Jan Carson's Blog, page 16

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Fifty One

December 17th 2015 – East Belfast

Stephen Gordon

We are standing in line for the midnight screening of the new Star Wars. You are wearing a hat with flaps which covers your ears and most of your face so your nose is your only discernible feature. I do not think I could love you more.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I say. “I’ve never had a girlfriend who loves Star Wars as much as me before.”

You smile softly. Now you are mouth as well as nose. I expect your eyes are still in there somewhere, hiding under that hat. I take your hand in mine. It is small and slides around inside its glove.

“I wouldn’t say I LOVE Star Wars,” you admit, “I did enjoy the movies though, and the TV programmes. Actually, I think I liked the programmes better.”

I feel my stomach drop.

“What programmes?” I ask.

“You know the one with the man whose ears are all pointy? Beam me up Scotty, and all that,” you reply.

“That’s Star Trek,” I say, and when you laugh and ask, “what’s the difference? Sure, there all space and robots aren’t they?” I try to let go of your hand, but you are holding mine in both of yours and won’t let go. I can’t remember what your face looks like under that hat, pretty much the same as my last girlfriend, I suspect.

 

December 18th 2015 – Bedford Street, Belfast

Dave Capener

There were fifteen different cakes –a cake for each person attending the party. This had not been planned. Neither had it been planned against. The invite said, “bring a snack to share,” and everyone brought cake. There was chocolate, double chocolate, coconut cream and cherry, coffee vanilla, fudge with sprinkles and something which looked like a cake but tastes of banana sandwiches. This one was not popular with older attendees.

The carrot cake went first. Most people returned for a second slice and some even chanced a third. They could not have explained with words why they’d plumped for carrot cake over other more exotic cakes on offer but when they were eating the carrot cake there was a taste in their mouth like the memory of a childhood birthday. This was something worth holding on to and so they bypassed chocolate and Victoria sponge for another slice of carrot cake and smiled, and smiled like the future was stuck in their teeth.

“I was laughing when I made that cake,” said the woman who’d baked the carrot cake, “I think I mixed some of the laughter in.”

This made sense to everyone at the party. They could taste it.

 

December 19th 2015 – Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast

Anne Marie and Donal Ryan

When your Grandmother grew too old to knit or distinguish between her female grandchildren she checked herself out of the nursing home and moved into the shed at the bottom of our garden.

“I’m dying,” she said. This was probably true. We could see it in her cheekbones and the way her skin had grown thin and crinkled like a brown, paper bag hanging from her bones.

“I want to go backwards,” she said. This was my grandmother’s way of saying she wished to be in the end as she had been in the beginning, which is to say, empty of all those experiences to come.

My grandmother forced herself to forget the world outside her shed: the wars and weather and interior designs which had complicated her adult life. She read no books. She watched no television and only drank milk from a beaker which my sister carried from the house three times daily. She did not speak to my sister and my sister knew not to speak to her.

My grandmother passed six weeks in this quiet state before dying. She slept and smiled in her sleep and dreamt of empty spaces waiting to be filled.

 

December 20th 2015 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Matt Minford

Last winter it didn’t snow. It always snowed for at least two months before Christmas and a month afterwards. Most people blamed global warming for the lack of snow while those who still did not believe in climate change though it was simply a preternaturally mild winter.

By mid-November the Tourist Board had begun to panic. Most visitors came particularly for the snow. It was all the area was famous for. These tourists would not be amused by green ski slopes and Alpine lodges with their roof tiles still visible. Next year they might winter in America or somewhere more reliably cold.

The Tourist Board took action. They pooled their remaining resources and purchased twenty kilometres squared of synthetic snow. “No one will be able to tell the difference,” they said.

This was not true. The fake snow stuck to the tourists’ sweaters and collected in their hair like fine, whispering flakes of dandruff. They did not, for a moment, believe it was the real thing but could not have cared less what it was made of so long as it looked white and fluffy in their holiday photographs; so long as they looked like they we re having a fabulous, wintery time; so long as they made their friends and colleagues jealous.

 

December 21st 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Emma Dickey

It is impossible to predict a food fight. One minute the elderly ladies are passing the trays of sandwiches round the table, hand to hand like the Sunday morning collection plate, next thing Mary is lifting the apple cream which Maureen had had her eye on since the moment she first sat down at the table, and before you can say, “pass the milk jug,” they’re calling each other all the farmyard names of the day, words which you would not expect to hear coming from the mouths of well-dressed ladies, words such as, “thieving bitch,” and, “auld hag,” and worse things with spit. Next thing the scones are flying. Jammed and creamed, they go gallumping across the table, skimming the edge of Maureen’s new perm, landing crump, splut in Mary’s lap, leaving stains, drawing all the other elderly ladies in until it’s a regular bun worry and even the sandwiches are flying and it’s hard to remember that these flinging hands were only moments earlier, reaching daintily across the doilies and sugar bowls for an apple cream, or a fondant fancy, or a tiny, German biscuit.

 

December 22nd 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Kyle and Margaret McAdam

This Christmas, for money, I am being an Elf in a department store, Santa’s Grotto. I make minimum wage plus all the mince pies I can eat. Santa makes almost double this. I do not think this is entirely fair but most competitive careers are biased in favour of male employees.

As an Elf I wear a green and red tabard, striped socks and a hat with a bell on top. I should wear pointy, Elf shoes but last year’s Elf neglected to hand her shoes in at the end of the Christmas season so I am making do with brogues.

I greet the children at the door, usher them towards Santa’s chair, (attempting to calm those children who go poker straight, hysterical at the very sight of the man himself). Afterwards, I hand out the presents. This is the best part of my job, except when the children are spoilt and do not say thank you for their presents. Then I am a bad Elf. I lean in, real close to their ears and whisper, “Santa just told me he won’t have time to visit your house this year.” Actually this is the best part of being an Elf.

When dressed as an Elf I wear two dots of red face paint on my cheeks. The stain lingers well into the New Year like a blush which simply will not fade.

 

December 23rd 2015 – Waterfront Hall, Belfast

Stephen O’Neill

You can hire a badge making machine from the Play Resource Warehouse at the cost of five pounds per day. This low cost is meant to ensure the service is affordable to community groups and children’s organisations but you have always wanted to make badges and so I hired the machine for your birthday. You were thirty five this year.

The badge machine came with one hundred badges. We made badges of our names, the bands we’d liked in High School, your favourite football team, my favourite rude word in German, Star Wars, cats and the yellow, smiley face man from the early 90s. We still had many, many badges left so we made badges of everything in the flat: ‘sofa,’ ‘chairs,’ ‘cushion,’ ‘curtains,’ ‘rug,’ pinning each one to the appropriate item. You’d long since run out of enthusiasm for the badge machine and the palms of your hand were beginning to blister from operating the lever, but you would not stop until all the badges had been made. You did not want to seem ungrateful. You have always been kind like this, and driven to excess.

