Bryan Islip's Blog, page 53

Part two Untitled #1

This opening has been edited so it's best to read it as if you never read it previously. Today it leads into part two of three. Finally I know how it will end. Do you?
#1: No Title
Roger spatula'd off the excess head of beer, pulled to top up the glass, handed him his next pint. 'You OK, Tommy?' he said, then at once, 'Sorry, sorry. Stupid question. Listen mate, cheer up. What is it - three months now and not a word? She's just not worth it.'
Tommy shifted on his bar stool but said nothing. He'd said enough. Right now he was trying not to think about Glo and her new man, Angelo the plumber - whoever that bastard might be. Snow had piled up outside in the corners of the pub's window panes like on all the poxy Christmas cards. No sooner the postman's back-breaking Christmas gone than yet more cards today; bloody Valentine's. All the coloured envelopes, some with stuff on the back like SWALK, BURMA, ISYU. Most of them obviously husband to wives or more likely wives to husbands or more likely wives to someone else's bloody husband. Had Gloria sent this Angelo one? He fingered the unopened envelopes in his pocket. There were always a few for him, all of course anonymous, some of them really crude. Most postmen got them but this one couldn't give a damn.
'You finished for today?' Roger asked.
'Yeah, finished'
'Good. Listen Tommy, mate, you've got to get a grip.' He wiped off the bar top. 'Shit happens. 'Postman drunk in charge of a push bike' won't help, will it? He laughed. The business type sitting along the bar raised his head from his paper and his scampi and chips and his glass of white wine. Roger went on, 'If it snows much more you'll be having to dig your bike out. Leave it there. I'll see it's OK. You're best off home on good old Shanks's pony today.'
'Maybe. Bike belongs to the Post Office. Let them come and dig it out,' Tommy muttered. The room was beginning to spin. He concentrated on keeping his head still but that didn't help.
Roger shrugged, moved off to talk to his only other customer. There was a good fire in here. Nice and warm. Sickening smells of yesterday's beer and today's fried food. Tommy was not hungry and wasn't thirsty but he was well outside a whole lot of beer today, like most days. To hell with Glo and her Italian bloody stallion. Plumber, she'd said! Angelo the plumber. Sounded like a bloody Ninja Turtle. Well, he'd plumbed Gloria all right. Bastard! He blinked back the tears of self-pity. Twenty two years married and she hadn't told him nothing about it. Not a blind thing 'til he'd got home that time, picked up the envelope off the kitchen table. Nothing. Not how long it had been going on for nor any damn thing except she loved the man and, 'I don't want to hurt you Tom, because you know I've always loved you too in my own way. I'm so sorry there have been no children. I'm so sorry!!!' No address where they'd buggered off to. Nothing!
The rest of his new pint disappeared in one long swallow. He banged down the glass for another. His bar stool somehow tipped over sideways and he went down hard. Something seemed to be breaking; something other than his heart.

