Bryan Islip's Blog, page 2
March 31, 2016
I hear the music still
Two years ago next month I was diagnosed with advanced prostate. I took the pills and the injections but six months ago I'm heading for a holiday with my son and family in Spain when I got as far as Paisley before having to get back on a train for Inverness and home. Never will I forget being met off that train by my good friend Jackie and a young porter with a wheelchair. Nor will I forget, having got back home, collapsing and not even being able, for some long time, to open the locked door to admit my helpers.. At that point I realised that, if I thought I had experienced extreme pain before in my life, I really hadn't! So it's Saturday night and I'm back to Raigmore hospital by ambulance. 'I'm putting you on these new chemo type pills,' announced the head oncologist, 'And you'll be staying here for a week of lying stock still plus a short, intense course of radiotherapy.'
'Thank you, doctor,' said I, believing I was on the last page of my final chapter. I wasn't. Now, half a year later I'm virtually pain free and have mostly resumed normal service, (well, whatever that might be for an eighty one years old!). And I've managed to finish and today self-publish a new novel - Like An Angel Sings - plus my autobiography, SO WHAT?
I'll keep taking the pills and writing to the very best of my ability and reading good books and having good moments with good friends and family. But of course I think a lot about my wives; Dee who passed away from me an astonishing two and a half years ago and Joan, mother of my beloved children, who left us eighteen years back. In a roundabout way Joan is remembered in the title of my latest novel.
Imagine: it is almost midnight, I'm sitting up in bed reading Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice, Dee fast asleep beside me. I come to this passage where Lorenzo, a gentile, is wooing his hoped for bride to be Jessica, a jewess - a liaison strictly forbidden by both families.They are walking in a moon-lit wood ... Lorenzo wants Jessica to understand the music of the spheres - the rhythmically sweet sounds of our living, breathing universe. He says ...
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
As I finish re-reading this passage the phone rings. It's the night sister at Joan's nursing home. She tells me that my wife, my lover since our teenage years, the mother of our children and the sufferer of some twenty years of multiple schlerosis has finally ceased to live.
I see the stars. I hear the music still.
'Thank you, doctor,' said I, believing I was on the last page of my final chapter. I wasn't. Now, half a year later I'm virtually pain free and have mostly resumed normal service, (well, whatever that might be for an eighty one years old!). And I've managed to finish and today self-publish a new novel - Like An Angel Sings - plus my autobiography, SO WHAT?
I'll keep taking the pills and writing to the very best of my ability and reading good books and having good moments with good friends and family. But of course I think a lot about my wives; Dee who passed away from me an astonishing two and a half years ago and Joan, mother of my beloved children, who left us eighteen years back. In a roundabout way Joan is remembered in the title of my latest novel.
Imagine: it is almost midnight, I'm sitting up in bed reading Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice, Dee fast asleep beside me. I come to this passage where Lorenzo, a gentile, is wooing his hoped for bride to be Jessica, a jewess - a liaison strictly forbidden by both families.They are walking in a moon-lit wood ... Lorenzo wants Jessica to understand the music of the spheres - the rhythmically sweet sounds of our living, breathing universe. He says ...
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
As I finish re-reading this passage the phone rings. It's the night sister at Joan's nursing home. She tells me that my wife, my lover since our teenage years, the mother of our children and the sufferer of some twenty years of multiple schlerosis has finally ceased to live.
I see the stars. I hear the music still.
March 30, 2016
A Land Less Spoiled
A Land Less Spoiled
Our day slows down as last light paints the skyand you can feel the movement of the globe,hear gentle surf, the wheeling seagull's cry,watch land and sea in pastel colours robethis Wester-Ross where calming nature seemsa place of magic that itself redeems,inspires an artist and a poet's dreams.
You think perhaps Blake's feet in ancient timeswould want to tread a land unspoiled as this.There's little discord here where most things rhyme,and all is sensate to an evening's kiss,when no-one's going far and peace is soughtand found; for what this is cannot be bought,and things material count for little, less or nought.
Bryan Islip
It was this little poem, originally composed for the back of my Ardmair painting greetings card, that first inspired the novel Like An Angel Sings, published this day ref 978-0-9555193-9-0. Soon after I wrote the verse I heard of a certain young man who, wandering in the hills, had come across an old, abandoned whisky still; illicit of course. The cave also held a stoneware flagon filled with what would have been whisky (uiscea beatha - aka 'the water of life'.) The young man, consumed with totally misdirected guilt, poured the whisky away into the heather!
March 29, 2016
Reflections
When you write your life story introspection is the price you pay....
Reflections in the form of a sonnet
I cannot claim to have done very much:I’ve never swum an ocean wild and wide;I haven’t met with kings and queens as suchNor slept with famous women by my side.I have not met disaster with broad smiles(‘Though on the other hand there’s been few tears)Nor walked that hard five hundred lonely milesPreferring life with all its problems shared.For me the morning sun will always shine -Sunset’s a time for other (night time) folk;I know there’s paradise for me and mineAnd words I write I hope the stars invoke.Oh yes, I’ve been a mostly happy man,Partaking Adam’s fruits whene’er I can.
Bryan IslipApril 1 2016for those I know and love and those I’d like to…
March 28, 2016
Read any good books lately?
Good day, world! Well, it seems as if I have survived the winter with a new lease of life...
