18 Saturday Jan 2014
Posted in Poetry
Tags
(For Rizla)
Riddle me a riddle,
My old friend dressed in red,
Do the folk who roll you
All end up stoned in bed?
Now, we all like a riddle,
We’ll hunt and find your name.
Rice that’s made for smoking,
And lips to hold your fame?
17 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Summer
Tonight I walked along the estuary of my youth,
Saw water colour landscapes of hope and fear
Watched the family outline in the surf,
Smelt the kelp and tasted salt once more,
Heard the white noise of waves breaking at the bar,
The tinkle of dinghy bells, the relentless nagging of the gulls,
The flap of ice cream banners in deserted cabins,
And witnessed the sun’s last defiant blaze,
As a crescent moon rose above Tyrau Mawr.
Winter
A November evening
A pocketful of birthday money
Waiting at the old signal box
Eating nougat
(pronounced the Anglo-Saxon way),
Shivering, happy and ambitious.
17 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in Essays
A Textbook Example of Repositioning?
The best characters, like all great brands, live in the minds (and hearts) of the audience. In modern marketing theory, the process by which products, people and services gain a piece of this mental real estate is called ‘positioning’[i].
Positioning recognizes that, in a complicated and busy world where there is so much choice, there is a continuous battle for the audience’s attention and only a disciplined and focused approach to creating meaning is likely to succeed and cut through the clutter. In fiction, perhaps a similar approach is also needed. As G.K. Chesterton said, ‘a good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.’ [ii]
But there is one challenge greater than the projection of a character into the audience’s head, and that is the challenge of modifying a strong character’s reputation once it has been successfully created. This is what brand-smiths call ‘repositioning’, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall provides an excellent example of it.
Wolf Hall has won many literary awards but its most significant triumph has been the way in which it has succeeded in creating and popularising a ‘new model’ Thomas Cromwell. The conventional and popular view, derived from both academic history[iii] and contemporary fiction[iv], is of Cromwell as an unscrupulous Machiavellian thug who smashed and grabbed his way through monastic wealth and chopped off the heads of anyone who got in the way of the King’s business. Simon Schama’s colourful description of Cromwell’s plot against Anne Boleyn was written in 2000 and is not untypical:
‘What he [Cromwell] cooked up was thing of pure devilry; a finely measured brew, one part pornography, one part paranoia.’[v]
Drawing upon recent academic research that suggests that another interpretation is possible[vi], Mantel sets about reappraising him. Her new ‘framing’[vii] of Cromwell is of an altogether more sympathetic character: a man of his time, doing the best for his king, country, family and personal beliefs. This is a man who weeps, prays and loves.
The restaging is handled skilfully over 650 pages. Mantel takes few shortcuts. To enable the reader to see a different Thomas Cromwell she concentrates on his interactions with a small circle of key characters. Thomas, like Hamlet, is on stage throughout the book and in these encounters, described by the author from the point of view of an analyst deep within in his brain, we get to understand intimately what Cromwell thinks, believes and feels. Generally this works very well, but it is true that sometimes Mantel’s use of the pronoun ‘he’ in her narrative style confuses and slows down the story.
Thomas Wolsey is the first of Mantel’s instruments of repositioning. Wolsey is Cromwell’s mentor and father figure who has an excellent grasp of people and values Cromwell’s talents as a fixer and negotiator who can bring a muscular rhetoric (or a ‘Cromwellian stare, the equivalent of a kick’) to the task of persuading courtiers to do what Wolsey wants. Wolf Hall is, on one level, the story of Wolsey’s fall, and how Cromwell manages to survive without compromising his sense of loyalty to his mentor. The courtier coalition set against Wolsey allows Mantel to show Thomas Cromwell as a loyal and pugnacious servant who refuses to desert his master even at the end, by which time his own life was in danger. The strategic significance of the Wolsey–Cromwell relationship is further demonstrated in the sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies[viii], which is the story of how Thomas avenges his mentor by destroying the whole faction which had worked to bring Wolsey down.
