Stranger In A Strange Land

It takes me by surprise, every time. I can be driving up the hill towards my house – the house – or staring out of my back window. I can be crossing the unmade, pot-holey road between my neighbour’s house and my own, invited – as I was yesterday – for a coffee. Even after seven – nearly eight – years in this village-at-the-end-of-the-world, I can get this feeling of unfamiliarity. I am not really here, something inside my head is saying. Any moment now I will find myself, as if by magic, in the place I actually inhabit, living the life I am actually living.

I am not here, the voice says. I am actually somewhere else, living a completely different life. I do not look like this. My name is familiar – and yet different – I am well, I am happy, I am where I should have been for the last seven – nearly eight – years and

I have never been here.

This, here, is an illusion.

What’s that called, psychologically-speaking. Alienation? Anomie? Ontological Insecurity? And what might be its cause. Something dire, I’ll be bound.

I typed it into Google and got Mumsnet, and Mumsnet, predictably, completely misunderstood the nature of my query. Back and forth these Mumsies kept assuming I meant “not being satisfied with what I’ve got” and quoting endlessly at one another some old body by the name of Joseph Campbell:

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to live the life we have waiting for us.”

But that wasn’t what I meant, smug Mumsies! It’s some sort of existential angst, not a vague conviction that I landed on earth with the intention of being a millionaire/ess. I mean, I know all about lemons and lemonade. I have made so much lemonade out of my manky old lemons, honestly.

It’s more a feeling that any minute now I am going to wake up. Except I don’t. I am a stranger in a strange land.

Which got me wondering where I heard that phrase, and I remembered reading a very good sci-fi novel with that title, by Robert A Heinlen. 1961, he wrote it. And having remembered it, I’ll have to read it again, forthwith. Or rather she will – the version of me that’s inexplicably here, as well as being wherever else she is.

Now I discover that Robert A Heinlen was quoting someone else – The Bible. It’s in Exodus 2:22 and it’s about Moses and his wife Zipporah – or Tziporah – which means “bird”.

And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for, he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

And then, of course, I had to look up Gershom, for why should being called Gershom have anything to do with the case? And I find that in Biblical Hebrew, Gershom means Stranger There or Stranger Is His Name or Exile, Expelled.

So now you know.

And I know.

But who, exactly – am I?

In my monogrammed gold pyjamas…

I don’t normally write about politics – well, maybe a wee nudge in passing – mainly because, after all, who am I?

Closely followed by and who cares what I think?

Supplemented by and in any case, it’s boring. Well, not to me, but then I’m odd. But this post seems to want to be written, and nothing else is queuing up to be written instead of it, so here goes nothing.

I feel I’ve learned quite a few things recently, by observing the rise and rise of Mr Trump in America, and Brexit gradually unfolding in Britain: the value of humility, for instance, and a willingness to modify your opinions where necessary.

When That Woman in the Horrid Trouser Suit, that Elderly Plumber with the Rod Stuart Hairdo and possibly Someone Else Annoying went all the way to the Supreme Court to challenge our Government’s right to trigger Article 50 (signalling our intention to leave the European Union) I was furious. I voted to leave. We voted to leave. I lived in a democracy. I had been given – wisely or not – a vote in a democratic referendum. So I voted. And I won. We won, and now this woman…

I hated her. Every time she appeared on my television set yet again, I hated her. However, I would not have abused her on social media, as some did. Neither would I have written a newspaper headline describing the Lord Chief Justice and two of his colleagues, who decided in Ms Miller’s favour, as Enemies of the People. That’s because I’m old fashioned. I believe in courtesy, kindness and moderation. I believe in good sportsmanship – the idea that you should be modest in victory and generous in defeat. I believe that blind fury/incoherent ranting mean you have already lost the argument.

