James Watson's Blog: A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK

AWriter’s NotebookNo.52, November 2014
http://Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com/
Contact email address: Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

Contents Editorial
Social media: Does it warrant the fuss?
Poems: February by Alison Prince

EditorialWhat used to be a monthly blog has suffered slippage. This comes about by considering oneself superman rather than an ageing scribbler, saying Yes instead of No and then being lumbered with two mightyish revisions of books it might have been better to leave behind. Both are academic, of long standing, their subject-matter the media. Both will be reissued in 2015, the 4th edition ofMedia Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Process from Palgrave/Macmillan; the second, written with Anne Hill, the 9th edition of The Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies, from Bloomsbury.

The work, in each case, has turned out something more than a touch-up. Reading what had been written for the last editions confirms the experience of slippage, in terms of time but also with regard to content. Retirement from teaching begins to show itself within days rather than weeks: you discover you are out of touch, and this is especially true of the fields of media: new terminology, new developments, more recent events clamour for mention and analysis, for adjustment or even  deletion.
Three editions ago the Dictionary had no entry on social media, yet in the past three years it has become the headline-scooping attraction of the digital age. What follows is a modified entry for the 9th edition of the Bloomsbury book. It is a definition and a comment in time which might in turn be on its way to obsolescence before it appears in print.
 
Thanks to Alison Prince whose poems continue to enrich The Writer’s Notebook.
 
Social media: Does it warrant the fuss? The Internet rapidly fulfilled the prophecy of media guru Marshal McLuhan that electronic communication would turn the world into a global village; indeed it can be said that, with the growth of social networking, it has become a global backyard. Basically, social media is hundreds and thousands of people e-chatting and message-exchanging via the Net and sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Tumbir, Flickr and Twitter, not, that is, people actually meeting face to face; more likely squaring up to their own isolation.
      In the opinion of MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011), summarising years of research findings among young people,  relying on the mobile phone, texting, exchanging messages on Facebook substitutes machine communication for the real thing; we are connected but alone. ‘We would rather text than talk,’ and in doing so we ‘sacrifice conversion for connection’.

Pressures to conform
 We might nod in appreciation of such possibilities but we continue, in the words of Jill Walker Rettberg in Blogging (Polity Press, 2010), to submit to ‘our instinct for collecting’. Rettberg says, ‘Once enough of your friends have joined a social network site, social pressure can make it very difficult not to participate’.
Social network analysis has become a rapidly expanding field of study, producing a new generation of commentators and gurus matching optimistic with pessimistic visions of the impact of social networking on users. The optimism of American writer Clay Shirky shines through the title of his book published by Allen Lane in 2010, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. In an interview with the UK Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead (‘If there’s a screen to worry about in your house, it’s not the one with the mouse attached’, 5 July 2010), Shirky says the popularity of online social media proves that ‘people are more creative and generous than we have ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia – for no financial reward – because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness … Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the social activism also emerging’.

Net delusion?For every Shirky there is a worried pessimist (or cyber skeptic) who has a basketful of concerns about the impact of social media representing as it often does unbridled freedom of expression and consequently its subversive potential, for good or ill. One of the skeptics is Evgeny Morozov. His book The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (Penguin, 2011) sees network communication as a whole as being under the threat of, on the one hand, censorship (chiefly by governments), on the other, appropriation by big business.
     Morozov comes down heavily against optimistic claims that the Net is too big to be censored, for the very act of online social intercommunication is subject to surveillance that tracks who we are, what we are doing, where we’ve been, what sentiments we’ve been exchanging. In short, once we step into forums of social media, once we give information about ourselves, we have taken a decision to deliver up our privacy.

Democracy or surveillance?While Morozov focuses chiefly on the threat of authority to the freedom currently experienced by online communicators, Robert McChesney fears for democracy itself, seeing corporate power, often in partnership with government, as encroaching on, indeed appropriating the Internet for commercial purposes in the same way that public services (such as broadcasting) are privatized. In Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New Press, 2013), McChesney acknowledges that in the early days of the Net, grasping it – exercising control over it – ‘was like trying to shoot a moving target in a windstorm’.
     Today sophisticated technology tracks Internet activity as never before, and it does so in the interests of control (the perspective of those in authority) and monopoly (corporate ambition); in each case, McChesney argues, the path to equality, the foundation stone of democracy, becomes increasingly difficult to negotiate. He writes, ‘What seemed to be an increasingly open public sphere, removed from the world of commodity exchange, seems to be morphing into a private sphere of increasingly closed, proprietary, even monopolistic markets’.
     Capitalism of the neoliberalist sort, he believes, has ‘conquered the Internet’; it ‘has been converted into an advertising-based medium’.  In addition, McChesney looks with concern at an Internet that is ‘swarming with mostly anonymous and unaccountable companies  tracking anything that moves’.

Power of the collectiveIn contrast to this bleak picture, evidence of Net citizens, in small action groups or in the mass, has demonstrated empowerment with regard to social, political and economic issues. Public opinion remains a key factor for both governments and commerce and where the publics use their collective power via the Net to bring about change much can be achieved, in democracies and even authoritarian states. The danger remains, that those who take action, who surrender their anonymity for a public cause, have been noted, their personal details classified in the massive databanks of the state.
    Further, the current ‘openness’ of the Net permits more than government agencies to pursue questionable agendas: industrial espionage, cyberwarfare, hacking,DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), pornography, identity theft, malicious impersonation, trolling, rape videos, falsification of information, online fraud, paedophile  rings, spam emails, stalking and bullying in their many forms, render the Internet ‘backyard’ a place of danger with potentially destructive powers.

Women as targetsMost worryingly is the cyberwar on women (see @StopWebBullying).A June 2014 report by the think-tank Demos, Misogyny on Twitter found more than 6 million references to the word ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ used in English between 16 December 2013 and 9 February 2014. In conversation with Time online (7 October 2014), Danielle Keats Citron, author of Hate Crime in Cyberspace (Harvard University Press, 2014), argued that ‘Getting us to see online abuse as the new frontier for civil rights activism will help point society in the right direction’. However, a number of social media platforms have been reluctant to take down expressions of cyber abuse, apparently on grounds of freedom of speech and expression. Such libertarian arguments prove difficult to sustain in face of the personal suffering that hate crime causes its victims, this, in a period when the number of suicides resulting from cyberbullying is on the increase.
For some commentators, idealism prevails. In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky talks of the ‘civic value’ of Network activism, seeing it as potentially revolutionary. He predicts a time when ‘we are slowly going to set up islands of civil discourse’ in which norms are established that encourage people to use their real names or some well-known handle. The challenge for social networking is how ‘to maximize’ the Internet’s ‘civic value’.

Comments on Social Media are welcome, around 300 to 500 words. Please mail toWatsonworks@hotmail.co.uk.

 FebruaryAlison Prince                      

Lower the gangplank, lad – maybe the dovemeant business with that twig. Go steady, now,
it’s treacherous. Dad, look! Dear God, a tree!
Unbolt the hatches, Missus! We’ll release
the armadillos, peccaries and bears,
parrots and accountants, mountain goats,
architects and bees and three-toed sloths,
yes, free the whole complaining lot. There’ll be
no biscuit ration handed out tonight,
no brackish water lapped, no whinnying,
no roars, no yelps, no threats that they will sue
on Health and Safety grounds. We got them through,
we kept the ark afloat, we have endured
storms and seasickness, we even hung
tinsel in the holds for Christmas cheer.
It’s February. It’s done. Until next year.

***
 
 
 
 

AWriter’s Notebook
No.51, September 2014http://Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com/

Contact email address: Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk
CONTENTS
NOTES IN PASSING
    High Road, Low Road, No Road
Poetry: Again by Alison Prince
Review: Arrivederci Commissario!  Helen Dempsey
Correspondence

HIGH ROAD, LOW ROAD, NO ROAD  The Scots have made their decision. We are united once more; so the politicians celebrate. After a lot of good sense north of the border  from both those for and those  against independence, we enter the era of honour and fair play; of politics set aside; of British common sense demonstrating itself to the world. This is crap; and so have been most of the comments by the power elite reported in the media.

    Friends, the Scots were voting for something more than independence. Indeed it is arguable that they were not voting for independence at all: what they wanted was to be shut of  the kind of government they have suffered under from Westminster; the government of cuts in social welfare, the ideology which introduces legislation that enriches the rich and punishes the poor. They wanted an end to Toryism, just as the English, Welsh and Irish may wish to do once given a vision of what is possible.
‘Believe us, we’re listening…’Heeding the politicians’ clamour of promises and cross-my-hearts, you would guess that Scotland’s example has been on their minds for generations, regardless of the fact that they’ve wrangled for generations over what to do with the House of Lords.  Locked in to the mentality of their parliamentary privileges, having so benevolently kept the nation’s blessed nurses and other professions vital to the nation to a one percent pay rise while they dish out the shekels  to themselves, rest assured they have the CONSTITITION  in mind. PR man Dave wants to rush it along, 20-20 style; slow-motion academic Ed prefers two innings and a five-day game. Though it will milk the headlines for a few weeks more, reform will fade from the government’s agenda as swiftly as the Royal Charter on the press.
    Years ago it was put to Yorkshire that they become part of regional government. A vote was taken. Nobody was interested, because the good folks of Yorks were well aware that, as far as the ruling class was concerned (Labour in this case) change meant more of the same.
   It is such a relief, however, to know that so many things have been pledged, that politics will be abandoned by all parties in order to debate the common good; to learn that the advance towards independence of the English would under no circumstance be influenced by party ambitions.
 Of all the promises made during and after the campaign nothing summarises better what the Scots have known for centuries, that English assurances are as reliable as King John’s vows to honour Magna Carta (also referred to, more accurately, as the Barons’  Charter).

The country will never be the same again: officialYes, there will be ‘constitutional reform’. It will promise change. Before you know it we will have a nation cleared of any resemblance to the past. The ruling cabinet will be made up of Etonians. Britain’s best education will be provided by public schools. Sunday will still be prayer day on the BBC and there will not be a cat in hell’s chance of having non-believers speak on Thought for the Day. The income of the royal family will be tripled. Prince George will become Lord of the Isles on his fifth birthday and inherit fishing rights for lochs Awe to Tay from Eck, from Morlich to Ness. The nurses will receive 2% over ten years following the concluding transfer of the National Health Service to American medical conglomerates.
     Statutes and formulas galore will have been assembled by City-based consultants at fees  equivalent to the income of Greater Manchester which will share the role of capital of Merseyside with Liverpool on a six-monthly rota. Devolved committees with powers of recommendation will be responsible for dealing on a local basis (yet to be defined) with issues such as what to do with immigrants, the sick, the elderly, disaffected youth, taxing Starbucks, banks, corrupt business practices, down-and-outs, hedge funds, Wikileaks, jihadists, all of course as usual in the name of equality, fair distribution of wealth and the abolition of prescription charges (over the dead bodies of the Conservative Republican Alliance).
     Cornwall will be restored to its ancient kingdom status and the Cornish language permitted to be spoken on the  royal births and deaths. As a result of Scotland’s promised privileges, plans for a motorway in Cornwall will be postponed till 2025.

Much to doOf course most of the items listed above are currently well in hand. The difference is that the Citizens’ Charter will speed things up or slow them down accordingly. It will be subject to independent debate across the new counties of Yorkshire-with-Lancashire, Surrey-with-Kent and Inner-with-Outer London, the new regions or Landes of North, East, South and West and the new conurbations of North-and-South Watford. Needless to say, Parliament itself will continue  to shut up shop for four months during the summer months.
    Having proved such a failure, public ownership of facilities and social services for New Britain will be the responsibility of the private sector. Schools will be expected to earn their keep, profitability to be the sole  criterion of new league tables. History teaching will go easy on Edward 1’s ravaging north of the border,  the role of the English in the problematic events at Glencoe, the massacre  and post-combat slaughter at Culloden and the Highland Clearances.   If it has not already been delivered, the Stone of Scone will be returned to whatever location will command the greatest attention of the paying public.
    As for decisions concerning what is of exclusive interest to the English, the Welsh, the Irish as well as the matters of exclusive interest to the Scots, these will be the responsibility of a Royal Commission operated by retired judges, diplomats, former ministers of state plus a 1% representation of local taxpayers over 40 with residency rights of a minimum of 15 years. Except where necessary, all posts will be open to women applicants.
    The future is well on its way to fruition, though there are still doubters. As one English voter recently settled in a new council  house on the shores of Loch Lomond was overheard to say, ‘A new face for the English? I’ll believe it when I see it!’

Again By Alison Prince

Beside my mother in the cinemaI saw the stick-white bodies of people
bulldozed into graves, and understood
that this was what the war had been about.
Our own deaths had been accidents – the bombs
struck randomly. But this slaughter was planned,
a system coldly carried out.

 Appalled sympathy wrapped victimsand survivors in the deep respect
due to those who might point to our guilt.
They never did. It had not been our fault -
we could not know. But all the same,
a debt stood to be paid and at the least,
we felt we must remember and  take care
that such a thing never happened again.