Thomas More is the other principal character that Mantel deploys to bring about her re-evaluation of Cromwell. Acting as a yin to Cromwell’s yang, Sir Thomas More is Cromwell’s complete intellectual, political and religious complement. In a series of highly charged set pieces, Mantel uses More to put the conventional case against Cromwell. According to More, Cromwell is the Italian/Machiavellian, the heretic/atheist, and the unscrupulous/unprincipled creature of state. In defence of her protagonist, Mantel firstly asks the reader to re-evaluate the character of the prosecutor, Thomas More. In her telling of the story, More is no saintly liberal but an elitist bigot with a merciless intolerance for religious debate and a dark suit of cruelty. He is also shown to have a very bizarre set of family relationships. Then, in a series of debates between the two, she shows Cromwell arguing to maintain good order in the realm by the avoidance of war and all forms of religious extremism. In her portrayal, Mantel is drawing upon an important contemporary concept coined during religious wars in France: the idea of the politique[ix]. A politique was someone who put peace and balance in the commonwealth above religious faction. Mantel’s Cromwell is much more of a pragmatic politique than either a scheming Machiavellian or a religious fundamentalist.
Famous for creating encyclopaedic fact-bases for her books, whether lists of who-was-where-when, or what were hot contemporary fashions in food, dress and sex, Mantel uses an armoury of historical fact to build the case for Cromwell. After the book’s climax — the death of More — while Cromwell and Rafe are sharing a brief moment of decompression and discussing the detailed calendar of the next royal itinerary, Cromwell once again shows his humanity:
‘I seem to have four, five days in hand. Ah well. Who says I never get a holiday?’
Without any visible compromise to history, Mantel has been able to paint a compelling emotional narrative over an incontrovertible factual framework and chronology, with Cromwell at the centre. A similar sentiment was expressed by Sarah Dunant in her 2013 lecture:
‘Why should you make it up when history gives it to you?’[x]
In another Brookes lecture, Rebecca Abrams[xi] talked of the ‘Tudor history feeding frenzy’ and the current popularity of Tudor fiction. So, how does Mantel compare with other writers? CJ Sansom is one of the most well-respected writers to use the period. He writes well-crafted, carefully researched stories that mix historical fiction with crime. Sansom’s Cromwell[xii] plays more to the conventional stereotype and we see him blackmailing Sansom’s hero, the hunchback lawyer Shardlake, into undertaking various investigations. The setting is clearly Reformation London, and the time is 1529. In contrast, however, Mantel speaks to us as if it were London 2009 as well. There is a timeless quality to the writing and the book is rich in Cromwell quips, comments and one-liners that are absolutely true to the time but just as relevant today. Here is Wolsey speaking like an irritated CEO to a senior member of his board:
‘Thomas, what can I give you to persuade you never to mention this to me again? Find a way, just do it.’
Cromwell is Wolsey’s ‘man of business’, and speaks with a corporate lawyer’s voice. Here Cromwell is advising Wolsey on how to persuade Boleyn to allow his second daughter to follow the first into becoming a royal mistress:
‘Boleyn is not rich,’ he says. ‘I’d get him in. Cost it out for him. The credit side. The debit side.’
Thomas’ speeches are especially important at key moments of crisis in the narrative, such as the series of Cromwell/More confrontations, in which Cromwell desperately tries to get More to toe the party line. As these interactions reach their deadly denouement, Mantel swaps the Inns of Court banter of the early exchanges for longer, more oratorical and passionate speeches, where every debating trick is played. As Audley, the Lord Chancellor, says at the end of one attempt, ‘we won’t do better than that.’ And they didn’t. To the end, Mantel’s More remains superior, controlled and unassailable, and we sense that this is both a cause of genuine regret for Cromwell and his biggest failure.
In this exhaustive exercise in reappraisal, Mantel has one more repositioning trick to play: Cromwell tells Rafe to make sure that More’s daughter gets her father’s head from the London Bridge spike. This small act of kindness provides an illuminating contrast of the family values of these two Tudor giants and a final step in Mantel’s case history in repositioning.
