Grogbox

On Christmas Day my niece told me how much she enjoyed Conor McPherson’s play The Veil at the National Theatre. One of the blogs that has been floating through my head was how much I did not enjoy it, and why. I stayed silent on Christmas Day so might as well do so now. If a play works that well for someone it clearly works. My theatre-going has been valiant of late. I head for the good times I once had. It seldom works. Comedy gives me my best strike rate. I’ve always noted how willing audiences are to have a good time whatever you put before them, managing to laugh against the odds.
Good theatre for me was on Hungerford Bridge on the way back across the Thames, a full moon in a clear sky over St Paul’s. Visitors from all over the world lined the bridge, turning it into a moon-viewing platform.
The same weekend we headed for the  Dulwich Picture Gallery, invited by friends for ‘Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven’. I expected vast canvases with tiny figures and bold mountains. What I found was revelatory. Tom Thomson’s work (above) built like a mosaic of stripes into a peerless vision. The show had a glorious finale in the works of Lawren Harris, whose paintings (one below) shifted me into that sacred space of mountains. I had seen something related to this style of mountains as visionary art in some paintings of Rudoph Sauter, but nothing akin to this capture of Arctic light. It was encouraging, to spend time with works pulled from great artists responding to wilderness.

My one web visit every day is to the Leicester City page in the Leicester Mercury. When live matches come up on TV I wander between local pubs and only twice has anyone bothered to show them, when I’ve sat alone and downed a pint.

My last live game was an away cup match at Charlton years ago. I had a go at jumping up and chanting but the spirit wasn’t with me. I was fresh back from a summer in the Orkneys. Come halftime I sat in the stands, travelling back to the islands in the short stories of George Mackay Brown.

And yesterday I went live again. Leicester were away to Hull, and so just a walk away from my Hull home. Hull was becoming Leicester-on-the-Humber with the old Leicester manager and half the team and staff, but that manager’s just switched back (Judas the Hull crowds sang) so this was something of a grudge match.

The other day I found myself jammed into Hull’s City Centre during the countdown for the switch-on of the Christmas Lights. I get moved by the community feel of such occasions, young families out as units thrumming with excitement. There was the same buzz in the crowds walking to the KC Stadium. I breezed along till the scab in me wheeled off to the North Stand to join with the away supporters.

I was born in Leicester. In truth my active support died off a bit when I hit sixteen and got a moped and some independence. The Nottingham Theatre Royal was in its heyday then so I tended to buzz off at 30mph and ctach a Saturday atinee for preference, or an Arts film at the picture club. My support persists as something tribal, a family honouring, my link to my roots (the writer Julian Barnes stays a Leicester supporter even though he left the city aged four). From a kid the team has no more passionate supporter than my mother. I bought her a memorial brick in the new stadium wall for her birthday just before she died.

Hull has a new stadium too, the KC. It looks sleek and white from outside and the pillars, roof and lights are attractive. The physical experience of entering the ground is as shoddy as ever. Tickets are taken behind a tiny plateglass screen and then you shove your way through a narrow floor-to-ceiling ribbed iron turnstyle as though you’ve elected a spell in prison. Inside you’re back in the same old world of concrete blocks and steel urinals, queues so long that men look round to check you’ve clocked their daring at pissing the baby washbasins.

I’d forgotten the sheer volume of these occasions – or the volume has got pumped up which is likely since it’s happened everywhere else. It’s not just the PA systems and music but the yelling. Songs used to be clever. A guy just in front of me yelled full throated abuse for the whole ninety minutes. The nicest he could manage was ‘break his fucking leg’ whenever a Hull player got the ball. The language was impossibly offensive and would have had him arrested out on the streets. It seems a different social order applies in the football stadia. I guess that’s why they have special family sections, where kids can go till they get to grow and bulge into full vulgarity themselves. All the apelike prancing is there, a wide stance and arms raised high with clenched fists so as to force a venomous grunt at the opposing tribe.

My main goal was to put faces and skills to the names of Leicester players I read about on the web each day. From behind the goal it’s as hard as ever to judge the football since half of it is lost in the distant perspective. The whole thing looked like a lot of kick and rush to me, Leicester at last trying to pass the ball to each other rather than the opposition after the halftime break. We gave away a penalty, had our captain sent off, and lost 2-1.

Hull families were happy and I’m glad for that. I still did get surges of excitement when play flowed and was up and cheering for our goal, subdued for theirs.

Before kick-off, in the darkening sky, a pair of swans flew high over the ground. It was another Orkney moment and I was glad of it.

Jung on Hitler in 1937: Hitler ‘is a medium, German policy is not made; it is revealed through Hitler. He is a mouthpiece of the Gods of old…’
There was me, thinking Jung was some disassociated voice from neutral Switzerland pronouncing wisdom drawn from some primordial strata. It seems I’ve been granting him hindsight and he’s as crazed as the rest of them.
(This nugget comes from Martin Arnold’s Thor: Myth to Marvel – Im preparing to interview Martin n stage in Hull tonight.)