Who could have known that thosewith a camp number tattooed on the arm
would have descendants who look back and find
a tribe to blame for all the current ills?
War never stops, but this new targeting
of children, dark-haired as  the bombers' own
children, is again well-planned.

 In a mosque's rubble a thin boy huntsthrough damaged books thrown in a skip
on top of other stuff. I remember
the smell of stone-dust and the stale
reek of doused fire and, too, the pride
of being still alive. I hope he found
something to sell or, better, to take him
beyond the ugly tedium of war,
just for a while. We are now too far gone
to ask for more.

Arrivederci Commissaro!
Helen Dempsey fears the winter without the comforting vistas of Sicily and the bow-legged, balding Inspector Montalbano
Gosh and alas, the dark nights are approaching and we are to be deprived by BBC Channel 4 of Salvo (Inspector Montalbano) and his dedicated and dishy assistants, Fazio and Mimi, the glimpses of the deserted streets of Vigata, the programme’s evocative music and – in the final instalment, a parrot singing the Internationale.
    Il Commissario played by Luca Zingaretti is not exactly one’s image of the Italian heartthrob; he is short, bow-legged and shorn. But he has a mighty chest as the production team regularly remind us in most instalments catching our hero swimming in Sicily’s languid waters prior to him being half-way through a coffee before the phone rings and he learns of the latest murder to be solved.
    Unlike most western crime series which are often laconic in the extreme, made up of grunts and silences, ‘Montalbanio’ as one would expect from a population blessed with an eternity of sunshine and pavement cafes, consists of talking, not just between the key characters as plots deepen and become more convoluted, but with a horde of minor portraits, usually witnesses of all shapes, sizes, ages and appearances who are given speeches sufficient to serve as lessons in Italian and encourage British visitors to venture beyond Buon giorno and, yes,arrivaderci.
    Serious critics would shake their heads at the vein of populism that runs through the series. There must be more women of spectacular beauty and seductiveness featured in ‘Montalbano’; yet Salvo, though he might be tempted never surrenders his priorities: his work, his quality food and wines and his girlfriend who, convenient for narrative requirement, lives and works far off.      Like all policeman’s ladies, she is the victim of forgetfulness, lateness and neglect.
     Whatever the temptations, even the prospect of a weekend in Paris, our Salvo is impossible to shift from his immediate context – and why should he when his mis en scene is made up of exquisite sea vistas, crumbling country mansions, spectacular interiors, courtyards and eye-catching stairways?
     I’ll miss Montalbano because like all good detectives, while willing to bend the rules, he is honest and fair, the sort of character, firm, brave and unpretentious, who drives a car utterly devoid of distinction. He is resistant  to bullying by his superiors, often authoritarian towards his colleagues who in turn he often finds exasperating. Yet at Christmas time they compete to invite him to join their family celebrations. I’d be happy to do the same. Benvenuto, Commissario!

CORRESPONDENCEDear Ed.,
As a dedicated reader of A Writer’s NotebookI was delighted to be invited with my wife to your celebration of Blog 50 at the end of August. The gust swirling round the cleaners’ cradle at the Shard was a little unnerving at first. My wife lost her coque-au-vin but that was amply compensated by our chance to meet your famous correspondent, Ned Baslow, who kept us entertained with tales of his trials and tribulations concerning the celebrities due to appear at the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Festival of the Arts.
     My wife and I have booked tickets for Extracts from Homer’s Odyssey read by the author himself; and we had a lot of fun returning to Tunbridge Wells anticipating the interval when there will be a competition to award Mr. Homer a first name – as Ned argued, the loss of a great poet’s first name is as bad as somebody pressing the Delete button before the final stanza of his masterpiece.
    However, Mrs. Baslow, who is studying for an Open University degree, said all this naming was a nonsense, the word Omer (with or without an h) was the ancient Greek equivalent for ‘Anon’.  It is amazing how much you can learn dangling half a mile above London with a sausage roll in one hand and half a pint of Guinness in the other!  Yours etc.,
Peter and Glenys Bird.

  Our thanks to Peter and Glenys and to the dozen or so guests who dropped us a line. Also to Alison for her beautiful poem, and our first-time correspondent Helen Dempsey. We’re all a bit sad that Inspector M. won’t be demonstrating the gentle art of Sicilian crawl under a Mediterranean sun. Instead BBC 4 will be serving up the same old Nordic angst – perpetual ice and snow, mangled corpses, and characters verging on the bi-polar and not a laugh from one instalment to the next. Which means the critics adore it…      

A Writer’s Notebook
No.50, August 2014
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com Contact address: Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

 CONTENTSEditorial
Notes in Passing: More Than a DRIP
Jarama Remembered 
Book review
Correspondence

 EDITORIAL 50 and counting slowly
Novelist and media scholar Umberto Eco writes in the Preface to Travels in Hyperreality (Picador, 1986) that while he is capable of writing learned volumes, 'work that demands time, peace of mind, patience' he also feels compelled in journalism and in teaching to communicate his ideas now rather than later: ‘That is why I like to teach, to expound still-imperfect ideas and hear the students' reaction. That is why I like to write for the newspapers, to retread myself the next day, and to read the reaction of others’.
   He is probably echoing the feelings of many writers largely committed to ‘works of length’, novels, plays, academic books. There is a need for balance, in Eco’s case, journalism and teaching.

Practising for pleasureAs a writer of journalistic pieces during vacations from college, subscribing to my university newspaper, editing a magazine during my National Service, writing profiles of Italian artists while I was teaching English in Italy, then employed as a reporter on a Thomson newspaper before, eventually, switching to teaching in further and higher education, I’ve always prized journalism as part of my DNA. Moving from work as a journalist to lecturing in media I tried to keep up with writing as an expression of pleasure, admiration or in some cases, anger (TALKING IN WHISPERS was born out of anger at the seizure of power by the military in Chile). I did art reviews, book reviews, film reviews, all the while combining these, and teaching, with writing fiction for Young Adults.

 CounterbalancingNovels take one hell of a time, and the more you write, the longer they take. That’s what so attractive about writing them: they engage you for the foreseeable future; they structure that future and when they’re finished there is often a terrible feeling of loss. Writing short pieces can be compensation, for the pleasure is in the process, of getting things down on to paper, of shaping texts which never existed before.
   The idea of doing a blog, ‘A Writer’s Notebook’ (Blog 1, 3 September 2009) was thus an opportunity to be grasped with relish, for it took me back to the days when as a teenager I produced my own magazines. What evolved was something personal, not autobiography, but a reflection of my particular interests – writing stories, creating characters, analysing narrative, in the hope that others might be interested too; and that the blog might attract contributors, which it has.

Freedom to expressMuch of what has been posted has taken the form of extracts and summaries of novels, a series on Poems of Place, articles on press freedom and censorship, pieces on writing academic works about media, on the importance of history (Blog 4, 23 October 2009 featured HISTORY’S FORGOTTEN WOMEN), on women’s soccer (prelude to my novel FAIR GAME: THE STEPS OF ODESSA), an article on blogging itself (Blog 13, 14 July 2010),  a number of reviews of books, films and art exhibitions.
   There have been highly readable contributions including book reviews by Tony Williams, comment by Alison Prince, dialogues by Bron O’Brien and two extracts from Laura Solomon’s novel Imitation of Life (Blogs 42/3, 17 September and 20 October 2013). The pages of A Writer’s Notebook are open to contributors; in fact I have been troubled as to where to put the apostrophe; yes, the Blog has been mainly mine, but its contents have been enriched by others.

Not forgetting NedLast but not least, the editorial team are delighted to acknowledge the (now regular) correspondence of Ned Baslow, secretary of the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven International Festival of the Arts. He is living proof that the art of letter writing prospers. His letters to potential performers at the Festival such as Wolfy Mozart (interlude pieces, choir conducting), Billy Blake (scenery), Cervantes (script for the musical, The Spectacles of Don Quixote), Florence Nightingale (first aid) and Capability Brown (landscaping the festival site) are already being serialised on Facebook.

Hastings: a 1000 year blipOur only disappointment has been King Harold’s ignoring Ned’s advice not to rush in to things after his victory at Stamford Bridge. We are all rather sad in the office that Harold’s impatience has led to a thousand years of the Normans, progenitors of the iniquitous Bedroom Tax and much meddling with education.

NOTES IN PASSING: More than a DRIPHow slowly human rights progress; how swiftly they can be removed; and with what casual concern. While we (some of us) were worrying about the failures of the English soccer team in Brazil, the English cricket team at Trent Bridge; shocked and helpless at what’s been happening in Gaza, those twinkle-toed politicians slipped through whatever defences the British public has as its disposal and hit the back of the parliamentary net with a new bill that will banish online freedoms once and for all.
   The rush to legislate was as sneaky as schoolkids smoking behind the bike shed. We are talking about the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill – DRIP for short - which an Open Letter by 15 academics stated ‘is a serious expansion of the British surveillance state’, while on a Privacy International website posting, readers were warned, ‘Make no mistake about it – both the current policy [RIPA, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. 2000] and the new bill give the government carte blanche for massive and disproportionate invasion of privacy’.

Submission on demandNothing, should the bill become law, will in future be hidden from the eyes and access of what has been termed ‘womb-to-womb’ government observation. In future, everything we transmit on line will be subject to surveillance. Individuals, groups and social platforms will be required, on demand from the authorities, to surrender content about all of us. The Security services will be able to trawl through all our exchanges.
    RIPA was bad enough. This extended blanket powers of interception to telephone and Internet traffic, allowing the police, local government and, let’s face it, every Tom, Dick and Harry in the nation’s machinery of government, to probe our personal details. A Guardian leader declared the Act ‘a mockery of the right to privacy that the Human Rights Act is supposed to protect’.

Nothing to fear The rationale for DRIP is as old as the political hills: it is being brought in to protect us against terrorism. If we are not terrorists, we have nothing to fear; if we have nothing to hide, we can rest assured that Big Brother means us no harm. The legislation will only operate in ‘extreme circumstances’. Relax. Journalists such as Rafael Behr are only trying to work people up by talking of ‘creeping spookocracy’.
   This will be very bad news for organisations and movements who use the Internet to coordinate their (legitimate) activities, that of supporting causes, advocating change, protesting about innumerable things they see as being wrong with contemporary society. It will also prove bad news for lawyers because DRIP is in breach of European law: perhaps that is one reason why the present UK government plans to dismantle existing human rights legislation.

Atlantic bargainsIn Cheltenham, Britain’s Spy HQ, already equipped with the most sophisticated and expensive surveillance system in the world, next to that of their American buddies at the National Security Agency, they’ll be relishing extending the sale of our data, our online exchanges, or mobile phone conversations for a tidy profit.
   All of this, with scarcely a public voice or hand raised in protest. Surely we don’t believe what we are told; or are we waiting to join forces with the poor old House of Lords when they come to discuss the bill, when they remind the nation of its hard-fought liberties yet in turn get railroaded by a parliament bent on regarding the entire population as potential suicide bombers? Watch this space, but bear in mind that it might also have been under scrutiny, its visitors and their traces duly logged.

 JARAMA REMEMBEREDWhile the nation has been commemorating the tragedy of the First World War, another war has been recalled by a diminishing number of those whose relatives fought in it, and who work hard to keep memories of the Spanish Civil War alive.
   What was it that took hundreds of British volunteers (and French, Americans, even Germans and Italians) to fight and die in a foreign war? First, a sense of brotherhood, the desire to support Spain’s republican government as Franco’s fascists, supported by German and Italian bombers (the ones that destroyed Guernica) as it struggled against the odds from one lost battle to another: a democratic government cut off from assistance by the ‘impartiality’ of the states of Britain, France and the US.
  But second, the belief among the volunteers that the war they were fighting was prelude to the war to come: victory for reaction, the success of history’s first blitzkriegs, the belief of Hitler and Mussolini that ‘the allies’ were too scared to get involved, and would be so when the big war came, proved compelling, worth the risk of dying in a foreign land.
   Among the battles that the British Legion of volunteers fought and died in was Jarama. In a moving ceremony in February of 2014, the family of Jack Edwards from Liverpool, wounded at Jarama, according to his wishes, scattered his ashes on the field of battle. There were 400 others paying homage to the fallen. At a gathering of the International Brigade Memorial Trust in Manchester Town Hall on Sunday 9 February marking the anniversary of the battle the lives of 120 volunteers who were killed were commemorated.
   Parallels have been drawn by some with the current call to arms of Islamists carrying young Britons to struggles in the Arab world. The inspiration, the youthful haste to act in a cause, are similar; the difference is that the brigaders were volunteering for a humanitarian cause, while jihadists seem to have it in mind that one day they will return to wreak havoc in their own country.
   Even so, among the volunteers who broke the law and evaded the agencies of order to travel to Spain there were those with little cause to love or respect their own country: unemployment in the 1930s stalked Britain. The gap between the wealthy and a hard-up population was almost as wide as it is today in contemporary Britain. Poverty and hopelessness motivated many men to opt for a life of adventure and sacrifice. It is unlikely that they imagined being pitched into such a combat of horrors, of killings, of executions, of towns and cities devastated by German junkers which would soon would be turning their attention to London and beyond.
   Their message had been clear: Spain was the practice-ground for the 2nd World War; alas few were paying attention. As for the volunteers of the International Brigade, the memories live on in their families, through the pages of the Brigade’s newsletter, in conferences on the war, in books and magazines and on the commemorative plaques both in Britain and in Spain that mark the heroism and the tragedy in which, contrary to the imperatives of stories, the good guys lost.