And now, watching what is happening in America, it seems to me that I was wrong even to have thought ungenerous thoughts about Ms Miller and her irritating trouser suit, or those pompous old farts of Judges in their wigs and gowns. I see the various Courts in America struggling to curb the rise of an out-and-out autocrat. I see that they, and the people themselves, protesting in whatever way they can, are now all that stands between democracy and dictatorship, and that may well be the case for the next four or (surely not?) eight years. How could I have thought badly of our own judges for doing what they were appointed to do in helping to define our democracy?

Before this last year, I wondered how dictators ever came to power. How did Hitler, for example, ever get to be in charge of Germany? Couldn’t people have seen through him? How did all those ghastly African dictators get to be in power in the first place? I used to think maybe it was because in Africa people were less sophisticated than us, politically (I know – a prejudice left over from Imperial days) but that did not explain Germany. Now I have watched this process happening, potentially, in the last place I would ever have expected to see it. I see how easy it is to fool at least half of the people, half of the time. And that’s all you need. Half of the people, half of the time.

I have been thinking about the Peter Principle:

Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails.

Or, more specifically:

In an organizational structure, assessing an employee’s potential for a promotion is often based on their performance in the current job. This eventually results in their being promoted to their highest level of competence, and potentially then to role in which they are not competent, referred to as their “level of incompetence”.

Maybe this is what has happened on a grand scale in America. Someone who was extremely good at one level of “running things” has got himself promoted to a much higher level of “running things” and he’s not exactly coping.

I dislike having to feel sorry for obnoxious people, but in spite of myself I am beginning to feel a little sorry for President Trump. Unwillingly, I try to imagine myself in his place: I am seventy-going-on-three and wandering around the palace of my dreams late at night in my monogrammed gold pyjamas, gleefully exploring its many rooms and corridors. My father’s house has many mansions… Maybe I open a desk drawer here, or peer behind a brocade curtain there. I look up at the portraits of past presidents. Here I am guys!

I wanted to win, and now I have won. At last, I’m in charge…

(My father, an electrician working for the Electricity Board, over the years refused several offers of promotion. He was popular, and a good organiser. He’d probably have made a good foreman, but he used to quote this little verse:

The working class can kiss my ****/ I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.

The extra money would have come in handy for a man with a wife with a wife and three large daughters to support, but he stuck to his socialist principles.)

…but oh, it’s not much fun in my palace of dreams: it’s hard work, it’s long hours and SO much more complicated than I imagined. People don’t just do what I tell them, like they ought to. People are criticizing me. Me!

And there’s NO ESCAPE. I can’t just tell them well, I won – but now I’d really rather go off and play golf a lot or get back to buying hotels. I can’t just turn to the nearest minion and say – here, take over this President thing for me, will you? It’s not nearly as exciting as campaigning.

I’m BORED now.

Now, I am BORED.

So bored!

Should you, because you can?

I often start off thinking no, I couldn’t possibly write that…

Next thing I know, I’ve written it.

This post may be one of those.

Sometimes I have moments of enlightenment. It’s probably a myth, you know, that enlightenment happens all at once, a blinding flash in the dark, sunlight on the road to Damascus. It’s more a tantalising chink before the door creaks shut again, sometimes for millennia.

Last night it occurred to me, not for the first time, but every time I forget – which is another way in which the door creaks shut – that I may not even be here to write. Or rather, just because I can write doesn’t mean I should, or that I absolutely have to. Maybe I’m not meant to be doing it at all at this point.

I don’t mean this sort of writing – this blogging pastime – which to me is more like chatting on the telephone, or writing a longish letter to a friend.  I mean the sort that requires the participation of your entire being, that drains every drop from the glass, that scrapes the last baked-bean from the saucepan, that… well, you know.

It just reminded me. When I was younger I had a friend. He was more than a friend, in fact (and then considerably less, but that’s another story).  My friend had a guru, except that, being a Christian he referred to him as something else – my Mentor, my Guide – can’t exactly remember now. This Guide was revered among Christians of a certain hue – those who drawn to the paranormal, out-of-body and near-death-experiences. He wrote a whole series of books; I read one or two of them but found them a bit chewy. Perhaps I should have another go at them now.

