Richard Butchins's Blog: Angels stand corrected..., page 2

The Grimmest story

The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm by Jacob Grimm

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Once upon a time there were two brothers named Grimm. They were thieves and they would visit the homes of poor people throughout the land and steal their stories and their tales. These evil brothers would make the stories their own rewriting and embellishing the tales in ways that were never meant to be and then they sold them and made themselves rich and famous. So rich and famous that many years later (102 to be precise) still other men of letters and merchants of words are cashing in on the tales of the poor villagers who are long since dead. But, I'm pleased to say no one lived happily ever after.”

It’s, of course, easy to forget that the Grimm brothers did in fact rape and pillage the folklore of the surrounding regions but not through traveling about as is commonly believed. They took them from already printed sources and as this book referrers to them (rather oddly) “informants” making the tales themselves feel like crimes.

Though, it has to be said that I’m glad they ‘collected' the tales or I wouldn’t be able to read the original version of – for example – Hansel and Gretel where it’s the mother that forces a wimpy father to abandon his children in the woods because they haven’t enough food – rather than a wicked stepmother – The Grimm’s have a lot to answer for in creating the evil step parent trope. The children burn the old woman (witch) to death in an oven and steal her gems returning home to find the mother dead they and the father live happily ever after as rich folk. It also gives pause for thought about the German fixation with burning people to death – what’s with that?

The book contains a fair few grim (pun intended) tales such as “How some children played at slaughtering” which does what the title states except that the children after watching a pig being slaughtered then slaughter each other. It make Steven King read like Enid Blyton. I very much prefer these less sanitised and edited stories they are sparse and abrupt and so delightfully distant from Disney.




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Talking about murder...

A week or two back I was on a podcast for the UK online magazine Disability Now talking about my book. Here's a link (but I have not listened to it myself)

http://www.disabilitynow.org.uk/podca...

Enjoy (and let me know what I sound like)...

Tea with Ray Winstone

Last weekend I had a tea and a chat with the actor Ray Winstone in his kitchen in Essex. I was with Rosa Hoskins and we were interviewing Raymondo as he calls himself about his time working with the actor Bob Hoskins. Ray is a really genuine and lovely man with te uncanny ability to insert the F word into any sentence and make it feel at home. The man is a fabulous swearing machine. I usually find actors to be rather dull and self absorbed but not Ray he's a proper geezer and funny as fuck. Also makes a great cuppa tea and he cheered Rosa up "right proper"

Cheers Ray

A newspaper feature on my book and me !!!

The Camden New Journal ( a London Paper ) interviewed me ages ago and I had forgotten it ever happened and then it came out the other day....here's the link here it is It's a book about London in a way. Hence the article - have a read....

A rather good review of my novel

Hey, someone got it... "This is brilliant writing, atmospheric and disquieting. The imagery of the dreams alongside Smith’s observations of his everyday surroundings are haunting." Here's a great review posted today by a blogger. It's good to be appreciated...


neverimitate blog

Mixing it up 'Hoskins" style....

I love collaborating on projects. I suppose I have been lucky (or exercised good judgement) in my collaborators, they have all been great to work with. At the moment I am collaborating on a project to write a biography / memoir of the actor Bob Hoskins. I am co authoring with his daughter Rosa and it's a pleasure to work with her. She writes well and has the ability to be objective about the subject she's writing about, which is herself and her Dad, so that's a blessing.

In general I have rather an antipathy toward celeb biographies and memoirs they always seem so self indulgent, and exploitative, in the sense that they are really about cashing in on the fan base of the subject. I suppose this is a perfectly reasonable commercial decision but this commercial imperative means we end up with ghostwritten autobiographies of 23 year old reality TV contestants, which is risible in the extreme.

Of course no one is forced to read them and who am I to say that they are a waste of ink, paper, and e pages? I'd like to think the book Rosa and I write will appeal to a larger audience than just the people that liked Bob Hoskins and his films (I am one of those people) and we are writing with that intention, the back and forth of collaborative writing is fun because you are never sure what you are going to receive in the next email - even if you have discussed what's being written it is still always a surprise and, in this case, always a good one.

If you have never tried collaborative writing I recommend it, as it's a good way to introduce variety and to flex ones editorial muscles in a way you can't do when writing on your own.

kindle version less than £1.00 ($1:50) for a few days

My publisher has reduced the price of the E version to under a pound - buy while it's hot - click on the link below

buy the E version here...

thanks

A tiny bit of book.....

it's all true......perhaps


The sun glints off the dirty green water. It’s not deep, maybe five or six feet at best, perhaps less. It had been cleared of most of its underwater junk in the 1980s and it’s usable.