 **********************************************************************Among the women volunteers who joined the war was artist Felicia Browne who became a member of the Catalan Communist Militia. With Felicia in their ranks, they attempted to sabotage a railway line. They were ambushed and outnumbered by fascist forces. In going to the aid of an Italian comrade who was wounded, Felicia was machine-gunned down, possibly on 22 August 1936. She was the first of the women volunteers to be killed. Her sketches will be featured at an exhibition, ‘Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War’, on show at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, from 8 November to 15 February 2015.

**********************************************************************
R e v i e w: Dublin, the Bits in-BetweenTONY WILLIAMS is impressed by James Plunkett’s Strumpet City.

It is only just over the water but it might well be in farthest Oceania. Two works, Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall and James Plunkett’s Strumpet City have brought it home to me how sketchy my knowledge of Ireland is: Drogheda, the Famine, the Home Rule debates, the Easter Rising, the Black and Tans, the Civil War, the IRA,  Behan – all these are familiar to me. But what of the bits in-between? What about Dublin in the years preceding 1914, was anything happening then or was it just a lull waiting for the independence struggle? Well no, as it turns out from James Plunkett’s novel, these were years of terrible conflict and starvation caused not by the usual villains, the British, but by the clash between capital and labour.

Shades of the present?Dublin was a populous overcrowded city which had lost much of its manufacturing base and unemployment was the norm for the unskilled. The poor, the extremely poor, were crammed into apartment blocks formerly grand homes of the gentry. What work there was for the unskilled, carting, delivering, on a zero hours basis, a day’s work here or two hours there.
   Onto the scene came Jim Larkin - a name which was to resound throughout twentieth century labour disputes in Ireland, the USA and USSR. In Dublin this Liverpool Irishman organised the unskilled into the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, initiated strikes for tolerable hours and pay and coined the slogan ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.’  Larkin led the workers through dreadful deprivations over years of lockouts, was jailed on several occasions and ultimately deported to the USA.
   James Plunkett’s great skill is in making me want to immerse myself in this unpalatable story, informing yet without tub-thumping. Larkin features in the background in this story of richly drawn individuals: a carrier, a foundry worker, various priests, factory owners and managers, prostitutes and, most vivid of all, Rashers Tierney, the lowest of the low.
Plunkett does not share the widespread contempt for the poor, Dublin’s cast-offs, living in cast-off housing, in cast-off clothes bought in second-hand shops, where even the fuel they burn is second-hand: ‘Children and the old searched the bins of the well-to-do for half-burnt cinders’. Rashers Tierney, despised and bullied by officialdom is reduced almost to the level of his dog Rusty, his friend and equal: ‘… the child rooting in the ashbin, the cat slinking along the gutter, the cockroach delicately questing along the wooden joins of the floor.. these were sometimes his competitors, but more often his brothers.’

Police brutalityAs a literary figure Tierney could have sprung from Gorky, but in the flesh can be found in numerous favelas throughout the world.  The brutality of the police in smashing the strike, quite literally breaking into the houses of the strikers and in front of the terrified wives and children taking sledgehammers to all the sparse furniture, cookers and fittings, smashing their ‘delph’, leaving them with nothing to take to the pawnbrokers – this brutality is unthinkable now, of course. We use bulldozers.
   Plunkett is not a black-and-white polemicist, and even the most odious Father O’Connor who does his utmost to deny the strikers sustenance and thwart their attempts to send their starving children to England, even he can be seen as a human being at times. Individual capitalists and their wives also make more than token efforts to help the suffering families of the strikers.
  The novel ends with the capitulation of the strikers, the banishment to the USA of Larkin and the move toward war.

James Plunkett, (1920-2003) worked in the Irish trade union movement and in Irish radio and television. He has been well-known for many years to people in Ireland and beyond, but only recently, to my shame, to me.Published Gill & MacMillan, Dublin 1969.

 CorrespondenceThe major part of Blog 49 was given over to Ned Baslow as guest editor on account of the Blog’s editorial staff being up to their eyes planning the future, specifically preparing new editions of heavy tomes. Ned mentioned how keen his wife Betty is about having a water feature in their garden. We immediately received a kind and generous offer:

We have surplus statue of Cupid that we could donate to Betty's water feature.PoseidonBetty, we learn, who is studying for an Open University degree, immediately cautioned Ned about accepting this gift, pointing out that Poseidon was the Greek god of the sea, while Cupid was of Roman origin. ‘Something fishy about it,’ she said.
   Ned’s postbag  was too numerous for us to reproduce it in bulk, but below is a selection of mainly-emails from our readers.

Dear Ned,I was talking to Johan Sebastian during Evensong last Sunday and he expressed genuine regret at not being invited to conduct his Motet for Four Horns and Ukelele at the Festival you are organising. Is it too late to book a performance? He would be happy to give a brief introduction to the work; and his fee would be modest.
Yours etc.
Pete Urwin.

 Dear Ned,Talking of your wife’s admiration for water features, my company specialises in water feature spectacles. We would be very happy to design such a feature to accompany your planned Tableau of Beauties featuring the one-and-only Helen of Troy. We were the company responsible for the fountains that served as background to the production of The Little Mermaid at the Gove Memorial Free School in Balham.
Yours etc.
Splash Productions.

 Dear Mr. Baslow,Congratulations on holding the fort while your editorial colleagues escaped their duties on Bournemouth beach. I personally was witness to the mess they made as, eager to rescue their barbeque in a strong east wind, their manuscripts were wafted out to sea or were consumed by seagulls. Put two or more writers together, in my view, and mayhem follows as swiftly as night follows day.
Yours etc.
Liz Motram

Dear Ned,I’m submitting two new songs in lieu of your rejecting my Lark Ascending, on the grounds that it’s been done to death.
Yours etc.
Ralph V. Williams.

Dear Ned,We’re just finishing breakfast, though my housecarls have left a corner for William of Normandy’s head. We have an insuperable advantage, being located on a hill overlooking the battlefield. I shall be willing to give a talk at the Festival on the theme of How to Net Harold Hardrada, His Brother  Tostig and Will Norman in Under 48 hours. See you shortly.
Harold Goodwinson.
PS: Please arrange for me to meet Helen of Troy in private.

MARKET STREET Kindle editions at crazy prices:
Talking in Whispers (£2.01)
The Freedom Tree (£1.03)
Ticket to Prague (£1.63)
Justice of the Dagger (£2.03)
Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa (£4.11)
Pigs Might Fly (£4.11)

Contributions are welcome and should be e-mailed to: watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

 

A Writer’s Notebook
No. 49, JULY 2014
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
 The Return of NedBaslow…

Dear ReadersI’m probably as confused as you might be to discover I’ve been appointed by the editorial team Visiting Editor for this edition. This comes at a time when, fresh from my three weeks Union-assisted sojourn in Fuengirola (too many Russians for my liking), I discover a note on the living room mantelpiece informing me that the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven International Festival of the Arts has been postponed till December on account of Councillor Gilbert Stokoe falling off his son Octavian’s horse and damaging his elbow and breaking a number of ribs. So much for outdoor performances of The Spectacles of Don Quixote, the centrepiece of the Festival.
     So the honour of being appointed editor is somewhat dimmed in the light of the mountain of correspondence that awaits me. Whether the Greeks (Odysseus, Menelaus, Homer et al) will want to take part in the Great Battle of the Titans, or Helen of Troy lead the dance chorus in the Tableau of Womanly Beauty down the ages, bearing in mind last year’s endless rain, is beyond my guessing.
     The Editorial Board, by the way, have lumbered me with this task because they in turn have been lumbered with preparing new editions of a couple of books they thought were at the end of their trail, but aren’t. So there’s not a sausage in the In-Tray and only a half-eaten banana in the Out-Tray.

Confidence misplacedI thought, well, it’s an opportunity to spread information about the Festival to the thousands of readers of A Writer’s Notebook, particularly as many of our artistes are avid readers of the blog – Wolfy Mozart, Billy Blake, Florrie Nightingale, Calamity Brown, Endeavour Morse and Maid Marian to name but a few.

     How to fill its pages? Well, could blogging be another country for ordinary folk? Not a jot of doubt was in my head that family, friends and neighbours would rally round and contribute a piece, long or short, about the Pleasures, Challenges, Ups and Downs of Life in Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven. Not a jot or a tittle!
     My wife Betty, in the middle of her Open University studies, is too busy on an essay for her tutor Dr. Arbuthnot (expert on The Black Rat and the Brown Rat in the Year of the Plague). That’s just what we need, I said to her: What foreigners think of the English, edited down with pictures of England’s anti-heroes such as Judge Jefferys or Jimmy Savile. Of course I got an earful for belittling the study of history; even got a straight No on the theme of Academic Life and the Struggling Housewife and ever-forebearing hubbies.
    Betty’s sister Brenda’s Spanish husband was next on my list: a piece on what the Common Market has done for Spain, Roderigo. He said he’d prefer to do something on bull fighting, at which Betty shut him up by saying readers would be much more interested in the way Picasso rendering the sport. ‘Picasso betrayed his country,’ shot back Rod. The look in his eye (I call it the ‘Franco gaze’) dissuaded me from asking why.
    Demetrius, owner of the local chippie, replied to my request for A Greek’s View of Homer that he was too busy trying to reduce the price of cod to even think about cartoon characters. My best bet for a contribution has been Joe Wilson, Captain of the Cromwell Arms Quiz Team. His general knowledge is phenomenal, yet he has had even less formal education than I have. I offered him 25 different topics, including the Flora and Fauna of Lathkill Dale, Monsal Dale and Dovedale.
    Readers of this blog, I told him, would not only be fascinated by an illustrated article on his specialty they would make the dales their next port-of-call. It was the wrong proposal: ‘If I thought I was to blame,’ he said, ‘for one more body trampling over my precious flora, I’d top myself’.
     I ended up with an offer from my 13 year old Benjie to pen a story about his guinea pig, Useless Eustace, that died in mysterious circumstances. I said I thought the RSPCA might object to the grizzly bits, but he refused to alter a word, saying they'd have to cudgel him with the Royal Charter to make him. Betty then subjected him to a 20 minute lecture on Magna Carta. 'Same thing,' responded Benjie. 'A lot of hot air!'
To the rescueI have had no alternative but to delve into the missives of my contributors down the weeks. There’s been much to choose from, some of it sad, like King Harold’s reply to my invitation to take part in the Battle of the Titans.

Dear Ned (was the last letter I received from him)Your letter warning me about rushing in to battle without a Plan B has been duly noted. But after Stamford Bridge I feel we have the wind on our sails. This Norman intruder on sacred English soil will get his come-uppance, never fear. He is a canny fixer but my Housecarls know how to deal with such people. If he tries that trick of pretending to retreat, we  know how to react (though I can’t quite recollect whether I’ve told the lads in so many words).

   At the moment we are easing our feet and consuming a flagon or two of Saxon ale at a village inn on the road to Burwash. I’d be very happy to give a talk on the tactics of war to your Women’s Institute, though as you advise I’ll go easy on the bloodshed.Yours etc.

Well there you go: a potentially star entertainer facing an epic battle yet still with time to consider his humble subjects.  Harold’s footnote almost brought me to tears: ‘All the best for Derby County in the new season!’
I fear we are going to have a few squabbles among the musicians; and Wolfie’s likely to be at the heart of them (though his acceptance of a 25 Euro fee for 30 minutes incidental music, with a night’s conducting thrown was snapped up without a demurring voice from the Committee).
Dear Mr. BaslowI hear on the grapevine that Master Beethoven has promised you his 10th symphony on condition it is performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and free tickets will be made available to him for the Tableau of Womanly Beauty. Considering his present state of health, it is a preposterous offer and is certainly making me think again about being the Master of Musique of your Festival.
   If the Emperor himself has the affrontery to suggest of my latest opera that there are ‘too many notes’ the idea of yet another contribution from Luders the Lugubrious will be more than my ears can take.
   Please write to Master B declining his offer and my own very best wishes for his health; but avoid any mention of your proposal for  us to play together ‘Four Hands Make Light Work’. These days my old friend hits the keyboard with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Yours as always
W.A. Mozart.