The black became white and the white became shapes and the shapes became faces, the faces of strangers dressed as medics. 'Don't move, Tommy' said one of the faces, the male one; You're going to be all right but best to keep still for a little bit. You had a fall. You're in Southampton General. I'm Doctor Sikorski and this is Nurse O'Reilly.' The young man smiled down at him. 'Just testing now, Tommy. What is my name, did I say?'
His tongue seemed to be too large for his mouth. 'Silosky. Doctor Silosky? Or Sikosky?' He groaned.
'That's near enough. You'll be fine. You took a bit of a bang on your head and your hand's suffered some laceration. Nothing permanent.' He straightened up, stethoscope swinging, then moved out of sight. 'Nurse, stay with him for a while, yes? Help him sit up. Back in an hour or so.'  
He felt her moving around the bed, tucking in and arranging the covers. Finally she crooked an arm around the back of his neck, helped him to sit, plumped up the pillows, lowered him gently. She smelled of flowery deodorant, liquorice, lipstick, antiseptic; woman. Yes, woman.Finally she drew up a chair, took out and shook down a thermometer, inserted it into his mouth. 'You don't recognise me, Mr Barlow, do you?' She was smiling gently. Tawny blonde hair curving out from under the cap, nice lips, friendly eyes with just the right network of the finest lines. About his own age maybe. Pretty lady.
In spite of his aching head and the pain in his bandaged right hand Tommy felt the attraction, and how long an age since the last time he'd felt like that? He managed to speak around the glass tube lodged there under his tongue. 'Don't think I'd have forgotten, nurse, but can't say I remember you, no. Should I?'
'Thirty nine Napier Avenue?'
The response came as if on automatic; 'Mrs Belinda O'Reilly! The one with all the catalogues. Right, of course. We're near neighbours.'  
She leaned forward to remove the thermometer, looked at it, shook it down and replaced it. in its case and the case into its correct breast pocket position 'Yes, so we are.' There was an Irish twang in her voice. 'So we are, Mister Barlow.'
'Tommy.'
'Tommy. Of course I -' she hesitated, then, 'Of course I heard about your wife. I'm sorry.'
Christ, had the whole world been in on it? On the shame of it? 'Don't be,' he muttered. 'There's nothing to be sorry about.
(To be concluded tomorrow. Suddenly the conclusion is known!)

# 1 Untitled yet

Yesterday I set the scene for a short short story without having any idea other than it would be about a postman in a southern England lunchtime pub whose wife had left him. This then is the first part of a unique fiction. In writing it I have gained a glimmering of where it might go from here ... keep watching ...
#1: No Title (My titles always come last)
Roger behind the bar spatula'd off the excess head of beer, pulled to top up the glass, handed him his next pint. 'You OK, Tommy?' he said, then at once, 'Sorry, sorry. Stupid question. Listen mate, cheer up. What is it - three months now and not a word? She's just not worth it.'
Tommy shifted on his bar stool but said nothing. He'd said enough. Right now he was trying not to think about Glo and her new man. 'Angelo'! whoever that bastard might be. Snow had piled up outside in the corners of the pub's window panes like on all the poxy Christmas cards. No sooner the postman's back-breaking Christmas gone than yet more cards today; bloody Valentine's. All the coloured envelopes, some with stuff on the back like SWALK, BURMA, ISYU. Most of them obviously husband to wives or more likely wives to husbands or more likely wives to someone else's bloody husband. Had Gloria sent her Angelo one?
'You finished for today?' Roger asked.
'Yeah. Finished'
'Good.' He wiped off the bar top. ''Postman drunk in charge of a push bike' won't help, will it?' he added, and laughed. The well suited businessman sitting up the bar a bit raised his head from his paper and scampi and glass of white wine. 'If this goes on much longer, Tommy, you'll be having to dig your bike out. Leave it there for a bit, mate, right? I'll see it's OK.' You're best off on good old Shanks's pony home today.
'Yeah? Bike belongs to the Post Office. Let them come and dig it out,' Tommy muttered.
Roger shrugged, moved off to talk to his only other customer. There was a good fire in here. Nice and warm. Comfortable smells of yesterday's beer and today's fried food. Tommy was not hungry and wasn't thirsty but he was going to get well outside a whole lot of beer today, like he did most days these days, and to hell with bloody Glo and her Italian bloody stallion. Plumber, she'd said! Angelo the plumber. Sounded like a bloody Ninja Turtle. Well, he'd plumbed Gloria all right. Bastard! He blinked back the tears of self-pity. Twenty two years married and she hadn't told him nothing about it. Not a blind thing til he'd got home that time, picked up the envelope off the kitchen table. Nothing. Not how long it had been going on for nor any damn thing except she loved the man but didn't want to hurt him, her husband. No address where they'd buggered off to. Nothing! The rest of his new pint disappeared in one long swallow. He banged down the glass for another. His stool tipped over sideways and he went down hard. Something seemed to be breaking. Something other than his heart.

