Spooks Week: The Creature in the Field

 

My dad, as a little boy, in Poland.

This story really belongs to my lovely late dad. With a different setting and date I've used it in a novel called The Amber Heart, which is available in eBook form, and is about to be published as a paperback. It formed a very useful background to a major turning point in the book. 

But it happened to my father and my grandfather, Wladyslaw, when dad was just about the age in the picture above, so here it is. 

Dad came from what was then Eastern Poland and is now Ukraine. He was born and spent his childhood on the family estate in a place called Dziedzilow, now Didyliv. You can look at the village on Google's street view and find that it isn't much changed. It's rural, rolling agricultural countryside. Winters were hard with plenty of snow, and the family used sleighs to get about. But this story happened in late autumn, when the hard frosts had started, but the snow hadn't yet fallen in any quantity.

The two of them were coming back from a visit to a neighbouring house, in a pony trap, a 'droshky' to use the English spelling of a Polish word.  It was a very cold night, darkness had fallen, but there was a full moon. It must have been about 1933 or 34. Dad would have been seven or eight, and my grandfather, twenty nine or thirty. I never knew him, but I know that he was funny, warm, slightly autocratic, and definitely had a wild streak. I'm currently writing a new book about him called The Last Lancer.

They were passing a lonely field in which there were big heaps of manure, left there for the frosts of winter to break them up, when in the moonlight, they spotted what can only be described as a creature, on the other side of the field. It was child sized, dad said, but somehow it didn't have the look of a child. 

Not at all. 

Wladyslaw drew the trap to a halt and they watched, fascinated. The creature was leaping up onto each heap of manure and - as my dad described it - bending backwards and forwards like a coiled spring. He said it looked like an impossible contortion. Worse, as it bent backwards, it cried out 'hehee!' and as it bent forwards, it called 'hahaa!'. The sound, comical and sinister at the same time, echoed through the night. 

Wladyslaw - and this seems like exactly the kind of thing the man I have come to know and love would have done - stood up in his seat, cupped his hands, and shouted 'hehee, hahaa' in the general direction of the creature. 

It heard. It paused and turned its head in their direction. It looked, said my dad later, horribly grotesque and uncanny. Especially when it began to head rapidly towards them, leaping on manure heaps, coiling and uncoiling itself as it came.

'What happened?' I asked.

'My father sat down, whipped up the horse and we never stopped or looked back till we were safe and sound at home,' he said, with a grin. 

Nothing followed them. My dad was a scientist who didn't really believe in the supernatural. But he remembered exactly what they had seen, and could never find a wholly satisfactory explanation. Can you? 

Spooks Week: A Village Ghost

 

The Glebe in spring

This is the first of a few spooky - and mostly TRUE - stories, for the week before Hallowe'en. Feel free to add your own true ghost stories in the comments. 

Many years ago - although it seems like yesterday - we looked after my parents' dog while they were away in Vienna. Dad spent a couple of years working at the International Atomic Energy Commission there, before his retirement. I would walk the dog in the morning and afternoon, usually taking her up one of the roads out of the village. She had a particular tree that she liked to get to before turning for home again. 

It was autumn, just about this time of year, and not-quite-twilight when we were heading for home together, passing the field that you can just see in the photograph above, the Glebe, that used to belong to the old manse. It's very much a part of the village, with a low wall, and a driveway leading into old and new manses. The dog was a rescue dog with a very sweet nature. 

We were walking along the pavement and a fine drizzle had started, when I saw an elderly gentleman on the other side of the road, standing up against the wall in the picture. He wasn't unwell or anything. Just standing looking over the wall. 

Because this is a village where people are friendly and the road was empty and quiet,  I began to cross over, to speak to him. The odd thing was that the dog crossed over before I did. She tugged me across in his direction, pulling on her lead, so she clearly saw him too. 

When I got there - seconds later - he disappeared. 

He disappeared as swiftly and suddenly as a picture disappears when you switch off the television. It was so odd and so unexpected that I found myself looking over the wall, which was ridiculous, because it's not a high wall, and even walking the few yards back to the manse entrance, peering around the length of the wall, just to make sure nobody had bobbed down on the other side. The dog looked confused as well. She wagged her tail and looked up at me. 