We visited him together, just once. His house was quite a long way away, and so bare. I never saw a house so devoid of everything except its occupant. It was as if stuff no longer had any meaning for him. There was a piano, but it was locked. There was a big old table but no cloth, no books, nothing on it. Ladies brought him food – home-made cakes and such, my friend said, and he lived mostly on what people brought him. Food didn’t matter.

I can’t remember much more about that meeting, except that he looked at us both, very carefully, and for an uncomfortably long time, and told us we were old souls. I think I knew this already, as did my friend: I had known him since the earth was molten metal, since we were blades of grass side by side in some prehistoric meadow, since… but then people in love tend to reckon in geological time. How can there ever have been a time when we were not together? How can there ever come a time when we will be apart? And maybe they are right. Maybe we’re the deluded ones.

And I couldn’t help thinking, well, what else would you expect a guru to say? Just as you’d expect a fortune-teller to tell you that you would cross water and meet a tall, dark gentleman. A gypsy fortune-teller at a church fête once told me I’d have four children. That didn’t come to pass, in fact no children came to pass. But then she was the vicar’s wife in boot-polish and a fancy shawl. What would she know?

I asked about the locked piano. My friend told me that his Guide once played the piano. He had so loved to listen to a certain piece music that he could close his eyes and be transported by it onto another spiritual plane. But music had to be given up in order that he could become what he needed to become. It was the price he had had to pay. There is always a price to pay. It seemed very shabby to me then – all of it – the house with the empty table, the donated cakes, the locked piano, the absent gramophone, the being alone in the dark most of time, the occasional cup of tea, a visitor.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I had a dream. I was on an upper level of a railway station, looking down at the scurrying figures in the concourse beneath. Between them and me was a plate-glass window so wide and so thick that there was no way they could ever hear me, even if I thumped on the glass. And they would never look up. They were fixed on their destinations, whereas I had no destination – or at least none that I knew of.

Writing was always a kind of thumping on the glass or – a later analogy – the weaving of an elaborate web. I couldn’t get into their world but maybe, just maybe, I could entice them into mine. With the benefit of hindsight and old (well, medium) age, I see this would never have worked. Had the spider’s web been encrusted with precious gems and its strands laced with the finest of nectars – had they crawled in in their little wingèd millions to worship me, the Great Writing Spider – it wouldn’t have worked. They would have been deceived, bewitched, enticed. They wouldn’t have come otherwise, wouldn’t have entered willingly. And that great windy nothingness at the centre of everything would still be there.

So what’s an old soul to do, apart from a bit of blogging now and again?

I think maybe nothing. I think just Be.

I think open a channel.

I think wait.

There’s a long, long worm a-crawling…

You know how you get earworms – bits of songs going round and round in your head that just won’t go away. My latest episode of musical torment is a song called The Boys of Summer by Don Henley of The Eagles (1984). I won’t embed a video in case it attacks you too.

There is usually an underlying reason for a particular song getting stuck in one’s head, at least I believe so. Our conscious minds are very word-orientated; Subconscious doesn’t ‘do’ words – but he does almost everything else. Famously, of course, he does dreams. Freud and co were always banging on about the messages to be found in dreams. For example, a man dreams that a white horse is charging through his house in a panic, wreaking havoc. Not long afterwards he is dead. The house symbolises the body, because your body is the ‘house’ your soul, or what you experience as you, lives in. So, that horse was not good news.

Almost any source of imagery that is not-words can be, and is, used by Subconscious to get his message across. You just have to listen to pictures. Sometimes it can be a piece of music that haunts you. Sometimes it’s flashes of imagery that don’t seem to be apropos of anything in particular. I have, for a few seconds, found myself flying. Not actually flying but seeing the world from a completely different, aerial, perspective, and not from an aeroplane.

