Bryan Islip's Blog, page 48

See you there?

Since publishing Twenty Bites people often ask me which is my own favourite short story? Tricky question, a bit like being asked which is your favourite child (assuming you own to having more than one). Some stories are home to my favourite characters, some to favourite settings, some to favourite literary qualities and some to favourite actual story lines.But if I had to pick one story to be incised (though of necessity in exeedingly small letters) on my gravestone that story would probably be the final one in Twenty Bites , 'Speaking of Champions'.

However there is now a new contender. The little fella to which I have just given birth, the story that will flash through cyber space on 1st of March to all short story of the month 'free subscribers' comes very close, and not just because it's my latest. I would dearly like to jump the gun with this one, release it here. But of course cannot / will not - except to put a label on it so you'll know it, if you are a 'free subscriber', when it hits your screen on the appointed day. It is entitled 'There Was A Soldier'. And if you're not yet subscribing just go to www.bryanislipauthor.com and click there - top right hand - to become one. Costs you nothing and for me the more the merrier. You'll get the February story, A Life With Dogs and then on March the first There was A Soldier and then a new one as yet unborn on the first day of each month this year.

I'll on reflection tell you one more thing; the soldier in There Was A Soldier is a Queen's Own Highlander, in fact the section known pre the recent amalgamation and for centuries as 'The Seaforths'. How far does coincidence extend and when does coincidence turn into something verging on the mystical? Yesterday I was invited, quite out of the blue, to read from my works on 5th March, World Book Day - at Ullapool's famous Seaforth Hotel!

See you there?

Such stuff as dreams are made on

As you might have noticed I am not 'into' the celebrity thing - indeed you could say I'm more like out of it, but last night I sat through the BAFTA Awards on TV. Having made one of our very rare excursions across the hills to Inverness to watch it, we were both keen to know whether The Kings Speech would do well. It did and I'm glad it did, for it is a very fine movie of the docudrama genre.

How would I sum up the occasion? Well perhaps ... pretty (pretty expensive) frocks / strained smiles / restrained handclaps /  bad speeches - most not all / vulgar presentation by Jonathan Ross, who never changes / substandard organisation as evidenced, several times, when the presenter/s completely lost it. Not good for these professional showbiz faces. Overall a poorish reflection on the often wonderful British film 'industry'.

Why oh why cannot the speeches be strictly controlled in length per Award - say 4 minutes for Best Film down to say 20 seconds for Best Audio or something. And a total ban of all - yes all - 'heartfelt thankyou's'. Cannot we take those as read, please? And please, please, please - only one person at a time on stage and on mike to represent everyone concerned in receiving a particular Award. In amongst the scrum one awarded person so often hid another awardee's unamused face, not to mention their expensive dress! Awfully embarrassing for them and all of us I thought.

Perhaps at the end of the evening all concerned with BAFTA should bear in mind the written words of their arch-deacon, spoken through the mouth of his Prospero (The Tempest) ...

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all of which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Fiction or fantasy

What is the same about Harry Potter and Tom Brown (of Tom Brown's Schooldays)?  They are both, of course, one hundred percent fictional schoolboys. The obvious difference is that whereas Harry purports to be living in another world, a  world dreamed up in the imagination of author J K Rowling; the second lives in this one, the one of Rugby School, the real world as inhabited by Thomas Hughes, his originator.

You can extend the comparisons at will: Robert Louis Stevenson's Pip Hawkins in the fantasy Treasure Island to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn living by the real Mississippi river; Lewis Carroll's marvellously dreamlike Alice (in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) to Louisa May Alcott's famous Little Women, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March.

So what is fantasy anyway? All fiction is fantasy in that the events and the characters are fantasized. Only the places can be sometimes real, sometimes imagined although places always of this world. When the places are out of this world and are not real it is science fiction, which requires the ultimate leap of imagination by both writer and reader. 

