Writer’s Life
Wonderful Winchester September Staycation – Part Two
We visit Winchester Cathedral quite often; this time we had been told about the flower festival. After a late breakfast at Wetherspoons we sauntered down the road to the cathedral. It was a week day so we weren’t expecting to see a queue to get into the cathedral, but a flower festival by definition can only last a short time.
It was worth the wait; it was a flower festival like no other I have ever seen and the rich colours cannot be conveyed in the pictures. What can be shown is the crowds. There were a lot of very English,’ excuse mes’ and ‘sorrys’ as we all tried to take photos or stay out of the way of other people taking them. Winchester is very light inside and gazing up you could forget you were not alone.
The rich reds, blues and purples reflected this year’s theme which was inspired by the Winchester Bible.
The Winchester Bible is the largest and finest of all surviving 12th-century English bibles. A single scribe wrote out its text in Latin, while artists worked its exquisitely illuminated capital letters. Their glowing colours, including gold and lapis lazuli, are as intense today as 800 years ago.
We have never seen the Bible. On a previous visit, hoping to see it, we were informed with great satisfaction by an officious lady that the room where it was kept was closed that day! This time we could have queued to see one volume in a temporary exhibition, but made the decision to queue for the crypt.
Down here, often standing in water, is Antony Gormley’s statue. Cyberspouse got a picture years ago when he pushed open a door that was ajar to see where it went; that time the statue was a complete surprise. This time the surprise was to see a candlelit path to the man with cupped hands.
http://www.winchester-cathedral.org.uk/our-heritage/art-architecture/antony-gormley-sculpture/
http://www.winchester-cathedral.org.uk/
On staycation you visit places for the day that others may have travelled across the world to see. We chatted to a couple who had come down from the North, but had the convenience of a son-in-law who worked at the cathedral and lived in the cathedral close, so they had free delightful accomodation and the opportunity to look round when everyone else had gone home.
In my novel Three Ages of Man the stranger has never seen anything as old and solid as a cathedral and marvels as he lays his hands on the stone walls of Winchester Cathedral.
Silly Saturday – Digital Dithers
Typing at school is not for me,
A secretary I’ll never be.
A home computer, whatever for?
A Commodore 64?
For that we are too poor.
Who has the patience to dial,
Peering at screens is such a trial.
Internet we do not need,
Goodness knows where that would lead.
You don’t have e-mail..
How will we keep in touch?
Amazon, that is a river,
Blue hieroglyphics in your e-mail,
Links are what you get in chains.
I only wanted to know
What you’d like for Christmas.
Join Facebook? No thanks,
What, you’ve put me on already
And my date of birth…
Hey come and look at this picture,
You’re not on Facebook, how come?
How do you keep in touch?
Kindle, what’s that?
Self publish, what a dream,
But I don’t DO technology.
You’ve got your book on Kindle,
Tell us how…
Yes, it’s live now.
Artists and Writers’ Year book thrown out,
I’m an Indie Author now.
How many novels have I sold?
Two or is it three,
One for my sister and one for me…
Websites, domains, Goodreads, Twitter,
Google, Pinterest, Linked In, Tumbler
Too much trouble
Just a muddle,
Two domains by error.
My picture’s gone sideways on Goodreads,
I’m only Linked In to three people,
I’ve lost my Twitter account.
Only four friends have Liked
My Facebook Author Page.
Blogs, no time to read or write,
My novel I must complete.
On WordPress there’s a pattern,
Where my photograph should be,
I don’t know how to schedule
Or understand the Stats.
My website is sunshine yellow,
My blog is sea green,
But neither flash or move
And I wish I could be seen
As a jolly cartoon
For my Author Persona.
I have an identity crisis
How do I become an Avatar?
Sunday Salon – Nights in and a Night Out
Reviews of two very different novels and a murder mystery play by Francis Durbridge
I posted both book reviews on Amazon and Goodreads
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths
by Barbara Comyns
5 Stars
I read this as a paperback passed on to me and recommended. I had not heard of the author before.
Many of us love anything to do with the twenties and thirties; architecture, art, music and elegant young men and women capture wistfully the two decades between world wars. But we also know it wasn’t glamorous for most and for the British it was a time our parents and grandparents remember before the Welfare State and the birth of the National Health Service.
Sophia is young and naive and the novel is probably very close to the author’s own life. I love the way she tells us her story as if she was looking back and telling a friend, which indeed she does at the end. The book was published in 1950.
