Photographic Memory by Sarah Bower

Please, I beg of you, do not take my photo. I find it excruciating. Either I really do look like that, or the camera, unlike the mirror in Snow White, is not merely indifferent but lies through its teeth, with malice aforethought.

I have recently returned from the Asia Pacific Writers Conference in Bangkok. It was my first trip any further east than Greece and among the many cultural differences I noticed between Asia and Europe (the eating of deep fried grasshoppers from paper bags, like batter scraps or boiled sweets; the fake Mulberry handbags mounded in shopping malls like a breeding orgy of exotic-coloured toads; the gilded Buddhas dancing along motorway verges in place of emergency phone kiosks; the aircon that seems to freeze the natural humidity into blocks in your chest) was the universal obsession with snapping photos. During a workshop I gave at the Bangkok Arts Centre, any number of people unknown to me simply walked into the room, held aloft their iPhones, clicked, flashed, bowed deeply and left again. I have no idea what happened to these photos. I’m inclined to be magnanimous because of the bowing. Also because I have been spared looking at most of them. Perhaps they languish in the photographers’ phones, perhaps they have cropped up on some social media somewhere to which I do not subscribe, or been published in a Bangkok paper. Perhaps they were deleted once the photographer realised he had snapped the wrong workshop, or at least, the wrong woman in the right workshop.

Of course, we in the West are not immune to this obsession. More and more, as we become ever deeper embroiled in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and their like, we seem to cultivate an almost superstitious belief that an experience hasn’t happened unless we have pinned it down in pixels then posted it for our followers to admire or fall over laughing at. We complain about the ever-increasing inroads into our privacy yet cheerfully collude in these by disseminating drunken selfies all over the Web. While acknowledging the double standard, the loss of privacy is not what troubles me about photography. I, like most other people living in mature economies, knowingly traded my privacy years ago for the convenience of online banking, internet shopping and blethering on Facebook when I should be working.

What troubles me about photography, particularly still photography but also video, is the way in which it is coming to define memory. I was myself a keen photographer – and a reasonably good one – until, at some point between the births of my first and second children, I just stopped. Anyone who has more than one child will appreciate the practical reasons for this. Most of the time I was simply too knackered and distracted, running around after a toddler with a screaming baby under my arm, to think about picking up the camera – even if I had been able to remember where I’d put it. But as time passed, and the children grew (relatively) more manageable, and I still didn’t bother to look for the camera, I began to realise that something else was going on. It had to do with the complexity of memory, and the reductive nature of photography, the way it transforms all those layers and nuances and contradictions into a series of two dimensional images, brutally sheared off at the edges by the limitations of the lens.

Taking photographs was also taking away the truth of memory. What did the smiling mother with her two tidy little boys have to do with the reality of sleepless nights, nappies, pureed parsnip spattering the kitchen walls, an ankle turned on a stray block of Duplo? If I were to capture my memories in any way close to the actuality of the events that spawned them, I had to do so, it seemed to me, in words. There is a subtlety to language, a capacity to represent the past in three dimensions and to layer it (because the creation of every new memory involves the action of earlier memories on the mind experiencing and storing it. When, for example, I described the fake designer bags in the Bangkok shopping malls as looking like orgiastic toads it’s because I was accessing an older memory of a TV nature programme to find a way of expressing the more recent observation.). Language enables me to make my memories uniquely my own in a way which photographs do not.

Of course we all look at photos in different ways. You may look at an image of me grinning over dinner in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and think, ‘lucky woman’. I think something unflattering about my teeth, my hair, my dress… But we express our differences of perception in words. We have our greatest fun with photos when talking about them or exchanging comments on social networks. When we visit photography exhibitions, we look for the accompanying legend on the wall or in the catalogue to help us make sense of each image. We seem to need words to show us how to look and to articulate what we see.

