What Night Was It?

T'was the night before Christmas, and all through the night
The author, Shaun Finnie, had stayed up to write

He stared at his screen in the gathering gloom
And churned through the words for a deadline did loom

Just a thousand to go then his work would be seen
In a national monthly glossy magazine

He focussed intently so didn't quite hear
The noise from above (he's just got one good ear)

The clatter of runners and thunder of hoofs
Left tracks in the snow that lay deep on the roofs

But Shaun was engrossed in his literary script
So he wasn't aware of the old man who slipped

into the room, then with a "Ho!" and two more
Said, "You don't have a chimney. I kicked in the door"

"But what are you doing awake at this hour,
"When good boys and girls snore at forty pig power?"

Now Shaun wasn't stupid. He'd soon worked it out.
There was only one man with a triple-ho'd shout

And he was a master at meeting deadlines
He'd done it each Christmas for several lifetimes

"Oh Santa, please help me," the stressed out Shaun asked
"I'm so far behind in the work I've been tasked

"I'll never achieve all the things I should do
"I'm so far behind so I thought I'd ask you.

"How do you manage, in only one night
"To give each kid presents and judge them just right?"

"It's easy," said Santa, his eyes filled with twinkles
"I felt a bit old and got too many wrinkles

"So now I plan early and just delegate
"I have helpers worldwide. I just sit back and wait

"I can't do it all, not a man of my age
"So I employ an army on minimum wage

"They do all the work but the credit's all mine
"They're all sworn to uphold the traditional line"

This set Shaun to thinking he could do the same
And use foreign employees to achieve his aim

A workforce with English as their second language
Who cares if the work they come out with is garbage?

He'd meet all his deadlines and hit all his wordcounts
He'd soon see a rise in his bank balance amounts

But greed's an emotion from which we all suffer
And Santa disliked what he saw in the other

"You can't go outsourcing your tasks while you shirk
"Using  cheap staff's no way out of hard work"

So Shaun didn't get any gifts from the sack
And the things his Beloved had bought were sent back

For Santa had placed him on his naughty list
But here's where the story takes on a new twist

For Shaun sent the writing to Indian chaps
And now they type stories and blogs while he naps

Who cares if the qualities not quite as good
And if Shaun doesnt pay them as much as he should

Because nobody cares about gramma no more
And spellcheckers only find what they look for

Nobody puts in the hours that it takes
To make sure that the work isn't full of misteaks

At least the delivery deadlines met, right?
"Happy Christmass to all, and too all a good nite!"

© Shaun Finnie 2013 (after Clement Clark Moore and possibly others)

I am Falling, I am Falling

Hard work never killed anybody, my grandmother used to say. I'm not going to disagree with my beloved granny but this week, it certainly came close.

My Beloved's father has been building a barge over the last couple of years and this week the time has finally came to launch it. It's now in the water and pretty soon we'll be off on its inaugural voyage. But there are a few things to be done first, as you'd imagine, like converting the inside of it from a building site to a habitable living space. I really hope that no health and safety inspectors come visiting for a while.

I'm astounded at how he's built it single-handedly without any plans. He just got some sheet metal and started welding. Fabulous. It's even more impressive when you learn that he's seventy-three and just does this as a hobby. If I'm half as capable as that at his age I'll be happy. Actually, I'd like to have been half as capable as him at any age in my life. With my sedentary, chained to a laptop lifestyle, I don't come close. He's incredibly fit - note that I didn't add "for his age"; he's just incredibly fit whereas I'm more…  well let's say I'm cuddly and leave it there.

Older readers might recall an advert from the 1970's that went "Weebles wobble but they don't fall down". For those too young to remember, Weebles were little egg-shaped toys by Hasbro. They were weighted in the bottom so that, while they may have appeared unsteady on their feet, they were difficult - if not impossible - to knock over. That's what I'm like moving around the boat. Some people don’t like shimmying around the thin walkways or wobbling along decks that are constantly moving below their feet but I'm fine with it. It must be something to do with my low centre of gravity. Just like those Weebles toys.

Which is why I felt such a total plank the other day when, for the first time ever, I stumbled on deck.

It was my own fault. I'd tried to squeeze myself past a mate on one of the thinnest parts of the deck. He pressed himself against the hull and was hogging almost all of the handrail so I sort of tried to hop around him. It was, I realise both now and at the time, a very foolish thing to do. I would normally never have bothered but I was cold, it was late in the day and (most importantly) I was bursting for the loo.

I was almost around him when I felt something tugging at my foot. A capstan that had been there all along must have suddenly grown a little as it grasped my ankle and pulled me off balance. I stumbled. I fell. I scrabbled and clawed at my  pal's back. He grasped the handrail even tighter, clenching his entire body in case I actually managed to cling on to him.

He needn't have bothered. I missed completely, grabbing at the air behind him. For a moment I hung in mid-air, one leg and at least half of my bodyweight leaning over the port side of the ship. I could hear the water lapping against the hull below me like a siren beckoning me down to the murky depths. Not that canals are very deep. The odds are that I'd be able to stand up in it and the water wouldn't come to much above my chest, but that wasn't the point. I had no desire to get completely soaked on a freezing December day, not least of all because I didn't have a change of clothes with me.

I looked down to the muddy water, fully aware of what fish had done in it for centuries. I looked up at my mate, still clenched solid in terror. I did the only thing that I could. I dived for the safety of the deck.

Unlike those Weebles I did indeed fall down, but by some miracle I stayed dry. I made a perfect one-point landing that rang around the metal hull with a satisfying echoey 'boing'. The aforementioned spikey capstan hit me flush in the trumpet causing me to let forth with a very unmanly shriek of pain and surprise.

The boat rocked.

I rolled around the deck like a very unhappy beached whale who'd just had a metal capstan forced into his blowhole. This way and that I thrashed, trying to find something that I could hold onto that would stop me from wobbling over the side.

The boat rocked in the other direction.

The seventy-three year old boat builder came running from where he had been sawing wood on the top deck to see his son-in-law (in all but name) impaled on his best capstan. And he still wants me to help him with its maiden voyage.

I hope he doesn't have a gangplank.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Eat, Drink and Be (Very) Merry

I've been to quite a few employees' Christmas meals while working for quite a few different companies in the last thirty years. We've eaten in corporate boardrooms, football grounds, posh hotels, small family restaurants and quiet, specially reserved upstairs rooms in pubs. The quality of food has varied wildly from almost gourmet quality to stuff I’d be ashamed to have cooked myself.

And, sorry to say, I've seen food fights in just about all of them. I've never personally been involved, you understand. It's only through other people that I know that an empty party popper filled with black pepper and plugged with a cold sprout makes an excellent and rather explosive missile. Allegedly.

All of the places that I worked had one thing in common. Whether they were small, family run businesses or multi-national corporate behemoths every one of them had put a little - and in some cases a heck of a lot of - cash behind the bar, paying for the employees' drinks for their Christmas celebration. The money always ran out far too early but that didn't stop us from making the most of it. Without exception every single work's do that I've ever been on has descended into drunken carnage. Every last one. It was seen as a kind of stress relief for the under-pressure workers at the bottom of the corporate food chain, as was the occasional sight of newly-connected couples sloping away from proceedings when they thought that nobody was looking. Naturally they were never as invisible as their beer-fuddled brains thought, much to everyone else's delight the next day at work.

