Bryan Islip's Blog, page 54

Reflections

For me, watching the world of late has been like watching a magnificent caterpillar turning itself into a stone-like crysallis. This is surely a time of massive change, therefore a time of great danger, therefore a time of great excitement. I'm not just talking about banks and stuff either. In fact the last time I felt like this I was six years old and the London sirens were beginning to sound out nightly and children were being 'evacuated' and their fathers put into uniforms and their mothers leaving the kitchens for the munitions factories. You could sense that your world would never be the same again and it never has been.

It's really quite strange because, right now, nobody seems to want to acknowledge the reality. All the talk is of something called recovery, as if what is happening is a mere interruption in mankind's ever onwards and (?) upwards so-called prosperity. If only our leaders could find it in themselves to see something other than what has passed and start planning for the ways in which our children will live - and what has to happen now, body and soul, to make it come about. But let me be charitable and say perhaps they themselves don't have a clue about caterpillars and crysalles and butterflies or the like. And/or perhaps if you live in an ivory tower you wouldn't like the sound of, much less feel the need to acknowledge the word 'change'. In world war two at least you knew what all the agony was for, believed Churchill's talk of us all going on to those "broad, sunlit uplands" of his. Sorry, Winston; the sun did come out but most of us got rid of it some time back; buried it, along with ourselves, under piles of mammonic excretia.

Pessimistic? I think the opposite. Living where the air and the light is this clean and clear and amongst so few people, most of whom you know well enough to exchange a smile with in passing, I think I can, in mind's eye at least, see the emergent butterfly in all his shaking, brilliant, fresh-winged splendour. In fact I think and write about this in my upcoming novel. Going with Gabe might help those who can make a difference, who knows?

THIS IS A COPY OF MY BLOG IN JANUARY 2009. No apologies for repeating myself

An armada of shags

Just finished designing our Christmas card. Now I'm doing my best to stop looking out of the window. Difficult. Not a whisper of wind, not one single cloud in a sky of ice blue melding into apricot / light gold low down. The sun has all but dropped below the jagged rim of the hilly ampitheatre in which we live. All above is reflected, upside down, one shade darker, in the still waters of Loch Ewe. No complaints, folks.

Yesterday was almost as good. We walked Firemore beach. The tide was very low. We climbed up on to the grassy, hard stone spur  that reaches out into the sea, sitting down with our drinks and sandwiches at its rocky tip. Just a glimpse of a distant walker and after a while a couple throwing sticks into the water for their dog to retrieve. Otherwise not a soul in sight nor a sound other than occasionally that of a seabird. Made me want to get out my beach casting rod ... stay there all afternoon. In the old days that trusty old weapon would have been in constant use but now - well, you can't do - or you can't have- everything. (Anyway, never on a Sunday).

The day before that we had walked down to the ruined watermill at Second Coast. We were sitting quietly with our usual 'picnic' when around the headland, close in, came swimming a veritable armada of shags. Thirty five of them I counted. Even closer in a diver was hard at work, dipping and diving undersea for up to three minutes at a time. (Red throated or black throated or great northern? Not sure now they all have their dulled down winter plumage.) He took no notice of the invaders as they swam past him and, seemingly without haste, far out towards Gruinard Island. Wonder what they're talking about, without sound?

It's the product not the person.

For Sir Walter Scott read R L Stevenson (re my last). Thanks for the correction M. Typo or senile decay? I know not.

However the correction caused me to think about this so-beloved 'celebrity thing' now such a part of our culture. When we buy a book or go to a cinema or view a painting why should the name of its creator hold so much fascination for us, when we have paid out our pennies to enjoy the product itself, as opposed to its creator / star actor whatever? Would the Mon Lisa be any less powerful a piece of oil paint on canvas if it were signed Joe Soap as opposed to Picasso - oops! I mean Michelangelo - oops! I mean Leonardo Da Vinci? Why do we all know who really created it, when it's a million to one neither you or I know who designed the Ford Mondeo or Westminster bridge, or painted The Last of the Gloaming - Fort William or in any way cares?