At the risk of sounding as though I’m indulging in one of those competitive travel conversations that happen at certain kinds of dinner parties, earlier this year I found myself working in New York. Having never visited the city before, I dutifully took myself around the sights, including a visit to MoMA, where I had the worthy intention of doing homage to Willem de Kooning, an artist I love. I lasted about fifteen minutes among the Abstract Expressionists and even less in the other galleries. Apart from one elderly gentlemen seated before the Monet water lilies, every other visitor was scurrying from one painting to the next, pausing only long enough to snap it with their phone, or be snapped standing in front of it, more as if they were clocking celebrities on a red carpet than looking at art. The atmosphere was avid, restless, acquisitive. These people were collectors in the way Victorian naturalists were collectors, trapping, chloroforming, pinning to display boards (or Pinterest). What sticks in my mind – the memory that formed, settled and allowed itself to be coaxed into these words – is a Barnett Newman, largely an expanse of red paint on a rectangular canvas. In an amateur snap, that is what you would get – a red rectangle. But as you look at the painting with an eye unmediated by the digital, you begin to see the texture of the paint, thick, fibrous, like the pelt of some impossible animal. Then the colour starts to vibrate, to shake itself apart into yellows, oranges, into blood red and scarlet and black. That which the camera would kill comes to life in your mind’s eye.

I did bring a photographic trophy back from MoMA, a postcard of a de Kooning portrait. I gave it to a friend, because it was a painting he and I had talked about. The meaning of the image resided in the words exchanged about it, in the sharing of impressions and memories associated with it. Words give. The camera, on which we now rely so heavily not just for memory but for experience itself, is ‘…always taking…A camera hides a face, does away with the need for conversation…’ (Michelle De Kretser, Questions of Travel) Please, I beg you, put the camera down. Remember me as I am.

Sarah Bower has almost no idea how to operate the camera on her phone. She was so busy trying to sort it out she missed the moment her elder son’s medical degree was conferred on him and had to rely on him to tell her about it afterwards.

Who Are You? (The Dr Who Quiz)

It’s been a hundred and fifty years since Doctor Who started on the BBC and so we thought we’d capitalise on this by having a fun quiz designed to see which Doctor you are most like. Have fun!

Question 1 of 1

Look in the mirror. Examine yourself closely. Do you see –

a) An old grumpy man in a long white wig that looks like it has been bought out of the bargain bin in the joke shop? And are you in black and white?

b) A man in a fur coat with a terrible Beatles wig? Are you still in black and white?

c) Worzel Gummidge?

d) Someone who goes around offering sweets to strangers?

e) A TV vet?

f) Someone who is going to be a lot heavier when they are older?

g) That bloke out of top 1970’s kids art show Vision On? (Not Morph).

h) Someone out of an episode that no one has ever seen?

i) Someone who’ll never talk about it again?

j) A man wearing a coat that’s too big for him?

k) Someone with a chin that begins below your bottom lip and ends slightly above your navel?

Wigtown Shuffle by Danny Gillan

As has now become the way of such things, I have waited for almost two months to write this recap of the Ed and my’s experience at this year’s Wigtown Book Festival. Being very careful at the time not to take any notes or even keep a copy of the programme, I have found over the years that this approach allows my thoughts to coalesce in a more satisfactorily freeform, amorphous way and leads to an article unburdened by bothersome impediments like facts and things that actually happened.

It was only a flying visit this year. Normally we like to spend at least two or three days checking the quality of wines and spirits in the many, many pubs of Dumfries and Galloway, however a combination of inconveniently ill husbands (the Ed) and a terminally sick bank balance (me) meant we were limited to one night only. We were forced to miss out on a few traditions – we didn’t manage a late night pizza, or even a lunchtime sausage supper, but we still drank a lot so it wasn’t all bad.

We made it to four events in total and, impressively for a book festival, only one of them involved an author with a book. One was a play, another was something to do with a bus and the fourth was Joanna Lumley.

As mentioned above, I can’t remember anything anyone actually said or did so I’ll stick to general impressions.

As you’ll know if you’ve been paying more attention than I have for the past few years, Wigtown is officially classed as Scotland’s Book Town. It is essentially a wee village, but chose to reinvent itself a while back by focussing on an already existing literary tradition and now boasts more book shops per head of population than any other town in, eh, the world (I’m guessing that last bit, but there are loads).

The town holds a variety of literary events throughout the year, but the big one is the two-week book festival in September/October. Its reputation has grown year-on-year and it is now held in such high regard that it regularly attracts literary luminaries like Joanna Lumley.

The Festival also has the downright decency to occur over my birthday, which means I can generally con a steak dinner out of the Ed as a birthday present, and for this I am truly thankful.

