Writer's Block

Killer Mine

I have found myself reading The Killer Mine by Hammond Innes and The Island of Sheep by John Buchan in tandom. The Hammond Innes book was found in a bus Depot and liberated so as to lighten the journey. It didn't very much. The Island of Sheep is the last of the tales of Richard Hannay, famed for his adventures in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Even in one of the lesser known Richard Hannay novels the prose is elegant and the plotting clever. Reading Hammond Innes makes me want to find him a good editor. Sadly I suspect that today Hammond Innes sells a lot more books than John Buchan - well he would wouldn't he?

I am still writing online articles to drive traffic to my website. I am beginning to find that there is a limited amount one can say about senior health and fitness.

Early Church

I am hugely enjoying Henry Chadwisk's The Early Church. There are so many hilarious moments. Consider the choosing of a bishop on one occasion.. There were several candidates, the relative virtues of each were discussed at length, but no clear front runner emerged. Then, behold, a bird flew down and landed on the head of one man. A sign! The bishop was chosen and all lived happily ever afterwards. To my knowledge he was never asked if he had crumbs in his pocket. But of course if that was the case the most intelligent and pragmatic of the candidates was indeed chosen.

My real hero is another bishop who was greatly loved by sailors and young women. For the sailors he wrote theological sea shanties. It is not recorded what he wrote for the young women.

I spend my time writing articles to promote my website. Not only is it boring, it is having a devastating effect on the remains of my literary style. But it is all in a good cause. Probably.

Man Booker

I observe that my local Border's has just two copies of The White Tiger, the rather good Man Booker winner, on show with a minimal publicity card. They sit on the 'just out' table overshadowed by 2009 calendars. This suggests that the publishers is not prepared to pay the outrageous fees charged by bookshop chains to promote a book. Good for them, I say. The Man Booker prize winner doesn't really need to be in the middle of a window display with a printed handwritten card saying Manager's Choice.

My new website http://www.seniorwalkingfitnessblog.com is now complete and will just be updated regularly if I can think of anything useful to write. Amazingly I'm making a few dollars a day from it already, and it is getting very little traffic. When I can push more traffic to the site (not very difficult) it will keep me in Caffe Nero skinny latte. I suspect that it won't pay for the long awaited trip to Alexandria, but who knows.

As a rest from opaque novels I am reading The Early Church by the mega erudite Professor Henry Chadwick. The true story of the early church makes The Life of Brian look serious and accurate.

Christmas

My Christmas in Cambridge article went off to the magazine, later than I had hoped but sent none-the-less. The editor was very nice about my effort and asked if I had a photo of Cambridge to go with it. 'No, but I'll pop over and take a few, no trouble at all,' I said. That was before she told me her deadline was the next day. So there I was rushing about Cambridge, like a Japanese tourist on roller-blades, photographing anything that didn't move too fast. Amazingly I was able to send off three quite good photos on time. I think I have earned some Brownie points at long last.

I have finished The Honorable Schoolboy. Having been obscure all the way through the plot became predictable and a little weak at the end. I can't help feeling the book was a bit of a potboiler. Which is rather an unkind thing to say about the second of the three great Smiley novels.

Booker

I see that the Man Booker Prize winner has been named and political correctness is alive and well. From an exert I have read The White Tiger is rather good and I wish Aravind Adiga every success. In fact I may well save up and buy a copy. Something I seldom do with Man Booker winners. I have very nearly finished John le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy, a crossword puzzle of a book if ever there was one. It did hold my interest for 400 pages and the descriptive passages about wartime Laos are brilliant. But 30 pages from the end I am still as confused as ever. Maybe that was the idea.

My new website is now online in all its moderate glory. The idea is to test a marketing niche for Senior Walking products. If nobody stops by to take a look we try something else. So those of you in your prime and who fancy a bit of Senior Walking check out http://www.seniorwalkingfitnessblog.com

I have finished the first draft of Christmas in Cambridge and am working on several other articles to promote Senior Walking. Busy, busy, busy.

Paris

Just back from Paris, hence the hiatus. Nothing much happened there apart from rain and wind exported from the UK.

I am now on page 430 of John le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy and something is starting to happen. What exactly it is will, no doubt, be revealed...slowly.

I have been asked by good old Dimdima Magazine to write a Christmas article about Cambridge, so I am trying to think of what happens in Cambridge at Christmas. It is tempting to do a John le Carre and spend the first ten thousand words describing a traffic jam. Dimdima is also publishing my story Beyond the Harbour Wall in November.

My website is going ever more slowly, I am supposed to have it up and running in thirty days, but that is not going to happen due to poor online teaching. Most of the time I am working on the edge of human understanding.

