Jan Carson's Blog, page 22

Postcard Stories 2015 – Week 5

January 29th 2015 ��� East Belfast��

David McGreevey

Various inspirational people, including the musician Brian Eno have contributed to the design and installation of the Clock of the Long Now. The Clock of the Long Now looks very much like a piece of living room art borrowed from the 1970s. The Clock of the Long Now currently resides in the Science Museum, London though scientists can only speculate about the architecture and landscape which will surround it some ten thousand years from now when it finally quits counting time. The Clock of the Long Now intends to make people think seriously about long-term things such as time itself.

January 30th 2015 ��� Tesco Metro, Belmont Road

Olwyn Dawling

At the close of each month Margaret buys enough bananas to keep her lunchbox stocked all the way through the following month. February is the shortest month, requiring only twenty eight bananas. (With the extra thirty something pence afforded by those three absent days, Margaret buys a stamp and sends an annual letter to her sister, Doreen, in Coleraine.

For ease of access she splits up the bunches, presents the gormless man at the checkout with twenty eight loose bananas, freshly severed. He slides them across the scales one at a time emitting, as they pass, a startled bleep; the sound of robots climaxing. They are like strange yellow fish or jaundiced fingers, come loose at the joint.

A line builds up behind Margaret. People shuffle in their shoes and mutter, ���what does she want with all them loose bananas?���

January 31st 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Sveinung and Solveig Nygaard

This morning at ten minutes past ten an enormous wind came clumsying up Bedford street and battered its way into the Ulster Hall. Every door in the building, (most of which were older and wiser than the Titanic), opened, paused, and then closed as to draw breath or admit a horde of gig-going ghosts.

Bolstered by this charmed wind, the Ulster Hall rose six feet into the January air and slid backwards towards Linenhall Street. The traffic caught, collided and came to a rumbling halt all the way round City Hall. This was the farthest a Belfast building had chanced to move since the Ceasefire. Many people took photographs and videos on the mobile phones.

All exposed to the spectacle were reminded of Daisy Buchanan, floating on her wind-whipped sea of curtains,��paralysed��with happiness and they wished such reckless joy for other buildings: the Courthouse, for example, also Central Station.

February 1st 2015 ��� Lower Newtownards Road, Belfast

Kelly McCaughrain

On the Lower Newtownards Road there are gingerbread men scattered across the pavement like the corpse outlines of gunshot victims. Some are crushed; others shattered. A few remain whole and grinning whilst their comrades lie, mere inches away, decapitated by the local dogs. The trail of the dead begins outside Iceland, extending, with grim determination, past the bus shelter, to the ever-open doors of the Bethany chip shop. One loose gingerbread man might be ignored. Two dozen or more grate against the proper order of pavements. In these parts it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a funeral and a protest.

February 2nd 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Deborah McIlwrath

First thing on Monday morning the back came off the hole-punch. This was not so much an accident as yet another case of force applied in inappropriate measure. (���Like the front door,��� she thought, ���or jewelry, or those things I said to him on the telephone from Spain.���)

Suddenly unleashed, two years worth of tiny perforations cascaded across the office. They were hailstones in descent, but gentler, like white and pale pink and feint-lined full stops. She left the dots where they fell, stepping carefully around them each time she crossed the carpet to the photocopier. She thought they were pretty, if somewhat impractical, like wedding confetti before the rain ruins everything.

February 3rd 2015 ��� East Belfast

Mark Adamson

On the day when Harper Lee announced her first publication in fifty five years we consider other entities capable of holding their silence for fifty years or more. These include, in no particular order, long term animals such as whales and turtles, redwood trees, the American author J.D.Salinger, various individual volcanoes including Vesuvius, God, Buddy Holly, a number of satellite stations lost in orbit, specials services, sedimentary rocks, once again God and that girl with the clown who once featured on the BBC test card, sketching noughts and crosses on a blackboard grid.

February 4th 2015 ��� West Belfast

Michael Nolan

After which there were sausage rolls and thin slices of fruit cake, blood thick Tetley in mugs which had come free with last year���s Easter eggs. The place smelled of closed cupboards. You encouraged the women gathered to consider aspects of identity, (both single and otherwise), in the John Hewitt poem, ���Once Alien Here.��� The seemed more inclined to discuss grandchildren and funerals and whether ���Fifty Shades��� was worth the lend or not. The sound of them roaring and getting on was a bold sound like walls, like furniture and other permanent gestures. You understood then that Hewitt could not speak for these women for they were not alien in this tight corner of the Shankill and never once had been.