This was WWJ’s fifth visit to the festival. Although it took until last year for us to discover where the toilets are, most things have remained consistently impressive. The organisation is always impeccable, with all events starting on time and most of the people on stage being the person who was advertised. Equally impressive is the ability of the box office to lose our press passes every single year, but they’re always very nice about it so we don’t mind really. The Ed just holds up her phone displaying the confirmation email at them till they give us our pick of events. It’s possibly not the most efficient system, but we’ve come to find it endearing.

Sadly missing from the programme this year was the much-missed Iain Banks. He’d been there almost every year up until illness took him to the big book shop in the sky. Wigtown was the first place I saw him speak and, although already a huge fan of his writing, I instantly became an even bigger fan of him as a human being. Between our first visit in 2009 and our second the following year, I read every one of his ‘M’ Sci-Fi books, having previously limited my reading to his mainstream literature (never has the term mainstream been more misapplied).  By 2010’s Festival I was full of questions about this magnificent new universe to which I’d been introduced. Obviously I didn’t ask any of them because I’m both a star-struck fanboy and a terrible journalist. But I like to pretend he caught my eye at one point and we came to a silent understanding. I miss that man.

Another yearly occurrence has been not seeing Christopher Brookmyre. He and Mr Banks are probably tied as far as favourite author status goes. Unlike Banks, that Brookmyre fool has had the sheer  balls to schedule his appearances at Wigtown just a day or two before or after our visits. Every. Single. Year. I know he does it deliberately. I have of course caught him appearing at some other festivals over the years and keep meaning to call him out on his frankly shocking Wigtown record. But, again, terrible journalist.

Limited as it was, this year’s visit was not short of delights. We watched a wonderful, intimate production of August Strindberg’s 1888 play, Miss Julie. Performed in The Swallow Theatre, the smallest professional theatre in Scotland. Despite some dubious sexual politics and that weirdly prevalent reliance on suicide as an honourable way out of trouble plays sometimes have, the production was excellent. The three-person cast did a great job and the limited stage space and single set served to create a voyeuristic closeness that held the forty or so audience members in thrall from start to finish.

Robyn Young is writing a series about Robert the Bruce. So, being Scottish, obviously I loved her. Those historical fiction authors do a hell of a lot of research, it turns out. Who knew?

William McIlvanney & Neal Ascherson were in town to promote the re-launch of The Bus Party. Originally devised in 1997 as a way to encourage non-partisan debate about Scottish Devolution, the concept has re-emerged ahead of next year’s independence referendum. The hope is that a revolving group of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers will travel around Scotland, to all the wee places, and start a chat about the subject. The idea is to engage, not dictate. Some of the bus party are pro-independence, some against. All of them are open to discussion and debate. It’s a fine idea. If it passes your way, pay them a visit. They might even buy you a pint.

And then there was the goddess that is Joanna Lumley. And it turns out she really is a bit of a goddess. She manages that rare trick only a select few can pull off of being as posh as hell without being irritating as fuck. Stephen Fry and Peter Ustinov might be the only other two I’ve come across who could manage that one. She was appearing as a patron of the Peter Pan Moat Brea Trust, a worthy campaign to turn the childhood home of Pan creator J.M. Barrie into a haven for the promotion of literary education for children. She’s had a hell of an interesting life, that Lumley woman, and is a raconteur of epic proportions. I was left with the impression that it would be a magnificent thing if she was my auntie or something. But by marriage not blood, just to leave things tantalising. Plus she’s a bit Scottish, which always helps.

So, another tick in the box of Wigtown successes. I really would encourage all of you to try to get there if you can. It’s a beautiful thing in a beautiful place, surrounded by other beautiful places.

Also, if you don’t live in Scotland go next year at the latest. They might be shutting the borders after that.

The Write Time: 10 ideas to free up extra time for the creative stuff

By Jane Ayres

As a writer, not only are you a creative producer, you are also your own publicity consultant, secretary, accountant, and all round administrator. In fact, you need so many skills to keep on top of things, it’s a wonder you get time to write at all! Admin is a time vampire, but a necessary evil. And if you aren’t thrilled by keeping up to date with record keeping and paperwork, you’ll need plenty of self-discipline to get it done. Let’s be honest - what would you rather do - complete your tax return or write the next chapter of your novel? No contest, really. So how do you free up extra writing time by being more efficient with the boring stuff? Here are 10 ideas that could improve your productivity and make all the difference.