Among the heaps of post after my Fuengirola holiday was a rather bristling note from the squire-class gardener who has agreed to re-jig two of Councillor Stokoe’s back meadows formerly serving as an open-plan piggery, more recently ‘discoloured’ as my Betty put it, by rape seed. The folks of Wickerstaff were all for it; and the folks of Fernhaven against it. On the grounds that in Fernhaven at least two of Councillor Stokoe’s election posters were defaced, he used his casting vote to invite the famous landscape gardener CapabilityBrown (not Calamity Brown as I inadvertently called him) to render the rape and make Stokoe Manor the mirror image of Chatsworth, but without the lake, the waterfall, and that ugly horse that greets visitors in the courtyard. I have written to Mr. Brown to apologise and suggested that if he can spare the time could he plan a water feature for our back garden, as a surprise for Betty’s birthday (preferably with literary connotations).
     Talking of posters, I’ve had to shield the committee from the ire of Billy Blake who jumped the gun and produced a poster announcing the wrong dates. As I pointed out to him on the phone, best leave a space for dates and times until the local council gives its assent, we receive confirmation of a royal visit from Prince Charles and advertising space has been booked in Derbyshire Life, The Lady, Hello (they’re desperate for pictures of Helen of Troy) and Camping Today.
    Billy’s illustration also did not meet with the universal approval of the Committee. One member called it ‘weird’ and almost came to blows with Betty who yelled ‘Masterpiece!’ over and over again: ‘anyone but an idiot could see that’. At which Betty in turn was accused of being an idiot. I stepped in to the quarrel with the comment, Billy comes cheap: we can make a bomb out of the sale of his etchings. At which William Blake’s ‘masterpiece’ was given approval on a vote of 5 to 4.
The complainant has resigned from the Committee and posted some bitter comments on Facebook about ‘folks who try to improve themselves and end up nothing but snobs’, referring to our Betty who delivered some equally bitter twitters on people happy with their own ignorance and content to spread it like manure.
Signing offReaders, the travails listed above reminded me of the Prime Minister’s idea of a Big Society. He should come and try it. There’s always somebody out there ready to blame hardworking volunteers: will they take over? Like hell they will. Leave it to Ned is all I hear, in my company or out of it: Good Old Ned. That’s what the editorial team of A Writer’s Notebook must have said as they sloped off to the beach at Broadstairs (or is it Skegness?) with laptops and mountains of notes: Good Old Ned will cope. To be honest, it’s been a pleasure despite my failure to get friends and acquaintances to pen a paragraph or two.

That, in my opinion, is the trouble. 140 characters seems to be more than enough for most people; as for letters who needs them, who writes them anymore? Well I do and I get some unexpected and extraordinary responses. After all, how many committee secretaries can claim to have acceptances from Nebu-chad-nezar, Odysseus’ Misses, Penelope, John Milton, Miguel Cervantes, Albert Einstein, Nurse Nightingale, Leonardo da Vinci, the Sheriff of Nottingham, the Chief of MI5 and Elvis Presley for one event, not to mention the rest?
Well, folks, there are letters to write. The team promises to be back for Blog Number 50. I brought six bottles of Spanish red from Fuengirola. Droppers-in at Yer tis, just down the road from the Cromwell Arms, will be welcome, but if there’s a message on the front door, SILENCE COMMANDED, it means that our Betty is at work on her latest Open University essay or she’s busy on the Internet exchanging messages about Fate and Destiny with Uncle Bill as Benjie calls him.
Thanks for your attention, NED

 

A Writer’s Notebook
No. 48, April 2014
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
 
James Watson
Friends and contributors
 
CRIMEA EDITION/NOT… WHY CAN’T THEY SETTLE IT  ON THE SOCCER FIELD?
 
‘What we must avoid at all costs,’ team supervisor Mr. Boychuk announces, ‘is any sense of…revenge against Russia and the Russians. Sport is all too often used to repay old scores.’
     Team coach Vera Sorokin dares to interrupt. ‘I think my girls understand that, Mr. Boychuk. They will play hard and fair, fair and hard, whoever the opposition is.’
 ‘Thank you, Miss Sorokin. However, it has to be admitted that the Russian squad may prove to be out of our league in terms of skill and experience. We must not resort to tactics that will bring the national side into disrepute. We must prove ourselves.’ He pauses, stares from face to face. ‘And that means we must, if necessary, prove ourselves good losers.’
   This is more than Natasha can stand, as it is for a few others in the team, including the captain, Galina. The voice of a Kaltsov rises above the rest: ‘We don’t intend to lose, Mr. Boychuk. We’re on home territory, and the people of Ukraine are right behind us.’
Sensing their strength in unity, the whole team shout their support, driving Boychuk into an apologetic silence. ‘Of course, naturally…we pray for victory.’…
 
The Russians are big, most of them as tense as the Ukys, and unsmiling.
 ‘If they call you names,’ Vera Sorokin had warned, ‘ignore them. Self-control is everything. Lose your rag and you’ll lose the match.’
The lines break; captains meet at the centre-spot. The referee tosses a coin. We are playing into the wind. Ten minutes into the game and Natasha has done a lot of running but has scarcely added to her first touch of the ball. The Rus are good. Their passing suggests a team that has played together often. For the last two minutes, none of the Ukys has managed to hold on to the ball.
Squad captain Galina is calling: ‘Hold on to it, control it!’ To Natasha, who has strayed well in to her own half, she commands: ‘Stay up!’
In the crowd, Grandma Kaltsov has risen to her feet and is waving her umbrella and fuming as she sees her granddaughter hacked down from behind. ‘Damned Rus, treacherous dogs – they deserve a thrashing, the lot of them!’
As Natasha skids on to her chest, the packed crowd in the Odessa stadium leaps up and down in a war dance of rage: ‘Red card, red card!’
The kick went straight into the back of Natasha’s knee. And here it comes, the sledging, the verbal tactic that seeks to drain away a player’s self-confidence. ‘How’s it feel? – pigtail! Khokhol!’
Natasha gets up, with a helping hand from centre-back Svetlana, who is about to worsen the situation with a swift denunciation of this Rusky in particular and Rus in general, until Natasha pleads, ‘Don’t!’
It’s been a bad enough knock for Vera to call for Valentina the physio to come on to the pitch, but Natasha shakes her head. No need for treatment. She limps a few paces, feels better. It’s agony, but she nods, waves away Valentina.
‘You’re a hero as well as a star, eh?’ comes the same voice.
The referee steps in. ‘One more word from you,’ she warns the Rus defender, ‘and you’ll be back down the tunnel.’
The Russian defender who brought Natasha to ground takes a few paces towards her own goal. Loud enough for those around her to hear, but just out of earshot of the referee, she declaims, ‘Bunch of Nazis!’
It is a chilling accusation because there is no reason in it. Natasha is as curious to know why this young Russian, her own age, in the 21st century, chooses a term of insult so inappropriate; yet employs it with such passion.
There is a skirmish, the attackers and defenders so close together that the ball becomes invisible. One defender falls, one attacker falls. A poor shot, spinning wide of the goal, hits a defender. The Ukraine goalie goes one way, the ball the other, trickling between the posts.
Ukraine nil, Russia one.
Some divine justice! Natasha stares wildly at the heavens. I’m fouled from behind. We’re called Nazis and now fate makes things worse with a sloppy goal.
Sensing the imminent crash of morale, Galina races into the goal, picks the ball out of the net and sprints back to the centre spot. She turns on the team, but stays calm: ‘Don’t bunch, we lost formation there, letting them push us out of midfield. So remember Vera’s game plan.’
The crowd is roaring for the Ukys to get a grip; roaring and cheering, chanting and chorusing. Their Mexican wave out-does the Black Sea in an autumn storm. Their cheers seem to be coming from beyond the ground, from the city; sweeping across the great Steppe, thundering down from the Carpathians, foaming along Ukraine’s mighty rivers.
Stand still, Natasha has told herself, and they’ll get you. Big Mouth wants my scalp. So keep moving: weaving, thrusting, seeking out space. The tactic pays off. Natasha has latched on to a pass from Galina that has split the Russian defence.
This is the moment: it may never return. She has steadied herself. Defenders encircle her on three sides, blocking off a route to goal; so she swivels on one heel, dragging the ball around with her. She steps on it, stops. The defenders lunge, but this is the best back-heel in the history of soccer.
The ball shoots through the legs of the advancing goalie. Natasha is in the air, and the ball is in the net. She flies, she soars, and the team is piling on her in the goalmouth with screams of triumph.
   How did I do it? Easy. Just put it down to sheer genius; and by eating my fruit and veg like a good girl.
There are appeals for off-side and protestations by the Rus when the referee blows for a goal. It’s official: Ukraine 1, Russia 1.
Not a second to lose: emulating her captain, Natasha sprints back with the ball to the centre-spot, plonks it down, challenges the Rus: ‘Bring it on, Comrades!’
With Natasha’s goal, matters at least on this pitch have become equal. It has become a level playing ground between two peoples; Ukraine, historically the perpetual victim, Russia the perpetual oppressor.
Never again!
Corners are where shirts get tugged and torn. Natasha sees the ball hovering above the penalty area. Three bodies leap, including hers, and one arm, in the melee, drags her back so forcefully her shirt sleeve tears at the shoulder. True, the gesture neutralises Natasha. Keeps her on the ground as it was intended to do, but the attention she is getting is so focused that it is too focused. No one has been covering Masha who darts in behind the ruck. It is the sweetest of headers.
This is no miracle, but it is treated as such by the crowd: Ukraine 2, Russia 1.
All at once there is fighting. Masha’s leap has carried her over the shoulders of two defenders, forcing both of them off balance, one to measure her length on the scuffed mud of the goalmouth, the other to twist her knee.
The sight of the ball drifting into the back of the Russian net turns normal, sensible, highly trained athletes into warriors surprised by a night attack and desperate to make up for their negligence.
Arms raised and swinging, hands thrusting, bodies colliding, accompanied by yell and screech, bluster and threat, create such a confusion that it is impossible for the referee or her assistants on the touchlines to figure out who started the war, who decided to escalate it and who is perpetuating it.
Vera Sorokin is bellowing from the manager’s dugout. The manager of the Russian team is also bellowing, first at the referee and then at her players, then at Vera, who bellows back.
It is with relief all round, and not a moment too soon, that the referee separates the combatants. She gives them an ear-stinging rebuke. No one is booked, no one dismissed. But the teams are left in little doubt that if tempers flare up again the result will not be one red card or several but banishment of both teams to the changing-room.
Natasha emerges from the incident with a shiner. Her right eye is already puffing up, and throbbing. She has no idea who tore her shirt. No idea who elbowed her in the eye.
Less than five minutes later, the whistle goes for half time. As she walks off, feeling numb and just slightly groggy, Natasha is joined by Big Mouth, who seems in a jovial mood. ‘Sorry about that.’ She puts a friendly arm around Natasha’s shoulder. ‘Fair game, eh, Tasha?’
At least she remembers my name. Funny old world. Natasha returns the compliment, rests her hand on Big Mouth’s shoulder.  ‘The game’s not perfect,’ she says, ‘but it’s got to be fairer than life – right?’
‘Fairer? I don’t know. But it’s better!’
 
Edited extract from FAIR GAME: THE STEPS OF ODESSA (Spire Publications paperback; and Kindle edition).
 
Editor’s note:
For the second issue in a row we have to apologise for the absence of Ned Baslow’s amazingly popular correspondence. His sojourn in Fuengirola has resulted in an extended stay in order to recruit what he refers to as ‘fandango dancers’ for the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven late summer festival, a perfect complement he believes to the top show, ‘The Spectacles of Don Quixote’.
 
 

A Writer’s Notebook
No. 47, February2014
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
 
James Watson
Friends and contributors
 KIEV EDITION: Not…
Having spent several months researching Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004 in preparation for a teen novel set in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities I felt the pull to put my oar in to what originally looked a simple tale of human rights protest. Then the orange turned to red. Complexity ruled; an elected, albeit authoritarian president was sent packing. Europe and the US dipped in their own oars, pontificating as usual about matters of which they had questionable knowledge. Russia was not amused; nor were Russia-leaning citizens south and east of the capital.
Then we are informed out of the blue that Ukraine is teetering on the abyss of bankruptcy: why has nobody in the European community mentioned this before? It’s all too complex for a blog which will be out of date the moment it is posted. Amazing, though, how the protestors stood the bitter cold all night, and night after night, fought off police and snipers, many dying as they did so. Shades of Occupy?
So in KIEV EDITION – NOT something that did happen and something that didn’t but surely might have…
 
A real-life journalist martyr
Little known in the West and long forgotten is the story of the journalist and outspoken critic of the government of the Ukraine, Georgiy (or Giya) Gongadze, editor of the online newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda. In those days the country was ranked by Reporters Without Borders as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists to pursue their trade. It still is.
    Giya disappeared on 16th September 2000. On 2ndNovember a farmer discovered a headless body on the outskirts of Tarashcha some 80 miles south of Kiev. The corpse was identified as being that of the 31 year-old Gongadze, murdered, many have claimed, with the approval of the then President.
Only in 2008 did the trial of three policeman, Mykola Protasov, Oleksandr Popovich and Valeri Kostenko, reach a verdict. Protasov was jailed for 13 years, Popovitch and Kostenko each for 12 years. The instigators of the crime remained, at the time of writing, unidentified.
 
