Richard Butchins's Blog: Angels stand corrected..., page 4

Extract No.2 "Waterloo Sunset"

Another very short extract. I am just setting the scene. The next one will come with a "warning". It's going to get very dark...


I cross Waterloo Bridge; the pavement is three large and two small paving stones wide with a pretty gully of eight-inch bricks between the two foot square and fifteen inch square slabs. On my left are the Houses of Parliament – the Palace of Westminster to give it its proper name. In front of them is Charing Cross Railway Bridge with its new footbridge alongside it. I have always thought Charing Cross Bridge is the most romantic of London’s bridges. I used to love the old soot-stained, blackened footbridge running alongside the railway bridge, and the way that you could watch the trains as they drifted in and out of the station, through the struts of the bridge they flowed like an old movie, stuttering and jittering in and out of Charing Cross.

I remember, as a child, watching them at dusk with the lights inside the carriages flickering past. In those days I was highly visible, a small child glued to the railings staring at the trains snaking past, oblivious of the drop to the dark rushing waters below. Passers-by would stop and check to see if I was accompanied by an adult or that I was not lost, or any number of worthwhile things.

A monochrome bridge. A black and white movie. A steam- wreathed symbol of love. Now, however, the white masts of improvement that signify the new footbridge – out with the old and in with the new – they’ve dissipated the bridge’s romantic mystery. The soot and smoke washed away by New Labour, replacing the work of the past with the fury of the future. The steam has evaporated and the scene is in a beautiful nouveau colour, all romance denuded by a downpour of modernity with a massive full stop at the end of the bridge: the Millennium Wheel, like some child’s Meccano construction with its pods of tourists slowly rising and tumbling through the sky like flies in test tubes.

Extract No.1

This is the first extract from my book. It's a short one, after all this is a blog post and I don't want TL:DR to come up...ever.

Enjoy, next one on Friday.



I like the walk along the canal, water is soothing for some reason; even the fetid liquid that squats in the Regent’s Canal is soothing, despite its empty beer cans, tyres and trash. Why is that? The peace offered by bodies of water – perhaps it’s the idea of another world, silent, dark and cold, containing life totally different from us – the strange nature of its substance, both solid and liquid. Life-giving and life-removing, it creates borders and separates us from each other. I think it’s that, and the life-giving nature of water, which is deeply embedded in our souls. We recognise its power and, in an unknowing way, we worship it – it has power over us – we cannot live without it or in it, we cannot tame it or control it. It has us we do not have it. Is that why I love being close to water? Sometimes, on the rare occasions I get to be by the sea, I feel a powerful urge to walk into it and drown, to let it close over my body and remove me from the world. I have heard that drowning is a peaceful way to die.

Celebrity Cult..ure

So, I have a book and I am not a celebrity. This is a problem, according to my publisher, you can't get an audience in this inattentive and noisy internet age unless you have celebrity status of some kind - or at least celebrity endorsements.

"Go and get some celebrities to read the book and say nice things about it."

"Er, I don't really know any celebrities. I mean I am on nodding terms with some and acquainted with some people that work for celebrities from time to time. But to ask them to read a 200 page book is pushing it some."

"Hmmm, well you know ------- ask him to read it he's a very well known author."

"He will be busy authoring and not have time to read books by people he is related to, let alone weirdo's like me."

Nevertheless I sent famous author a copy. It's probably still on a table with 1278 other books for his attention. It's not that I think he won't want to read it, but that he can't, there's not enough hours in his lifetime to get to it.

So, what to do? I believe that I have written a book that deals with some important and difficult issues. It is a very different take on the subject and the voice is unique. Well, of course I think that....I nearly died in order to write it, what else would I think?

Anyway, the celeb route isn't really working out. Funny because I am currently co-writing a celebrity biography for a large publishing house in London. Turns out there are lots of types of celeb and all these are the wrong type for my work. I need to try and create an audience so I am going to publish extracts from the book on this blog - and keep doing so until you all pay attention or I run out of book, whichever comes first. I will not publish the extracts in order and I'll keep the really good bits back.

I'll do another giveaway (I don't know how Goodreads selects the winners of these?) and I'll also offer review copies to people for free after I have published a few extracts, if anyone expresses an interest - I think that's allowed by the site but I'm not entirely sure.

So that's it. My answer to not being a celebrity.... Not much but well, it'll have to do for now.

Oh, I'm on twitter at @PavementNovel

A poem - In Memoriam

For Cate (1978 – 2013)


Death’s jester came to you,

All jingling bells and japes,

You listened to his trickery,

And now he dances with your soul,

Not me.

Never meet your hero's...they always let you down

Once upon a time I met Pete Townshend from the Who. He played an acoustic gig at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford to launch a exhibition by a friend of his. There were about 50 people present and he played some of his famous songs. It was an amazing event to be present at. After he finished the show a friend and I walked him and his girlfriend to his car because he couldn't remember exactly where he had parked it - we located the car - a fabulous Jaguar sports car.

He opened the doors to the car which had only tiny little seats in the back. I went to put his guitar in the back and he stopped me and told his girlfriend to get in the back because he wanted to strap the guitar in the front passenger seat. She had to climb into the back - the guitar took the passenger seat. In they clambered and drove away. I was left thinking that it was pointed that the guitar got the front seat and the person was put in the cramped back seat.