1. Choosing the right time

This can be the key to successful time management. Everyone has times when they are at their most creative. For some people, it’s first thing in the morning. Others tend to be night owls, and their imagination really flourishes when the sun goes down. Notice when your writing flows and when it feels like more of a chore. Choose your least creative time to do administration. Then you won’t be tempted to leave it to write the next chapter of your novel. Or feel frustrated because you’re not being creative.

2. Prioritise

What has to be done? And does it really have to be done now? There really is a difference between urgent and important. If you’re within 24 hours of a competition or copy deadline, that piece of work outstanding is urgent. Getting out the invoice to bill a publisher for an article they just accepted is important - but not urgent. You won’t get paid any quicker.

3. Don’t put it off!

Having established what needs to be done urgently, do it now!

4. Planning makes perfect

This is all about strategy, forward planning and using lists effectively.  To ensure you don’t find yourself constantly having to deal with lots of urgent administration at once, draw up a ‘to do’ list every day - and tick off each task when it’s done. (It works for me!). And make sure that list doesn’t end up buried on your desk among last week’s ‘still not done’ list - put it up on the wall above your desk as a constant reminder. (If necessary, on a big sheet of paper!)

5. Sort that mail.

Learn to let go. Don’t open junk mail – print or digital. It’s a waste of your time and energy and you might get tempted to spend money on something you really don’t need. Unwanted paper can be filed in the bin, and junk emails should be deleted. Where possible, with any other mail, deal with it the day it arrives. Otherwise, file it. Put it in a folder – paper or virtual - marked ‘To do this week’.

6. File that pile!

Yes, filing is fun! Seriously. Not only is it a time saver, it’s a great creative tool for collating and sifting ideas. Having an efficient filing system really does matter, particularly if, like me, you tend to keep losing bits of paper with ideas on them or decorating the table with fluorescent post-its. You know you jotted down the opening of a novel - somewhere. You’ve been commissioned to write a local history feature and that piece of research you did on churches would be ideal - if only you could find it. If you love scraps of paper, rather than leave them scattered around the house, put them all in a box file. Or keep them organised in a series of clear plastic wallets, properly labelled. For instance, one labelled ‘ideas for novel’, another ‘feature on bellringing’, etc. You get the idea. Or keep a hardcover notebook to write your ideas in. For the laptop lovers, a computer file simply called ‘Ideas’ can save on paper and at least you know exactly where to find it.

7. E-mail getting you down?

E-mail is both a gift and a curse. Get your control back. Don’t be side-tracked by those 80 new emails that magically appeared in your inbox. Here’s how.

If you can’t deal with emails immediately and quickly, set up folders. File your e-mails in appropriate categories, by subject or publisher, whichever suits you best. Or, better still, set up folders for ‘deal with today’ and ‘deal with later’. Delete non-essential messages. Try to keep your inbox as clear as possible. It’s a bit like having a tidy desk.

8. Productive record keeping

You do keep scrupulous records of the fate of your submissions, don’t you? For example, title of manuscript, where sent, date and result. What do you have most success with? Short stories, poems, articles? To get the best use of your writing time it’s vital to know what kind of work brings you the most positive response. Review and evaluate your output and productivity. Regularly. This might sound way too much like a business mantra but if you want your dream of making a living from being creative to come true, it’s essential you understand how this works. It matters. A lot. You can be so busy sending stuff out that you don’t stop to think about this. If you don’t keep proper records how will you know how productive you really are?

9. De-clutter.

Bookshelves heaving? Keep tripping over your precariously balanced collection of writing manuals? Is that multi-storey pile of magazines rapidly rivalling the Eiffel Tower? Then it’s time to de-clutter. Be brutal. Ruthless. More physical space = more creative headspace. Honestly. Recycle and rehome. Decide which books you couldn’t bear to part with. Then identify the books you will never read, however worthy, that are merely gathering dust. Pack them into boxes or bags and take them to your nearest charity shop. They’ll be delighted.

Then attack your magazines and journals. Again, what you don’t want, take to a charity shop. The rest, organise. Those you are likely to access for research or information, file in magazine racks; you can even colour co-ordinate by subject and they can then live on your considerably tidier bookshelf (and they make good bookends, too). The magazines you keep can go in labelled box files. Then store on the top shelf. Never throw out unwanted books and magazines - they can still bring pleasure to other avid readers. And as a writer yourself, how would you like your words consigned to the bin?