He ‘does’ déjà vu, I suspect, and he does coincidences. Whenever you get a sense of the uncanny, a slight chill or blurring of reality, that sense of something else going on – he’s probably lingering about. However… the boys of summer.

So the actual words of Don Henley’s chorus are:

I can see you –

Your brown skin shinin’ in the sun

You got that hair slicked back and your sunglasses on, baby

I can tell you my love for you will still be strong

After the boys of summer have gone…

It’s about lost love, summer love, growing older, not going back – a mixture of all those things, perhaps.

It kept nadging at me, where does that phrase boys of summer come from? It just didn’t sound like something anyone would have made up on the spur of the moment, if you know what I mean – it was too compact. And it was ringing bells; very, very faint and annoying bells.

Weeks went by and I gave up trying not to think about it. I knew it was time to put on my Detective Hat again. I kept thinking – Shakespeare. So many phrases originate either in the Bible or one of Shakespeare’s plays – any mystery quote stands a 50/50 chance of being from either one or the other. In Cymbeline – a play with a plot so complicated that theatre managers were said to offer a reward to anyone who, having seen Cymbeline, could explain what had just happened – there is a beautiful funeral song. In Shakespeare’s time it would have been sung, but the music has been lost:

Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Here are some golden lads who, being gone (dead) need fear no more the heat of the sun. It felt like the beginning of the trail, but not all of it. It wasn’t close enough.

One red herring – somebody on a message board suggesting that Don Henley got the phrase from a book called The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, which is about the Brooklyn Dodgers – presumably a baseball team. Nope, I thought – red herring. Roger Kahn, whoever he was, got that phrase from somebody else. Like many authors before him, he had used a quote for a title, but it was a quote. It just felt like a quote.

Then somebody else suggested Dylan Thomas, and things finally began to fall into place. I read everything I could find of Dylan Thomas’ in my youth and what had been bothering me was a bat-squeak of memory. Dylan Thomas wrote a poem called I See the Boys of Summer. It’s complicated, scary, beautiful, and too long to include in full, so here’s an extract:

I see the boys of summer in their ruin

Lay the gold tithings barren,

Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;

There in their heat the winter floods

Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,

And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

 

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,

Sour the boiling honey;

The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;

There in the sun the frigid threads

Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;

The signal moon is zero in their voids.

 

I see the summer children in their mothers

Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,

Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;

There in the deep with quartered shades

Of sun and moon they paint their dams

As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

Dylan Thomas – his poems are like paintings by Hieronymus Bosch or Salvador Dali – or like the intricate covers of fantasy novels. You read them and think – this makes no sense. But yet it does. And that’s what’s so powerful and terrifying, that it does.

Dylan Thomas’ father was a teacher of English Literature at a Grammar School, and taught his own son. Dylan Thomas was brought up on Shakespeare. Dylan Thomas drew on imagery from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline when writing I See the Boys of Summer. Don Henley studied poetry at university in Texas and could easily have read I See the Boys of Summer, then used the image in The Boys of Summer.

Well, thank goodness that’s all sorted out.

And I still can’t get rid of that earworm.

Bosch: from The Garden of Earthly Delights

Blogging While Rome Burns

I’m not good at plans. I make any number of them. My computer’s littered with them. Mostly they are called Plan. Sometimes they are called Plan 2 or Plan 3. I found one the other day called Yet Another Plan. But not a single one of these Plans have I ever managed to put into action. Making them used to make me feel like I was doing something. Like I was in control. It doesn’t nowadays but I can’t seem to stop making them.

I don’t know whether my life is currently going to hell in a handcart, and my survival so far has just been a lucky accident. I don’t know the state of my life because another thing I’m not good at is assessing and coming to logical conclusions. I am very logical; drearily, pedantically logical in fact at times. I just can’t apply the dreary logic to my own circumstances. My mind goes off at tangents, and then tangents from the tangents. It slithers away from most things. Slithers back to the single thing it was designed for – scribbling stories; finessing poems few people will ever read – and of course to blogging, this endless tap-tap-tapping away and one damned machine or another. I am all input and no output. Consumed by what I am, and the way my brain is wired, I need another planet to be on.