Bibliography:
Bolt, Robert (1960) A Man For All Seasons
Burroway, Janet (2003) Imaginative Writing. Longman
Professor Mark Horowitz, review of The many faces of Thomas Cromwell, (review no. 1168) URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1168; Date accessed: 14 March, 2013
Hutchinson, Robert (2007) The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister. Phoenix
Knecht, RJ (1996) The French Wars of Religion 1559-1598. Longman
Lukeham, Noah (2010) The First Five Pages Oxford
Mantel, Hilary (2009) Wolf Hall. Fourth Estate
Mantel, Hilary (2012) Bring up the Bodies. Fourth Estate
May, Stephen (2010) Get Started in Creative Writing. Teach Yourself
Pinker, Steven (2007) The Stuff of Thought. Penguin
Ries, A and Trout, J (2001) Positioning. McGraw-Hill
Ridley, Jasper (1982) Statesman and Saint. Viking
Sansom, CJ (2003) Dissolution. Viking
Schama, Simon (2000) A History Of Britain. BBC
Scholfield, John (2008) The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell: Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant. History Press
Thorpe, Adam (1992) Ulverton. Secker and Warburg
[i] Ries, A. and Trout, J. (2001), Positioning. McGraw-Hill
[ii] Chesterton, G.K., Heretics quoted in May, Stephen (2010) Get Started in Creative Writing. Teach Yourself
[iii] Hutchinson, Robert (2007) The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister. Phoenix
[iv] Bolt, Robert (1960) A Man For All Seasons is a typical example
[v] Schama, Simon (2000) A History of Britain. BBC
[vi] Scholfield, John (2008) The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell: Henry VIII’s Most
Faithful Servant. History Press
[vii] Pinker, Steven (2007) The Stuff of Thought. Penguin, page 243
[viii] Mantel, Hilary (2012) Bring up the Bodies. Fourth Estate
[ix] For a definition, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politique and Knecht, RJ (1996) The French Wars of Religion 1559-1598. Longman
[x] Dunant, Sarah, Oxford Brookes guest lecture 2013. The author’s own notes.
[xi] Abrams, Rebecca, Oxford Brookes guest lecture 2012. The author’s own notes.
[xii] Sansom, CJ (2003) Dissolution. Viking
17 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in Poetry
Tags
For Natalie and BP
The light.
The gauge.
The night.
The green.
The white.
The lane.
The pump.
The hose.
The fuel.
The shut.
The walk.
The shelves.
The meal.
The bean.
The card.
The chip.
The face.
The smile.
The belt.
The stop.
The fuller stop.
17 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in Fiction
Tags
It is 2051 – and a very different England.
Following a cataclysmic financial meltdown in the early 2020s, the country has disintegrated into The Pale – poor wastelands where the only jobs are in soul-less Gozoan1 fulfillment sheds – and the mega-city of London, dominated by Historyland, a giant theme park built to entertain swarms of affluent Chinese and Indian tourists.
This is where Rob Lyttleton, a geeky young history PhD from the provinces, has just arrived for his first ever job as Historian-in-Residence. With a somewhat over-enthusiastic interest in the English Civil War, his authenticity obsession soon brings him into conflict with the park’s Disney-Las Vegas way of staging historical spectacles.
Things will go a bit awry, but he does get to meet some interesting women and in this extract, he meets the one who will change his life.
Orientation
Rob had been dozing for hours when his messager alarm sounded at 7.30 a.m. His room had been so warm that he’d thrown off the duvet after waking up in a horrible sweat. At home in Armitage, once famous for its lavatory porcelain, the room he shared with his brother Seb had no heating apart from that provided by Thucydides, the family cat, and the electricity was intermittent and unreliable.
He jumped out of bed and started to perform a number of pike-man lunges as specified in the Bagot’s Regiment of Foote training manual. Rob had learned the hard way that handling an ash pole eighteen feet long required stamina and fitness. Stretching enthusiastically, he tapped the messager screen and mirrored it to the huge vistel display on the wall of his room. A Consortium news briefing was being streamed.