Branagh

Kenneth Branagh was excellent in Ivanov although he was not exactly stretched in the part. Anyway it was excellent that I saw the great man perform, having missed most of the best actors of the previous generation through inertia and poverty. The programme had an advertisement for the RSC at Wilton's Music Hall in East London This is apparently the oldest music hall there is and dates from 1850. Champagne Charlie played there. It is semi derelict. Go see it before a benevolent council pulls it down to build affordable homes.

My pain with my new website continues. I managed a link to an affiliate sales advertisement. I was celebrating by linking an article to Clickbank, clicked the wrong button and now have the web hoster's dashboard on my own website. I am scared to click delete in case everything vanishes. It would be nice to have a real person holding my hand on this project. To be positive, I am learning what not to do. In fact that's most of what I have learnt.

Mega Stress

It seemed such a good idea at the time to build my own website. The online course only lasted thirty days, with a lesson a day, and at the end of it I would have a website selling affiliate products while I slept. Rags to riches in thirty days; Alexandria here I come I thought. It is not quite that easy. I have now received sixteen lessons, but sadly am stuck on lesson six. To my surprise I was able to download an affiliates advertisement and put it on the website I had just built. Hooray!! But then I found that when I clicked on the words CLICK HERE to go to my affiliates sales page I went in a circle and finished up at my own website minus the text. This, the ultimate in a non sales campaign, is quite an achievement in its way. At present the problem cannot be solved.

As you will know by now the Man Booker shortlist was announced a week or so ago. The six lucky finalists, whom you have of course heard of, are: Aravind Adiga(India), Sebastian Barry(Ireland), Amita Ghosh(India), Linda Grant(UK), Philip Hensher(UK), Steve Toltz(Australia). Which only goes to show how international good writing can be and how, by pure chance, this resulted in a politically correct shortlist.

Rip-Off

I was looking forward to seeing David Tennant and Patrick Stewart in Hamlet. Tickets were on sale on 12 September ( I didn't mention this due to diplomatic amnesia). So promptly at 9.30 am - London opening time for almost everything - I checked the theatre's website. Sold out, would you believe. So Plan B, try the agencies. Hooray, tickets were available - singles, minimum price £220 each. I subsequently learned that tickets sold out everywhere in three hours. The following day pairs were changing hands at £1100. Now David Tennant is a fine actor, and Patrick Stewart is as fine, if not finer.This may well be the best Hamlet for some years, but who with any common sense would pay the price of a perfectly good, if rather old, Ford Fiesta for two tickets? To me this was a rip-off fueled by media hype.

On the rebound and muttering about undeserving Russian oligarchs and politicians impressing their secretaries, I carried on surfing theatres and found Kenneth Branagh playing Ivanov. Now he is arguably the best classical actor of his generation (check out Henry V) and worth big bucks. I bought tickets in the stalls for £36 each. Now that is really good value.

Here We Go Again

I have just bought tickets for a talk by John le Carre in London. It may be an opportunity to ask him why it takes 160 pages of introduction in The Honourable Schoolboy before something happens. The answer may be that, if it is so annoying, why am I still reading the book?

The amazing David Tennant and Patrick Stewart Hamlet opens in London in December. It is remarkable that Dr Who can play Hamlet so well (we are told), but then perhaps he met him once.

My own efforts with Alexandria are getting into a routine and I'm writing a couple of pages a day. I think I have done about 3000 words, only 32,000 to go.

Back to Work

Now that the Olympics are over (hooray I hear you cry), and the Alonah Reading Cambridge is up and running as fast as it will ever be, I am picking up the literary pieces from some months ago. I hope I have recorded everything as I have forgotten the cunning plot twist of Alexandria Part Two. Anyway at present I can spend time sorting out a really bad bit in Draft one, Chapter four. In a moment of mild inspiration I found Alexandria on Google Earth and zoomed around the city and along the coast. It was all rather useful background.

I am reading John le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy which is very elegantly written and plotted. Being John le Carre he has reached page eighty and has only just finished introducing the characters and back story. At times he makes James Joyce seem an easy read, but something will happen soon, I just know it will.

I re-read a short story I wrote last year for American Radio. It couldn't find a home because Americans don't understand irony. But after this lapse in time it seemed rather good, so I'm sending it off again on the rounds of publisher's waste paper baskets. I also broke a New Year's Resolution and entered it for a competition, probably a bad move.