I conduct this debate with myself because I have not long finished reading T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, then followed it up with Adrian Greaves's biography, Lawrence of Arabia. Of course Lawrence remains a mystery even after all the millions of words. That is the way he wanted to live - as an enigma even to his family and his closest friends. He was a man made up in his own dreams and of his own dreams; the ultimate fiction.

False Freedom and Food

Two items of news hit me this morning. First, giant headlines everywhere you look or listen; 'Egypt Revolution Frees Citizens'. Then a tiny piece tucked away almost out of sight; 'Wheat Crop Fails in China'. Haven't the media got this the wrong way around? I asked myself.

Don't want to be the spectre at the feast but does anybody inside or outside of Egypt really feel that Hosni Mabarak's retirement is going to change anything for or about the people there? Hate to say it but sometimes a dictator - even one as unbelievably corrupt as Mr Mabarak - is the best of all the bad solutions. A fresh set of hands on the national treasury is surely going to be as grasping as the last pair. Especially, I would suggest, if the new set is attached to bodies in uniform. Corruption is endemic not just in Egypt but most of this world over. As they say these days, 'Get used to it!' (Hateful as is that prospect)

A serious shortage of the staple foodstuff in a country as populous and as powerful as China - now that is very, very disturbing. I am not going even to speculate about this one. Most people know well my views on people numbers and our planet's ability, medium term, to feed and water us all. Economics pale into insignificance alongside this. Even if China does now vitually own the almighty dollar.

A Comedy For April First

More than one reader has told me that my short stories of the month (January's One Cold, Cold Day and February's A Life With Dogs) have brought them to tears; could I please write a lighter one, even a funny story? For them the good news is that I'm writing a story that might just make them laugh out loud but the bad news is that my March story is already completed and will probably effect them like the first two, only more so.

I do find it much easier to dream up a story full of pathos and with strong characters often in big trouble rather than one of the opposite. I've no idea why because I have no problem writing humorous dialogue but it always seems to suit the stage rather than the page, and I haven't (yet) written any proper stage play or film script.(I'd like to have a shot at one before I go gently, hopefully laughing, into that good night.)

So, I've been much preoccupied with answering the question; 'What kind of a situation makes folks laugh?' I know what makes me laugh all right: books like Mash and Catch 22, TV like Dad's Army and Extras, films like Airplane and Some Like It Hot. What is the common denominator, if there is one? People being ridiculous of course; accident prone people. Banana skin folk but no-one getting hurt. So the April story is about an accident prone person approaching a banana skin on the pavement - well, figuratively! Just right for April Fools day.

Banks and Auctions

First an apology to those who may have commented on one or more of my past blogs. I have not been picking them up via the comments box on my dashboard! Now it isn't that I'm a technophobe, JC! More like a technoramus, perhaps. I promise to mend my ways. And thanks for the reminder, M.

Right: so today is the most beautiful day in the history of the most beautiful part of the world, i.e Wester-Ross! All is blue and green and nothing moves by wind. Garden birdsong all around. Seagulls slow patrol the water's edge. Snow-capped hills form the horizon jagged, sharp and clear. Today is why folk (including self) don't often get much beyond the adjective 'beautiful' when describing this adopted homeland of ours.

********

Now for something different. Yesterday I wrote about bankers who shunt money - our money - to and fro between themselves, creaming off chunks of it in the process. Nice work if you can get it except it is not work by any commonly understood definition of that much misused word, and personally I would not want to bury the capitalist system by which I have lived my life in the way they are burying it.

Last evening we were watching a program on TV that we much like. It's called 'The Antique Road Trip' and for those not watching the BBC, pairs of antiques dealers drive around picking up bargains from shops owned by other dealers and then selling them hopefully at a profit in auction houses. The winner is the one making the greatest profit. It dawned on me that the auction house bidders appear to be 90% + other antique dealers. Presumably the chain goes on until the last dealer is left holding something he doesn't want and cannot sell, other than at a loss.

I could see the micro similarity to the latter day activities of  big bankers. One big difference though. When a big banker is left holding the baby the government (in other words you and me) is prepared to take it off him. After all we can't have the banker's Saville Row suit pissed upon, can we? We ordinary folk in jeans and jumpers might protest but we can stand it, can't we?