These are my newly published books, released April 1st on Amazon. Kindle and, as they say, all good bookshops (on request). My latest novel Like An Angel Sings - 978-0-9555193-9-0 and my autobiography SO WHAT? 978-0-9555193-7-6. Their respective back cover blurbs are …
(For Like An Angel Sings RRP paperback £8.99) Ben and Marie Case are forced to stay overnight in a cave on Beinn Torrobach in north west Scotland. The contents of the cave, ancient and not so ancient are to have a bearing not only on their lives but, through their teenage son Jamie, the lives of many others world wide. Jamie was born with a spina bifida condition and an exceptional imagination / intelligence. He is also a new-found musical savant who recognises the so-called music of the spheres, so well known in pre-history. There is also the healing significance of his parents’ other accidental discoveries inside that mountain cave. And did those feet, in ancient times, really walk upon Scotland’s mountains bleak?
(For SO WHAT? RRP paperback £8.00) There’s nothing consciously egotistical or contrived here. Just the truth and nothing but the truth as best I recall it, each memory tumbling out, like it or not, from the shadows of my life. The 84 edited episodes (‘essays’) in this book started out as web blogs over the months of 2014 / 15. They cover my event-filled years between 1934 and 2015. Yes, I am now eighty one and reasonably fit apart from the rogue cells of an advanced prostate cancer. I find that nothing to worry about. Just mother nature getting set to call me in, perhaps to the most exciting of all my adventures.
Hope all well with you guys. Buy my books! How the hell else is their author ever going to make it to Hollywood?.
Bryan
These are my newly published books, released April 1st on Amazon. Kindle and, as they say, all good bookshops (on request). My latest novel Like An Angel Sings - 978-0-9555193-9-0 and my autobiography SO WHAT? 978-0-9555193-7-6. Their respective back cover blurbs are …
(For Like An Angel Sings RRP paperback £8.99) Ben and Marie Case are forced to stay overnight in a cave on Beinn Torrobach in north west Scotland. The contents of the cave, ancient and not so ancient are to have a bearing not only on their lives but, through their teenage son Jamie, the lives of many others world wide. Jamie was born with a spina bifida condition and an exceptional imagination / intelligence. He is also a new-found musical savant who recognises the so-called music of the spheres, so well known in pre-history. There is also the healing significance of his parents’ other accidental discoveries inside that mountain cave. And did those feet, in ancient times, really walk upon Scotland’s mountains bleak?
(For SO WHAT? RRP paperback £8.00) There’s nothing consciously egotistical or contrived here. Just the truth and nothing but the truth as best I recall it, each memory tumbling out, like it or not, from the shadows of my life. The 84 edited episodes (‘essays’) in this book started out as web blogs over the months of 2014 / 15. They cover my event-filled years between 1934 and 2015. Yes, I am now eighty one and reasonably fit apart from the rogue cells of an advanced prostate cancer. I find that nothing to worry about. Just mother nature getting set to call me in, perhaps to the most exciting of all my adventures.
Hope all well with you guys. Buy my books! How the hell else is their author ever going to make it to Hollywood?.
Bryan
March 19, 2016
The first of the essays
After a bit of techno-scrambling I finally received finished copies of my auto-bio: SO WHAT? Here's the first of my book's 84 blogs / essays ...
SO WHAT?
1. Early daysMy birth certificate tells us I was born to Marie and Edwin Islip in Chigwell, North London, on the 23rd of October 1934. My father tells me I was born dead and was granted an existence only by the good doctor who persisted in swinging me about by my baby ankles. Welcome, Bryan Henry Islip, to this Vale of Tears.My only pre-world war two memory is of a family picnic / fishing day out in Epping Forest, just to the northeast of London. Quite recently I wrote a long narrative poem about my early love of the piscatorial arts. It included these lines …I would have been aged about four …
But I remember the finger-feelof warm black earth, uprooted turfthat we hand-dug in search of bait from the soft bank, wriggly worms,for whom I felt that sadness: and still I feel the sleepy weight of summer through sun-shaft foliageoverhead; green, golden, shifting, and still the moving water glistens; I hear the ruckle of its slow running, swirling, cold to my bare feet, and the insect drone of tiny wings amidst the waxy drowse of that forest.
I have to assume that mother, father, two years old sister Shirley and now baby Bryan were living in some kind of modest suburban affluence, for shortly after the outbreak of the second world war I have a fractured memory of getting used to our ‘just-for-practice’ nights in the Anderson bomb shelter at the bottom of our garden. At any rate, unless memory plays me false I am sure my five years old self was, with the rest of the nation, crowded around our radio as Mr Nevelle Chamberlain spoke so very sonorously that we were now in a state of war with Germany. As the echoes of world war one must still have been sounding and most of my little boy toys were military I do remember that this didn’t seem to me to be at all bad news. Father’s position as a quantity surveyor with The Ministry ensured that he was needed more for the construction of war-time airfields than the wearing of any uniform other than that, eventually, of the Home Guard. His work on the giant USAF airbase at Burtonwood in Lancashire led to the whole family, now increased to myself and Shirley plus Tina and Maureen, migrating north, away from London’s bombing. I understand that soon after we left Chigwell an enemy bomb landed foursquare on our Anderson shelter, leading to the local newspaper’s obituary account of the complete demise of the entire Islips! One of my earliest clear memories is of the long car ride from Essex to Lancashire in father’s Morgan sports car. Traversing a bridge over the river Ribble my daddy stopped the car. I watched him as he scrambled down to the waterside and came back up after a while carrying a mighty salmon that by his account had stranded itself in a bankside pool. Fish and fishing would become a fixation, one that would last all of my life. This is another little extract from my poem ‘Fisherboy’ …
…but this is fishing, nineteen forty two.Lancashire pond, shiveringly deeprush fringed, overhanging willows,dark skies, menace, mirror calm,whatever monster lurks down there?My father is handing me his rod, shiny soft feel of its cork handletiny bobble float red and white, with quill upright out in the middle. ‘Watch it, now, pay attention’,he instructed, (as if I needed it),and yet I miss the strike when, dis-believing, I no more see a float,just plop within those circle ripples,gone. ‘Too late, Bryan’, father says,and I feel his disappointment in me in spite of all my good intent, and in myself , all passion spent.