Kiev: The body in the woods
Early morning, and to the north-west of the city, a man is calling to his dog. Yuri Semko has work to go to as an estate labourer, but every day without fail he walks the dog through the woods near his cottage. ‘Hey, Valeri – come on now.’
Valeri, his son, had been killed in the same week that Yuri’s black Labrador had appeared in his kitchen garden. It was starving, scarcely more than a skeleton on flimsy legs. ‘Strays,’ Yuri had decided, thinking of the kids who had recently walked into his lonely existence, ‘are my speciality.’
 Dogs, cats, birds with broken wings or missing tails, even a wounded fox once, they all seem to have tuned into a message carried on the wind: Try old Semko’s place. He never turns anyone, or anything, away.
And so it was a delight and a relief to him when three children appeared at his front door one afternoon recently, asked him for food and offered to do jobs in return for shelter for the night.
He had taken them in, out of the snow. Beggars. At first he had thought they were one of those gangs of kids that roam the city, stealing, breaking in to places, mugging folks. They’d slept in the loft for the first night. No parents, no friends. They’d run away from some institution. But then, he guessed, these three had been running away all their lives.
‘I’ll have to report it to the authorities. Or I’ll be in trouble.’
The bright one, the leader, called Katiya, had pleaded with him to give them a chance. ‘We can ’elp you round the house, Mister. Olga is ill sometimes, but Dmitri, well, he’s little, but he’s good at some things.’
Yuri had been persuaded. His only son had been called up for the Russian army only weeks before Ukraine had become independent. He’d been sent to the war in Chechnya. On his first day he had been shot dead by a sniper.
So Yuri had felt compassion for the Three Strays, befriended them and felt bitterly about a world that could treat its children so neglectfully.
‘I guess it’s either me saying yes, or you lot being sold into slavery. But if there’s any thieving – you’re out.’
Katya, Dmitri and Olga clean, chop wood, fetch water, help cook meals. In return, Yuri feeds them, shelters them, has bought second-hand clothes and shoes for them from the open-air market on the edge of town. Most importantly, in his view, he has begun to teach the younger ones to read, and Katiya to write.
‘If you read, you learn. If you learn, you advance. No one can make slaves of you.’
Yuri is standing now in the woods, calling once more for Valeri; and feeling upset and badly let-down. ‘Young wasters,’ he is saying to the trees. ‘Them skipping off like that, without a word. At least they didn’t steal anything, not that I’ve anything worth stealing. We were making out. Smart kids. Good company.’ He shakes his head. Melted snow is still dropping from the trees.
He had come home from work last night, in the dusk as usual. The fire had been lit but had gone out. The table was laid, but of the Strays there was no sign. That leaves just the two of us again, Valeri.
‘Come on, Boy! Come on!’
Whatever explanation Yuri has given himself for his young companions’ disappearance is wrong: it isn’t that he didn’t feed them enough; or that they were unhappy bunked down beside the fire; or that he bored them sick with his tales of the past. They had gone because they had been witnesses to an event. They had been chased away, and the explanation, at least in part, is about to be made clear to him.
‘Valeri, come on away from there.’ The dog’s barking is enough to wake the dead. Or rather, not enough.  Yuri steps off the narrow path through the trees. He notices the buds. How early they are this year. All the snow has melted, but snowdrops are sprinkled everywhere; and among them, here and there, are the first glowing heads of crocus.
At this point the woodland thickens. There are enough fallen branches to keep Yuri’s fire cheerful through any winter. He stops. Valeri races to him, then about-turns, charges back into a thicket of brushwood. ‘What’ve you got there, then – rabbit?’
There used to be wolves in these woods.
Yuri pulls back the bush, steps into undergrowth, and halts. ‘Oh my God!’ He reaches forward, pulls away loose branches from a naked corpse. ‘No!’ He wrenches away his gaze, shuts his eyes, for a moment never wishes to open them again: the body lying before him, its limbs tangled like the undergrowth, is headless.
Yuri steps back, jamming his hands to his face, almost trips over the branches he has removed. He opens his eyes. He wants it all to have been a mad vision.
Valeri seems to share the trauma of this discovery. He has gone silent, pants, mouth open, staring at his master.
In the early light, the skin of the male corpse resembles the flesh of mushroom, and like mushrooms it is flecked with streaks of earth.
Yuri gags, turns, clutches a tree for balance. Horrified at the sight at his feet, he retches, though only saliva gushes from his lips. His hand beats his forehead. He backs away, hears the pounding of his breath, sees it rise through the cold morning air.
Valeri watches his master, seeks a signal to retreat, to go on with the walk; perhaps continue as if nothing had happened, as if nothing this morning were different from every morning. He begins to bark.
 ‘Shsh, shsh, Valeri.’ Yuri gazes about him, nods. ‘Dumped.’ He gathers together his nerves. It won’t bite. He is standing over the corpse, reaches down, then decisively rolls the body over on to its chest. The victim’s wrists are tied behind his back with cord.
‘An execution. Here I was thinking the bad old days were over.’
What’s for sure, this body was not here yesterday morning; otherwise Valeri, on their usual walk through the woods, would have found it.
But what to do now? Of course, in a civilised country, you call the police.
 Yuri hesitates, for his first thought is – they could arrest me for this. I’m the only witness to my innocence. What’s it to them if they accuse me of murder, bang me up, execute me, if they end up with a clean sheet; crime solved?
Got to think about all this. Not got to rush. Keep a cool head, for I’m in trouble, no question. Which is worse, though, reporting it or not reporting it? Yuri steps out from the corpse’s brushwood grave. He tidies up the site so that from the path nothing can be seen.
He pauses, sorry for the dead man, racked by the callousness of his execution. ‘Poor sod, whoever he is, whatever he’d done, there’s no way he could have deserved such a dying!’
 Extract from Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa(Spire Publishing and Kindle e-reader).
 Regretfully the Ned Baslow correspondence has been held over for another month, but readers can follow Ned’s campaign to put the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Grand Festival of the Arts on to the world map of cultural excellence in previous editions the WRITER’S NOTEBOOK. Here are a few gems from Ned’s tireless pen: Florence Nightingale (December 2013), Inspector Morse (November), Marcel Marceaux (October), Vincent v G (September), Agamemnon(May), King Harold (April) and Capability Brown (March).
  THANKS ALL!
 

A Writer’s Notebook
No. 46, January 2014
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
 
James Watson
Friends and contributors
 
CONTENTS
Editorial: Bravissima, PJ!
Guantanamo: The Banning of books
Chile: The Burning of Books
A brace of haikus
 
Bravissima, PJ!
Regular listeners to BBC Radio 4’s morning news programme, Today, might well have thought they had been transported to a  different planet during January 2014 as the programme had been handed over to a new editor-of-the-day.
There’s nothing new about these occasional forays into the semblance of broadcasting independence. Usually the guest editor’s take so resembles the usual day to day content and approach that one fails to notice the difference.
But not with singer/composer P.J. Harvey’s editorship. As a measure of her innovative and utterly surprising stint, the Daily Mail’s outraged response was praise enough for something welcomely different.
Naturally the Mail spotted where P.J. was coming from, wafting in on clouds of double-dyed left wing prejudice. Forgotten, predictably, was the editorship granted to the new CEO of Barclay’s bank who took care to permit a flicker of blame for past banking  practices before proceeding to to inform listeners that the way forward was a garden of roses: pure propaganda reflecting Today’s own daily cow-towing to the world of big business.
The producers who opted for P.J. Harvey probably didn’t have the slightest notion of what they were letting themselves in for. A singer? Good idea. Educated, too; with a touch of the intellect in her songs.
Suddenly the Radio 4 airwaves were bristling with the radical, subversive comments of speakers who, in the normal course of programming, would not be allowed within a mile of the microphone; and that included the better-known: John Pilger, scourge of Left as well as Right, author of Hidden Agendas? Were we crazy?
 P.J. – your programme was like emerging from the ‘same-old’ and breathing in the fresh air of unmediated truth; for a few moments, dramatically illustrating the difference between what should be said about issues and what is permitted to be said. Alas, I doubt whether the editor’s chair will be waiting for you in the foreseeable future. Thanks for the memory!
 
THE BANNING OF THE BOOKS…
A recent edition of The Guardian noted that not a lot of books are available for prisoners in the cells of Guantanamo Bay. Those banned seem as inexplicable as most codes of censorship allow. Take four: Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots, Cinderella and The Merchant of Venice. Jack has aspirations: he kills an evil giant: could prisoners see something of Uncle Sam in this tale? Puss’s ambitions are brought about by his killing rats and mice. Sounds like pure terrorism. Obviously it’s a No to Puss; and, despite the Merchant being by the Bard, it does smack of anti-Semitism: best not to play in the hands of suspected Islamist extremists.
No need to guess, however, that Kafka’s The Trial gets the thumbs down, or Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, especially in the light of what happened to Bradley Manning and what awaits Edward Snowden if he ever sets foot again in the Land of the Free.
Some contemporary authors will be pleased and relieved that their work has been under the cosh. John Pilger’s Hidden Agenda really asks for the blue pencil as does, predictably, Lord Thomas Bingham’s The Rule of Law. Breath again George Galloway and Clare Short: you’re banned.
Which seems to leave us with an embarrassed Jeremy Paxman: his The English is permitted, though the same charity is not extended to The New Dinkum Aussie Dictionary…
Finally it is a mystery whether Anna Perera’s outstanding teen novel Guantanamo Boy (Penguin) is accessible, except under the counter, to young American readers. Any stories about how it has fared in the US?
 
…AND THE BURNING OF THE BOOKS
Forty years ago in September 1973. Democracy was overthrown in Chile. A period of arrests, mass shootings, torture and terror began under the generals, the most prominent of whom was General Pinochet. Forty years later, into the second term of President Obama, the promise to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has not been kept. Further, as this blog’s editorial suggests, the American state is as scared of the content of books as the Generals were.
 
In this short extract from teen novel TALKING IN WHISPERS, Andres, hunted by Security, cannot resist returning to the house of his popular ballad-singer father Juan who has been arrested and taken to the House of Laughter.
 
As he reached the Via Rivadivia, Andres stepped back in shock. In his mind’s eyes he had expected to see the street as he remembered it – friendly and quiet, whitewashed, with the occasional balcony adorned with baskets of flowers; a sleepy street with blue-grey cobbles and trees casting tranquil shadows.
Instead, he witnessed a street under siege. Directly in front of him were a jeep and a military van. Beyond, in the centre of the street, a raging bonfire. He glanced up and saw blankets spread over window-sills like signal flags. There were at least ten soldiers on guard. Others were moving from one house to the next. So far there were no blankets hanging from the windows of Juan Larreta’s house.
Our turn, I think. A crowd had gathered in the street and Andres had no difficulty concealing himself.
Weak sunshine had succeeded the rain, kindling steam from the pavements into a visual echo of smoke from the bonfire. Juan’s bedroom window was thrown open. A second later – out came the books, the whole of Juan Larreta’s library, and Andres’ collection too, no doubt, hurtling through the sky, a rainstorm of knowledge, of ideas, of songs and poetry; flittering, soaring, smacking the pavement, sometimes shedding pages, sometimes falling as neatly as if placed there by a loving reader.
And the books were shovelled towards the bonfire.
Andres spied a few titles as they ploughed into one another on the ground: The Eagle and the Serpent, War and Peace, Neruda’s poems, a biography of Mozart, the story of the Beatles, the drawings of William Blake, Film Directors of Chile, a life of Bolivar and, to Andres’ momentary amusement, momentary grief – Alice in Wonderland, given him by his mother years and years ago.
Andres wanted to laugh. So the Junta is even afraid of Alice in Wonderland. One day I’ll write a song about this: ‘The Junta through the Looking Glass’. Yet he did not laugh. The scene before him of vicious and insane destruction was no laughing matter.
All Juan’s songs in manuscripts were being burned.
The officer supervising the book-burning called to the crowd above the crackle of the bonfire. ‘This, by order of the Junta, the property of all enemies of the state will be seized and destroyed.’
He paused for his words to sink in to the heads of his listeners. He watched the crowd whose eyes remained fixed upon the continuing avalanche of books, upon the flames, upon the pages curling, turning black, dissolving.
‘The entertainer Juan Larreta was a traitor – to the nation, to the Holy Church and to the name of decency. The Interior Ministry has banned the publication of his work and the performance of his songs.’
The officer waited, as though half-expecting a backlash of protest. Like the others, Andres silenced his opinion and saved his skin. Like the others, he felt cowed, ashamed, almost unclean.
He had listened to lies and he had not responded. He had not even whispered a protest.
The silence pleased the officer. He chose to interpret it as assent. Perhaps for a moment, in his heart, he had expected the crowd to defy him. Perhaps also in his heart he knew the lies he spoke. Yet he had won. He had declared injustice to be acceptable, and the crowd had let him get away with it.
Except, that is, for an old man at the rear of the crowd. He cried out, lonely, shrill, but courageous: ‘Larreta was a good man. He spoke to the people’s hearts.’
The old man’s words were as petrol to the flames. ‘Step forward – that man, step forward!’
The crowd was reluctant to open up for the old man. Andres recognised him. An Indian, who worked at the bakery down the road. Juan had sung at his grand-daughter’s wedding.
He stood forward, bare-headed, in a suit that had grown old with him. He was bundled, without protest, without words, into the army van.
The officer delayed returning his pistol to its holster. He wagged it in the face of the crowd. ‘Any more heroes?’
 