Sorry, this sounds like some ancient Roman death-rattle and it didn’t start off like that. There’s nothing new in the situation – I’m just noticing it more at the moment, what with the pending house move and all the alien focussing-on-dull-stuff that that process entails. And Mum going into a home.

When Mum was around it was my role to be her child. I knew where I was with that. However old I got, having no children of my own, I remained her child. Now she’s left me, mentally – physically too, since she was carted off in an ambulance with an exhausted lady social worker. I was one of the principals in our family play. I played the eldest daughter, that gifted disappointment, the damp squib. I was the Sunday visitor staring into space; the one who did the tortoise shuffle up to the café with her; who manoeuvred her arms, with all those woolly layers, into the sleeves of her winter coat; who fumbled about for her walking-stick under the table. I was the one with the endless capacity for boredom (which was really a capacity to be thinking of many other things whilst appearing to listen). I was the incompetent, the unlucky one, an endless source of concern for a mother who ran on worry. ‘Oh Linda!’ her constant refrain. That was what I was for.

And suddenly here I am – one of a faceless crowd mumbling rhubarb-rhubarb to sound like I’m really talking; third from the left in the chorus; the soldier who walks on with a spear in the Second Act.

So, at the moment my own particular Rome may be burning. Or I may just be worrying too much. Usually it’s the worrying, but as usual I have no way of telling. But I can tell you this one thing, best beloveds: writing makes the world all right. Writing about disintegration pulls everything back together. Writing about chaos makes some temporary sense of it. Writing is threading a giant bowlful of beads into a necklace. Why or how that should be… I don’t know.

I did some cursory research about the Emperor Nero. He couldn’t actually have fiddled while Rome burned since violins – that whole class of instruments – hadn’t been invented yet. He might have played the cithara, which may or may not be the wooden instrument he is shown with, in the above illustration. Or his fiddle/cithara playing may be purely metaphorical. Sadistic, decadent, unpopular – he wasn’t nice at all, old Nero. He was an ineffectual leader, not bothered about the sufferings of his people, and that’s probably what the legends of his fiddle-playing were all about.

Therefore blog on, best beloveds. Like the orchestra on the Titanic, we shall keep on playing Nearer my God to Thee as sea-water dampens our trouser-bottoms. If Rome is indeed burning, such music shall we have.

Once apron a time

Mrs Daniels lived in the bungalow next door to Nan and Grandad’s. I don’t remember much about her. She was small, a bit shrivelled-looking. There was definitely a Mr Daniels. He seemed to be bigger, and red in the face. Nan, who was a much better source of stories than Mum, told me that Mrs Daniels’ one peculiarity was collecting those frilly waist-tied aprons 1950s housewives were often pictured wearing.

She didn’t just collect the occasional apron. She collected one a day – at least. She got them from Hazell’s, a kind of all-purpose grocery shop and Post Office just below the station. In this same shop I was stung by a wasp which was lurking under the counter, just where I happened to place my hand. The wasp was attracted to the sticky cakes which were, of course, uncovered and displayed at the front of the counter so as to collect the maximum amount of dust, sneeze-germs and halfpennies dropped from purses. Same logic as hanging entire dead animals on hooks outside butchers shops so as to attract flies and absorb traffic fumes. I remember making no sound, but completing my purchases and waiting till I was outside to inspect the sting. Being stared at and fussed over was infinitely worse than pain and a bit of poison.