��

��

Postcard Stories 2015 – Week 4

January 22nd 2015 ��� Belfast International Airport, Aldergrove

Hannah McPhillimy

A man in the line for Edinburgh has three inflatable worlds in a plastic bag. He is stopped at the departure gate by an Easyjet representative.��

���What have you got in the bag?��� she asks. It is seven am, too early for lipstick, but she is wearing a thick gash of it; fire blood red

���Three worlds,��� he replies, and removes them one at a time, clamping them between his feet, for the world is shaped like a soccer ball and inclined to roll if permitted to do so.��

���One item of hand luggage only,��� she states mechanically, already eyeing up the next offender. ��

The man proceeds to demonstrate how, with great determinations and a little pressure, the world, (and all those back up worlds to come), can be contained within an overhead luggage locker.

January 23rd 2015 ��� Edinburgh

Heather Wilson

All the lonely artists have gathered in the basement for the spring mixer. Each has come alone for they are, by nature, solitary beings, preferring the company of easels and chalkboards and modelling clay to actual other people. Kathy stands to the side hunching over a radiator as she clutches a gin and tonic. She is unsure how to begin a conversation which cannot be rendered in acrylic. Francois, overdressed in a black belt tie and shirt, feels naked, wishes he���d accessorized with a paintbrush. And in the corner by the sandwiches, Patrick cradles a plateful of cheese and pickle and wonders when it will be acceptable to dispense with the niceties and begin sketching each of the attendees in nervous biro.

January 24th 2015 ��� Edinburgh

Maureen Boyle

Portobello beaches hesitates between blue and deeper blue. The cold is clawing through our coats.

We pause on the threshold of the Amusement Arcade, removing scarves and hats and home-knit mittens, still vinegar sharp from this afternoon���s chips.

We read, ���the Golden Rules of playing Fruit Machines,��� etched like a last ditch disclaimer on the glass between beachfront and all those blinking lights. ���Playing machines is buying fun, not investing money.���

This is fun, we tell ourselves, wasting three pounds, ten five on the two p machines; still fun as we swap our hard-earned tokens for a single packet of Parma Violets; an investment of sorts to admit this 3D picture of Elvis Presley has cost us fifty pounds worth of two pence pieces, an entire weekend indoors.

January 25th 2015 ��� Edinburgh

Hilary Copeland

In 2004, working primarily in pencil and ink, the Scottish-born artist, Charles Avery began an ambitious project entitled, ���The Islanders.��� The natives of Avery���s fictional island are known as The If���en and enjoy their own peculiar customs, gods and culinary habits, entirely distinct from regular Scots folk.

���View of the Port��� (completed 2010), is amongst Avery���s largest pieces. Measuring over five metres in width, it depicts the bustling port of Onomatopoeia. Central to the scene a stout man appears, arguing with a well-dressed lady. His shirt is printed with the slogan, ���I counted the gods and they are finite,��� or perhaps, ���I counted the gods and they are infinite.��� Interpretation depends entirely upon what hides behind the parted curtains of the man���s jacket.

From the artist���s perspective both fears seem equally probable.

January 26th 2015 ��� Edinburgh

Eimear Burton

There are four thousand seven hundred and ten individual names printed on the stairwell of the Scottish National Museum of Modern Art. These names represent every person, the artist Douglas Gordon can remember meeting. Damien Hirst is up there, also Bono, and a number of imminent artists from here and foreign places.

Four thousand seven hundred and ten individual names yet the eye falls first on a boy you once knew in Sunday School and you are unsure if this name is common or evidence of a man who managed to slip his hometown skin for long enough to be remembered.

January 27th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Martine Madden

Most mornings now a human statue boards my bus at the corner of the Holywood Road. Usually he is Napolean, occasionally when the weather is more inclined towards togas, Julius Caesar. Beneath his concrete pallor it is impossible to guess his age, ethnicity or political affiliations. He carries his lunch in a Family Circle biscuit tin. He is no more nor less still that the average commuter. However, when he pauses before sitting to lay a Sainsbury���s bag across his seat ���protecting the bus���s mottled upholstery from his own painted backside- he is statuesque like a Saint or a Matador casting his cape in the air conditioned wind.

January 28th 2015 ��� Connswater Tesco, East Belfast

Cathryn McCarroll

There are tiny mythical creatures living behind the muesli boxes in the cereal aisle of Connswater Tesco. Confident that their cover will never be blown in a supermarket which does not stock couscous, avocados or fresh herbs of any kind, they have been hanging out behind the raisin bran for years, watching the slow parade of trolleys and senior citizens and pajama trousered teens deliberate between coco pops and crunch nut.

At night, when the store falls silent, they sing their mythical hymns and play bingo with the cornflakes, and recount legendary tales of their brave offspring who ventured past the check out girl and through the electric doors and into East Belfast proper, hidden beneath the polystyrene base of an oven bake pizza.