A brace of haikus
 
   EARLY MORNING WALK HAIKU
            A flotilla of slugs
            Heads for the allotments
            Intent on mayhem.
 
 
            HAIKU FOR TODAY
              Eleven soup kitchens
              In Coventry alone;
              Tory Britain now.
 
Our star correspondent Ned Baslow is on holiday with his wife Bette, son Benjie, twin girls Beatrice and Barbara and Grandad Barnie in Benidorm.  Hurry back, Ned! We have an email from Elvis that needs a swift reply.
 
Kindle editions (4)
JUSTICE OF THE DAGGER
The machines are yellow like the morning sun.
At first Muyu’s people thought them gods. They glowed, they glistened, they roared. No forest ears had ever heard such sounds. Not even the gunfire of the soldiers from the Distant Masters could match them…
How can young Muyu and his beautiful friend Lyana stop the hated soldiers and the timber companies from destroying the forests?
 Their friend ‘Greenboots’, whose book about their people’s plight has focused the eyes of the world on East Timor, now has a price on his head and they are on the run together, in a desperate bid to outwit Captain Selim, the Butcher in Shades…
 
‘Watson’s pedigree as a writer of political novels for young adults is impeccable…This is a powerful and intelligent book which uses its chosen genre both to grip and incite its teenage audience.’ Books for Keeps [5-star rating].
 
This was a Waterstone’s Book of the Month.
 
See more at http://tinyurl.com/ka7gbnd
 
 As ever, comments and contributions are welcome. Please email to Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk
Thanks for reading this!
 
 

A Writer’s Notebook
No. 46, January 2014
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
  James Watson
Friends and contributors CONTENTS
Editorial: Bravissima, PJ!
Guantanamo: The Banning of books
Chile: The Burning of Books
A brace of haikus
Bravissima, PJ!
Regular listeners to BBC Radio 4’s morning news programme, Today, might well have thought they had been transported to a  different planet during January 2014 as the programme had been handed over to a new editor-of-the-day.
There’s nothing new about these occasional forays into the semblance of broadcasting independence. Usually the guest editor’s take so resembles the usual day to day content and approach that one fails to notice the difference.
But not with singer/composer P.J. Harvey’s editorship. As a measure of her innovative and utterly surprising stint, the Daily Mail’s outraged response was praise enough for something welcomely different.
Naturally the Mail spotted where P.J. was coming from, wafting in on clouds of double-dyed left wing prejudice. Forgotten, predictably, was the editorship granted to the new CEO of Barclay’s bank who took care to permit a flicker of blame for past banking  practices before proceeding to to inform listeners that the way forward was a garden of roses: pure propaganda reflecting Today’s own daily cow-towing to the world of big business.
The producers who opted for P.J. Harvey probably didn’t have the slightest notion of what they were letting themselves in for. A singer? Good idea. Educated, too; with a touch of the intellect in her songs.
Suddenly the Radio 4 airwaves were bristling with the radical, subversive comments of speakers who, in the normal course of programming, would not be allowed within a mile of the microphone; and that included the better-known: John Pilger, scourge of Left as well as Right, author of Hidden Agendas? Were we crazy?
 P.J. – your programme was like emerging from the ‘same-old’ and breathing in the fresh air of unmediated truth; for a few moments, dramatically illustrating the difference between what should be said about issues and what is permitted to be said. Alas, I doubt whether the editor’s chair will be waiting for you in the foreseeable future. Thanks for the memory!
THE BANNING OF BOOKS...
A recent edition of The Guardian noted that not a lot of books are available for prisoners in the cells of Guantanamo Bay. Those banned seem as inexplicable as most codes of censorship allow. Take four: Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots, Cinderella and The Merchant of Venice. Jack has aspirations: he kills an evil giant: could prisoners see something of Uncle Sam in this tale? Puss’s ambitions are brought about by his killing rats and mice. Sounds like pure terrorism. Obviously it’s a No to Puss; and, despite the Merchant being by the Bard, it does smack of anti-Semitism: best not to play in the hands of suspected Islamist extremists.
No need to guess, however, that Kafka’s The Trial gets the thumbs down, or Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, especially in the light of what happened to Bradley Manning and what awaits Edward Snowden if he ever sets foot again in the Land of the Free.
Some contemporary authors will be pleased and relieved that their work has been under the cosh. John Pilger’s Hidden Agenda really asks for the blue pencil as does, predictably, Lord Thomas Bingham’s The Rule of Law. Breath again George Galloway and Clare Short: you’re banned.
Which seems to leave us with an embarrassed Jeremy Paxman: his The English is permitted, though the same charity is not extended to The New Dinkum Aussie Dictionary…
Finally it is a mystery whether Anna Perera’s outstanding teen novel Guantanamo Boy (Penguin) is accessible, except under the counter, to young American readers. Any stories about how it has fared in the US?
 ...AND THE BURNING OF BOOKSForty years ago in September 1973. Democracy was overthrown in Chile. A period of arrests, mass shootings, torture and terror began under the generals, the most prominent of whom was General Pinochet. Forty years later, into the second term of President Obama, the promise to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has not been kept. Further, as this blog’s editorial suggests, the American state is as scared of the content of books as the Generals were.
 In this short extract from teen novel TALKING IN WHISPERS, Andres, hunted by Security, cannot resist returning to the house of his popular ballad-singer father Juan who has been arrested and taken to the House of Laughter.
 As he reached the Via Rivadivia, Andres stepped back in shock. In his mind’s eyes he had expected to see the street as he remembered it – friendly and quiet, whitewashed, with the occasional balcony adorned with baskets of flowers; a sleepy street with blue-grey cobbles and trees casting tranquil shadows.
Instead, he witnessed a street under siege. Directly in front of him were a jeep and a military van. Beyond, in the centre of the street, a raging bonfire. He glanced up and saw blankets spread over window-sills like signal flags. There were at least ten soldiers on guard. Others were moving from one house to the next. So far there were no blankets hanging from the windows of Juan Larreta’s house.
Our turn, I think. A crowd had gathered in the street and Andres had no difficulty concealing himself.
Weak sunshine had succeeded the rain, kindling steam from the pavements into a visual echo of smoke from the bonfire. Juan’s bedroom window was thrown open. A second later – out came the books, the whole of Juan Larreta’s library, and Andres’ collection too, no doubt, hurtling through the sky, a rainstorm of knowledge, of ideas, of songs and poetry; flittering, soaring, smacking the pavement, sometimes shedding pages, sometimes falling as neatly as if placed there by a loving reader.
And the books were shovelled towards the bonfire.
Andres spied a few titles as they ploughed into one another on the ground: The Eagle and the Serpent, War and Peace, Neruda’s poems, a biography of Mozart, the story of the Beatles, the drawings of William Blake, Film Directors of Chile, a life of Bolivar and, to Andres’ momentary amusement, momentary grief – Alice in Wonderland, given him by his mother years and years ago.
Andres wanted to laugh. So the Junta is even afraid of Alice in Wonderland. One day I’ll write a song about this: ‘The Junta through the Looking Glass’. Yet he did not laugh. The scene before him of vicious and insane destruction was no laughing matter.
All Juan’s songs in manuscripts were being burned.
The officer supervising the book-burning called to the crowd above the crackle of the bonfire. ‘This, by order of the Junta, the property of all enemies of the state will be seized and destroyed.’
He paused for his words to sink in to the heads of his listeners. He watched the crowd whose eyes remained fixed upon the continuing avalanche of books, upon the flames, upon the pages curling, turning black, dissolving.
‘The entertainer Juan Larreta was a traitor – to the nation, to the Holy Church and to the name of decency. The Interior Ministry has banned the publication of his work and the performance of his songs.’
The officer waited, as though half-expecting a backlash of protest. Like the others, Andres silenced his opinion and saved his skin. Like the others, he felt cowed, ashamed, almost unclean.
He had listened to lies and he had not responded. He had not even whispered a protest.
The silence pleased the officer. He chose to interpret it as assent. Perhaps for a moment, in his heart, he had expected the crowd to defy him. Perhaps also in his heart he knew the lies he spoke. Yet he had won. He had declared injustice to be acceptable, and the crowd had let him get away with it.
Except, that is, for an old man at the rear of the crowd. He cried out, lonely, shrill, but courageous: ‘Larreta was a good man. He spoke to the people’s hearts.’
The old man’s words were as petrol to the flames. ‘Step forward – that man, step forward!’
The crowd was reluctant to open up for the old man. Andres recognised him. An Indian, who worked at the bakery down the road. Juan had sung at his grand-daughter’s wedding.
He stood forward, bare-headed, in a suit that had grown old with him. He was bundled, without protest, without words, into the army van.
The officer delayed returning his pistol to its holster. He wagged it in the face of the crowd. ‘Any more heroes?’


A brace of haikus
    EARLY MORNING WALK HAIKU
            A flotilla of slugs
            Heads for the allotments
            Intent on mayhem.
             HAIKU FOR TODAY
              Eleven soup kitchens
              In Coventry alone;
              Tory Britain now.
 
Our star correspondent Ned Baslow is on holiday with his wife Bette, son Benjie, twin girls Beatrice and Barbara and Grandad Barnie in Benidorm.  Hurry back, Ned! We have an email from Elvis that needs a swift reply.
KINDLE EDITIONS (4) Justice of the Dagger
 The machines are yellow like the morning sun.
At first Muyu’s people thought them gods. They glowed, they glistened, they roared. No forest ears had ever heard such sounds. Not even the gunfire of the soldiers from the Distant Masters could match them…
How can young Muyu and his beautiful friend Lyana stop the hated soldiers and the timber companies from destroying the forests?
 Their friend ‘Greenboots’, whose book about their people’s plight has focused the eyes of the world on East Timor, now has a price on his head and they are on the run together, in a desperate bid to outwit Captain Selim, the Butcher in Shades…
 ‘Watson’s pedigree as a writer of political novels for young adults is impeccable…This is a powerful and intelligent book which uses its chosen genre both to grip and incite its teenage audience.’ Books for Keeps [5-star rating].
 This was a Waterstone’s Book of the Month.
 See more at http://tinyurl.com/ka7gbnd


  As ever, comments and contributions are welcome. Please email to Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk
Thanks for reading this!
PS: System said No to photos this month!
 
 
 

A Writer’s Notebook
No. 45, December 2013
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
James Watson Friends and contributors

CONTENTSNotes in passing: The Birthright of the Briton
Review: An Imitation of Life
Poems of place (21): The rows of icon
Ned to Nurse Nightingale

THE BIRTHRIGHT OF THE BRITON
Number 45 on ‘The 45’
A timely moment to praise a pioneer of press freedom
In Douglas Adams' radio and subsequent TV series The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy the meaning of life turned out to be – 42. If we were to look for a similar answer to the question, when did freedom of speech truly make its mark on British shores, we might offer the answer – 45, and the date when John Wilkes (1727-97) brought out the first edition of his radical paper The North Briton. In the first editorial Wilkes wrote, 'The liberty of the press is the birthright of the BRITON, and is justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country'.
Issue No.45 attacked European peace terms then being discussed by the government of the day. Wilkes was an MP, but as editor of what the general warrant called 'a seditious and treasonable paper' he forfeited his right of parliamentary immunity, for this did not cover 'the publication of a libel, being a breach of the peace'.
As was to happen so often in the next century, and the one after that, government acted as though surrounded by warriors intent on overthrowing them and the system they represented. Wilkes was arrested and sent to the Tower of London.
What was interesting in Wilkes' case was the degree of popular support he had in his struggle for freedom of speech, not the least from the so-called under-classes or, as the writer and parliamentarian Edmund Burke later termed them in his Reflections on the French Revolution (1792), 'the swinish multitude'.
Wilkes' plea for liberty was for all, not just the privileged and the educated:
My lords, the liberty of all peers and gentlemen and, what touches me more sensibly, that of all the middling and inferior set of people, who stand in most need of protection, is in my case this day to be finally decided upon a question of suchimportance as to determine at once whether English Liberty shall be a reality or a shadow.         
At the first court hearing in Westminster Hall a huge audience composed of supporters from the City cheered Wilkes to the rafters when he announced that the liberty of an Englishman 'should not be sported away with impunity'. As he left the court, the air rang with the call, 'Liberty, Liberty, Wilkes for ever!'

A public burningThe government shifted its ground. A proof copy of part of an Essay on Women by Wilkes was obtained and judged by the House of Lords a 'most scandalous, obscene and impious libel'. Wilkes was in the dock now for two publications. Following a Commons vote of 273 to 111, No.45 was condemned to be publicly burnt by the official hangman at Royal Exchange.

