Here Comes The Sun

When I vowed to post on every one of the last nine days of May, I was not expecting one of them to be astonishingly sunny.

The temperature is still only sixteen degrees, but that’s irrelevant. Global warming has given Ireland a succession of disappointing summers, so when we get a cloudless day like today we go absolutely mental. People rush down stony beaches to hurl themselves into a still freezing sea, like someone getting into a shower five seconds after they have turned the hot water on.

Men show off horrendous legs in horrendous shorts. Women forego tights to wear open-toed shoes with red-painted toenails peeping from them. Everyone eats their own weight in ice-cream.

And people have barbecues, the chance to swap meat cooked thoroughly and safely in your kitchen for the same meat burnt in spots over an open fire.

While I have done none of the above, I have unashamedly slept Sunday afternoon away in a sun-lounger in the back garden. I am now slightly pink (rather like barbecued chicken normally is), but I don’t care.

After all, the Pink Panther is probably the coolest person on the planet.

A Week Of WordPress, Day 7

WordPress want me to write about the topic I normally blog about as if I were a music critic. What I mostly blog about is me…

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Tinman’s opera Worth Doing Badly is a piece written in many movements. In other words he writes on the bus both to and from work.

It opens with a long solo of maybe six months, during which he performs unaccompanied. Over time he is joined by a small but wonderful chorus, from all over the world.

He makes extensive use of the organ, that organ being his heart, as during the oft repeated theme “mio busto metallica, repetione?” (“I have a pacemaker, have I mentioned that before?”). The percussion section is much to the fore here, as he keeps banging on and on about it.

The piece has many bold sections, never more so than during the aria “mi multi bradpittzi” (“I am a Stud Muffin”). The brass section is particularly evident here, mostly in his neck, and in the blowing of his own trumpet.

The part played throughout by the wind section cannot be underestimated.

The strings hold the whole thing together, though only barely.  Some parts are “allegro”, meaning that he wrote them in a hurry. Most of the work is falsetto.

He keeps away from the very lowest part of the range. For example in this very piece here he has resisted the urge to use the word “flute”.

My enjoyment of the piece would have been improved by greater use of the Harp. Or possibly the Guinness. Any drink I could have got my hands on really.

I think that Tinman should attempt a ballet next.

If you want to see a load of balls, then he is definitely your man.

But It’s Comin’, By Gum

One Saturday at the weekly Writers Centre workshop a friend of mine declined to read out what she’d written because her foot was asleep.

This excuse may seem daft. As daft, perhaps, as my own offering, which is that I have done less blogging over the past few months because the weather has been cold.

As our winter stretches now into April, and as temperatures still remain obstinately in single figures, I am sticking with my story.

I do a lot of my writing on the bus on the way to and from work (buses are notoriously bumpy methods of transport, which may explain the shakiness of some of my plotlines). There seems to be an agreement among all Dublin Bus drivers that they will not turn on the heating, no matter how cold the day. Perhaps they are afraid that if we passengers were made comfortable (in other words, treated as customers instead of as nuisances) we would stay on the bus for the day, like kids trying to sneak a second go on the dodgems, travelling on an endless loop into and out of the city, forsaking our jobs and therefore further weakening our economy.

The lack of heat makes fingers cold and unbending, so hands have to be dug deep into pockets. Coats remain on, instead of being placed against the wall as a buffer for one’s elbows while typing. Brains have to go into hibernation.

No-one could write in conditions like this. Ok, Scott of the Antarctic did, but no-one else apart from him.

The journey home is the same, and then you face into a biting east wind and walk up to your house. You sit down on the sofa in front of the TV, just for a few minutes, to warm up. You do not move until bedtime. Posts are unposted, indeed unwritten, other bloggers are unvisited, and your blog sits forsaken, an internet version of Puff the Magic Dragon after Little Jackie Paper grew up.

But Summer is on the way. We know this because, as is customary every Spring, “traditional” weather forecasters, those who forsake science and instead look at stuff in fields, have been invited onto the radio. People like Dave from Donegal, who predicts the weather by watching which side of rocks the lichen has grown on this year, and John-Pat, from Clonakilty, who does the same by examining the thickness of the plumage of the lesser-spotted tree warbler, come on to predict a warm if wet June followed by a scorching July and an August with temperatures normally achieved only on the surface of Mercury.

