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Recently, due to my wife’s new job, I’ve found myself making part of my journey home from work by public transport. Bus, followed by tram. And even after a matter of days it’s begun to irk me. It’s not so much that I no longer have my own space: buried in a book you can block out the people around you. It’s not even the din from headphones and mobile phones, annoying though these are. No, worse than any of these are the wasted minutes. Not being stuck in traffic – you get that in a car – but those inexplicable delays when the bus just pulls over and the driver spends several minutes counting cobwebs, or whatever it is they do, thus ensuring that you miss your connection and have another unnecessary delay waiting for the next one.

What’s silly, of course, is that these delays don’t generally amount to much. To quote Reggie Perrin – ‘eleven minutes late, leaf mulch at Golder’s Green’ or, in my case, ‘six minutes late, inexplicable wait by Nottingham Station’ – it’s clearly not so long as to be a major problem, but somehow, because someone else is in charge of my destiny I resent it. If I really wanted to get annoyed, I really ought to focus on the fact that my new journey home takes almost twice as long as the old one – over half of that on public transport. But because I’ve manipulated my schedule to minimize that effect, it becomes the little delays which niggle.

We live in a society dominated by time, almost controlled by it, and we sacrifice a great deal of it – perhaps not without complaint – but certainly without serious anger. When our forebears heard the news that we were switching to the Gregorian Calendar, moving New Year from March to January, there were riots – people genuinely thought that months of their lives were being stolen. Now, when another delayed train actually does steal an hour, we sigh, but do little more. Perhaps it’s because, with electric lighting we can use the nights more than our ancestors, perhaps it’s merely the resignation of a people who grew up with British Rail, who knows.

Only, of course, progress is very much a two-edged sword. It may be the case that our post-industrial society now means that many more of us travel to work, that the volume of commuter traffic means that a thirty mile journey to work can take two hours, but look back before the age of road and rail and you will find a time when the same journey was a day’s hard ride or two day’s march. And whilst the common man may rarely have travelled beyond the nearest market town, there were those who ventured far and wide, not just across England but across the world. Talking about a two year slog to the Holy Land or five years to the Orient puts six minutes extra crossing Nottingham into quite some perspective…

Another mad definition that came to me in my waking hours this morning:

Nemetode – Christening ceremony for amphibians.

Living through winter in Sherwood, one can’t help but wonder about the hardships of former residents. Robin Hood could not have turned to the central heating when the frosts came, and living on the run in the Royal Forest he’d have had to be pretty careful about lighting camp fires. That said, of course, the odds that a fire in the centre of the forest could be seen twenty miles away in central Nottingham are pretty remote, so perhaps that’s what he did.

In terms of winter weather, Sherwood is actually in a peculiar spot. Because the channel coast is about 150 miles away and the Peak District screens our western flank from weather systems from the Atlantic, it’s unusual to see more than a small sprinkling of snow. The four inches we received last week was, therefore, a surprisingly large amount, even if it does nothing to compare with the deluge falling in Wales or Scotland. Still enough to have Nottinghamshire running out of grit, but maybe that’s because outlaws are stealing it to grit their tracks in the forest or to salt their venison. Stranger things have happened.

Happy New Year everybody.

There have been many things written about the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Many of them are scandalous, many more are only libelous, most are simply untrue – although in accordance with Dr Han Streetmentioner’s theory of the quasi-reciprocality of truth this means that they are almost certainly the kind of indisputable facts for denying which a major religion could kill you.

One of those untruths, and here the author undertakes his statement with full awareness of the risk of a multi-dimensional fatwa, is that the book is written by a large number of roving researchers writing in from exotic locations around the galaxy. Literary research suggests it was actually written by just one man working from his bath. Nobody knows why this should be so, or in fact if this means that baths are in fact the basis for a wholly undiscovered form of interdimensional travel, but sales of rubber ducks amongst astrophysicists suggests they are looking into it.

The literary researchers, meanwhile, have found something else to look into: a new series of entries from the guide which appear to have been written by a different man, writing from an entirely different bath. And, in a development which could turn astrophysicists to thoughts temporal, it appears to have taken longer to emerge than it takes for an Algolian suntiger to settle for the night.

