and tut. I raise my eyebrows inquiringly at the driver. She looks back with a sympathetic and world weary expression. I get off the bus, and the doors close.
The adrenalin's going and I'm full of empty, frustrated anger. I've got the game on the telly in the pub to look forward to anyway, and hopefully the boys can give the Danes something to think about and we can do better than England's pitiful draw at home to Macedonia. An away draw'd suit me fine and I feel better in the fresh air as I head to the pub.
It's not a part of town I'm used to, and I realise I've got off a stop too soon. Never mind, the walk'll do me good.
I'm almost cheerful again when I see three people up ahead, walking towards me through the yellow sodium light. As they get nearer I realise it's the students. They've got off at the stop I should've done and they're either lost or they've come to find me.
It takes them longer to recognise me, but they manage to do so at a distance of about thirty yards. They point and laugh. The girl seems to be trying to discourage the two lads from doing something. The lads begin to run towards me, chanting 'No surrender' at a quick rhythm.
Whether this is a joke or not I decide I've had enough. I stand and wait, next to a side road and a billboard. The first one to reach me gets my shoe in his groin, hard. He gasps and falls. That's him out of the game for a while. I see the other's face, washed out pallid in the streetlight, change its expression from sneering triumph to naked fear. My keys are in my left hand, and the long back-door key protrudes from amongst my fingers. I jab it into his solar plexus and he stops and totter back but doesn't fall. I smack my forehead into his nose and feel a satisfying squelch and crunch. He bends over and veers sideways, hands to his face. I kick his head and he falls into a foetal position.
His mate's lying by the billboard, trying to sit upright. I put my left foot in his chest and push him prone. I stamp on his elbow. Then I grind it into the pavement with my heel. He yelps and bleats. I pick up a decayed half-brick lying under the billboard and raise it above my head.
The girl's standing 10 yards away, frozen and crying. I raise the brick higher, yelling, "I'm gonna fucking kill ya!" I look down and he's shut his eyes. I bring my arm down hard.
The old brick breaks apart on the pavement six inches from his head. Lumps and rotten dust scatter and stick to the snot and tears on his pale, podgy face. I remove my heel from his elbow and spit. I breathe through my nose, deeply. All three of them are crying, moistly, childishly.
I lean over him and whisper. My voice is harsh and guttural as I give him some ancient words. " 'Our cry was no surrender/No republic we will join/And this will always be in mind/Derry, Aughrim and the Boyne.' My parents are Prods from Larne, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom," I add, as I turn away.
I leave them. I'm feeling quite good and I've got a taste in my mouth that only lager will shift.
Sometimes violence is the only thing these people understand.
Zack Wilson's debut novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' is out, from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
____________________
Zack Wilson's debut novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' is out, from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
They see me on the bus and can't help it. "No surrender! No surrender! No surrender! To the IRA!" they chant. Two lads and a girl who looks like she knows better. Students probably, full of cooking lager and disappointment because England could only draw. They've seen the green flicker of my football top through the gap at the top of my jacket and made assumptions. I turn and stare at the taller of the two males. They're sitting in the sideways seats normally reserved for the disabled and I'm standing up at the front because I'm only on for the two stops.
My stare shuts them up for a bit. The girl's hands fumble with the scrunchy holding her blonde hair back, as she half giggles, "Don't, he's getting angry, don't." Her accent is southern and exclusive, as are those of her friends when they remark, "So what. Stupid paddy cunt," and, "fucking terrorist."
I decide it's time to speak. "Have you three got a problem?" I ask.
I think my Sheffield accent throws them. They were probably expecting Kerry or cartoon Belfast. The girl replies, giggling again and avoiding my sharp glare. "No…no," then her friends start chanting "No surrender" again, briefly. I shake my head and leave it. My stop's coming up.
There's a kind of quiet hostility on the bus. The other passengers seem to be trying to work out whom to hate most and can't quite decide, so they fear and mistrust me as much as the students. I can hear my three antagonists muttering and laughing, there's some kind of joke being told. The girl can't help her giggling, she keeps saying, "Shut up, shh!" then snorting and laughing again.
My stop arrives. The bus doors hiss open. I turn to the students and challenge them. "If you three twats want to make something of this then we can get off the buys now and sort it." I thought the lass would be flattered to be included.
"Just banter, mate. Just banter," the tallest of the three says from underneath his NY Yankees baseball cap. There's an expectant hush from the other passengers. I can feel their slight approval now. Taking control is something they can admire.
"T'int funny then," I reply. I stand and wait. The driver, a butch woman with boy's hair and nasal piercings, has left the doors open. I glance across at her. She's placid, waiting, looking ahead with no sign of irritation at all.
The students mumble. I lose patience, shake my head and tut. I raise my eyebrows inquiringly at the driver. She looks back with a sympathetic and world weary expression. I get off the bus, and the doors close.
The adrenalin's going and I'm full of empty, frustrated anger. I've got the game on the telly in the pub to look forward to anyway, and hopefully the boys can give the Danes something to think about and we can do better than England's pitiful draw at home to Macedonia. An away draw'd suit me fine and I feel better in the fresh air as I head to the pub.
It's not a part of town I'm used to, and I realise I've got off a stop too soon. Never mind, the walk'll do me good.
I'm almost cheerful again when I see three people up ahead, walking towards me through the yellow sodium light. As they get nearer I realise it's the students. They've got off at the stop I should've done and they're either lost or they've come to find me.
It takes them longer to recognise me, but they manage to do so at a distance of about thirty yards. They point and laugh. The girl seems to be trying to discourage the two lads from doing something. The lads begin to run towards me, chanting 'No surrender' at a quick rhythm.
Whether this is a joke or not I decide I've had enough. I stand and wait, next to a side road and a billboard. The first one to reach me gets my shoe in his groin, hard. He gasps and falls. That's him out of the game for a while. I see the other's face, washed out pallid in the streetlight, change its expression from sneering triumph to naked fear. My keys are in my left hand, and the long back-door key protrudes from amongst my fingers. I jab it into his solar plexus and he stops and totter back but doesn't fall. I smack my forehead into his nose and feel a satisfying squelch and crunch. He bends over and veers sideways, hands to his face. I kick his head and he falls into a foetal position.
His mate's lying by the billboard, trying to sit upright. I put my left foot in his chest and push him prone. I stamp on his elbow. Then I grind it into the pavement with my heel. He yelps and bleats. I pick up a decayed half-brick lying under the billboard and raise it above my head.
The girl's standing 10 yards away, frozen and crying. I raise the brick higher, yelling, "I'm gonna fucking kill ya!" I look down and he's shut his eyes. I bring my arm down hard.
The old brick breaks apart on the pavement six inches from his head. Lumps and rotten dust scatter and stick to the snot and tears on his pale, podgy face. I remove my heel from his elbow and spit. I breathe through my nose, deeply. All three of them are crying, moistly, childishly.
I lean over him and whisper. My voice is harsh and guttural as I give him some ancient words. " 'Our cry was no surrender/No republic we will join/And this will always be in mind/Derry, Aughrim and the Boyne.' My parents are Prods from Larne, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom," I add, as I turn away.
I leave them. I'm feeling quite good and I've got a taste in my mouth that only lager will shift.
Sometimes violence is the only thing these people understand.
Zack Wilson's debut novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' is out, from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
____________________
Thursday, 22 November 2012
Sheffield Fragments
This were originally published by Laura Hird at her showcase. I like them...
FRIENDSHIP
-Shut tha face nob ead, Ah’m thinking.
-Thinkin? Thee? Abaht fuckin wot?
-Tha doesn’t need to knaw.
-Well, what’s tha doing ere den? This is no fun, dahn t’pub wi a fuckin depressive.
-Ah’m not a fuckin depressive! Just got things on me mind.
-What mind?
-Aa fuckin aa.
-Well, that’s it fo me. Ah’m gooin, Ah’m not fuckin sittin ere any longer wi thee.
-Aw, dorn’t be a cunt!
-Ah’m fuckin not!
-Orreight, Orreight. Fancy a peint?
-Aa, goo on then.
Remember that my debut novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' is out, from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
POLITICS
Ah’m fuckin sick on all this shit. It’s on t’telly evry fuckin day at t’minute. All t’fuckin Septics gooin on, whittling abaht t’Twin fuckin Towers. They neva fuckin learn. Ah mean, ma parents ad to move ouse twelve times during t’war cause o’t’fuckin Krauts. Mosta them cunts in them buildings were criminals anyway, robbin workin folk.