The radio presenter is thrilled with this, informing us that Dave and John-Pat have been using these methods of weather prediction for over one hundred years now, and have never once been wrong. The fact that just last Autumn Dave predicted a Winter featuring a plague of stoats, and that John-Pat predicted fifteen inches of snot (he couldn’t read his own writing, the word should have been “fifty”) is forgotten. These people are soothsayers, their word is to be taken as gospel, and we all rush out and buy speedos, barbecue coals and Factor 90 sunscreen.

And on the rare occasion, about once every fifteen years, in which we do get a glorious summer? Well, you couldn’t possible write in that weather, it’s far too hot.

Floating Liquid Natural Gas

“Floating Liquid Natural Gas is the technology of the future”. That was the prompt for our Inkslingers Writers Group this week, the idea being to get us to write about something we knew absolutely about. Unfortunately, no matter what the topic my mind seems to march determinedly off in the most schoolboyish direction …

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Natural gas is drilled deep underground, piped through pipes (what else?) and brought in from the sea, in a shell apparently, though I may not have been listening properly to that part.

This is a complete waste of time and, ironically, energy. Truly Natural Gas is not all around us, it is inside us. We each literally have it within us to be practically energy self-sufficient.

If harnessed correctly the burp after a Coke could charge an iPhone. A plate of cucumber could run your hairdryer. A quickly-drunk can of lager could power a vacuum cleaner.

Floating Liquid Natural Gas is simply Truly Natural Gas harvested into something such as a bottle with a cork stopper (but not a helium balloon, that would just be silly) and then distilled in liquid form into giant floating hydrogen tanks. In this way the Gas can be used only when it is needed, otherwise we could find ourselves burping the television on in the middle of the night.

As with more traditional gas, Truly Natural Gas has a distinctive odour, though it has the advantage that this does not have to be artificially added.

It may not be clean, God knows what you’ve eaten if it’s green, but Floating Liquid Natural Gas really is the technology of the future.

Why? Because the backlash, as it were, from a night on the Guinness can, if properly combusted, blow you into the middle of next week.

Harry’s Game

My friend Harry from our Inksplinters Writers Group has written a book, about a time machine and the exploits of its inventor, and plans to publish it on Amazon. I’ve read it and it’s enormous fun. He has asked me to write a review, as apparently the number of reviews makes a difference in getting a book noticed.

Well, if it’s just the number of reviews that matter…

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I’ve read it, and it’s enormous fun. Tinman

It has set literature back fifty years. And then taken it forward two hundred. The Times Literary Supplement

I was sorry when the book ended, because writing it had kept him out of my hair for months. Harry’s wife

He’s a promising young writer. At least he would be if he went back and wrote it when he was forty years younger. AS Byatt (she reviews everything)

Time Travel? Impossible. Doctor Who

We are thrilled for him, and not in the least jealous, envious or raging inside. The Inksplinters Writers Group

I thought of it first. Or not, depending on when he was when he wrote it. HG Wells

A philosophical masterpiece, exploring the effect on the soul of modern-day life, the agonies that haunt the psyche, and the deep innermost condition of humanity itself. That’s the type of book we’re looking for. What, this book? We didn’t read it. The Booker Prize Committee

The type is awfully small. Patricia from the Writers Group (she actually said this)

I’m waiting for the film. That’s because I’m hoping to be in it, I haven’t been in a film for at least four weeks now. Samuel L Jackson

I liked it when he met Hermione and Ron for the first time. Emily, aged 9, who may be thinking of the wrong Harry

And finally…

I’ve read it, and it’s enormous fun. Tinman, ten minutes earlier than the first time

Bold Type

If you try to make a comment on Laughykate‘s blog, you get a note that says “Sorry, but due to a sensational amount of spam commenting I’m adding word verification for a spell just to make them go away”. Blogspot then asks you to type a random made-up word and some numbers, saying “please prove you’re not a robot”.