Postcard Stories 2015 – Week 3

January 15th 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast��

Eve Cobain

In 1898, the Belfast-based illustrator Joseph W. Carey was commissioned to paint a series of thirteen oil paintings. ���These paintings,��� he was instructed, ���should look best when viewed from a distance, through a fog of cigarette smoke.��

Insulted, but incapable of refusing a well-paid job, Carey painted one dozen scenes of a fading city and a thirteenth, depicting the toll road to Dublin, snow-covered. On the right edge of this canvas ���invisible at any distance- he added a coiled fist, the sleeve and trailing shoulder of a man who���d already turned his back on Belfast; a man with eyes for other, more honest cities.

January 16th 2015 ��� Ormeau Road, Belfast

Marcia Bosscher

Between the years of 1981 and 1982, almost 10,000 DeLorean cars were manufactured in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland. While it was later proven that these cars could trip the space time continuum, scuttling between pasts and reasonably distant futures, they were not without their problems. Entire sections of East Belfast, blessed as they were with streets no wider than an average pavement, became no-go areas for local DeLorean owners. Those foolhardy few ��� racing boy Billy���s and Kevin���s with an eye for the ladies- found themselves wedged between the terraces, one winged door jammed against an odd house, the other against an unyielding even like some great metallic chicken, caught in the notion of flight.

January 17th 2015 ��� Linenhall Street, Belfast

Brid Gallagher

On Linenhall Street it is beginning to snow. This same snow has been beginning for three days now. Like shampoo scum it settles on the wet slabs, damps and disappears before it could be called a blanket or even dusting sheet. A child of around five years has raised its head to the sky. It lingers, open-mouthed, outside the breast-screening clinic. It is expectant as any disciple. Five individual snow drops descend and melt on to its outstretched tongue. It is pinker than any child should be. Beneath the hat and hood and woolen clothing it is boy or perhaps girl. The passing stranger is not privy to gender nor the hymns which come whittling out of that cold little mouth in Polish or perhaps Romanian.

January 18th 2015 ��� Botanic Avenue, Belfast��

Helen Crawford

In the window of Oxfam a volunteer is undressing a red-haired mannequin. Embarrassed, or perhaps complicit, she looks upwards to the right, eyes blued aquarium blue. Her mouth is beginning to peel.

The volunteer lifts her dress gently, slips it over the place where the leg section slots into her torso. A gap the size of an HB pencil circles her hips like a low slung belt and he is careful not to upset her further. Upwards then, over a navel-less belly, breasts set and coloured like two free range eggs.��

���Easy does it,��� he says, as he begins to negotiate her neck.

Even through the glass you can see he���s enjoying every awkward second of this until her arms unlock, coming away in his hands like a semi-detached hug

January 19th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Joye Carson

During the final week of winter all talk of the weather was banned. We were beside ourselves with the cold and the constant discussion of it. The wind was all we had in common, and the snow, which we hoped and dreaded in equal measure. We felt quietly jealous of those who lived in higher places where the white could linger deep and undisturbed for a week or more.

���Let���s talk about something else for a change,��� we said. ���Art or football or all the shouting up at Stormont,��� and in the end could not agree upon a single topic and like errant alcoholics slipped back to the old ways: the rain, the snow, the universal wind.

January 20th 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Orla McAdam

Last year, for Halloween, our children were Lego men. My wife found a template on Pinterest and spent hours in the spare room with scissors and taping. Once costumed it was almost impossible to tell the older child from the younger for she���d given them matching yellow shoeboxes as arms and legs, claws for hands, and a perfectly squared Ikea bag in lieu of a torso. From a distance they were indistinguishable ; equally easy, or perhaps difficult, to love. At five feet I could tell the younger by the way he held his arms, indecisively, like a dropped stitch. I could not remember how his face was and wondered if there was anything to be argued for keeping that sun-faced helmet on all year round.

January 21st 2015 ��� Ulster Hall, Belfast

Zoe McGrory

The chairs left easily and the desks, with some tight cornering, followed after. The people, though reluctant, were easy, for they had legs and on the end of these legs, feet, for stepping. Pens, paper, staplers and sellotape dispensers were hardly worth noting for they left as they���d first arrived, unassuming like the first sleight blush of a snowstorm. The stationary cupboard would not fit through the door. We stood at a distance admiring its stout rebellion, commiserating, (though we did not mean it), with the movers as they shoved and forced and tore shrewd chunks from the doorframe.

Exlibrisdolor*

This has certainly been a year of many first experiences: first book, first book tour, first time, (hopefully not last), inside Bob Dylan’s house and, just yesterday, the interesting, if somewhat distressing moment when I first ran my IPhone through a mixed fabrics cycle in the washing machine. All experiences have been valid and some more pleasant than others. However, over the weekend I encountered one of the oddest first experiences of the year so far.

