Bryan Islip's Blog

Auction of Bryan's work - Saturday 8 July from 9.30

We're pleased to announce that an auction of Bryan's work will take place at the Perfume Studio, Mellon Charles, Aultbea, on Saturday 8 July 2017 - viewing from 9.30am, auction starts 10.30am.

Various beautiful artwork from Bryan will be available - from prints to originals.

All proceeds to Highland Hospice and MacMillan Nurses.

Refreshments available.

If you are unable to make it on the day, but would like to leave a bid, please contact the Perfume Studio direct:

http://www.perfume-studio.com/

01445 731618

Farewell to our dear friend.....

It is with much sadness to report that our much loved Bryan Islip passed away before Christmas 2016.  This blog will remain active until later in 2017 - we hope you'll enjoy Bryan's musings and smile.... along with us.
For those of you who wish to purchase Bryan's work - shortly we'll be announcing here an auction of a fantastic selection of his work. It will take place local to Aultbea, Wester Ross (where Bryan lived) - full details will be posted here.   February 2017

Writing your memoir - the pain and the pleasure.

With the passing of the years most of us are less and less inclined to look at the face in the mirror. Nevertheless behind that face there is a mind and within that mind a giant bank of memories to make a story - a life story unique unto itself; compelling if ever it is told with humility and, above all, with truth. The truth and nothing but the truth as best it be recalled.
Naturally, such a tale will not - can never - claim to be the whole truth. Not even if told in as much fine detail as that famously semi-autobiographical Ulysses, a substantial book encompassing the life of a single man on a single day in Dublin town. Nobody wishes to hurt friends, family, even oneself! Nobody, that is, other than James Joyce.
About a year after my being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer my youngest son said he enjoyed reading my occasional blogs. But because I, his father, obviously enjoyed writing them, why not blog about your life? he suggested, adding that people seldom know very much about their parents’ early lives and are always curious. (He might well have been fed up with the rantings against the world of a grumpy old man but would have been too polite to say so!) So I started blogging in November 2014. It took me about a year to cover, through eighty four irregular essays my life between the years 1939 and 2015. The autobiographical SO WHAT? is the paperback / e-book compendium.  
I wrote about the things I have done and those I have left undone, the things I have seen and those I wish not to have seen. I wrote down my thoughts along the way as best I can recall them. And, as I am a writer, I wrote with as much attention to the structure and musicality of language as I could muster. 
But why should one put oneself through the toil and sometime pain of remembering and producing, with as much care as one can, a hundred thousand word autobiography? It has nothing to do with ego. There are warts in abundance within the life described and I can hardly be proud of them. Truth is, I found the writing experience cathartic, even therapeutic in itself. I reckon you or anybody would find the same.
But, I hear you say, I am no celebrity. Why should anyone be interested in me?To that I say two things: firstly that you are writing primarily to and for your very own self. If another or others are looking over your shoulder, fine. Secondly, that your autobiography should be a celebration not so much of you as of life itself. Whether you are called Beckham or Smith, whether you are or were rich or poor, talented or not, mainly a good person or mainly the opposite, your story is unique. Written well and with honesty it can be of singular interest, therefore of value to others. But what about my carefully protected privacy? you ask. Well, sorry, in this man’s view privacy is largely illusory in these cyberatic times of ever greater public intrusivity. In any case there will be no such thing as privacy when one is finally standing before that golden gate. When I am at that time asked questions I can refer the questioner to SO WHAT? The answers are mostly there - as could be yours.Bryan Islip
p.s. The photo at top is my very first shot at a selfie. No too dusty, huh?

Are you listening, Amazon?