We have a vivid picture of life with very little money, renting rooms and sharing bathrooms. From details of what they eat to the realities of pregnancy and childbirth which will appall most women. Ironically it was also a time when new mothers who were able to afford a nice nursing home would have enjoyed two weeks of bed rest – unheard of these days! Love and poverty never go well together and being married to an artist who is never going to earn proper money is a recipe for disaster. Follow Sophia in a poignant story that has humour, very dark times and then hope.
Secrets by Anita Dawes
4.0 out of 5 stars A deep dark look into childhood.
20 August 2018
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
I finished reading this in the middle of last night; though it is not unusual for me to turn my Kindle on in the early hours, this is not the sort of novel you should be reading in the dark watches of the night! It is a good paranormal thriller, but more than that it will make you reconsider all our childhoods. How responsible are children for what they do and what is really going on in their minds? In some ways I felt most sorry for Jack’s parents, a poignant back story gradually revealed, an event that ruined any chance of his father continuing the life he loved or his mother coming to accept their rural life. There is a lot going on in everyone’s lives, but Jackie is a reminder that those of us who have led ordinary lives cannot know what others have had to overcome. There were only a few things that jarred – I thought it was likely the social services would have got involved, Maggie did not guess an obvious pointer as Jack’s story was revealed and some dialogue and characters’ thoughts could be confusing in the pace of the story. But overall I really enjoyed this unusual novel.
SHELLEY THEATRE, BOSCOMBE.
Francis Durbridge’s play Suddenly At Home
Thursday-Tuesday August 16-21
Durbridge won international acclaim as the creator of Paul Temple, one of the most famous of all BBC radio detectives. He also wrote nine stage plays, Suddenly At Home was first performed in 1971.
Shelley Manor
Percy Florence Shelley was the son of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 -1822) and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
He bought Boscombe Cottage, near Bournemouth, Dorset for his mother to live in and had it rebuilt based on the Casa Magni in Lerici, northern Italy, the last home of Percy Bysshe and Mary. He renamed it Boscombe Manor. Mary died before it was completed and Percy and his wife Jane took residence.
Sir Percy had a timber theatre built in the grounds but replaced it with the current grander theatre which opened in 1870 with a public performance. Many of their friends acted and came to see shows including Sir Henry Irving and Robert Louis Stevenson (who wrote Jekyll and Hyde in Bournemouth).
Now this lovely pocket sized theatre has been restored and is a treat to visit. The volunteers give you a friendly greeting, there is a pleasant bar and the seats are very comfortable – they came from the much hated Bournemouth Imax cinema building when it was demolished, but that story is for another blog!
Small theatres are always fun, the audience are there to enjoy themselves for a play such as this which follows in the long British tradition of darkly comic murder mysteries.
The London Repertory Players were at the Shelley Theatre for a four play summer season. The action was set in one room; all that was needed were a few items of furniture and several doors. Door bells and ringing phones, always at the wrong moment, kept the cast and audience on their toes and guessing till the final curtain.
http://shelleytheatre.co.uk/article.php?sec=ABOUT&articleId=3224
Silly Saturday – Surviving Self Publishers
Survival guide for friends and relatives of Indie Authors
How many of us recall being waylaid at the school gate by other mothers with Tupperware party invites or the friends for whom Amway cleaning products became a religion? Do Amazon Kindle Self Publishers pose a similar threat?
Spare a thought for friends and relatives of Indie Authors…
You probably were not even aware your friend or aunty was an Indie Author; you weren’t listening when they were telling you about their writing, or when they mentioned modestly that their first novel was available on Amazon Kindle. So here is a survival guide.
- Never reveal that you own any electronic device larger than a postage stamp.
- Never ask ‘How’s the writing going?’
If it is too late for the above, the following excuses may be helpful.
A. I’ve lost my Kindle charger.
B. I left my Kindle on the train.
C. WiFi not working.
D1. I’m going to buy your book when I go on holiday.
D2. LIE. I have downloaded your book and will read it when I’m on holiday.
E. I like to buy my books at the charity shop.
F. I have to finish reading the book for my book club.
G. I have an iPad, but don’t know how to download books and have to wait till my son/daughter/nephew comes round.
H. My Kindle is full, I already have 5,000 free classic novels by dead authors on there.
I. I’m just waiting till pay day. (This last excuse could be seen as rather feeble, especially if they are selling their book for 99p.)