Back to the analogy. When you, the antique dealer, is left holding the unwanted baby? When you have something nobody wants at a price bearable by you? Tough luck. In your game of musical chairs you should have sat down faster, barged aside the others more forcefully, bought yourself a pinstripe suit.

Help!

Old men often begin their narrative with the good old, 'when I was young', bit.

So, when I was young and the world was one of green fields and smiling people, winning wars and world cups, everyone knew that the bedrock of British wealth and happiness was manufacturing industry. Yes, the industrial revolution that began right here in our islands. Love it or hate it, making stuff was essential and 'Export Or Die' was our government's much advertised mantra. Equally we all knew that you cannot export hairdressing or money banking or good restaurant eating or financial advising or church services. Such so-called service industries seemed very much secondary, seemed to be there to serve those employed in front line manufacturing. Someone has to make the actual things - be it sheets of paper, computers, hairbrushes or oaken pulpits - that  these services use. There seemed to be a huge, almost a moral difference between making boots and shoes (exportable manufacturing) and running a shoe shop (service)

I read that, today, manufacturing occupies only eleven percent of the British economy. The other eighty nine percent is 'service' but has taken over our economy and with it our very culture. Yes, the same culture our P.M. told us last weekend in Munich he now wishes to save. What a cosy, white-collared, blind reversal! A Saudi Arabian businessman once told me why the Saudis loved Margaret Thatcher so much. "Every time she closes one of your factories." he told me, "We will open one." Anyone guess at the percentage of manufacturing in today's global growth economies? It surely ain't no stupid eleven percent. Thanks, Margaret, for throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

And now the final wake up call. One of these so-called service industries has taken over the economy to the extent that it can with complete impunity swallow all the money and gamble with itself, in the process ruining everything for everyone except its own. It's a sort of financial onanism. It's like the waiters have eaten all the food and drunk up all the wine. Help!

Eagles

Driving home to Aultbea on Sunday afternoon after a very pleasant interlude with friends we had reached the uphill twists this side of Inverewe when Dee said 'Look - a pairof eagles!' I stopped the car and sure enough there they were, unmistakable. Golden eagles in full courtship flight, wheeling and diving and climbing over a nearby hilltop. I believe eagles mate for life so I imagine these two were re-making acquaintance after their joint family raising of last summer and ahead of the same again. Yes, winter still is here but spring cannot be all that far away.

And that wasn't all. Less than a kilometer further on, from over the rise on our left came a mighty white tailed sea eagle. Yes we could tell it truly was that feathered majesty, not just because of its size, not just because of its ultra slow wing beat and its small head and tail in relation to its giant wings, not just because we've seen them a few times before, but because it even had a white tail!

When our son and his family visited us a few years back they told us of how one of these great birds had flown so low over their moving car that it's shape virtually filled their windscreen. If you're reading this, Stu and Lorraine, our sighting on Sunday was in that very same place. True!

Three (or four) score years and ten

Wait for it folks: here's a new Theory of Relativity (with apologies to Mr Albert Einstein).

All things are relative, especially the thing we call 'time'. A butterfly with a lifespan of but one summer does not count or discount the passing hours as do we. A dog has a small memory of things past, a huge understanding of things present, zero understanding of, interest in, or concern about the future. If an oak tree has the consciousness that some would believe, it would see our three score years and ten as little more than an irrelevant flicker. I look out over the sea loch and see the mountain called Beinn Airidh Charr that has been there, virtually unchanged, since the last age of ice filed it into its present shape as it slid great glaciers on their way down to the sea. On my window ledge is a fossil given us by our lovely daughter in law who found it newly loosened from a Dorset cliff; it was once a thing that lived on the bed of the sea before that bed folded up to become a cliff or a mountain. We are led to understand that there are bodies in space that pre-date our planet earth by billions upon billions of our so-called years.