Last November whilst visiting Portland I attended a showcase of writers featured in McSweeney’s Literary Journal. This took place in Powell’s City of Books; a book store so magical, so impossible to leave that most of the city’s writers are permanently decamped in its coffee shop. It was not the best reading I’ve ever been party to, (neither was it the worst). One guy played acoustic guitar whilst reading a story about a giant slug, trapped inside the glove compartment of a car. This was memorable but not very good. The other guy read a slightly better short story but I can’t recall anything about it, save for the fact that in his introduction he mentioned nipping down to Powell’s fiction section earlier in the evening, just to check they had his short story collection in stock. This sort of anxious book checking, it should be noted, is not pride, rather a strange affliction like a nervous tic which comes over every author upon publication of their book. It is impossible to walk past the appropriate bookshelf upon which your book should be filed without at least glancing over to verify it’s there. During the early days of Malcolm Orange‘s release I visited the fiction section of Waterstones so many times, (pretending to peruse Young Adult and Crime Fiction until some unnatural force dragged me to the same snug shelf spot, between Ciaran Carson and Lucy Caldwell), that I began to fear Waterstones’ security guard would think I was casing the joint for some sort of literature heist.

The McSweeney’s contributor, (unnamed), did indeed find several copies of his short story collection shelved in Powell’s fiction section. His joy, however, was short-lived for, upon opening a used edition of his own book he discovered that it was not only signed, but worse still, signed with a rather flowery quotation to a young lady whom he’d been pursuing amorously under the suspicion that she felt similarly. This anecdote I remember and nothing at all about what the poor man read. I did at the time feel mildly sorry for him. Today I empathise entirely having, for the first time, encountered my own novel on the shelf of a second-hand charity book shop. I’m still not quite sure how I feel about this or what the correct protocol is for author’s encountering their own, unwanted books.

I saw Malcolm out of the corner of my eye whilst perusing the A – D section. After six months of carting him round I could spot him a mile away and, on account of being tangerine orange, he’s pretty hard to miss in a line up of black spined regular novels.��At first I felt mortified. An emotion rushed over me similar to that experienced on Valentine’s Day of Primary Six when a young man, (who had warty hands, so I’m counting this a lucky escape), returned my homemade Valentine’s card, unwanted. Thereafter, I was overcome by the desire to draw the attention of fellow shoppers to my own book, languishing on the shelf of Oxfam Books, in close proximity to Angela Carter and Raymond Carver, albeit incorrectly filed outside the Irish Literature section. I would have signed it for the Oxfam Books man, if he’d been so inclined. I would have moved it to its correct place on the Irish Literature shelf, nestled between Ciaran and Lucy but I thought it best not to even touch for fear that the possessive parent in me might kick in and I’d feel compelled to take it home with me. Finally, I decided I didn’t quite know how I was feeling. The situation was not, in itself, troubling. The book looked read. Mercifully it wasn’t signed to any young man I am currently enamoured with. It wasn’t signed to anyone and so I concluded, for my own sanity, fully understanding that this would be the first of many similar experiences, that some stranger had read Malcolm and simply wanted to pass it on to someone else. I bought a nice hardback copy of The Luminaries for ��2.50 and left Oxfam book a little weighted down ��by the whole experience.

* The recently coined word for the very particular emotion experienced upon encountering one’s own book in a charity shop for the first time. Copyright Orla McAlinden January 17th 2015

Postcard Stories 2015 – Week Two

January 8th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Laura Kreger

At the age of 67 I went deaf, overnight, without warning. I could hear nothing beyond my ears but understood that sound had not left the world for the curtains still caught in the shuffling breeze and there were raw lights turning on police cars and ambulance roofs. Inside my ears the sounds were louder than ever. The cautious creak of old bones settling. The click catch of each tight breath. The wet kerplunk of veins and ventricles still pulsing. And, loudest by far, the stop start, seldom pausing, thoughts; more audible, more insistent than any word overheard or spoken.

January 9th 2015 ��� Albert Bridge, Belfast

Tiffany Sahib

January 9th and every third person over the Albert Bridge is running. The marathon looms like the hope of Heaven and other judgments to come. Sleek are some, as river fish, in all their proper gear. Others make do with tracksuit bottoms and shirts, occasionally slept in. The worst lack all conviction. They move from one mile to two, flat-footed in Converse high tops, their feet flip flopping past the station and the market. From a distance they are pedestrian slow. Up close they have the look of women who return library books half-finished. The noise of them running is the last hand of the applause, parting to cup the silence.

January 10th 2015 ��� Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

Mary Hegarty-Walsh

���Ladies,��� says tonight���s taxi driver who is, by default, the bald and mouthy twin of every blessed taxi driver in the East, ���there is nothing like a good power ballad.���

We agree and, from the backseat, argue for Starship. He won���t be budged on REO Speedwagon and we all agree that Celine Dion should not count in this and other matters. However, it is ���The Power of Love��� I���m humming as I fall asleep, picturing the early evening couple, (she fringed, he bearded), who eyed themselves from one end of Muriel���s bar to the other, taking three hours and tremendous gin to meet in the middle, kissing beneath all that highly strung underwear.