There was nobody there at all. 

When I got home, slightly bemused, I told my husband, describing what I'd seen. 

'I think you've seen Jock,' he said.

Jock McBlane was the village chimney-sweep, general handyman and elder of the kirk. My husband remembered him well although I had never known him. But he knew all there was to know about all the houses in the village, where the drains ran, how the old houses were constructed. A useful person. He always wore white gloves in the kirk. And he liked to walk about the village in the evening, checking that all was well. He once told my husband that ours was one of the most soundly constructed houses in the village. It was built back in 1808, but Jock had definitely done some work here in the intervening period. 

The cafe in our village shop is called Jock's Cafe in his memory. It's situated in the village hall now, but it used to be in the old building that had once been Jock's workshop, over the road. Back when it was a restaurant, one of the previous owners told me that she would often come in in the morning to set up for the day and turn on the radio so that she could hear it in the kitchen, only to have somebody turn it down again. She assumed Jock didn't approve of loud music!

Why I love reading fiction on my Kindle ...

 

Since I publish most of my fiction on paper, as well as in eBook form, it feels a bit heretical to write this, but I read pretty much all of the fiction I read purely for pleasure on my Kindle these days. It's an old, bog standard Paperwhite and it has been going for years now. It is a bit slower than it once was, although switching it on and off again tends to remedy that, but I'm considering asking for a new one for Christmas. 

I don't want anything too complicated though. An upgrade of this one will be fine. I don't really want to browse the internet or get onto social media while I'm reading. In fact it's one of the big attractions of my old Kindle that I can't do that. I can, of course, download a new book as soon as I've finished the most recent one, which is very handy when it comes to those series you gallop through voraciously, desperate to start the next one. Fred Vargas and her brilliant Commissaire Adamsberg novels, for example. I can look up words and even place names, which comes in handy. And I can take and save notes and juggle with the settings to suit myself. But that's really all I need.

I do a lot of my fiction reading late at night. I'm something of an insomniac. I can wake up at 4am, so wide awake that I know it will be impossible to go back to sleep. That's when I pick up my Kindle, set its light very low, and read for an hour or two before eventually falling asleep, and all this without waking my slumbering husband. Not only that but the Kindle will quietly switch itself off when I fall asleep, and it will keep my place for me. Although it does sometimes slide off the bed and wake me up again when it lands with a thud on the carpet. 

But all this involves practical details, and my love for my Kindle involves far more than that. Years ago, when radio drama was in its heyday, somebody pointed out that they loved listening to plays on radio because the pictures were better. And I love reading on my Kindle, especially in the dark, in the middle of the night, because the pictures are definitely better. 

One of the complaints made about eBooks (especially from people with a vested interest in selling paper books, oddly enough) is that people don't remember what they read on an e-reader. I find that the opposite is true. Although I'd admit that it depends on the quality of the book. NVG fiction will just slide away from you, but NVG fiction on paper will do the same thing. 

There is something magical about entering the world of a good book in the middle of the night, in the dark, just you and the words and the world that the writer has created. The pictures are so much better. Sometimes, a book can be so entrancing that I find myself falling asleep and continuing the story in my dreams. You should try it. It's magic. 

Apples - and a Recipe.

 

These are Golden Noble apples from the very old tree at the bottom of our garden. They're cooking apples, but much sweeter than Bramleys, so you don't need to add much sugar. The tree is so old that it's now on a two year cycle. It has a massive crop one year, and then rests up and has only a few the following year. The variety is old as well. As they ripen and mature, they turn a lovely golden colour. 

This year was an apple year. We have made apple pies, apple crumbles and apple scones. We've frozen some for winter. We've given a lot of them away to friends. You're not allowed to leave the house without taking some apples. We've given the small windfalls to a friend with horses - they love them, seemingly. We don't spray the tree, so there are no chemicals on them. The wasps have had a good go at the remaining windfalls, and the birds are doing the same thing. 

Now, most of them are gone, winter's on its way and I'm going to cook the last few. This isn't my favourite time of year. I love the colours that I can see from the window of the room where I work, but I hate the fading light, the way the nights draw in. The only positive thing is that it's easier to batten down the hatches and write. This year, in the sad old UK, with our energy prices rising to crazy levels, I'll be writing all wrapped up in woollies and socks and blankets, and hoping for a less chilly winter. I've got my fiction to keep me warm.