Ah fuckin ate Muslims too, mind. Cept Rafeeq, but e as a peint nah and then.
SEXUAL POLITICS
Winter fuckin Olympics! Why tha fuck is that on t’fuckin telly? Ah mean, speed skating. Ow many speed skaters does tha knaw round ere?
Mind you, look at t’ass on er! Ah do like a fit bird wot looks after ersen.
SPORT
Orreight? Ow’d Wednesday do? Ow many?! Ere, Stan, t’Pigs got done foar nowt! At Hillsborough! WAAaaay! Sometimes, tha knaws, Ah think Ah fuckin ate them moar than Ah love Uneited.
WEATHER
Rainin! Fuckin rainin agean. Does mean we can’t do any work on that roof though. Ivry cloud…
Remember that my debut novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' is out, from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
FRIENDSHIP
-Shut tha face nob ead, Ah’m thinking.
-Thinkin? Thee? Abaht fuckin wot?
-Tha doesn’t need to knaw.
-Well, what’s tha doing ere den? This is no fun, dahn t’pub wi a fuckin depressive.
-Ah’m not a fuckin depressive! Just got things on me mind.
-What mind?
-Aa fuckin aa.
-Well, that’s it fo me. Ah’m gooin, Ah’m not fuckin sittin ere any longer wi thee.
-Aw, dorn’t be a cunt!
-Ah’m fuckin not!
-Orreight, Orreight. Fancy a peint?
-Aa, goo on then.
Remember that my debut novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' is out, from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
POLITICS
Ah’m fuckin sick on all this shit. It’s on t’telly evry fuckin day at t’minute. All t’fuckin Septics gooin on, whittling abaht t’Twin fuckin Towers. They neva fuckin learn. Ah mean, ma parents ad to move ouse twelve times during t’war cause o’t’fuckin Krauts. Mosta them cunts in them buildings were criminals anyway, robbin workin folk.
Ah fuckin ate Muslims too, mind. Cept Rafeeq, but e as a peint nah and then.
SEXUAL POLITICS
Winter fuckin Olympics! Why tha fuck is that on t’fuckin telly? Ah mean, speed skating. Ow many speed skaters does tha knaw round ere?
Mind you, look at t’ass on er! Ah do like a fit bird wot looks after ersen.
SPORT
Orreight? Ow’d Wednesday do? Ow many?! Ere, Stan, t’Pigs got done foar nowt! At Hillsborough! WAAaaay! Sometimes, tha knaws, Ah think Ah fuckin ate them moar than Ah love Uneited.
WEATHER
Rainin! Fuckin rainin agean. Does mean we can’t do any work on that roof though. Ivry cloud…
Remember that my debut novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips' is out, from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Monday, 19 November 2012
Steve Ely: Poet of Sunday Leagues and Sainted Rebellion
Steve Ely is a poet and author from Yorkshire, England. When I first came across his work, thanks to social media, it struck as very different indeed from much of the poetry that was being written. Consciously intellectual, with historical subject matter and archaic language, it celebrated an England of northern saints and doomed peasant rebellions.
It also challenged the reader to understand the references. It was poetry to be read, rather than consumed in seconds and forgotten. The work had gravity.
From my point of view, Steve's viewpoints on history and culture seemed to resonate with some of my own. When I first read Steve's work, I had just read the late Mick Imlah's 'The Lost Leader'. Imlah's book, with its reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie in its title, was a poetic treatment of Scotland's history. Often obscure in its references, it used poetry to both inform and make wider historical and contemporary points. It used the past to illuminate the present.
Steve's work seemed similar to me, certainly in some of its textures and fundamentals, its stating points and attitudes. He writes about football players as well as monks, Falklands War heroes as well as medieval saints.
This is ambitious poetry, stimulating work which goes far beyond the merely observational or solipsistic. I spoke to Steve about his writing, his sporting passions and what drives him to express himslef in the way he does. Of particular interest to me were his references to sport in literature, and how playing and watching sport had contributed to his work.
Firstly, your writing seems to indicate an intriguing and, to many people, probably baffling mix of the archaic and the radical. You use Catholic faith, Anglo Saxon language and archaic forms in your writing, as examples, but you are also a socialist and a self-professed hater of Tories, as well as liberals. How do you reconcile what seem to be such competing instincts? Is it hard work to make a coherent whole out of such varied and seemingly competing instincts?
In a word, yes! I’m a former socialist – I was in and around the left for large parts of the early eighties and early nineties (with an interlude in the Green Party) and I retain some of the atavisms of the left, such as a knee jerk animus to Conservatism.
But I haven’t been a member of a political party since 1996 and my political activism since then has been non-existent. However, since my second, unpublished, book of poems, JerUSAlem, which was an exploration of American extremism and concepts of the American Dream, pretty much everything I’ve written has had a political edge.
Over the last four years I’ve been exploring the roots of England in my work and my embracing of Catholicism is part of that.
But I’m a poet, not a politician, and although you’re right to suggest I’m working to a synthesis of sorts, I’m not looking to reach a manifesto position – I don’t see that as being my job. I want to raise important themes through my work and challenge my audience. But most of all I want to create striking and evocative work with a powerful affect.
You have written about war as well as sport. What do you make of Orwell's 'war without the shooting' reference to sport?
I think Orwell’s statement is often understood in the simplistic sense of, ‘young men used to go to war and sow their wild oats of allegiance and violence but now there aren’t as many opportunities to fight in wars, so playing and supporting sport is a surrogate outlet for the same emotions’.
It’s an interesting perspective, with some truth in it, but ultimately obfuscatory. If you’re part of a team – as player or supporter – you inevitably get that electric sense of belonging, mutual responsibility, support and communal striving in which your individual identity is harnessed in, and to some extent subsumed, in a greater whole.
Given that sport, by definition, involves asserting yourself against an opponent in a context of physical exertion and high emotion (competition), violence and aggression will never be far beneath the surface. When overlaid by aggravating factors of politics, religion or long standing rivalry (Celtic-Rangers, Fenerbache/Galatasary), for example, it can be seen as analogous to war. But I wouldn’t push it beyond an analogue. Sport isn't war.
So, if sport cannot be called 'war', can it be called 'art' with any justification?
At its best, sport is an art form, or a thing of beauty at any rate. The movement and grace of Barca in the 2010-11 season, the vision, technical accomplishment and audacity of Ibrahimovic’s last goal against England the other night, Bergkamp’s goals against Argentina, Leicester & Newcastle, Carlos Alberto’s winner in the 1970 world cup final – these things take the breath away – like Lawrence says about the ‘shout’ of the tortoise - ‘it sounds on the plasm direct’ - not just an aesthetic, physical or intellectual impact – the moment impacts whole body.
What do you think watching sport offers writers in the way of inspiration or understanding?
Having played team sport all my life, the thing sport has brought me is an appreciation of the importance of what might simplistically be called team spirit – that the individual is always part of a larger collective and has a responsibility to fulfil a role in that collective that is reciprocated in the care and support the individual receives from the team.
Or, as we used to say when I played for the Travellers FC - ‘one in - all in’. That’s what Camus meant when he said, "all that I know of morality and obligations I owe to football." Bill Shankly and Brian Clough called it socialism. It’s certainly Catholic Social Teaching in a brightly coloured shirt.
The other week saw a great clash in Glasgow between Celtic and Barcelona. Both those teams have strong religious/ethnic/nationalistic identities, albeit in Celtic's case that of a non-native tradition. Do you think that attaching such strong cultural significance to sports teams is healthy?
The fervour generated in the Old Firm matches can provide legitimisation for psychopaths – there was a horrible incident a few years ago when a Rangers ‘fan’ slit the throat of a Celtic fan outside Ibrox in an unprovoked attack, purely because the latter was wearing the hooped shirt.
That was exceptional, but there’s no doubt that this ‘sectarianism’ gets more or less routinely out of hand. But, for better or worse, Rangers and Celtic have become emblematic of the identities of many of their supporters, and the affective power arising from that, alongside the context of wider politico-religious conflict, is what makes the Old Firm.
You regret the excesses, but ultimately, would you have it any other way?
Barca is different. For the almost forty years of Franco's dictatorship, Barca was the only expression of Catalan identity and nationalism the Catalans could get away with, and it is why Barca is ‘mes plus un club’.
Take that away, and all you’ve got is Man City, or Chelsea. You can’t separate politics and sport, because sport is not just about entertainment – it’s about allegiance, activism, commitment, engagement and identity. So often, sporting teams emerge from very specific communities and are the flagship of those communities.