Would Strictly Come Dancing be any worse if the names and circumstances of the participants were X, Y or Z instead of - you know who because they're always in the tabloids? Why are they always in the tabloids, for that matter? Why are we all encouraged to celebrate the existence of people who seem to do actually so very very little to warrant it? Thirteen million of us feel compelled to spend a couple of hours a week watching a second rate soap actor, a lightweight comedienne who graced our screens a generation back,  a redundant politician, an admittedly athletic TV presenter, a retired rugby union pro now ex-househusband, a bigtime party-girl and a psychologist who once waved her rather wonderful figure at David Frost. Personally I would find it more interesting to watch on a Saturday night an Ullapool coalman, a night club hostess, a lady who runs the whelk stall on Scarborough seafront, the chairman of the Board of General Motors (UK) etc etc.

By the by, no-one knows who the devil was that writer of Hamlet, Othello, etc - you know, the creator of the third most well known, well-viewed, well-heard portfolio of written works in human history. They call him Shakespeare but so little is known about this product of an age before Celebrity happened. The first and second most? The Bible and the Koran of course. We know next to nothing about the creators of them, either! Point is, it's the content, not the creator, right?


Anyway that is what my Gabriel believed.

Fiction past and present

Sir Walter Scott's 'Kidnapped' is an amazing read; a real object lesson for the modern novelist or TV producer or film-maker.

Kidnapped's narrator, the lowland, anti-Jacobite David Balfour is your classic hero, an upright young man cast upon troubled waters (at one point literally). By contrast his friend in times of trouble, the bloodthirsty Jacobite outlaw Alan Breck is your classic anti-hero. But neither of these opposites behaves always in black and white. David can be less than gentlemanly. Alan can display unexpected tenderness. In other words these are real human beings, not the cardboard cutouts as per 99% of fictional characters these days.

How good it would be for Inspector whatever his name is completely fail to solve a particularly nasty Midsomer Murder, or find his lovely lady wife at home in bed with his station sergeant. Or perhaps a tearful Hannibal Lecter should just now and then take time out to repent his sins in the confessional.

However there's one aspect of Kidnapped which is completely aligned with modern fiction. David's struggles to extricate himself from an unjust adversity only result in a deepening of the mire and even greater injustice until, with one mighty bound ... and they all live happily ever after (except that really nasty uncle of David's!) Only around half of my twenty stories in just published Twenty Bites end that way, I'm pleased to report.

The Campbells are coming

Meeting of the Wester-Ross Burns Club Tuesday evening. Got off to a shocking start. We all turned up at the Poolewe Hotel on time only to find the place in a state of disrepair. Apparently some kind soul had sneaked in mid-evening, made his (must have been a him not a her) way upstairs and wrenched out some water pipes. Result: a great deluge through the downstairs ceiling and untold damage generally. Poor Sandie was of course devastated and has had to take a sabbatical 'down south' whilst necessary action by police and plumbers etc take effect. Such events are extremely rare. That is partly why many of us are up here.

Anyway they did find us a nice dry space so our meeting went ahead even if with a little less exubrance than usual. All set up now for the Supper on 21st January (are you listening, M&S?) and before that the get together at Elena's place. Any excuse for a jolly / ceilidh. Rabbie would have thoroughly approved. For some reason it emerged that Elena is actually a Campbell. I'm reading Sir Walter Scott's famous 'Kidnapped' at the moment. (What a great novel!) I felt it necessary to point out that  Kidnapped's Alan Breck had some extremely negative views of the Campbells. Not all that surprising, coming from a Jacobite Highlander, even one who had deserted the Prince's army. Elena indicated it was just jealousy as the Campbells were the most powerful clan in Scotland.

That in turn reminded me of my old boss, an American on UK detachment called Joe Campbell. Joe and his lady wife took a holiday and of course travelled up to Glencoe. At the visitor centre there they fell into conversation with another American couple, whose name turned out to be Macdonald ...