Meanwhile, I make my scones with about 500 grams of self raising flour, a couple of teaspoons of baking powder, a walnut sized lump of butter rubbed in, as many peeled apples as you like chopped into the mixture (lots) and a tablespoonful of sugar. I mix them with home made kefir, but if you haven't got that, buttermilk, or a big dollop of Greek yoghurt mixed with milk, or sour milk - all these will do. I like to add some vanilla essence, but you might prefer cinnamon. Your scone dough should be very soft - just not quite sticky. Better sticky than too dry though. Form into two rounds on a well greased baking tray, make a cross in the middle so that you can pull them apart later, and bake in a medium to hot oven, (about 200C) until well risen, and cooked all through. If you're baking them in big rounds like this, it's about half an hour. If you're making nice little scones, it'll be more like 15 minutes. Cool on a baking tray and eat while they're still warm with lots of butter. They freeze well too. 

Telling Tales

All my writing life, people have been giving me advice. Some of it was solicited, and some of it wasn't. Some was useful and some wasn't.  I once asked an established artist friend if people routinely told her that she ought to make drastic changes to her work, and she looked at me as though I had gone mad. 'No' she said. 'No, they don't!' 

I don't mean skilled editing. A good editor can help you to see the whole wood when you're obsessing about individual trees. I mean the person who tells you to turn your book into the kind of book they would have written themselves, if only they could write. Two different people once told me to cut a third of a novel. The trouble was that one wanted me to cut the first third and one wanted me to cut the last third. 

Neither of them was right, although the book in question certainly needed a lot of pruning. In fact when I did prune it, here there and everywhere, I probably deleted just as much as they had been recommending. But they had gone for the easy option which said more about them than it did about the book. 

Beta Readers worry me. I don't have them, but I worry about other people's reliance on them. Most (although not all) writers want to be read. We're in the business of communicating. And we often have some hypothetical reader in mind. But most of the time, we're writing the kind of book we want to read ourselves, telling the stories that gnaw at us till we put them into words, the ideas we feel passionate about. 

Which is why when somebody says 'I've got this great idea for a book!' our hearts sink. We may smile politely, but what we're really thinking is, 'well go and write it then.' Other people's ideas for books are just like other people's dreams. Only our own are interesting to us. We may like to chat to our readers once the book is published. I know I do. We may like to hear from them, and answer questions and even debate with them. But I don't want any random reader critiquing my work before the event. 

Which leads me, in this rambling post, to note that I've just finished reading Kingfishers Catch Fire and I'm wondering as I do with all her novels, why it has taken me so long to discover Rumer Godden's work. Why didn't it feature as part of my course work all those years ago when I did a degree in English Language and Literature and when the first two years consisted of a quick gallop through 'the canon'. Mind you, the canon was mostly male, dead and English (even in Edinburgh) so it isn't too surprising. 

If you haven't read it, do. Immediately. It's magical. And very relevant indeed at a time when, as the Covid threat begins to recede a bit, so many people seem to be deciding to move to rural communities in order to 'find themselves' and finding mostly that they don't know how to live in rural communities. Or they make television programmes about 'finding themselves' in rural communities where people have already found themselves, thank-you very much.

Godden tells wonderful tales. And that brings me back to the thorny problem of advice. I'd lay bets that if a beta reader had got their hands on Godden's extraordinary work they would have told her everything that was wrong with it, just because it is so strange and so different from anything they might have read before. 

Then it struck me that the one piece of advice I wish somebody, anybody, had given me when I was just starting out, was this: Tell your story and tell it well. But first and foremost tell it for yourself. If you're bored with it, everyone else will be. If you're engrossed in it, passionate about it, and if you truly know what you're writing about, there will certainly be somebody out there who loves it too. 

Men Writing Women

My novel with a male narrator

I was doomscrolling through Twitter, first thing this morning, as you do, even though you know it's bad for you, when I came across a thread by a writer who had started a novel by a gender neutral sounding author, only to realise on the second page that it was written by a man. How did she know, she asked. The answers, mostly from women, were many and varied, although all of them were accurate. 