The next day I returned the badge machine and unpinned all the badges. There were tiny, puncture wounds like vampire bites in all our soft furnishing, so we’d keep remembering your birthday long after the event ended.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Fifty

December 10th 2015 – Linenhall Street, Belfast

Martin and Lucy Cathcart Froden

This morning I read that Kay Ryan poem, the one about the fourth Wise Man who disliked travel and preferred his own bed to the open road, which made me think of the shepherd who went off for a quick wee at exactly the wrong, angelic moment, and all the people who, upon hearing there was only one portion of loaves and fish to split between so many, went home to fix their own sandwiches, and the guests who drunk themselves blind beneath the tables long before the water turned wineish, and, of course, the disciples, who were almost always asleep in boat bottoms and gardens and other comfortable spots, missing the point of everything. And finally, I arrived at myself, and the very many times I have decided to stay in, watching re-runs of Morse and Poirot, reading paperback novels in bed, whilst in the streets and bars and staged rooms of this city, miracles are miracling away, and I am only afterwards hearing about them on Facebook.

 

December 11th 2015 – Ormeau Road, Belfast

Damian Smyth

This morning the Loch Ness monster died. It was to have been her nine hundred thousandth new day and, while she was a great old one for rounding up, she did not think she could bear another hundred thousand wakenings just to hit the square million.

It was not guns which killed her in the end, nor old age, or even the skeptics trying to disapprove her with their sonar machines and special cameras. It was, instead, a very specific kind of loneliness which causes her to draw breath, and hold that breath until her big lungs sunk and all the seeing went out of her eyes. It was the loneliness of being left behind after everyone else has gone home.

By this evening the Loch Ness monster had begun to disappear; her monster belly caving in upon itself, her skin slipping loose and bones unclasping to bury themselves in the gritty silt. Smaller and more ordinary creatures will strip her bare with their mouths and teeth.

Tomorrow there will be nothing left to prove the Loch Ness monster has ever been. This will have no impact whatsoever on those individuals, (both local and international), who can believe in things unseen. They will continue to hope for her arched neck, humping every time the Loch rises.

 

December 12th 2015 – Ballymena

Laura Garwood

My grandfather was a difficult man who always chose the road not taken even when the obvious route made much more sense on paper and in practice. Each Christmas he asked for a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. We were careful to choose images we thought might appeal to him such as vintage cars, French chateaux and watercolour paintings of the Lake District. We needn’t have bothered. My grandfather turned each piece over and built his jigsaw cardboard side up.

“More of a challenge this way,” he said, yet still requested a different puzzle each Christmas.

When my brother, the artist, was twenty five years old and back from New York for the summer, he spent weeks painting pictures on the cardboard side of our grandfather’s puzzles, forcing the aesthetic back into the old man. By this stage it was too late. Our grandfather had gone blind, though he was still building his jigsaws by hand. My brother sat next to him as he felt his way round the ins and circled outs of each piece, describing the picture his broken eyes could no longer see. This was too much for the old man- a final indignity he could not stand. Perhaps, he’d never trusted beauty. Perhaps, he’d always had more confidence in things he could touch. He quit building his puzzles and, two months later, died; the events unconnected, or perhaps, intrinsically linked.

 

December 13th 2015 – Queen’s University, Belfast

Christine McClune

Enough was enough and I had to draw a line under it all. It seemed just the right moment for a protest so I decided to lock myself inside my car and stay there until things changed. I was not an idiot. I’d seen films about this kind of thing. I took water, crisps, books and tinned fruit to stave off the hunger. By the middle of the first night I was wishing for a warm blanket and other essential items.

It was almost a perfect protest. I was angry and visible to all those passing by. They stopped to peer through my windscreen and ask was I ok? And, what was doing, staying up all night in a Citroen Saxo? I tried to give them my list of demands, gesturing furiously and using my outdoor voice, but the windows got in the way, and I could not risk wasting the battery by lowering them, even an inch. I wished I’d informed the Media about my protest, or even a friend on the outside who could advocate for me. It was too late though, and leaving the car would mean starting my protest all over again.

When the Fire Brigade came to break me out with a special key I was not angry, only relieved to have attracted some concern.

“We thought you were having a breakdown in there,” they said, and I wondered if I was.

 

December 14th 2015 – Bedford Street, Belfast

Kasey Pilcher Mascenti

This morning is our annual Christmas Party. We are playing Pass the Parcel with accompaniment on an upright piano. Jingle Bells, Frosty the Snowman, Silent Night; we are singing all the words we can remember, humming the rest. Almost half the people taking part have Dementia. Several of them are not sure why they are passing a gift-wrapped box from hand to hand around the circle but they keep watching their neighbours and copying their actions. They have learnt to do this with almost everything.

When the music stops they look down at the thing they are holding. It is gift-wrapped and shiny, so they assume it to be a present, and because it is resting in their hands, are certain it must be meant for them. They smile, say thank you and try to put the gift into their handbag or coat pocket. It doesn’t fit.

When the music begins again and the present is snatched from them they are confused but do not object. They have grown used to having things taken from them; precious things which never come back.

 

December 15th 2015 – Linenhall Street, Belfast

Ali Fitzgibbon and Glenn Patterson

This morning’s envelope contained a wedding ring, two slices of cooked ham and a photograph of my late grandfather, squinting into the sun on Portstewart Strand. He couldn’t have been more than twenty five years old in this photo but I could already see how his face would fold and slide slowly downwards with age. The brine from the cooked ham had caused the photograph to smudge a little around the edges and there was a damp, almost translucent patch islanding across the envelope. It contained no letter, no written explanation for its contents, but of course we weren’t expecting any.

An envelope like this arrived most mornings from my grandmother in the nursing home. They habitually contained coins, sugar sachets, paperclips and coils of children’s hair, a page clipped from the Radio Times, boiled sweets, buttons or plastic, cocktail swords; small envelope-sized items which my grandmother had come to believe were precious and therefore liable to be stolen by cleaners or light-fingered care workers. She sent them to us for safe keeping. Some were worth keeping and my mother stored these in a biscuit tin on the topmost shelf of the larder. The rest she binned.

“It’s just rubbish,” she said, and though I agreed in principle I always wondered if perhaps my grandmother was judging her treasures by a different standard.

 

December 16th 2015 – East Belfast

Heather Thomas

As a child they took me to see Santa in Connswater Shopping Centre. Connswater Santa was not particularly believable, but he was free and every child who visited him was entitled to a free souvenir photo and gift-wrapped present. This was always a selection box, one of the cheaper brands with fun-sized chocolate bars and a miniature Bounty which no one on in our house –not even my hoover of a dad- would eat. In those days we were not yet rich or even moderately well-off. I did not get many Christmas presents and so, despite the lack of surprise, kept my selection box from Santa fully wrapped until Christmas morning.

The year I turned eight the selection box contained no chocolate bars, just six rectangular indentations in the plastic like tiny, unfulfilled graves. I should have suspected this. The Santa present had felt worryingly light that year. Perhaps, I’d assumed it full of Maltesers or bubbly, lighter than air, Aero bars. Perhaps, I already knew that a stranger giving gifts and expecting nothing in return was a little too good to be true. Either way, I said nothing and held on to the idea of Santa for one more Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Forty Nine

December 3rd 2015 – St George’s Market, Belfast

Claire Warwick

For several days each year, possibly as many as fifteen, the largest freshwater lake in the UK is located outside the entrance of St. George’s Market. Those pedestrians unfortunate enough to work in, or around, the Markets are forced to take their dry ankles in their hands and dash along the damp pavement opposite the market hoping, and hoping, and always encountering the disappointment of a Translink bus or taxi as it speeds through the lake’s edge, baptizing them all in a head to show shower of stagnant water.

