On Your Bike

I note that it’s Tour de France time again. Some will be getting excited at the possibility of a British victory. Some will see it as a chance to lust after fit young men in skin-tight Lycra. And others will already be typing their articles about ‘drug cheats’, just itching to insert the latest star name into their writing.

Because sure as boxers will go through their ridiculous macho pre-fight weigh-in posturing pantomime, sure as weak-ankled Premiership footballers will roll around in agony as if taken out by a sniper in row J at the merest nudge from an opponent, sure as Pakistani cricketers will overstep the mark every time that they overstep the mark, then cyclists will feel that they have to test the substance testers’ testing abilities. I don’t know what it is about this particular sport but it seems that, more than any other event, the winner of a cycling tour isn’t finalised until all the urine’s been analysed and the court rulings have been overturned several times.

(All of the above is ‘allegedly’ of course.)

It’s terrible the stuff that people put into their bodies to give them an extra competitive edge, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

I’m not so sure. Let’s take the hypothetical case of two athletes – pick any sport you want. Athlete A sticks to a healthy diet of grilled chicken and fish with plenty of fruit and vegetables, protein shakes and isotonic drinks to aid recovery. Athlete B regularly eats pizza and chips and washes them down with eight pints of beer.  Now if all other things are equal then you’d expect Athlete A to come out on top in their chosen event, but isn’t that just because they both partook of substances that they knew would alter their performance – one for better, one for worse? Could it not be argued that eating a protein-packed tuna steak is no different to taking some other substance that will increase muscle strength? The Olympic motto is made up of three Latin words: ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’, which translates as ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’. Surely steroids, stimulants and all the other drugs on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned substance list are designed to make the human body do just that: run faster, jump higher, be stronger. Isn’t one of the aims of the Olympic movement to test the limits of human ability? How fast can we go, how high can we jump, how strong can we be without the aid of physical attachments?

Which brings us to Oscar Pistorius, the incredible South African ‘Blade Runner’. Sprinting on his carbon fibre prosthetics he is, quite literally, in a class of his own. But that’s the problem. Oscar wants to be able to run against all the other kids in the other classes too. He’s not content with demonstrations and private challenges. Having rightly become a Paralympic legend, Oscar feels that he should be able to take on the best able-bodied athletes in the world in regular competitions like the upcoming London Olympics and has taken his case to court several times. Now I think that what he’s done with his life is magnificent and his drive and determination put most other people’s to shame, but if we allow Pistorius to compete against able-bodied athletes, where do we draw the line? Could we eventually see an old bloke who works at B&Q winning the weight lifting with the aid of his fork lift truck? Should shot putters be allowed to take a howitzer into the circle with them as part of their legal equipment?  While he is undoubtedly a supreme physical specimen, at least some of Oscar’s successes must go down to the technology which aids his phenomenal natural ability, and this must prevent him from competing against those whose abilities aren’t also mechanically enhanced.

There are some mighty big questions there and they’ll be discussed long after this summer of sport is over. One thing’s for sure though. I won’t win any medals. I’ll be too busy watching it all from the safety of my sofa with beer and snacks within arm’s reach.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Self Censored

Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Then the boy – and isn’t it always the boy? – does something stupid to ruin the situation. Just when things are at their worst something miraculous happens and they get back together. The end.

How many short stories have followed that basic formula? Thousands? Millions? And many of them have been written by much better authors than me. There’s no way that I could write a top quality short story along those lines, but it hasn’t stopped me trying, many times.

No, if I’m to be successful in the short story field (however you might define ‘success’ – there’s a whole ‘nother blog in that) then I have to try something different. I have to make my stories stand out from the crowd in some way.

Fortunately I’m not afraid to take the road less travelled, to write about subjects that others might shy away from, so maybe this is the way that my writing should veer: towards the dark side. Don’t get me wring, I couldn’t and wouldn’t fill my tales with ‘gorenography’, sexual deviance or distasteful political and personal viewpoints just for the point of titillate the reader, but I wouldn’t automatically reject them as subjects if they were part of a good plot. For instance, I once wrote a short story about internet grooming. It conjured up unpleasant thought in me and hopefully in the reader too but it was integral to the storyline and, believe it or not, the final twist gave it a ‘feel-good’ ending. Sort of.