Now I'm not condoning these events of alcoholic hedonism, I'm just stating the honest facts. That's what has happened at the office parties I've attended. They've not always been fun but they've always been memorable and since becoming self-employed I have missed the camaraderie that these kind of events reinforced among the workforce. Being a sole trader I don't have that day to day banter at the drinks machine, that social intercourse that cements workplace relationships. What I do have is lunch with my Beloved every day which is infinitely better, but it would still be nice to have a work's Christmas do.

So this week I arranged one. Not that I officially employ anyone these days, I don't think that my writing income will ever stretch to that, but I do pay people for work occasionally. Mostly the aforementioned Beloved, my primary proof-reader and muse, but occasionally others get reimbursed for their reading and suggestions. I made a few phone calls and one afternoon this week a few of us gathered at a local Toby Carvery. Hey, if I'm paying then I get to pick what and where, and I've never been one for fancy food. Make it simple and plentiful and I'm happy. Suffice to say that it was and I was. The people with me were happy too. We had old fashioned roast dinner, a couple of beers, a lot of fun chat and (best of all in my book) there were no silly party hats.

And there was no food fight and the only people who went home together at the end of it were me and my Beloved.

Result.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Sanity Clause

I'd like to point something out, something that all shops and media seem to have forgotten. It's a simple message, just six words, but I feel it's important to get it off my chest.

There's still a month to go.

We still have a week of November left. It's nowhere near Christmas yet so why are they already trying to whip us into a festive frenzy? The run-up to the big event seems to start earlier each year, destroying the magic of Christmas. Whatever your religious views, is there really any fun to be had in starting shopping for the festive celebrations while the deciduous trees are still green?

Carry on like this and by the third week of December I'll have exploded in a starburst of tinsel and cranberries. It's too early. It's too early. I keep telling myself that but it's no good. I have a stupid amount of writing to fit in between now and Christmas so the earlier I can get my shopping done the better. Christmas shopping in huge crowds drives me crazy.

I think that somewhere, probably in the depths of one of the Catholic Church's secret vaults known only to the Pope and Dan Brown, there's a special annotated version of the Bible. It has an extra line with an extra promise from God detailing how he would, at an unnamed date in some far flung future, repay his followers for creating the shopping frenzy of Christmas. It will contain just one extra line, reading as follows:

"And lo, on the several billionth day, God created Amazon."

I, for one, am very thankful.

Today is known as Black Friday in America, the day when many people turn their thoughts from the Thanksgiving holiday towards preparing for Christmas. This time of year, when December is itching to be uncovered on my calendar and we've already seen the first snow of the season, seems a much more civilised time to start, not the end of October (which is when I first heard "I Believe in Father Christmas" playing in a shop). It's Cyber Monday in a couple of days too, the day when more money gets spent on online shopping than any other, apparently.

Much as face-to-face interactions are sometimes nice, if you want to avoid the crowds the it's much better to stop at home and settle down with a coffee and a well-prepared list in front of your screen and keyboard. I spent an afternoon like that this week, in blissful isolation, clicking away and handing my Visa details over to the Russian Roulette of the virtual bankers. Within a few hours pretty much all my Christmas presents were ordered. If the Royal Mail can manage not to go on strike for just a few weeks then maybe my family will get their presents on time.

But some things you can't really buy online. Some things have to be seen or felt to know that they'll be the right gift for the right person. And that they'll fit. With that in mind I decided to take my annual 'do everything in a morning' shopping trip to my local massive mall this week. It's a huge indoor shopping centre, one of the biggest in Europe. It's fine when it's relatively empty but the busier it gets the less I enjoy it. Guess how full it's starting to get already? So I employed my standard Christmas shopping strategy - get in, get done, get out before most people have even got out of bed. It worked a treat and I got everything that I needed but it was still far too busy for my liking. Last Tuesday morning was as heaving as a normal Saturday afternoon. 

And I heard Greg Lake telling me how he'd woke with a yawn at the first light of dawn far more times than was enjoyable.

So I've done three separate sets of Christmas shopping this week. The hellish one at the large shopping centre, the pleasant afternoon spent at home in front of my laptop, and yesterday a wonderful trip to a Christmas fair and market in the grounds of my (relatively) local stately home, Chatsworth House. For those of you who don't know it, think of it as being halfway between Downton Abbey and Buckingham Palace, both in size and in poshness. It was decked with classy trimmings and there was no piped music, just a hurdy gurdy and a brass band. The smells of cooked pig and roasted chestnuts filled the air as did the mist of my breath in the cold, damp atmosphere of a beautifully clear end of Autumn day.

I bought no presents whatsoever, just wandered around a load of food and craft stalls. The only things I bought were some cheese and a jar of jam. My wallet stayed relatively full but my stomach became even fuller as I sampled as many edible wares as I could. Bliss.

Now that's the way to kick off my Christmas preparations.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Counting Down

When I was little one of the first mental challenges my parents set me was learning how to count. I'm guessing that your early education was similar. "One, two, three, four, come on baby…" Eventually I got to be so proficient at it that I didn't even need to take my shoes and socks off.

These days I'm a master at this counting lark and can easily get to a hundred, five hundred, a thousand. It gets pretty boring after a while but I can count almost as well as that guy off Sesame Street now. In fact I wish I could write as well as I count. Words flow from me when the ideas are there and my fingers are pretty adept at typing, but I still don't do it as quickly as I'd like. I used to say that my target was to write a minimum of a thousand words per day. A thousand words, that's approximately a page of a glossy magazine or maybe four pages of a paperback novel. For someone who's trying to make their living from writing though a thousand words per day isn't quite enough. I need to be able to double, triple that amount or more.

You may have heard of something called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. Hundreds of thousands of would-be novelists around the world (so maybe it should be InterNoWriMo?) try to write the first draft of their novel, end to end, through the thirty days of November. That's just a first draft, nothing polished, nothing that I'd want anyone else to read. For many, that will be enough. Others won't make it that far. But some of us will use it as a springboard to give us the impetus to start and even finish our novels. However many drafts it takes to complete after November, it's NaNoWriMo that starts it off. I did it last year and the result was my novel, 'The Happiest Workplace on Earth.'  This year I'm using it to kick-start that book's sequel.

As part of the project you're encouraged to hit a daily wordcount. They suggest 1,667 to give a total of a 50,000 word first draft. I'm there or thereabouts at the moment. But I can't get my head past that 1,667 being a very arbitrary figure. And why is the first draft 50,000? Why not 60,000 which would be 2,000 words per day? That's much closer to a 'proper' book length.

Or how about writing for a given length of time rather than measuring the output? After all those 1,667 words could just be 167 repetitions of 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'. Nobody says it has to make sense. And it's not something that I'm beholden to. Life, taxes, doing my accounts and watching Pointless all take precedence over work. I mean I try to get the words done but sometimes something important steals my hours. That's fine, it will always happen, but the problem comes when the time thief is something that's not really that important, like Candy Crush Saga. That's when working somewhere with no internet connection (like my local coffee shop) can come in so very handy.

Right, I'd better crack on. Time or words, however you measure my output, it's not as much as it could be today. And anyhow, I've just got to take a few minutes out to try and complete level 103…

© Shaun Finnie 2013

What Would Arthur Brown Say?

Dark nights, baked potatoes, visible breath, checking for hedgehogs, unrecognised pagan references, flash and thunder fire, woollen mittens and staying up way past bedtime, extremes of heat and cold.