I made a comment a couple of nights ago (that was morning to you, LK) and before it would let it get through I had to type this:

LK, you’re not supposed to make the words up yourself.

Second Try

About two years ago WordPress asked us to pick a book at random from our bookshelves, take the second sentence of the second paragraph of the second page, and use it as the basis of a story.

As I reported at the time I got a children’s book called “Gail of the Whales” and the prescribed sentence read “she wondered how big a horse would have to be to have a horn that long” (the previous sentence was about unicorns, by the way), so needless to say the story did not happen.

Last night I decided to try my own version of the plan. In the library of the Writers Centre I went to the second shelf, picked the second book, turned to the second page of the second chapter and read the second sentence of the second paragraph.

The book was The Janissary Tree, by Jason Goodwin. On the cover Kate Mosse says it has “everything you could want from a novel”, so presumably it contains romance, beauty, tragedy, laughter, heartbreak, a ring to bind them all and a really good car-chase.

What it definitely contains, as I have discovered, is the sentence “He’d done it before, dashing all the hopes and ambitions of the lovely gödze, the girl selected to share his bed that night”.

I have no idea what a gödze is (actually, I have no idea what a janissary is either) but the context makes the meaning pretty clear. And I’m guessing that “he” has some embarrassing problem, unless the hopes and ambitions of gödzes involve pillow-fights.

Perhaps he should read “Gail of the Whales”.

Anyway, this morning I had one last go. In the dim of our early-morning sitting-room I went to the second shelf of the bookcase and pulled out the second book.

It was The Daily Telegraph Big Book Of Cryptic Crosswords. I’m giving up.

The Play’s The Thing – Act 1

The time for procrastination is over, or at least will be tomorrow.

I wrote last year that some of our Writers Group have agreed (I think we were fed cheap rum and then hit over the head) to take Strumpet City, Dublin’s 2013 choice for One City, One Book, and adapt it for the stage for an amateur Drama Group. The director is now ready to start casting, so we have now decided we’d better start writing.

We have done a certain amount of preparatory work. I, for example, have bitten the bullet (which would have been more fun) and actually read the book. We have decided that we will update it to modern times, since the same sort of deprivation and rich-v-poorness that happened in 1913 is happening here now. We have decided which scenes we are putting in, how the storyline will go (pretty much like the book, otherwise we wouldn’t be adapting it, we’d be writing our own play) and who will write the first drafts of each scene.

I have been given a well-off couple’s dinner party scene to do. There are a couple of problems with it. In the book the four people in the scene retire after dinner to play music and sing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. As far as I know this does not happen at dinner parties these days. I feel that I can hardly have the four of them playing Wii Sing, belting out tunes by Beyoncé or Aerosmith. Perhaps they could play Twister.

In the book one of them plays the cello. Now there’s a challenge for the props director.

In the book the foursome (no, that’s not what I mean) consists of the Bradshaws, who own the house, Yearling, a rich and cynical “gentleman” and the young local priest. In modern day Ireland I can think of no reason why a priest would be invited to such a gathering.

My first draft of the scene races off in all directions. Yearling is, at various stages, a retired headmaster, a civil servant, and a bank manager. The same line appears twice in the scene, some forty lines apart, since I’d forgotten that I already used it.

If we want the play to last for 90 minutes and have ten scenes then each scene should last about nine minutes (I can’t write drama, but I can still do maths) . I have acted out what I’ve written, the scene into which I’ve put in everything I could think off, and it lasts about two minutes. If I take out the line that’s in twice it will be even shorter.

The one good thing is that I have managed to sneak a joke into it. It’s not a very funny joke, but it’s one joke more than James Plunkett put into the whole of the original book, a tome unrelenting in its grim purposeful depression. I may not get away with this, the Plunkett police may arrive at my door late one night and tell me that I have broken the spirit of the book, indeed the spirit of the author may turn up to say the same thing.

Still, we promised we’d do it, and we will. We’ve set ourselves the utterly ludicrous deadline of January 31st, purely to force ourselves into activity. Four of us each writing different scenes should necessitate some line editing, after we’ve discovered that one of us has a character as a carpenter, one as a steelworker and one as a marine biologist.