Although, of course, most astrophysicists wouldn’t know how long that was. If you can’t fire it round a twenty-seven mile tube without it scratching your face off, they don’t really want to know about it. Any good biologist, however, would tell you that suntigers are frequently kept awake by their own bioluminescence, an affliction that makes them irritable and likely to attack without provocation but generally far too tired to actually kill anything. Not unnaturally this, combined with the use of extracts of suntiger in pan-galactic gargleblasters, has led to a decline in the species in recent years. Conservationists have travelled to Algol to highlight the problem, but since the invariable outcome is that any concerned conservationist will end up being eaten by a suntiger desperate enough to make a real effort, commentators suggest that nature has clearly already found a way to keep the species from extinction. Nobody worries about the possible decline in the numbers of conservationists, since the one species they try very hard to propagate is their own.

Unfortunately, biologists wouldn’t really care about the guide, which brings us – by a path only marginally shorter than a large hadron collider – back to the literary researchers. Since literary research is, like most poorly-paid professions, doing its best to become showbusiness as a means to stay solvent, researchers have responded to the new volume by strapping glamorous assistants into poetry appreciation chairs, priming them them with simile dumpers, metaphor enhancers and some of the less illegal forms of thesaural stimulators and reading them extracts. Most have died immediately – usually of adjectivitis. This has, therefore, been a failure on two counts: firstly in that it consigned literary programmes to poorly paid post-watershed slots – still the only time of day you are permitted to kill people on live television; and secondly in that the only findings from the research have been the review one assistant delivered in her dying breath, which was this: ‘it’s alright, but it goes on a bit.’

And this, although true, was entirely unhelpful. Because, if there’s one thing that strikes the casual observer immediately about And Another Thing it is that it is big, really big. It hasn’t quite achieved the feat of being the first book to be not only good value for your ninji but of comparable size: that distinction is held by The Magrathean Observer’s Book of Planets (Life Size Edition); a book which it is claimed can sit on a shelf with any of its rivals, as long as that shelf is (a) relatively sturdy and (b) on a planet too large to be included in the book. The Mag, as it is affectionately known in the trade, has however suffered poor sales due to the refusal of galactic libraries to stock copies of what they call ‘mere pocket trivia’ – but even in these economically uncertain times it’s bankable stuff. After the mere pamphlet that was Mostly Harmless, And Another Thing is a veritable election campaign of a novel, albeit presumably a campaign for the cheese and wine party.

But what it isn’t is another Adams gem. It couldn’t be, if only because Colfer isn’t Adams. Even with the vast panoply of beliefs in the modern universe, there are none which support the concept of simultaneous reincarnation, or at least none that are taken seriously, and since Adams was clearly extant in Colfer’s lifetime, Colfer cannot be Adams. QED.

Which would be fine if the dissimilarity ended there. The Unganga people of Bastablon, when faced with the accidental death of a popular princess in a freak baking accident, realised that, since most people had never personally met the princess, there was no difficulty in substituting a similar woman they found in a nunnery. The chosen candidate was given a makeover, taught how to wave and speak in an approximation close enough to fool the vast majority of the populace and then thrust into the full glare of the public spotlight – a level of illumination which had the added benefit of masking a distinctive mole on the woman’s left chin. Unfortunately, the Unganga people had failed to remember that the original princess was also noted for a string of illicit affairs. When the former nun failed to appear in flagrante delicto in  a fuzzy, poorly-focused shot in a tabloid for over a year, the scam was uncovered and the perpetrators, far from being thanked for sparing the public grief, were executed for having obviously been involved in the death – forensic evidence being useless after such a span of time.

Colfer’s personal life, like Adams’, is a closed book. Since both are kept in a vault in the British library it is beyond our ability to compare them. Unfortunately, however, his writing is – if not an open book – a book that can be readily opened over a coffee in the bookshop of your choice.

The coffee needs to be strong.