January 11th 2015 ��� Central Station, Belfast��

Phillipa Maddox

It was almost impossible to tell when he was. The time machine, having been programmed by a man with no particular interest in geography, had deposited him in a grassy field overlooking a number of other grassy fields, each one indistinguishable from the next. With less than half an hour on the clock it seemed pointless to wander. He sat down in his grassy field, smoked a cigarette and watched the clouds fuddle past.��

Later, when they asked what the future was like, he would reply, ���much like the present.��� Though this was the honest truth, no one would wish to hear it.

January 12th 2015 ��� Royal Avenue, Belfast

Daniel Cant

On Sunday afternoon, when the sadness had begun to take on its own taste, he stumbled upon an exceptionally happy man in the Food Hall of Marks and Spencer���s. Trailing two paces behind this man he filled his shopping basket with identical items: tinned salmon, coleslaw, expensive crisps, mid-priced Chianti, and paid at the same till. Afterwards, he followed the man down Royal Avenue, sat one table removed in Caf�� Nero and drank the same clouded coffee from a cup, barely capable of containing his disappointment. When the man rose to lift a newspaper from the rack, mercifully, there were two, and he also read the Mail on Sunday, back to front for an hour, wondering why he did not feel exceptionally happy yet. Perhaps, he concluded, happiness depends upon shoes or haircuts, or the particular sweater you lift from your wardrobe in the morning.

January 13th 2015 ��� Queen���s Quarter, Belfast

Anne Weinhold and Chloe Thwaites

Every day Jean had less words to hold unto. The opposite of see through, the town which cornered Carrickfergus, Michael���s wife, the thing you touched when the lights came on; all had folded into that mumbling place where thoughts caught and stuck like angry rag nails. Jean imagined these old sayings edged out of practice with the acquisition of each fresh word, like the bronzed coins in the two p machine at Barry���s, avalanching under pressure. This was a jolly thought and cheered Jean until she recalled that, at her age, there were no new words for finding, or caught herself frozen in the corner shop, pointing for, ���one of those blue, white, shelved things for woman, with plastic;��� her mind playing charades with itself.

January 14th 2015 ��� East Belfast

Jon and Jenny Parks

January 2012, a dozen strangers and occasional friends holed up in a guesthouse with wine.

���Like something from an Agatha Christie,��� you said when it started to snow and the snow settled on the white blue beach huts and the bicycles and the beach itself so the sea was a smile grinning into the drift.

The roads closed. The tide demurred.

���And we���d all be suspects,��� you said when midnight found one of us missing and he returned, hours later, frozen; the ocean his only alibi.��

But in the morning no one was dead nor close to dying and we ate cake in the window like Christmas morning, with the snow.

Postcard Stories 2015 – Week One

January 1st 2015 ��� Portballintrae Harbour

Susan Featherston

Every New Years at midday we meet at the harbour and cast our ghosted bodies into the sea. We are no longer seventeen and, over the years, have progressed from last night���s underwear to trunks and t-shirts and finally, oil sleek wetsuits, straining to contain our spreading guts. We are, like soldiers returning from the Front, fewer with each passing year. This morning we are two and a handful of bemused children sheltering beneath their anorak hoods.

Afterwards, shivering, we say, ���same time, next year?��� and mean, as our fathers must once have meant, ���all good things come to an end, even the sea.���

January 1st 2015 ��� East Belfast

Nicky Bull

This Christmas I gave you seventy six metaphors for the common potato.

���No need for the romance,��� you said. ���It���s not poetry I���m writing. It���s a Guide to Contemporary Farming Techniques in Mid Ulster.���

��But I persisted with my, ���tight white fists,��� and my ���soil teeth,��� and all those drills of ���pebbled roots,��� like, ���poor buried children curling beneath the muck.��� And I reminded myself that despite current limitations you were still a writer.

January 2nd 2015 ��� Holy Lands, Belfast

Judith Cupples

After several years of wearing their reading glasses perched atop their heads, many of these people developed the ability to look upwards as if seeing with a second set of eyes. At first they were delighted to have finally gained perspective, albeit somewhat late in life. Later, distracted by the heavens above, they began to lose interest in the ordinary world settling and unsettling around them. The worst affected took to wearing their hands across their eyes, like drawn blinds or curtains, as they pictured the unfolding places above.

January 3rd 2015 ��� Kells, Ballymena

Matt Kirkham

After the candles there was cake and after the cake, presents: socks, liquorice, grandchildren in silver-plated frames, the usual kind of items presented to ninety year old men on the occasion of their ninetieths. And, after the presents some wise guy at the back of the room suggested charades and we laughed at the thought of them raising their spindling arms aloft to mime other peoples��� names- Napoleon, Churchill, Lady Gaga- when they could barely remember their own. And after the presents there were cards, a more sensible option by far, though the names were still problematic.