The DOE calls this phenomenon a puddle. Sometimes, on the wettest days, they place signs in the road and call a spade a deep spade, admitting that this is a flood. It is more than a flood. It can be seen from Space. Lough Neagh knows this. She envies the new lake its size, its depth, its cosmopolitan location and fears the day when she will look herself up on Wikipedia and discover that she is no longer the UK’s largest inland lake.

 

December 4th 2015 – QFT, Belfast

William Rihel

I am surprised to discover that Hal Ashby, director of cult 70s movies such as ‘Being There’ once proposed Agatha Christie as an ideal candidate for the role of Maude in his 1971 hit, ‘Harold and Maude.’ Despite the fact that Ms. Christie has no background in acting, and the unlikely, (and somewhat disturbing image of her, making love to a twenty three year old boy), I am intrigued by this possibility.

I would not put it past Agatha Christie. I would not put anything past Agatha Christie. I remember that she once stood up on a surfboard whilst all the other ladies sat down to tea.

I imagine Agatha Christie in pearls and tweed seeing a murder lurking behind every one of young Harold’s suicide attempts, taking notes, suspecting everyone, doing a stellar impression of Jessica Fletcher. I imagine her refusing Ashby his ambiguous exit scene for the chance to gather the whole cast in the drawing room in order to point an accusatory finger at the guiltiest party.

 

December 5th 2015 – St George’s Market, Belfast

Hugh Odling-Smee

Every year during the month leading up to Christmas Eleanor takes a stall at St George’s Market and sells disappointment in small, hand-made bottles. It is mostly locals who buy from her. The tourists tend to skip straight from the felt handbag stall on her left, to the organic candles on her right, barely pausing to register the little, glass bottles lined across Eleanor’s table.

She stocks any number of different disappointments: the disappointment of an unsupportive parent, the disappointment of a homely child, the disappointment of being alone or not nearly alone enough, the disappointment of cats, good wine, box sets and religion, the dry disappointment of Christmas Day evening which is easily the most popular product on her stall. Customers seem to know without asking exactly the right disappointment to buy.

Eleanor only sells disappointment at Christmas. She could not afford the fees for an all year stall. Besides, during the rest of the year people do not require an excuse for the way they feel kind of hopeless first thing in the morning. The sun is up or down, and one day follows the next, and what is there to be particularly happy about? At Christmas people are expected to sparkle and when they cannot muster the guts it helps to have a bottle to point to, to be able to say, “I was absolutely fine ‘til I took this.”

 

December 6th 2015 – Dundonald

Debbie McCune

We weren’t going to do a real tree this year but then I thought, “what the Hell, it’s our last year in this house. Next year, when the kids are gone, and we’re settled into an apartment, we can make do with a pretend one.”

I sent you off to buy a tree. You came back an hour later with a forest slung over your shoulder. You smelled like Vosene hair shampoo.

“It’s environmentally friendly,” you said, “afterwards we can plant it in the back garden. It’ll still grow.”

You only said this because the tree had cost almost fifty pounds and you didn’t want me to think you a fool. It was too late for rose-tinted thinking of any kind, twenty five years too late, next June. It was also too late to stop the tree. It did not want to wait for replanting. As soon as we’d set it up in the corner of the living room and draped the fairy lights round its outstretched arms it began to grow. Its roots burrowed beneath the hardwood floors. Its branches climbed the inside of the chimney and wrapped themselves around the radiators. It attracted birds who built nests.

When we came to sell the house we tried to pitch the tree as a feature, but no one was buying this.

“At least we’re set for next year,” you said and I wondered if we’d even see June.

 

December 7th 2015 – Royal Avenue, Belfast

David Torrance

I stole a pen from Eason’s this morning. I only took it to prove I was not adverse to stealing or either misdemeanours such as drunkenness and the use of those more offensive swear words. I decided that a pen was a perfectly acceptable first attempt at theft. It was not as insignificant as gum or loaded with the same weight of consequence as a book, for example, or a pair of shoes.

I chose a mid-priced marker in red, (the colour of danger), slipped it up my sleeve and walked swiftly out of the store and into Royal Avenue. After stealing the pen I felt invincible and also a little warmer than usual, (the sweat had begun to swim down the back of my jumper).

“What the Hell,” I figured, “now I am a criminal I might as well commit as many crimes as possible.” (I know from reading detective novels and watching The Bill, before it got cancelled, that the criminal life is a slippery slope with one crime inevitably leading to another).

So, I ran my red marker round every building in Donegal Square and added vandalism to my criminal record. Once the ink was gone I thought about using the empty carcass of my pen to stab a man but the nib was blunt and too soft to pierce even the thinnest skin, and by then I had grown tired of my life of crime.

 

December 8th 2015 – Bedford Street, Belfast

Finn Kennedy

Certain parts of England are underwater this morning. River banks have burst, ponds have swollen to form lakes and there are lakes the size of oceans now, turning the fields and forest parks to soup. On the television news cars are swimming down the High Street like half- submerged submarines. Only the tips of the hedges are visible, islanding above the tide line and in one village a whole family has gathered on the roof of their house to swipe frantically at the air. They are not waving. They are not drowning either but the possibility is ever present.

The train tracks trundle into one side of the flood, disappear and emerge half a mile later, still heading in the same direction. It is easy to imagine the carriages submerged beneath the water and the passengers with their newspapers, their briefcases and packed lunches sitting tight as they wait for normal service to resume. Their hair writhes damply round their head like seaweed caught in the current. There are houses down here too, and trees, and other man-made structure. It is slower down here. It is calmer, and in some ways easier to breathe. The people on the train are in no real rush to leave.

 

December 9th 2015 – QFT, Belfast

Nick Boyle

Tonight they’re serving Christmas dinner to the inmates on C Block. Individual trays of roast potatoes, turkey and Brussel sprouts are placed in front of each prisoner. The turkey is tough this year and requires a knife. This is the first time in months that there have been knives on the table. The men stare at the knives for a long time before lifting them. They have forgotten how to hold a weapon- even a tiny, plastic one. They are still cuffed and struggle to slice and spear with both hands bound together. Food slips from their forks leaving stains on their festive, Christmas napkins.

They pull their crackers with both hands, reaching across the table to assist the prisoner opposite. The sound of crackers snapping is too like gunfire and in the in the corner of the dining hall one man lifts his hands to cover his ears and cannot manage this while shackled. The Senior Guard reads cracker jokes aloud. This passes for entertainment on C Block. They are terrible jokes but everyone laughs anyway, glad of the opportunity to stretch their voice.

After dinner the prisoners offer the cook a round of applause. But their cuffed hands will only stretch so far and the applause does not sound like clapping so much as a gentle, defeated tap.

How to Read Poems Properly

Most of my friends are poets. I’ll rephrase this because it sounds terribly pretentious. If you did a kind of job census on the people who I spend most of my time with I’m pretty sure I’d end up with more poetry writing associates than teachers, lawyers, doctors etc. Another way of saying ‘most of my friends are poets’ is, ‘most of my friends are permanently broke.’