Perhaps his guide entries are, as some have speculated, intended to originate from Ford Prefect; because, far from resembling Adams’ clever, philosophical ramblings springing from the narrative, Colfer’s are tangential, often disruptive, and contain childishly puerile gags many of which, presumably, simply seemed like a good idea at the time. They attempt to hark back to the original canon through references to aliens and planets from Adams’ volumes, but this is done in such a heavy-handed manner and with so little original insight that it comes across as more suggestive of fan-fiction than professional writing. One could criticise his inconsistencies – referring to both of Ford Prefect’s parents doesn’t square with what we know about his sharing five of the same mothers with Zaphod – but it is more the rampant crowbarring in of species as if playing to someone with the I Spy Book of Hitch-hiker’s Aliens and a passive biro that jars.

Not that Adams himself escaped criticism, of course. His fondness for the long sentence, in the literary rather than the judiciary sense – although there is a narrowly-held belief that he advocated long stretches for those who wilfully destroyed rubber plantations – was part of his legend. He was notoriously held to be the only man who could empty an entire set of Scrabble tiles onto a triple word score in a single play – something which might explain the names of some of his aliens. The cast of the Burkiss Way gave their lives in satirical impersonation of his asphyxiating style. Frequently.

But Adams pulled it off. Like his hero, Wodehouse, he understood that a long sentence with several parenthetical clauses could work if you got the rhythm of the thing right. He knew that you could place one word at the end of a sentence and turn its meaning around. He knew how to balance lengthy discursions against short, punchy phrases in a way that made both stand out. And he didn’t, like Colfer and many other modern authors.  Have. The. Problem. Of placing full-stops in arbi. Trary places. Few authors had Adams’ delivery: perhaps only Wodehouse could be regarded as better.

This stylisation of Adams’ prose extended to his dialogue as well, meaning that when the recent film naturalised the language it came across as flat and un-Adamsy. Colfer’s dialogue is un-Adamsy, unfortunately it is also unnatural. In keeping with his own Artemis Fowl novels, the characters lack a depth and realism, leaving you without emotional attachment or even belief. Whereas Adam’s’ dialogue crackled with wit and sarcasm, Colfer’s lacks humor, apart from of the basest kind.

One thing Adams didn’t really do, at least in his earlier books, was plot. Like his friends in Monty Python, he wrote in sketch form. This led to a somewhat discursive narrative – and one which changed between revisions of the story – but it also meant that every scene had a point, which was invariably to make the reader laugh – and because this was Douglas Adams – hopefully to make them think as well. The dish of the day at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was a satirical look at squaring our much-vaunted enlightenment with our acceptance of our carnivorous animalistic inheritance. Colfer’s suicidal cows take the same basic idea, strip out both the humour and the intellect, then repeat it for enough pages to get the word count up.

And that’s how the whole thing comes across. Despite the weight of the book, there’s no more depth of plot than in one of the original volumes. Trying to identify specific gags or scenes, you find yourself realising that a hundred pages have passed without you having gained an iota of insight into what the point was. Perhaps the pages are soaked in Janx Spirit, perhaps  the words are simply too close to the page. Who knows…

Of course, in the interests of balance it must be admitted that following Adams isn’t easy. Colfer has taken on the Herculean task of following an author so exacting that even Sisyphus would have declined a jobshare. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe, sometimes, we have to accept that mantles are not made to be taken up. One has only to look to Isaac Asimov – an author once denigrated by Douglas Adams as so bad he wouldn’t let him fill in his tax returns – to see what happens when someone plunders a writer’s intellectual estate. Asimov may not have been the skilled linguist that Adams was, but he wrote with a humanity that shone through his language. When sequels to his Foundation novels were written, they lost the heart and ended up coming across as poor clones of William Gibson, obsessed with updating the science at the cost of the character. Updating Hitch-hiker’s was never going to be about updating the science – there have been no developments to obsolete the infinite improbability drive or render happy vertical people transporters obsolete – but even if the objective was to continue the story it should have been given to someone who shared Adams’ passions, who loved language and philosophy, science and silliness, ecology and erudition. Unfortunately, there is probably no such person – at least not in our universe – and we are left with someone who, like a supply god on the seventh day, struggles to keep to the previous standards.  