There were a few dead giveaways.

Someone neatly summarised them as (1) female protagonist young enough to be ugly male protagonist's daughter or grand-daughter, but still fancies him. Instantly. Hops into bed with him at the first opportunity.  (2) Female protagonist has no idea how beautiful she is. (3) Answers her door wearing next to nothing.(4) Gazes at herself in the mirror and (5) Always, always fondles her boobs. 

Even more accurately summed up as 'she breasted boobily down the stairs'. Young women, as written by men seem curiously aware of, not to say obsessed with, their own chests. Also, they absentmindedly caress them with the back of their hands. Not easy. Try it. There are many examples, and male critics never notice.

Mind you, the other dead giveaway is when the female protagonist casually puts her hands in her pockets. I put a perfectly good pair of trousers in the charity shop bag only the other day, because it had the abomination that is MOCK POCKETS. Sometimes the pockets are only stitched up. I had a jacket like this for about a year before I realised that it really did have beautiful, useful deep pockets - once I had unpicked the stitches! 

A few things occurred to me about all this though.

It works the other way. When I read a book by Fred Vargas, my best discovery of lockdown, thanks to a recommendation from a friend, my first thought was - wow, what an interesting and perceptive writer this is. What believable characters. Then, I realised that Fred is female. I began in the middle of the series with The Ghost Riders of Ordebec. There is one particularly wonderful passage in one of the later novels where a big, brilliant female character hides the hero in a very unusual way. You'll know it when you read it. 

Do men feel the same about these novels? Do they read them without a second thought assuming that Fred is male? Does that predispose them to enjoy them? I have no answers to these questions. 

All I know is, I read more fiction by women than by men these days. There are plenty of exceptions. I think Winston Graham writes absolutely believable female characters for instance.  But my tendency is always to enjoy female fiction more. I can't help it. Recently, seeking to escape from the doomscrolling and the gratuitous violence, I went back to Mary Stewart and Rumer Godden for the sheer pleasure, the recognition, the comfort of the female perspective. It's why I love Barbara Pym too. And Jane Austen. And the Brontes. 

You do, though, as a writer, start to wonder if you're writing believable men yourself. I wrote a whole novel in the voice of an elderly Scottish narrator remembering his youth in late 1700s Glasgow. (The Physic Garden) I think he was credible. But how would I know? He was a grumpy old bugger, and I liked him a lot. 

If men won't read books by women, and women don't much like books by men, where does that leave any of us?  

Loving Ayrshire

 

It's no secret that I love Ayrshire. We moved from Leeds, years ago, when I was twelve, and my biochemist father got a job in a research institute here. I never enjoyed school much, even though I did quite well academically - but I adored the countryside and history of this lush, green and, let's face it, rainy county. If you can put up with the rain, it's considerably warmer than the rest of Scotland, and warmer than much of Northern England. Winters are much milder than in my native Leeds. 

Holidaymakers tend to pass it by in the mad rush for the Highlands, but the scenery is spectacular and the history is fascinating. Not surprisingly then, it has featured in at least some of my fiction, in novels such as The Jewel and Ice Dancing, as well as in many of the radio plays I used to write, notably a couple of series: The Peggers and the Creelers and Running Before the Wind. I'm planning a new series of novels even as I write this, and guess where they are mostly going to be set? 

I was happy to be asked to record a reading for this year's Tidelines Festival and chose a passage from the Jewel, about an early encounter between our very own Robert Burns and the woman who was destined to become his wife, and who was quite clearly the love of his life: Jean Armour. I didn't much want to record myself just sitting on a rock reading and my tech skills weren't up to recording myself walking and reading on a smartphone - so I included a sheaf of my own pictures of Ayrshire, as well as some lovely watercolour images from a Victorian artist called Janet Muir, who lived in Mauchline. Nice to see that the person putting the video together worked a bit of magic on them all. 

Anyway - here it is. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and watch the whole Love Ayrshire video. You'll find me, and a sheaf of other Ayrshire writers too. 

Superior Spoilsports and Rotten Reviews

Straight from the horse's mouth! 