Every time Nottingham Forest play at Oakwell, chants of ‘scab’ echo around the ground – and the thing is, they used to before the 1984-5 strike – the folk memory of the terraces was remembering the aftermath of the 1926 strike, when the Spencer’s bosses union split Cook’s NUM.
‘Politics’ in sport ramps up the intensity and makes for a more electrifying experience – but you’ve got to rein in the nutters.
What sports do you like? Who are your sporting heroes and why?
Football is my main sport. I played to a decent standard Sundays (and sometimes Saturdays as well) for over twenty years.
I was a striker. I began as a Stan Bowles-type dribbling inside left, evolved into a Steve Claridge type workhorse and ended my career as a Grant Holt style lump.
As a kid I supported Sheffield United and saw them play River Plate in 1978 just after Argentina had won the World Cup. United had just bought Alex Sabella (now the coach of the Argentinian national team) from River and the pre-season friendly was part of the deal.
Leopoldo Luque, Daniel Passerella and Ubaldo Filliol of the cup winning team played. United won three-two, with Alan Woodward scoring the winner from the spot.
Aged about sixteen, I switched teams and started watching Barnsley with my mates, largely because I was sick of going to Bramall Lane on my own – nobody else I knew supported United. I had a season ticket at Oakwell for six or seven years but I haven’t been for ages now.
I never really felt an emotional connect with Barnsley, because I was a latecomer to them, I suppose.
I also watch a lot of Rugby League on Sky. I used to play league as a young kid.
At middle school we had a teacher, Mr Milnes, who was from Featherstone, and he introduced the game to the school. We were very good at that age – we used to beat sides from Cas and Fev, who were not hapy that a team from outside the league heartlands was besting them.
I love the mercurial geniuses: Maradona, the greatest of all time, Messi, who will supercede him, Best, Gascoigne, Rivaldo and Dennis Bergkamp, for his purity.
From League I like Rob Burrow and Sam Tomkins, for the same reasons.
Your own English nationalism is very different from that of groups like the EDL. You also have an Irish connection. What made you think of yourself as English? Is being from Yorkshire more important that being English to you?
My concept of England is based on the concept of the people in the land and the corollary opinion that, over centuries, the people have been expropriated and the land degraded and destroyed.
I suppose I’m a utopian in the tradition of William Morris - my project is heuristic and archaeological, seeking to bring to light neglected aspects of Englishness – the Anglo-Danish heritage, the pre-reformation English Catholic Church, the traditions of resistance running through the silvaticii rebels against the Norman occupation, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the radicalism of the English revolution, the nineteenth and twentienth century working class movements and the particular experience of ‘the North’, as well as the wider heritage.
From these, to use Eliot’s idiom, I assemble the fragments ‘I shore against my ruins’.
It is a tragedy that discourse of Englishness, or of English nationalism, is pre-sullied by the reactionary racist populism of the EDL or the fascist successors of Moseley’s BUF from the NF to the BNP.
It’s up to the rest of us to wrest the discourse of identity and nationality away from those motivated by confusion, fear and hatred. And a precondition for this is engagement with the past to re-discover the wellsprings.
For all our alleged national obsession with ‘heritage’, (the ‘mad parade’ of the Sex Pistol’s in God Save the Queen), there is probably no developed country in the world in which the person on the street is more ignorant of even the basics of the history of the nation to which they belong, not to mention their local history. There has certainly been no European nation quicker to throw it away.
Yorkshire is important to me as county and regional identity should be to everyone - but ultimately, county identity should find its place in that wider polity of the nation.
I’m also, for better or worse (sometimes better, often worse), very class conscious, almost instinctively so. At the core of my developing, incoherent worldview is what might be called transcendental parochialism.
I vision a time when people can name the birds and animals in the farmland near their town, know the significance of the funny old building on the corner and the gnarly old tree in the town square, understand why the river running through their village is straight and not meandering, know who the guy on the statue was, why they’re living in a tower block, their local and national history (etc) – as well being engaged in current affairs and global issues.
I suppose I’m tacitly proposing a kind of informed civic engagement in which people secure in their identity and interests and with a sense of solidarity with their corporate community, are empowered to assert their interests and shape their world.
In my recent work, I use archaic forms – Old and Middle English, quotations, epigraphs and references from/to ancient and neglected texts, the spellings and syntax of the Wyclif and King James Bibles, for example – to emphasise my vision of the essential continuity of England and the English.
Historical and literary studies impose a series of arbitrary disjunctions – Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Mediaeval, etc.
This has the effect of severing ‘the past’ from the present, resulting in its neglect. The very term ‘History’ in the popular conception implies something definitively past, therefore irrelevant and thus something that can with good conscience be ignored. My forthcoming book Oswald’s Book of Hours (February 2013 – available for pre-order on Amazon!) and my work in progress, Englaland, are synchronic and synoptic looks at England. The tributaries flow into a single stream.
Lastly, would you have preferred to write a bestselling book or to be a sports star yourself?
Well past the time when it was a clearly a pipe-dream, I clung to the forlorn hope that I could ‘make it’ as a professional footballer, go on to play for England, score in a Cup Final and so on.
It was never my ambition to write a bestselling book, as such, because that seems to imply a certain pandering to the audience which inevitably compromises artistic vision.
I write what I have to, what I’m driven to and if anyone else likes it, that’s a bonus. So professional footballer it is. I could’ve written in the afternoons when the rest of the lads were playing snooker.
Steve's novel 'Ratmen' is available from Blackheath Books.
It also challenged the reader to understand the references. It was poetry to be read, rather than consumed in seconds and forgotten. The work had gravity.
From my point of view, Steve's viewpoints on history and culture seemed to resonate with some of my own. When I first read Steve's work, I had just read the late Mick Imlah's 'The Lost Leader'. Imlah's book, with its reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie in its title, was a poetic treatment of Scotland's history. Often obscure in its references, it used poetry to both inform and make wider historical and contemporary points. It used the past to illuminate the present.
Steve's work seemed similar to me, certainly in some of its textures and fundamentals, its stating points and attitudes. He writes about football players as well as monks, Falklands War heroes as well as medieval saints.
This is ambitious poetry, stimulating work which goes far beyond the merely observational or solipsistic. I spoke to Steve about his writing, his sporting passions and what drives him to express himslef in the way he does. Of particular interest to me were his references to sport in literature, and how playing and watching sport had contributed to his work.
Firstly, your writing seems to indicate an intriguing and, to many people, probably baffling mix of the archaic and the radical. You use Catholic faith, Anglo Saxon language and archaic forms in your writing, as examples, but you are also a socialist and a self-professed hater of Tories, as well as liberals. How do you reconcile what seem to be such competing instincts? Is it hard work to make a coherent whole out of such varied and seemingly competing instincts?
In a word, yes! I’m a former socialist – I was in and around the left for large parts of the early eighties and early nineties (with an interlude in the Green Party) and I retain some of the atavisms of the left, such as a knee jerk animus to Conservatism.
But I haven’t been a member of a political party since 1996 and my political activism since then has been non-existent. However, since my second, unpublished, book of poems, JerUSAlem, which was an exploration of American extremism and concepts of the American Dream, pretty much everything I’ve written has had a political edge.
Over the last four years I’ve been exploring the roots of England in my work and my embracing of Catholicism is part of that.
But I’m a poet, not a politician, and although you’re right to suggest I’m working to a synthesis of sorts, I’m not looking to reach a manifesto position – I don’t see that as being my job. I want to raise important themes through my work and challenge my audience. But most of all I want to create striking and evocative work with a powerful affect.
You have written about war as well as sport. What do you make of Orwell's 'war without the shooting' reference to sport?
I think Orwell’s statement is often understood in the simplistic sense of, ‘young men used to go to war and sow their wild oats of allegiance and violence but now there aren’t as many opportunities to fight in wars, so playing and supporting sport is a surrogate outlet for the same emotions’.
It’s an interesting perspective, with some truth in it, but ultimately obfuscatory. If you’re part of a team – as player or supporter – you inevitably get that electric sense of belonging, mutual responsibility, support and communal striving in which your individual identity is harnessed in, and to some extent subsumed, in a greater whole.
Given that sport, by definition, involves asserting yourself against an opponent in a context of physical exertion and high emotion (competition), violence and aggression will never be far beneath the surface. When overlaid by aggravating factors of politics, religion or long standing rivalry (Celtic-Rangers, Fenerbache/Galatasary), for example, it can be seen as analogous to war. But I wouldn’t push it beyond an analogue. Sport isn't war.
