Where might a modern wanderer find his home? Will it lie in a distant land, its rocks rich with minerals? In a strange homestead harbouring a secret? In the transfiguring power of live music? Will his salvation lie in Beulah Land?
Set in a magical part of South Africa, this debut novel imagines one particular vision of heaven on earth.
— Read on www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/peter-bacon-and-andy-paterson/in-beulah-land/paperback/product-e2y8dr.html
I finally got around to getting my first story printed in a neat little pocket-sized paperback. I haven’t held one in my hand yet, but hope to in a week’s time.
In early November last year I read a piece in a newspaper about National Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo as it is rather tweely abbreviated. You can rightly assume from that abbreviation that it is an American initiative and aimed at a young – though not exclusively so – audience. The idea is that each November budding writers are encouraged to spend that month writing 50,000 words – a 50,000-word novel, or, more realistically, some of the words that might someday, with a lot more work, make a novel. Perhaps even a novel worth publishing!
When I found out that my daughter, Harriet, had had a go a couple of years ago and was having another attempt this time around, I decided, on a whim, that I might join her, if only so that we might encourage each other to get some words down on screen.
By the time 30 November came, we each had about 27,000 words of our respective stories , so we decided that a more realistic word target and and a time extension might be sensible. Christmas became the deadline and 35,000 felt like a more reasonable word count.
Of course, in a moment of desperation in mid-November I had done an online search to find out what some classic works of fiction added up to. It’s a depressing exercise. Even such modest volumes as William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway clock in at 56,695 and 63,422 respectively. Oh well, we’d just have to claim concision over flab! Except that flab is far easier to write, we discovered.
Anyway, the short answer to all this is we got there. I have to confess to entreating Harriet with the following words and with increasing fervour as the month shot by: “To hell with what the words mean, just bash any old thing out – that’s what I’m doing!”
Having achieved my goal the question then arose: what now?
It felt a bit wimp-y to just leave it sitting there in a document in iCloud, so since I seemed to have attracted a few excessively tolerant friends to this lockdown blog back in the spring and early summer of last year, I thought I might inflict my fictional effort upon you, in instalments of a chapter a week. There are 22 chapters, so that will be half your year wasted!
As a caveat – doubtless the first of many – I should confess that re-reading my own writing makes me very unhappy and leads to striking the delete key with anxious repetition. So I avoided that in November and have diligently continued that abstention. Otherwise you’d have nothing to read…
Saturday 4 July 2020 ~ Well, this is it… I don’t think we can say we are in lockdown any longer. Of course it might return, and if it does then so will this blog. But in the meantime, thanks for reading and farewell.
Friday 3 July 2020 ~ Opening up? Is that what we’re about to do, having locked down over three months ago?
“Lockdown” – it was always a rather shit term, the kind beloved of macho, populist leaders with their war-drenched vocabulary. Sufficiently over-dramatising, too, to score strongly on social media. I suppose the suggestion of us all being imprisoned was not far from the truth, however.
Was it the right move? Time will tell. Maybe the Swedes did the right thing. If the numbers (i.e. deaths) turn out to be similar between Sweden and, say, Norway or Denmark, then the Swedish model would probably have been the way to go. It would have saved the devastating effects on a country’s economy, for starters.
And how will Britain have shaped up when the great COVID-19 reckoning is made? (Or should that be England, since although the odious Johnson would appear to be Prime Minister of a united kingdom, in the case of the response to this plague the other lands in the kingdom have been taking their own distinctive measures.) The answer looks like it’s going to be: not well at all!
To assess how different countries have coped with the coronavirus pandemic, a tally of total deaths by country is completely meaningless yet these are the figures highlighted each day in the newspapers and on the TV news. What really matters is deaths taken as a proportion of population. The odious J – and his henchmen, like the pathetic Hancock and the toadious Raab – are fond of adding the compound adjective “world-beating” to the new initiatives they announce one week before announcing their demise a few weeks later. Yet the only valid application of that compound adjective is to this black-bordered Top Ten:
Even the laughable Trump and the nasty Balsonaro have a better record against the bug than the odious J!
But enough of the macro horror… what of the micro delights that have been enjoyed in the shadow of the windmill (initially actual, later imagined) – and can some of them be retained in the new open world?