Hazell’s may well have been staying afloat financially only because of Mrs Daniels. The brightly coloured pinnies were hung from a hook on a pillar, and a garland of fresh ones appeared every day (I guess they bought in bulk, especially for Mrs Daniels). They certainly were attractive – I could see why she liked them. The 1950s was a time of bright and bold design. Fabrics were sprinkled with larger-than life vegetables and illustrations of kitchen equipment – colanders, apple-corers, wooden spoons and so forth. The colour thing was a reaction against the drabness of war, the dark, utility clothing, the sensibleness of everything. And the housewife – well, housewives were the new rock and roll. Men were back from the war. Women had to be encouraged not to keep the jobs they had proven so efficient at during the war. The emphasis once again was on femininity, on the household arts. A woman was encouraged keep young and beautiful, stand by her man and have lots and lots of babies. This was to replace Britain’s lost boys, the widows’ lost husbands, the spinsters’ lost fiancés. A generation of slaughtered, unconceived and unborn children. It was a woman’s duty to be fruitful. Hence the baby boomer generation.

Yes, if I had been of apron-wearing age, and if my pocket money hadn’t been so measly I too would have been attracted to frilly pinafores. I remember asking Nan what exactly Mrs D did with her aprons. Did she wear them one on top of the other – each serving to protect the one beneath? Nan laughed. It reminded her of a song about a spider and a fly. There was an old lady who swallowed a fly…

If she did leave the aprons on, why wasn’t she as stout as a barrel by now? Did she even take them off at night? How long would it take to untie them, smooth and fold them all?  Or did she keep them stacked neatly and laid them in her airing-cupboard just in case. Just in case the thousand other aprons should be stolen from her. Just in case the moth should get in and chew holes from the top of the stack to bottom. Just in case… Because I sense that would be the underlying fear. There is always an underlying fear. One day she would be in dire need of an apron, and wouldn’t have one. Yes, she might run out of aprons. Unfortunately, and I am loath to admit it, I can understand that quirk.

I worry about running out of things too. After a trawl round the supermarket I don’t even have to glance down at my trolley to know that I will have bought two of everything – two cakes, two packs of eight yoghurts, two loaves of bread. I will buy two loaves of bread even when I know one will be stale before I open it. Everything must be backed up. My mother is the same, I notice – two currant cakes, when she doesn’t even like currant cake – or four, or six – but never an odd number. It’s that fear of being without, of finding the cupboard bare – even if the corner shop is just around the corner. Unsatisfied want. Probably something to do with breast-feeding. Yes, let’s blame it on the bosoms.

I read somewhere that people who do this may actually be twins, but one of the twin has been lost in the womb (making that person a Womb Twin Survivor). That impulse to provide for the other, to make real the missing sibling, never to let them go. The same thing as children, insisting that a place be laid at table for their imaginary friend, and bereaved parents keeping their child’s room untouched for years. That tie of love, that cord stretching between the living and the lost. The impossibility of letting go.

I read somewhere else that extreme hoarding is a way of not dealing with a problem in the past – something so painful the person isn’t capable of dealing with it – at least, not without help. And even with help, extreme hoarders are known to be among the least motivated and most recalcitrant of subjects when it comes to therapy. So what is the point of hoarding? What is the mechanism? One theory is that a hoarder is creating a second problem, which supersedes the first. So, a houseful of junk is a suit of armour. Remove the junk and that person is raw, terrified – like a snail without its shell.

I suppose the thing is, we are none of us that far from OCD. Where does eccentricity end and extreme hoarding begin? At what point do you cross the line, from thinking It’s getting terribly crowded in here with all these aprons, or I could do with a sixth garden shed to house my lawnmower collection to I can’t let this tottering mountain of old newspapers go? I have no option but to read them all in case there’s something I’ve missed – an article, maybe, or an advert. Something in the obituaries. And even then, I won’t let them go…

Or it may be that Mrs Daniels was bored and depressed. Lonely. The aprons were bright, fresh and pretty, they smelled of new cotton, they were crackling-stiff with that starchy ‘dressing’ and they made her feel better. Or buying an apron made her feel she had accomplished something– that here was at least one thing she could tick off her list.