So, if sport cannot be called 'war', can it be called 'art' with any justification?
At its best, sport is an art form, or a thing of beauty at any rate. The movement and grace of Barca in the 2010-11 season, the vision, technical accomplishment and audacity of Ibrahimovic’s last goal against England the other night, Bergkamp’s goals against Argentina, Leicester & Newcastle, Carlos Alberto’s winner in the 1970 world cup final – these things take the breath away – like Lawrence says about the ‘shout’ of the tortoise - ‘it sounds on the plasm direct’ - not just an aesthetic, physical or intellectual impact – the moment impacts whole body.
What do you think watching sport offers writers in the way of inspiration or understanding?
Having played team sport all my life, the thing sport has brought me is an appreciation of the importance of what might simplistically be called team spirit – that the individual is always part of a larger collective and has a responsibility to fulfil a role in that collective that is reciprocated in the care and support the individual receives from the team.
Or, as we used to say when I played for the Travellers FC - ‘one in - all in’. That’s what Camus meant when he said, "all that I know of morality and obligations I owe to football." Bill Shankly and Brian Clough called it socialism. It’s certainly Catholic Social Teaching in a brightly coloured shirt.
The other week saw a great clash in Glasgow between Celtic and Barcelona. Both those teams have strong religious/ethnic/nationalistic identities, albeit in Celtic's case that of a non-native tradition. Do you think that attaching such strong cultural significance to sports teams is healthy?
The fervour generated in the Old Firm matches can provide legitimisation for psychopaths – there was a horrible incident a few years ago when a Rangers ‘fan’ slit the throat of a Celtic fan outside Ibrox in an unprovoked attack, purely because the latter was wearing the hooped shirt.
That was exceptional, but there’s no doubt that this ‘sectarianism’ gets more or less routinely out of hand. But, for better or worse, Rangers and Celtic have become emblematic of the identities of many of their supporters, and the affective power arising from that, alongside the context of wider politico-religious conflict, is what makes the Old Firm.
You regret the excesses, but ultimately, would you have it any other way?
Barca is different. For the almost forty years of Franco's dictatorship, Barca was the only expression of Catalan identity and nationalism the Catalans could get away with, and it is why Barca is ‘mes plus un club’.
Take that away, and all you’ve got is Man City, or Chelsea. You can’t separate politics and sport, because sport is not just about entertainment – it’s about allegiance, activism, commitment, engagement and identity. So often, sporting teams emerge from very specific communities and are the flagship of those communities.
Every time Nottingham Forest play at Oakwell, chants of ‘scab’ echo around the ground – and the thing is, they used to before the 1984-5 strike – the folk memory of the terraces was remembering the aftermath of the 1926 strike, when the Spencer’s bosses union split Cook’s NUM.
‘Politics’ in sport ramps up the intensity and makes for a more electrifying experience – but you’ve got to rein in the nutters.
What sports do you like? Who are your sporting heroes and why?
Football is my main sport. I played to a decent standard Sundays (and sometimes Saturdays as well) for over twenty years.
I was a striker. I began as a Stan Bowles-type dribbling inside left, evolved into a Steve Claridge type workhorse and ended my career as a Grant Holt style lump.
As a kid I supported Sheffield United and saw them play River Plate in 1978 just after Argentina had won the World Cup. United had just bought Alex Sabella (now the coach of the Argentinian national team) from River and the pre-season friendly was part of the deal.
Leopoldo Luque, Daniel Passerella and Ubaldo Filliol of the cup winning team played. United won three-two, with Alan Woodward scoring the winner from the spot.
Aged about sixteen, I switched teams and started watching Barnsley with my mates, largely because I was sick of going to Bramall Lane on my own – nobody else I knew supported United. I had a season ticket at Oakwell for six or seven years but I haven’t been for ages now.
I never really felt an emotional connect with Barnsley, because I was a latecomer to them, I suppose.
I also watch a lot of Rugby League on Sky. I used to play league as a young kid.
At middle school we had a teacher, Mr Milnes, who was from Featherstone, and he introduced the game to the school. We were very good at that age – we used to beat sides from Cas and Fev, who were not hapy that a team from outside the league heartlands was besting them.
I love the mercurial geniuses: Maradona, the greatest of all time, Messi, who will supercede him, Best, Gascoigne, Rivaldo and Dennis Bergkamp, for his purity.
From League I like Rob Burrow and Sam Tomkins, for the same reasons.
Your own English nationalism is very different from that of groups like the EDL. You also have an Irish connection. What made you think of yourself as English? Is being from Yorkshire more important that being English to you?
My concept of England is based on the concept of the people in the land and the corollary opinion that, over centuries, the people have been expropriated and the land degraded and destroyed.
I suppose I’m a utopian in the tradition of William Morris - my project is heuristic and archaeological, seeking to bring to light neglected aspects of Englishness – the Anglo-Danish heritage, the pre-reformation English Catholic Church, the traditions of resistance running through the silvaticii rebels against the Norman occupation, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the radicalism of the English revolution, the nineteenth and twentienth century working class movements and the particular experience of ‘the North’, as well as the wider heritage.
From these, to use Eliot’s idiom, I assemble the fragments ‘I shore against my ruins’.
It is a tragedy that discourse of Englishness, or of English nationalism, is pre-sullied by the reactionary racist populism of the EDL or the fascist successors of Moseley’s BUF from the NF to the BNP.
It’s up to the rest of us to wrest the discourse of identity and nationality away from those motivated by confusion, fear and hatred. And a precondition for this is engagement with the past to re-discover the wellsprings.
For all our alleged national obsession with ‘heritage’, (the ‘mad parade’ of the Sex Pistol’s in God Save the Queen), there is probably no developed country in the world in which the person on the street is more ignorant of even the basics of the history of the nation to which they belong, not to mention their local history. There has certainly been no European nation quicker to throw it away.
Yorkshire is important to me as county and regional identity should be to everyone - but ultimately, county identity should find its place in that wider polity of the nation.
I’m also, for better or worse (sometimes better, often worse), very class conscious, almost instinctively so. At the core of my developing, incoherent worldview is what might be called transcendental parochialism.
I vision a time when people can name the birds and animals in the farmland near their town, know the significance of the funny old building on the corner and the gnarly old tree in the town square, understand why the river running through their village is straight and not meandering, know who the guy on the statue was, why they’re living in a tower block, their local and national history (etc) – as well being engaged in current affairs and global issues.
I suppose I’m tacitly proposing a kind of informed civic engagement in which people secure in their identity and interests and with a sense of solidarity with their corporate community, are empowered to assert their interests and shape their world.
In my recent work, I use archaic forms – Old and Middle English, quotations, epigraphs and references from/to ancient and neglected texts, the spellings and syntax of the Wyclif and King James Bibles, for example – to emphasise my vision of the essential continuity of England and the English.
Historical and literary studies impose a series of arbitrary disjunctions – Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Mediaeval, etc.
This has the effect of severing ‘the past’ from the present, resulting in its neglect. The very term ‘History’ in the popular conception implies something definitively past, therefore irrelevant and thus something that can with good conscience be ignored. My forthcoming book Oswald’s Book of Hours (February 2013 – available for pre-order on Amazon!) and my work in progress, Englaland, are synchronic and synoptic looks at England. The tributaries flow into a single stream.
Lastly, would you have preferred to write a bestselling book or to be a sports star yourself?
Well past the time when it was a clearly a pipe-dream, I clung to the forlorn hope that I could ‘make it’ as a professional footballer, go on to play for England, score in a Cup Final and so on.
It was never my ambition to write a bestselling book, as such, because that seems to imply a certain pandering to the audience which inevitably compromises artistic vision.
I write what I have to, what I’m driven to and if anyone else likes it, that’s a bonus. So professional footballer it is. I could’ve written in the afternoons when the rest of the lads were playing snooker.
Steve's novel 'Ratmen' is available from Blackheath Books.
Steve Ely was talking to Zack Wilson, the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
Getting Between the Lines: A Review of 'Countries of the World', by Steven Porter
Steven Porter's novel 'Countries of the World' (available from Amazon HERE) is the kind of book you immediately want to do well. Much like the charismatic midfielder with an attitude that drives his manager mad, or the striker who never trains but still bags 20 goals a season.
Players like that are rare in modern football. Books like this are rare too, which is probably why Porter had to go down the indie route of assisted self-publishing when it came to getting this quirky, sensitive and touchingly humorous account of growing up in Scotland.