In the good old, bad old pre-internet days you wrote your book and submitted the typescript to as many publishers as you liked. Eventually, either one of them accepted your efforts or you ran out of patience / confidence in yourself or in your work. Then, permanently into that dusty drawer went the child that had been so painfully fathered by your fevered imagination and mothered by all those lonesome hours. But of course the process of submission had been laborious in the extreme. All by itself it dissuaded many potential authors from embarking on the road to becoming that which I and most others think of as being ‘a proper writer’.
Then along came the Net and with it, the mighty Amazon. Suddenly you could easily publish your work, whether it be a novel or an autobiography or The Art & Craft of Making Lead Soldiers. Anybody could become their own publisher, so to hell with Faber & Faber! Dozens of eager new beavers queued up to help you ‘publish’ your new book in the certain knowledge that Amazon would offer it, sight unseen to the world, truly beautiful or truly awful as it might or might not be. Furthermore your little darling could actually take the form of a hardback or a paperback or - hey presto - an e-book for your Kindle. Magical!
The fly in the ointment is simply that, without the screening provided by literate professionals, a trickle of self-published words has rapidly grown into a true shit-storm of waste paper and pointless electronics. Too many of we readers have laid down our hard earned cash on commercially eulogised crap only to bin the thing after just a few disappointing pages or chapters read. Far from opening up a new readership for the betterment of the books trade, both paper and electronic, this self-publishing revolution is, in my opinion, threatening a kind of death by a thousand cuts!
My own suggestion, as follows, would apply only to novels. Looked at from the reader’s (i.e. the market’s) point of view, what is needed is a fail safe system allocating a yes/no rating as infallible, as believable and as totally independent as possible to all newly published novels, however and wherever the thing is being published. Either: yes, this book is worth the expenditure of your time and money or no it is not . No caveats, no stars, nothing else. And when a new book comes out without such a yes/no rating one’s assumption has to be the latter. In other words, buy it if you like but we (the raters) would not advise it!
Ah, but how to create such an infallible, independent system of rating? You might well be asking that question. Fortunately the web-site YouWriteOn incorporates something of a model. Through it you submit an initial ten thousand words of your (anonymous) work to five other (anonymous) authors, computer selected, who rate what they read according to a set of YouWriteOn’s criteria. You in return receive five anonymous works by - different - randomly selected fellow authors for your own critiques. There is an in-built check to ensure that you and the others actually did read what you / they are criticising!.
You would begin by inviting any and all readers of novels in English to put themselves forward as panel judges, specifically by genre. But why would anyone agree to get on such a computer assembled panel? Because when the computer selects you as part of a fifty person group to judge a currently unpublished book unattributed by author or publisher, you receive the initial ten thousand electronic words, then when you return your critique in the terms required you receive perhaps ten pounds or fifteen dollars to spend on books (from Amazon?) Thus, when you look for, say, a crime thriller, you know that fifty people thought this one worth buying - or not buying as the case may be.

So my novel's yes/no rating costs 50 x £10 = £500. Where is that money coming form? I, as an author who has devoted a year of my life to the creation of my novel, would be happy to pay £500. Many of my reviewers will, given they will know by then who is its author, want to spend their reward on buying my novel - or more important yet, recommending it to their book loving friends! But what if my reviewers said 'no, this is not worth reading'? Well, I could either go ahead anyway with publication of a book carrying that 'no' burden or I change tack altogether, having saved myself a lot more than the £500 in wasted time, morale, physical cost and personal energy.

Is it just possible that everyone really is a winner? Oh yes! Are you listening, Amazon?

Forbidden musings

At the point of a loaded pistol the highwayman of old used to demand, “Your money or your life!”When one is diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer the medics offer you a similar choice; “Your sex life or your life!” For me, at close to eighty years of age that one was a real no-brainer so I abdicated my sex life. The medication did the rest. However the pills do enable a new and curious objectivity of thought and in my experience cannot erase one’s general interest in the subject of sex or one’s sexual memory! Now, I should add that these remarks have perforce to be from the male perspective. Perhaps the female perspective is different. (Like most males I have my theory on that.)
We males talk to one another about many things; almost everything in fact, with the probable exceptions of our personal finances and our true sex lives. (Our physical wellbeing is often another taboo area although I have noticed a tendency to reveal all about that, too, as I and my friends grow older).
I have opened up much of my own financial circumstance in my autobiography, SO WHAT? But I have skated with rather more care around my sex life. So here I’m going to take a deep breath and dive deep beneath those rose-tinted, sweet smelling, warm ‘though dangerously shark-infested waters. Should you have a problem or feel an embarrassment about that, please go off and read something more comfortable elsewhere. (But come back another day, please. I really need and do appreciate your company!)
It is quite obviously true that the act of sex is hardly ever the procreationally motivated procedure for which one has to believe it was designed. It is for most of us an intense pleasure, a routine kind of physical excitement and very often an undeniable compulsion - whether inside or outside the marriage bed. Either way the acts of sex are much akin to rather pointless tight rope walks across Niagara Falls; walks culminating for many in a swim through very troubled waters down below.
Shame on you Adam! You had to go and bite into that bloody apple, didn’t you? And to hell (literally) with the fact that you ruined or preoccupied so many billions of lives down so many millions of years. How much greater would this species of ours be, had you initiated a more innocent, less sensory, less mandatory a way to procreate? i.e. One less demanding of our mental, physical and moral resources, thus leaving us to concentrate on things of greater importance to ourselves, our species and planet Earth.
According to the 2005 Global Sex Survey by The London Rubber Company (Durex), adults today have on average a lifetime total of nine sexual partners. At once the question is raised; am I getting / did I get my fair share? My own answer would be (probably) ‘yes’. I have a vivid memory of walking with my beautiful, much loved wife into a neighbourhood party, looking all around and fancying every female in the room! And actually being jealous of all the other males! Disgraceful? Not really, mind games don’t count!
I have to believe that, in a monogamous society, out of wedlock experiences usually give rise to considerable negativity. Short term physical gain (pleasure) for long term emotional pain (misery) in fact. It takes a dispossessed, therefore dispassionate view such as mine to see that sex outside of marriage is tantamount to a visit to the sweetie shop, only to discover that all the nicest stuff is actually poisonous.That bloody apple all over again!
Anysay tht's enough of all that....