Good luck, but don’t think you have escaped. Did you get an invitation to tea and cake round at your friend’s house, wondering what a Pop Up Bookshop is? Your local Indie author has now learnt how to create paperbacks on Kindle Direct Publishing. After eating some delicious cakes they expect you to wipe your sticky fingers and look at the pile of lovely new paperbacks that just arrived on the doorstep. They belong to Amazon Prime and get free deliveries, so they have saved you the trouble of ordering from Amazon yourself and there is the bonus of getting your copy autographed by them. …and if you don’t buy their latest novel you will probably get it for a birthday present.
Being In An Anthology
Anthologies, collections of various authors’ stories, are an attractive prospect for many new or not so new, but still aspiring authors. The chance to have your writing in print, your story chosen by strangers is an affirmation and you have something to show your relatives. Your story will be surely be read by all the friends and relatives of each writer who features in the anthology and perhaps one of them will be a publisher, head of BBC Drama or a film producer… The route to these exciting possibilities is often via a competition, you might also win some money and impress your family.
Back in 2009 I was browsing in Borders, a heavenly mix of music, books and magazines; lurking on a bottom shelf under writing and history magazines was a colourful monthly publication called First Edition. Get Yourself Published For Free it proclaimed. Of course that meant they would not be paying YOU for your stories, but that didn’t seem to matter and one of my stories, Reality, was accepted, my brief biography sent off and in due course my free November copy arrived in the post. I immediately rushed off to check the shelves of Borders and WH Smith to buy another copy to send to my mother. I then e-mailed friends and family who hunted in their local branches; I could say I was in print nationwide. Alas, that edition, only the ninth issue, was the last and by the end of that year Borders had suffered a similar demise in the UK. I wonder what happened to the second story I sent them?
The first time I won a prize was second place in Wrekin Writers’ competition, the cheque for £70 impressed Cyberspouse. The story, Darren’s Day Out, was the first I wrote for the writers’ group I still belong to. The subject was the door, I later added the second part. You can read that story and others at my website.
https://www.ccsidewriter.co.uk/chapter-six-fiction-focus
Dorset Voices was compiled by Poundbury Voices and published by Roving Press, foreword by Prince Charles. Poundbury is an experimental new town on the outskirts of Dorchester in the county of Dorset, England. The development is built on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall.
https://www.rovingpress.co.uk/DorsetVoices.html
Writers were invited to submit short stories, articles and poems, paying £6 to ‘encourage’ them to send their best work; they didn’t have to write specifically about Dorset, but I figured it would increase my chances. Photographers were invited to submit black and white photographs. My story ‘Four Days In June’ was accepted and the book was launched at Bournemouth Library. Those writers able to attend each read an excerpt from their work. By happy coincidence my sister was on holiday from Australia – Cyberspouse was happy as he didn’t have to come to the launch and my sister could take a copy back for my mother, thus saving on postage. I did get a free copy, but also bought several as gift ideas. Prince Charles did not come to the launch.
My favourite covers are those of the first two volumes of An Eclectic Mix. I have two stories in each.
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Thanet Writers publish articles, stories and poems daily on their website and a dozen of mine have featured. This year my story ‘Thanephant an Elephantasy’ was included in Shoal, their first anthology, published as a paperback and on Amazon Kindle. It was launched at Turner Contemporary Gallery, Margate in May.
You can read Darren’s Day Out, Four Days In June and stories from Eclectic Mix in the third collection of my own stories, Times and Tides.
Into Infinity
Grand Prix, everyday traffic – noise and pollution, I hate it, bring back the horse.
…but put big fuel guzzling engines up in the skies and I love them, carbon footprints forgotten.
I don’t fly often, perhaps if I did the novelty would wear off, but for me a trip abroad begins the moment the cabin floor starts to slope upwards and the engines blast into full power. A window seat and clear sky provide the fascination of identifying landmarks, but if the plane ascends through heavy cloud cover there is still the fun of being up in a fluffy heaven.
My first ever flight was across the world, when we emigrated to Australia. My novel ‘Quarter Acre Block’ was inspired by our experiences; in that story none of the Palmer family had flown before, but in real life my father had been a flight engineer in WW2. He was determined we would fly rather than sail out. I have flown across the world a few times since then, but perhaps more exciting was my shortest ever trip, flying in a light aircraft from Jandacot, Perth, Western Australia across twelve miles of Indian Ocean to Rottnest Island – real flying.