This is a book which is hard to categorise after all. If it was a footballer, one senses that it would play 'in the hole', neither striker nor midfielder, neither winger nor central thruster, occupying space where no one else quite sees it. And keeping the crowd, rather than the vain venture capitalists in the directors' box, happy.
This is certainly a reader, rather than a publisher's kind of book. The bittersweet characteristics present in much of Porter's best prose are here in great numbers. Porter's respect and affection for his characters is also clear.
Tales of maniacs like Wilson Dodds, who in any context apart from football would be viewed as an anti-social nutcase, litter the book. There is no contempt for the characters at all, no sneering from a writer at his less than perfect creations. Instead, we understand them better because of the context in which Porter presents them. Dodds, a man who "put his love for his club above his own welfare at times", emerges as a loveable British eccentric when viewed through this lens.
Not that Porter would thank me for describing his creation as 'British'. There is much in the book about Scottish identity, and the reader gleans a clear sense of Scottish Nationalism throughout. The tone is never one of bagpipes, tartan and shortbread though. Again, it is subtle, pointing out Scotland's cultural differences with England in a way which is not always obvious unless you are reading carefully.
Scotland's rejection of the values of Margaret Thatcher is dealt with nicely in an encounter at a Scarborough caravan park, where the English owner hails the Iron Lady and indulges in some casual hatred of the Welsh. The great blue elephant in the room of Rangers fans' bigotry and idolising of 17th century Protestant heroes comes into focus during a coach trip to Northern Ireland, where an Orange march holds things up for a handy family discussion. The link made to the Freemasons would not be obvious to anyone with little awareness of how the Protestant Ascendancy is expressed in Scotland.
At times, the tone can perhaps become a little didactic, particularly when it comes to filling in the details about football history. But that is easy to say when you know all this football history. It is sometimes easy to forget that many, perhaps even most, do not have the same obsessive knowledge as this author, and the detail is often necessary to make an obscure point a little clearer.
Scottish Nationalism peeps through a few times, but it is subtle stuff. One interesting passage relates a classroom discussion in the early 1980s. All the students pose as English haters before realising that many of the things they most like, such as Liverpool FC, The Specials and Torvill and Dean, are from England. Porter himself sums it up perfectly with his description of his feelings when watching 'It's A Knockout'
Porter perhaps sums up his own brand of Scottish Nationalism best when viewing it through the lens provided by football. "For Scotland supporters, losing a few games or going a year or two without a trophy is not a crisis...Winning more often than losing is the best any Scotland fan can hope for, qualifying for a major tournament and then falling flat, to be mocked and patronised. But we can laugh at our neighbours when their expectations of glory don't materialise."
The range of characters in the book is also great, and many of them have tics and nuances that require some knowledge of Scotland to fully appreciate. One highlight is the Roman Catholic Pole in the town of Breogan, who has become a full-on Rangers supporting Bluenose who makes sectarian remarks about Celtic fans.
When we find out that many of those Celtic fans are actually Protestants, a subtle point is made about how football shapes identity more than people's actual identity. Porter, typically, teases out the point, leaving it up to the reader to grasp it fully. This kind of writing is very appealing; it places the burden on the reader. If you want to really understand what he is saying, find out for yourself.
The book can also be returned to time and again. Indeed, its quality becomes more apparent when picked up and dipped into. While the over-arching narrative of a young man coming of age is nothing particularly noteworthy, the way in which each piece functions as something which can be read entirely independently of the others is something special.
The references to pop culture will also strike a note with many readers of a certain age, with sweets, television programmes and chart hit records all given ample page time. This functions like a kind of literary archaeology, allowing the reader to date the events in accurate layers according to Subbuteo sets, Grifters, Commando comics and Russ Abbot on telly.
Difficult to market properly, skilful and neat, with maybe a touch of deliberate indiscipline around the edges: this is a book like all your favourite players. Sign it up for your bookshelf now.
Players like that are rare in modern football. Books like this are rare too, which is probably why Porter had to go down the indie route of assisted self-publishing when it came to getting this quirky, sensitive and touchingly humorous account of growing up in Scotland.
This is a book which is hard to categorise after all. If it was a footballer, one senses that it would play 'in the hole', neither striker nor midfielder, neither winger nor central thruster, occupying space where no one else quite sees it. And keeping the crowd, rather than the vain venture capitalists in the directors' box, happy.
This is certainly a reader, rather than a publisher's kind of book. The bittersweet characteristics present in much of Porter's best prose are here in great numbers. Porter's respect and affection for his characters is also clear.
Tales of maniacs like Wilson Dodds, who in any context apart from football would be viewed as an anti-social nutcase, litter the book. There is no contempt for the characters at all, no sneering from a writer at his less than perfect creations. Instead, we understand them better because of the context in which Porter presents them. Dodds, a man who "put his love for his club above his own welfare at times", emerges as a loveable British eccentric when viewed through this lens.
Not that Porter would thank me for describing his creation as 'British'. There is much in the book about Scottish identity, and the reader gleans a clear sense of Scottish Nationalism throughout. The tone is never one of bagpipes, tartan and shortbread though. Again, it is subtle, pointing out Scotland's cultural differences with England in a way which is not always obvious unless you are reading carefully.
Scotland's rejection of the values of Margaret Thatcher is dealt with nicely in an encounter at a Scarborough caravan park, where the English owner hails the Iron Lady and indulges in some casual hatred of the Welsh. The great blue elephant in the room of Rangers fans' bigotry and idolising of 17th century Protestant heroes comes into focus during a coach trip to Northern Ireland, where an Orange march holds things up for a handy family discussion. The link made to the Freemasons would not be obvious to anyone with little awareness of how the Protestant Ascendancy is expressed in Scotland.
At times, the tone can perhaps become a little didactic, particularly when it comes to filling in the details about football history. But that is easy to say when you know all this football history. It is sometimes easy to forget that many, perhaps even most, do not have the same obsessive knowledge as this author, and the detail is often necessary to make an obscure point a little clearer.
Scottish Nationalism peeps through a few times, but it is subtle stuff. One interesting passage relates a classroom discussion in the early 1980s. All the students pose as English haters before realising that many of the things they most like, such as Liverpool FC, The Specials and Torvill and Dean, are from England. Porter himself sums it up perfectly with his description of his feelings when watching 'It's A Knockout'
Porter perhaps sums up his own brand of Scottish Nationalism best when viewing it through the lens provided by football. "For Scotland supporters, losing a few games or going a year or two without a trophy is not a crisis...Winning more often than losing is the best any Scotland fan can hope for, qualifying for a major tournament and then falling flat, to be mocked and patronised. But we can laugh at our neighbours when their expectations of glory don't materialise."
The range of characters in the book is also great, and many of them have tics and nuances that require some knowledge of Scotland to fully appreciate. One highlight is the Roman Catholic Pole in the town of Breogan, who has become a full-on Rangers supporting Bluenose who makes sectarian remarks about Celtic fans.
When we find out that many of those Celtic fans are actually Protestants, a subtle point is made about how football shapes identity more than people's actual identity. Porter, typically, teases out the point, leaving it up to the reader to grasp it fully. This kind of writing is very appealing; it places the burden on the reader. If you want to really understand what he is saying, find out for yourself.
The book can also be returned to time and again. Indeed, its quality becomes more apparent when picked up and dipped into. While the over-arching narrative of a young man coming of age is nothing particularly noteworthy, the way in which each piece functions as something which can be read entirely independently of the others is something special.
The references to pop culture will also strike a note with many readers of a certain age, with sweets, television programmes and chart hit records all given ample page time. This functions like a kind of literary archaeology, allowing the reader to date the events in accurate layers according to Subbuteo sets, Grifters, Commando comics and Russ Abbot on telly.
Difficult to market properly, skilful and neat, with maybe a touch of deliberate indiscipline around the edges: this is a book like all your favourite players. Sign it up for your bookshelf now.
Zack Wilson is the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Friday, 12 October 2012
Stumbles and Half Slips: Ambition
As it's Friday here's a video of me reading a story from my new book 'Stumbles and Half Slips'. This is the first story in the book, and serves to introduce one or two recurring characters...
Buy 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press. Also available from Amazon.com.
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
Lescar: Sheffield Star Interview
My second collection of fiction is called 'Lescar', and was published by Blackheath Books of Wales a few years back.
You can buy it here. You can buy my current novel, 'Stumbles and Half Slips', from here.
I'll be blogging a bit about 'Lescar' later on here, but it was a series of stories set in a real pub in Sheffield, on Sharrowvale Road, near Hunter's Bar. It's a real pub and it's still there, but it was changed enormously in recent years. All of the characters are fictional though some names may be familiar...