I think I must have been something of a risk taker even then, for to this day I bear a scar central on my forehead from an injury sustained in falling off some wall on to an iron railing. Much blood, much panicked mummy! I detested infant school in my new home village of Walton-le-Dale. In fact I’m not sure if I was or wasn’t in the act of absenting myself when falling off that wall. But I so well remember sitting with mummy and daddy in the headmaster’s office; the latter, stern of face, asking me whether I reallywished to let down my family so much? I understood that by my family he meant my maternal grandfather Albert Osborne, then the world-wide General of the Salvation Army. I remember him well, grandfather Osborne; a very big man in all senses.
When the U.S.A. entered the war on our side huge convoys of American vehicles would crawl up Chorley Road past our house. This is an extract from another of my long, autobiographical poems, the one I call Early Stirrings …
There’s this eight year old in war-time Lancashire when the doorto England opens wide as his eyes,and they’re singing or hummingall about The Yanks Are Coming, mother says they'll help us win whilst father mutters better late … And me? I’m bedazzled, silent,standing outside our garden gateat the village roadside, puzzled,when that great convoy passes.Puzzled by Yankee imprecationsin language strangely accentedwhilst they throw out small tins of proper coffee and Wrigley’s much sought after chewing gum for us to scramble over: but whywould they want to meet the girls of Walton-le-Dale? I wonder,for girls are so boring, at least, as are my sisters three to meand girls can’t even fight the German Hun or Eyeties, anyone.But still there are more interesting things than where the fighting's beenor what goes on unseen behind the sightscreen on the green:like exploring the summer fields,and fishing (if father was home)or watching him shoot bottles off our fence, or birds alivewith his Home Guard forty five(he let me hold it, unloaded),and learning from a local boy to tell an ordinary rabbit hole from a breeding burrow, pull out a baby with a bramble, so at school I tried to please butit was not there I felt at ease, and my classes dragged along,and learning right from wrong,and how the price of wrong is pain and ‘Bryan, don’t do that again’,yes, my world is full of fearsas dreams turn often into tears,'til came the time in that farmer’s barn with its piled high bales of straw, where up on top I hide, watch that Yankee soldier ridea breathless, laughing village girlwith all that grunting, groaning ending in strange female crying,and I feel unreasoned angeralthough lustful wings are whirringand thus there is that early stirring.
No doubt totally the wrong kind of sex education, but I had begun to notice the biological differences between myself and my sisters three.
I learned to fear my father - or rather his inexplicably foul moods when the rest of us so wanted him - and us and everything - to be happy. One Christmas we had all been sitting with mother ahead of father’s return from his work in London for what seemed like ages making paper chains with which to decorate the house When daddy arrived he took no notice of our decorations. Soon enough the shouting began; that is, father shouting, mother saying nothing, which simply resulted in the upping of his volume. He raged around, tearing down our careful work, yelling inexplicably about how there could be no Christmas in this house!
It’s the little things that years later are still there in the forefront of one’s mind. It must have been for my seventh birthday that my parents presented me with what automatically became my prized possession: a pearl handled penknife. A few days later I was by myself in the nearby woods, cutting my initials on to a tree when along came three much bigger boys. One of them said he’d teach me to throw my knife from a distance so that it would stick in the tree trunk. Needless to say that was the last I would see of my precious possession. I ran home in tears. Daddy asked me what was wrong. When I told him he ordered me to go back to the wood, find those boys and retrieve the knife. I roved around in the trees until dark, of course without finding them - in fact dreading to find them for what was I to do if I did? As punish-ment for that I was made to bend over for a good hiding with a carpet slipper, my mummy crying in the background. I was lucky. The more extreme punishment came via daddy’s leather leather belt.
I think I must have been quite a shy little boy. The time came when, instead of being escorted to the barber shop by mother, father gave me the money and told me to go by myself. I was racked with embarassment. On returning home father flew into a rage, declaring that the barber had ‘hardly touched’ a part of my hair. I was to go back by myself and demand a ‘proper haircut’, he said. For ages I walked up and down outside the shop. I think the barber must have seen me and understood this strange little eight year old’s problem, for when I did finally pluck up courage to go back in he made no fuss about it; made no extra charge, either.
In spite of all I really loved my father; idolised him in fact especially when he donned his officer’s Home Guard uniform and practiced firing his sten gun, shooting, or trying to shoot tin cans off our back garden fence. But it was mother who I loved the most. I recollect the sheer beauty of the woman and I truly relished the comforting warmth of her love for me. But strangely disturbing things were to happen. Mother put Shirley, aged twelve and myself aged ten on a London bound train at Preston. I could not understand it when I realised that she was not coming with us. I see her still; she is waving as our train pulls away, tears sparkling on her face. I would neither see nor hear from my mother again for the following forty two years.
So what next? I've no idea; looking for / waiting for marketing inspiration. All ideas welcome. But if you would like to read on try asking for ISBN 978-0-9555193-7-6 in the bookshops or on Amazon after April 1st or calling me for a signed copy on e-m bryan@bryanislip.com. I'll send you the book. Then you'll send me the £8.99. OK?
SO WHAT?