The sublime and the ridiculous

Eighteen months after that dreadful day we still miss them, our pair of vizslas. Always will. The other day we did one of their / our favourite lunchtime walks from the bridge over the Gruinard river down through a regiment of dunes on to what we call beach four. We cross a wide expanse of red gold sand before scrambling high on to a heathery, rocky promontory projecting out into the waters of Gruinard Bay.

This day was cold, windless, sunny; perfect. Sitting right at the tip of the promontory eating our usual picnic lunches we spoke now and then of days and dogs gone by. Out in the bay a raft of eider ducks called to each other with those funny 'oo-aah's' of theirs. And although we couldn't actually see him or her we could certainly hear the calls of a great northern diver, the bird called a 'loon' in the States. Remember the movie, 'On Golden Pond?'. The loon's is the loneliest, most wilderness, most wistful sound I know - and how well it travels over water.

On the walk back we stopped to watch a white tailed sea eagle as he (yes, an adult male) quartered the beach and an adjacent hillside looking for something to eat. For five minutes we stood quite still until, right over our heads, he must have spotted us. He banked away and without apparent effort, those great wings  beating ever so slowly, he proceeded directly upriver and was gone.

Sublime. Food for future paintings

Back at home we found a letter from someone somewhere enclosing a laminated Notice designed to be affixed to our wall. No doubt the entire area had been similarly favoured, for we have NATO fuel oil tanks built into a seaside hill near by. This Notice told us what to do if the tanks should perchance explode. We put it carefully into the drawer where we keep our Navy issue iodine pills. Yes, every few years a couple of young Royal Navy lads come round to collect the old pills and deliver a new packet. You see, out in the loch there is something called a Z buoy. It is reserved for the exclusive use of nuclear submarines although we haven't actually seen one of those in the loch during our eight years of looking out over the waters of Loch Ewe. Apparently, should there be a 'nuclear accident' we are to swallow the pills which will block off our thyroid glands, thus preventing radiation from killing us. Seems a bit like calling for the aspirins having been run over by a steamroller but who are we .... Oh, and by the by, you, mister or mrs taxpayer, have just shelled out six million quid on renovating our local Nato refuelling pier. We hardly ever see a warship using it other than the annual 'exercise' and no wonder, for as far as I understand it, Al Quaeda is land locked and bears but small arms.

We're so worried about the nation's finances? Really?

Ridiculous.

More thoughts on Power Sharing

I've had a couple of positive responses and an interesting discussion re my concept of energy rationing (yesterday's blog, 'Power to the people')

The more I think about it the more I feel it would work. I mean, it would benefit all and resolve today's truly warscale energy problem. But however appropriate the potential parallel with wartime rationing of food, clothing and petrol, some tweaking would, I think, be necessary. For instance if I had as many coupons as Richard Branson and I don't need all mine and he needs more than his (a reasonable scenario!) such coupons could be tradeable on an open market. Result: I live using much less power but with some of his money and he continues to live using a hell of a lot more power, but now with slightly less money. As there are many more Bryan Islips than Richard Bransons total power consumption would be bound to diminish. Which is surely what we all want, considering environment factors as well as the huge cost to us all, both financially and aesthetically, of new energy sourcing .

Of course the government would need to set the size of our national (energy) pie to be divided into coupons. No more this headlong rush to give everyone and every industry just as much as we / they demand today in the crazy, hopeless name of continuous 'growth'. We all wanted more sweeties than we could have in WW2, but we got used to the idea that we each could only have two ounces a week. (And oh, how much sweeter the taste of something you could but rarely pop into your mouth.)

Having set the size of the pie for say, year 2025, (same as now, or more, or less) our elected government in conjunction with competing industries whether private or public could decide right now from where such energy will be sourced. So, for instance, hopefully no more driving blind into today's plethora of problems such as the Lochluichart contratemp. If every new house built had, by law, to incorporate sunshine or wind power generating, which is no different to every house having to have waste plumbing, or if we require by 2025 to have a Severn tidal barrier in place or a gigamillion megawatt windfarm in the Thames estuary at least we all know and accept where we are.

