Nigel Quinlan's Blog, page 39
July 29, 2015
Neil and Ed Wharton! (Picture by Keith Robinson!)Neil: This is a...
Neil and Ed Wharton! (Picture by Keith Robinson!)
Neil: This is a long drive.
Ed: Yes it is.
Neil: You drive a lot don’t you?
Ed: Yes, I do.
Neil: Because you’re a lorry driver and you like to drive.
Ed: That is correct.
Neil: But you’re also a tourist.
Ed: That is also a correct thing, yes.
Neil: But not just a tourist, you’re a Tourist. I put a capital ‘t’ in there, did you hear it?
Ed: Yes I did and yes I am. Neil, are you, a bit like like the lorry we are currently sitting in, actually going anywhere with any of this?
Neil: I just wanted to introduce you in case anyone was wondering who you are.
Ed: Neil, there’s nobody else here with us to wonder any such thing. Unless Owen is hiding under the seat.
Ed: Owen isn’t hiding under the seat is he?
Neil: Ha ha no, of course not.
Ed: Check, Neil.
Neil: Yeah, I’ll check.
Neil: Nope, all clear.
Ed: Thank you. Pray continue.
Neil: Continue what?
Ed: Please get to wherever it is your inane questions are taking you before I show you how the passenger ejector seat works.
Neil: Uh, okay. You have a passenger ejector seat?
Ed: Neil, I am a patient man…
Neil: Right, right.
Ed: But even I have my limits.
Neil: Okay, I said! Sheesh. So, you’ve been all over the world and seen all sorts of amazing things and you were chased by a spectral hamster in France and nearly married a statue and used Thor’s hammer to nail a chair together, but what’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen? The most magical and strange and wonderful thing?
Ed: Well, Neil, that’s a good question.
Neil: Thank you, Ed.
Ed: Doesn’t make up for all the other stupid questions you asked, but never mind.
Neil: Shut up, Ed.
Ed: There was this time I was driving through a strange and foreign city. The streets were crooked and narrow, and the houses leaned threateningly over me, closing me in, blocking the sky. A fog came out of nowhere, blocking my sight, slowing me to a crawl. For endless hours I ground my way through a maze of ancient thoroughfares, lost and alone. No soul stirred in the grey gloom. Night was drawing in. I felt unseen eyes watching from the blank windows. It was as if I had wandered into some outer suburb of limbo, and would never find my way out. Suddenly the houses drew back. The street widened. The fog thinned. A blazing golden light flooded the world as the setting soon finally broke through the murk! And standing before me, a figure all in white, shining and glowing as if awash in a river of gold! One hand raised in a graceful gesture, as if reaching out to me, the other holding a staff topped with a majestic red orb that blinded me with a single word of command. I was compelled to instantly obey! I slammed on the brakes and the lorry jerked to a halt, and I stared in wonder as a line of tiny figures rushed behind her, too quickly to be seen. The figure stared at me in grave and noble silence, and I stared back at her, enraptured.
Neil: What… what was she? An angel? A goddess? A ghost?
Ed: A lollipop lady.
Neil: A - wait, a what?
Ed: Yup. School crossing. White coat. Big red sign with STOP written on it. Never so happy to see another human being in my entire life.
Neil: …
Neil: Yeah, okay.
Ed: Hey, did I tell you about the time I accidentally stole the Last Tulip from the Miser Of Macon?
Neil: Does it have hamsters in it? That hamster one squicked me out a bit. I didn’t know they could be so creepy.
Ed: Ummm, there are a couple of creepy hamsters in it, yeah.
Neil: Mmm. Oh go on, tell me anyway.
July 28, 2015
Everywhere Stories- Nigel Quinlan guest post
All places have stories. You just have to ask, and listen. There’s a hill where I grew up called Lisavoora. Translated from the slightly mangled Gaelic, it means ‘the fort of the giant.’ There’s a bridge with the same name near the foot of the hill made of red sandstone. Wind and rain have shaped the tops of the stones into a rough surface of bumps and hollows. Somewhere in all those bumps and hollows is said to be the handprint of the giant, left there after he came out of the fort and vaulted over the bridge. You can run your hand along the stone, searching for the handprint. You can even find it a few times in a few different places. The giant himself is buried under the hill, and they say he will wake before the end of the world, though they don’t say why.