10. Now get writing!

You’ve got the filing, planning and admin done in record time. You’ve eliminated the time vampires. So get down to some serious, productive creative activity. No more excuses….Do I practise what I preach? Hmmm.....

About the author:

Jane had her first short story published in a UK pony magazine when she was 14. Since then she has written many books and stories for children and teenagers, and published work has been translated into nine languages. A passionate cat lover, Jane is donating all author royalties from her e-book Coming Home to the charity Cats Protection. See the trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aweX0y3lvL4&feature=youtu.be

Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jane-Ayres/e/B004MWCTD8/

Blog: http://www.janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/

Jules Rimet and Me

Procrastinating with Perry Iles

 We played a game, my parents and I, during the 1966 World Cup. At the start of the televised stages, my father took down an ashtray from the mantelpiece, wiped the detritus from his pipe out of it and put it on the footstool in front of his armchair. At the start of every match, the three of us each put a shilling into the ashtray and my father assigned us numbers: zero (me), one (my mother) and two (himself). If no goals were scored, I kept the three shilling kitty. Meagre as it was, it was still a chunk of money in my terms, back in 1966. If a goal was scored we each put in sixpence and the kitty passed to my mother, who won the money if there were no more goals during the match. But if a further goal was scored we added another sixpence and the pot went to my father, and subsequent goals cost us sixpence each and moved the kitty another step round our little numbered circle. I was hoping for goalless draws or results in multiples of three, but each game was rendered interesting even if we weren’t rooting for a particular side, because it didn’t matter which team scored.

We sat around our little Dynatron black and white television during July 1966, ignoring the warm summer evening sunshine, watching as the World Cup played itself out and England, mostly by virtue of being the host nation, managed to survive to the final. The opening game, England against Uruguay, was goalless and won me two shillings plus my stake, so I was bitten by the gambling bug from the start. A few days later, France beat Uruguay by two goals to one and I won a further five shillings and sixpence. 5/6d, we wrote it then, and to this day I do not know why “d” stood for “pence”; it just did, and that was good enough back then. It was probably something Latin. But five-and-six would have nearly bought a Rolling Stones single, and I’d have had change from buying a pint of mild and bitter and twenty Players’ Number Six if I’d been old enough to do such things. We sat through the games, drawing the curtains to stop the sun reflecting off the television screen, cursing the high static levels that made the picture crackle and blur and fine tuning the vertical hold when it started to jump. In Group 2, three of the six games ended 2:1, and my parents paid up with feigned ill-grace. In Group 3, four of the six games ended up 3:1 and my mother won some of her money back before scooping a fifteen shilling pot when Portugal beat North Korea 5:3. In the later stages, one of the quarter finals, both semis and the third place playoff finished 2:1 and my holiday savings started to look healthy. We even joked about the possibility of a game with six goals in it.

But our holiday was the fly in the ointment. On Friday July 29^th we left the comfort of our sitting room, opened the curtains and aired the cigarette and pipe smoke from it and departed for Italy. This was quite a convoluted process back then, because we drove there. There was no Channel Tunnel, no Eurozone, no common currency and no motorways or bypasses. We left in the late afternoon when my father got back from work, we drove out of our Cambridgeshire village and crossed the Thames estuary on the Tilbury Ferry, heading down towards Dover. Crossing the channel to Ostend we dozed fitfully on hard chairs while people who’d got there before us lay down across the longer benches and slept more soundly. There seems to be a universal law of travel that says whenever you need to sit somewhere, or are faced with a delay, the seats are always taken up by unconscious gap-year students, each one lying across four seats and sleeping the sleep of those who believe the world owes them a living. The same is true today of airport departure lounges, where Sebastian and Ophelia consider themselves entitled to four seats each because they stayed in a mud hut in Nicaragua once and ate a lizard for tea. How I would love to be able to summon up the courage and strength of character to simply roll them onto the floor and sit down. But like everyone else, I tiptoe around them so as not to wake them up and smile secretly when other people’s children start striking their sleeping faces with sticky lollipops.