It doesn’t leave much time for blogging, so apologies if I miss the occasional day. How we are getting on will, however, provide material, so there will be regular updates here, so that you too can feel the gnawing ache of terror as we get nearer the deadline but no nearer the end, like the way Olympic stadiums seem to be built.

They say it will be alright on the night. I’m just not sure when that night might actually arrive.

Panic Room

A WordPress prompt: “you are trapped in a room with your biggest fear. Describe what’s in the room.”

As a blogger, of course, my biggest fear is being trapped with a computer, a blinking cursor on an otherwise blank screen, and a mind as empty as a political promise.

For other, more normal, people, so much depends on what their fear is. If you suffer from Agoraphobia then what’s in the room is a very contented person without a worry in the world, or else a terrified person teetering on the edge of some weird spatial vortex.

On the other hand if you suffer from Cleithrophobia, the fear of being locked in an enclosed space, then you are in very big trouble (Claustrophobia, the word you were probably all thinking of, is actually fear of Santa).

If you suffer from Taurophobia, fear of bulls, there is just a bull and you in a small room. I think you’ll agree that such a situation would make Tauraphobes of us all.

If you have a fear of cutesiness then you are probably in a room with Laura Ashley wallpaper.

Some are afraid of the number thirteen. How this would work is not clear, unless there is a giant number thirteen in the room with you. This is unlikely to say the least, but if it just happens just switch the digits. Nobody is afraid of the number 31, that would just be daft.

And if abstracts like numbers are allowed in, then why not anything. The colour blue. The feel of morning stubble. The sad reflection on the futility of existence. Freckles. Rain on your wedding day. Alanis Morissette.

The above suggestions were intended to be silly, but this afternoon I overcame my Sackedophobia (fear of being caught researching for your blog during working hours) and looked up a list of phobias. As a species we are seriously messed up.

There are actual named phobias about string, chins (?), opinions, chopsticks, names (??), handwriting, belly-buttons, infinity, sermons, justice(???), time, paper, and the Pope.

Then there is Arachibutyrophobia – fear of (and there aren’t enough question marks in the world to put after this one) peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.

And there is Phobophobia – the fear of phobias. Of course there is.

Blowing My Own Strumpet

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The title of this piece probably needs some explanation.

Someone at the Irish Writers Centre made a plea for help recently, saying that a very old Dublin Drama Group had fallen on hard times in terms of membership and asking us to come along to a meeting to see what they could do to revive themselves. Since she mentioned that they need writers some of us said yes, and although I have no interest whatsoever in acting I have since found myself at fortnightly workshops where I have facially expressed quizzicality, bodily expressed happiness and internally suppressed wind.

But the writing part has arrived, though not in the way I’d expected.

Each year Dublin has “One City, One Book”, in which a famous book connected with Dublin is chosen as, effectively, our Book of the Year. In the past it has been The Picture of Dorian Grey, this year it’s James Joyce’s Dubliners.

And apparently each year this Drama Group of which I’m definitely not a member stage something based around that year’s book.

Next year’s book is Strumpet City, by James Plunkett, and in March the group are going to put on an adaptation of it, an adaptation that myself and two of the girls from our Writers Group have somehow found ourselves promising to write.

There are one or two problems.

None of us have ever turned a book into a play before.
None of us have ever collaborated with another writer on anything before.
None of us lives even vaguely near either of the others.
The play is planned for March, which means that the actors probably won’t want to be handed the script on, say, the 26th of February. In other words, we’ve only a couple of months, with Christmas in the middle of them.
Because its linked to “One City, One Book” the Group get funding from Dublin City Council, so this is a serious venture.

I have one further problem, and perhaps I should have mentioned this one sooner. I have never read Strumpet City.

I gather though that it’s exactly the kind of writing that I don’t do. The book’s popularity derives from its realism and its naturalistic presentation of traumatic historical events. There are no made up words like “austeritised”, no intentional anachronisms and no character who is the re-incarnation of Cleopatra.

I didn’t write the sentence before last, I stole it off the back cover of the book. Since I’m planning to steal the whole of what’s inside the cover then I might as well get in practice.