Creating a story

Thank you for the feedback a la No Gangplank Feet. Interesting. On the strength of this and discussions with my friend in Achnasheen I'm going to aim at 'publishing' via the new Bryan Islip FICTION web-site, a totally new short short story  on the 1st of each month. It will take you 2-5 minutes to 'read and inwardly digest' as they used to tell you in the Services. In other words, some 400 - 1000 words.

It shouldn't be too, too difficult. Charles Dickens wrote at least one of his classic novels for publication in The Times at the rate of one chapter per one month. He always struggled with the deadlines and never failed to meet one.

My new web-site strap-line is going to be: "Bryan Islip - Writes Fiction Worth Reading" To make that a truism the stories must be unique and uniquely well written in the sense of their actually meaning something. How's that? Well, nobody knows how it works. Nobody knows how an arrangement of words and phrases in the form of a made-up story is sometimes capable of playing such exquisite tunes on the human soul (whatever, in turn, that may be!). We only know that sometimes it really does; that there is a chance when we begin to read a story that it can; that this one really will.

Over the next few days I'm going to use this blog to clarify my own thinking on the creation of a fictional story, hopefully at the same time bringing you into the heart of the process. Right now I have no idea at all as to what this story will be, but it's going to end up as #1 on the new web-site if all goes according to plan.

First I have to decide on three  factors:-

The viewpont characterThe problem The settingThe viewpoint character could be anyone - male, female, juvenile or even animal: e,g, the President of the United States, a Carmelite nun, captain of the school's football team, Nellie the elephant. I'll choose ... Tommy Rogers, 45, postman.

The problem (his problem that is) could be anything. He falls off his bike, is falsely accused of tampering with the mail, they're going to close the local post office so no job for him, but ... it's 14th February, (Valentine's Day) so he is delivering all the love cards just after his wife, his one and only, has left him for another.

The setting could be a ski resort in the Alps (for Tommy Rogers read Alphonse LeClerk), a Birmingham tenement estate, a suburb of New York. But ... this will be a snowbound village Inn in Southern England.

Now for the difficult bit. I have to write a short short story with a beginning, a body and an ending. Watch this space! And when, hopefully, the 400 - 1000 words are completed I'll show myself and you how it could have been expanded into a 'proper' 3000 -5000 word short story or into a 200,000 word novel.

No Gangplank Feet

Will you help me with a litle experiment? If I ask nicely?


Thing is, I'm working with a digital marketing expert to create a fiction only web-site. Part of the attraction is intended to be an invitation, on the first of each month, to 'take time out' for a cup of coffee and a quick read free of charge. I'm interested in the optimum target read-time for the story - 2 or 5 or 10 or 15 minutes. Will you e-mail me with the gen on how long it takes you to read the following brand new story. It's a very very short one, don't panic! Ttoo short for purpose? Let me know?
No gangplank feet.     
He had to give up trying to dislodge the ginger tom from his lap. What was it with Brits and cats? 'Thanks for seeing me Mrs Roberts,' he said, 'It's a long way from LA but you know how it is. Guess we all want to know where we came from.''That's all right, love. Alvin, you said? Took me right back you did.' The old lady indicated the framed photo in his hands. 'She were my best friend, your grannie. She gave it me. That's her, Daisy, second in from right. The Big Bang Club we called ourselves.' She chuckled. 'But different meaning today. In the war we used to go off shift at t' bomb factory, quick wash and change then the dancing at Burtonwood. All those lovely Yankee jitterbuggers! You know what they used to call us in the war, Alvin? 'The girls wi' gangplank feet,' that's what they called us.' She laughed again, shook her silvery head; 'I only wished I'd had 'em, meself. Not that there's 'owt wrong with here.' She paused as if in defence, as if to remember then, 'Any road, I can remember your grandfather going off  back to the States then coming for your daddy when he were still just a little bit of a baby. After Daisy died. He were right shook up, were Hank. That there high explosive stuff we were making bombs of? It killed more than just those bloody Germans over time, that knows.' 'Yeah? I guess it did. Anyway as I said, grandfather passed away last year. He'd often told me about it, how he'd tried to get grannie out to LA after the war finished but she wouldn't go.' 'Hank told you that? Maybe it's right but that's what they all said, Alvin, after they'd had their wicked way and got away, like. Oh well, it's just human nature.' Outside in the street a dog barked. The ginger tom dug in his claws. The picture went flying, broke up in the fireplace. Amongst the pieces he found an ancient, unused BOAC ticket: Manchester - Los Angeles, one way.                                            ENDS