Human beings are, as many a thinker has observed, creatures of habit. After settling into a way of thinking they cling to it as tenaciously as a frightened koala to a tree. Authors, however, have a particular peculiarity in this regard. A mind geared to the plotting of novels will find, even when not bathed in the cool glow of the monitor, it is inclined to view life as if it had a point. Where the non-writer will take life as it comes, tinting their outlook with rosy optimism or cold pessimism, the writer will look for the story. Inconsequential actions will gain almost superstitious significance, particularly if they can be viewed as details ‘laid in’ for later on in the narrative.

Take my present circumstances, for example. Three years ago I used to run a small shareware business. After a brief halcyon age it was declining, becoming more a cause of irritable bowels than celebration. Then, out of the blue, my wife was made redundant. Whilst we could stagger on one and a bit incomes, we couldn’t cope with less. Reluctantly, I wound down the shareware and looked for work. Within a month I had secured a job and, within a day, my wife also secured a job. What was interesting was that the two jobs, whilst both about thirty miles from home, were within half a mile of each other. Most people would have seen this as convenient, I saw it as part of the narrative.

Fast-forward to the present and the economic downturn means that my wife has again succumbed to redundancy. Academically, I know us to be safe enough. My salary can cover our outgoings, even if it does mean a reduction in frivolous living, but the writer in me is thinking that narratively speaking things have to get worse before they get better.

Because, if you consider it, that’s how it always happens. You watch the latest blockbuster and you’ll see the hero progressively become more battered, every encounter giving him another injury that will miraculously fail to scar him in the sequel. And just when the odds seem to be insurmountable, just when you think the writers have to kill him off to keep their credibility, that’s when he comes through. It’s a classic formula because it sells. After all, if the hero merely sprained his ankle in the opening scene then proceed to soldier on and clear the building of terrorists with no more than the occasional wince it wouldn’t be worth the price of the ticket.

And it’s not just the blockbusters. Can you imagine a film about a man struggling to believe in his own value would sell if the angel came to save him when he just whined to a colleague at the bank? Would you empathise with the well-fed middle class child who won a tour of a chocolate factory? In writing, adversity is a necessary precursor to success. Applying this to real life may not seem particularly rational, but it’s built into the DNA of writers around the world.

Fortunately, in the longer term this lends writers more optimism than most people. Fortunately for everybody, that is, because how many books would be published, how many films made if writers couldn’t cope with years of rejection by believing in the imperative of a happy ending? The same genetics that make us believe life is never so dull as to contain no scenes of mild peril also gives us faith in our winning through in the final chapter. After all, only Terry Gilliam seems to be able to sell films where the hero is, in the end, crushed by the system. And that clearly can’t come from belief when it’s from a man who, after facing disaster after disaster trying to tell the story of Don Juan not only makes a best-selling documentary about the experience but goes back to finish the film a few years later.

In the short term perhaps the best way to cope with difficult times is to let go and become one of the audience. If we don’t worry about the price of the popcorn and stop trying to guess the ending we might just consider that whether scripted or entirely random, life is always original. And if we cling onto that then maybe, just maybe, we can believe the plot is going to turn in our favour before the end of the current scene.

Have you ever felt there are gaps in the English language? Perhaps it’s being a writer, but from time to time I find myself wondering about why there’s a word for one thing and not another.

Take for example the word accident. Perfectly common English word, but what is its opposite? The thesaurus gives us intention, plan, provision but none of these seem appropriate. If you were in a car and someone quite deliberately rammed you, it might well have been their intention, but was it actually an intention? Doesn’t sound right, does it?

More significantly, there’s a word missing in between the two. Certainly it is an accident if someone’s brakes fail and they crash into you. And it would be an intention (for want of a better word) if they deliberately drove into you, but most of the time what happens is neither of the above. Most of the time what happens is that someone simply doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t apply the brakes when they should have and then runs into you. We term such things as accidents for want of a better word, but to do so colours the incident as somehow nobody’s fault: shit happens and it requires nobody to make a bowel movement for it to do so.

Why does it matter? Well, take for example the Chernobyl disaster (disaster here being a generic word for something that wasn’t a good thing and, again, apportioning no blame). When Chernobyl went up it was because the cooling systems were shut off. It wasn’t intended as an act of terrorism, but neither was it exactly accidental. To call it an accident is to dismiss it as just one of those things, barely worthy of blame.