In the early light of dawn we drove through the flat Belgian countryside and got lost in Brussels as usual. When we eventually found the right road, we continued through hilly woodland toward Luxembourg, ate lunch under a tree in the Ardennes somewhere and pondered the football match that afternoon that we were about to miss. These days, of course, we’d have watched it on a laptop or on someone’s iPad, plugged in to the car’s cigarette lighter. Back then, this was impossible, because the car didn’t have a cigarette lighter amongst other things. So my father decided we should go and look for a café with a television, which entailed finding a city, which is how we found ourselves in Metz.

Metz was primarily red — a dusty brick red like a Midlands city. Somewhere to the east of the town, a sluggish Moselle wound its way towards the Rhine. It was hot, so hot that we’d wound the windows of the car down and the pinking of engine valves blatted back at us from the walls. It was the sort of weather when you used to drive with an elbow out of the window and a hand on the roof, fingers drumming with impatience at any minor holdup as you got yourself a cabbie’s suntan (one blackened arm, the rest a pasty and unhealthy white). You don’t get that now because of air-conditioning, which is a godsend in times of extreme heat, but I remember the days when cars were made of plastic and tin, and you couldn’t sit on the seats or touch the dashboard without incurring minor burns. But in Metz there was a pre-storm summer heat, all airless and echoey, as if someone had turned the bass up and added a touch of reverb. Sweaty and sleep-deprived, we found a bar in a rough looking area and went in, which we quickly realized might not have been a good idea. Behind the bar there was a small black and white television showing the match to a silent, concentrating crowd of locals who turned and gazed at us for a few seconds with flat, half-lidded Gallic stares before returning their attention to the match. We could perhaps have done better that to ask for tea, but sadly that’s exactly what my father did, and of course they messed it up, bringing a pot of hot-but-not-boiling water and teabags in cups. My mother went to ask for milk but my father put a hand on her arm and gave her a restraining frown. We sat at a table by the wall drinking black tea and watching the game, which by then was in the final stages of normal time. England was winning 2:1 and I was reasonably happy, mostly because it would win me more money.

But then, in the dying minutes of the game, the Germans scored and the Frenchmen in the bar went deliriously insane. 

In the fug of Gauloise smoke, the yellowed curtains shook to the sound of their roaring. Cups and glasses rattled and hobnails stamped on the floor. Our conclusion was that the French, being French and a great deal more demonstrative, had applauded the goal because it was a goal, not for any more mercenary reasons. My father had been in the war, and had done his bit for his country by helping drain the Italian national economy by spending four and a half years there as a prisoner of war. Why he wanted to go back there for his holidays is beyond me now, but at the age of eleven, mine was not to reason why. Nevertheless, I saw him and my mother exchange a worried glance as extra time started. My father could of course be forgiven for imagining that the French would have been on our side, especially because we were in the Alsace Lorraine region which we had helped liberate from the Germans a couple of decades previously. Verdun was just down the road, where nearly a million French soldiers had been killed by the German guns in World War I. The French owed us, for heaven’s sake. So when Geoff Hurst scored a dodgy goal in extra time, we expected the shouts to be even louder. Instead, Hurst’s goal was greeted with pin-drop silence, a few muted grumbles and then a rising growl of protest that the goal had been awarded despite the ball not appearing to cross the line. I rose from my chair to yell in triumph but my father’s reactions were quicker. He leapt to his feet and clapped his hand across my mouth. A dozen French faces turned to stare in a new silence, a silence that was broken only by the sound my chair made as it fell over backwards onto an uncarpeted floor. It was the sort of silence you get in Texas schoolrooms when you try to criticize creationism and you realize that Bubba and his brother Bubba are going to take you outside and beat you like a red-headed stepchild. I was eleven, tall and quite fat, but my father carried me from that French bar in Metz, walked with my mother in his wake back to our oven-like Vauxhall, where he bundled us in with an unseemly degree of haste.

“Tim, did you pay for the tea?” my mother asked him. My father said nothing, but dropped the car into first and accelerated as hard as possible along the road out of town.

Later I discovered England had won by four goals to two, and was able to collect some more winnings from my parents. I still don’t know why those Frenchmen wanted Germany to win. Why did they hate us so? What’s wrong with the perception of Britain and the British abroad? The countries of Europe are like a bunch of teenagers, lost in Europe on a long journey through time and bickering because we can’t get away from each other. We’d argued with the French for centuries because they were sitting next to us in the back seat and kept pulling faces, but when the Germans had gatecrashed the party we’d grabbed France and pulled her to safety. And now, with the fickleness of adolescence, France was going out with Germany because he was handsome and drove a Mercedes, and we were cross. There’s no telling in European relationships, and we all have really big bombs now, so the future isn’t looking too good. But for the ordinary French homme dans la rue, Germany ruled in 1966 and they’d just taken a bit of a punishment. And as far as the shifting sands of England and France’s relationship is concerned, they might think it’s all over, but it never will be; not in my lifetime and probably not in anyone’s.