But mostly I have been on the ground looking up. At Farnborough Air Show, as children, we would marvel as jets flew silently by, followed several moments later by their sound.
Years later, living very near Heathrow Airport, we would spot four planes in the sky at a time coming into land, at night like ‘UFO’ lights. But the aeroplane we never tired of watching or hearing was Concorde. If many Concordes had been built and flown the noise would have been unbearable, but the two flights a day were an event; teachers in local schools would stop talking at eleven a.m., working in an airside passenger lounge with a great view of the runway, we watched her take off like a graceful bird. On winter evenings I would dash out of the kitchen into the garden to see her glowing afterburners soaring up. Alas poor Concorde…
The end of August brings the Bournemouth Air Festival, now in its eleventh year. If you don’t like the noise, are not interested in aeroplanes and live near the cliff top, there is no opting out, unless you go on holiday. Roads are closed, there are diversions, daily routine is disrupted as over a million visitors come over the four days. But this does not affect me. With visitors coming I have no intention of going anywhere except the kitchen, local shops and the sea front.
The longer the journey your visitors have made and especially if it is their first visit to the Air Festival, the more likely it is to rain. But with the festival spread over four days there is always some good flying weather. The cliff tops make ideal viewing and the beach is crowded. You can book a place on board a boat, but if the weather turns rough you are stuck out at sea! There are hospitality tents and deals at cliff top hotels with balconies.
It all starts tomorrow, so in next week’s blog I’ll fill you in on the highlights and weather, with hopefully some photographs.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quarter-Acre-Block-Janet-Gogerty-ebook/dp/B00A6XDUQM
Pause and Applause
We were at a matinee concert at Bournemouth Pavilion, near the front was a young mother with a little boy who was chatting excitedly, when the music started he quietened. After a few bars the conductor raised his baton for a pause in the music; the little boy called out in a loud voice STOP. It was so funny. The conductor lowered his baton unperturbed and the orchestra carried on playing, but before the next piece of music a busy body usherette came bustling down and moved the mother and child further back and to the side. I hope it didn’t discourage them from live concerts. After all, the child was better behaved than some adults and Bournemouth Pavilion seems to attract more than its fair share of odd people when Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra are playing.
The seats are very close together with little leg room, not surprising in a building nearly a hundred years old, so just getting to one’s seat involves lots of very English ‘excuse me’s and ‘sorry’s. One afternoon in the foyer, an ‘odd chap’ was already causing confusion in the queue for programmes. Soon after I sat down he came shuffling along, huffing and puffing, treading on toes as he made his way to the middle of the row in front, then with much shuffling, grunts and elbows flying finally sat down. Nobody could believe it when in the middle of the first piece of music he stood up and reversed the whole procedure till he finally reached the aisle again.
One evening the lady in front of me started rummaging in her bag the moment the first notes were played, her friend whispered advice ‘In my experience the more you look the less likely you are to find what you are looking for.’ The rummaging continued until the last note when she triumphantly held aloft what she had been looking for – her glasses.
Surely no one would unwrap sweets noisily? Yes, perhaps they can be excused if they have just had a coughing fit. But why would anyone eat a packet of crisps in a concert? One evening, across the aisle from us, sat a lady who we assumed had come along as carer or friend with a very disabled lady in a state of the art wheelchair. The disabled lady sat quietly enjoying the concert and needed no attention from her friend, so what on earth was her companion doing digging in her bag, rustling around, disturbing everybody and probably the orchestra as well?
Visit another Pavilion concert in a previous blog.
https://tidalscribe.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/wagner-elgar-and-all-star-superslam-wrestling
Not everyone intentionally causes havoc at a concert. We were at the Lighthouse in Poole, the BSO were at full throttle in a lively movement of a Tchaikovsky symphony when we felt our seats vibrating. It wasn’t the music; several well built Saint John’s Ambulance people were wheeling a stretcher down the aisle, with even more disruption as they tried to get to the collapsed man; finally they wheeled him off with his poor wife, clutching her handbag, following after them. The orchestra played on valiantly, presumably the conductor would not have seen all the action, some of the orchestra must have, unless they were totally absorbed in the music.