January 4th 2015 ��� Botanic Avenue, Belfast

Jason O���Rourke

In the year 1974, 4% of the American population applied for tickets to attend Bob Dylan���s comeback tour. Things were different in 1974. With online booking services as yet unavailable, eager concert goers lined outside record stores and venues, or sent cheques and postal orders in the mail, hoping they wouldn���t boomerang back, un-cashed. In the year 1974, twelve million Americans politely asked, in writing, and eleven and a half million were disappointed. Elsewhere, in America: Watergate, Ted Bundy, the Cold War and other more pressing disappointments.

January 5th 2015 ��� Holywood

Connor McCullough

Each year the surgeon grew quicker, defter, less-inclined to drop a stitch in theatre. His colleagues watched from the sidelines, scrubbed and breath-masked, wholly astounded.

���This,��� they whispered, ���from a man with heels for hands, with fingers like rolled cigars.���

The surgeon smiled behind his mask and took his needles home at night, practicing in darkened rooms, with small eyes until his stitches grew neat as typewritten words.

The surgeon���s wife, discovering knots sewn into the sheets, the curtains, the tiny hairs at the base of her neck, counted them love letters and could not bring herself to unpick a single stitch.

January 6th 2015 ��� Belfast

David and Amy Titmus

I am reading a biography based upon the life and work of the musician, David Bowie. It is both utterly compelling and the dullest book I���ve read in at least a year. Every so often I recount anecdotes from the life of David Bowie to my officemates. I pronounce Bowie to rhyme with Zoe as I was brought up to do. One officemate says Bowie like he���s the back end of a boat and the other solicits no opinion either way. I am reminded of a certain Belfast bar where I was once offered Merlot, (with a hard T), or Rioja, (with a soft J), or Shiraz, which I felt compelled to order, though it is by far my least favourite red.

January 7th 2015 ��� Belfast

Esther Haller-Clarke and Garret O���Fachtna

Though it was neither practical nor particularly comfortable, a dinner party for ten was once held inside the wooden bowels of the Royal Albert���s Pipe Organ.

���Surely,��� said the Victorian wives of Victorian gentlemen, as they swept their heavy brocades past all nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine pipes, ���the fact that this is the world���s largest pipe organ should suffice.���

But the Englishman has always liked to prove his superiority with knives and feasting and well-dressed women, crushing in the dark.

February Shorts 2015

This is a picture of my recently purchased copy of Hilary Mantel’s short story collection, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. From a distance it looks as lovely as most hardback books look before they make their way out of the��bookstores and into the sweaty-fingered, satchel-stuffing, spine-breaking and cruel, dog-earing hands of the average reader. Unfortunately my copy of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is now not only beat up, (as all my books are), but also infused with the aroma of the sweet potato and beef stew which escaped from its container on my way home from work, subsequently coating everything in my rucksack, (lap top, notebooks, make-up, hairbrush, brand new Hilary Mantel), in a glutinous meat and potato mess. I am particularly sorry that this book now stinks to high heaven because it is, quite frankly, the most enjoyable collection of short stories I’ve read in an awfully long time. After finishing the collection I decided to give up on nurturing the jealousy I’ve been feeling towards Hilary Mantel ever since I first read Wolf Hall. The woman clearly operates on some supernatural creative plane, inaccessible to the rest of us more pedestrian writers. Everything Mantel touches is golden and the most infuriating thing about this state of affairs is the fact that she makes it all seem so bloody effortless.

Jealousy aside, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher reminded me that last year, in honour of the shortest month, I decided to read only short story collections for the entire duration of February. This was a very worthwhile pursuit and I have decided to make it an annual occurrence. If nothing else, February Shorts, (as I’ve chosen to call it, note image above, which Google chooses to throw up if you type the word February beside the word Shorts), will give me an excuse to read Raymond Carver at least once a year and also hopefully a post of Flannery. I’ll be beginning my reading adventure on February 1st with some new writers and probably a few old faithfuls thrown into the mix. Perhaps you’d like to join me and also only read short stories in February. I’d appreciate the company and, if you don’t mind reading a book which smells like a Sunday roast, would be happy to lend you some Hilary Mantel for the road.