‘A truce has been called today by Russia and the Ukraine in their conflict over water supply. Meanwhile Princess Diana and her husband Alexey have returned from a working holiday in Shanghai and will be hosting a royal garden party later today for Historyland competition winners.’
He had seen enough and tried to switch channel.
‘Can I help you with something, Rob Lyttleton?’ said a female voice that took him by surprise. ‘Rob, I’m here, on the display. May I give you a simple advice? Just ask me something and I will do what I can to assist you.’
The voice belonged to a near-full-size avatar of a woman whom Rob estimated was supposed to be aged about twenty-five.
‘Well, you could start with your name, I suppose.’
‘My name is Alicia Zachary. I am your in-room assistant and IT valet. I am configured by default to be friendly, straightforward and submissive. Is that to your liking? Other personality archetypes are available to download.’
‘I see. Okay, we shall talk about this later, Alicia, but for now can you give me an idea of the weather outside, please?’
‘Absolutely, Rob Lyttleton. We are blessed with a dry, sunny day but it will be very cold, and out of the sun you may need a scarf and hand-wear. May I also recommend for your short walk to Historyland HQ a place to stop off for a breakfast pause?’
‘No thank you, Alicia; I’m sure I’ll find my own way to breakfast!’, and muttered to himself: ‘Breakfast pause and hand-wear indeed!’ as he headed towards the bathroom.
Moments later, Rob was revelling in the heat of the shower and, afterwards, feeling terrific, was even beginning to think that the shoddy Puritans–in-Prada extravaganza he’d witnessed the previous night perhaps wasn’t all that bad.
Exactly as Alicia suggested, it was a marvellously crisp and sunny November morning. Walking first through the Cast Zone, there were American Indians eating sushi with Roman gladiators. Egyptian New Kingdom medjay warriors were limbering up with a Historyland fitness trainer. In the Grand Piazza, with its arcaded forums, guest families were taking breakfast and checking Tabs. All routes in Historyland were named after the great ruling families of England, and Rob followed the Plantagenet red route to the HQ building where he was to receive his Historyland 101 induction. From the exterior Rob thought Historyland HQ, with its chimneys, turrets, and crenellations, was like Hampton Court. Inside, was a vibrant lobby with cafe bar, ticket office and waiting area. He walked over to the reception desk to check in. The receptionist was a friendly but formidable woman in her late forties. Her holobadge bore the name Prudence Pieton.
‘Good morning. My name is Rob Lyttleton,’ he told her. ‘I’m a new Cast member. I’ve come for my orientation session.’
‘Thank you, Dr Lyttleton. I see from today’s blogdate that you are our new Historian-in-Residence?’
Rob nodded.
‘Welcome. I’m sure you will find it very interesting to work here. Please take a seat over there; your group will be called very soon.’
Rob waited nervously, and was beginning to regret his decision to ignore Alicia’s breakfast suggestions. Then, as if taken in some bold ambuscade, his attention was captured – no, stormed and overwhelmed completely – by the young woman he saw walking towards the elevator.
It was the copper hair and cobalt eyes, then the freckles, and that scarf poised so elegantly. He didn’t know about scarves but it looked expensive and was a proper Roundhead orange; happily, he thought, the rest of her uniform said Cavalier. Under her arm she carried a messager cased in bronze. He also noticed her delicate ivory hands with nails the colour of fresh lime. Then the elevator door closed and she was gone.
He was still thinking about her when a lobby announcement told him to make his way to the Livingston room on the first floor. It was time to be inducted.
1 The monolithic company formed by the merger of Google and Amazon
17 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Money in, money out;
In and out,
Our accounts,
Back and forth,
This and that
Big respect,
Community,
Newbury.
Bottom drawers,
Retirement dreams
Passbook smiles,
Tip top rates,
Telling you straight.
Money in, money out;
In and out,
All accounts
Back and forth,
This and that
Big respect,
Community,
Newbury
Bottom rung,
All mod cons;
Front and back,
Up and down,
Spick and span
Mortgage rate,
Talking straight.
Money in, money out;
In and out,
All accounts
Back and forth,
This and that
Big respect,
Community,
Newbury.