I’m a realist so I am reconciled to the dark clouds that have been hanging over the world staying there for some time. Maybe they have always been with us. And I think I would rather get on with living now. This kind of waiting-room existence is all very well, but probably best left for necessary visits to the doc or dentist, or as the pergatorial precursor to playing the harp on a cloud.
So my personal Top Ten while occasionally black-humoured is silver-lined, not bald figures but fantastical wishes. I think I will call them:
WINDMILL DREAMS
1. May people not go back to offices but continue working from home a lot of the time. May they refrain from commuting half way across the country and instead use the technology more sensibly, so that the air can be cleaner and that the HS2 railway line which will devastate the countryside around Lichfield and elsewhere can be shelved. This will have the added bonus of making the roads clearer for selfish and self-indulgent recreational cruisers like me and the other Mr Toads! (These are dreams, remember: I didn’t promise logic.)
2. May all the right shops go bust. The ones that exploit the poor in third world countries in order to sell cheap clothes to stupid uber-consumers in first world countries. Oh, and also the ones that sell pointless knick-knacks, the stuff we can all do without. You’ve seen them: the silver-painted bunches of twigs in vases; the cushions with “Let’s stay home” written on them in sparkly letters; the mugs with “I ❤️ Coffee” on them just in case you are confused as to what you are drinking; the trays inscribed “Let the evening beGIN (geddit? didya?). The trouble with this wish, I realise, is that these shops are mostly run as vanity projects by the rich wives of the rich venture capitalists who have all made our lives a misery in the first place and who will still be loaded when the apocalypse arrives.
3. May the salary slips of those doing useful jobs, like nurses and care-workers and binpeople, etc, be switched with the salary slips of all those doing bullshit jobs. Examples of bullshit jobs, as indentified by the author David Graeber in his book of the same name include: lobbyists, corporate lawyers, public relations specialists, survey administrators and corporate compliance officers. Oh, and anyone in middle management or who refers to themself as a leadership professional. And, after an increase in interest along these lines during the plague months, may the idea of a universal basic income become a reality.
4. May the theatres, arts clubs, galleries and concert halls be given the funding they need to carry on bringing us the vital live culture we all need to nourish us. And may they thrive and blossom as a result. May there be more bookshops and bakeries and old-fashioned ironmongers and greengrocers. And may music and record shops return.
5. May it be OK to do again all those dangerous things again. Like gathering in cramped little pubs full of jolly people drinking jolly fine drinks. And chatting in cosy cafes over tea and cake. And singing in choirs. And making music with one’s friends. And having those friends squeezed in round the kitchen table with food and wine. And all hugging on arrival. And hugging again when we all say goodnight and safe journey home. And not a bloody mask in sight!
6. And, of course, may the populist governments of the world crash and burn so that a new breed of enlightened, cultural, green and kind leaders can take their place, and, if not lead us all to the promised land, at least fulfill the promise of our current lands.
Pages read: More later, and in the days to come…
Minutes spent online: some looking at coronavirus stats and getting angrier and angrier. Maybe fewer in the days to come…
Hours slept: 7, but maybe fewer in future as the parties get started…
Exercise taken. Some later, and more in the days to come…
Thursday 2 July 2020 ~ I’m not really a dog person. I had one once, bought for me in my teenage years by my parents, and destined, as so many dogs bought for children are, to be the parents’ responsibility for evermore.
He was a Pembrokeshire Corgi called Taffy, and he was a bit of a disaster. Well, let me correct myself: he was fine, we as dog owners were a bit of a disaster. We didn’t train him properly, we couldn’t get him to wear a collar so could never take him out, he was a bit of a yappy dog and highly strung. Although, looking back and in the light of what a good friend has told me since about dog psychology, I realise that what I took for incessant yapping when my parents went out in the evening and left me and Taffy on our own was in fact his idea of being a good guard dog and protecting me.
Oh well…
Before Taffy – and since – we’ve always been cat people, though when our last cat died, we decided that was it. It’s been a relief for me, as I realise I have probably been midly allergic to them all along.
So no dogs, and now no cats either. But other people’s dogs? Ah, that’s another story entirely. My sister and her husband have two black Labradors, both marvellous dogs. And at the beginning of lockdown, we had the privilege of living close to two other marvellous dogs.