1. Early daysMy birth certificate tells us I was born to Marie and Edwin Islip in Chigwell, North London, on the 23rd of October 1934. My father tells me I was born dead and was granted an existence only by the good doctor who persisted in swinging me about by my baby ankles. Welcome, Bryan Henry Islip, to this Vale of Tears.My only pre-world war two memory is of a family picnic / fishing day out in Epping Forest, just to the northeast of London. Quite recently I wrote a long narrative poem about my early love of the piscatorial arts. It included these lines …I would have been aged about four …
But I remember the finger-feelof warm black earth, uprooted turfthat we hand-dug in search of bait from the soft bank, wriggly worms,for whom I felt that sadness: and still I feel the sleepy weight of summer through sun-shaft foliageoverhead; green, golden, shifting, and still the moving water glistens; I hear the ruckle of its slow running, swirling, cold to my bare feet, and the insect drone of tiny wings amidst the waxy drowse of that forest.
I have to assume that mother, father, two years old sister Shirley and now baby Bryan were living in some kind of modest suburban affluence, for shortly after the outbreak of the second world war I have a fractured memory of getting used to our ‘just-for-practice’ nights in the Anderson bomb shelter at the bottom of our garden. At any rate, unless memory plays me false I am sure my five years old self was, with the rest of the nation, crowded around our radio as Mr Nevelle Chamberlain spoke so very sonorously that we were now in a state of war with Germany. As the echoes of world war one must still have been sounding and most of my little boy toys were military I do remember that this didn’t seem to me to be at all bad news. Father’s position as a quantity surveyor with The Ministry ensured that he was needed more for the construction of war-time airfields than the wearing of any uniform other than that, eventually, of the Home Guard. His work on the giant USAF airbase at Burtonwood in Lancashire led to the whole family, now increased to myself and Shirley plus Tina and Maureen, migrating north, away from London’s bombing. I understand that soon after we left Chigwell an enemy bomb landed foursquare on our Anderson shelter, leading to the local newspaper’s obituary account of the complete demise of the entire Islips! One of my earliest clear memories is of the long car ride from Essex to Lancashire in father’s Morgan sports car. Traversing a bridge over the river Ribble my daddy stopped the car. I watched him as he scrambled down to the waterside and came back up after a while carrying a mighty salmon that by his account had stranded itself in a bankside pool. Fish and fishing would become a fixation, one that would last all of my life. This is another little extract from my poem ‘Fisherboy’ …
…but this is fishing, nineteen forty two.Lancashire pond, shiveringly deeprush fringed, overhanging willows,dark skies, menace, mirror calm,whatever monster lurks down there?My father is handing me his rod, shiny soft feel of its cork handletiny bobble float red and white, with quill upright out in the middle. ‘Watch it, now, pay attention’,he instructed, (as if I needed it),and yet I miss the strike when, dis-believing, I no more see a float,just plop within those circle ripples,gone. ‘Too late, Bryan’, father says,and I feel his disappointment in me in spite of all my good intent, and in myself , all passion spent.
I think I must have been something of a risk taker even then, for to this day I bear a scar central on my forehead from an injury sustained in falling off some wall on to an iron railing. Much blood, much panicked mummy! I detested infant school in my new home village of Walton-le-Dale. In fact I’m not sure if I was or wasn’t in the act of absenting myself when falling off that wall. But I so well remember sitting with mummy and daddy in the headmaster’s office; the latter, stern of face, asking me whether I reallywished to let down my family so much? I understood that by my family he meant my maternal grandfather Albert Osborne, then the world-wide General of the Salvation Army. I remember him well, grandfather Osborne; a very big man in all senses.
When the U.S.A. entered the war on our side huge convoys of American vehicles would crawl up Chorley Road past our house. This is an extract from another of my long, autobiographical poems, the one I call Early Stirrings …
There’s this eight year old in war-time Lancashire when the doorto England opens wide as his eyes,and they’re singing or hummingall about The Yanks Are Coming, mother says they'll help us win whilst father mutters better late … And me? I’m bedazzled, silent,standing outside our garden gateat the village roadside, puzzled,when that great convoy passes.Puzzled by Yankee imprecationsin language strangely accentedwhilst they throw out small tins of proper coffee and Wrigley’s much sought after chewing gum for us to scramble over: but whywould they want to meet the girls of Walton-le-Dale? I wonder,for girls are so boring, at least, as are my sisters three to meand girls can’t even fight the German Hun or Eyeties, anyone.But still there are more interesting things than where the fighting's beenor what goes on unseen behind the sightscreen on the green:like exploring the summer fields,and fishing (if father was home)or watching him shoot bottles off our fence, or birds alivewith his Home Guard forty five(he let me hold it, unloaded),and learning from a local boy to tell an ordinary rabbit hole from a breeding burrow, pull out a baby with a bramble, so at school I tried to please butit was not there I felt at ease, and my classes dragged along,and learning right from wrong,and how the price of wrong is pain and ‘Bryan, don’t do that again’,yes, my world is full of fearsas dreams turn often into tears,'til came the time in that farmer’s barn with its piled high bales of straw, where up on top I hide, watch that Yankee soldier ridea breathless, laughing village girlwith all that grunting, groaning ending in strange female crying,and I feel unreasoned angeralthough lustful wings are whirringand thus there is that early stirring.
No doubt totally the wrong kind of sex education, but I had begun to notice the biological differences between myself and my sisters three.
I learned to fear my father - or rather his inexplicably foul moods when the rest of us so wanted him - and us and everything - to be happy. One Christmas we had all been sitting with mother ahead of father’s return from his work in London for what seemed like ages making paper chains with which to decorate the house When daddy arrived he took no notice of our decorations. Soon enough the shouting began; that is, father shouting, mother saying nothing, which simply resulted in the upping of his volume. He raged around, tearing down our careful work, yelling inexplicably about how there could be no Christmas in this house!