Respect!
17 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in Poetry
Tags
There is a field in Northern parts
Where root vegetables grow strong,
Against Peak winds and cold,
And at the harvest moon, stand resolute
And welcome the immortality that
Follows swimming in the brine,
To winter in more acidic climes.
And when the summer summons comes
(Their world thus now ajar),
They charge to spike the maiden salad
Like some Brontëan ravisher
At the wedding feast who cries:
‘Unleash the bulldog,
And cry Great Branston!’
16 Thursday Jan 2014
Posted in Poetry
Tags
(For Mulberry and for Bex)
A bag is a bag
Is a receptacle, a container
Of leather, plastic, cloth or paper,
Capable of being closed at the mouth.
It started with the Viking bagge you pack your pillage in,
Became Burglar Bill’s over-the-shoulder swag,
Or the brown bag of moonshine to drink under the stars;
Or the place where late the cat was waiting patiently to exit
Or frankly a mixed one of curate’s eggs,
Rucked, duffelled and toted.
Don’t forget that bag of bones, the woman who’s just gotta have Alexa,
The It-Bag apparently,
(So my sources tell me,
Unless it was a typo and actually she said ‘kit bag’)
And if any wanted proof of our baggage bonkersness
And the sublime triumph of irrationality in human behaviour,
Let them visit Mulberry.
But afterwards, watch out for an unexpected Bayswater[1] in the bagging area.
[1] The Classic Mulberry bag, a snip at £795
16 Thursday Jan 2014
Tags
We had finished the workshop early. A combination of physical and intellectual exhaustion and the mind focussing anxiety of a long haul flight back to various cities in Europe had at last achieved, amongst our dysfunctional clients, a calm consensus tinged with just a little smugness.
As flip charts were being numbered, folded and placed in art bags and the flotsam and jetsam of the product stimulus stored in captains’ bags, the mood of my colleagues was lifted by the prospect of a weekend in Manhattan, shopping halls bedecked and dressed as only Manhattan at Christmas knows how
Thanking my colleagues for their efforts and great enthusiasm in the face of some highly uninspiring clients and some chippy agency folk, I let them know that it was now officially the weekend and the real fun could commence. I suggested cocktails at the Pen Top Bar at seven o’clock, giving my colleagues three of hours of free time – but not necessarily cheap given the exchange rate!
I left the Agency where our 3 – day workshop had been held, and headed up Madison. I was immediately hit by the full multi-sensory package of a Friday afternoon in Midtown on a holiday afternoon in December.
The last splodge of blue sky was fading now; the air was cold and smelled of the usual mix of pretzel salt, roasted chestnuts and automobile exhaust fumes. The soundscape was dominated by the noise of gridlocked cars, the whistles of NYPD traffic wardens, charity bell ringers and the claptrap of pedestrians walking in that focussed way to wherever it was that they were going. I was making for 5th Avenue and St Thomas’, where I was hoping to catch one of the services.
I knew the calming quiet of the stone and the beauty of the canticles would transform my spirits and restore my energies for what lay ahead when I would be meeting the team intent upon some serious R&R.
I was walking westwards along 45th, when temptation suddenly presented itself in the shape of Saks Fifth Avenue. Since we creative types in marketing don’t wear ties anymore, finding interesting ways to differentiate ourselves and reveal character is an important business task and not just a matter of personal vanity. I knew that Saks had an excellent range of stripy socks.
The side entrance took me to a small treasure house display of leather and jewels, and from there I found myself in the fragrant bling of the ground floor, a shrine to the industry of beauty. I took the elevator to the men’s designer gallery on 7th, and as its doors opened, I started scanning the scene with a strategic shopper’s eye.
No more than 10 minutes later, I had handed over my credit card and paid and was now carrying a seasonal Saks shopping bag containing numerous pairs of socks, a silk handkerchief and a woollen hat and scarf. The sugar rush from shopping had revitalised me. But I also needed to visit the toilet. Moments later, I was back at the elevator just to the right of what Saks called the Men’s Lounge. The door opened and I walked in
The car was empty apart from a random Father Christmas figure who looked straight out of central casting
‘Hello Santa’ I said, emboldened by my impulse purchasing success.