Everything is created, everything changes, degrades / dies / disappears, in the process freeing its atomic structure possibly as contribution to some new creation: butterflies, dogs, us, mountains, planets, all the same. Time does not exist other than as a comfortable anchor against the tides of uncertainty or insanity for such as you and I.

Only age exists and age can be measured only by its effects, only in its degradation. That's my theory of relativity anyway. Perhaps 'sixty is the new forty' after all?

A Play for the Robert Burns Club

I  wrote this in an hour, just ahead of a meeting of the Wester-Ross Burns Club last year. I was the narrator, Mel MacGregor was a very convincing Robert Burns and Tony Davis played William Shakespeare beautifully, in a broad west country accent. Near enough! Neither had seen the thing until I thrust the pages into their hands. Great sports and typical of our little outpost of the Burns empire. Anyway thought you might enjoy ...

Two Gentlemen in a FarOff Land.
A Short Play for The Wester-Ross Burns Club

This all takes place in a land flowing with milk and honey, a land where all the good folk go when they get tired of planet earth - or planet earth tires of them. Two men meet up, greet each other warmly, sit down for a chat  on a grassy bank alongside the slow moving Milk river. The sun shines just warm upon them and down  this sylvan glen.
Don't ask what these two look like or what they're wearing. They look as you want them to look and they wear what you feel they should be wearing.
Most of the language is here translated into modern English, or indeed any other language known to or preferred by the listener.  Note also that in a land of milk and honey neither time nor distance exists at all. Let us begin …
RB: Now then, Will, how's she hangin'?
WS: That's horrible. And I've told you before, my friend, I'm William, not Will and you are Robert, not Rabbie. But yes, as a matter of fact she's hangin' pretty well. Having said that, I've just been watching my 'As You Like It' being played on that television thing with the men dressed up as those nasty old nazis and the girls as ladies of the night. Not at all as I like it. Robert. Oh, what they do to us, once they think we're dead and gone!
RB: Right. (Chuckles) As You Like It indeed! You know how much I used to like it. (Sighs)
WS: Strange, wasn't it, Robert, how, ever since that lovely old Garden of Eden, sex seemed to be everything for so much of the time. Seems such a waste of your adult years there on earth, doesn't it?
RB: Well - it's just the way of it. The way He put is all together, yes? Pal of mine once told me; 'it'll pull you more than dynamite'll blow you'.
WS: Not too too elegantly put but yes … There was this dark lady …
RB: I read all about her in your sonnets, William. Very discreet. Not like my lassies at all. No sooner I bedded them than there they were - still are - in my verse. But I don't spend much time looking down there these days. Maybe just now and then I'll look in on some of their Hogmanays -
WS (interrupting): Their new years eves, don't you mean? No colloquialisms, remember?
RB: OK - sorry - I mean yes. But there's millions of them at it with the crossing arms and holding hands and running out of words after verse one. Of course we don't do vainglory here, William, but if we did I'd have to say there's more at the auld acquaintance not being forgot, when all the rest of it has been, than well, than anything else written or sung by the live ones, poor things.
William holds out his hand, palm uppermost. Bees zoom in on it from all quarters, alight to deliver their succulent loads. A small pyramid of honey at once begins to grow.
WS: You must be right about that. I often wonder why I myself didn't do more poetry in the form of song. Big, big impact. Oh yes indeed: Greensleeves; Bring On The Clowns; My Heart Is Like A Red, Red Rose; Ain't Gonna Work No More On Maggie's Farm.
William nods 'enough' and the bees disappear. He raises hand to mouth, licks up their sweet libation. Continues …
WS: Yes, strong stuff, that songbook of yours. By the way, I meant to ask you, when are all the seas due to gang dry?
RB: When? Honey, honey. Think I'll join you with some of that.
Robert holds out his own hand. Bees arrive, get to work. He continues…
RB: The seas are going to gang dry any time now, says the boss. When they've warmed up their old planet enough there's a critical point when all the oceans suddenly evaporate. Too bad.
WS: Going to get a wee bit overcrowded for us here then?
RB: Doubt it, Will - William. He tells me there's not all that many down there will qualify when the time comes. Oh, look here, my friend!
A beautiful young lady, floating apparently on a raft of wild flowers and splayed out long blonde hair is drifting slowly by, carried by the flow of the Milk river current. 
WS: Ophelia! That's my Ophelia, Robert. (Breaks into song) Isn't she lovely, made for love.
Robert springs to his feet, flings his arms wide (forgetting the accumulation of honey which runs all down his arm) declaims …RB:
Ophelia, thy charms my bosom fire,
And waste my soul with care;
But ah! how bootless to admire,
When fated to despair!