It was a bitter December day, just right for a bonfire of 'false, scandalous and seditious libel'. As the sheriffs arrived at Cornhill a vast crowd of the 'middling and inferior' blocked the way. The fire party turned on its heels and the crowd – so the story goes – rescued the North Briton from destruction by urinating on the flames.
Such were the attempts by government to destroy Wilkes that he went into exile. The Annual Register wrote of the 'ruin of that unfortunate man'; a little prematurely because Wilkes returned to London in 1768 and was hero of the capital. He was returned as MP for Middlesex.
 Light you your windowsThere followed two days of joyous celebration which included the chalking of 'No.45' on every door from Temple Bar to Hyde Park Corner and a demand for those who supported Wilkes and his cause to light up their windows at night in celebration. The Austrian ambassador was dragged from his coach and had 'No.45' chalked on the soles of his boots.

Heady days! There was, of course, much smashing of windows. In terror at what was happening when a huge assembly waited to greet Wilkes in St. George's Fields, the government ordered the presence of troops. Several volleys were fired, leaving eleven dead.
The story of Wilkes suggests a more complicated popular response than merely that of calling for Liberty. Wilkes himself was prone to journalistic exaggeration. 'English liberties' were as much in his head – he was from a wealthy and privileged family – as identifiable in the real world, and much of the tenor of his support was characterised by a harsh, chauvinist nationalism: after all, No.45 was attacking a peace initiative rather than urging peace not war.
One of the dragon’s teethJust the same, Wilkes deserves his place in the pantheon of those British writers (such as Thomas Paine, William Cobbett and Richard Carlile) who risked much to declare freedom of expression a human right. He was a worthy successor to the poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1606-74) who had penned the most famous argument in English for the liberty of speech and publication. In his Areopagitica (1664), Milton wrote of books and their significance in words that have resonated down the centuries:

I know they are lively, and vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost to kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.
Wilkes and the generation of editors and writers who followed him took Milton's words as their creed. The issue which Milton raised, which Wilkes and others fought for, is of course as alive in the 21st century as it was then: censorship is in the air we breath. Governments are as scared of exposure as ever.
After Leveson, we are witness to the freedom of the British press being placed under the interdict of a royal charter, a move not greeted by street protests but with public complacency, yet a blow to liberty of expression that would have had Wilkes roaring his protest, not sparing his tabloid vitriol, and railing at privilege, secrecy and a raft of censorial legislation; but not, readers, censorship by royal charter.
An extract from Media History: From Gutenberg to the Digital Age, to be published as a Kindle Reader in 2014.
REVIEW: A DREAM OF MONSTERS Issues 42 and 43 carried extracts from Laura’s novel, reviewed below.

Laura Solomon’s Imitation of Life(Solidus, 2009) is a very singular novel. Its central protagonist, Celia Doom, arrives in the world a grotesque. Delivered in a banana box, she falls into the category of ‘unmentionable things’ with one black eye and one white; her teeth are fangs and her craving is for insects, butterflies, spiders and moths, and for Fanta in gallons. At the age of three she is five feet in height; at six she stands 6’3” and weights 150 kilos.
For those around Celia, destruction and death are commonplace; even the locality of Provencia suffers devastation on her watch. Befriended by Jacob who wreaks havoc with his chemistry set, she learns the art of explosions. Molotov cocktails become their plaything; what they blow up (including Celia’s adoptive parents, Lettie and Barry) they film on super 8. ‘This one’s for you, Celia,’ says Jacob as he blows himself up.
The event that puts Celia on a meaningful track is the gift of a camera from her Uncle Ed – ‘the instrument I would cling to for the rest of my days’. Ed we eventually discover is her real father; a conjurer of remarkable powers (of appearance and disappearance) and worrying proclivities.
Celia proves herself a photographer of vision, focusing on the everyday, and a career develops until those that market her work exploit it, and her, to the point when they use a rival, a stripper, Lucinda Fortune, whose photos are so uncannily reminiscent of Celia’s that both images and careers shape themselves into double-focus; until, that is, Lucinda removes her dark glasses – and reveals one black eye and one white. Welcome to Celia’s Mum.
Celia confesses to have lived a ‘muddle old stew of a life’. Her talents as a photographer are duly exploited by relatives and ‘carers’. Arty pampers her with Fanta and bags of bugs at the same making a good living for himself out of her work. Then there’s George, her critical friend, selecting her photos for exhibition: ‘Where’s the sense of flow? Where’s the continuity?’ Such questions the author takes on board arguably as comments on the novel itself, and it’s true that at times the switching, in a scenario teeming with characters, most of them eccentric and bordering on the grotesque, is often abrupt and momentarily confusing.
It is a tale, then of the unexpected, the core of it treating the reader to an account of the life, talents and exploitation by others of a photographer, eventually to the point when we get used to, and momentarily forget, the physical grotesqueness of our heroine.
Imitation of Life treats us to a galaxy of originals, such as Celia’s two grannies, united by mutual loathing, Uncle Ed, careless with snakes in the company of kids, not averse to setting himself on fire but who invites his own demise by entering a glass house containing 300,000 bees, applauding himself as he dies.
It’s a story teeming with eccentrics, though its message is not easy to locate. Perhaps Ed sums it all up in his final letter to his daughter Celia: ‘Blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.’ It’s a rumbustious text and on film the novel would take off as a piece of surreal effects that might shock as it surprises.
The writerly talent demonstrated in this novel is impressive, prompting the reader to wish to reach beyond the narrative to the author herself, the creator of a macabre scenario that walks the edge between comedy and tragedy, defying a commitment to either. The critical question might be – what’s next?H.C.

 Poems of place (21)
                                          THE ROWS OF ICON
                               You can walk the rows of icon.                               Witness the changeless centuries:
                                Not a sliver of evolution, except
                               An arresting detail, a tentative risk
                               Withheld; always solemn, pursed lipped.

                               The saints George and Mamas                               Awkwardly perched on horse and lion,
                               Close down all narratives but one.

                               After marvelling at occasional line and colour,                               An eye or a hand well-wrought
                               And jewel-fresh in dry Cyprus air,
                               The mind cries out for sensations of another sort,
                               A return of greater gods and better tales.

                                With respect it has to be admitted                               The sombre story of Christ crucified
                               Never matched the wild absurdities of Olympus.

 Dear Nurse Nightingale Pardon me, Madam, for rushing straight in to things, without even a by-your-leave, but we are in considerable trouble; and I thought, as I was at one time a near neighbour of yours, albeit separated by a good three miles as the crow flies, I would appeal to you; as it were, throw myself on your mercy.

The situation is thus: arrangements are being made for the most notable event in the history of the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Pantomime and Light Opera Society – but virtually at the last minute, the St. John’s Ambulance service in these parts have only discovered a prior arrangement with the Lower Beasley (in my frustration I might be tempted to say ‘Beastley’) Gymkhana which has been switched from June to July on account of a variation of swine flu among the horses.
The local constabulary have informed us – no medicals, no Miguel Cervantes! In short, it is the hope of our committee, and of our chairman, Councillor Gilbert Stokoe, whom we affectionately refer to as Lord Gilbert, that the Heroine of Scutari will come to our aid; and such is your reputation for getting things done in the teeth of prejudice, inertia, downright ignorance of the importance of cleanliness, using swabs only once and generally being antipathetic to swarms of flies and other undesirables, that we feel you will be pleased once more to be the darling of all that is wholesome in the life of the nation.
 The committee can assure you that you and your team of ministering angels will encounter none of the horrors that greeted you during the Boer War. On the contrary, we are hoping that there will be little for you to do other than to look pretty in your blue costumes (Mrs. Stokoe is assembling these at this very moment).
Usually our shows pass without incident or injury, though my boy Benjie fell through a poorly erected marquee at the Annual Flower, Vegetable and Livestock Show, quite without intention destroying Lord Gilbert’s prize exhibit of Icelandic Nasturtiums. (He was, nevertheless, presented with the first prize in compensation, Lord Gilbert that is, not our Benjie – who, you will I know be pleased to learn, sustained only a bruised elbow and a telling off from his Mum).
We are fully aware of how busy you must be lobbying parliament for a decent health service, but confident that you, the Soldiers’ Sweetheart, will not only receive a warm welcome from the crowds that will be coming to Wickerstaff from far and near. Now that we have buried the hatchet with the Russians, we hope a few who have settled in the area will take time out from property speculation and even bring along their ballylayakers to serenade early arrivals.
 In fact, the only worry we have with regard to possible injuries concerns how the Russians, the Poles, the Bulgarians, the Romanians and the Geordies will get on with each other. With regard to this, we are still in two minds whether to go ahead with the five-a-side soccer tournament which ended up last year with a set-to the like of which hasn’t been seen in these parts since Peterloo.
 Dr. Ivan Arbuthnot, a committee member, and incidentally my wife Betty’s tutor – she is at present studying for an Open University degree – believes that your presence, Miss Nightingale, will bring about peace and harmony. Dr. Arbuthnot, by the way, is an expert in 18thand 19th century corantos and chapbooks, but he has also written a slim volume entitled ‘Why The Invasion of Iraq Was The Stupidest Action in British History Since The Charge of the Light Brigade’. We plan to sell this, as it were, ‘under the counter’ in order not to upset certain arms manufacturers who have second homes in the vicinity and who recently generously contributed to the parish church roof fund.
 Madam, we are fully aware that the challenge we are offering, which carries no remuneration except for the satisfaction of doing a good, Scutari-style job of work, means your coming briefly out of well-earned retirement. We are confident, however, that you might regard as ample compensation the fact that none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is likely to write the incidental music and that the show’s scenery will be the work of Mr. Billy Blake, who has promised not to read any of his Proverbs from Hell in public.
Oh, I had almost forgotten: our musical play which features Lord Gilbert as Don Quixote and your humble servant as Sancho Panzer (my Betty was planning to audition for the part of the fair Dulcy Naya, only for it to be awarded to our next door neighbour and Lord Gilbert’s half-cousin, Jill), will be followed by The Epic Battle of the Titans, The Greeks versus the Anglo Saxons, Robin Hood and his Merry Men doing the honours for the Saxons (along with King Harold if he can make it).
We have positively banned bloodshed, but once these warriors get the scent of battle in their nostrils you cannot be sure what excesses may scupper their good resolve.
As you will see, Nurse Nightingale, we have every need of your good services. Refreshments for the ‘workers’ are being provided at her personal expense by Lord Gilbert’s wife who also auditioning for Dulcy Naya (though in confidence I confess that not only is she too old for the part, but too round). Ideally, we’d have cast Helen of Troy for the part but since the shinanegins over the Wooden Horse and that, her husband doesn’t let her out at nights, and we’ve only got the village hall for rehearsals between seven and nine.
 Mind you, with reference to Mrs. Gilbert, there’s nobody in Wickerstaff, or in adjoining villages, who can make scones, rock cakes, plate custards or Chorley cakes like Beryl. In fact, a display of her specials would, I have no doubt, have stopped your Lord Raglan in his tracks before he led the poor Brits into the jaws of death and glory.
Please write to the above address as a matter of urgency. Without your assistance in this matter, The Charge of the Light Brigade will be nothing in comparison to the cancellation of what Joe, the captain of our pub team, has called ‘the biggest thing in Wickerstaff since sliced bread’.Yours etc.Ned Baslow
Hon.Sec.

PS: My Grandad Barney used to rent a house just outside Crich, home of the Tramway Museum, which is just up the road from your stately manse. He often used to say, ‘Why don’t we drop in at Florence’s place for a cuppa tea?’ But we never did. I think he was joking.
 Happy Christmas!
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A Writer’s Notebook
No. 44, November 2013
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
  James Watson Friends and contributors

Contents Notes in passing: double-click on Klee
Feedback: what's in a title?
Poems of place (20) Alien presence, Gunwalloe
Ned to Inspector MorseKindle editions (3) Ticket to Prague

 NOTES IN PASSING: Double-click on Klee
Always thought that Paul Klee was best sampled in small doses; but not a bit of it. The show at Tate Modern stokes up an appetite for Klee in plenty. Some major exhibitions of artists have a stretching effect, quality and inventiveness flag; though it could also be eye-wearout on the part of visitors; that and the crowds.
  Klee sustains interest despite the fact that his work, in the main, is small-scale. One could run off with most of his works tucked under the arm, and the temptation offered by so many of them, like the 10”x 5” Translucancies: Orange, Blue,a tiny poem of colour composition, tempts one to furtively check the CCTV cameras. The artist wrote about his art, taught it (at the Bauhaus) and was a ceaseless experimenter. This exhibition focuses on his work from 1913 to his death in 1940.
Boosted by Blue RiderKlee’s confidence as an artist was contributed to by the other artists he met, in particular the Blue Rider group which included Kandinsky, Marc and Macke, the latter two killed during World War 1. Klee too was called up, but someone with a vision of his future had him employed as a clerk.
    We are all the beneficiaries of that decision. Klee was also lucky in those who admired and wrote about him. In his book Flight Out of Time published in 1917, Hugo Ball wrote that Klee in ‘an age of the colossus…falls in love with a green leaf, a star, a butterfly’s wing.’ Louis Arragon commended his ‘lightness, grace, spirit, charm and finesse’, while Jankel Adler referred to his ‘creative quiet’.