I spend a lot of time at poetry readings. I spend a lot of time on the edge of discussions about Louis MacNeice, and various types of sonnets, and whether this poet or that poet deserves to win a prize for their poems about fish/history/B list celebrities, and if it’s acceptable to write poems sideways so they stretch across two whole pages and you have to turn the book sideways to read them; also how to maintain the fine balance between black clothing and tweed clothing when reading your poems out loud in a public place. Most of the time I don’t really understand what I’m listening to but there is often free wine at these gatherings and the poets are mostly very kind and pleasant individuals so I don’t mind being a little bit lost in their company. Sometimes there is another prose writer present and we huddle together for solidarity saying things like “Jonathan Franzen” and “how many thousand words did you write today?” very loudly so the poets can tell that we are different from them and might even write television screenplays in the future.

The poets, for the most part, (and I have to make some exceptions here), do not read prose. They are wary of it, or perhaps do not know where to start. This is ok. I have a similar attitude when it comes to shellfish. This year I decided that I should set an example for the poets by reading ten volumes, (Collections? Books? Annals?), of contemporary poetry in order to show the poets that it is not so very scary to venture out there into a different literary genre. Below is the list of books which the poets decided I should read. This list was not without controversy. It was drafted and passed round the Sunflower during a Lifeboat reading in order to gain the approval of all the poets present, (the collective noun for a group of poets is a rhyme, an iamb or an obscurity,[really, an obscurity!]). It returned to me dog-eared and annotated by several different hands: “not enough American poets,” “I have no idea who this poet is,” “tendency to overdo the classical references.”I was not to be dissuaded, even by the classical references. This is what we have Wikipedia for after all.

I read everything on the list. Some of it was life-changing and made me cry. Some of it was the reading equivalent of sucking paperclips, (nb. any poetry collection with an Andy Warhol style pop art cover is not to be trusted). I read twelve more poetry collections. That’s twenty two individual books of poems in total. This is pretty good going for a person who hasn’t seriously read poetry since Yeats at undergrad and also completely missed the fact that Autumn Journal rhymes.

In the process of this experiment I have learnt some things about how to read poems properly. The following points may be useful to other people who have too many poets in their life and wish to build up a stockpile of things to say at cultivated dinner parties, (in fairness most poets I know don’t have cultivated dinner parties. They are too poor and are more likely to be found in Boojum or eating chickpea curry off a plate on their knees), or people who have become stuck in a literary rut of their own making reading endless quirky, short story collections and paperback novels by male American writers of the early twentieth century. I hope you will find it useful and maybe read some poems yourself. The good thing about poems is that some are extremely short so if you are a little intimidated you can start with one which is only two lines long and build up to The Wasteland (which is considerably longer than two lines), over a number of weeks. Good luck to you.

How to Read Poems Properly:

Do not read poetry without a drink in your hand. Coffee is acceptable. Wine is much better. A slight muddliness in your brain may well help you to appreciate the poem more. Reading poetry is a little like trying to see the boat in a magic eye picture; you need to let yourself get a little out of focus to see the point of it.
Underline bits you like. Do not underline too much or you will appear to have no discernment. Approximately one in every eight to ten lines is probably sufficient.
Do not read poetry as fast as you read novels. My novel rate is 100 pages per hour. This would make the average poetry collection last around twenty five minutes. This is too fast. Spend at least four minutes looking at each page then make a small satisfied noise as if you have just eaten a particularly delicious bit of delicious food, then turn to the next poem. Repeat until there are no poems left. For me this process was comparable to looking at art in a gallery and trying to seem like I understood why I should be looking at it.
Do not think about how much poems cost. The average poetry collection seems to be about £10 for sixty poems of around 150 words each. The average novel is around £8 for about 70,000 words. If you spend too long thinking about this you will realise that novels are much better value for money than poems. This is not the point of poetry. You should remind yourself that Pot Noodles are extremely cheap but they taste like shite and you will still be hungry fifteen minutes after you have eaten one.
If you read poems by Anne Carson you are reading the right poems.
Some poems are written in odd shapes, (such as Christmas trees and houses and broken up ladders). Despite what you were taught in school you should not assume that a space between words or lines automatically indicates the point at which you are meant to take a breath whilst reading a poem. If you do this with some poems you will sound like you are having an asthma attack.
Not all poems rhyme. Some do. You should not base the worth of a poem on whether it rhymes or not. Some poems rhyme sneakily in the middle of a line or in a very odd place. If you spot one of these stealth rhymes you should feel extremely pleased with yourself. You are now a semi-proficient reader of poems. Underline this bit.
If there is an idea or an image which sticks in your mind and will not leave you be, even hours after reading the poem then this is the point of the poem for you. It may not be the actual point of the poem but that is ok. Ignore what they say in The Guardian or on Radio 4. The poem is there for you as much as anyone else who reads it even if they are extremely accomplished poets..
Do not be put off by the covers of poetry collections. Some poetry collections look like the reproduction paintings found in nursing home dining rooms, but are actually very, very good. It is usually different for novels. It is perfectly acceptable to judge a novel by its cover.
A lot of poems are about nature and animals. This is hard if you don’t like nature or animals.
If you get stuck when talking about poetry refer back to Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal. Everyone in the world agrees that it is brilliant. It is, in this sense, very similar to Fight Club.

 

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Forty Eight

November 26th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Jason Johnston

The chicken factory has let him go and the tyre place is not taking on new starts on account of downsizing and competition from the Eastern European market. He has no qualifications to speak of. This is not exactly true. He has three GCSEs, and an HND in being a pastry chef, and a one thousand metre swimming badge from when he was in the BB. His lungs are bigger than normal and exceptionally good at holding a breath longer than is strictly safe.

He remembers his might lungs as he begins to apply for jobs. He could be a glass blower, a balloon modeler, or a singer of enormous, operatic arias. None of these jobs are currently available at the job centre. Instead he becomes a person who will travel from one joyless space, (funeral parlour, Pound shop, Weatherspoons’ Pub), to the next, to stand open-mouthed at the entrance, sucking the atmosphere out of the room until left but dry function and echo.

He has the lungs for this. He is not sure if he has the stomach for it. All the sucked out joy swells beneath his rib cage like trapped wind. He wonders if a man can die of too much happiness, tightly compressed.

 

November 27th 2015 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Jonathan Ryder

Says he, “you’ve a lived in looking face,” which he probably meant as a kind of compliment, though it was hard to take as such and all day thereafter she could not get past the idea of her face as a kind of house. The eyes like windows with all the people she’d ever known, peering out. The nose like a sort of chimney breathing in and breathing out so she was not so much removed from the person next to her and the things which came frequently in and out of their heads. The mouth like a sort of door, open now, as if to say, “won’t you come in?” And he, sat there, across the table, stirring his coffee so she could not decide if he was for staying or if the “lived in” look of her had put him off.

 

November 28th 2015 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Matias Vallve

I am in Boots the Chemist trying to buy a hairdryer. My old hairdryer has reached that stage where it is sometimes hot as Hell itself and sometimes freezing cold and sometimes stops blowing halfway through a head of hair as if it needs to catch its own breath. I cannot buy a hairdryer today because the man in front of me in the line is buying every hairdryer in Boots the Chemist.

“I’ve bought out Superdrug already,” he says, “and I’m off to Argos next and then Tesco’s.”

I find this extremely strange. No one person requires ten dozen hairdryers, not even a professional hairdresser. Besides, this man is bald as a hard-boiled egg.

“What’s with all the hairdryers?” I ask him.

At first he’s reluctant to speak but I can tell he really wants to talk so I smile at him, ever so gently, and he finally admits that he’s trying to create a hurricane, all by himself, with hairdryers.