My Bookish Friends 2014

It’s been a decent enough year for reading. A lot of traveling has left me with quite a bit of in-air, on train, between stations, time in which to plough through my paperbacks. I’ve managed 97 books this year and while that’s no personal best, there were a few enormous beasts of books included, (Murakami’s 1Q84, The Goldfinch and a couple of other big hitters), slowing me down. I have to say it’s been one of those years when old friends disappointed me a little. A number of authors whom I’ve habitually adored produced awful, self-indulgent, dull novels which simply weren’t up to standard. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch was definitely the most disappointing read of the year and due to the fact that I read it in hardback, also gave me a wrist strain for my trouble. After the sheer reading pleasure of Tartt’s first two novels, I found The Goldfinch, bloated, meandering and a bit pointless. I was also disappointed with Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour and I couldn’t even finish Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon.

Aside from this however, I have to commend some excellent short story collections by Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett, Aimee Bender and the truly wonderful George Saunders which I read as part of my February Shorts, (shortest month so I only read short stories). Also Breece DJ Pancakes shorts which I discovered this year, thanks to a recommendation from Hugh Odling-Smee. It may well have been the year of the short stories though there were also some wonderful novels. Eimear McBride’s breakthrough novel, A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing was also an unarguable highlight and being able to interview her at Literary Lunchtime in December was the icing on the cake. I also thoroughly enjoyed Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience, roughly based on her childhood within London’s hasidic Jewish community and felt it sat wonderfully alongside another two favourite novels of the year, Charis Bray’s exploration of grief within the contemporary Mormon community, A Song For Issy Bradley and The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood.

It’s lovely to see some extremely strong female voices making the list this year and while I’m not placing it in my Top Ten, as I’m not sure how it’ll stand the test of time, Marina Keegan’s posthumous collection of essays and short stories, The Opposite of Loneliness deserves mention for it energy and exuberance and the concise  manner in which she’s managed to capture the American zeitgeist. Though I’m a little late to the party I’m also placing my lovely friend, Bernie McGill’s The Butterfly Cabinet on my best of 2014 list. It’s a long time since I read a piece of Northern Irish fiction so captivating and beautifully written. It was a treat from start to finish as are Bernie’s short stories, collected in Sleepwalkers. Novel of the year would probably go to Colum McCann, (once again). Transatlantic is deftly written and incredible emotive, proving, if there was any doubt, that McCann has an ability and longevity, not just as an Irish writer but as a contemporary writer to rival anyone writing today. Transatlantic is the only book which made me cry this year and I greatly appreciate a good cry.

I also wish to include some great non-fiction reads. Narrowly missing the list is Irvin D. Yalom’s Love’s Executioner, a collection of true stories garnered from his distinguished career as an eminent psychotherapist; a fascinating and surprisingly quick read well worth getting a copy of. I’ve read a number of Dylan biographies as part of my research for the new novel. Some have been good, some have been mediocre but the most memorable by far has been Toby Thompson’s early attempt at a Bob Dylan bio, Positively Main Street. It is perhaps the strangest and most readable piece of Dylan writing I’ve ever come across. Even if you can’t stand Bob, this book is fabulous. My book of the year is also a non-fiction read. I’m choosing Brad Gooch’s Flannery O’Connor biography simply because it’s probably the book which has impacted me most this year. O’Connor is a writer who’s had an enormous impact on both my writing and my faith and this biography felt like an absolute tonic for my soul during a very stressful year.

So, in no particular order, (Flannery O’Connor aside), here are my top ten books of the year. Of course, many of them weren’t published this year. I don’t have enough money to be constantly buying hardbacks but I would throughly recommend tracking down some of these and look forward to dozens of great books in 2015.

Best of 2014:

My favourite book of the year: Brad Gooch “Flannery; A Life of Flannery O’Connor”

1. Aimee Bender “Willful Creatures”

2. Toby Thompson “Positively Main Street; An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan”

3. Eimear McBride “A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing”

4. Breece D.J. Pancake “The Stories of Breece D.J. Pancake”

5. George Saunders “The Tenth of December”

6. Colin Barrett “Young Skins”

7. Colum McCann “Transatlantic”

8. Claire Keegan “Antarctica”

9. Naomi Alderman “Disobedience”

10. Bernie McGill “The Butterfly Cabinet”

Worst of 2014

I’m not going to be cruel but there were a good few books which bored the back teeth off me this year. Special mention goes to The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out A Window for being overlong, dull and unbelievable in both book and film format. Otherwise, here are my five turkeys of the year in no particular order.

1. Donna Tartt “The Goldfinch”

2. Barbara Kingsolver “Flight Behaviour”

3. John Irving “The Water Method Man”

4. Margaret Atwood “Life Before Man”

5. Jonas Jonasson “The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out A Window And Disappeared”

2014 at the Cinema

While it’s been a rather traumatic end to the year for Northern Irish cinema and all those who worship weekly in the hallowed pews of the QFT, it’s been a reasonably decent wee year for movies. There have been a few terrible turkeys and a couple of exceptionally good movies. Locke, Dallas Buyers Club, Under the Skin, Only Lovers Left Alive, Paddington and The Drop, all deserve a place in the best of list, (I’m also a little embarrassed to admit just how much I enjoyed Woody Allen in Fading Gigolo), but in the end I went with the ten films which I enjoyed best. It was a year where I valued escapism and these movies made me completely forget myself for an hour or two. At the top of the list is Calvary – far and away the best thing I saw at the cinema this year- the rest are in no particular order but seem to feature shotguns quite heavily. I’ve taken the liberty of including my short reviews, just in case you missed them the first time round.