You, your life

I cannot tell what you and other men Think of this life;    (his own life, that is)
but, for my single self, I had as lief not be as live to be In awe of such a thing as I myself.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
April Fools Day was quite significant for the release of my autobiography! Its title is SO WHAT? and it takes the form of eighty four essays, each of them an episode in the story of my life to date. The vast majority of these essays saw first light on my blog, www.bryanislip.com, in the beginning at the suggestion of one of my sons who, probably tired of my blogged rantings about the world at large said, Dad, why don’t you tell us something about your early life. None of us (his siblings) know much about that. Hey, most people are curious about that kind of stuff!
I am a certified extrovert although it seems that like most extroverts I have believed myself the opposite. Therefore at first this self-examination, this probing into deep memory was not an easy thing. For sure (at least, I reckon for sure) as we grow older we succeed in forgetting or obfuscating those mean or nasty thoughts and actions, and especially our failures. On the other hand with what ease, with what pleasure are we able to recall the green fields of childhood, the hope and promise of early adulthood, the discovery of precisely and with what cleverness we sooner or later make a fit of ourselves with the world. And overall, how tempting it is to take personal credit for that which is in reality plain old good fortune; but how ready we are to attribute our historically wrong turnings to the fickle finger of fate, aka damned bad luck!
In spite of all I recommend the process of writing one’s memoirs. For myself it has been a form of catharsis in the aftermath of the death of my friend and lover, my wife, my Delia. This autobiography has in fact been a kind of irrigation of body and soul, a getting rid of the bad stuff. In my experience the bad stuff tends to rest in peace once shown the light of day.
My mantra says, ‘Writing is for Reading’. All right, but by whom and why should any he/she/they read my memoirs? Well, I think there are several reasons. The main ones: perhaps because (1) anyone’s life is a story (and we all like stories); (2) curiosity (aka the ‘nosey parker’ syndrome); (3) simply because the author is known to the reader (and the reader might be mentioned). None of these are likely to ensure a weight of readership of interest to the mainstream book publisher - unless the author be called David Beckham or similar. Ah, that modern day, media cultivated celebrity thing! Complete nonsense. Everybody mature enough and who I happen to know well enough, I know to have led or be leading a life of greater interest to me - I have to assume to others also - than the short and well cushioned life of a young man outstanding as a football star, aggressively average as a human being.

My memoir SO WHAT?contains the truth and nothing but the truth but of course it cannot contain the whole truth. Clearly it has taken me a lifetime thus far to live it and so would need to take another lifetime to write it all. There’s no book big enough. Also it must be said that one has to have regard for the feelings of those nearest and dearest to oneself. I have no wish gratuitously to hurt anyone - even myself.  

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams, wrote William Butler Yeats ... Yes, please.

Thanks, Ms Cade; not Amazon!

"My autobiography SO WHAT? was out last week alongside the latest of my novels, Like An Angel Sings'.You might like to read one or the other - so here's the Amazon link 

http://tinyurl.com/BryanIslip-newbooks

I've had one review already for the novel ... this made me happy and no, I haven't the slightest notion of who this lady might be!