It’s the little things that years later are still there in the forefront of one’s mind. It must have been for my seventh birthday that my parents presented me with what automatically became my prized possession: a pearl handled penknife. A few days later I was by myself in the nearby woods, cutting my initials on to a tree when along came three much bigger boys. One of them said he’d teach me to throw my knife from a distance so that it would stick in the tree trunk. Needless to say that was the last I would see of my precious possession. I ran home in tears. Daddy asked me what was wrong. When I told him he ordered me to go back to the wood, find those boys and retrieve the knife. I roved around in the trees until dark, of course without finding them - in fact dreading to find them for what was I to do if I did? As punish-ment for that I was made to bend over for a good hiding with a carpet slipper, my mummy crying in the background. I was lucky. The more extreme punishment came via daddy’s leather leather belt.
I think I must have been quite a shy little boy. The time came when, instead of being escorted to the barber shop by mother, father gave me the money and told me to go by myself. I was racked with embarassment. On returning home father flew into a rage, declaring that the barber had ‘hardly touched’ a part of my hair. I was to go back by myself and demand a ‘proper haircut’, he said. For ages I walked up and down outside the shop. I think the barber must have seen me and understood this strange little eight year old’s problem, for when I did finally pluck up courage to go back in he made no fuss about it; made no extra charge, either.
In spite of all I really loved my father; idolised him in fact especially when he donned his officer’s Home Guard uniform and practiced firing his sten gun, shooting, or trying to shoot tin cans off our back garden fence. But it was mother who I loved the most. I recollect the sheer beauty of the woman and I truly relished the comforting warmth of her love for me. But strangely disturbing things were to happen. Mother put Shirley, aged twelve and myself aged ten on a London bound train at Preston. I could not understand it when I realised that she was not coming with us. I see her still; she is waving as our train pulls away, tears sparkling on her face. I would neither see nor hear from my mother again for the following forty two years.
So what next? I've no idea; looking for / waiting for marketing inspiration. All ideas welcome. But if you would like to read on try asking for ISBN 978-0-9555193-7-6 in the bookshops or on Amazon after April 1st or calling me for a signed copy on e-m bryan@bryanislip.com. I'll send you the book. Then you'll send me the £8.99. OK?
February 29, 2016
February 28, 2016
Words
Words
After sixty yearsFocussing on right nowI found the two fine walkersColeridge and his friend Mr William Wordsworth, Had a brief skirmish with That other wondrous set,The dreamer Keats, the Poetic mister ShelleyAnd the bad Lord B, Went backwards in timeThrough Swift and PopeAnd Dryden to blind MiltonIn his metronomically Agonistic anti-ParadiseTo find my friend John Donne,A love-struck island to himself,The whiff of somethingOf great meaning thusBecoming ever obvious; Like incense As the swinging starts.
Breathless, reading muchOf Elizabethan and suchI circled Shakespeare, But warily, for a long whileKeeping nervous distanceUnsure about this EverestOr maybe of my ability To climb it or find the light That so many others find,Went back a long strideBut Chaucer was too tough,Loved Spencer's Faerie QueenThen fell on Tamburlaine,From reckless Marlow and,Ah! Here it is, (I thought,)The source! that riverOf sweet scented mistsStill coiled and flowedAnd thrust and heaved And his words livedAnd in his halcyon shade I lay and took my rest awhileAnd read how ShakespeareWas perhaps Marlowe Come live with me and be my love
They or some one wrote.Although to me it mattered Only that they were.
And then in WinchesterIn the dusty- silent attic Of that antiquarian book shop Logan Pearsall-Smith's1928 Jewel of a treatise,On Reading Shakespeare,Lay opened in my handAs when something flashedBrightly in a muddy fieldAnd you stooped to pick it upAnd you were looking Into the bright sun-colours Of a diamond.
And so the good professor Opened up the door Switched on the lightsAnd there for me that wondrous treasuryOf works to brighten up my daysTo hold an explanation for my nights.Thus, in the beginning,Were his Words.
Bryan IslipApril 98
December 11, 2015
SO WHAT?
Having not written any blogs for a couple of months I have been told some folk were wondering whether I had been gathered in by that old grim reaper!
Not just yet! I have been putting together all these autobiological blogs, editing them and preparing the result for publication under the title Me, My Life, SO WHAT? Will I or anyone else ever publish it? I have at present no firm idea. I suppose much depends upon the final shape and perceived force of my third novel A Kind of Harmony, and it is this that will occupy my remaining days.
In the meantime this is the preamble to SO WHAT? ...
Preamble
About a year ago my youngest son remarked quite casually that 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’ lives and are always curious. So I started blogging in November 2014 as I start here, with one of a couple of narrative poems; the one reproduced by way of a prologue called ‘Fisherboy’and the other concerning my sexual awakening entitled ‘Early Stirrings’ which is not reproduced here.
It took me about a year to cover through irregular blogs, in roughly chronological order, the years between 1939 and 2015. This book, SO WHAT?, is a compendium, an edited gathering together.
Why should I or any non-‘celebrity’ put themselves through the toil and sometime pain of remembering and producing with as much care as he/she possibly can - perhaps even publishing - these one hundred thousand words? That’s a question that has been asked of me by a well meaning friend and one which I have indeed often asked of myself these twelve months past. I regret, friend and self, having no answer other than, perhaps, the traditional and equally pathetic answer to the eternal question, why do you want to climb that mountain?
