Update.

I've just posted a short story that occurred to me one morning in the shower while enduring my usual gloomy forebodings about the end of the world and craving caffeine. I guess it represents the continuation of my obsession with pulling apart the idea of short stories needing big pay-offs that began with Red Shift.

What else? Oh yeah. I don't know if I mentioned it at the time on here, I rather suspect I didn't, but I had some more poetry put up on The Writers' Hub, including my poem 'The Lovers' which is about paintings that want to, ahem, seduce you and 'Man and Superman', which has nothing to do with Nietzsche beyond the title. (It's actually about me watching my son watch the first Superman movie for the first time.) There's also a poem about an anthropmorphic boob called 'Alice's Left Breast'. Plus ça change, etc. All three can be found here. 

Finally, I just last week finished the second and, hopefully, more or less final draft of my first novel (I'm working on another one, and another one kind of, and I have an idea for a super-cool one which I'm itching to start, but oh the time!). Now I have to work out what to do with the first one. More on this later, perhaps.

And so to bed. Or not, as it's only 11.22 in the morning. WHY AM I NOT IN BED?

Galadriel's Choice.

Scary GaladrielYou know that bit in LOTR when Frodo offers Galadriel the ring and she thinks about it a bit and then goes all scary and then gets all sad and normal again before saying, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West'? First of all, it's a bit Craig David to refer to herself in the third person like that. Second, I've come to realise this is the defining metaphor for growing old. Here she is being offered everything she could ever conceivably want: power, immortality, a life without fear. However, knowing as she does that she can't make the selfish choice without corrupting herself or the sacred balance of the universe, yadda-yadda-yadda, she says no. And that's just like getting old. Sure, you can be a dick about it and cling onto the dream of your youth, when you were amazingly wonderful and important, if only to yourself. But that, as Sauron learned the hard way, does not get you invited to Elrond's birthday party. Alternatively, you can be unselfish and let the natural course of things diminish you gradually, without eradicating whatever it is you still believe in. This is probably how it feels to be a cliff: you stand there every day getting eroded, and after a while you're pretty much unrecognisable even to yourself – but you're still a cliff. There's a certain comfort in thoughts like these. And that's probably why I find myself – most often in the shower when I've noticed some new travesty inflicted by my body's ongoing attritional war with time, whispering to myself, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West.' 

ENGLAND AT THIS REMOVE.

Beachy HeadAt this distance from the UK, steeped in the clear air of separation from all the received notions and behaviours of one’s homeland that you put on like an old coat as soon as you return, I can’t help feeling that the secret to living in England has to lie in not succumbing to the pessimistic viewpoint propagated by the media and the people who believe the media. You have to find a bit of clear space and look after it and not worry about the rest. Of course, I know now that I always feel this way whenever I’ve been out of the UK for a spell. The only difference from the way I was when I came back from India aged 19 full of unshakeable conviction is that now I know I will lose this certainty just like all the others.

Here's a thing.

And it would probably be helpful if I explained it a bit. But that would imply that I'm taking this seriously, which I'm not, and that I have the time to unpack abstruse cultural theories, which I don't.

Transcendence of the Dolls.

Quite literally a couple of thoughts about a recent Julia Donaldson title, The Paper Dolls, featuring illustrations by Rebecca Cobb.

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