For many of us in Britain the fifth of November is the only night of the year that we venture outside as a family after dark. It's the only time that we gather with family and friends and eat in the cold and dark, wrapped up against the weather. We're no longer a nation that spends much time outside but for this single evening we put that to one side and celebrate in the way that our grandfathers and their grandfathers would recognise.

But why? Are we really still jubilant about the foiling of a plot to bring down the parliament four hundred years ago? Or is it really just an excuse for revelry, for coming together, for showing the cold and the dark that we humans won't be cast down by such natural unpleasantries, that we now have control over illumination and temperature, that we are now the masters (and potential demolishers) of the environment in which we live?

How many people who oohed and aahed at the flames and the rockets on the fifth of November  know that the original celebrations had strong anti-catholic overtones and the first effigies to be placed atop the burning bonfire were more likely to be of the Pope than of the would-be assassin Guy Fawkes? And how many of us had a small family bonfire in the back garden, complete with our own fireworks display, as was common when I was a boy, forty years ago?

The celebration of Bonfire night seems to be in decline or at the least it seems to be merging with an increased celebration of Halloween (something that went pretty much unnoticed half a century ago) here in England. But don't go thinking that Halloween is an American tradition that we've imported to Britain. No, it was a British celebration that went over to America with the pilgrims. We here let it lapse while the colonial cousins continued it.

The moral is, don't believe everything that you've been taught to be true, especially if you read it on the internet. Remember, once upon a time everyone 'knew' that the earth was flat. Question everything, constantly.

* Bonus points to anyone who can tell us exactly what Arthur Brown would say.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Silence is Golden

I've been talking to several other writers about music recently. Specifically, what type of music, if any, do they listen to while writing.

Me, I love to listen to music. It's one of the great joys of my life. Just about any music will do from Mozart to Motörhead, Frank Sinatra to the Frank Chickens (look them up if you need to), I've never understood genres; it's all music. And most of it is interesting.

And therein lies the problem. Not only do I love music but I adore words, the combination of words, the subtle interplay of them that, when mixed by a good wordsmith, makes the whole immensely greater than the sum of its parts. And I can't hear a song without listening to the words being sung and the poetry that binds them together as lyrics. And if I'm listening to lyrics, to other people's words, then I can't really concentrate on placing my own specially chosen combination of words on paper or screen.

Some writers choose to play different styles music to put them in the mood for writing different kinds of scenes. Hard rock for an action sequence or a light piano piece for a gentle love scene. Whatever does it for them, I guess. For me, I'm OK as long as it's an instrumental tune with no discernible lyrics. Or if I'm struggling with something, if I'm stuck with how to express the emotion in a piece I'm writing or how to get my characters out of (or into) a particularly thorny plot hole then I'll turn the speakers off and work in absolute silence. That is, if you discount the dog down the street that barks incessantly morning until bedtime.

So, fellow witers, what's the soundtrack to your working day?

Maybe it's Elvis Costello's "Every Day I Write the Book"?
Or "It's Only Words" by the Bee Gees"?
Or, if you're recording the audio book of "The Hobbit", maybe you listen to OMD's "Tolkien Loud and Clear"?

Sorry.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Pursued By A Bear

'They', those wonderful and perfect people who love to direct the tiniest details of our lives, say that we shouldn't 'sweat the small stuff'. I'd broadly agree with that, unless the "small stuff" in question are pieces of onion. This should be sweated down to an almost liquid pulp so as to make the reeky root more palatable.

And the phrase isn't used to refer to obese kids on sports day either. That would be sweating short stuff, not small stuff.

The term about sweaty small stuff is more normally used to mean that you shouldn't worry about details, you should get the big things sorted first. Control the whole and you'll be mostly OK. Of course this contradicts other phrases like 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves' or 'God is in the detail' but nobody ever said that English was a simple language.

Unless you're Shakespeare, that is. He made writing so simple that the rest of us who put ink on paper (and dots on screens) can only bow at his feet. He had a way of making words flow so simply that they dripped from him like honey.

I went to see 'The Winter's Tale' this week, noted as being possibly the most problematic of the Bard's so-called Problem Plays. It's certainly unusual, starting off as an exercise in psychological terror before suddenly switching style at around the halfway mark and becoming a bawdy comedy. Some of the language used is among Old Billy's most impenetrable text too making the audience work quite hard if they want to understand every single word said.

But you know what? They don't have to. If a Shakespeare play's performed well then we in the stalls don't have to fully understand each and every word. We can get the feeling and the intention of the line from the actor's body language. They show us the meaning by their actions. That's why it's called acting.

Those who say that they don't understand Shakespeare have usually never his works performed live, their only exposure to the work being having been forced to read set texts at school. When performed by a talented cast who put their all into it the plays come to life, as vibrant today as they were back in Will's time. And of course it helps that they've been blessed by some of the most colourful lines ever to be penned.

Watching Shakespeare, you don't have to sweat the small stuff. Just go with the flow.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

badgerbadgerbadgerbadger

I want to see a badger with his
Pointy, stripy nose
And his massive, bulky silver back
And sharply curving toes

I want to see him shining bright
Beneath a moon-lit sky
I've waited here for half the night
I think he might be shy

The garden's full of fruit and nuts
And smothered in bird seed
I've laid out everything I've got
I want to see him feed

I want to see a badger
And so many other creatures
And I want to feel their fur and scales
And probe their unique features

And I want to hear a nightingale
Or cuckoo's simple call
Before their voices quieten 'til
They can't be heard at all

I want to see a tiger
Or an Arctic polar bear
But I'll have to travel quickly
Or there won't be any there

I want to see a dodo
Or a laughing owl in flight
Or a mighty stegosaurus
What a huge, impressive sight

But the pink passenger pigeon
Won't be passing by here soon
And the fierce Tasmanian tiger
Won't be hunting by the moon

"Extinction is Forever"
So the warning posters say
But they never tell precisely when
They never name the day

That a species will be gone for good
The death of all its kind
And if we'll even know it's gone
Or if we'll even mind

So I want to see a badger
While I'm still around to care
Yes, I'd love to see a badger
Oh look! There's one, over there

© Shaun Finnie 2013

The Bargain Store is Open, Come Inside

If you live in a country village then your opinion will most likely be influenced by your peer group, your neighbours, your community council. It's a simple message. Independent shops are good, multinational supermarkets are evil. They're systematically killing off our livelihood, our neighbourhood and our countryside-ihood, clogging up and damaging our roads with their massive container trucks and forcing us to eat their homogeneous, flavourless foodstuffs.

If you live in an inner city, working full time and grabbing as much overtime as you can get but still struggling to pay the bills, your view will be just as clear. Superstores are cheap and convenient. Quirky little shops providing "the personal touch" between 10am and 3pm might be nice for the lucky few who can afford a friendly chat along with their artisan bakes and skinny lattes but in these days when most of us are strapped for cash and time, that's a utopian dream, a luxury that most of us cannot afford. And what does "artisan" mean anyhow? Isn't it the same as "handmade"? Weren't all our great-grandparents artisans?

Some see the likes of Tesco driving the little shop owner out of business with their stack-em-high, price-em-low attitudes. Others see a classic economics case study for the laws of supply  and demand, democracy in action with the people voting via their wallets.

As with so many things in life there are two sides to every story, neither of which is wholly right or wrong. Some people will never set foot inside a chain coffee shop on principle while other people can't see why anyone would ever pay more than four pounds for a plucked chicken. They both have what seems, to them at least, excellent views but to me they seem to be missing the point a little.