I'm tempted to end by saying 'and we all will live happily ever after', but instead will just say: read Going with Gabriel! Perhaps a Farland is not so far away after all...

Power to the people

Recently I've had an exchange of e-mails about the proposals for yet more wind turbines at Lochluichart on the heights of the Scottish Highlands. The level of local objection is truly off the scale, and understandably so. Now, the whole massive issue of future power supplies is not for this blog - except perhaps for one personal suggestion.

It seems to me that the whole world is full of objections to this or that scheme designed to satisfy an increasing demand for power per head - per head of a population that continues to rise and rise. Keep in mind that every one of us is against some energy source plan X or Y or Z, but very seldom do we as objectors see past the problems to a solution!


I was a child through world war two and through those post war years when government-initiated food and clothes rationing was both Law and Norm. So far as I recollect everone understood the reasons. It was vital for survival that our nation should cut back on non-military consumption of scarce resources. It seemed to me, and still does looking back, that the rationing of our available food and clothing created no special hardship. Everyone learned to live with their books of coupons - and with no more than the customary grumbling.

If available power supply is so much of an issue, why not ration energy from now on? You could use your personal ration in any way you like: petrol, air flights, domestic. Local government could have their own 'ration books'. Ditto manufacturing industry. Ditto service industry including sports. The more people needing power and the less (environmentally acceptable) power supplies, the lower the ration for each and all. How much simpler to administer today with all our IT and computer force than in days of yore?

Answers on a postcard or per comment here?