Unrepentant

Okay, I know, I got the number of Olympic medals wrong. What really hurts is that a politician got it right. But wait, the thrust of my argument was correct. Team GB( Middle Classes) did an amazing job, with a small hiccup from the Equestrians due entirely to under par horses. With a few exceptions (one of whom arguably should not have been allowed to compete) Team GB(the rest) did their usual shambles. We had men's relay (disqualified), women's relay (dropped baton), BMX - not a real cycling event, so very much the rest - (fell off), triple jump ( dramatic failure at last jump) and so on and so on. The result, at the time of writing, looks like dropping us to fourth behind the Ruskies in the medal table. So instead of the good old National Anthem we will hear the new Russian anthem instead, While We Were Marching Through Georgia.

No doubt much will be explained afterwards, but a few questions are raised. Take running as just one example. Blacks are great and respected runners, so their success at the major events was expected. And good luck to the amazing Jamaican squad which, I think, had nearly forty runners in it, one of whom is now the fastest man on the planet. But the black population of Jamaica is only twice the black population of the UK, they did brilliantly, we had small success ( one of whom arguably should not have been allowed to compete). We should really do something about Team GB(the rest) before 2012, or spend the money allocated to them on some boats and a couple of good horses.

Training

What is a train station? Since trains were invented they have stopped and started from railway stations, but now we have train stations. Today I heard it used on Miss Marples, by Miss Marples would you believe. It only goes to show how far the stories have deteriorated since boy writers began writing them for television. If television ever gave up reality programmes I would expect to hear the appalling words in some boy writer's revised version of Hamlet.

Our updated Alonah Reading Cambridge website is nearly up and running. All I have to do is get my web-builder chap to provide an auto -responder and we're there. Sadly he is finding that task very difficult. I have no idea why and he seems reluctant to tell me, which only reinforces my lifetime motto. 'If you want anything done properly do it yourself.'

I am carefully watching the Olympic Team GB medal tally. The experts tell us thirty five are expected. A politician forecast forty two, but that was based on the usual political mixture of hubris and ignorance so should be discounted. I fear for the thirty five medal tally.At the time of writing Team GB(Middle Classes) have done really well in Equestrianism, Water Sports and Cycling . Now we must depend on Team GB(The Rest). Could we be heading for the usual embarrassing disaster. I will be delighted to be proved wrong.

In Our Prime

As we know, our peoples' Government is determined to concrete over Southern England in order to provide affordable homes for teenage single parents, who will then vote for it out of gratitude. But sadly the economy is about to collapse due to ten years of living beyond our means and a nudge from the sub-prime market.

Meanwhile Kevin Loadsamoney, CEO of Mega Construction plc, sits in his office on the twentieth floor of a glass and steel ego trip by Norman Foster in South London. Through drifting cigar smoke (smoke alarm illegally turned off) he spots the quarterly profit returns of Mega Construction(House Building) plc on his computer. The graph looks like the track of a diving gannet. Stirred into action he calls a board meeting and stops all work on newbuild in the private sector. Later he sits in The Ivy, gloomily considering the sale of his Roller and a return to his roots on the Isle of Dogs.Then he perks up. Old money! The country house conversion racket. Must mix with the toffs. Kevin Loadsmoney hurries out muttering, 'If you can't beat 'em join 'em.' He is off to buy the Daily Telegraph and an Old Etonian tie.

On another side of town Tracy Scrubber, sixteen years of age and with a one year old child named Daren, Aeryn and Dave after his possible fathers, is not happy. She was convinced she would get an affordable house, it is her human right to have an affordable house and if she doesn't get one she wants compensation. For the moment she is living with her Mum and it isn't working. If she doesn't get a house soon she will be very annoyed indeed and out of spite will vote Tory. Oh dear!

Berlin

We note that the silver tongued Senator Barack Obama in his presidential speech to the adoring people of Berlin did not fall into the John F. Kennedy trap. As is well known, although not to President Kennedy at the time, a Berliner is a type of pastry. Hence when the president said the never to be forgotten words Ich bein Berliner, by a simple slip of the tongue he did not say 'I am a Berliner', but 'I am a fruitcake'. No doubt he was pleased by the cheering of the crowd.

I do hope that Senator Obama does not get too carried away with the John F. Kennedy comparisons. To only just avoid the Third World War and then get shot is probably not a very good role model.

I have been watching with interest the lack of progress on the Cambridge Central Library site. Although it is hard to see what is going on inside, it lacks the usual cheery building noises. Radio 5 Live, offensive whistles at nubile teenagers, sandwich wrappers thrown out of windows and F words were, on my last visit, all sadly lacking. There was the same silence as on all my previous visits since the Grand Arcade opened last spring. Could it be that we are just a heartbeat away from the site being flogged off to ***?

Amazingly I have finished the overhaul of our Alonah Reading Cambridge website. Everything is now off to the grandly named Webmaster, who will in due course send me a mouth watering estimate for the cost of the changes.