He turned and smiled and said:
‘And you are an advertising man, are you not?’
Well, I was carrying a small art bag, so I suppose this was an easy guess to make; and I was indeed an ex –adman. But I had long since given up trying to explain the difference between an adman and the tricky concept of a brand consultant.
Before I could answer he said,
‘Do you handle charity accounts, what I believe you call, not for profit- services which have a social value?’
I nodded slowly as if he were a Santa of limited intelligence
‘Well please take a look at this and see if your Agency would like to work with me….’
He handed me a small carefully wrapped, Christmas gift with a rather formal envelope…
‘People don’t seem to believe in Father Christmas anymore and maybe, your group could help change that…’
The elevator door opened at the second floor, and looking at me fervently, he said,
‘Take a look and if you are interested, come and talk some more tomorrow- you’ll find me in my workshop on the eleventh floor’ and then he was gone.
The doors closed, and seconds later I was walking up 5th Avenue towards St Thomas’ and Choral Evensong.
Later, much later that evening in the banter of post workshop cocktails, I told my colleagues about my meeting with Santa, and we started to come up with all sorts of ideas about how we could reposition Santa, and as Martini followed Martini, the ideas naturally became sillier.
The following morning, after a couple of false starts, I got up and found the small parcel. I opened it to find it was a small book entitled The Gift. I flicked through about a hundred pages of fairly dense text and then opened the envelope. Inside was an elegant Carte de visite, bearing the name Nicholas Myra with a 5th Avenue address. There was also a small piece of text on it, which looked like a Latin quotation:
‘Quas dederis solas semper habebis opes’
A rapid search on my IPhone showed this to be one of the epigrams written by Martial the Latin author, and a very liberal translation of the line would be:
‘You only truly own what you give away’
So not a bad motto for this Santa with a penchant for Latin tags, I thought, but let’s find out exactly what he was offering me.
After coffee, and a re-invigorating walk in the park, I walked down 5th back to Saks.
The Christmas multitude was already gathering and I had to push my way through the crowd at St Patricks back into the ground floor hall. I made for the bank of elevators and was able to slide into the last place in a car. I turned and looked at the floor plan and noticed there was no 11th floor. I’ll take the 10th I thought to myself and find a staircase.
The door opened and I appeared to be in the administrative area where I was met by the gaze of a friendly but rather formal senior Associate
‘Can I help you, Sir?’
‘I’ve been invited to a meeting with one of your colleagues on the 11th floor’
‘We have no 11th floor, sir…’
‘But I met your Santa yesterday and he invited me a meeting at his workshop on the 11th floor- here’s his card…’
She looked at the card, there was pause and then she said slowly and earnestly
‘We have no 11th floor; we have no Santa Associate. This is Saks Fifth Avenue, sir, perhaps you have us confused with Macy’s?’
‘But I met him yesterday- please look at the card…’
‘Sir, can I get you a glass of water?’
I demurred and retreated back to the elevator…I looked down at the card, there was no name, no address, and there was no longer any Latin words to be seen…but there was a short sentence in English:
‘What you give of yourself shall alone remain as your permanent riches. Good will to all men, Happy Christmas!’
I stood there for a few moments and then I began to smile.
I was still smiling as I walked out of Saks and into the fast flowing sea of festive people on 5th, and in the distance, I could hear a carillon playing Santa Claus is coming into town.