You can find out a bit more about the book and its inspiration in this interview with Martin Dawes of the Sheffield Star...
Lescar's new chapter
Published on Wednesday 31 December 2008 09:35
TO the Lescar Hotel at Hunters Bar to interview author Zack Wilson about his new 'chapbook' of stories set in the boozer.
Now this 17th century term is not one you hear much these days, but think bigger than a booklet, smaller than a book.
We arrange to meet in the Lescar itself. Zack, a former English teacher at Westfield School, hasn't been in there for getting on for three years, ever since he went on the wagon.
The book is set in what Zack insists is a fictional Lescar in 2004 so the fact that his Lescar has a landlord called Duncan McAllister and the real Lescar had one called Duncan MacFarlane, or the pub had a barmaid called Emma and the book one named Emily is purely coincidental.
It's perhaps best not to inquire if there really was a Jewish Dave or a Bob Brown, about whom it was rumoured... no, we shan't go on.
The one character Zack says is not a composite is Mayhem, a man devoted to the music of Status Quo.
"It's very definitely fiction but like all fiction every writer takes what they see and weaves into it their own experience. There are several things which really happened... but the details and context have been changed, usually for the sake of style," he says over a lime and soda.
The stories are written in a crisp, vivid style which often reads like reportage. There was a visit from the Blades Business Crew but, says Zack, he wasn't there at the time.
His stories started on the web, where much of his writing now is. He gave up teaching to work for the city council's youth offenders' service (another literary gold mine) but is now full time as the Premier League reporter for a football internet website.
It's not clear what the new management of the Lescar will make of the book. He's not told them but wonders whether they'd like to sell it on the bar.
The Diary asks why he needed to name the pub at all and not just make one up.
"I am drawn to fiction set in recognisable locations, as in James Joyce's Dublin or Irvine Welsh's Edinburgh. There is a recognisable context for what goes on," he says. Besides, the Lescar was then his local and had a heady mix of respectability and riff-raff. It was what you would call bohemian, a place where you could find people with recreational substances.
Those days have long gone, of course. We are intrigued to find the 2009 Lescar has a wine club.
The stories don't sound like they were written by a man who sat alone in the corner.
"I used to stand here at the bar. I hardly ever sat down," he says.
This collection of stories is the first volume. Another is planned for the spring and, sitting on the backburner at the moment, is one on the Lescar's women.
After all these years of self-imposed exile that will have to be done from memory. And any resemblance between fact and fiction will be purely coincidental.
Originally published at:
http://www.thestar.co.uk/lifestyle/features/lescar-s-new-chapter-1-264969
You can buy it here. You can buy my current novel, 'Stumbles and Half Slips', from here.
I'll be blogging a bit about 'Lescar' later on here, but it was a series of stories set in a real pub in Sheffield, on Sharrowvale Road, near Hunter's Bar. It's a real pub and it's still there, but it was changed enormously in recent years. All of the characters are fictional though some names may be familiar...
You can find out a bit more about the book and its inspiration in this interview with Martin Dawes of the Sheffield Star...
Lescar's new chapter
Published on Wednesday 31 December 2008 09:35
TO the Lescar Hotel at Hunters Bar to interview author Zack Wilson about his new 'chapbook' of stories set in the boozer.
Now this 17th century term is not one you hear much these days, but think bigger than a booklet, smaller than a book.
We arrange to meet in the Lescar itself. Zack, a former English teacher at Westfield School, hasn't been in there for getting on for three years, ever since he went on the wagon.
The book is set in what Zack insists is a fictional Lescar in 2004 so the fact that his Lescar has a landlord called Duncan McAllister and the real Lescar had one called Duncan MacFarlane, or the pub had a barmaid called Emma and the book one named Emily is purely coincidental.
It's perhaps best not to inquire if there really was a Jewish Dave or a Bob Brown, about whom it was rumoured... no, we shan't go on.
The one character Zack says is not a composite is Mayhem, a man devoted to the music of Status Quo.
"It's very definitely fiction but like all fiction every writer takes what they see and weaves into it their own experience. There are several things which really happened... but the details and context have been changed, usually for the sake of style," he says over a lime and soda.
The stories are written in a crisp, vivid style which often reads like reportage. There was a visit from the Blades Business Crew but, says Zack, he wasn't there at the time.
His stories started on the web, where much of his writing now is. He gave up teaching to work for the city council's youth offenders' service (another literary gold mine) but is now full time as the Premier League reporter for a football internet website.
It's not clear what the new management of the Lescar will make of the book. He's not told them but wonders whether they'd like to sell it on the bar.
The Diary asks why he needed to name the pub at all and not just make one up.
"I am drawn to fiction set in recognisable locations, as in James Joyce's Dublin or Irvine Welsh's Edinburgh. There is a recognisable context for what goes on," he says. Besides, the Lescar was then his local and had a heady mix of respectability and riff-raff. It was what you would call bohemian, a place where you could find people with recreational substances.
Those days have long gone, of course. We are intrigued to find the 2009 Lescar has a wine club.
The stories don't sound like they were written by a man who sat alone in the corner.
"I used to stand here at the bar. I hardly ever sat down," he says.
This collection of stories is the first volume. Another is planned for the spring and, sitting on the backburner at the moment, is one on the Lescar's women.
After all these years of self-imposed exile that will have to be done from memory. And any resemblance between fact and fiction will be purely coincidental.
Originally published at:
http://www.thestar.co.uk/lifestyle/features/lescar-s-new-chapter-1-264969
Zack Wilson is the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips', available from Epic Rites Press and Amazon.com.
Monday, 8 October 2012
Sport's More Evil Aspects: Violence
This is an old short story of mine, dealing with an episode of football violence. It is fairly mild by the standards of the 1980s, but incidents like this used to occur more often than the media would like you to have thought when I was a regular at matches...
Around this time I got friendly with a bunch of lads from Matlock, who were friends of a lad I worked with in Sheffield at Yorkshire Electricity, in the Disputed Reads Section. He was called Paul and was sound, quiet lad, never acted without thinking first. We worked for a character called Phil, who we nicknamed ‘Pop’ because he was fat and bald. He claimed to have been a trainee at Lincoln City and played semi-pro for Long Eaton Town or someone, fairly near the bottom of the pyramid. Actually, he organised a 5-a-side office team and entered us in a league. We did quite well and came second in our division, and Phil missed a penalty which was the last kick of our ‘season’ that would’ve sent us up, and no one could take the piss out of him for it because he would get upset. Phil used to sweat a lot when he played because he was overweight. He had good touch and could pass well, but his head used to shine with all the sweat. Simon, our keeper, used to say that he worried Phil would have a heart attack, what with all his shouting as well. If that had happened I think we would have laughed.
After one game in this league, Phil tried to organise a big night out. At my suggestion we went to The Varsity on West Street, they had a thing going on Thursday nights where if you paid a quid to get in then all your drinks were just a quid for the rest of the night. Phil had made it out to be a massive night out but when I got to The Varsity it was only me and another lad who showed up apart from Phil. After the pub we went to Kingdom where an awful ‘70’s tribute act called ‘The Gutter Band’ played. They were shit. There was loads of nurses in Kingdom and one tried to impress us by saying that she could make us come by massaging our prostates and she was really good at it because she was a nurse. I said, “You might buy me a drink first.” Phil called her a fat bastard and blamed me. I heard once that years ago when he was a coach in kids’ football he’d kicked a kid really hard on the arse for tackling him.
Anyway, these lads from Matlock I got friendly with, some of them were a bit handy, or thought they were. They knew some very handy types anyway. There were also two lads who were Paul’s mates called Nigel and Chris, who weren’t handy at all. It was these two I was friends with, and a harder lad called Graeme, all the others I really just knew to nod at. Nigel was slow and a bit simple really, but loyal and kind, he used to get a lot of grief for his name. Chris was sharp and bright, if a bit of a straight peg. He was a real ladies’ man though. He always got some action, or seemed to, fuck knows how. They were good drinking mates anyway, and knew enough about football for a decent chat.
We’d gone into the Merry Widows after the Everton game. We’d had a couple in the Waterfall immediately post-match, and then moved next door into the Widows. This was a game Derby had lost 4-3, coming back from 3-1 and 4-2 down. It was probably Branko Strupar’s finest hour for us, he scored with a classy header and a fantastic 35 yard volley that was probably the finest goal I’ve ever seen at Pride Park. But we still lost and it was another step towards relegation.