Way back in the days when newspapers had reasonable circulations, and therefore paid - albeit not much - for reviews, I used to do some professional reviewing. It was never really my thing, and I mostly did it for the money. Like all writers, we do what we can to survive. Sometimes I enjoyed it, and sometimes I didn't. I always took time and trouble with my reviews. 

Once or twice, I'm sorry to say, I indulged in what I now think were fairly   mean spirited reviews of books I hadn't liked. I cringe now, when I think   of it and I'm sorry about it. My excuse is that I was young, and hadn't had   my fair share of mean spirited reviews myself!

 I still, occasionally, review a book on Amazon, but only if I've liked it or   at the very least appreciated something about it. Then, I can   honestly say nice things about it. The better the book, the more I enjoy trying to   analyse why I've liked it so much. If I've hated it, or read 50 pages on   my Kindle and asked for my money back - as I've done a few times - I   won't review it at all, even though I will be pretty certain about   why I've   disliked it. 

We all get bad reviews from time to time. Sadly, a single bad review will stick in our minds and keep us awake being indignant for far longer than ten good ones. I don't mean mixed reviews, or thoughtful reviews that analyse a piece of work on its own terms. Those can be incredibly helpful. It means somebody is taking us seriously, debating with the piece of work, if you like. But they don't have to like everything about it. 

I mean those one star, bald and bold 'I hated this' kind of reviews that you look at and wonder if they've actually read the book, or seen the play or film. 

One of the wisest things somebody wrote about these occasional terrible reviews was to try not to take them to heart, but to simply imagine yourself saying to the reviewer, preferably with a shrug, 'then it's not for you. And that's fine.' And then mentally walk away.

You have to practise doing it, but honestly, it works.

Social media, however, seems to have encouraged the phenomenon of the superior spoilsport, especially where a popular book or film or TV show is concerned.

Here's how it goes. 

A group of people will be on, say, Facebook, happily discussing something they've enjoyed. Let's avoid getting embroiled in book critiques by using an example from the world of music. I've seen it happening twice recently, once with Abba and once with the Beatles. In both cases, people were having a good time sharing what these bands and their music meant to them, debating songs and memories, disagreeing a little, but enjoying the chat no end. 

And then along comes somebody who posts 'I hate Abba.' Or 'The Beatles were rubbish.' 

I wouldn't mind if they ever gave a valid reason why they think this. But they hardly ever do. I can give you dozens of reasons why I love the Beatles, and Abba too. Some of them are extremely personal, but some of them are to do with my appreciation of the music itself. If you try to pin them down, ask them why they think this - which they're perfectly entitled to do - they just dig their heels in. 'I hate them because they're rubbish' they say. Which doesn't make a lot of sense. 

There have been a couple of widely praised TV shows that I've disliked recently, but I know why, would be happy to say so, and equally happy to acknowledge that this may be down to me, and not necessarily a fault of the programme itself, which I know other people have enjoyed. If pushed, I could analyse this further, point out faults in the writing and direction. But in my experience, you can forgive a whole lot of faults if you find something entertaining. 

I've encountered the spoilsports so often now, that I'm forced to the conclusion that there's a kind of superiority about it. They don't ever want to be seen appreciating something that lots of other people like. So they'll pretend that they, and only they can see through it. 

They are spoilsports. What I really want to say to them is just leave us to our enjoyment. It's not for you, and that's fine. But you don't have to be here right now, telling us how much you loathe the thing we love. We don't care. It's not going to change our opinion.

So just for once, go play on your own page, write an online one star review if you like -but leave us alone to wallow in our fandom.  

Agents and Publishing - Some Further Thoughts

That last post about my disappearing agents was so popular, that I thought a few more random reflections  might be helpful. 

1: I would never want to deter new writers from going down the traditional route, or trying to. Once you've got a good portfolio of work under your belt, there's no harm in sending out query letters if that's what you want to do. Just don't be persuaded that an agent is the only way to publication. I've known people with fantastic agents, who have been instrumental in their success. I've known people who have got onboard with agents in the wake of success. And I've known plenty of people who have secured the services of an agent, only to realise that they spend too much time writing to the demands of their agent, who is often looking to predicate the next big success in terms of the last big success.