Isn't this entire argument just a symptom of a greater question, one that's basically political? I don't have any answers, it's for each of us to make our own choices here - a choice that sees beyond the black and white and delves into the various shades of grey behind the knee-jerk reactions.

But wouldn't it be nice if there was a place that was convenient to get to, where a group of food producers could gather together and sell directly to us, the consumers? A place with plenty of free parking that opens when most people aren't at work? And if such a place existed then, without the enforced profit margins of middle-men to contend with the sellers could afford to sell their wares at relatively cheap prices yet still make a living profit? Surely we'd all agree that this would be A Good Thing?

I'll be visiting such a place this weekend. It ticks all those boxes, as trendy economists say. I'll be going to my local farmers' market on Sunday. The food is top quality and I'll spend less than at any shop, large or small. As they say, every little helps.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

The Ballad of Thomas May

I wonder what happens in the school at night
When there’s nobody there and it’s locked up tight

And they’ve all gone home and turned out the last light
Tell me, what goes on in the school at night?

I wonder what happens when they’ve all gone home
And there’s just the caretaker all alone

Walking up and down in the empty halls
With his footsteps echoing off the walls

When it’s freezing cold because the heating’s off
But nobody moans that they’ll sneeze and cough

For they’ve all gone away to their comfy houses
And there’s no living things except the spiders and mouses

To hear the building groan and creak
In the way that old places like to speak

And to tell the tales of the things they saw
About all the kids coming through their door

All the generations, bad and good,
Who attended here from the neighbourhood

The crumbling school has seen them all
As they walked – “Don’t run” – through their crumbling halls

Silence in class or break-time noise
They’d all been here, all the girls and the boys

And they’d all gone home when the day was done
Yes, they’d all gone home. Well, except for one.

A twelve year old called Thomas May
Whose parents thought had run away

From home. They said they’d had a fight
About what time he should turn out his light

So he’d gone to school like he always did
But he never went back, this poor little kid

Who nobody liked and who sulked all the time.
When he hadn’t got home by eight or nine

They called the police and they searched the town
But no sign of Thomas was ever found

He’d stayed behind when school was done
Rather than face his angry Mum

And hidden away till silence fell
Long after the final lesson’s bell

He’d crept through the gym to the changing room
And there he’d hidden in the gathering gloom

'til they’d all locked up and no-one was aware
That a foolish boy was hiding there

But in the silent darkness out he came
Yet the empty school didn’t feel the same

Was there something there just out of sight
In an unoccupied school in the dead of night?

He thought he glimpsed, from the corner of his eye,
A shape, a figure, something flash by

He was caught on film about one forty-five
And that’s the last time anyone saw him alive

The security shots that the camera caught
Shows him running away, looking scared and fraught

Though it never showed what he was running from
Or what happened when the thing caught up with Tom

But we know that nothing good occurred
In the silent school where nothing stirred

For young Thomas May is still around
And his ghostly form can be sometimes found

You can see right through him like he’s made of glass
As he wanders around from class to class

Like he’s searching for an exit door
But poor Tommy May won’t go home any more

He’s the old school house’s resident spirit.
Every ancient building has at least one in it.

There he’ll stay to the end of days
Paying the price for running away

So don’t stay alone in a dark, dark school
Our you might end up like that young fool

Find another safe place to hide and play
So tell me children, what do you say?

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Coffee, Tea or... Something Else?

Charity is always needed by other people. People in faraway, war-torn lands. People with horrific, incurable diseases. People who live lives that are inconceivably different to our own. Charity is never needed by us.

Until it is.

Until that terrible, devastating thing happens to us. Until our world falls apart. Until we don't know which way to turn.

That's when charities do what they do best. Offering help in practical ways when we're too broken, physically or emotionally, to help ourselves. They do the things that we never knew needed to be done, because they come up against these terrible, life-altering problems daily. Practical things. Advice and information. A hand to hold for those who have no other. Essential assistance.

On Friday this week I'll be helping out at a MacMillan coffee morning. I don't have much spare cash these days but I do have a little spare time. I'll make up my writing hours later. So I've been baking, and plan to bake some more. Some of my speciality breads and cookies and maybe even my sister's legendary apple cake. My Beloved's been doing the same. She'll be there with me, running a tombola, collecting cash and generally doing whatever is required on the day.

I'd love it if you could pop down to the Allotment Deli in Hoyland on Friday 27 September and sample some of my baking - or perhaps something much nicer baked by someone else. Or maybe there's  a MacMillan Coffee Morning nearer to you that you that needs your support?  See what they do and why they need your help - and money - here.  http://coffee.macmillan.org.uk

Or possibly you have another good cause that's closer to your heart, one that you intend to do something for one day, when you get around to it. Well why can't "one day" be today? And if not today, then when? The problem with "one day" is that it never comes around unless you make it happen.

Nobody wants to have to ask for help. But everyone can help charities for those who do.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Half a Job

I bought a new car this week. It's beautiful sitting on my drive where all the neighbours can admire it. It'll be even better when I get an engine to go in it. They had plenty in stock in the garage but none that fit my particular model. I was a little disappointed when he told me that, but never mind. To commiserate I went to a bar for a cocktail, a nice refreshing Sea Breeze. The barman gave me the grapefruit and cranberry juice with lots of ice. I paid him the full amount and tried to enjoy what I had but it didn't quite seem right. 'No sir,' he said. 'You need lots of vodka for a proper Sea Breeze. I'll send that on to you in a few weeks.'

Do the above scenarios sound ridiculous? Of course they do and you wouldn't put up with either of them if they happened in real life (sorry, I was telling fibs at the start there). So why do we put up with this kind of treatment when it comes to technology?

I appreciate that when I go to buy a car I can have optional extras like alloy wheels, kid leather seats or metallic paint. None of these things actually change the working of the machine, they're just posh add-ons to lift me above the crowd. I pay extra if I want something out of the ordinary, I get that. But if I don't want them I still get a basic vehicle that works perfectly well.

So it only makes sense when I buy a new laptop that I'd have to pay extra for a fluffy cover to keep it warm at night. But a power cable? Surely that's something that you most definitely need, not an optional extra? Nor are other connector cables, or internet connections, or a basic set of programs or, it could be argued, a printer.

I got a new mobile phone this week (really). I opened the box and everything that I'd expected was there, even a plug to charge it with - bonus! So I took the back off my old phone, removed the battery and took out my sim and memory cards. Then I tried to take the back off the new phone to insert them. After thirty minutes of doing the man-thing of trying to work it out myself I relented and looked at the instructions. They left me no wiser so I struggled on. After an our and a broken thumb nail I went to the internet. There I found a lovely video of some chap showing me how 'easy' it was. He had three goes, including one where the phone flew out of his hand and landed with an unpleasant tinkly crack on the table. So it wasn't just me, but at least he taught me the knack.

I eventually got the back off and the memory card inserted but then…  then I found that the sim card in my new phone was of a totally different size to the one in my old. it just would not fit. So back to the internet I went where I found that I had to get a new dual sized sim, then cut that one down to mini-sim size before I could use it.  *sigh*  Was life this hard when all we had to worry about was being fire-bombed by the Luftwaffe?