Fear and Loathing in the Chilterns

By Perry Iles

There’s a church on a hill, but the bells are pre-recorded because it’s more reliable than campanology. The sound system is more expensive than real bells, so the locals consider it a status symbol. Down the street, retired bankers live in million-pound houses behind high hedges and alarmed gates. There’s a no parking sign by the car park and no turning signs everywhere one might consider turning. It’s too old-fashioned for footballers and too uncool for internet billionaires. Every Saturday morning there are small traffic jams made of Volvos as yummy mummies take Orpheus and Chlamydia to the pony club.

Fear and loathing in the Chilterns. But in the middle of all this, set squarely in the Prosecco-and-Cambozola belt just north of the M25, there’s Chorleywood Literary Festival (cwlitfest.org — be careful with that W, guys. Chorleywood may only be one word but sometimes discretion is the better part). I’ve come from the land of the ice and snow, from the Tennents-and-chips belt just north of Hadrian’s Wall, in a ten-year-old car with 150,000 miles on the clock, full of moody diesel that should by rights be in a tractor. My wife made me sandwiches and packed a sixpack of Pepsi Max, so I’m full of pickle and flatulence as I prepare to rub shoulders with David Suchet, Bill Bryson, Kate Adie and Sirs Ranulph Fiennes and Terry Wogan. The stars of Downton Abbey will be there, as will Tony Benn’s daughter and Hadley Freeman off of the Guardian. And the cast of Triskele Books, an independent group of publishers looking to change the world and make it a better place, hoping to lead us all closer to home, like Grand Funk Railroad only prettier. I’d met them online over the years, but never in more than two dimensions, and their third dimensions were worth the 750 mile drive. Jill, Gillian, Kat, Jane and Liza are remarkable women. They have worked in close proximity for over two years and don’t hate each other yet. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever known that to happen, and I’m quite old now. They have carved an ethos in the ether and formed a partnership on paper. Their books have a style and an imprint that sets them apart and gives them a sense of individuality. Each writer is allowed total artistic control, there are no agents and nobody tells them what to put on the cover (well, you know, within reason…)

Over the last ten years self-publishing has taken over from the vanity trade, so anyone can write a book, design their own cover and hurl it into the world like a small plastic bag full of dog eggs. Because the result is invariably crap. Off-centre block-pastel covers with bad fonts, crushed up front matter, chapters that start on the wrong page, typos, spelling mistakes and the sort of English that makes Dan Brown look like Shakespeare. The Triskele collective does not allow this sort of thing. They have stipulations, including layout and proofreading and the ultimate power of veto. They’re fussy buggers, thank God. They read each others’ books, comment, suggest, hone, polish, sharpen and improve. They do this from the profound and extensive pool of their collected knowledge, which means the books wind up being pretty good. Then they put the results out to independent editors and proofreaders and insist that their covers are designed by Jane Dixon-Smith, who does not inhabit the same universe as us. Jane has three children under five and has moved house three times in the last six months. Nevertheless she runs Words with Jam magazine when she is not busy designing book covers for a lengthy queue of people. Jane has discovered wormholes in the space-time continuum and has harnessed them for the benefit of mankind. Some say that in real terms she is 84 years old, and that she is also The Stig.

Triskele (rhymes with Jellied Eel, by the way) symbolizes the power of the collective. Read their “how we did it” book, The Triskele Trail, by downloading a copy from Amazon. It’s full of good advice which may at first seem rather daunting, but these are the hoops you have to jump through if you want to spend a few years turning yourself into an overnight success. And this is why Triskele exists. The group can call on a vast network of resources and helpful forums, giving their authors a much greater chance of success. Their authors, rather than being cosseted stars who are jetted from one book signing to the next, become part of that process, encouraging dynamic growth and endless input, giving and receiving. On Saturday morning at Chorleywood, they explained how they did it, and released three new books into the world: Liza Perrat’s Wolfsangel, Kat Troth’s Ghost Town and Jane Dixon-Smith’s Overlord – the Rise of Zenobia. Discover them at www.Triskelebooks.co.uk. The three writers and their colleagues set themselves up for nearly two hours as a human resource library but couldn’t hope to cover all the ground that’s in the book. Then all five Triskele founders explained their ethos before letting the audience have a taste of the three most recent releases.