2: In the interests of balance, remember that agents and publishers all get horrible submissions all the time. Not just bad writing, but badly presented bad writing. Cobwebby documents that have sat in folders for years. Manuscripts printed out on two sides of pink paper, with single line spacing and coffee rings all over them. Entitled authors who want an immediate response and don't like it when they get it. So DO have a little patience and respect and - above all things - professionalism. 

3: Back when I was starting out on this long hard road, a good agent didn't expect to edit. That was the job of the publisher. If the manuscript was good enough, then the donkey work would be done between writer and publisher's editor, with some payment changing hands in advance, facilitated by the agent. This is not the way it works now. 

4: Now, the publisher expects the agent to submit an 'oven ready product' so in general, your agent is going to keep telling you to go back to the drawing board, in an effort to second guess the publisher and the 'market'. But those requirements will change over the course of the time it takes you to do rewrites. Also, many big publishers seem to have an informal 'three strikes and you're out' policy, so if an agent has three (possibly fewer now) projects by the same author turned down, they won't look at a fourth. To prevent this, the agent may keep sending you back to the drawing board. And this may mean that you finish up with several projects that you like and can self publish. (Like the nicely reviewed Ice Dancing above!) On the other hand, it can mean that you get stuck rewriting the same book over and over again. 

5: Finally, read Stephen King's On Writing. Best 'how to' book ever, although it's more of a memoir than anything else. Briefly, his advice is to read a lot and write a lot. I couldn't agree more. 

Disappearing Agents

 

'Just an old man, telling his story.'

As I've posted on here before, I've given up looking for an agent. I've done better without one over the past decade or more since last I had one. Although if somebody came along asking if they might try to sell my foreign and/or translation rights for me, I'd give it a go. 

It pains me when I see writers just starting out on their careers, firmly believing that once they've secured an agent, success will be practically guaranteed. The only people I know who continue to propagate this myth are agents. And in the immortal words of Mandy Rice Davies, they would, wouldn't they? 

However, a recent online conversation with a friend prompted me to remember my 'disappearing agents'. Because I had three of them. I had more agents than that, and a couple of them were good. But I changed what and how I wrote over a long career, which meant that a change of agent wasn't entirely out of the question. 

Disappearing Agent Number One

My first disappearing agent head-hunted me from a previous agency, by promising me the earth. Actually, not quite the earth. But she did promise to kick start my career as a playwright all over again. I was doing rather well with stage plays at the time and with some television and plenty of radio thrown in for good measure. My previous agent, although very efficient in terms of increasing my rates of pay, was London based (as are most agencies). This new one had travelled from London to open an office in Glasgow, and promised to liaise with various theatres south of the border, facilitate introductions, find opportunities and so on. 

I liked my previous agent a lot, but the relationship seemed to have grown a bit stale. I think the tipping point was when I spent the best part of a year working on a proposal for and with a large Scottish media company, only to have them reject the project entirely. This wasn't an unsolicited submission. I had worked for them before, they had expressed interest in it, and had me working with a (paid) script editor for months on end. But they had paid me no development money at all, not a bean, and no kill fee either. It struck me quite forcefully that a new agent might at least widen my horizons. So I left my old agent, amicably enough, and waited.

She disappeared. So did the office. She wrote to me later to apologise. I sometimes think I have had more apologies for incompetence than rejection slips.

Disappearing Agent Number Two 

This involves a situation far too complicated and boring to go into in a blog post. In short, there was a great schism in the agenting world and a plaintive request to stick with her personally as she moved on. So I did. Unfortunately, within months, her situation changed to the extent that she inherited a number of starry (and lucrative) clients and guess who fell off the bottom of her list? My last submission to her was The Physic Garden, which an intern read and dismissed out of hand as 'just an old man, telling his story'. After that, as the saying goes here in Scotland, my bum was well and truly 'oot the windae'. 

Disappearing Agent Number Three

This one really did disappear. I signed up to a reputable small agency where he worked, only to have him leave to set up on his own account within the year. Nobody asked me if I wanted to leave with him. They just assumed I would. Eventually, he set up an office in Glasgow (Is Glasgow a sort of black hole for agencies, I wonder?) and I went along to a laughably named launch event, which involved a plastic cup of warm white wine in a chaotic little room, with one other person. Soon after that, he went completely incommunicado. There was no response to phonecalls or emails. Since the office was part of a complex of offices for rent, I eventually managed to call the main desk where somebody confirmed that nobody had been in for weeks, and the mail was piling up. I still have no idea what became of him. 