It has nothing to do with money or expectation of a readership or ego. You should know that I am in no way egotistical. I have little to be proud about anyway! Furthermore there are warts in abundance within the life described here and I can hardly be proud about them! On the contrary I consider myself, whenever I might bother with any introspection, a humble kind of a man …
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this 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.
(Shakespeare: Julius Caesar)
The first lines of my main text will tell you that my bodily structure is today well inhabited by advanced prostate cancer cells. Therefore I am expecting, soon enough, to embark on that mighty adventure that goes by the name of death. I literally shiver with excitement at the prospect of meeting once more, soul to soul, not only both of my wives who, if you read these pages, you will come to know I have loved, but perhaps even the author of the words above along with the other poets and the writers and the artists who have added their star spangled lustre to this man’s often pain-filled pathway through his life on earth.
Bryan Islip
December 2015
October 18, 2015
P.S.
The fifteen years old boy in my novel in progress was born with a spina bifida condition and an exceptional brain and an exceptional mother who is educating him at home. He has used the net extensively to research and has learned, out of the company of other children to think differently than others. He might have read these words, as written down by Wm Shakespeare in the play called Hamlet ...
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In composing the pages of this autobiography I have often thought, yes, what a marvellous piece of bio-mechanical engineering I am - and you are - and are we all! What an even more marvellous mystery lies behind all of us that propels our individual and group actions through each and every millisecond of our lives here on planet earth!
I suppose the lucky ones are they who would dispute that previous paragraph because for them human bio-mechanics are of but secondary interest. We are what we are, such folk would argue, and no underlying mystery exists because all is either explained by my Godhead or not explained by It / Him. We are not to bother about it.
Me, I suppose through my years I’ve gone like most of us through the usual arc of thinking on such things; beginning with dear father which art in heaven hallowed be thy name … etc, which morphes into natural scepticism - there’s only what’s here and when you’re dead there’s nothing else.After that, this is not as good as I had hoped so what’s it all about? Is this really all? This cannot be all! I have not yet reached the final ‘please God help me! but at the age of 81 my personal conclusions are that there is indeed something mysterious that goes by the title of a human soul and that there is no reason for this not to survive the body corporate. That being so - hey! there is a hereafter, after all; this life must therefore be its hereunder. The logical conclusion, for yours truly, is that the transition from the hereunder to the hereafter - aka death - will surely be the very most powerful of my - or any of our adventures. Beautiful dreaming!
At any rate it has become clear to me that although the species of animal of which I am one is a marvel amongst creatures great and small, it is at the same time deeply flawed. We have consistently sought to damage as well as to create. Nothing has been safe from our depredations. How consistently we have tried to hurt our fellow man (and woman to a much lesser extent), and our fellow man has sought to hurt us. Not only that, but we as a species have, either consciously or carelessly extended our destructive force to other life forms here on earth. We even seek unconsciously to destroy the host planet itself. I cannot think of a single way in which the air, the sea and the main substance of this planet is anything other than damaged now compared with how it was on the day I was born. I take no pleasure in saying this, but in truth if we were, all of us, to disappear overnight all other forms of life on earth would heave one almighty sigh of relief.
In writing this accidental autobiography (I say 'accidental' for in answering my youngest son's question about my early life I had no idea that an autobiography would be the outcome) I have tried to stick to straight reportage, albeit couched in the most careful language at my command. I have for the most part avoided the temptation to comment on things in general or the world at large. I have left such things, as I have left that which I see as our saving grace until now.
Our saving grace, it seems to me, is this ... you and I are a part of the one, so-privileged species that has it in its power to create things beautiful as well as things ugly, to recognise such creation for what it is and to find within it a proper and personal raison d'etre. Most importantly we have it in our power to amend our own behaviour so as to accentuate the beautiful and eliminate the ugly. Will we ever learn so to do? If we do then we shall have created Milton's Paradise. If we do not then we shall be no more.
Science (aka insatiable curiosity) is what ratchets up the degree of difficulty on the road to redemption. I posit that, even if we could find through our science the answers to each and every question thrown up by our combined intelligence and imagination, we would know not one billionth of what there is to know. So perhaps we should wise up, learn to live well with the blessings already given, bloody well stop trying to become our own God of a security and comfort ('wealth') greater than that 'belonging' to our neighbour. Perhaps we should listen to the music, i.e. the beautiful creations, some of it musical, of those who have preceded us. Each generation produces beauty in many, many forms even though it may seem in diminishing scale as time unrolls.
I look out of the window. There I see the jagged skyline of ancient Torridian mountains (today against a powder blue sky for a welcome change!). It uplifts me as does Brahms symphony number four that’s playing on the radio right now or the sight of that ragged V’s of barnacle geese that overflew me a few moments ago or the snatch of Shakespeare at the head of this postscript. I might shock you by saying what I think makes it difficult or perhaps even impossible for the vast majority of us to access this saving grace in these modern times ... pick any part or all or none of the following ...
science because science feeds our curiosity and falsely claims that nothing exists until 'proven'the media because it is most often better for the soul and the wellbeing simply not to knowmechanical transport: travel that has often become a pointless end in itself rather than a means to a useful endmoney because it does not actually exist and can do nothing to nourish, then satisfy the soulthe advertising of consumer goods because it is designed to create needs that are not needed inheritance and other non-earned gains because something for nothing is always destructive, never creativeI cannot think any of us will ever really be able to get behind the screens listed just above then truly smell the flowers. I hope so but do not think so. We have constructed too many obstacles of too severe a difficulty in the ways in which we have chosen to live our lives. But as I turn over to this last page of my own life at least I can imagine how it would be, once given enough of individual vision and enough determination to actually realise it ... for …
.