When we got into the Widows I was really feeling the drink. I’d had a few pints before the game and now I was drinking Strongbow. I liked the way it was easy to drink after pints of gassy lager, mixing well with whatever you’d been drinking before and producing a kind of appropriate headstrong buzz. We sat down in a corner by a fireplace. Either the layout of the Widows has changed since then or my memory’s playing tricks because the last time I was in there, for the Cardiff game this season just gone, it looked completely different and all the geographical indicators, like the bar and the toilet door, were in different places. Maybe it’s because the Cardiff game was in August or September, a sunny day like, and this Everton game was February time or something and it was dark by the time we got to the Widows.
I have a recollection of an embarrassing conversation with 2 coked-into-numbness DLF lads, friends of Graeme’s, but that might’ve been another time, I was really silly and drunk and asking what Wednesday were like these days. One of them was definitely there later on too, though, a ginger haired lad whose tight white skin was discoloured by dissipation beneath nasty blue eyes. He always seemed in a bad mood, and when I commented on this one time with Chris, he laughed and agreed. I wondered whether it was just me he didn’t like, but Chris told me he was like it with everybody, which was a relief. He was always really nasty, this ginger lad, if you were talking about the game he never said, “We should’ve played 4-4-2, not 3-5-2,” it was always something like, “Why didn’t we fucking play fucking 4-4-2, that stupid cunt Gregory, fucking 4 fucking 4 fucking 2! It never fucking fails!” Anyway, after this game he was with us for a bit in the Waterfall and the Widows too, but then he’d moved away to snarl with other men in expensive jumpers and baseball caps.
So me, Chris and Nigel sat down by the fire and were enjoying a rambling chat about a load of shit. I noticed that there were 2 or 3 kids playing about in the pub, about 10 years old or so, they kept going up to a fat woman with curly black hair who was behind the bar and getting crisps and coke off her without having to pay . She was the landlord’s wife and she had round staring eyes that were black and angry. I can’t remember what her husband looked like, he was indistinguishable from the generic shavenheads he was serving and chatting with in one corner of the bar. He only emerged into the wider environment to collect dirty glasses and ashtrays that needed emptying.
Beyond the immediate bar area, I remember the pub being strangely unlit. Only flashing lights from fruit machines and the lamps over the bar provided any light. It was hard to see people’s faces, and everyone looked very white, their faces contrasting grotesquely with the darkness. The pub had an intimate feel, friendly but exclusive, an insulation against the cold blue shadows beyond the windows.
Then there was uproar at the door. We turned round, Nigel and Chris and me. I sensed our bewilderment, I couldn’t see whether it showed on our faces. A large man with gelled hair appeared in the doorway of the pub. I can’t remember if it was the street entrance of the pub, or just an exit from the pub’s other bar. He was wearing a casual jacket and jeans, white trainers.
“Cum on den Daaahhrby!” he shouted, making the appropriate flapping hand movements.
Someone did go on. The landlord of the pub vaulted the bar impressively. I saw someone else’s hand grab a bottle of Beck’s that was still capped. The landlord punched the scouser and he went down, some other guys from the bar jumped in and kicked him. I saw the Beck’s bottle, still with its cap intact, break over the scouser’s head. Beer foamed and then trickled. Someone lifted him up and a little crowd fell through the door and into the streets.
Me and Chris and Nigel sat still, maintaining exactly the same poses and facial expressions we’d had at the beginning of the incident. I shrugged and the other two looked at their pint glasses. “Another one?” I asked, or something similar. I went to the bar to get a round in.
The landlord’s wife was standing by a fruit machine with her arms around a little girl who was crying. I heard the girl ask, “Did Daddy hurt that man, Mummy?” The woman smoothed the girl’s hair and carried on cuddling her.
“Is she alright?” I asked with a smile.
“Yes! No thanks to people like you though!” She was really aggressive and mardy.
I thought that was a little unfair.
[end]
Remember that you can buy my debut novel, 'Stumbles and Half Slips', published by Epic Rites Press of Canada, from Amazon.com.
I once went to Pride Park when Derby were playing Everton. We were still in the premiership then so it was probably 2000 or so. I used to still occasionally wear a replica shirt to the match then, anyway.
Around this time I got friendly with a bunch of lads from Matlock, who were friends of a lad I worked with in Sheffield at Yorkshire Electricity, in the Disputed Reads Section. He was called Paul and was sound, quiet lad, never acted without thinking first. We worked for a character called Phil, who we nicknamed ‘Pop’ because he was fat and bald. He claimed to have been a trainee at Lincoln City and played semi-pro for Long Eaton Town or someone, fairly near the bottom of the pyramid. Actually, he organised a 5-a-side office team and entered us in a league. We did quite well and came second in our division, and Phil missed a penalty which was the last kick of our ‘season’ that would’ve sent us up, and no one could take the piss out of him for it because he would get upset. Phil used to sweat a lot when he played because he was overweight. He had good touch and could pass well, but his head used to shine with all the sweat. Simon, our keeper, used to say that he worried Phil would have a heart attack, what with all his shouting as well. If that had happened I think we would have laughed.
After one game in this league, Phil tried to organise a big night out. At my suggestion we went to The Varsity on West Street, they had a thing going on Thursday nights where if you paid a quid to get in then all your drinks were just a quid for the rest of the night. Phil had made it out to be a massive night out but when I got to The Varsity it was only me and another lad who showed up apart from Phil. After the pub we went to Kingdom where an awful ‘70’s tribute act called ‘The Gutter Band’ played. They were shit. There was loads of nurses in Kingdom and one tried to impress us by saying that she could make us come by massaging our prostates and she was really good at it because she was a nurse. I said, “You might buy me a drink first.” Phil called her a fat bastard and blamed me. I heard once that years ago when he was a coach in kids’ football he’d kicked a kid really hard on the arse for tackling him.
Anyway, these lads from Matlock I got friendly with, some of them were a bit handy, or thought they were. They knew some very handy types anyway. There were also two lads who were Paul’s mates called Nigel and Chris, who weren’t handy at all. It was these two I was friends with, and a harder lad called Graeme, all the others I really just knew to nod at. Nigel was slow and a bit simple really, but loyal and kind, he used to get a lot of grief for his name. Chris was sharp and bright, if a bit of a straight peg. He was a real ladies’ man though. He always got some action, or seemed to, fuck knows how. They were good drinking mates anyway, and knew enough about football for a decent chat.
We’d gone into the Merry Widows after the Everton game. We’d had a couple in the Waterfall immediately post-match, and then moved next door into the Widows. This was a game Derby had lost 4-3, coming back from 3-1 and 4-2 down. It was probably Branko Strupar’s finest hour for us, he scored with a classy header and a fantastic 35 yard volley that was probably the finest goal I’ve ever seen at Pride Park. But we still lost and it was another step towards relegation.
When we got into the Widows I was really feeling the drink. I’d had a few pints before the game and now I was drinking Strongbow. I liked the way it was easy to drink after pints of gassy lager, mixing well with whatever you’d been drinking before and producing a kind of appropriate headstrong buzz. We sat down in a corner by a fireplace. Either the layout of the Widows has changed since then or my memory’s playing tricks because the last time I was in there, for the Cardiff game this season just gone, it looked completely different and all the geographical indicators, like the bar and the toilet door, were in different places. Maybe it’s because the Cardiff game was in August or September, a sunny day like, and this Everton game was February time or something and it was dark by the time we got to the Widows.
I have a recollection of an embarrassing conversation with 2 coked-into-numbness DLF lads, friends of Graeme’s, but that might’ve been another time, I was really silly and drunk and asking what Wednesday were like these days. One of them was definitely there later on too, though, a ginger haired lad whose tight white skin was discoloured by dissipation beneath nasty blue eyes. He always seemed in a bad mood, and when I commented on this one time with Chris, he laughed and agreed. I wondered whether it was just me he didn’t like, but Chris told me he was like it with everybody, which was a relief. He was always really nasty, this ginger lad, if you were talking about the game he never said, “We should’ve played 4-4-2, not 3-5-2,” it was always something like, “Why didn’t we fucking play fucking 4-4-2, that stupid cunt Gregory, fucking 4 fucking 4 fucking 2! It never fucking fails!” Anyway, after this game he was with us for a bit in the Waterfall and the Widows too, but then he’d moved away to snarl with other men in expensive jumpers and baseball caps.