I carefully trimmed the card to the correct size and amazingly it went into my new phone perfectly. Except my number and all my details were still on my old phone. It turned out that I had to do something called an online sim swap. Of course? Why didn't I think of that, I mean it's obvious really. So I did the sim swap - which involved typing lots of different numbers and validation codes into a screen on my provider's website - and got it wrong. Fair enough, I must have mistyped a number somewhere. I tried again. And failed again. After the third attempt it told me that I'd had too many goes and, for my security, I couldn't try again until the next day.

For my security.

I checked that great font of knowledge, the internet chat forums, and found that I should have prefixed one of the codes with the number 8933442. Of course. It should have been obvious really. Or maybe it should have been in the instructions, I'm not sure which. But I tried the next day and it worked. I now have a lovely new phone that makes calls and texts to people that I know. It won't access the internet but hey, you can't have everything. I might have a go at that next week.

Is it too much to ask that things work straight out of the box?

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and smash some looms.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Is There Anybody There?

I'll warn you now: this week's blog could turn into a bit of a rant. It's about a subject that we all hate but which has sadly become a fact of twenty-first century British life. I'm talking about business help desks that are manned at foreign call centres.

I know that it's unrealistic and commercially unviable to expect companies to employ hundreds of knowledgeable people on their switchboards, just waiting for customers like you and me to ring them. I suspect that this didn't even happen in the mythical golden days of my youth but surely we should be able to expect better service than the current system of "Press one to be cut off; press two to hear the complete works of Vivaldi; press three to listen to a repeating message telling you how important your call is to us"?

With this in mind I'd like any business leaders reading this to treat it as a blueprint for the kind of service that we, the customer, really want. After all, we're the ones who are ultimately paying for it. And for your wages.

1 - Don't force me to make any more than two multiple choice phone presses. Each time you give me another set of preference to pick from my anger levels rise a little more until I'm in dangerous 'Hulk' territory. Eventually I'm going to 'go postal' on one of your poor employees and you'll be responsible.

2 - Don't just tell me that my call is held in a queue - I already know that. Tell me how many other callers are ahead of me and what the average wait time is. And definitely tell me how much per minute the call is costing me. That way I can work out for myself whether I want to wait or not and maybe save both me and your call centre operative some time.

3 - Better still, make it a Freephone number. After all, if your service was as good as it should be, I wouldn't need to ring you in the first place.

4 - If my wait is likely to be a long one then give me the option of leaving my contact details so that you can ring me back at a time of my choosing. You can be sure that it won't be during my mealtime, which is when you usually seem to want to have a chat with me.

5 - Don't spent the first three minutes of the call telling me about the exceptional benefits of your online service and the wonderful things that I can find on there, especially when that same webpage has said that I should call this number for further details.

6 - Don't have your call centre staff use silly names like Danny or Sarah when it's obvious to us that they're really called Atul and Smita. I'm a grown-up. I know that it's cheaper for you to outsource this kind of work to Indian staff. Giving them fake names is an insult to them and me.

7 - Drop the light jazz elevator muzak! If you must keep me on hold for half an hour or more then at least give me a chance to pick what I listen to. The news, perhaps, or an archive recording of the Goon Show. I can only take so much Dave Brubeck.

8 - Don't tell me that my call is important to you when it quite clearly isn't in the slightest. If it was that important you'd have answered it.

9 - When "Danny" has been of no use whatsoever to me then instruct him to change his script. One of the things that's guaranteed to wind me up is the person at the other end of the phone finishing the call with "Is there anything else that I can help you with today?" when he's not been of any help already.

10 - Let me pick my own security password that doesn't have to fit the format that your I.T. staff decided was secure. I understand that 'G7w%98£R'  is an exceedingly secure password but I've got no chance of remembering it unless I write it down - which you've told me not to do. I have to pick something works for me, not you, and my cat's name doesn't include any numbers.

That's it, my top ten improvements to call centres conversations.

Now is that so hard?

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Who Nicked My Pick?

According to the font of all knowledge, the Oxford English Dictionary, a picnic is "an occasion when a packed meal is eaten outdoors, especially during an outing to the countryside". 

That's as good a definition as any. I've enjoyed many alfresco meals that match that description precisely. Sandwiches, cakes, a few token salad items so that I can say I made at least a bit of an effort and, crucially, as many different processed pork products as possible. As I keep saying, there is no foodstuff in the world that cannot be improved by the addition of bacon.

But all such delights must be earned. I like to edit my manuscripts outdoors. It's a little treat to myself after the days / weeks / months locked away in my garret writing a document. I allow myself the luxury of doing a (close to) final edit in the great outdoors. I know that if I've reached that stage then the piece is almost done and a different set of surroundings helps me cast a different eye over my work and, sometimes, pick up some problems that looked perfectly alright in the solitude of my attic.

My Beloved likes to take photos of scenery and nature so it works well for the two of us to partake of our passions separately - her snapping away and me spraying my red ink over sheets of printed paper - and then coming together at the end of our respective working day for a picnic. We have the full traditional kit - tartan blanket, wicker basket full of bright neon-coloured plastic crockery and cutlery (well, I don't want to be too traditional), and of course lots of different Tupperware boxes filled with goodies. We even have a tartan flask that once belonged to my dad, a relic of my own childhood picnics.

There's only one thing wrong with eating outdoors. It's in the outdoors. There are overfriendly farm animals and walkers' dogs, smelly by-produce left by overfriendly farm animals and walkers' dogs, other people's music (a term used very loosely) shattering the varying degrees of natural silence, wet grass that seeps through your blanket and clothes leaving you feeling a particular kind of damp unpleasantness that I (for one) haven't felt since I was a toddler. And bugs. A gazillion bugs whose sole purpose in their little lives is to annoy me in some way or other. Some bite, some sting, some crawl through the hairs on my arms making me judder and others just want to walk on my food with their little feet that have been tromping goodness-knows-where. Probably some of the aforementioned biological by-product.

And of course the worst among these is wasps. There's an old German proverb that loosely translates as "God made bees but the Devil made the wasp." That's about right as far as I'm concerned. I'm not one of these people who goes into screaming flapping fits whenever a wasp appears but I certainly don't weep when I see one dying of heat stroke in the window of a cream bun shop. It serves it right for trying to eat a sausage roll a thousand times bigger than its head.

What use are wasps? They don't pollenate things like bees, don't clear up dead stuff like beetles do, don't really do much at all apart from fly around looking for unsuspecting humans to sting. Their one job as far as I can see it is to ruin picnics, and they do it with gleeful malice.

But what about when it's raining and we have to resort to eating in the car? Does that still class as a picnic? I've spent many dismal hours, man and boy, sitting in a steamy vehicle listening to the rain drumming on the car roof while munching a smelly egg sandwich. At least the wasps can't get me in my metal prison but it sort of defeats the entire object of substituting the dining room for the countryside.

Or even worse, how about those times when you've planned a picnic but the weather's suddenly turned so bad that there's no point in even leaving the house? We've got all that food that we've already prepared the day before: if we spread our feast out on the living room floor can we validly call the meal a 'carpet picnic'?

I recently even had a picnic on the deck of an almost-finished boat that was still in dry dock. We were visiting the boat builder and stopped at a shop on the way for supplies. Just bread, meat, tomatoes and (naturally) a few processed porky products. Nothing much, nothing fancy, we just spread everything out on the roof of his half-complete barge, but it was one of the best meals I'd had in ages.

You can keep your Michelin Stars.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Double or Nothing

One of the first things that those in the business want to know when you submit a novel to them these days is, "Is this a standalone book or is it part of a series?"