There’s a place next to where my grandparents used to live, a long, narrow valley with steep sides covered in dripping undergrowth, a stream gurgling and splashing through it, and a strange spot halfway down called the Mass Rock. The valley is called Glenstal, ‘the glen of the stallion,’ because someone once released their horse there rather than be forced to sell it cheap. The Mass Rock is where Catholics heard Mass during the dark days of the Penal Laws. My Dad tells me there was a Belgian monk from the nearby monastery who saw something evil in the woods around there and fled back to Belgium. There’s an artificial lake within a mile or so that drained once when the dam holding its waters in broke, and people wandered the muddy flats and picked up fish from the ground and put them in bags and took them home to eat.
Every place has stories. When you grow up listening to these stories, hearing the names of these places and remembering the stories that lie behind them, then place and story become impossible to separate. Every place must have a story. Every story must have a place.
Even if that place is a phone box.
There aren’t many phone boxes left now, and there’s a whole other story in that. There used to be plenty of them, everywhere you went. They were so ordinary and boring you wouldn’t have thought they needed a story. Handy places to make phone calls, you’d have thought, until someone comes along to invent the mobile phone. Can’t even take pictures with them.
Nowadays, if you were driving down a lonesome road in the heart of the Irish countryside and you saw one on the side of the road in front of an old farmhouse being run as a B&B, you might wonder how it got there, and why. You might wonder who runs the B&B. You might ask yourself if they have children and if those children play on the wooded hill across the road. You wouldn’t be able to see the lake or the farm on the other side of the hill, but even if you did, you wouldn’t assume there was any connection between them and the phone box.
If you decided to stop for the night at the B&B, you could ask the Maloneys, all five of them, these questions. And because places have stories and people like to tell stories, they would tell you all about it.
They might not tell you the real stories, though.
About why they call the phone box the Weatherbox. About the magical dawn ceremony that takes place in the Weatherbox four times a year. About the ancient fort that used to stand where that lake is now, and why it’s a lake, and why the farm is no longer theirs. About the vast and terrible entities that live in the sky and how they are kept in check by the Weatherman, and why.
When you live in place all your life and you know the stories by heart, you start to take them for granted. You don’t think about them, and when you do, you don’t think they’re special or interesting. Until the day comes when something happens and you have to remember the stories and think about them, because there’s a new chapter happening to that story right now that will change everything, and that everything depends on you. Sometimes when you associate stories with places you forget that they happen in places, but to people. And now those people are you.
Liz and Neil know the amazing story of the Weatherbox.
Now they have to tell us what happened next.
The hags! Who are they? Where are they from? What do they want?...
The hags! Who are they? Where are they from? What do they want? Wait, what are you, wait, careful with those sticks! Augh agh urgh urk -
Why hello dears!
Hellos to you all!
Here we are on the author’s sociable mediatings! The magics of modern communimications!
Electrickericks and computational internetterings!
Look at all the lovely delicious peoples reading his Tumblrings and Twitterations and Bookityfaces! So manies!
Enough to fill a very small phone box and still have room for the giant cat!
Mustn’t forget the giant cat!
Lovely delicious giant cat! Where is the wretched thing?
Posting rude comments on the YouTubers, I think. Naughty cat!
Ooh, a bit like that sneery-headed author who thinks he’s so clever was being rude about us!
Naughty, naughty author! We’re not nasty old hags! We’re adorable defenceless old women looking for beds and breakfasts!
We’re sweet and harmless and if you call us hags again we’ll take your thumbs off and feed them to the cat!
Oh no!
No?
Feed them to the cat? Waste of good thumbs!
Naughty, delicious thumbs! Much tastier than Tumblrs!
But what about the cheeky arty-schmarty lad what does the auld drawings?
Oh, we’ll let illustriminator Cat Birdboy off because he caught our good side.