By Mary Josefina Cade on 4 April 2016
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase  

The music of the spheres. Words to inspire the imagination and also, a spiritual quest. Like the author, Bryan Islip, I love the passage from 'The Merchant of Venice' that he has placed at the beginning of 'Like An Angel Sings.' Pure beauty.

I found 'Like An Angel Sings' to be compulsive reading. It is quite hard to review without giving away the surprises contained within these inspirational pages, but I can say that it is about the discovery of something extraordinary, within an apparently 'normal' style family. Marie, the mother, desperately tries to keep her family tethered to the earth, but those angels. When they call, we have to listen!

Jamie, the outsider, was my favourite character from the beginning. I love Jamie. I will say no more, but highly recommended for anyone who enjoys an exciting story, with added levels of wonder and magic.

Talking about Amazon - one small niggle (small for them that is but gigantic for me); they tell you to buy my new books on Kindle but if you want the paperback, as do most of my friends, you need to wait, I quote "1-2 months"! That's absurd. I've yesterday ordered my fifth batch of 30 copies from my printer / wholesale distributor, Lightning Source. They are already in transit to me. Lightning Source will send out one copy or ten thousand copies so what's your problem, Amazon? If you are worried about building stocks I'll fund it for you, so let's make it easy for folk to feel the paper.

After all, that's what made you guys rich, right?

I'm sending a copy of this blog to Amazon and will be posting their response.

Selling self

Tuesday this week I sat by my stall in Alison's Poolewe Tuesday Market, promoting (i.e. selling) my new books; the autobiography SO WHAT? and the novel Like An Angel Sings. 

Although I have much historic experience of selling my stuff in markets and to shops around the Highlands of Scotland I could not say I have always enjoyed it. That might be because it demands a considerable degree of self-adulation - and self-adulation was always regarded as a quality for those either of low-caste or of politics! In the author's preamble to my new autobiography, SO WHAT? I quote Shakespeare's Julius Caesar ... I cannot tell what you and other men / Think of this (that is, his own) life / but, for my single self, / I had as lief not be as live to be / In awe of such a thing as I myself.

All that aside, if you want to go through the immense pains and pleasures of writing your own life story - never mind fictional stories of the lives of fictional others - you had better be prepared to get yourself out there, doing a hell of a lot of selling both soft and hard. There are few things more depressing to a writer than the sight of dusty piles of his unloved / unwanted, high cost books! Of course one thing more depressing is the target's flat negative repeated many times more than the occasional positive.

In America they spend a deal of time teaching tyro salesmen how to react (or not to react) when confronted by the target customer's classic instruction: 'pick up your shit and fuck off'! But in all truth I have seldom experienced rudeness on anything like that scale when being blanked out by a prospect. And certainly never at the Poolewe Market or anywhere in these Highlands of Scotland.

Why did I give up on the markets two years back? Some will know from these blogs or my new autobiography SO WHAT? that not long after Delia died I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, my life then potentially having its sell-by label. I became easily tired and lost a lot of my physical strength. That was when the owner / manager of the regular Tuesday market at Poolewe, Alison Rushbrooke, came to my rescue. She actually volunteered to run my stall for me. Where else than the Highlands of Scotland would you encounter such an unbelievable gesture of goodwill?

Anyway I was pleased this week both with my market - the closest to being once more one of a comfortable team - and its sales results. We all react with happiness to praise, however well concealed and the greatest of that happiness comes when somebody actually puts their hand in their pocket and hands you some of their hard earned cash in exchange for the product of your own daily toil and talent. That's true whether it be in the form of an end of month salary cheque or the purchase of one of my books.

The feedback is good. I really feel like a writer, age immaterial, cancer immaterial.

If writing is architecture rather than interior design, as claimed by my friend Ernest Hemingway, then I can the my Taj Mahal arising.

Playing the game

Yesterday should have been a cornucopia of sporting excellence, and so it was for the most part: the T20 cricket final in India, Leicester City's fourth in a row football win by one goal to nil, the starting lap of the Bahrain F1 - all brilliant spectacles if so very regrettably and so very deeply flawed by the behaviour of those involved; the abso9lute opposite of sportsmanship. I cannot be alone in not wanting to see - indeed being embarrassed by the absurd triumphalism of modern day professional 'sportsmen'.