But there is an opposite effect also. Continual use of the word accident to describe something stupid but avoidable runs the risk of tarring genuine accidents with the same brush. The cyclist whose sudden and unexpected bout of hiccups causes him to swerve in front of you, the ferry driver who puts to sea without knowing that a rare breed of metal eating superbugs have snuck into the hold (although there you could classify the sinking as a terrorist act committed by the bugs): if we live in a world where these things are regarded as accidents and accidents are somehow semi-intentional, then we live in a world where people take out frivolous lawsuits against the paving slabs they trip over or the food they overeat. Clearly, for the sake of sanity we need a word that defines a middle ground, an unintended consequence of a foolish or careless action.

There is some precedence for this kind of grey thinking in our language. Think of murder: in Britain we distinguish between murder, manslaughter and misadventure. In America they go further with degrees of murder – so an incident could be sort of 45% murder, 25% argument and 30% yes, but I didn’t know a broken ketchup bottle was sharp. This has evolved because it’s all too easy to dismiss the outcome of a trial as unfair or disproportionate. To regard accidentally decapitating someone who started an argument with you whilst you were operating a strimmer as purposefully persuading them to go to B&Q with the intention of so disabling them is clearly unsatisfactory.

Language clearly doesn’t require quite as much gradation. We don’t need a hundred words for accident any more than the Eskimoes need their mythical hundred words for snow. It’s not unreasonable, however, to have at least some gradation. In this spirit I would therefore like to propose duncequence for everything between accident and intention. It’s easily understood and etymologically sound, which is always a good start. If you rang the insurers as a victim of a duncequence they’d know to handle things differently than as a victim of an accident.

If the word ever makes it into the OED, remember you saw it here first…

Late summer is a surreal time of year for those of us living in the countryside. Driving to Nottingham on an August morning is like visiting a rural sculpture park; passing field after field with the hay baled and distributed, seemingly randomly, across the landscape, transient totems of a megafaeniliac age.

And as with all such phenomena there is variation between the tribes. Some favour the traditional cubes, sharply regular and striking against the gentle Midland slopes; others go for the more aesthetic cylinders. Both, no doubt, have their benefits, whether they are easier to move or to store.

By why do they stop there? I noticed this morning one of the traditional silly season stories about corn circles. Once, people would travel to marvel at these alleged alien markings. At least, that is, until it was admitted they were part of a practical joke. Now it doesn’t matter how elaborate the patterns become, few people bother to look. Why? The trouble with corn circles is that they aren’t really that visible at ground level. People get their best view in the newspapers. But what if, say, one enterprising farmer were to take his hay cubes and to stack them, not just anyhow, but in an approximation of Stonehenge? It would make the papers, naturally, but it would also attract visitors. Visitors who might be encouraged to visit a local farm shop, say. The success would encourage other farmers to try something similar the following year. And it could go on and on. For a couple of weeks in summer our countryside would be strewed with a myriad temporary sculptures, lightening the mood, encouraging trade and reconnecting us with both our cultural and agricultural origins.

Maybe that’s what the traditional stone circles were all about in the first place. Tradition is, after all, simply a name for something people keep doing because they can’t remember why they started. And our traditions have always been quirky ones. So go on, flatten the hay – and then stack it in interesting formations across our green and pleasant land.