16 Thursday Jan 2014
Posted in Fiction
Tags
So, you want me to tell you what my hidden talent is. In a story, just like at school? Oh, blimey, I’ve not had not had a job interview like this before! Well OK then. My name is Dianna, but my friends call me Di, and I was born twenty four years ago in Buenos Aires to a German father and an English mother. Dad travelled a lot for work and I went to a boarding school in England: a bit jolly hockey-sticks, like Mallory Towers really. As I had no brothers and sisters, my school friends like Lottie and George became my family. Lottie is now my flat-mate and all meet three of us meet up every week. At the moment I’m working as a secretary in another advertising agency in Soho called Spark. It’s always pretty crazy and sometimes quite hard work, but full of such lovely peeps. Now, I ‘d better get back to your question: my greatest hidden talent, and by the way I promise you I am not playing for time waiting for inspiration – really! But I’d like to show rather than just tell you about it. It’s just that sometimes, you can’t display psychic ability on demand. Yeah, that’s right. I have a gift – don’t laugh please- I’m serious. Actually I am not sure that gift is the right word for it. I first discovered I could do it it at school one evening, larking about with the girls. I was about fourteen and we all were writing letters home to our parents in our study. It wasn’t anything like a séance, and there wasn’t a Ouija board in sight but all of sudden I just started to write down what other people were saying to me in my head. Lottie and George freaked out a bit and looking back I suppose it was a bit scary at first but I’ve got used to it- well mostly. The strange bit is how my handwriting just changes as different people talk to me. When it happens, I don’t know I’m doing it or what I’m writing. Sometimes I need to, need to, need …Queen, queen, queen and two jacks a-shagging. What did he have? Aces? That’s absolute shit, and he knew it, the Toe-rag! A prial of dames and a couple of jacks always beats three aces, so I told him to just leave that pot to me. I said to him, ‘Sunshine, are you going to find some more money or do you want call it a day? He shook his head and it told me he wanted to settle, which was just as well because the artillery fire was getting closer. ‘Well, that’s ok with me, Tosh,’ I told him ‘there’s not much time for us to get away before one of Nasser’s tanks puts a very large one up our rear end, eh Sarge?’ Shit, that was bloody close, c’mon my lovely ladies, it’s time for you to get back into your little box and we need to, need to …So Mr. Adman, you’re probably thinking my friend Dianna is either a fraud taking the piss or raving bonkers. Now, isn’t that right? But all is never what it quite seems in this world, is it? Take you, Mr Adman Interviewer. All your friends marvel at your marriage, they think that you and Caroline, the domestic Goddess of Notting Hill, are brilliantly matched; you’re so happy and so lucky to have met the love of your life. Whilst you might – like most men, of course – admit to looking around occasionally, and we both know how much you like looking, you’d never touch, would you? Isn’t that right, Mr Huckster-Fuckster? Or is that just another load of the wishful thinking bollocks you sell to your dickhead clients? Well, as it’s a kind of party, it’s now time for me to show you my little magic trick – and do watch out for the modest little coup de théâtre that’s coming very soon. So Mr. Adman and HR Big Cheese, I bring good news and bad news. The good news, Liebling is that the love of your life’s name does indeed begin with the letter ‘C’. Phew, that’s good you’re thinking, whether or not you actually believe it. But the bad news, my friend, is that the love of your life is not the C for Caroline whose arse you’ve been banging for years but someone you haven’t even met, well not quite yet. Incroyable, monsieur, ne c’est pas? But I can see that I do have your full attention now, because deep down in that lightweight mind of yours in the perfectly formed strong-room where your darkest secrets are kept, there’s a note to self you wrote which says ‘she’s not the answer’. So who is, you want to know. Let’s make this a little interactive now, shall we? Here’s a question for you. Have you read any Shakespeare or was that not available as an option on your polytechnic marketing course? Thought so. Well – and cue cheesy fanfare! – from today set your security alerts to watch for a lady whose name consists of three vowels, AEI, and two consonants, CL. Oh, you’re very quick, you’re very good! That’s right, the voice in your head is correct; the answer is ‘Celia’- A lady called Celia is going to suddenly appear and turn your life upside down. So we do need to talk about Celia, chum, except that is, to Caroline, your charming little hausfrau of a wife. But only if you believe the scribblings of my posh totty friend and associate, Dianna, who I can always rely on to be my mouthpiece or should I say wrist? So how did she do, Mr. Adman, has she got the job? It is quite a talent isn’t it? You need to, need to…
* Automatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer claims to be produced from a subconscious, and/or external and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content. Lewis Spence An Encyclopaedia of Occultism Dover Edition, 2003, p. 56
Flotsam and Jetsam 