Cricketers hurling foul-mouthed insults at each other on the back of a game infinitely better than its players.

Footballers rushing and hugging and rolling around and, yes, even kissing man to man when a ball finds the opposition's net whether by intent or assisted by chance. 

One F1 'team-mate' sneeringly and unlovingly decrying the well-earned victory of another. (My grandson could drive any of their beautiful machines as fast as do either of them, with opportunity and training, and would behave properly in the process, I sincerely hope.)

Yes, I do know we live no longer, if we ever did, in a world of gentlemanly fair play. But the spectacle of these hugely overpaid 'stars' performing like the guttersnipes they are - this is in no way appetising.


It hurts me most of all to see my own sporting hero, having lost a tennis match, publicly smashing his racket time again and time again in a mind-numbing fit of blind petulance.

I think I'll stick to watching snooker where I can see talented players, often from the most disadvantaged of family backgrounds perform in emotionless silence as if life depends on winning yet shaking hands with respect at the end of the game - and that's the end of it, 'til next time.

So what next?

Today my new novel Like An Angel Sings is released by Amazon, Kindle and that big brigade of bookseller shops - if only to a muted fanfare of trumpets! At the same time and probably to similar ineffect comes my SO WHAT?, the autobiography created mostly here on this blog.

So what next? Well, I'm not short of choices. The world is full of stories - my world is, anyway, the world of imagination. I could make a new start on Rose Feather, the novel half written twenty years ago about a young lady snooker player and her dissolute father. Or I could morph any one of half a dozen short stories into long ones, in particular the five thousand word story called Willie's Place in the anthology entitled Twenty Bites. Or  ... for month after month whilst writing and re-writing and editing over and over again my Like An Angel Sings I knew the story of Jamie Case could not be neatly tied up in some kind of happy ever after ending. I wanted to go on with, at the very least, an extra hundred thousand words. Impractical. Now, I'm not overfond of the thing called a sequel but my choice for what next is just that - call it Like An Angel Sings Again even though that will definitely not be the title. Furthermore this sequel will link up with my second novel, Going with Gabriel.  

If you have read my autobiography you'll know I have not been present at the birth of any of my children. But I imagine it is not that much different (for the male gender) to the pain and the pleasure of giving birth to the first paragraphs of a novel. And the future of that novel cannot be that much more uncertain than that of emerging baby. So share thie following with me ... It helps if you have read Like An Angel Sings  and its predecessor, Going with Gabriel ... but not essential.



Chapter one


As instructed he left the cottage in total silence, dark into windy, rainy darkness. He stumbled as best he could down to the shore, unable to make out the waiting inflatable until the last moment. Taking great care he scrambled over the loch-side boulders. No more back pain these days. In silence the man he knew only as Gabriel took his hand, assisting his ungainly embarkation. He could feel the bump and scrape on the rocks beneath as he settled down in the boat's bow. He looked out across the water. The riding lights of the warship glimmered in and out. Inland, the croft cottage, his home these six months past, was invisible but Rita Mackenzie’s cottage as always had a light left on. For her dog, Crack, she’d said.
Jamie Case felt a sickness that had nothing to do with the heaving of the sea.
Gabriel pushed them off with an oar then began to row westerly towards the mouth of the loch, keeping as close in as he could to the shore line, presumably to decrease the chances of being picked up by the warship’s electronic surveillance. After the best part of a wordless and ultra-wet hour they left the cover of the rocks and cut across the sandy bay on which, only this evening, he had spoken to and played his tin whistle for all the people. Having once more arrived alongside a jumble of shore side boulders Gabriel temporarily stopped rowing. ‘You O.K. now, James?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I’m good. Where are we headed?’
‘About another hour or so we’ll be well round the headland. You know there’s no road or pathway along there after the beach. There’s a bit of a cave in the cliffs not far past the point. Accessible only by sea unless at low spring tide. There are a couple of friends waiting for us there. We’ll be OK in there while the hue and cry dies down.’
‘I won’t ask you what then, after that,’ Jamie said.
‘No. But it’s all good. You’ll find out, young man.’ He had a nice voice, this Gabriel. Calm, good humoured. ‘You brought your tin whistle?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good again. We’ll be playing duets. You in the lead.’
I'm going to try to write a chapter a month, 'publishing' it here. You know what they say; a man's reach should exceed his grasp. We'll see ...