Meet Staffordshire Bull Terriers Lola and Jack, the much loved pets of our very good friends in Parktown North, Johannesburg. He and I have been friends for nearly 50 years, and I am forever indebted to him not only for giving me a part in the best play I have ever been in, but for helping me get my first job in newspapers and so escaping the drear of library life. They were our lockdown saviours, too, when we were stranded in South Africa, and it was in their garden flat we spent the first couple of weeks of the plague months and where this blog began 99 days ago.
If we were too slow in opening the French doors in the morning, small polite woofs would drift up the stairs, and when I went down there would be Lola (named after the Kinks song, not the Barry Manilow one!), head raised in expectation. She is the sweetest-natured Staffie I have ever met. Jack acts like a bit of a bruiser but is equally charming.
I miss them – and our friends/saviours – terribly.
I asked our friends how they are getting on three months on and heard back that L-O-L-A-Lola, already suffering from a torn ligament in her back leg – “the result of Jack crashing into her” – had recently slipped on some icy decking, so is now facing an operation. With winter in full flow there both dogs’ current obsession is finding warm places to sleep – “constantly seeking heat sources, including humans, blankets, the master duvet…”
Best let sleeping dogs you-know-what, eh?
Pages read: a few more of the Sue Prideaux biog of Nietzsche – those Wagners, they were nuts!
Minutes spent online: Only a few catching up with the political news. Our leaders are as crackers as the Wagners.
Hours slept: 7
Exercise taken: off for a walk and picnic in the Derbyshire Peaks – quite possibly in the rain.
Wednesday 1 July 2020 ~ A good friend asked me why I am writing this blog. Or rather, what is the impetus that draws me to my laptop each day. He gave me a choice of motivations, taken, he told me, from the final verse in a poem by Bertolt Brecht.
It’s called A Bad Time Of Poetry and was written in 1938. Here are the relevant lines (the house-painter is Hitler):
Inside me contend
Delight at the apple tree in blossom
And horror at the house-painter’s speeches.
But only the second
Drives me to my writing desk.
It’s a fun game to play – have the words you read been inspired by delight or sparked by horror? I thought of it while reading a newsletter from the editor of The Idler magazine, Tom Hodgkinson. It starts like this:
“You may have been forgiven for viewing Airbnb as a clever money-making scheme, whereby the owners of the platform take bookings for short-term lets via a computer, cream off a percentage and count the millions pouring into their bank accounts. At the other end, skint homeowners make a few extra quid.
“The reality, we now discover, is that Airbnb is a spiritual movement which aims to spread love around the world. That’s if its CEO and co-founder, Brian Cheskey, is to be believed. This extraordinarily wealthy estate agent last week wrote a letter to his 8,000 staff announcing 1,900 layoffs. Airbnb’s bookings have collapsed, for obvious reasons. He took this opportunity to present himself not as an avaricious capitalist but as a new incarnation of the Dalai Lama. In the old days, when a mill owner sacked a quarter of the workforce, he was content to be hated by them. But Brian Cheskey wants them to keep loving him, just as he loves them, his little children.”
Later on he asks:
“Why can’t tycoons just admit they are tycoons, like in the old days, when they wore top hats and went around in a Rolls Royce while smoking fat cigars?”
And then he turns his attention to another master builder of the online world:
“Another example is the advertising salesman, Eric Schmidt. As chairman of Google he made untold billions (he is worth over £5 billion according to the Daily Mail) spying on people and selling advertising space. These ad salespeople used to be called “media sales executives” and they worked at the less glamorous – though important – end of publishing, selling ads in Vogue or The Sunday Times to large companies. Now they anoint themselves as prophets of a new world.”
Hodgkinson had been incensed hearing Schmidt in a rado interview talking sanctimoniously about how his priorities were “telehealth” and “remote learning”. Hodgkinson’s riposte?
“In actual fact Google, far from being benevolent, is a highly aggressive ad sales platform that has caused thousands of local newspapers to close over the last ten years by stealing their advertising. Having destroyed the world Eric Schmidt now steps forward to save it.”
Well, we all know what drives the Idler-in-chief to his laptop, then!
I hope I have managed to suppress my own anger in this blog – well, most of the time, anyway.