She died a long time ago. I sometimes wonder whether she isn’t wandering around heaven, collecting dropped angel-feathers to arrange in crystal vases, or…

MIDWINTER UNWRITTEN

This one short story has fought me mounted and standing – a description I once read of a novel that was giving its author a pretty hard time – on and off for the past twenty years, and I still haven’t pinned it to the field of battle with my trusty sword… to push the fantasy/archaic military imagery slightly beyond its usefulness.

It started out as a ballad – you know, one of those long poems with interminable four-line verses – and rather a good one, I thought. However, at some point I decided it had to be turned into a short story and then, various house moves and computer meltdowns later, discovered I had lost the poem and could no longer remember the words. Unfortunately I still have the character Midwinter in my head, and I still have the story behind the poem. If only I hadn’t lost the original poem, I might have been able to let go of the short story obsession. Midwinter still nadges at me for her story to be told.

The original beginning for this phantom short story, went:

The robes of Wizardesses are blue with stars. The robes of Wizards are green with stars. And there are still Others, of whom little is known and less is said, whose robes are beyond description being of all the colours of the rainbow, and none. But all have stars.

I just adored those four sentences, but didn’t get much beyond them.

Harry Potter put a spanner in the works. Pinched some of my (unwritten, unpublished) ideas, so she did.

I have made plot summaries for this short story. I have written various half- and quarter-versions of it – filed them, fished them out, had another go, filed them, fished them out. All those yellowing bunches of file paper held together with rusty staples or rusty paperclips. Recently I even conceived a plan for a quartet of linked short stories based on an ever-expanding (in my mind, only) saga of conflict, cruelty and retribution between an ancient race of wizards and an equally ancient race of men. Each element in the quartet was going to have the name one of the Celtic festivals – Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh – with the grand, overarching title of Midwinter. It was going to be the bee’s knees, this quartet of mine.

I had another go at it this afternoon. Maybe if I just start writing, I thought. Attempt to channel my inner wizardess…

The child had no name. Sometimes it was called It. Sometimes it was called You. Once in a while it was addressed as Wryshanks on account of its twisted legs and crooked back. In its head it was Midwinter, for the time it arrived at Castle Bellbroke, and for the first of its memories.

Of that day, it mostly remembered cold. Thin limbs, a think blanket, cold like a rat a-pinching its ears and gnawing at its face. Its fingers and toes were afire with the pain of cold and it waited for death. Death, so much better than cold.

Above it, a mouth full of iron teeth, like the teeth of an iron giant. Great chains on either side. Above that windows like slits for arrows to come through. What it rested on was wood, slatted, wet. Wet seeped through its blanket…

Gone. Now I know how men must feel.

What to do? I know this could be a good short story, maybe more than one short story – a novel, even. So why can’t I write it? I am writing this to find out why I can’t write it.

Um… I am wondering if it wants to be a poem again? Tell me, Midwinter, are you wanting me to re-materialise you, atom by atom, as an interminable ballad that no one will read? No one reads poems. I love poetry and even I don’t read poems. Not in blogs, anyway.

Is it because I’ve tried and failed so many times before? Is it possible to lose all interest in a character yet still not be able to let them go? Why can’t I just dump you, Midwinter? Hop on the bus, Gus…

Is it perhaps that you are me, Midwinter? What is it about you that both grieves and obsesses me, makes me reluctant to nail your sorry self to the floor and be done with you? Would I be repairing some great rent in my inner landscape in repairing you, my Twisted Child? Are my Archetypes even now engaged in mortal combat? And have they always been so? Sometimes I have this image of dragons entwining, warring dragons becoming one, metamorphosing. Am I ready for that battle, that becoming and that extinguishment? Do I want to be that powerful? Could I bear a happy ending, if I could write it?

Maybe I run on misery.

Would I be destroyed, if I was happy?

[If the thing ever gets written, believe me, you will know. I will trumpet it from the rooftops, I will tell it in Gath, I will proclaim it in the streets of Ashkelon: MIDWINTER WRITTEN – yay!]