Yet in thy presence, lovely Fair,
To hope may be forgiven;
For sure 'twere impious to despair
So much in sight of heaven.
WS: Heaven! That's a nice one.
He's looking down at his hand in the grass. A tiny fieldmouse has hopped on and is nibbling away at the last trace of honey.
WS: Hey, just look at this little chap. Is he not enjoying himself! Oh, but he's gone in a flash!
RB: That was my wee timorous beastie, you ken? Oh, Timmy, little Timmy.
I'm truly sorry man's dominion Has broken nature's social union, And justifies that ill ' opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor earth-born companion,And fellow mortal.
William rises to join his standing friend. Ophelia is seen swimming ashore, climbing out of the river, smoothing back her long golden tresses.
WS: But your tiny friend is not mortal, Robert, any more than are you or I. We are here all immortal, remember?
RB: She isn't - wasn't; your Ophelia, no? But I often wondered … she was, like, someone you knew, William? Down there?
WS: Of course. Every character one created was like someone you knew. Ophelia was actually Beatrice, a farm girl in the village where I grew up.
RB: Laughs.
By the by, gentlefolk. I should have told you: 'human' emotions are all here in this place - provided they're the positive ones - joy, satisfaction, love (non-carnal of course) etc. No negative waves. No fear or hatred or anything downbeat, right?
Meantime the young lady Ophelia has taken off her filmy dress and now stands there naked, wringing out the milk. The two in conversation take little notice.
RB continues: You know we were so much alike, William. You had a fancy for this Beatrice / Ophelia? Of course you did. So alike. We both of us impregnated young girls when still not far out of our minority. What was it you had your Othello say? "One that loved not wisely but too well"? And we both worked on farms before gravitating to the big city, both earned a measure of fame in our own lifetimes, both learned so much from books without doing overmuch in the way of schooling, etcetera.
WS: Yes, and we both used things of long ago on which to weave what they called our tapestries of words. You used Scottish traditional songs. Me, I used Ovid and those other good old storytellers.
RB: But you ended up moneyed and comfortable and I died poor and most uncomfortable. It's very hard, even here, to think charitably about that doctor who told me to swim in the sea every freezing day. Yes, you ended up better than me. You were the better businessman, William. But it's a funny thing, I seldom had any money but never felt like a poor man, ever. Hungry yes, but poor? Never. A man's a man for all that and all that.
WS: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. But comfortable in death? No, sir. I died of exposure after a night out in an alehouse near Stratford with my old compatriot, Mister Ben Johnson. You know, the one who wrote my epitaph: "Not for our time but for all time"? Found in a ditch! What an inglorious ending. Not exactly any flights of angels taking me to my rest. I just arrived here all by myself. Don't quite know how.
RB: Ah, William Shakespeare - Man of mystery! But all's well that ends well.
WS: One of these days we'll have to write something together. Play, poem and song all in one. By Robert Shakespeare and William Burns. Come on, let's go find some of the others. (Calls out) Come with us, Ophelia. No, no need to bother with the dress.
The three of them wander off across the meadow and into the trees, singing together, Should old acquaintance be forgot, And never …but no crossed arms.
The sun has not moved in the sky, nor will it move in this land where the trees never shed their leaves and the birds never cease to sing and where there are no noxious people nor any of the trials and tribulations that come with noxious people. So there are none of the human problems that William Shakespeare and Robert Burns had spent their earthly lives trying their very best to explain, justify or cover up with words of such an everlasting beauty.