Some people enjoy a night out without hearing the concert. I knew an elderly couple who came to the Lighthouse throughout the season. He loved music, she did not and figured they could afford for him to go to more concerts if they didn’t buy tickets for her. She was quite happy to sit in the foyer with her knitting, holding court, chatting to the Saint John Ambulance and bar staff. At one stage she made a friend who also sat out the concert waiting for her husband.
If you have never been to a live concert before don’t worry, you won’t draw attention to yourself if you follow two simple rules. Don’t clap till you are surrounded by applause; even regulars don’t always know when a piece of music has ended. Second rule, don’t stand up, don’t move a muscle until the orchestra leaves the stage. You may think the concert is over because the conductor and soloist have been applauded and left the stage. Don’t be deceived, they will return, perhaps several times to more frantic applause and just when you really think it’s over and you will be in time to catch your train or get to the car park before your ticket expires, the pianist will sit down smiling and play an encore. At one concert the flamboyant pianist played three encores, each with enthusiastic flourishes, did I detect a look of panic on the faces of the orchestra members, was she ever going to go home?
Sunday Salon – Recent Reviews
Two angels and a healer, an autobiography, a novelette and a novel; the three books I recently finished reading and reviewed on Amazon and Goodreads.Or at least that was the plan, but for some reason Amazon would not accept my review of Angels Landing. I’m not sure why and won’t bore you with extracts from their ‘community help’. People have problems of all sorts with Amazon reviews, one of the reasons I decided to post my book reviews on Tidalscribe. |
Chords and Discord
Do you like those music quizzes on the radio where you have to listen to the opening or closing notes of a pop song or piece of music and see how quickly you can guess what it is? If you listened to an opening chord strummed on guitar for less than three seconds and not a single note more, would you guess the song? For many of us A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles is instantly recognisable, probably bringing memories of the cinema where you saw the film of the same name. Paul McCartney famously never learned to read or write music, instinctively using chords, complex harmonies and change of key without ever learning the mathematical theory of music. Songs have always passed down through the generations without needing to be written down and we all learn to talk before we write. Perhaps McCartney feared the magic would be broken if he tried to learn music properly. Straight to fame without the years of study at music school, the only downside apparently being that he needs help to write his orchestral pieces.
In the days before recorded music, Bach’s astonishing output would have been lost forever if he had turned up every Sunday morning at Thomaskirche in Leipzig, expecting the Thomanerchor to perform his new cantatas off by heart, because he couldn’t write them down.
For most of us, our attempts at learning an instrument bring our first contact with musical notation. I still feel aggrieved that I always ended up with the triangle and not the drums on the rare occasions when we had ‘the instruments’ out in junior school. But another opportunity presented itself when I was seven or eight. I waited till bedtime to ask my parents if we could get the violin out of the loft as I had to take it to school the next day. We had been told in class that if anyone had a violin they could have violin lessons, this was the first my parents knew about it. How I even knew that Dad had an old violin he had bought for half a crown in his youth remains a mystery, he had never shown us, let alone played it. But the instrument was duly produced and at school the violin tutor took it away and exchanged it for a quarter size. Maybe Dad’s original instrument was a Stradivarius and she made a fortune, we will never know.
Violin lessons took place in the same room as school medicals, the headmaster’s office up a narrow staircase in the old Victorian building, in winter an ancient bar gas fire was lit. I memorised the four strings GDAE, put rosin on my bow, learned the treble cleff and did give one public performance; in our garage in the back garden. Mum’s friend round the corner had six children and we put on a variety concert when aunties and uncles were visiting. I played a solo, Three Blind Mice. The audience had paid sixpence each for the excruciating experience. That was the height of my career as a violinist.
Like the rest of my family I later attempted to learn various instruments, with little success. The guitar can sound impressive merely by learning a few chords, or that’s what I hoped, but I had the wrong hands, fingers not long enough. At college I was in a recorder consort, playing descant while the more proficient played alto, tenor and base. We performed at our lecturer’s wedding … and that was the summit of my musical career.
Since then I have attempted to teach myself on the electronic keyboard and piano, at least progressing to learning the bottom line, base cleff, but never getting up to speed or coping with any music that has more than an f sharp or b flat to deal with.
The fun of being a writer is that if you can’t be a brilliant musician yourself, you can create one. Emma Dexter is a famous young violinist, pianist and composer from a very ordinary unmusical family. In Three Ages of Man, second of the Brief Encounters Trilogy, a stranger has made an impossible journey to find out what really happened to the woman whose music he loves so passionately.
Times and Tides of a Beachwriter 