I can have Jamie Case succeed where all of us in real life fail:
The novel, A Kind Of Harmony.by Bryan Islipto be published early 2016 or thereafter
This demi-paradise: how beautiful you are ...
October 9, 2015
Thinking of it so far
Ernie Wise used to ask his partner Eric Morecambe, Well, what d'you think of it so far? to which Eric would invariably reply, Rubbish! I guess all of us at times would respond in similar vein when asked how they felt about their lives, and I am no exception. On the other hand we all know and marvel that our lives on planet Earth have at times been filled with sweet harmony; the great beauty that I imagine, in my current novel-in-progress, are glimmering, pinpoint reflections of the everlasting Music of the Spheres.
In these pages I have been able to revisit some of these immense joys as well as to face up to its hurts and disappointments. I here include even the personal shortcomings with which I have all too often played the good cards handed to me at birth. Until this I have never spent much time looking within myself. I have, I suppose, been something of a stargazer rather than ingazer.
So with what gifts and what handicaps, can I now conclude, was I endowed? And how well or badly would I conclude I have used them? I think I was given more than my fair share of good looks, physical fitness and imagination but no more than perhaps above average of intelligence. Measured in terms of fame and fortune I have undoubtedly under-used such assets. Perhaps the key word here is 'character; perhaps it is the force and strength of character that decides how well or how less well we are / have been able to use ourselves. One can after all be congenitally disabled and at the same time a person we would all recognise as being 'good' or even 'great' for any one of a thousand reasons, or on the other hand some genius greek-god-like figure who by general consent is a 'bad' person - in the vernacular, 'a right bastard'! Only time will tell how well or badly I have used my own 'endowments'. That is, of course, should 'time' care to tell anything at all about Bryan Islip. None of us can - nor should ever pretend to be our own judge and jury.
But I do know what has made me especially happy to be me and to be alive. Amongst many, many things that might qualify, most if not all of them of no importance whatsoever to anybody else ...
... Being allowed to walk a young lady named Joan Wood home after the Saturday night dance in York at the De Grey Ballroom ... coming home from work mid-week then taking Robert and Stuart and our boat down to the cold winter night-time Solent to fish for cod ... finding the perfect nest of, and collecting the perfect little egg of a golden-crested wren ... being in Picadilly Circus with my father at the end of ww2 in Europe, one of an enormous crowd listening to and singing along with Ida Lupino out on that hotel balcony I'm gonna get lit up when the lights go on in London ... coming out of that Newmarket cinema into the night after viewing On The Waterfront; (Brando: 'I could've been a contender') ... the exciting smells inside my grandfather's fishing tackle box on Hastings Pier ... walking to work in Cambridge filled with enthusiasm for being a twenty one years old married man with utter confidence in our future ... holidays camping by the beach on Shell Island lying in my sleeping bag listening to the spatter pattering of rain on tight canvas and the eternal, metronimical shushing of wave of shingle... the constantly replenishing heat of lust and sex with wondrous love, (never, ever without) ... the pure perfection of sight and smell (but not necessarily of sound!) of our babies, one by one ... overcoming with that first significant order from Jack's Hill Cafe the early fear of (business) failure ... reading the final pages of Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls ... being presented with my first national short fiction award (for Willie's Place) in that Tottenham Court Road book store ... the all too rare perfection of one particular golf shot (amongst many, many less perfect!) ... the take-off from Riyadh airport in the Heathrow red eye and that first malt whisky after a dry business fortnight under the harsh Saudi sun, order book nicely filled ... reading the very favourable review in the Ross-shire Journal of my first published novel, More Deaths Than One ... that first time, after dinner, when I stood up to address a group of people knowing they were really, really listening, really wanting me (or that which I was to say) somehow to make things better ... watching Stuart in the great big dog show ring with his lovely young vizsla dog Seth in all their pomp - and winning ... reading Tennison or Hemingway to my (early teenage) girls over the breakfast table ... my first ever sale in an Ullapool street market of a greetings card bearing my painting on its front and my verse on its rear ... standing on the beach at Hillhead that glorious morning after I had been advised that my new bosses had no further use for my services and that therefore for the first time in my adult life I was free to do anything, go anywhere within means and reason ... admiring myself in the mirror wearing the light tan harris tweed jacket earned from first earnings at Boots the Chemist in Cambridge, the jacket that my father said made me look like a 'spiv' ... walking into the Stratford-on-Avon restaurant as the guest of my daughter and son-in-law on the occasion of my eightieth birthday to find waiting there my beautiful grandson and granddaughters with their various partners (did I really do all this, I wondered?) ... being the first person to gain the topmost branches of a certain great tree in the grounds of Abingdon School ... the quiver of my beach caster rod tip announcing the arrival of a sea bass ...etcetera
I was planning next to set out a contrary series of miserable low-lights or disappointments in my life but have decided against doing that, having already made myself sufficiently unhappy through their narration within these many pages.
I have tried to tell the truth as faithfully and as well if not as completely as I possibly can, or as I have the courage so to do. I cannot tell the truth completely for to do so would be to hurt myself and others to an unnecessary degree and I have no wish to hurt any of us beyond the bare minimum. Besides, the size and weight of such a tome would be impractical! Neither have I set out here to state my general views on life and the affairs of mankind (although that may come in the next and final postscript episode), for my views would truly be only one man's opinions and are therefore as irrelevant as is today's newspaper editorial which is indeed only another's. My grandfather was an evangelist but I am not. Perhaps that makes him (or you) a better person than I. But telling it as it is, that's one thing; telling it in ways and words that can, if one is lucky, sometimes transcend the content - that is what I have tried to do, whether in this or in my other writings, fiction or non-fiction. Ernest Hemingway wrote that fiction, or any prose, to be any good must be 'truer than the truth' ... and (Death in the Afternoon) ... Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, ... A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. ...