A few years ago I was prompted to reflect on what draws me to pound the keyboard – I had been writing about jazz music (the website is called thejazzbreakfast) for about ten years – when I was invited to talk about blogging to journalists and music students. I explained my impetus by telling this story:
When I was a university student in Cape Town in 1970 I would frequent a tiny record shop in a side street not far from the Houses of Parliament. At the counter they had two or three turntables and sets of headphones, so that customers could sample the LPs (we didn’t refer to them as “vinyl” in those days) they were considering buying. I had picked a couple of albums to buy and approached the counter, squeezing in next to a fellow customer who was bobbing his head about, clearly enjoying the music that was bouncing around between his ears. As I stood there, he suddenly whipped his headphones off and, with the words “Listen to this! It’s really great…” popped them over my ears.
I realised, looking back nearly half a century, that it was exactly this act that I had been replicating in a different form ever since. With most of the interviews, previews, reviews, comment pieces, etc., I wrote for thejazzbreakfast I had been, in effect, repeating those words: “Listen to this!”
So, I know now what to answer my Brecht-quoting friend…
And I hope, although it has been much more self-indulgent, that the same impetus has been clear in these daily lockdown posts. It’s all about the apple blossom for me.
Pages read: about 30 of I Am Dynamite!, the Sue Prideaux biography of Nietzsche.
Minutes spent online: a few reading a Bertolt Brecht poem.
Hours slept: 6
Exercise taken: A walk if the rain holds off.
Tuesday 30 June 2020 ~ While browsing the CD shelves for something to play my eye lit upon an album by Brazilian Tropicália superstar Caetano Veloso. It’s called Federico e Giulietta and it’s a recording of a concert Veloso gave in 1997 in the little state of San Marino, enclosed within Italy and very close to Rimini, the beloved birthplace of one of the dedicatees of the album, film director Federico Fellini. The other dedicatee is Fellini’s wife and muse, the extraordinary actor Giulietta Masina.
It’s a beautiful album, nearly as rich and full of life as a Fellini film.
I have been watching quite a few Fellini films over the past months, DVDs I have been slowly acquiring and which I have been saving up. “Saving up” is the appropriate phrase, I think, because Fellini’s films are such a rich feast both sensually and intellectually that I can easily end up feeling as if I have over-indulged.
We’ve gone through a box set of earlier films starring Masina, The White Sheik, La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, and then the other night the film generally considered by critics as his masterpiece, 8½. That last-named really is mind-boggling, mixing the dream sequences and nearly-as-surreal reality of a film director facing an artistic block. What I find so extraordinary and so exciting about all of Fellini’s films is the way each frame is so perfectly composed. There is the temptation in the age of DVD with its superior picture quality and the existence of the pause button to just keep on stopping the film to test my theory… Each frame is one I would be happy to do just that with and hang it on the wall. 8½ for example, is filmed in black and white, but what black and white! How can such richness be built into two non-colours? The screen shines, gleams, pulses… never has monotone been less mono.
I often go back to Amarcord, a later film, even more autobiographical than the others, and a little less demanding of the viewer, and I still have La Dolce Vita to rewatch. Oh, and I bought Il Bidone recently, though I had actually meant to buy I Vitelloni…
And then there is the music in Fellini’s films, mostly written by Nino Rota. Rota’s music and Fellini’s images are inseperable in my mind, so when I can’t cope with the full seven-course dinner of a film I can at least enjoy the more digestible supper of a soundtrack.
Fellini is quoted as saying: “When I start a picture, I always have a script, but I change it every day. I put in what occurs to me that day out of my imagination. You start on a voyage; you know where you will end up but not what will occur along the way. You want to be surprised.” Which is why, I suppose, he films without sound, and often without specific lines for the actors to say, and then dubs their words and the sound on afterwards.
I also remember reading that even when he could film, say, on water, he preferred to use helpers waving lengths of material in a large film studio to give the artificially created illusion of water.
Which is probably why another of his famous quotes is: “A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.”
Caetano Veloso has an unmistakeable voice, so delicate and apparently vulnerable, yet so perfectly controlled. He never appeared in a Fellini film, but he does appear in Pedro Almodovar’s Habla Con Ella. Just copy these words into your search engine and you should find a YouTube video of the relevant extract from the film: Hable con ella: Caetano Veloso – Cucurrucucu Paloma
Pages read: None so far.
Minutes spent online: a few reminding myself of some Fellini facts.