Probably the most difficult aspect of being a writer is knowing where to draw the line in self-criticism. Even amongst those who struggle to get past page one of their magnum opus, it is invariably the feeling that what they are doing is worthless that makes them (metaphorically these days) rip the paper from the typewriter and hurl it into a disgusted ball in the wastepaper basket.
Get to my stage of things – several years passed, a number of books written, still fighting to get them out there – and it’s actually harder. Because, even if you are self-confident enough to hold up your latest effort as a work of genius (a state of mind I’ve never achieved) by the time you’ve written a few more books the chances are you’ll look back on that earlier work as somehow flawed. If it hasn’t been published by then, the temptation is either to rewrite it or ditch it. The former is what I refer to as the Tolkien trap. Tolkien was not a prolific writer, but a prolific rewriter. In his life he wrote and rewrote the same books continuously. After his death, his son has issued a number of these rewrites, most of which are only purchased by true hardcore fans.
Was Tolkien right to behave this way? Would the first version of Lord of the Rings been as successful as the version that eventually emerged? Who can tell, but authors should take heart from the fact that many of the books that are released and are successful would probably be roundly condemned by many authors, not least their own. Some are simply naive scribblings that were nonetheless good enough to get their author accepted and give them chance to grow; others are products of a bad period in an established author’s life. None of them are, for the most part, seen anywhere near as badly by the legions of non-writing readers in the world. These people are forgiving of overused dialogue tags, of semi-colons serving where full-stops would have been better, of hanging clauses used as sentences. For no good reason.
When you develop your writer’s eye you can find faults in books lauded as classics. Walter Scott’s chapters of character set-up grate; early Wodehouse can fail to effervesce in the way of his later works. And that means that, when dusting off an old work and giving it a new edit, when trying to batter a once great scene into a shape where you can still admit you wrote it; in those circumstances you should be a little more forgiving of your own work. Let the reader be your strictest judge. After all, the last thing you want is to die in penury only to have your children prosper by publishing everything in the ensuing years.

On a note related only homonymically (if that is a word) today I received my copy of The Duckworth-Lewis Method’s eponymous CD.

The last few years have been something of an Irish music odyssey for me: I’ve been intending to listen to something by The Divine Comedy for several years (it occurs to me every time I watch Father Ted or The IT Crowd) and then, after stumbling on another Irishman – Duke Special – playing support for Crowded House at the end of 2007, I finally got round to picking up the greatest hits. At the same time, I was looking around for information about the rumoured Idle Race box set and this serendipitously led me to the website of another Irish band by the name of Pugwash. The three acts are very different from each other: the Divine Comedy is an eclectic mix of comic and poignant songs about the modern world, Duke Special is somewhat vaudevillian (again, is that a word?) and Pugwash very much in the classic Beatles-Byrds-Beach Boys vein. All three are, however, brilliantly talented and, intriguingly, seem to be interrelated. Neil Hannon, the singer-writer-lead musician of Divine Comedy, has appeared on both Duke Special’s debut album, Songs From the Deep Forest and on Pugwash’s latest masterpiece Eleven Modern Antiquities, perhaps demonstrating that the Irish music scene is less driven by ego and commercial considerations than its English counterpart.

It should, therefore, have come as no surprise to find that Thomas Walsh of Pugwash was collaborating with Neil Hannon on an entirely different musical project. Released to coincide with The Ashes, The Duckworth-Lewis Method is an album of cricket-inspired songs, poignant, mostly comic and with stylistic shades of both Pugwash and The Divine Comedy mixed with a touch of Flanders and Swann it’s an album far-removed from the indentikit bands that plague our charts at the moment. It’s hard to pick a particular standout moment – diversity always makes choice difficult – but Meeting Mr Miandi seems to be the one that’s got stuck in my brain at the moment.

Allegedly, there is supposed to be a new Divine Comedy album coming later this year, despite Mr Hannon’s best attempts to avoid it, and with rumours that Pugwash will be embarking on their first UK tour to promote their best of album Giddy I’m hoping this means the two acts will be playing on the same ticket. It would certainly make for a good night out.

Links:
Pugwash
The Duckworth-Lewis Method
The Divine Comedy
Duke Special

During the summer months I tend to restrict the writing to light duties. When you’re holding down a full-time job you don’t want all the sunny evenings to be earmarked for work. Usually that means I spend the summer editing a book I’ve already written, or writing a book with characters I know well enough that a day off here and there won’t interrupt the flow.
This year, however, I’m doing something different: in the last few weeks I’ve been editing the current draft of my first stageplay. As a keen theatregoer it’s odd that I’ve not done this before, but I’ve finally got round to it and, once it’s been read by my usual filters, I’ll start foraging for an outlet for it. The play is currently going by the name of Winter Lillies – a name chosen because it feels rather Noel Coward, although the play itself is probably more Alan Ayckbourn in tone and construction. More news as it develops…