After all that, I went in search of lager and discovered that Chorleywood is scary. I’m from Scotland and Chorleywood is darker. I’d gone to abandon the car at the hotel so I could get drunk like everybody else, and I walked back across the common, where the path gave out and left me flailing in waist-high wet grass in total darkness. My phone wouldn’t work. There were no signals here, less than twenty miles from London, so I struck off through the grass, expecting a group of well-spoken and impeccably-mannered natives to appear in front of me at any moment and torture me by taking me to an antiques fair or making me read the Daily Mail or something. When I finally stumbled, wild and disheveled, onto the road across from the pub, I found everyone ready to go home again. Now, like any other ginger haired Scottish bastard, I wanted beer, so I had to go all the way back to the hotel and get the car and find, in this wilderness, a branch of Aldi where the lager wasn’t made from hand-rubbed Ruritanian hops and as a result didn’t cost £5 a bottle. The best I could hope for was something Mexican from Tesco Express, and thus armed I returned to the fray.

Here’s a sign of culture. If the food hurts, you’re somewhere posh (unless it’s Japan, where the food wriggles too). Here, the Chinese takeaways proved their true cosmopolitanism by filling their spicy chicken with… well… spices, to threshold of pain levels. I swear the lager hissed as it went down. My mouth hadn’t hurt this much since I was last in Switzerland and cut it to ribbons on Toblerone. I am a man of simple tastes, so my journey back to Scotland was a happy one. I ate what remained of my wife’s sandwiches, swithered between Maccy D’s and Burger King when I got hungry again and used up the last dregs of my wrongly-coloured diesel. My wife, I think, was surprised to see me again, considering as she did that the literary world was filled with loose-moralled floozies who would swoon at my every utterance like a gay man at an Oscar Wilde gig. My wife sees my better attributes, and occasionally forgets that they are framed within the body of a fat, bald sweaty bloke that’s knocking on sixty. I got home in one piece, still slightly hung over, a little bilious and marginally liverish. My first literary festival. No pretensions, no fuss, no prima donnas or over-sensitivity, just a good time with a great bunch of people and a fair amount of alcohol. Triskele books; brimming with talent and ability, populated by real people from a real world with stories to tell.

Go read them. 

Review of In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes

Review by Cathy White

Rating: 5 stars

This book burrowed deep inside me, stayed with me, gave me nightmares. Fortunately for me – unlike Jude, who the novel centres around – I woke up from my nightmares.

Jude is six years old when she finds her mother dead from an overdose, along with a note that reads, "Jude, I have gone in search of Adam. I love you baby." 

This is the last time anyone tells Jude they love her. On Jude’s tragic roundabout, we trace her childhood as she grows up in a seaside town through the 80s with a raw vulnerability and a life a world away from sticks of rock, donkey rides, lycra and legwarmers.

In Search of Adam is a book without love, about a child without love. The cruelty, physical and mental abuse Jude receives is so unremittingly relentless you want to reach into the pages and make it stop. You especially want to reach in and punch out her neighbour’s brother. Oh, and her dad. And her’s dad’s girlfriend, Rita. You want to say ‘Hey Jude, take a sad song and make it better’, but the only thing that could make it better would be for her mum to come home with Adam.  Jude eventually discovers her mother’s diary where all is revealed but it’s not something Jude had ever anticipated.

Caroline’s writing style in this novel isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste, as the short, stilted, child-like sentences echoing the pattern of Jude’s fragmented thoughts take some getting used to. But. You do get used to it. It. Just takes a bit. Of time. Caroline’s vibrant writing makes this novel a worthwhile compelling read and, ultimately, unforgettable.

Cathy White was born in London and in a previous life held a variety of jobs including legal secretary and literary agent’s assistant. In 2009, she left the city for the sticks, emigrating to the Kent countryside where she lives in an 18^th century ex-bakery with her boyfriend and cat. She blogs at www.cathywhite.co.uk, www.jog-blog.co.uk and www.planetveggie.co.uk.