“The air will be hot,” he says, “like in tropical countries.”

 

November 29th 2015 – East Belfast

Sonya Whitefield

In the very far away future, when people will be almost robots, (with bionic muscles and computers for brains), but still capable of basic human functions such as laughter and strongly disliking other people, they will grow tools in order to complete the various tasks which are assigned to them each day. An accountant will have a calculator attached to his wrist by a fine, fleshy string. A butcher will have knives which flick sharply in and out of his fingers like the handsome one from X Men. Hairdressers will have brushes and scissors and tiny, silvered mirrors which emerge from a panel in their bellies. Writers will have pens, so many pens that their skin will become zebra’d with ink stains. These tools will slip and slot and slide away like the various blades on a Swiss Army knife. Those who have climbed from one career to the next will, by retiring age, so well-equipped for life that they are almost self-sufficient. The long term unemployed will be notable for their smooth skin and the way they carry their hands, open and turned upwards, as if to say, “this is all I’ve got going for me, right now.”

 

 

November 30th 2015 – East Belfast

Peter Strain

I was not even born then but I like to pretend that I was, and because my face is older looking than it actually is people tend to believe me and ask, “what was it like back then, before all of this?”

“Oh,” I usually reply, “it was not so very different from now: trees, and hills, and people falling in and out of love etc. Of course there were dinosaurs back then and mythical creatures with wings and sinister powers. We don’t have so many of those these days, but aside from that, everything was pretty much the way it is now.”

“Were people happier back then?” they ask.

And I always, always say, “yes, absolutely! People were so much happier back then,” because everyone wants to believe that sadness is a new invention and people who are alive right now have it way worse than anyone who has ever been alive in the past.

Sometimes people do not believe me when I tell them that I can remember how things were before. I am thinking of growing a beard in order to appear older to these people.

 

December 1st 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Rachel Austin

There was nothing behind the first door in his advent calendar. There would, he knew without checking, be nothing behind the second door or the seventh or the twenty first. Some years there were chocolate stars or snowmen. Most years his father got there first, removed the calendar’s back and threw all the chocolate into the bin.

From this experience he was supposed to learn disappointment; not just the ordinary, ongoing kind of disappointment, but the very particular kind which occasionally blesses and more often, withholds blessing and gives no indication of when and how to brace yourself against these possibilities.

He holds his advent calendar in both hands and knows he will not be allowed to bin it but must continue each morning, for the next twenty three days, with the opening and closing of these disappointing little doors. He recalls the Christmas when Santa brought a bicycle pump but no bicycle and wonders how long this lesson will go on for.

 

December 2nd 2015 – Donegal Square, Belfast

Molly Pearl

Yesterday, I wore my new shoes to work. Several of my colleagues commented on how nice they were with their shiny buckles and their soft, brown toes.

“Oh, these old things,” I said, “I’ve had them for ages.”

This wasn’t exactly true. But the inability to take a compliment is wired into us, Northern folk like the propensity to ignore rain , to drink tea, to take the wrong end of the stick and beat our neighbours round the head with it.

Which leads me to a conversation I once overheard on the bus between Knock and Castlereagh.

“What a beautiful looking wee baby,” said this one older lady to the woman sitting opposite her with a buggy.

The woman with the buggy, pre-conditioned as she was to deflect compliments of all kinds, did not miss a beat, nor chance to look at her sleeping child for fear of nurturing an arrogant streak. “Oh this old thing,” she replied curtly, “sure, I’ve had her for ages.”

As I said, it runs through us all like a coastal seam, this fear of leaning too far into a good or kindly thing.

 

Five Very Little Things You Can Do To Support an Arts Venue

Times are pretty tight in the arts sector at the minute and most of our venues are feeling the pinch. If you’re the sort of person who goes to concerts, cinema, theatre etc and you’d like to support local arts venues here are a few simple ways you can help them save money without actually spending any extra money yourself.

1. Buy your tickets early: Over the last few years there’s been a worrying trend towards audience members turning up last minute to buy tickets from box office. Buying tickets is always brilliant and much appreciated no matter when you decide to do this BUT if you buy your tickets early on it can often save a venue the money they’ll spend promoting the shows, which look like they’re not going to sell out but actually end up with a good crowd on the night. Venues also love people who book early as it cuts out weeks and weeks of anxiously wondering whether a show is going to have a decent audience.

2. Buy your drinks at the venue: If you’re going to buy a glass of wine or coffee before the show or afterwards plan on doing this at the venue. Wine is wine wherever you’re drinking it so you might as well drink at the in-house bar. Most venue which have a bar get a small cut of sales from the catering company which runs their drinks and snacks provision. We’re not talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds here, but it all adds up.

3. Return any free tickets you’re not using: If a venue is hosting a free event it will often “sell out” really quickly, but in Belfast this often means that only 50-60% of tickets actually translate into people showing up on the day. For free events venues often turn away lots of people who didn’t manage to get tickets. When you return a ticket you’re not using it helps the venue to ensure as many people as possible access the show, resources are fully utilised and funders etc. are not asking awkward questions about why so few people turned up for the event which they have paid for.

4. Be a pre-emptive social media user: It’s great when people Tweet or post on Facebook about a good show they’ve attended, especially if it’s still ongoing. However, it’s also much appreciated when audience members use social media to let their followers and friends know about a show they’re going to attend and are excited about. Word of mouth through social media is often a vital way of spreading information about an event and consequently selling tickets. Audience members raving about a show on social media is just about the best kind of advertising a venue can get.

5. Fill in evaluation forms: Evaluation forms are just about the dullest thing you can do with a pen. However, it doesn’t cost you anything to rate your experience and most venues require feedback from evaluation forms to improve upon their services, ensure their funders are satisfied and programme more effectively in the future.

I’d also like to add in a sixth sneaky point which is, appreciate the staff. Most of the people working Front of House jobs in our arts venues work long hours, make pretty mediocre money and are much more used to being complained at than thanked. A wee Tweet, an email or even a face to face thank you for good service or a pleasant experience is the sort of thing which will cost you nothing and very possibly make someone’s night.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Forty Seven

November 19th 2015 – East Belfast

John McCready

Then he tried to tell me that the ashes of cremated people are sent in Ziploc baggies to faraway places suffering from under-population and, when water is added to these ashes, they become an instant person.

“Hey presto,” he said, “like cake mix. Just add water.”

Of course I was skeptical. Earlier in the day he’d tried to convince me that the Red Hot Chilli Peppers were far superior to the Rolling Stones. He was full of this kind of crap.

“What about the relatives?” I asked. “Don’t they wonder where their loved one has gone?”

“They give them sand in a jar,” he replied, “just so they don’t ask questions.”

“And do these instant people look like they used to look?”

“Exactly like they used to look,” he said, “right down to scars and old sporting injuries.”

“What sort of places need instant people?” I asked and he too long to think before answering Morocco so I knew all this was just another one of his crazy lies and he’d only chosen Morocco because he knew I’d never been there before.

 

November 20th 2015 – The Holy Lands, Belfast

Brian Thatcher

It was only November 20th but the next door neighbours already had their tree up. There it was, discoing away in the window, making the damp street flash white and red, then white again. She did not feel like Christmas in her heart or in her living room. This was nothing to do with the earliness of it.

It had not been a good year. It hadn’t even been a decent year and, if truth be told, she could have quite easily skipped December and gone straight to the January sales. But this was not an option.