The End
(but not quite the end) 08 October 2015
In these pages I have been able to revisit some of these immense joys as well as to face up to its hurts and disappointments. I here include even the personal shortcomings with which I have all too often played the good cards handed to me at birth. Until this I have never spent much time looking within myself. I have, I suppose, been something of a stargazer rather than ingazer.
So with what gifts and what handicaps, can I now conclude, was I endowed? And how well or badly would I conclude I have used them? I think I was given more than my fair share of good looks, physical fitness and imagination but no more than perhaps above average of intelligence. Measured in terms of fame and fortune I have undoubtedly under-used such assets. Perhaps the key word here is 'character; perhaps it is the force and strength of character that decides how well or how less well we are / have been able to use ourselves. One can after all be congenitally disabled and at the same time a person we would all recognise as being 'good' or even 'great' for any one of a thousand reasons, or on the other hand some genius greek-god-like figure who by general consent is a 'bad' person - in the vernacular, 'a right bastard'! Only time will tell how well or badly I have used my own 'endowments'. That is, of course, should 'time' care to tell anything at all about Bryan Islip. None of us can - nor should ever pretend to be our own judge and jury.
But I do know what has made me especially happy to be me and to be alive. Amongst many, many things that might qualify, most if not all of them of no importance whatsoever to anybody else ...
... Being allowed to walk a young lady named Joan Wood home after the Saturday night dance in York at the De Grey Ballroom ... coming home from work mid-week then taking Robert and Stuart and our boat down to the cold winter night-time Solent to fish for cod ... finding the perfect nest of, and collecting the perfect little egg of a golden-crested wren ... being in Picadilly Circus with my father at the end of ww2 in Europe, one of an enormous crowd listening to and singing along with Ida Lupino out on that hotel balcony I'm gonna get lit up when the lights go on in London ... coming out of that Newmarket cinema into the night after viewing On The Waterfront; (Brando: 'I could've been a contender') ... the exciting smells inside my grandfather's fishing tackle box on Hastings Pier ... walking to work in Cambridge filled with enthusiasm for being a twenty one years old married man with utter confidence in our future ... holidays camping by the beach on Shell Island lying in my sleeping bag listening to the spatter pattering of rain on tight canvas and the eternal, metronimical shushing of wave of shingle... the constantly replenishing heat of lust and sex with wondrous love, (never, ever without) ... the pure perfection of sight and smell (but not necessarily of sound!) of our babies, one by one ... overcoming with that first significant order from Jack's Hill Cafe the early fear of (business) failure ... reading the final pages of Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls ... being presented with my first national short fiction award (for Willie's Place) in that Tottenham Court Road book store ... the all too rare perfection of one particular golf shot (amongst many, many less perfect!) ... the take-off from Riyadh airport in the Heathrow red eye and that first malt whisky after a dry business fortnight under the harsh Saudi sun, order book nicely filled ... reading the very favourable review in the Ross-shire Journal of my first published novel, More Deaths Than One ... that first time, after dinner, when I stood up to address a group of people knowing they were really, really listening, really wanting me (or that which I was to say) somehow to make things better ... watching Stuart in the great big dog show ring with his lovely young vizsla dog Seth in all their pomp - and winning ... reading Tennison or Hemingway to my (early teenage) girls over the breakfast table ... my first ever sale in an Ullapool street market of a greetings card bearing my painting on its front and my verse on its rear ... standing on the beach at Hillhead that glorious morning after I had been advised that my new bosses had no further use for my services and that therefore for the first time in my adult life I was free to do anything, go anywhere within means and reason ... admiring myself in the mirror wearing the light tan harris tweed jacket earned from first earnings at Boots the Chemist in Cambridge, the jacket that my father said made me look like a 'spiv' ... walking into the Stratford-on-Avon restaurant as the guest of my daughter and son-in-law on the occasion of my eightieth birthday to find waiting there my beautiful grandson and granddaughters with their various partners (did I really do all this, I wondered?) ... being the first person to gain the topmost branches of a certain great tree in the grounds of Abingdon School ... the quiver of my beach caster rod tip announcing the arrival of a sea bass ...etcetera
I was planning next to set out a contrary series of miserable low-lights or disappointments in my life but have decided against doing that, having already made myself sufficiently unhappy through their narration within these many pages.
I have tried to tell the truth as faithfully and as well if not as completely as I possibly can, or as I have the courage so to do. I cannot tell the truth completely for to do so would be to hurt myself and others to an unnecessary degree and I have no wish to hurt any of us beyond the bare minimum. Besides, the size and weight of such a tome would be impractical! Neither have I set out here to state my general views on life and the affairs of mankind (although that may come in the next and final postscript episode), for my views would truly be only one man's opinions and are therefore as irrelevant as is today's newspaper editorial which is indeed only another's. My grandfather was an evangelist but I am not. Perhaps that makes him (or you) a better person than I. But telling it as it is, that's one thing; telling it in ways and words that can, if one is lucky, sometimes transcend the content - that is what I have tried to do, whether in this or in my other writings, fiction or non-fiction. Ernest Hemingway wrote that fiction, or any prose, to be any good must be 'truer than the truth' ... and (Death in the Afternoon) ... Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, ... A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. ...
The End
(but not quite the end) 08 October 2015