There are basins where narrowboats are permanently parked up with people living on them, a fantasy of a bohemian travelling life complete with broadband and satellite communications, never far from the upmarket restaurants, bars and clubs of the city. The grimy warehouses of the past have been removed and replaced by luxury new-build apartments or reconditioned into slick, feel poor, live rich, lo-fi, hi-tech, media villages.

Nothing is left of the industry that caused the canal to come into existence in the first place. The tall new white buildings alongside the canal are topped with penthouse apartments that gaze down at the old canal.Through the floor-to- ceiling glass windows, I can see little people, like figures on a wedding cake.

I snake along the path, nobody noticing me. I hug the walls and dart under the bridges. I am not in a hurry. It’s just the way I walk: fast, urgent and with purpose, even though I have none.

I need to decide who to kill......(Not in real life - it's an extract from my book)

Another little slice of my novel Pavement for your delight...

I could grab someone off the street. How? I have no car and my disability would be a handicap in that scenario. Perhaps I should kill a child or several children, – it would be easy to entice the stupid little fuckers to my house and easier yet to butcher them and there would only be a small body to get rid of – but there are problems, children are not responsible and won’t understand what is happening to them and they certainly won’t understand why.

I need a cogent adult that understands the reality of what is happening to them. Perhaps a pregnant woman, however, the thought of ripping the dead woman’s body open to find the baby was still alive makes me feel nauseous. I would have to kill the baby or maybe I could dispose of the woman’s body and keep the baby and raise it as my own.

“What? Don’t be fucking stupid. No killing babies or raising them either.”

I say this out loud to enforce the thought, because sometimes thoughts seem quite reasonable until you voice them out loud, and that thought didn’t sound so great. I take a break, make a cup of tea and look for inspiration. As I place the spoon in the sink I spot the answer. It’s staring me in the face, a card lying on the side of the sink:

Yuko Japanese model
A&O, Lesbo Actions, VIP massage, Uniforms, Spanking, Watersports, Toys.
I’m local and can make hotel visits. Call 0773 788443.

I pick up the card and sit down with my tea. Of course, the serial killer’s old standby – the prostitute, a perfect victim – society hates them and no one cares about them if they disappear. The hooker, she’s expendable and dirty. Society secretly thinks they deserve to die because of the knowledge they carry about what so- called respectable men get up to. I feel ashamed that Yuko will have to be my victim, she feels like a kindred spirit, another invisible person despised by a hypocritical society. I am also upset that I will be pandering to a cliché in such a blatant way, but it really has to be said that nobody will give a fuck if a hooker vanishes.

London Bridge ain't falling down....no fair lady

This is my London - my loved and loathed London....enjoy this extract from my novel Pavement.


The view from London Bridge is its usual magnificent self. I stand and gaze: To the east there is Tower Bridge, a Victorian cake decoration, a marzipan fantasy of a bridge. It’s a ridiculous confection set across the river but like all confectionary, pleasing to the eyes. The original walkways high up above the road bridge were haunts for pickpockets and prostitutes after it opened in 1894, and had to be closed in 1910; it’s all grist to the tourist mill for the “most famous bridge in the world ”.

Beyond that I see Canary Wharf blinking in the distance like a giant dumb bird. In front of the toy bridge is HMS Belfast all bristling with guns and bedecked with flags. An aquatic hedgehog of destruction and another museum to the love affair we have with institutional murder.

I cross to the west side, the lowering sun glares in my eyes and catches the ripples of dull yellow river water as it flows in reverse into the heart of London. I can see the old Post Office Tower sticking up like a chewed pencil thrust into the ground. As I stare at the water I realise that the river is the perfect place to dispose of the body once I have cut it up into small pieces. I can just scatter them to the water and the fish, crabs and other underwater creepy-crawlies will do the rest. As long as the flesh is small and the bones broken and crushed, no-one will ever find anything.

I have walked along the little beach by OXO Wharf and the shingle is covered in bone fragments. I should do it easily on a Saturday morning as there will be no workers, and it will be before the tourists are out, just the invisibles and returning party and club goers, and they are too off their heads to bother some crazy ‘homeless guy’ with his bags feeding the invisible ducks on the riverside.