Every time she went outside another neighbor had decorated their house until hers was the only empty window in the street. It felt like High School all over again. She felt her lack of Christmas most keenly first thing in the morning and took to keeping her curtains drawn, even during daylight hours, hoping the neighbours would make assumptions about her. Hoping they would take her Christmas tree for granted, and her lights and 1980s style tinsel, and a kind of warm, holy glow which she had not felt in weeks.

 

November 21st 2015 – East Belfast

Miiko Chaffey Martin

Yesterday afternoon because it was cold out and I had nothing particularly pressing to do, I began wrapping Christmas presents. For a short period after college I’d worked at the gift-wrapping counter in a large department store and still take a peculiar pleasure in a neatly wrapped corner or a well-folded edge. I wrapped gifts for my parents, my friends and my work colleagues and, as I wrapped, took time to imagine the process in reverse: the wrapping paper coming loose, the ribbons untying, the tape slipping away from itself like orange peel. Most of all I imagine the faces of my friends, my parents and colleagues as they discovered the gift beneath the paper.

I imagined them grinning like little children, more from the act of receiving a good thing than any kind of value attached to it. I wanted this feeling for myself. So I spent a further hour wrapping my shoes, my comb, my notebooks and pens; picturing myself the following morning in mountains of discarded wrapping paper, feeling like a person who has been blessed by another person.

 

November 22nd 2015 – East Belfast

Emma Logan

The museum was not like any museum she’d visited before. She stopped one of the guards at the door and asked in a whisper, (for she didn’t want one of the other visitors to overhear and presume her ignorant), what sort of a museum this was.

“This is a museum of all the things we are trying to forget,” replied the guard.

Everything made much more sense then. The gilt frames with ordinary objects such as guns or wedding bands suspended against the gallery walls. The interactive grief display. The glass cabinets of children’s shoes and war and stuffed dogs and sepia-tinted photographs of old people in stern collars. The dead people posed like sculptures. Even the empty frames made sense to her; here were things already forgotten and passed from memory.

She thought she might visit this museum again and wondered if it was possible to donate some small item such as a book or a phrase he’d once said angrily to her in the street. She stopped the same guard to ask about donations and he looked at her blankly with polite disinterest as if he’d already forgotten her face. He was a terribly efficient guard, the best in the whole museum.

 

November 23rd 2015 – QFT, Belfast

Anneli Anderson

When I was a very young child and my imagination had yet to come off or even wobble beneath the weight of logic, I wished for a car like the cars in movies and television programmes.

“Look,” I’d cry out in the middle of the cinema, pointing at the car on the screen and its passengers, ( normally a man and a woman, or two cops being fired upon by gangsters), “the car isn’t moving at all. The world is moving to meet it.”

This was true in part but it would be many years before I learnt about green screens and looped sets and the magic went quickly out of the idea.

Tonight I am sitting in my very ordinary car outside the cinema. It is dark already and beginning to rain. I have just watched “Brief Encounter” which is chiefly fixated upon trains but also includes several “movie” cars. I am remembering my youth and how I’d hoped that the world would move to meet. How I’d spent much too long sitting still, waiting.

 

November 24th 2015 – Donegal Square, Belfast

Abbe Schipelroort

Without thinking they’d given the child her mother’s maiden name. This was Thomas. They’d grown accustomed to this name as a surname and there was no shame in a girl having a second name for a first. This practice was all the rage in literary circles: Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor being the first to spring to mind. They even thought it might breed gravitas in the child. They pictured her soberly at thirty five, a lawyer or doctor, wearing a particularly determined pair of spectacles.

They did not, for a moment, consider all the very many awkward years ahead of their daughter: arriving at school, for business meetings and dental appointments, always starting out on the wrong foot, always having to explain herself a woman with a man’s name. They did not think about any of this or how her name would constantly force her into frocks and feminine blouses. They simply called her Thomas after her mother’s side and loved her so thoroughly she would never consider swapping this name for the name of a less-loved girl.

 

November 25th 2015 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Wendy Erskine

This evening I have invited all my worst enemies to a pub quiz in town. Here is the geography teacher who made my life Hell in High School. Here is the dentist who pinched me when I would not open my mouth for a filling. And here are Ellen and Lorraine, who are only my enemies because they are more successful than me and this makes me jealous.

My worst enemies think they have been invited to an ordinary pub quiz. They are ordering drinks at the bar. They are fishing biro pens out of their handbags. They are hiding their smart phones under they can cheat without fear of being caught.

“Ha,” I think, as I look across the pub which is now full of terrible people and bar staff, “little do my enemies know.”

This is not an ordinary pub quiz. All the questions are about me. What colour is my current toothbrush? What is my favourite letter of the alphabet? How many pillows do I keep on my bed? I answer every single question correctly. My enemies get two or four in each round. This is not because they are knowledgeable. This is sheer fluke and guessing. I win, all by myself, with no team. This is how I defeat my worst enemies. It is not even really cheating.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Forty Six

November 12th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Charlotte Lewis

When the removal men eventually arrived it took them less than an hour to empty the apartment. They filled a van with our furniture, stacked upside down and sideways so it fit together like tower of interlocking Jenga bricks. We took a moment to walk through the empty rooms. This had been our home for almost ten years and, while we’d outgrown it, it was not as if we’d fallen out of love with the kitchen and the living room and the master bedroom, with its tiny en suite.

As we passed from room to empty room we began to notice that although our tables and chairs were already half way to Lisburn, the shadows of our furniture remained, lingering softly on the carpet. You thought it was dirt and scuffed it gently with the edge of your shoe, hoping to blend it into the rug. I thought the floor had faded round our furniture. It was a bright apartment, and over the years, the sun had turned the wallpaper pastel in certain places.

Neither of us was right.

These were not stains nor faded patches. These were the sad ghost of our sofa, our coffee table and our IKEA bookcase. They did not want to leave this apartment. They preferred to stay and haunt it. They, like us, had been terribly happy here.

 

November 13th 2015 – East Belfast

Kathryn McNeilly

For her fortieth birthday Stephanie asked her parents to buy her a display case. “A glass one,” she explained, “like the kind you find in museums.”

Her parents looked at each other oddly. They passed this looks backwards and forwards across the coffee table like an unexploded bomb. They had been planning to buy their daughter a slow cooker for her birthday. This, they felt, would be both practical and personal, for Stephanie having become somewhat obsessed with the television show, Celebrity Masterchef, had recently grown interested in cooking. In the future she hoped to host dinner parties for colleagues from work and friends, and possibly lovers.

“What do you want with a display case?” asked her father.

“I wish to display my most precious things in it,” she replied.

“Like what?” asked her mother and Stephanie had to admit that she currently owned no precious possessions worth speaking of, but the display case would be an incentive to acquire some.

 

November 14th 2015 – Portrush

Erin Gleason Presby

I saved up for ages and bought you a day with a big band. I found them in the Yellow Pages. You’d never mentioned a particular interest in this kind of music but then who wouldn’t want their own twenty five piece big band following them around everywhere? They were there when you woke up, crammed into the bedroom and hanging in the window from outside. They followed you to work, to lunch and later, out for drinks with the rugby lads. They played constantly: songs from the shows, swing tunes and instrumentals you could dance to if you were that way inclined.