This is less so if your book's of a particularly literary quality though. It's as if it's all right for those high-brow works to be one-offs but if you've written a mass-consumption tale, an easy airport read or a story for children, teens or young adults then these will only be picked up by publishers or agents if they show potential to be an on-going money-spinner. It used to be the realm of bad sci-fi but now it seems that every new novel that isn't in the running for the Man Booker Prize has to be part of a trilogy or a seemingly never-ending series.  It can work out really well - Mario Puzo's 'Godfather' novels, 'A Song of Fire and Ice' by George R. R. Martin, even E. L. James's 'Shades of Grey' trilogy have all been massive sellers and rightly so. They all captured something of the times in which they were written (for good or bad) and presented it in a way that huge sections of the reading public wanted. But for every 'Harry Potter', 'Brother Cadfael' or 'Biggles' there are a hundred remainder bins clogged with "a rollicking comedic space opera… volume five".

It makes perfect sense, of course. If your paying reader likes your novel and forms an attachment with the characters that you've slaved long and hard over then naturally they'll want to read more of their adventures. And from a publisher's point of view there's a lot less risk involved in printing and publicising a novel if the author is  already a proven seller and can be signed up to provide five, six, seven books in the same vein. It's simply good economics to milk that cash cow until it squeaks.

But, like a soap-opera actor moaning about becoming type-cast, does a successful trilogy or series stifle an author's creativity? Does it restrict them to one genre, one core set of characters and basic premise? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously said, "If, in 100 years, I am known only as the man who created Sherlock Holmes, I shall consider my life a failure."

Of course, sales are all-important. However much writers might assert that we need artistic fulfilment, we need food, liquid and a roof over our heads even more which is why, even though my first novel isn't even available for purchase through Amazon yet, I'm already working on the sequel. And I've got a file full of notes about a potential third book in what may yet become a never-ending series.

Never let it be said that I don't give my public what they want. As long as what they want is easy, brainless page-turners.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Proof, Positive

So you work through your manuscript. One draft, two, three drafts. Perhaps more. Probably more, many more. Stephen King says that he never lets a novel leave his desk until he's written at least nine versions. You're not as good as King but you've still been working on it for months, maybe even a year or more. The basic plot or the design of some characters may have been floating around in your head for a decade, but finally it's down on paper (or at least on laptop screen) and it's the best that you can make it. You've pared, honed and polished it and agonised over every word until you've got to the point where you're just tinkering and thinking about putting things back in that you removed several iterations ago. That's when you know that you're not making any further progress; you're just procrastinating. It's time to let go. It's time to send your baby out into the world. It's time to publish your novel.

We'll skip over editing and proofreading (they're obviously unimportant these days given some recent novels that I've read) and move on to the next step. Somebody formats up your novel (or you do it yourself if circumstances dictate) and you wait. Just like I've been doing for the last week.

I knew what it was as soon as I heard the thud when it fell through the letterbox. I wandered over and there it was on my doormat, a small brown cardboard package containing my soul. Or as some would call it, my debut novel. To most people it wouldn't have looked like much but they didn't know the amount of work that had gone into it.

I gently tore the strip that held it secure and paused. I always say that the day before the football season kicks off is the best day of the sporting year because my team doesn't have any points, doesn't have any victories and doesn't have any goals but what it does have is hope. At that moment they could be the best team in the land, as could any other. They haven't had a chance to let me down yet. It was the same with my book. Right now, with it still enclosed in its cardboard package, it could be a future bestseller. It could be the best novel ever written. It could even sell enough copies to pay my gas bill. It carried hope. The minute I looked at it, just like the moment that Sheffield United kick-off every summer, there would be the probability that it wouldn't match up to my hopes and dreams. I'm sure that there's enough in those last few lines to keep a philosophy course going for a term or two but sadly I live in the real world. It was time to look at my work.

It was beautiful. It was exactly as I'd expected it to be. I was so pleased that I posted a selfie on Facebook with me holding the proof copy and grinning inanely to camera. It even has sixty-three 'likes' at the time of writing. Two hundred and fifty pages of perfection. Perfection, that is, apart from that missing full stop on page forty-eight. But I could live with that. And I could ignore the fact that the chapter headings weren't quite as large as I'd anticipated. Nobody else would care. They wouldn't be bothered with the fact that the margins weren't quite as wide as I'd hoped. The original size was only in my head. Just like the fifteen or so other things that were just a degree or two away from perfection or at least, the vision of perfection that had been playing in my brain for months.

So as far as most people would be concerned, there's nothing wrong with it, and there isn't really. There's nothing wrong at all. It's just that it could be more right in quite a few ways. How many minor niggles make up a major problem? How bad does it have to be before I reject it and make further changes? How many people, apart from me, will give a flying purple damn about that missing full stop?

And yet…

I've waited a long time for this. I can wait a couple of weeks longer.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Incy Wincy

When I was younger I had a small toy spider called Webster. It was made of plastic with some polystyrene inside so that it floated. Little Webster wore a plastic set of goggles and a snorkel, and had a little wind-up propeller in his rear just where his spinnerets should have been. He wasn't built for making webs, this cheerful fella with his painted-on grin, he was made for hurtling around the bath at a rapid rate of knots. I used to think that he was brilliant as he ploughed through the bubbles leaving a little eight-legged wake behind but I understand that some people don't like spiders in general and the thought of one in their bath - even a plastic toy one like Webster - would be the stuff of their nightmares. If you fall into this category then perhaps this is as far as you should read. See you back here next week.

Still with me? Good.

So a few days ago I decided to take a nice long, relaxing bath. I ran the water, poured in a generous helping of Radox bath salts (I'm a traditionalist at heart) and gently lowered myself in.  I had the cricket commentary on the radio and a can of something cold and refreshing close to hand, ready for a relaxing couple of hours. OK, so at the end of it I'd end up looking more wrinkled than Cliff Richard's neck but what the hey, it was worth it. The only thing that could make it any better was if I had something to read so I reach over the bath side and picked up a magazine that I'd placed on the floor a few minutes earlier.

The magazine I had chosen was Take A Break's Fiction Feast, a monthly collection of short stories. Sadly this issue didn't include one of my contributions but it's always good to check out the competition and it's always a good read anyhow.  I lifted the magazine to my face. My  eyesight's getting worse these days and of course I couldn't wear my reading glasses in the bath. Not that I was reading anything steamy, you understand (ho ho, thank you very much). Out of the corner of my eye I saw something black slide across the page and there was a little 'plop' sound of something around the size of a hazelnut dropping into my bathwater.

Can you see where this is going? I bet those people who quit reading earlier are so glad that they did. Here we go…

I looked down to see a huge black spider - easily bigger than a two-pound coin - struggling for its worthless arachnid life inbetween my knees. I don't know whether he was doing some kind of thorax-stroke or a weird octopod paddle but whatever it was, it was ineffectual. The spider was just thrashing on the spot and not getting further from, nor - thankfully - closer to anything attached to me.

I didn't panic. I didn't let out a girly scream. I didn't even leap out of the bath and run around like the world's flabbiest and most nekkid headless chicken. What I did do was reach swiftly into the slightly sullied water, scoop the drowning invertebrate out and fling him a few feet into a nearby sink. Then, like the trooper I am, I slunk back into the relaxing waters and turned the cricket commentary up, just in case he were coughing his spidery lungs up in my basin.

To be honest the entire unsavoury even had put me off my bath somewhat and I curtailed my recreational soak to just under an hour. I wasn't really enjoying it any more. So I got out and dried myself (no further details required) and approached the sink.