Presumably they drove all the way to London like that. I was not impressed. To tell the truth I have never been impressed by the famous and the great when I have met them (and I have met a lot of them) they always let you down - it's the human condition I suppose.

Reading saved my life...

My childhood was a fucking disaster. I was a crippled kid and had constant trips to hospitals where, as far as I was concerned I was tortured - to make me better - it didn't work. Then there were the beatings at home. I could never tell what response any action might generate. One day I could spill a glass of milk and nothing would happen the next day I could do the same thing and be lifted up by my ears and thwacked soundly. As I grew into a teenager the beatings at home stopped (mainly because my mother and father had split up after years of beating the crap out of me and each other). But I was relentlessly bullied at school. It was terrible. The one thing I had to escape into were books, I read everything, like Scout in "To Kill a Mockingbird" I had been able to read since forever; though my father was no Atticus Finch.

I read all that I could get my hands on - like a drowning man I grasped at the books and the worlds they portrayed. They were a life buoy for me. I would retreat into my room and read. I'm not exactly sure but I think I read all the Narnia books by the time I was 10 and everything by Orwell by 14 and books like "The Wolves of Willougby Chase" and everything by Alan Garner.

I can't remember a time I didn't read. Later I read Kafka and Bulgakov and Beckett and, well, everything. I escaped into other worlds because I thought that what was happening in my world was my fault. I was wrong but that's how children's minds work.

The books saved my life, they gave me hope and nurtured the possibility that I might escape in the future as it happened I took the pain with me and it was many years before I had the confidence to write but I do now and my book is the result

Spider spider burning bright ...

Today I met a spider. I walked into my hallway straight into a spiders web and a big fat brown spider hanging there and I talked to it - now this is unusual - I freaked out at first and then I just told it that it couldn't be hanging around in my hallway like that.

I found a piece of paper and picked it up and put it outside. In a bush instead of stomping it to a mush with my boot on the floor. You have no idea how amazing this is - I recommend talking to spiders it diffuses the fear.

grief

When someone you love dies a sudden and unexpected death, the shock is nauseating. Vomiting occurs.

Everything you had invested in that relationship – everything you shared and perhaps, more important – everything you thought you were going to share is gone; snuffed out like candle, leaving only the acrid smoke of grief, nothing more, nothing.

Suicide is painless...

Taking your own life is not easy. I know I’ve tried, and obviously failed. When you commit suicide you haven’t lost a battle with depression or illness or whatever it maybe. No, you have won – you have taken the final step away from an insoluble problem.

One day, I'll take my own life and that’s ok. It’s mine to take (unless I were to hurt others in the process). I am a disabled man with little if anything to look forward to in life; apart from increasing ill health and poverty in a society that’s shown itself to be virulently anti old-age.

My lover took her own life last year, she, like Robin Williams, hung herself. She left no note but I found out from reading her diaries that she felt that life had come to a full stop for her and that she did what she did out of bravery not cowardice.

I have no information around Mr William’s death other than what’s already in the public domain but I suspect he knew all to well what having Parkinson’s disease entails and perhaps that factored into his choice.

People do not commit suicide in the depths of despair. There is not enough energy down inside that trench. It’s on the way out of the despair when you can see things more objectively that you have the energy to take action.

Once I wrote a lengthy suicide note that, in a twist of irony, caused me to carry on living. It became my novel on the futility of existence - Pavement. It’s no surprise to me that many suicides do not leave letters of intent. That much thought often hinders action. I ended up needing to know what would happen in the story my own suicide note had become. I suspect that many more people consider suicide than is commonly known about but the primitive survival instinct inside each of us is hard to overcome. I once attempted suicide by hurling myself from a bridge fully clothed but it’s harder to drown than you might think – if you can swim and you are conscious then you will.


I am not sure why our society has such a sanction on suicide when we seem happy enough to cause and create societal death on a huge scale. Perhaps the freedom inherent in the decision to take your own life is subconsciously felt as a threat – what if everyone realised his or her life is ultimately pointless? I also question the sanction that the religious have against self inflicted death, surely if there is a paradise then we should all promptly top ourselves and hop on the stairway to heaven, but nope, it’s a surefire way to Hell if we kill ourselves. Personally I don’t believe all this nonsense.

When you die it’s over and that’s a thing to be thankful for, I know I will be.

Release the hounds

Recently I have been having meetings with some large publishers about a book I am co-authoring the subject is quite commercial (can't say what it is here) and the thing that's been most illuminating is the insight into what these publishers, and therefore, by extrapolation all big publishers think and feel about the art of writing.

In short, the answer is not a lot. They don't care a jot about the quality of writing, which is convenient for most of the books they produce are dreadful. There's a shedload of ghostwriting going on, probably in sheds.

Any moron on a reality show can release their "autobiography" at the age of 23, I mean really - have some fucking dignity. You want a book of cat wisdom from the internet...you got it. They have no self esteem they will publish anything that will make them money. There is an almost shameless disregard for the written word.

The process has been interesting thus far and no doubt will continue to be so. I will blog about it on here in a forthright fashion until they set the lawyers on me, or the dogs, or fire me, or something !