Living and learning

There is a strong connection between living and learning. That's my view anyway. The day you put up the mental shutters, cease to be interested in learning anything new, you may continue actually to breathe for years and years but - living? Not in any but the literal sense of the word.

I'm not talking here of 'learning' in terms of the acquisition of information - i.e. what's happening / has happened, where, in whose opinion, etc. I'm referring to the learning of something new that one can actually do, that one actually does. Whether it's learning how to grow tomatoes or fish for marlin or collect Chinese porcelain or operate a bed and breakfast it's the vital spark that both justifies and satisfies your each and every passing day.

Right now I'm doing my best, (with more than a little help from my friend in Achnasheen), to learn how to promote my literary efforts on the web. This means I should really learn how to use this wonderfully complex thing not just as a mechanism to read the weather or the news or write up my blog, etc, but also as an end in itself. It's the difference between being a passenger in a car and driving a car, between driving a car and understanding how a car works. Taken to extremes, understanding why a car should or should not have two wheels and a gyroscope as opposed to the four wheels it now does have.

I've just bought (yes, from on-line Amazon!) Jon Reed's book 'Get Up To Speed With On-Line Marketing': header of the Introduction is ' Traditional marketing doesn't work: get over it!'  Condemning to death a multi multi million dollar world-wide industry that is a bold claim indeed. Apparently social marketing one to one is now the thing. Tweet, Facebook, etc etc - me to you and you to me. We shall learn. We shall see...

A stop to think time.

I guess the best of all this snow and ice is that it does tend to confine you to barracks other than for essential forays on foot to the local shop and the local post office. And being so confined you are encouraged to get on with all those unexciting functions you've been putting off and off. In our case these include tax returns, stocktaking and taking stock of just where we're at, a year after our move, and where we want to be at in a year's time. (Difficult, that one. Governments pay millions and millions to brilliant minds in an effort to forecast the future. They should save our money, print a matrix of numbers and ask a child to stick a pin in it blindfolded.)

But seriously it does no harm for us all to slow down now and then, does it? Frantic activity is good and idleness (or call it contemplation) is terrible. Work is a very admirable ethos whether one gets paid for it or whether one does not. Witness all the good folk shovelling tonne after tonne of snow even when logic tells them that nature will do it for you, in due course, at this time of the year. I received a lovely little e-mail from a good friend in Denmark today. He has actually done his snow clearing and now has settled down to a protracted period of feet up, glass(es) of red wine and a good book. Lovely jubbly.

We've just wasted a half an hour watching a couple of red deer hinds scrubbing around for food in our twilit garden. Beautiful. Wasted? No.

Deep and crisp and otters etc

Tuesday today. Haven't moved the car out of our driveway since the Big Snow set in, Thursday last. See pic below, (for the special benefit of at least one reader in Spain and at least two in The Canaries). I could of course have shifted it, given an hour on the shovel and a kilo or two of salted gravel. But what for? We're nice and warm inside, the shop and post office is ten minutes walk away; so we are saving the energy (mine) and the carbon emissions, (everyone's). And in due course nature will take care of the ice and the snow anyway.

Last night we opened the curtains to find our virginally white lawns criss-crossed with deer  prints. Just as well we put out a bowlfull of broccoli and cut apples. The prints contained what looked disconcertingly like bit of broken hoofs but on closer examination indoors they were just rock hard ice shards detached from the deer's split feet. Dee watched an otter working his way along the sea-shore by Kirkhill.Rumour has it that one of our neighbours actually has an otter holt in his back garden. He's been watching the female as she comes and goes and the other day witnessed the male otter paying her a visit. Great expectations.