I’m currently working a tale about assisted suicide. That one doesn’t have any twist but hopefully gets the reader to ask a few questions about themselves and the society in which they live. The same applies to another about domestic abuse. These aren’t taboo thrills shoehorned into my prose for shock value. They’re jumping-on points, integral themes without which the story wouldn’t even exist.

So my question to you today is this: Am I wrong to tackle these subjects? And if not these, are there some topics that are just too raw to write about, just too objectionable to put into a piece of fiction the point of which is, let’s face it, simply to entertain?


© Shaun Finnie 2012

Going For Promotion

It’s easy to see where some old phrases come from.  ‘Make hay while the sun shines’, ‘Don’t count your chickens until they’re hatched’, to ‘throw a spanner in the works’: these are all pretty straightforward in meaning and it’s not difficult to see how they originated.

But what about ‘blow your own trumpet’? Where did that one start? It does sound a little dodgy, especially in the American version, ‘blow your own horn’….

Well I did a little research and found that it comes from Ye Olde Days of Yore, or maybe a few months beforehand. When a knight rode into town he was supposed to have a herald or two to sound a fanfare announcing his arrival, but if he was too poor or lowly to have a herald – or even if he just thought that he could do a better job of self-promotion –  he would dispense with the need for a herald and literally blow his own trumpet.

It’s a fascinating concept – a guy who feels the need to announce his greatness to the world and if, through circumstances or choice, there’s nobody else to do it then by God and King Harry, he’ll just have to do it himself.

I can’t imagine doing that. I’m English. Maybe in the days when dragons needed slaying we did that kind of thing but not now. If God had an off-day and it was left to me to save the Queen I’d probably be more likely to say ‘It was nothing, don’t make a fuss’ than to book a slot on TV selling my story to Pierce Morgan.

But maybe I should. Maybe, in my professional life at least, I should shout my triumphs however small.

So here goes…

‘My name is Shaun Finnie and I’m a writer. I have several books available at the moment and they’re all fantastic. Go and buy them now, your life will be better for it.

‘Look at me everyone, I’m fantastic!’

No, it’s just not me. My horn should remain untainted by my own lips.

Perhaps I should try a wig and a pseudonym. Or hire a herald to write fake reviews on Amazon?

© Shaun Finnie 2012

'Group' Therapy

In the Year of Her Lord 1486, a book was published in St Albans. It was called, with incredible simplicity, ‘The Book of St Albans’ and was credited to Dame Juliana Berners. It was aimed squarely at the huntin’ an’ shootin’ and fishin’ types, probably because the Sun readers of the day hadn’t learned that they couldn’t read yet.

‘The Book of St Albans’ is memorable today for one reason; within its pages Dame Juliana more or less invented the concept of collective nouns – words for a group of things. As nobody had brought these words together before the good Dame she was free to do as she liked. And, apparently, she liked very much, which is why we now have a bellowing of Bullfinches, a plump of Moorhens and a murder of Crows.

But these were laid down over six centuries ago. Dame Juliana tried her best to move with the times, I’m sure, but there’s a limit to how far you can predict the future. Most things that we take for granted today would baffle her. Most of them baffle me to be honest.

With that in mind, let’s have a go at updating the list. Let’s create some new collective nouns, starting with a couple for my golfing buddies:

·         A Jed of Woods;

·         A ningboard of Irons;

·         An i-Sore of Gadgets;

·         A midden of D*n Br*wn Books;

·         An assimilation of Post Offices;

·         A deluge of British Summers;

·         A catatonia of TOWIE and Big Brother ‘stars’;

·         A serpent of Politicians;

·         A slumber  of Lords;

·         A redundancy of Big-Budget Movie Remakes;

·         A meringue of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings;

·         An irrelevance of Tweets;

·         A Cousteau of Chelsea forwards;

·         A remainder of Books by Shaun Finnie.

So that’s my claim for Damehood. Now it’s over to you…

© Shaun Finnie 2012