And because he’s half-bird half-cat so there’s nothing we could do to make it worse for him.
So just be a teensily bit more careful about what you call us in future, sneery- faced authory-schmauthory!
Or as the song says you’ll be typing without thumbs!
Now, off to the YouTubers to find that naughty cat!
And some troll stew?
Hang on, I’ll just google a recipe.
…
…
…
Uh, ow, ouch, whuh…. what the heck just happened?
Meet Dad! He’s the Weatherman, and not normally a shouty person...
Meet Dad! He’s the Weatherman, and not normally a shouty person but this morning he is shouting a lot! And meet Mrs FitzGerald, who is also not a shouty person because she is the sort of person who Does Not Need To Raise Her Voice, but she is also the sort of person You Do Not Want To Be Shouting At. So why is the Weatherman shouting at her? Why is she pointing at him so rudely? Why are the Maloneys all in their pyjamas? Find out in The Maloneys’ Magical Weatherbox! Out in the US today from Roaring Brook Press!
Illustration by Keith Robinson!
Meet Liz and Neil! Neil likes to go swimming and release...
Meet Liz and Neil! Neil likes to go swimming and release dangerous entities trapped under lakes! Liz likes to shoot arrows at the dangerous entities Neil releases from under lakes! They’re those spooky, scary, magic Maloneys you keep hearing about!
Illustrations by Keith Robinson from the UK edition of The Maloney’s Magical Weatherbox! US edition released from under a lake and having arrows shot at it on July 28th! Which may or may not be today, depending on time zones!
The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox | Digital Catalog - Macmillan Children's Publishing Group
So The Maloney’s Magical Weatherbox is coming out in the US on the 28th July, or ‘July 28th’ as you zany Americans call it, I believe. I got a whole box of these adorable little hardback US editions last week and I love them and I think I’m going to donate most of them, and some of my remaining UK copies, to women’s shelters and any children’s care and educational centres I can find. Suggestions welcome.
July 27, 2015
space-pics:
Great Red Spot closeup...
Great Red Spot closeup (contrast-enhanced)
http://space-pics.tumblr.com/
source:http://imgur.com/r/space/JkJ2tap
July 26, 2015
Under Goliath by Peter Carter
One of the drawbacks of growing up feeling ambivalent about the whole educational process is a tendency to develop certain prejudices against the materials used to educate you. The books recommended to you in school or taught in class tend to become associated negatively with the idea of ‘worthiness.’ Which is to say, like medicine, these books are good for you. Which is daft. I genuinely loved a lot of the books I was taught in school - Huckleberry Finn and Wuthering Heights and Persuasion. That didn’t stop me from regarding other books, not taught to me but on the curriculum, as 'worthy.’ This included, but was not limited to, To Kill A Mockingbird, Roll Of Thunder Hear My Cry, and Under Goliath. Peter Carter’s novel was doubly handicapped because it was set in Belfast and was about the Troubles. Nothing could be worthier than a children’s book about the Troubles, especially to an Irish child living in the South, for whom the North was a troubled id, sending nightmares and other disturbances to bother the consciousness via the six o'clock news and newspaper headlines.
But here I am. Alan is a Protestant, but a bit of an outsider for all that, his father being British. With no interest in hardline Protestantism, he nonetheless develops a desire to play the lambegh, the huge drum used by Orange marching bands. In the event, he joins a band, but ends up playing the fife. A chance, and chancy, encounter, brings him into contact with Fergus, a Catholic piper, and a hidden gun. They meet each week, their relationship uneasily distorted by the gun, and by the growing unease throughout the city and province, to the point where it seems impossible for them to be friends.
This is brilliantly, beautifully written, psychologically astute, vivid with the sights and sounds of seventies Belfast, awash with the social and religious pressures dividing the inhabitants. The final chapters brilliantly describe a terrifying riot in all its confusion and violence. The framing device has a shockingly brutal bitterness to it. The boys might survive their childhood experiences but the cumulative effect destroys their innocence and warps their lives.
The lesson here is, I suppose, that sometimes worthy books really are truly and genuinely worthy books.