I watched from a distance and took videos on my phone. I thought that you’d get a kick out of seeing yourself with your own big band. At first you were hesitant. You didn’t know how to react to the noise of them, the way they made strangers stare at you in the street. By lunchtime you were high stepping round the office, spinning and napping like Sinatra. You were the kind of man women wanted. I wanted you again. It had been worth all the saving.

 

November 15th 2015 – East Belfast

Lucy Lewis

Ellen had been ill for almost a month now. It was not an ordinary sort of illness. She had accidentally breathed in whilst walking, (without the protection of an umbrella or hat), through a particularly heavy downpour and, in doing so, had inhaled a small portion of raincloud. The cloud settled inside her head just behind her eyes. It felt like cotton wool at first and later, once sodden, like a damp picnic rug, balled up and stored towards the back of her skull. Elle could not think past the cloud. It dripped perpetually and the wetness of it could not be contained within her head. Rain came out of her eyes and nose, up her throat and round her mouth, swirling like a winter tide. She couldn’t swallow it down and took to standing beneath the blow heaters in the ladies’ bathroom, hoping to heat her portion of raincloud to a point where it would evaporate entirely. Steam rose off her forehead like cold night breath but the idea of the raincloud persisted. Ellen felt as if she was carrying the entire water cycle around inside her.

 

November 16th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Sandra Rutherford

When we were sixteen years old they sent us to dance lessons down in the city centre. The girls went into one room. We boys went into another. We learnt how to lead. We learnt how to hold the rhythm like the rhythm was a fine line and on either side of it, a sheer drop. We were taught not to apologise to the girls. If we stood upon their toes it was because their toes had not stepped backwards or forwards at the correct time. We did not dance with each other. This would have been ludicrous; almost grown men sweeping each other round the dance floor by their wrists. We danced in lines instead, tiptoeing round our ghost partners as our arms reached out towards them and our feet played footsy with their absent feet.

When we were accomplished enough to deserve partners they took us into the room with the girls and put us together in pairs. We did not need to speak to these girls. Our feet already knew what to say. We were like a two part harmony singing together for the very first time.

 

November 17th 2015 – East Belfast

Lucy Lewis

Last year our neighbours applied for planning permission to build a small, South facing extension. They had no intention of stopping at a third bedroom or conservatory. They leveled their house and in its place built a Medieval castle with turrets and a drawbridge. They quit driving cars and swapped their Ford Mondeo for a pair of riding horses which they kept tethered to the tree in the backyard, right beside their jousting poles.

Despite the other neighbours’ complaints, (the smell of raw, Medieval sewage, the visiting marauders and the unsightly way the castle looked, sitting next to all those bungalows and semi-detached houses), the people in the castle continued to fly their flags and roast their suckling pigs as if this was some kind of backward place to live similar to a common housing estate. When we tried to approach, asking to see the smallprint on our neighbours’ planning permission documents, the crocodiles in their moat snapped and snapped and would not let us in.

 

November 18th 2015 – East Belfast

Sharon Hastings

How to read poems properly:

Begin at the beginning.
Read slowly. Read so slowly that your eyes begin to hurt from not skipping ahead of themselves. This will feel like holding your breath when you are not even underwater. Do it anyway.
At the end of each poem pause. Hold the poem at arm’s length as if it is a piece of art on the wall of a modern art gallery. Adopt the posture of someone who is “getting” the poem. Hold this pose for two minutes. Hold this pose longer than is physically comfortable. Make a noise like a noise like a child eating a delicious mouthful of something delicious.
Underline individual sentences. Not too many sentences. One in five is ample lest you begin to look like a person without discretion.
Wonder what the point of the poem is. Wonder audibly. Pick a single line; something you actually understand. Decide that this will be the point of the poem.
Turn to the next poem.
Repeat until there are no poems left. Try to make this process last for at least one hour.
Feel accomplished/possibly smug in the company of friends who do not read poems or only read poems which rhyme.
Secretly think, “£9.99? Seriously? For this few words?”
Go back to reading novels which are much better value for money.

 

 

 

 

On Not Writing

This morning I was listening to Radio 4 in the car. These days I get all my current affairs/cultural opinions/wisdom by osmosis while half-listening to Radio 4 in the car. As I cruised round the Holy Lands looking for a parking space, Radio 4 was broadcasting one of a short series of documentaries they’ve recently recorded on the fear of death. The lady interviewed was a writer. I’d never heard of her but this is hardly surprising. The more I read, the more I realise that I’ve never heard of most of the writers out there. This woman had terminal lung cancer. She was surprisingly chipper. The programme was much easier to listen to than a radio documentary about a dying woman should be. I kept listening even after I’d found a parking space. Two thirds into the interview the writer said something which struck me as exactly the sort of thing I’d say in the same situation. “I’m still writing,” she said, “I can cope with just about anything if I’m still writing.”

I’m not writing these days.

There are a number of reasons why I’m not writing. I’ve been sick for almost three weeks now. I am tired like a person who’s forgotten how to sleep. I’ve no idea what’s happening with my job and, despite all my best intentions to rise above it, the worry of this is like dragging a dead leg round town. Also, I’ve discovered The Killing on Netflix. It’s really addictive. There are almost forty five hour long episodes. The next episode begins playing in the corner of the screen before the last one is even finished. This is hardly fair.

I say I’m writing. I say this mostly for my own benefit. I go to coffee shops with my computer. I move paragraphs around. I change the odd adjective to a different adjective and then, the next time I sit down “to write”, change it back. I make lists of things I want to write about. I have stellar ideas for my novel just before I fall asleep and the next morning can’t remember what any of these ideas were. I see other people power-housing through NaNoWriMo, crunching two thousand words a day, and I want to poke them viciously with HB pencils.

I am not writing anything and it doesn’t feel good.

When you are a writer not being able to write feels a little bit like the end of the world. It is almost as unbearable as writing badly and knowing you are writing badly. You feel stuck inside yourself. You feel scared that you’ll never stumble upon another good sentence again. You feel guilty all the time: guilty that you are reading, watching Netflix, cleaning the bathroom or taking a nap when you should be writing. The guilt is the worst part of not writing. It’s like a wall which requires pushing through or climbing over before you can actually get writing again. You think about nothing but being able to write again.

I realise this probably sounds insane to people who aren’t wired like writers. It probably sounds narcissistic and overly dramatic and rightly so. Writing is not the only thing in my life. Despite how I feel about it, it probably shouldn’t even be the most important thing in my life. People should always be more important than words. I am lucky to be so well-peopled. My community of friends and family and fellow-writers is one of the things I am most thankful for. But writing, like the woman in the radio 4 documentary, is how I cope with all the other parts of life which come hurtling at me without warning or consent. Writing is how I process my days, how I celebrate the moments which need celebrating and mourn the things which require grief. Sometimes it’s an act of creation and sometimes and act of confession and more often than not a kind of thing which passes for prayer. When the writing isn’t happening it always seems as if the world has become a little bit overwhelming. Everything feels as if it needs nailing down, but I’ve misplaced the nails and forgotten how to use the hammer and there are only so many things I can carry with two hands.

I am not writing and I don’t feel like myself.

I’ve been here before and people always give me the same advice. Go easy on yourself. It’s just a season. Take a break from the writing. I can’t do that. I’ve written almost every day for the last ten years and it has become a discipline like brushing my teeth before bed. It’s almost impossible to take a break from it; without writing my day feels as if it is missing some vital component like shoes or coffee or falling asleep. I have to keep trying even when the writer’s block is not so much a stoppage as an actual, enormous block of something solid sitting between myself and the words. I have to keep chipping away, trying to get back to the good stuff.