Going It Alone

After that, I decided to go it alone, and guess what? With a mixture of traditional and self publishing, I started to do rather well. The excellent Saraband published the 'old man telling his story' aka the Physic Garden, and went on to publish more of my fiction and non-fiction. 

Surprisingly enough, I have very occasionally thought it might be nice to have an agent. I even went so far as to send a couple of query letters. I got one or two nibbles, but nothing more. I'm too old for them now - they don't think they'll make enough money out of me and that's understandable. But in any case, perhaps because I am so much older and wiser, I'd want a different kind of relationship. A business partnership which doesn't cast me in the role of humble supplicant. Which is why I still think it might be good to find somebody who would undertake the specialised business of trying to sell the foreign and translation rights to the work I already have out there. I'm not holding my breath. 

Finally - why am I writing this? 

I remember chatting to another client of one of these disappearing agents, a new, young writer, whose hopes had been raised by all the promises, only to have them dashed by the grim reality. What really bugged me was that she was strung along for a couple of years. I was in touch with her and advised her to cut her losses, send a formal letter dispensing with the agent's (non existent) services,  and get on with writing something new. I don't know if she ever did it, but I do remember her disappointment. I was fine. I had a body of work, and options. But she had been counting on promises that were never going to be fulfilled. 

I only hope she picked herself up, dusted herself off, and carried on writing. 

Vegetables No More

 

One of my very few successes.

Anyone who has followed this blog in its various incarnations over the years will know that I'm quite a keen gardener, albeit not so keen that my garden could ever be described as 'manicured'. It's a nice old cottage garden, with lots of wildlife. I don't use sprays and pesticides, I tend to let things grow more than they should, and there's plenty of cover for the forty or so sparrows, among many other birds, beasts and insects that call this place their home.

This year, inspired partly by friends proudly displaying all their sumptuous home grown produce on Facebook, and partly by the likelihood of Brexit related food shortages (I'll say the bloody B word, even if the wretched BBC won't) we thought we would grow some veg this year. 

It hasn't been what you would call an unqualified success.

Crunch time came at the weekend, when we dug up two potato pots and harvested what looked like a pretty good crop of nice pink potatoes. Reader, I cleaned them and cooked them. What emerged was a large pan containing a small amount of wallpaper paste, in which were floating a few pieces of tough skin. I cried out of pure rage and frustration. 

There are times, plenty of them these days, when I wish I was Deborah Meaden. Quite apart from the fact that she always comes across as such a lovely lady, I remember her saying that she 'never cooks'. I too would love to be somebody who never cooks. A little light baking would be nice but that's all. 

Back to the veg. The garden is organised to make it easier to look after. We're neither of us getting any younger, or any richer, we're still working more or less full time and Alan's severe mobility problems make it all a challenge. So I thought I'd try growing vegetables, salad stuff etc in containers. We had plenty of good rich compost from the compost heap at the bottom of the garden.

It started off pretty well: tatties, spinach, chard, runner beans, courgettes, dill, salad leaves and, indoors, chilis and aubergines. The young spinach and salad leaves (especially something called senape) were very nice for about three weeks. The dill was good too and it's still growing out there. I've been using it all summer on the excellent Ayrshire tatties bought in one of our local farm shops, about a hundred yards along the road from there they grow them. We have mint and thyme and chives too. I'm actually quite good with herbs. 

I'm not so good with vegetables.

I've had three courgettes of which one was so small that it hardly counted. Lots of flowers, no courgettes. The beans got eaten, but not by me. The field mice got to a lot of the young plants in the cold frame, before ever they could be planted out. The chard bolted before it really looked like chard. The compost turned out to have a lot of weed seeds in it, so I've lost count of the number of nettle stings I've had from pulling out young nettles while trying to get at the spinach and salad. And if anyone tells you young nettle leaves don't sting, they're havering. As you can see from the picture, I have more chilis than any human being would use, or want to freeze, so I'll give many of them away. I also have two, count them, two tiny aubergines. 