Be not damned

Self-publish and be damned.
Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Virginia Woolfe, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, Mark Twain; all of them writers who published or financed the publication of at least a part of their own portfolios. Just like me in fact, although you are unlikely to have seen or read either of my self-published novels, More Deaths Than One and Going with Gabriel. And you've certainly not, as yet, come across my new anthology of short stories Twenty Bites, due out 11th November.
It has been a long journey since, at the age of twenty and with my final school-room five years behind me, I became quite sure I could write stories that lots of people would want to read. In fact I actually wrote some before coming to realise that this writer-in-a-garret stuff is good and well, but we don't all have the youth, dedication and confidence of a Hemingway with wife and baby son in 1920s gay Paree. I had the youth and the garret all right, and I had the wife and baby to go with it, but I and my new family rather liked the idea of eating. So off I had to trudge into the good old, demanding old University of Life, leaving the typewriter and my literary dreams gathering dust on the shelf.
Fifty years later, as a retiree from actually quite an exciting business career, I and wife Delia became adopted by our beloved northwest Highlands of Scotland. At last, I thought, some of those story ideas would now be able to burst full flowered into literary sunlight. Working at it between a strict quarter to four in the morning and late breakfast time, seven days a week and fifty two weeks of the year, the resultant More Deaths Than One seemed good enough to sell a million. Everyone said so - except the mainstream publishers who wouldn't read my work without the backing of a literary agent, and the literary agencies … well, you get the picture. Just too many debut novelists looking to get published? Author too old / unknown? Sensitivity to the story's mainly Saudi Arabian location? Novel simply not good enough (unthinkable to me)? Some or all of the above?
Shaken but not stirred I occupied another couple of years writing a second novel, Going with Gabriel. This one with an even more powerful, original and controversial theme than the first. Less than muted reaction from the trade. Stuff like, 'Clearly publishable but not for our list' and, 'Only one in two thousand novels by unpublished writers gets to see the printer's ink.'
Time to give up? After all, like most of my age I could watch the box, read the papers, look out the window, get under Dee's feet, do the garden (love gardens, do not love gardening). On the other hand I could self-publish my novels. Having written that which I passionately believed to be a publishable, saleable, intensely readable pair of novels I looked hard at the self-publisher's workload. First of course there's a lot more do-it-yourself editing - or have a wife and/or a friend do it - to arrive at something of a quality high enough to compete with the big names. Then there's the design and page layout of the book, the covers origination, the print commissioning. Then comes the most difficult of all the publisher's tasks, which is of course marketing the finished product.
Now, I have been into fairly high level industrial marketing all my life and many books have been written about the mechanics of selling books, but not even the largest publisher can tell you or themselves what it is that makes a new novel sell enough copies to transform itself into the fabled cash cow. There's absolutely no sales formula other than the writer's name, which doesn't help the unpublished, and strong publicity that as a rule is simply unavailable to a self-published newcomer.
'Word of mouth', I told myself, 'The marketing man's valhalla in this digital age.' But first I had to produce some books. Fortunately there are many instructional books on the market such as Peter Finch's How To Publish Yourself and Aaron Shepard's excellent Perfect Pages. Nowadays there are also quite a number of printers who will take your book and its covers over the net and print it instantaneously on demand, whether such demand is from you or from retailers world-wide, whether the order is for one copy or thousands of copies.
So, book now in hand, how to have readers of fiction worldwide understand the amazing value of your work so that they can tell anyone who'll listen? Dedicated web-sites? Sure, no problem, but how to get folk to click on them? Media reviews. Yes, but The Bookseller magazine told me they wouldn't review any book unless they considered it capable of 25,000 first year sales. As nobody has heard of me or mine that would be near impossible. I think it's called a circular rebuttal. I tried the time honoured direct route; the stipulated four months ahead of publication I sent out review copies of Going with Gabriel to all the national Press here in the UK and in the USA. Again no result. I don't mean no thank you, most often I mean no response. Because of the nature of Gabriel's content I also sent copies to relevant figures high on the A lists, receiving polite encouragement from a member of the Royal family, from the UK's leading environmentalist and from several well-known scientists. Unusable for promotion purposes however, and that's understandable. Would you allow your diamond studded wagon to be hitched to as invisible, as controversial a star as mine?
The only success - The Ross-shire Journal printed an excellent review first of More Deaths Than One and then of Going with Gabriel. I watched the Amazon sales charts with breathless anticipation, saw my works rocket up, clearly as a result of sales in sparsely populated Ross-shire and from friends and relatives in my personal e-mail address book, then die back to languish amongst the deadwood.
Without some new marketing initiative that's where they will stay. But now comes Twenty Bites, my anthology of short fiction. It says on the cover Yes, TWENTY stories: and BITES because they do. Yes, really they do.
I have just celebrated my seventy sixth birthday. My spiritual mentor Ernest Hemingway wrote, 'Man can be destroyed but not defeated'. If I have to bang on the door of every newspaper and bookshop, on foot or more likely through cyber space, then that's what I'll do … because these books are worth it!

More Deaths Than One and Going with Gabriel and now Twenty Bites  ISBN 97809555193-3-8 published 11 November 2010 Pictures and Poems, Aultbea, Ross-shire.   01445 731322   Pico555@btopenworld.com
Bryan IslipKirkhill HouseAultbeaRoss-shireIV22 2HU01445 731322www.bryanislip.com

Blow, winds ...

'Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! ... ' King Lear must have been listening to the same symphony of natural violence as were we at 04.00 this morning. (Crack your cheeks? Old maps always showed a face with distended cheeks built into cloud to indicate the prevailing winds.) His cheeks were certainly fit to bust last night. Storm force or higher and with strongly driven rain, lightning and thunder dramatic enough for me to leave the comfort of bed, scurry atound the house removing electrical plugs to TVs and PCs. Living as we do close to the edge of the sea, across the sea being just the Hebrides until you reach Canada, we enjoy a very close, sometimes worrying relationship with old Mother Nature.

But this morning the wind has dropped and although the sea is streaked with white there are some lighter breaks in the cloud cover. It's just as well. Inverness airport security permitting, Dee will soon be up there on route to the south for a few days visiting her Mum and Sis and Son and a Friend. She'll arrive home thoroughly exhausted on Saturday.

Never mind. With B&B business tapering down and P&P ditto we could both do with some R&R.