High on a wintry hill

Shenavall, near Dundonnell
The Bothy
High on the Fain*, they call it Shenavalla strong built refuge keeping folk from harmand they who came though distant now, recallthat lonely bothy, shelter from life's storm
Those thinking still of lovely Wester-Rossmay dream of this, their Highland wilderness,remembering challenges of summers pastthe taste of failure, feel of sweet success.And striding out the long and stony waysperhaps in dreams may think to know againthe muddy glory of those summer days,come back to face the wind, the sun, the rain.
As winter comes in snow upon the hilland weakly sun shines there's an eagle's callthat echoes rock to rock when all is still,who knows, to those who came by Shenavall.

*'Fain' (literal) is the gaelic for 'barren place'.

All must eat

Outside our kitchen window a rampant honeysuckle climbs a trellis, obscuring the large oil tank that sits behind it. Beyond the tank a fringe of mature conifers marks the extent of our garden and beyond them a large and untended 'field' as far as the eye can see. Delia hangs a number of bird feeders from the branches of the trees. Fascinating indeed to watch our many and varied feathered friends in action. However there's been a bit of a shadow cast over proceedings of late. A beautiful but murderous sparrow hawk has appointed our back garden as his larder.

He (yes, we consulted our British Birds and know it's a 'he') swoops with deadly intent, often succeeding in carrying off a small bird, or even sometimes striking down and de-feathering a ring dove on our little back lawn. Of course as soon as his presence is suspected all the smaller birds take refuge - and where better than in the tangled stems of the honeysuckle where they set up a terrific barrage of outraged chirping and tweeting. However this morning the hawk's initial attack proved fruitless, as did his repeated forays into the honeysuckle bush. Much wriggling and beating of wings large and small, but still he had not secured his breakfast / lunch.So he simply sat on the trellis top pending his next attack ... and his next ... and his next ...

Upset by such attempted 'murder', and defying the logic that tells us to Let Nature Be, Dee sallied forth from the kitchen. At first I actually thought the bird was going to remain right where he was in spite of her close, hand clapping presence, but at last he took off over the field, those scimitar wings propelling him in a trice from nought to (forty ?). Drama over, the small birds stopped their chirping and we got on with what we had been doing (Christmas card making, actually). The peace and quiet did not last for long. The sparrowhawk came in again on our honeysuckle like a kamikaze warplane. But still no joy for him. And still he sits and waits up there on the trellis ...

The Good, the Bad and the Never Ugly

What is 'good' art and what is not? What makes a picture worth it, from the buyer's viewpoint? A few years ago a lady commissioned me to paint, I quote, 'a picture of the river Ewe'. I called it 'River Ewe, Calm Day'. I had elected to choose an upstream view. The lady examined it closely before concluding that she didn't like it, therefore would not be accepting it in exchange for her four hundred pounds. I always make it clear that any commission is taken by me on the basis that the buyer does not have to buy when they see the finished article. Not very business-like I'll admit, but I do so detest those 'its not good yes it is good' arguments, when we all know 'good' or 'awful' are entirely in the mind of the beholder. (How would you like a Warhol can of coke stuck up on your wall for several millions of dollars?)














Crestfallen, I returned to the river with my pastels. This time the day was windy; results below - also rejected!
Taking a very deep breath I invited my intended patron to walk with me along the river, show and talk me through her actual expectations. It turned out that she had been in a long time habit of walking along there with her late husband. They had always stopped to sit and look back at at a certain point, and that's what she wanted - that precise downstream view. So on with effort number three. Results on the right. She was delighted. Anyone like an upstream view of the river Ewe? Going cheap (well, £330.00 -cheap for a John Constable.)

Actually I was able, with a lot of help from my lady, to turn disaster into some kind of a triumph, for we have sold hundreds of greetings cards bearing the two upstream river Ewe pastels. Also my booklet, 'An Incomer's Views ON WESTER-ROSS in 24 Paintings, Poems and Narratives' which includes this pair. 4000 copies sold to date.