I'm not particularly proud of what I did next. I'd saved him from drowning and deposited him back on dry porcelain, hadn't I? I'd given him a fair chance when, lets face it, if I hadn't been there he'd have quickly gone to that Great Web in the Sky. So as far as I knew he was safe and sound.

And that was the last I saw of him because by the time I opened my eyes, he was gone. Mind you, I had been running the cold sink tap for a good few minutes by then.

(c) Shaun Finnie 2013

Perception Deception

We went to a local farm this week. It's one of those show farms like you see in inner cities for kids who think that sheep lay sausages. Ours wasn't in some wretched post-industrial landscape though but in the real, honest-to-goodness countryside near home in wildest Yorkshire.

And it was rubbish.

They had one cow in a barn. Just the one. What kind of farm keeps just one cow? Perhaps they had loads but she was the only one deemed friendly enough to be let out with children? Maybe the others were all man-eaters locked away in a shed somewhere behind a sign saying "Take Care! These Cows Do Not Play Nice With Others!" (notice how I stayed away from the "udders" pun there? Even I have some standards).

There were a few pigs laid asleep in a dark corner, well away from grabbing hands, and a couple of bored-looking donkeys too. A pair of grumpy alpacas ground their cud aggressively, looking as though they were going to spit bile at anyone who even looked at them in a funny manner, and a pair of red deer were anything but timid, sprinting up to the fence as we approached in a "give me some grain or I'll gore you" manner.

There were the usual petting zoo favourite - rabbits, guinea pigs, pigmy goats etc. - and that was it. Apart from the meerkats. They were one of the main reasons we'd gone, to tell the truth. The Beloved has had a passion for these creatures for many years which occasionally reduces her to girlish squeaks of delight. She's a little miffed that other people have jumped on 'her' meerkat bandwagon in recent years too. Fortunately the run-down farm was deserted so on this occasion at least she could chuckle and "awww" at the little critters' antics all on her own with no johnny-come-latelies to spoil her enjoyment. Mind you, it wasn't the world's largest troupe, just four little meer-kitties huddled together under a heat lamp. Their enclosure was fine enough, as with all of the other animals' just a bit cheap- and cobbled together-looking. The entire place looked a bit sad and depressing really and, like a cheap strip club, I felt a little demeaned just by being there.

But…

Did I mention that we had our niece and nephew with us? A very girly twelve year-old and a hyper boisterous boy three years her junior? They saw exactly the same things that we did, they heard the same sounds and they smelled the same smells. And they had an absolutely magnificent time. They couldn't get enough of the small furry creatures, especially the baby rabbits. They spent literally hours stroking and petting the cute and fluffy kits and their parents. There were many cries of "Can I take one home, Uncle Shaun?" and wobbly lips when I firmly rejected the idea. Time seemed to slow as they couldn't be dragged away from the apparently fascinating sight of goats eating cabbage leaves and their delight at the meerkats almost reached the same level as the Beloved's own. Almost.

It was fascinating to note how their enjoyment of the place differed so much from my own. I basically hated it. They basically loved it. Two wildly differing views on the same subject.

I've been asked to review some books recently and have been acutely aware of the fact that, while I've been doing this, some other readers have been reviewing my own novel. I've been doing my best to be objective in what I've written but all the time I've been wondering how the author whose work I'm commenting on will feel if they should read what I write about their book. How would I feel if the roles were reversed? How will I feel when I read what others say about my work?

Perhaps it's safest to just write "everyone's view on this book will differ" and suggest that they read it for themselves, for as long as children will love to stroke furry animals people will have differing views on art.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

The Wings of a Dove

They say that travel broadens the mind.

They say that you should never work with children or animals.

They say that Harry Hill pays £250 for funny video clips on his television show.

"They" should have been in my local train station last week, armed with a HD smartphone. I had one in my pocket but was far too busy laughing to take it out.

We were off on a little weekend trip by train but (as is my usual habit) had turned up at the station very early. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I don't do 'late'. So we sat in an open-air coffee shop for a while enjoying the fine weather and pretending to enjoy the "freshly ground" coffee on offer. I'm not sure what ground they'd freshly dug it up from but it was more mud than coffee.

Their food can't have been much better either as someone who had recently vacated a nearby table had left most of their sandwich behind, a fact which hadn't gone unnoticed by the local pigeon population. Some may see them as flying vermin but these so-called rats with wings are some of the smartest birds to be found around our towns and cities. At least, some of them are.

While a group of them were content to demolish the remains of the sandwich that was on and around the table, one particularly curious bird had noticed something that none of the others had. He had seen that the paper bag that had once contained the sandwich was also on the table. Not only that but it was full of crumbs. Not only that but it was open just enough to allow one inquisitive pigeon to reach the tasty treats inside.

He poked his head in tentatively and obviously liked what he saw. Within seconds his entire body disappeared into the bag until just the ends of his perfectly-preened tail feathers were showing. The bag began to thrash around like an unhappy landed trout as he pecked away at the discarded panini crumbs inside. Presumably they were as attractive to him as pepperoni is to me as he obviously wasn't going to leave any scraps behind. However his jerky movements inside the paper bag dislodged quite a few crumbs from it which fell onto the table, attracting the attention of several of his feathery friends. They flew in en masse, and soon the table was lost from sight beneath their cooing feeding frenzy. One of them even had the audacity to land on top of our paper-shrouded hero as he sat still for a moment, presumably digesting his unexpected panini feast.

So here's the scene: there's one lucky pigeon totally covered, stretched out full length inside a paper bag on top of a coffee shop table. Using this bag and its confused contents as a wobbly perch is another pigeon and surrounding them both are their waste collecting comrades, all gratefully gobbling down this bountiful feast.

And on another nearby table were me and my Beloved, giggling like schoolkids at the comedic cavorting of some pigeons and some paper. We thought that it wouldn't get better. But we were wrong.

The pigeon in the bag suddenly stood up. The fellow on his shoulders lost his footing and took flight. Of course when one pigeon flies his flock-mates are sure to follow and they all took to the air, wheeling around the station, relishing the freedom of the skies.

All except for one.

He shook his wings tentatively but in standing to his full height he'd allowed the paper bag to slip completely over him from his beak to his missing-toed feet. He looked like the world's crappest glove puppet as he stood alone on the table surface, turning on the spot in bewilderment. To be fair I can only assume that the bird within was turning. What I saw was a paper bag, standing on its open end and slowly twirling around like a rubbish Halloween ghost on a turntable.

The Beloved and I were in tears by now and we absolutely howled when he tried to take a few tentative steps around the table top. Being totally hooded by the bag he couldn't see a thing and so had no way of knowing that he was perilously close to the table's edge. Off he plummeted, leaving the Beloved and I quivering wrecks as we sunk further into our seats.

I learned an important lesson that day. I learned that pigeons are heavier than coffee shop sandwich bags. He fell at a slightly quicker rate than his paper prison and so, with a panicked flutter of wings that showered everything in the vicinity with the remaining panini crumbs, he was free. Free to rejoin his pigeony pals with the tale of how he'd taken on the crumb-baited bag trap and lived to tell the tail.

Mere rats with wings? Not this chap. He was the escapologist and a stand-up performance comedian king of the pigeon world. Mr Feathery, I salute you.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Hot! Hot! Hot!