So me, Chris and Nigel sat down by the fire and were enjoying a rambling chat about a load of shit. I noticed that there were 2 or 3 kids playing about in the pub, about 10 years old or so, they kept going up to a fat woman with curly black hair who was behind the bar and getting crisps and coke off her without having to pay . She was the landlord’s wife and she had round staring eyes that were black and angry. I can’t remember what her husband looked like, he was indistinguishable from the generic shavenheads he was serving and chatting with in one corner of the bar. He only emerged into the wider environment to collect dirty glasses and ashtrays that needed emptying.
Beyond the immediate bar area, I remember the pub being strangely unlit. Only flashing lights from fruit machines and the lamps over the bar provided any light. It was hard to see people’s faces, and everyone looked very white, their faces contrasting grotesquely with the darkness. The pub had an intimate feel, friendly but exclusive, an insulation against the cold blue shadows beyond the windows.
Then there was uproar at the door. We turned round, Nigel and Chris and me. I sensed our bewilderment, I couldn’t see whether it showed on our faces. A large man with gelled hair appeared in the doorway of the pub. I can’t remember if it was the street entrance of the pub, or just an exit from the pub’s other bar. He was wearing a casual jacket and jeans, white trainers.
“Cum on den Daaahhrby!” he shouted, making the appropriate flapping hand movements.
Someone did go on. The landlord of the pub vaulted the bar impressively. I saw someone else’s hand grab a bottle of Beck’s that was still capped. The landlord punched the scouser and he went down, some other guys from the bar jumped in and kicked him. I saw the Beck’s bottle, still with its cap intact, break over the scouser’s head. Beer foamed and then trickled. Someone lifted him up and a little crowd fell through the door and into the streets.
Me and Chris and Nigel sat still, maintaining exactly the same poses and facial expressions we’d had at the beginning of the incident. I shrugged and the other two looked at their pint glasses. “Another one?” I asked, or something similar. I went to the bar to get a round in.
The landlord’s wife was standing by a fruit machine with her arms around a little girl who was crying. I heard the girl ask, “Did Daddy hurt that man, Mummy?” The woman smoothed the girl’s hair and carried on cuddling her.
“Is she alright?” I asked with a smile.
“Yes! No thanks to people like you though!” She was really aggressive and mardy.
I thought that was a little unfair.
[end]
Remember that you can buy my debut novel, 'Stumbles and Half Slips', published by Epic Rites Press of Canada, from Amazon.com.
Thursday, 4 October 2012
Ray's Days 1: Zip
Ray Doyle is the narrator of my debut novel, 'Stumbles and Half Slips'. In a new series of short pieces, I'll be giving him some new tales to tell, mainly about being at work. Along the way, you may well pick up some new details about his life...
I knew that the job was going to go to shit when the zip broke on the jacket that they'd given me. This only happened a week or so after I'd started, and I somehow knew then that it was not going to last.
Not that the job was anything special. Anything special at all, actually. It was meant to be security, but all we were doing in fact was car park attending. We were all working for an independent scrap metal merchant, who seemed to think he was a bigger businessman than he actually was. This was somewhere on the edge of the East Midlands, where it becomes the west, Burton I think.
There were two of us, and what we had to do, in a series of bizarrely organised shifts, was to stand at the gates to the company 'car park'. We had two deckchairs to sit on, which didn't really strike me as giving off the right impression. I hadn't asked about this, but Sean, the other bloke, did. The boss - some fella who's name I forget right now, this was back in 1993, 94 possibly, a long time back, but I do remember his jacket and trousers never seemed to come from the same suit -he just said that it was something he was working on.
The deck chairs didn't really bother me. Things like that never really do. It felt quite good to be sitting in a deck chair by what passed for a car park. It was actually one of those areas of what look like waste ground, turned into a temporary car park. The surface consisted of several different shades and kinds of gravel, washed with a thin grey sludge of rain, tiny pebbles and what could have been ashes. Puddles of varying depths, breadths and colours of water dotted the expanse like the spots on a damp dalmatian.
The weather did bother me though. This was autumn, about October, and the weather was not kind. I had a very nice jacket though.
What we had to do was basically stop every vehicle who came to the gate in the fence and take some details. All we did was ask their name and what they wanted. Then we'd tell where to park in the great space of the car park, which was never full, and often entirely empty. It was big enough to play five-a-side football in, but we never had enough people for a game.
Once we had taken the details we would completely forget them. There was no procedure for writing anything down, and no reception desk to take the details too, from our outpost by the gate. Instead, the visitors would just drive over to the space we'd indicated and park there. Then walk over the dirt and water to the small, single storey brick building that contained the two offices. The actual scrap yard was about two hundred metres away, down the road. When visitors wanted that, we would point at it for them.
But it was the jacket that made the job for me. It was one of those top quality hiking jackets, something that was still relatively rare back then. It was like the parka I'd worn at primary school, only cool looking, with layers and zips that made me impregnable to the cold. I loved that jacket. There was no company logo on it either.
Which was why I'd actually cried when the zip broke. It just seemed so typical. This was not long after my step-father had tried to kill me in a drunken rage, and then cried like a child the next day as he said sorry over the phone.
I was staying with a friend in his flat. I had few things to call my own. This coat, although on loan, was one of them. Something that defined me in this short period. But the zip broke when night when I was taking it off. I told the boss the next day but he said that there was nothing he could do.
Sitting at the deck chairs with Sean was still okay though. But later that in the day the boss returned and told us he didn't need us any more. He took the coats off us and we had to walk home. Sean told me that the agency that had got him the work was crap, and I agreed. I didn't know what agency he was with.
I still think of that coat though. It was the best I'd ever owned, until the zip broke.
To find out more about Ray Doyle and his life as a van driver, buy 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press.
I knew that the job was going to go to shit when the zip broke on the jacket that they'd given me. This only happened a week or so after I'd started, and I somehow knew then that it was not going to last.
Not that the job was anything special. Anything special at all, actually. It was meant to be security, but all we were doing in fact was car park attending. We were all working for an independent scrap metal merchant, who seemed to think he was a bigger businessman than he actually was. This was somewhere on the edge of the East Midlands, where it becomes the west, Burton I think.
There were two of us, and what we had to do, in a series of bizarrely organised shifts, was to stand at the gates to the company 'car park'. We had two deckchairs to sit on, which didn't really strike me as giving off the right impression. I hadn't asked about this, but Sean, the other bloke, did. The boss - some fella who's name I forget right now, this was back in 1993, 94 possibly, a long time back, but I do remember his jacket and trousers never seemed to come from the same suit -he just said that it was something he was working on.
The deck chairs didn't really bother me. Things like that never really do. It felt quite good to be sitting in a deck chair by what passed for a car park. It was actually one of those areas of what look like waste ground, turned into a temporary car park. The surface consisted of several different shades and kinds of gravel, washed with a thin grey sludge of rain, tiny pebbles and what could have been ashes. Puddles of varying depths, breadths and colours of water dotted the expanse like the spots on a damp dalmatian.
The weather did bother me though. This was autumn, about October, and the weather was not kind. I had a very nice jacket though.
What we had to do was basically stop every vehicle who came to the gate in the fence and take some details. All we did was ask their name and what they wanted. Then we'd tell where to park in the great space of the car park, which was never full, and often entirely empty. It was big enough to play five-a-side football in, but we never had enough people for a game.
Once we had taken the details we would completely forget them. There was no procedure for writing anything down, and no reception desk to take the details too, from our outpost by the gate. Instead, the visitors would just drive over to the space we'd indicated and park there. Then walk over the dirt and water to the small, single storey brick building that contained the two offices. The actual scrap yard was about two hundred metres away, down the road. When visitors wanted that, we would point at it for them.
But it was the jacket that made the job for me. It was one of those top quality hiking jackets, something that was still relatively rare back then. It was like the parka I'd worn at primary school, only cool looking, with layers and zips that made me impregnable to the cold. I loved that jacket. There was no company logo on it either.
Which was why I'd actually cried when the zip broke. It just seemed so typical. This was not long after my step-father had tried to kill me in a drunken rage, and then cried like a child the next day as he said sorry over the phone.
I was staying with a friend in his flat. I had few things to call my own. This coat, although on loan, was one of them. Something that defined me in this short period. But the zip broke when night when I was taking it off. I told the boss the next day but he said that there was nothing he could do.
Sitting at the deck chairs with Sean was still okay though. But later that in the day the boss returned and told us he didn't need us any more. He took the coats off us and we had to walk home. Sean told me that the agency that had got him the work was crap, and I agreed. I didn't know what agency he was with.
I still think of that coat though. It was the best I'd ever owned, until the zip broke.
To find out more about Ray Doyle and his life as a van driver, buy 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press.
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