So I won’t be taking a break this week. I’ll keep carting my laptop across the road to the coffee shop and trying to write. I’ll keep scribbling down little fledgling ideas and almost instantly forgetting where they’re meant to fit. I’ll keep taking comfort from Flannery O’Connor who said many, many wise things about writing, but this week said specifically to me, “when I told you to write what was easy for you, what I should have said was what was possible for you.” I’ll be trying to content myself with shuffling adjectives and eking out the odd decent sentence in the hope that if I keep showing up at the table eventually the possible will begin to feel a little more like the easy again.

Postcard Stories 2015: Week Forty Five

November 5th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Michael Gray

For Christmas Peter made life size models of all his friends and presented the models to them, fully gift-wrapped. The models were made of papier mache, stretched across a chicken wire frame. They were painted in authentic skin tones and for hair Peter used wool scraps salvaged from his grandmother’s knitting basket.

At first he thought about leaving the models nude, (classical statues were always naked or draped about with marble togas), but Peter balked at the idea of sculpting imaginary genitals for people he worked with and had to sit opposite in the staff room at lunch time. He did not want to see them this way and so bought clothes for his models from the charity shops on the Lisburn Road, as close to their actual style as his budget could afford.

Peter thought his friends would be pleased to receive a life-size model of themself for Christmas. It was easy to see that a lot of work had gone into their creation. His friends were not pleased. They looked at Peter with frantic, darting eyes. They asked, “what am I meant to do with this?” They gave him generic gifts like chocolates or cheap wine in return.

November 6th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Debbie Rea

Maureen was feeling tired. Her head had kept her up all night thinking about her sister and all the various ways she was not making a success of her life. The sister was a big shot lawyer. The sister drove a white BMW and upgraded every 18 months for a newer model. The sister had a perfectly adequate husband and two lovers: one who was young and one who was handsome and properly European.

Maureen gave guided tours of listed buildings to those few foreign tourists who’d deemed Belfast safe enough for a mini-break. She did not charge. She relied on tips which meant she was required to be both funny, charming and well-informed at all times, even when underslept.

This morning Maureen was too tired to keep to the script. She made up dates. She fabricated anecdotes. She told a group of Japanese business men that the Queen kept a static caravan in the grounds of Hillsborough Castle for those rare occasions when she felt like roughing it. She did not feel guilty about her lies even when the business men tipped her a twenty pound note and she knew they were not yet familiar with the currency.

With money in her pocket she felt successful like the sister. She thought she might buy a car and, if things kept going her way, later upgrade it for a better car.

November 7th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Andrea McCully

In the month’s proceeding the publication of Flannery O’Connor’s debut short story collection, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a large number of American men, (mostly single), wrote to Ms O’Connor in her Georgia home insisting that they were not only good men but also relatively accessible. Some sent black and white photographs of themselves in decent suits. Others wrote lists of their good qualities and attributes as if they were applying for a sort of job. None asked for Flannery’s particular affection though the implication was there, hiding behind casual boasts of academic tenure and well-maintained livestock.

Flannery O’Connor ignored them all. She was a most-determined young woman and knew which fights to pick and which to step around like back lane puddles. It was not her place to defend, or indeed belittle, the American man. She simply wished to write good stories and see these stories published and subsequently read, and if there was any time left over, breed peacocks on her own little farm.

November 8th 2015 – Ballymena

Joel and Cassie Binkley

Even before our son was entirely out of you the midwife was already saying how much he looked like you.

“He’s the spit of her mummy around the eyes,” said your father.

“And his mouth too,” added your mother.

“He has your hair, Sylvia,” said my father.

“And your mannerisms, Dear,” added my mother, (which felt a little like betrayal).

“There’s a not a single ounce of his daddy in him,” said your brother. “Are you sure he’s not the milkman’s?”

We all laughed. Oh how we laughed. But afterwards, when all the family had gone home, I turned our son sideways and upside down looking for even the slightest resemblance to myself. Nothing. Even his toes were yours.

So, I took an eyeliner pencil from your make up bag and drew a single beauty mark to the left of his navel, exactly where mine is.

“Look Sylvia,” I said, rushing the baby suddenly into our bedroom, “he has a beauty mark exactly like mine.”

“That’s just dirt,” you said. You took your thumb, wet it against your lips, and smudged the mark away. Later that evening I began to insist that he took my name.

November 9th 2015 – Belfast

Tim Mairs

She entered the bookstore with every intention of theft. On the way from new releases to the poetry section, she let her fingers fall upon the unbroken spines of paperback novels by Ian Rankin and Colum McCann. By the stairs there was a display of hardback copies of the latest Edna O’Brien novel. She paused for a moment on the first step. Rested her hand on top of the book and took a deep, settling breath. There was something distinctly Catholic about this gesture. Lately she had been flirting with the idea of Catholicism.

In the poetry section she faked an interest in the work of Mark Doty, then Seamus Heaney and, when she felt her alibi was firmly established, lifted the very expensive, hardback copy of that one, Scottish poet’s new collection off the shelf, flicked to the correct page, and stole the poem she’d come for. She used her phone which was also a camera. If she’d wanted to she could have used the voice recorder function to speak the stolen poem into her phone.

Afterwards, she shrugged for the benefit of Close Circuit Television, as if to say, ‘the thing which I came to buy isn’t here.’ Then she left the bookstore. She wished to be caught shoplifting as she had never broken the law before, but there was nothing to set the alarms off.

November 10th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Ciara Young

Things I saw on Facebook last night without particularly trying to see:

One turtle tipping another turtle over.
People being angry about Starbuck’s Christmas cups, other people not being angry about Starbuck’s Christmas cups and another set of people becoming angry or not angry about how people were reacting to the Starbuck’s Christmas cups.
A young man proposing with a stick of chewing gum.
A newborn baby dressed as a piece of Sushi, (California Roll).
At least five things I really wouldn’t believe.
Multiple cats balanced on a very small shelf, (possibly just a large handle).
Jeremy Corbyn.
A toddler with its foot stuck inside a washing machine in a funny rather than cruel way.
Ten things to do with leftover cheese/old socks/members of the popular 80s pop band Duran Duran.
You, with a girl I’ve never seen before, smiling and both of you in wedding clothes.

November 11th 2015 – Ulster Hall, Belfast

Ann McVeigh

It turned out William was wrong about the horses. He’d always imagined his new wife the kind of girl who’d dreamt of horses, who’d spent every childhood birthday wishing for a pony of her own. He could picture her in jodhpurs and riding hat, flying over hedges and stacked fences. She had a face for horses, and thighs to match, and while William had never had the gall to bring this up in conversation, he’d always assumed that his new wife would be looser, less of a tall stick, the minute he got her into the saddle.

He had not asked around. Though his new wife’s parents were dead, there were friends and a brother in Bournemouth he could have called. Instead, he simply bought a moderately-priced horse on Ebay, stuck a bow on its smooth, brown rump and cried, “Happy Birthday Darling, (and maybe Christmas as well. Ponies don’t come cheap after all).”

The new wife shrieked in fear and shrill horror. It turned out William was wring about the horses and also other, more significant things.