Best of 2014

Best movie of the year:

Calvary “Tonight this destroyed me in the very best sense. Uncomfortable and essential viewing.”

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel: “She’s a keeper Wes.”

2. August: Osage County: “Incest, Oklahoma and a host of Hollywood A listers looking rough as anything. Meryl Streep ghosting about in wig and sunglasses like a deathbed Dylan. I was always going to like this but it truly became a love affair when Julia Roberts said “don’t turn all Carson McCullers on me”

3. Lilting: “Tackles the whole subject of grief and loss with incredible delicacy and kindness. A truly beautiful wee film.”

4. Blue Ruin: “Kentucky gothic; shotguns, shacks and the sins of the fathers- pretty much everything I love in a movie.”

5. Boyhood: “Well worth the three hour commitment. Made me overly nostalgic for the last ten years of my own life.”

6. Wakolda: “Measured, stunning, truly disturbing (pity about the terrible bubble bath-esque fake snow)”

7. American Hustle: “First good movie of the year. Casino meets Studio 54 and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Christian Bale, as always impeccable even when lardy. Bradley Cooper put on God’s earth to play exactly this kind of slumdog. Jennifer Lawrence my particular scene stealer, (especially whilst cleaning to Live and Let Die in an up do). Amy Adams in desperate need of some buttons for her blouse. Go see.”

8. Cold in July: “1989, Texas; Sam Shepard, a fair few shotguns and enormous cowboy hats, unsurprisingly this turns into the very best kind of bloodbath.”

9. Paddington: “There is no cynicism left in my heart. I loved every second of this.”

10. Inside Llewyn Davis: “Dear Mr Coen, Mr Coen and Mr Burnett, you took a little piece of my heart and made it into a movie. Thank you.”

There were also some truly terrible movies this year and it was actually quite a struggle to limit my list to just five turkeys, plus one movie so truly awful it should win prizes for managing to make it to production. It was, without a doubt, one of those years when previously decent directors really should have known better, (take a bow Michel Gondry, Woody Allen, Spike Jonze), and I am now in fear and trepidation over just how terrible the forthcoming Terence Malick actually could be. Here’s my list of movies I wish I hadn’t wasted the money on.

Worst of 2014

Worst movie of the year, (and possibly also every other year since movies were invented): The Congress “It’s a long time since I last walked out mid movie (second LOTR). This is the worst thing I’ve seen in decades. Like someone vomited and made it into a movie.”

1. Her “And with this I mourn the passing of my inner hipster; what a pile of boring, self-indulgent, drivel. This is comparable to one semi-decent line in a George Saunders’ short that got stretched into a two hour movie. Come on people we can do imagination without sap, can’t we?”

2. Frank “I liked the last bit of this. The rest was really annoying.”

3. The Sea “Self-indulgent drivel from John Bannville. Another stunning example of why novelists should never be allowed to adapt their own books for screen. I honestly can’t think of a single redeeming feature of this movie.”

4. Monuments Men: “Who do you think you are kidding Mr Clooney?”

5. Mood Indigo: “You’ve gone too far this time Michel Gondry. What a load of silly nonsense. You put us all off Romain Duris and for this we may never forgive you.”

92 films watched. Approximately 45 movies enjoyed. Looking forward to more shotguns and Tom Hardy in 2015.

2015 Postcard Project

This year, whilst traveling around the US as part of the big research trip for my forthcoming novel, Roundabouts, I wrote and posted home around 50 shorts stories written on the back of postcards. It proved to be a really enjoyable and worthwhile way of document my adventures and though some of the stories were little more than quick sketches, a few of them turned into really great little short stories. The project proved to be a great way to hone my flash fiction writing skills and definitely made me a better/nosier observer while I was traveling. It was also a nice way to involve some good friends in my writing.

I love projects. I’m quite a goal-orientated person and like having something to aim for. The first draft of the new novel is almost finish and the next stage will be the boring editing and redrafting stage so to give myself something a little more creative to get my teeth into, in 2015, I’ve decided to revisit the postcard project. I’m going to aim to write 100 short short stories on the back of postcards this year. Each story will be inspired by something I see or overhear this year. I’ll mail the stories to friends and post them up here every so often. I’ll be kicking the project off on January 1st and am already looking forward to it. If you’re a friend and would like to receive a postcard send me an email with your address and I’ll make sure you get one at some point in the year.