Hours slept: 7
Exercise taken: None so far.
Monday 29 June 2020 ~ I awoke this morning with a small snatch of melody in my head. It’s not the first time.
When it come to music, I’m a melody kind of person. Some may go for a chord sequence, for others it may be the lyrics that stick with them, but for me it’s the tune. I suppose my musical history is partly responisible. There was a lot of music in our house when I was a child but I was never pushed to learn an instrument, nor do I recall learning to be able to recite poetry at school. But both my sister and I were, and are, whistlers.
When I did find an instrument I had an affinity for it was first the flute and then the saxophone; hence, I have managed to make my amateurish way in music with a still abysmal knowledge of chords and harmonies but an OK ability to hold a tune, and even make one or two up while improvising.
And so, snatches of melody suddenly rising unbidden to consciousness is a fairly common occurrence. Usually I know the origin immediately, can name the tune and the composer, list my favourite versions and understand why it has come to mind; occasionally the arrival of the tune is as steeped in mystery and the inexplicable as your average dream. This morning’s was one of those. What were they, these few notes, rising then falling, rising again, then falling in a different, slightly melancholy way?
I trawled and trawled through the cobweb-strewn, least-visited shelves in the internal mental archive, and eventually came up with the rest of the tune. And the name Ian Shaw (a British jazz singer), not consciously bidden, came to mind. Was this the singer whose voice I remembered singing it? But I still didn’t have a title, and I knew I no longer owned any Ian Shaw albums. It was a few more minutes of trawling before the unlikely name of Todd Rundgren emerged from the dusty gloom. Well, those two names gave me an internet search at least.
The song, it turns out, is called Pretending To Care. It has indeed been covered by Ian Shaw, as well as others – I found a nice version by another British jazz singer and pianist, Liane Carroll – and it is indeed by Todd Rundgren.
I am not at all familiar with Rundgren’s work. The creator of a psychedelic group called Nazz and then of hit songs in the 1970s with title like We Gotta Get You A Woman, a multi-instrumentalist who often has the label “prog-rock” attached to his name… not the most obvious source, one might think, for a tune with jazz singer appeal. But Pretending To Care, like Paul Simon’s American Tune, sits, I think, in a complementary relationship to the copper-bottomed classics of the Great American Songbook; its structure might not be quite as rounded or grounded in the Tin Pan Alley tradition, but in its own way it is as finely crafted.
It’s not that complicated a tune but it goes in directions one might not expect, and I think that is what appeals to me. I remember my father saying something similar when he first heard a Burt Bacharach tune: “That’s intriguing… I didn’t expect it to go there.”
I searched for a version I might share with you. Shaw’s feels a little overwrought, and Carroll’s, though impeccably conveyed as is always the case with this exceptional singer, is also not quite plain enough. I wanted the song itself rather than the performance to be the central thing.
And then I found this! Just search in YouTube for Todd Rundgren Pretending to Care Live under the RA Pyramid. I suppose the composer would have to know best how his song should be sung. And with just string quartet behind him he sings it beautifully and – mostly – plainly. Sure, towards the end he gets a little over-dramatic to the English ear, but that’s his prerogative. And considering his production credits include Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell and Grand Funk Railroad’s We’re An American Band, I suppose I should be surprised by Rundgren’s comparative restraint here.
Pages read: not many so far today.
Minutes spent online: a few searching and then reading up on Todd Rundgren.
Hours slept: 7
Exercise taken: not much so far today.
Sunday 28 June 2020 ~ The blogger’s day of rest so here instead is a the 27 June entry from James and Kay Salter’s Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book Of Days:
FRUIT WITH CHEESE
In the same way that fresh fruits and certain liqueurs go together, fresh fruits and certain cheeses go well with one another:
APPLES: Camembert, Cheddar, Blue cheeses, Parmigiano Reggiano, Brie
BANANAS: Chèvre
CHERRIES: Crema Danica
FIGS: Stilton
GRAPES: Camembert, Provolone, Pont L’Évêque, Appenzeller
NECTARINES: Brie
ORANGES: Gorgonzola
PEACHES: Triple crèmes, Gorgonzola
PINEAPPLE: Camembert
PLUMS (RED): Appenzeller
PLUMS (PURPLE): Stilton
STRAWBERRIES: Triple crèmes
windmill days 