Do not ask about tomatoes. We used to try to grow tomatoes until a couple of years ago when a nunber of lovingly tended, fed and watered plants yielded two tiny tomatoes. 

As a consolation prize, the old apple tree at the bottom of the garden is having a very good year, so there will be lots of apples, and a few apple pies and crumbles if I can bring myself to make them. 

As for the potatoes: well  after I had drained the pan, fished out the bits of skin and added a large quantity of butter to the miniscule amount of tasteless paste that remained, Alan said it was OK. I ate a few oven chips instead. 

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Two tiny aubergines

Identity Crisis

It was the Facebook ad for the supplements company that started it.

It bugged me all the following week. Which is why I'm writing about it. I suppose that's what writers always do. Try to get some perspective on disturbing things by writing about them. 

I thought at first glance that it was a spoof. It consisted of a Union flag, accompanied by a cartoon British Bulldog.  And essentially, it was advertising 'British supplements' made without all those 'nasty' foreign additives, of which it included a full list, most of which were harmless components of various herbal supplements. It only just stopped short of telling us that foreign supplements were (as my nana used to tell me about chewing gum, in an effort to deter me from wanting it) made of monkey bones. 

It had to be a spoof, hadn't it? 

Sadly, it wasn't. It was a jingoistic little ad from a jingoistic little country, and the comments were full of jingoistic little people saying how wonderful it was to have these unpolluted British supplements. It's out there, and I'm not going to link to it. Its strapline, unpolluted by commas, is 'clean strong no nasties'. It aims to promote 'British values' but it wants to 'open up a manufacturing branch in the USA'! 

This has been fermenting away in my mind, coupled with all those headlines about the EU supposedly 'blockading' poor little Britain, when in fact it's just about to enforce rules for non EU members that we helped to formulate back in those good old days when we were still in the club. The only country that might have been blockaded was Ireland, by England, but having bought some nice new ferries from Korea and opened up new routes, Ireland is doing just fine. 

Today, I saw a bunch of older people, on a Facebook group, making nasty, mean spirited, jingoistic comments about refugees from Afghanistan. It reminded me of those people who used to tell my mum that the 'Poles should go back where they came from', right after she had married my Polish refugee dad. 

The sad fact is that I'm a mongrel, a citizen of nowhere, and since 2016, although I was born in England, I've hardly felt British at all. I've lived in Scotland on and off since I was twelve and love this country very much. It's been good to me as it was good to my dear dad. Even now, people who used to know him will be at pains to tell me how much they liked him and, in some cases, how much he changed their lives for the better. 

But from time to time, I still feel like a foreigner here. More and more often, these days. And when I do, I find myself wondering if my dad felt the same - sometimes, often, never? He never spoke about it. I wish I could ask him now, when everything I thought I knew and felt about this disunited kingdom is open to question. 

Artwork: Free to a Good Home. (Or Else ...)

 

My husband, Alan Lees, painted this extraordinary crucifixion scene a few years ago. It's huge and heavy and the frame is hand made of Scottish driftwood. He titled it 'the Execution' and by any standards, it is an amazing piece of work.

He is now talking about chopping it up for firewood. He means it. 

It has been in his studio for so long, and is simply taking up too much space. Dear reader, we have tried to find a good home for it, and so far, we have been unsuccessful. 

The truth is that it took some six months to paint, but now, he would either be willing to accept any reasonable offer for it, or simply to give it away to a good home, a church, a religious foundation or similar. The only proviso is that the recipient has to be able to pick it up themselves. It is large and heavy, but it would fit into the back of a biggish hatchback, the kind of vehicle where you can tip the back seats down. Or a small van. By the same token, we can't parcel it up for sending overseas. If you or your organisation wants to do that, then it's down to you to arrange it. 

But if you'd like to save the picture, it would surely be a small price to pay. 

A couple of years ago we offered it to Christian Aid. They said they would look into it - but they can't have looked very hard, since nobody got back to us. 

Now, Alan has given it till Christmas. Then he'll get the axe out. He is, I have to say, perfectly capable of destroying this. More likely (if we twist his arm because it seems such a shame) is that he may just paint over it. Either way, a somewhat stunning piece of art will be gone, through sheer lack of interest. 

Is there anyone out there who can help?