Lunchtime was a quick spin out of my Clapton home and around the River Lee … checking in with these London turtles along the way.

I’ve often found solace in the animal world. In Scotland, as I set down my pen on finishing a novel, I heard a noise on the wooden patio outside and looked up to find a pine marten standing erect, looking back at me through the french window.
Deer made similar appearances in Scotland as I finished work. In France, it has been an eagle over the mountains. Or last time I finished a book there I looked out from my upstairs window and a grey heron (a bird I which I find especial totemic value) flew past at eye level, tracing the passage of the river below, and turned a tight circle right in front of me.
I’m writing a vampire novel at the moment. (I mentioned this to Deborah Rogers, my former agent, when she trotted across at the Booker Prize event the other night and cheerily asked what I was doing now. She winced.) Monday was the day for travelling back from our mountain refuge in the Pyrenees. I had tucked myself away there for a week, and this is the book that asked to be moved forward. Getting up before dawn, the narrative saw my vampire in a somewhat puzzled situation, and then suddenly after a page or two he broke through. He knew what to do. I wrote the breakthrough sentence down. And then looked up at the sudden flashing movement of a bat flashing black wings right outside the window and then shooting upwards.
I’ve not seen a pine marten before or since that time. I’ve not known any other heron fly at eye level, nor turn a tight circle. And no bat has ever appeared at my window. These moments don’t predict anything, even though I once naively thought they presaged commercial success, but I take them as celebrations of nature. They give confirmation for me that the writing has gone deep, and touched into that layer of life where all things are connected. Writing’s a lonely business and the publishing world seldom pays it due regard. These instances from the animal world startle and warm me. They say, in a way that gives me comfort, that the writing’s worthwhile. In some elemental sense I’m on track.

A separate avenue leads down through London’s Hyde Park to the Orangerie at Kensington Palace, the venue for yesterday’s party celebrating the Man Booker Prize shortlist.
I held back from grabbing the mike and singing ‘It Should have been Me!” – too timid to make the cheap shot for celebrity that might well make a difference in entering the literary stratosphere. Six writers were honoured instead of me (one among 138 books entered), and three cheers for them all. The whole shebang is a phenomenal show, hundreds of the select (very few writers among tyhem) drinking champagne and talking book business.
Part of the big news is that four of the six were published by independents. It’s true, independents do get a shout at this prize, but the likes of Canongate, Granta and Atlantic are hardly small fry. Do they really have more creative independence than the directors of imprint like Fourth Estate, Serpent’s Tale, Vintage and the like?
Maybe they do. Corporate bodies have a more ruthless bottom line. I tried out with one of the sortlisted editors the story I get from agents, that this is a lousy time for literary fiction and nobody wants it. It surprised him, he’s still buoyant and buying. For him, it depends whether those at the top of the house came up through the ranks from being editors or whether their foundations wee more in the business side of things.
Still, the publishing director of one of the big companies told how she spoke recently to students of creative writing, looking for ways that they might break into the publishing bigtime, and confessed to coming up forlorn. There is no obvious way, she realized. So much very good work gets returned all the time.
People are guessing the Booker winner, recognizing how little they know. Will the book about gang culture gain imeptus in the wake of the London riots? Will the Guardian readers’ sUpport promote Carol Birch’s novel? Will Julian Barnes’ be given it as a lifetime achievement award?
Some folk felt the list lacked a real classic – though they were intrigued at my comparison between Samuel Beckett and Patrick de Witt’s THE SISTERS BROTHERS.
And off I trotted down the Avenue into the storm clouds, glad to have been where books are rendered glamorous for a while.

At last … I’ve pulled my act together, followed the Smashwords styleguide, and have one of my backlist titles out in a newly edited digital form. I started with ON SACRED MOUNTAINS because for me it’s a shake the world book, and ideal for the ‘long tail’ of epublishing – it’s pretty esoteric (gay / spiritual / talking mountains, all that sort of thing) but there’s an audience out there for it somewhere. Maybe you?
The Smashwords style guide was helpful. An earlier attempt I made screwed the typography up awfully. I’ve posted it separately to Amazon.
Last Sunday, somewhat amazingly, we were at Knowth, an ancient megalithic site an hour north of Dublin. It’s the most powerful space I have been in since my sacred mountains journey rounded itself off. Today was a simpler but pleasant trip to Epping Forest, also surprisingly moving in its way. Few birds bar three jays, the usual crows, and some sparrows in puddles by the parked car … they do seem to have died out in northern Europe for we saw few in all of Ireland’s wild spaces …. but the forest presented a good stretch of untrammelled nature, plenty of trees with history, and floral meadows.
Tomorrow we head back to France and our retreat house in the Pyrenees, where there are still birds and butterflies, to write and walk for a week. Setting our clocks by nature before the onslaught of the coming year.