It’s been hot recently, have you noticed? Not just ‘hot for here’ but properly hot, Mediterranean hot. The kind of hot that makes normal people sweat in a way that makes us fat folks shout, “Now you know how I feel every day, whatever the weather!” It’s been so hot that streets have been melting and so have people. It’s the kind of weather that we in Britain get so rarely that it makes the front cover of newspapers. Who can forget the classic “Phew, What a Scorcher” headline? That’s how it’s been this year. We don’t get summers like the current one very often so people can sometimes let the heat go to their heads – literally and figuratively. They don’t realise that Anglo-Saxons like me aren’t built for this kind of weather. When it’s like this you have to be careful.

I’ve been doing the sensible things like staying inside in the shade, opening and closing the windows so that the ones on the cool side of the house let the most air in, drinking lots of water and having my fan on so much that the oscillating twister thing that turns it from side to side has broken. Now one side of me is frozen while the other is sweating like the proverbial pig. I keep having to turn around as if I’m on a spit. I’ve been taking naps at lunchtime wherever required and feasible, and I’ve not been overexerting myself.

My neighbours however have not being doing any such sensible things. They’ve never been in the house. We have a piece of communal land behind the house and they’ve pretty much commandeered it, sitting outside from morning till (their) bedtime (which is long after mine), drinking coffee and alcohol (both of which dehydrate you even further) and moving their plastic garden chairs to follow the sun across the sky for maximum potentially cancerous effects. They’re sweating even more than I am and permanently squinting into the sun. They have visitors over just about all the time who come for an hour or two or six and join them in their sun-worshipping.

They’re not overly loud, not affecting me in any way really. They’re just doing everything that we’re told not to. They’re blatantly ignoring all the health warnings and deliberately putting their bodies at risk. It’s shocking and I can’t for the life of me understand why they’d do such things.

So why do they permanently seem to have huge grins on their faces?

Turn a Different Corner

Science fiction writers have long had a tradition of creating works of alternative history, a subgenre telling stories based in some ‘uchronia’ – a time that doesn’t exist. The idea is simple: they take a setting or an event that we’re all (hopefully) familiar with and then twist the outcome a little so that the unexpected occurs.

But why do they write this kind of stuff and why do we, the readers, lap it up? Well all fiction begins with the simple question, ‘What if?’ and alternative reality tales ask more clearly defined ‘What if’s than most. It’s a plot device that can be used to answer big questions or show us something about ourselves and our world that we don’t (or don’t want to) usually see. Three famous examples are;

What if the Nazi’s had won World War II?
What if President Nixon hadn’t been assassinated?
What if the Apollo astronauts had found alien lifeforms already on the moon?

How would these changes in events effect regular people?  How would we have reacted in those circumstances? Would it have been how we’d like to feel we’d have acted? A good writer can hold a mirror up to us with these kind of tales while at the same time enticing us to read more with a rollicking good yarn. And that’s the kind of stuff we like. It has a built in backstory that we don’t have to go to the trouble of ploughing through chapters of prose to set up the payoff. We already know that Lee Harvey Oswald was waiting for the President in Dallas and that Neil Armstrong travelled through space in a Saturn V rocket. We don’t need much set up, we can get straight on with the story.

BBC’s Saturday teatime favourite Doctor Who has asked this kind of question for generations. In recent series they’ve had alternative histories involving the destruction of Pompeii, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare to mention but three shows from the last few years. They make little attempt at social comment, they usually just want to entertain and tell a good story. That’s the road that I usually go down too when writing fiction. I can’t see how my social or political views are more worthy of a platform than anyone else’s, so I just try to get a good tale down.

I’ve had my own attempt at this kind of story recently. It’s my first full length novel and it’s finally available for download via Amazon. It will be available through the i-store and other online shops in a month or so and a paperback version will hopefully be out in September. Its called ‘The Happiest Workplace On Earth’ and it asks the question, What If Walt Disney hadn’t died in 1966 but had continued the work that he was planning at the time of his death? What if he had completed the utopian city that he wanted to create and had actually managed to get people living and working in it? And what if that city became a terrorist target?

It's good to finally give people the chance to read it.

Centurion

It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks. I feel old enough as it is but even after I send my cards off to the recycler I’ll still be on the young side of fifty…  just. But sometimes I feel like I’m a hundred. My knees certainly seem that old when I’ve been hill walking or jogging. That’s what I get for playing American Football in my youth I guess.

My knees aren’t really a hundred though, nor is the rest of me. These blogs however, that’s a different story. This is my hundredth weekly report of my life as a struggling writer. I’ve enjoyed writing each and every one of them, even though the vast majority of them haven’t actually been about the art and craft of writing. I’ve written about cooking, sweating, hill walking, watching cricket, needing new glasses, music, things that annoy me (several times), the taxman, mental health and, on occasion, the writing and publishing process. And thankfully some of you have read them. I can’t thank you enough for your encouragement over the last two years.

In that time quite a lot has happened to me. I’ve ended my twenty-year career at a multi-national financial institution (not through choice – don’t believe everything you read about all bankers rolling in huge bonuses) and I’ve started living my life-long dream of being a full-time, self-employed writer. I figured that it was now or never so grasped the proverbial nettle and it’s been relatively successful, as long as you don’t measure success by monetary figures alone. I’ve had my work printed in several magazines and newspapers and have published a couple of short story collections along with half a dozen small quiz books and self-help books. Don’t mock, they pay the bills. Well, some of the bills. If I’m honest we’ve had to cut back on our spending as much as possible so those bills no longer include such luxuries as foreign holidays and satellite sports channels but I can’t say that I really care all that much. Those indulgences helped distract me from my unhappy working life so now that I’m doing something that I love, do I still really have that desire to travel to faraway places? Hell yeah, of course I do! But we take the life we’re dealt and make the most of it. And writing is what I most want to do. Amazingly I’ve got to a point where my long awaited (by me) first novel is on the brink of being unleashed on the market. That’s another ambition ticked off the bucket list.

I’m already well underway with the next novel (a cosy-crime murder whodunit) and there are a couple more quiz books coming, hopefully before the end of the year. And of course I’ll still be posting this blog every Friday for the foreseeable future.

Here's to the next hundred.

Stop!

There are several lessons in life that everyone needs to learn. How to tell the time; how to mix the perfect vodka martini; when to use an apostrophe correctly.

And everyone needs to know when they should keep on doing something and when it’s the right moment to say ‘Enough is enough, I need to stop this now’. When someone buys you the fifth tequila slammer of the night, for example, it’s probably time to quit. Or when you think it’s really cool to buy yet another Osmonds / Backstreet Boys / Westlife t-shirt (delete according to your age).

In my case at the moment, I’m having trouble knowing when to stop rewriting and editing my novel. It’s finished. I know it’s finished yet I can’t resist having just another little tweak at some part of it. And if I don’t think that particular section is as good as it can be then it stands to reason that the rest of it isn’t either – so I’ll start with another rewrite from the very beginning.

It’s so maddening. It’s been ‘almost there’ for a couple of months now but I seem unable to let go. Or should that be ‘unwilling’? I guess that what’s really happening is that I’m doing all I can to postpone the moment when I have to ‘send my baby out into the big wide world’, as it were. While ever I’m still working on it nobody can tell me that my book’s useless, so if I keep it locked up at home it – and me – will be safe from harm.

That’s ridiculous, I know, so it’s time to let go. It’s time to get the damned thing finished.

Now I’m sorry but I’ve got to cut this week’s blog short. I’ve got another draft to write.