What we get in equal measure in Klee is craftsman and artist. In this sense he was an exemplar for the Bauhaus at Weimar, then Dessau, that championed both. Klee was not, however, a slave to craft, to exactitude.     He wrote, ‘We construct and keep on constructing, yet intuition is a good thing. You can do a good deal without it, but not everything. Exactitude winged by intuition is at times best’.  

Art ‘makes visible’Tate Modern gives emphasis to what Klee said or wrote in his diaries about his art, leading off with a classic: art, he believed, ‘does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible’. His pictures are processes in making, assembling colours, lines, shapes – some representative, some semi-abstract, some wholly abstract – on meticulously prepared surfaces. They are the fruit of constant experiments employing what he called an ‘oil transfer method’ and ‘gradation’, approaches he encouraged his Bauhaus students to follow.

In fact, though one is intrigued and entertained by the foreground images, the juxtaposed squares of colour, the rhythmic shapes, the fish (that have swum out of his personal aquarium); despite the effects, the fabric-like pointillism, the fishing rods, the exclamation marks, the stars, the crescent moons, one’s attention keeps returning to the surface treatment that makes all possible, renders all magical.
 HarmonyThe Klee favourites are here: They’re Biting (1920), The Seafarer (1923), Portrait of an Equilibrist (1927), Jumper (1930) and Memory of a Bird (1932). The last picture in the exhibition, Twilight Flowers illustrates Klee’s pact with harmony, his preference for pastel colours combined with effecting colour radiance; odes to quiet joy.
   Such radiance Klee encountered on a trip to Tunisia early in his career. The impact of it seems to be a constant in his work. After his visit, Klee wrote in his dairy, ‘Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always. I know it...Colour and I are one. I am a painter’. (1914).
   Klee is famous for his memorable observation that in his art he is ‘taking a line for a walk’; however, it is colour that does the talking. Catch the Tate Modern show before it closes on 9 March next year. It’s worth every (expensive) penny.

 FEEDBACK: what’s in a title?Issue 43, looked at the ways titles enhanced or risked undermining their texts, whether novels, plays or films. Eye-catching, informative, evocative, mystifying or simply over-obvious, off-putting, dry-as-dust, uninspiring, misleading? Thanks to the readers who responded to the Good, Bad and Ugly challenge, serving up some humdingers and some dot-balls.

From Carl Briggs: My all-time favourite is a seven-worder: Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author. It suggests dramatic innovation, a process about to take place, an exploration. It hints at an uncertain outcome. I guess what I’m getting, as much an experiment as the telling of a story.
Like you, I’d find the film Misery a turn-off, but then the reputation of the director, John Huston, would suffice for me to give it a try; and that goes for authors generally and as far as films and plays are concerned, who’s in them counts for as much as the allure of the title.
From Helen Chan: It’s true, a good title can mask a bad film, and a good film can suffer from abad title. There are more of the second than the first. It would be interesting to talk to creative people and ask why, when it comes to titling, inspiration  deserts them. It’s not easy: I’ve just seen Michael Douglas in Behind the Candelabra. I tried to think of a better title for this excellent movie. Not easy, unless you rename it The Liberace Story, or Liberace and his Lover.
For me, good: The Mad Woman off Chaillot,derived from the Jean Giradoux play, which could suggest that the best film titles earn their keep from the stories they adapt. Same thing goes for The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Irving Lerner’s film version of the Peter Shaffer play, The Looking Glass War from the Le Carre novel and Laughter in the Dark Tony Richardson’s film version of the Nabakov novel. Lastly, as a promise of fun, There’s as Girl in My Soup Roy Boulting’s take on a Terence Frisby play.
Thanks, Helen. Sometimes the film title improves on the original. Get Carter has more oomph than the title of Ted Lewis’s story Jack’s Return Home.
From JP: For me, Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell and the recent movie, Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow; challenging because its meaning isn’t obvious, but suggests something menacing. Or, talking in numbers, how about a 12-worder from 1922, I’d Love to Fall Asleep and Wake Up in My Mammy’s Arms. Beat that?
From Bron O’B: The sixties produced some great film titles: Where Eagles Dare, Carve Her Name With Pride, The Lion in Winter, Nobody Runs For Ever and the daddy of them all, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  From Gwen R: I checked a list of recommended Goodreads and picked out those book titles that caught my eye straight away: The First Phone-call from Heaven by Mitch Albom got my prize. I liked This Wicked Game by Michelle Zinc, but wouldn’t want to take it forward on reading that it’s about voodoo. One-word titles? I liked Wil S.Hylton’s Vanished because it is intriguing and aided by a cover that hints at the book’s content – an enquiry into a US bomber that went missing in World War 11.
I decided to pass on another one-worder, Foreplay. A four-worder The Cute Girl Network wasn’t for me. Toltanica left me bemused, though Code of Darkness was perhaps the best of the three-worders. What matters, of course, is the meat in the sandwich of title and cover; but unless you’re drawn in in the first place, you’re unlikely to give the meat a chance.
From LRC: Can’t remember details, but there’s wit in the following: I’ll Never Forget What’s His Name, Charity Covers a Multitude of Sins and Never Complain to Your Laundress. One of my all-time favourites is Kind Hearts and Coronets, but having seen this wonderful British comedy it would be my favourite even if it had been called The Hell of It.
A quick vox pop produced the following favourite titles: Knife in the Water, Riddle of the Sands, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Ship That Died of Shame, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Missouri Breaks, They Crawl (a horror movie) and the English title of a French film, The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun (1970).
 It seems that you can’t go wrong if you put ‘Great’ in the title: The Great Imposter, The Great Muppet Caper, The Great Dictator, The Great Gatsby, The Greatest Show on Earth and The Greatest Story Ever Told all got a mention.
 How about the 8 best films to take to a desert island (equipment and blackout provided)?
 Poems of place (20)
ALIEN PRESENCE, GUNWALLOE
 His eyes would seem to be closed
In contemplation, as on long arms
He extends in one hand a bell,
In the other a fist for nestling snails.

The lids resemble less the visage
Of an early saint, than a storm-smoothed Buddha,
The jetsam perhaps of a shipwreck
Washed ashore on barbarous rock,
Resurrected here by the church
To shiver in a graveyard, washed
By cold tides, and far from home.

Walk close, and suddenly the eyes watch
And follow with seeming malice
As if each wanderer to the sea is held
To blame for this exile among Christian bones.

 The Ned Baslow Letters (cont)Theatre, opera and poetry lovers from Land’s End to John O’Groats are emailing ticket requests for ‘The Greatest Arts Festival’ ever to be mounted in the west midlands during July 2014 at Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven; and this is in no small way due to the marketing genius of our regular correspondent, Ned Baslow.

 Over the past few months he has harnessed the talents of not only geniuses of the worlds of art and music but the contributions of some of history’s most iconic names. This month we see Ned replying to Inspector Morse, whose sergeant, Lewis (a man after Ned’s own heart), has applied for tickets on behalf of his senior officer.
 Dear Inspector Morse
What a a pleasant surprise to hear from your Sergeant Lewis that you are interested in attending our Summer Festival production of The Spectacles of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and the Sights of La Mancha, followed by the Epic Battle of the Titans, though at the moment there are no plans to allow your second favourite composer, Herr Mozart, to, as your Sergeant picturesquely put it, ‘wield the baton’. We are not even certain that Wolfy as we call him is prepared to play ball over writing the incidental music.
You will understand that our conductor of many years, Mr Entwistle, who incidentally taught my boy Benjie the piano (until he gave this up for the trombone – Benjie, that is, not Mr Entwistle), will be supervising Wolfy and leading both the Women’s Union Chorus and the Lower Fernhaven Brass Ensemble, with interval music from the Gilbert Stokoe Jazz Quintet, featuring Lord Gilbert’s sons Julius, Hadrian and Octavian and his daughters Penthesilea (Penny for short) and Cybille.
We are hoping that Lord G will be able to entertain us with a medley of ballads on the theme of Robin Hood, composed by himself (Lord Gilbert, that is, not Robin Hood), though his main task will, of course, be in the starring role of Don Quixote and, by honoured tradition, leading the National Anthem at the conclusion of the performances.
It’s my opinion, Inspector, that we in Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven are on the way to matching any cultural event available in your native Oxford; and while the village hall theatre is smaller in area than your famous Playhouse (I saw the panto Dick Whittington there, or was it Dick Turpin?), it at least has more comfortable seats than the Sheldonian which, if you don’t mind me saying, is the most uncomfortable venue I’ve ever had to plonk my bottom in.
My only visit was a disaster. Having been forced to sit through a piece of music forty-five minutes long, I suffered chronic back pain from which I fear I shall only slowly recover. Also. I shall remember to my dying day the looks I got from others in the audience when I dared to clap during what only turned out to be a pause in the music.
I would never have gone to the concert at all had I known that my wife Betty had misheard the lady in the box-office, and dragged me to hear music by Steve Reich rather than Steve Race, always one of our favourites on Radio 2.
  Reich ought to be ashamed of himself – forty-five minutes, I ask you, and he scarcely used 45 notes, relying on repetition, reminding me of somebody opening and shutting a squeaky cupboard: it was sheer torture:  if they’d used this technique at the Guantanamo prison camps, they’d have got confessions soon enough.
Course, everybody around me thought this Reich rubbish was wonderful: I guess your Sergeant Lewis will appreciate how I felt, a real fish out of water.
 Unfortunately our VIP tickets have had to be curtailed owing to pressure of demand, as relatives of ‘Lord Gilbert’, Chair of the Panto and Light Opera Society, are coming in droves from far and wide, including cousins from Nova Scotia while my Betty’s godmother Bernadette and her Spanish husband Antonio (no relation to the famous tap-dancer) are due to fly in from Benidorm where, incidentally, they had a lovely bungalow overlooking the sea, until Spanish bureaucracy force them to evacuate before bulldozers came in at dawn.
They are now slumming it in Gibraltar, but are determined to make the Festival as they have a soft spot for Sancho Panzer, personal servant to Don Q, and source of considerable comedy throughout. I am happy to say, incidentally, that the part has been awarded to your correspondent, though it was auditioned by at least three others (including a current spear carrier at the Royal Shakespeare Company).
Another candidate for the part was my Betty’s tutor at the Open University, Dr. Ivan Arbuthnot, who I might have mentioned in my previous letter is an expert in 18th and 19thcentury corantos and chapbooks. As compensation he has been given the part, appropriately, of a wandering tinker and will be rendering one of Wolfie’s arias though this may have to be curtailed or cut altogether if Jill, our next-door neighbour, gets her voice back so she can, as the fair Dulcy Naya, the heroine, render her three duets with the Don Quixote.
 Tickets are available in sterling or euros, but I’d advise Sergeant Lewis (who usually seems to pay your bills, at least the cost of your ‘food for thought’ as you call it) not to leave things till the last minute. If you’ve managed to hold on to one of your stylish lady-friends from one instalment to another, she will be welcome. As my Betty always says, ‘Morse, he may not be successful with women, but he’s got taste’.
 Yours ever
Ned Baslow
 
  Kindle editions (3)   Ticket to Prague
In trouble with the law, talented swimmer Amy Douglas is put to voluntary work in a small home for mental patients. Josef, a middle-aged Czech stares all day at a blank TV screen. Amy learns that he was once a poet who, on a visit to England from Communist Czechoslovakia too refuge here.
 Her love of reading ignites the poet’s interest. A friendship develops followed by the invitation, as the Velvet Curtain is drawn back from decades of Soviet oppression, for Josef to receive a literary prize in Prague. Amy accompanies him, and finds fresh challenges and a new love.
 Shortlisted for the Lancashire County Council Book of the Year.
‘A very enjoyable way of researching Eastern European history in a fascinating story laced with risqué language and rich vocabulary.’  Ann Fisher, Carousel.
‘Although it is often funny, Ticket to Prague is also a very serious novel, and it shirks none of the tragic implications which it puts forward. [The novel] is deeply thought-provoking, dealing as it does with real personal and political problems and wisely leaving most of the answers to the individual reader.’ Junior Bookshelf .
‘I just finished reading your book Ticket to Prague for the third time, and I wanted to tell you how much I love it. You described Prague in such vivid language, I want to get my own ticket to Prague!! I won the book quiz at my local library last year and like I mentioned before, have read it several times. I'm a young writer myself, and books like Ticket to Prague give me something to aspire to. I'm waiting for school to start again, so I can hunt down some of your books in my school library, and I can’t wait!! I suppose you might get this a lot but you are a brilliant writer Mr. Watson and I love your work.’  Young teenager, emailing the author from New Zealand.
 Further information: http://tinyurl.com/nwlr59f
 Thanks for reading Blog 44.
In Blog 45 there will be a review piece on IMITATION OF LIFE by Laura Solomon; two small extracts from the novel were published in Blogs 42 & 43.