Monday 9 March 2015

talent is superfluous

Nowadays a rare talent really is not all that uncommon. When there is a whole interconnected world out there, the most statistically unusual of talents is common enough to occur a few times. The genuine rarity is someone that we might care about. A story only really works if it has characters that we might in some way care about. Be they good, bad or indifferent, we have to care to some extent. So the news and media need to have players cavorting on the stage, it does not care who they are or what they do, as long as the viewing public cares about them to some extent. So we care about Madonna falling off a stage because her cape did not come off, we care about minor celebrities appearing with Kevin Bacon in an advert. Out of that great soup of anonymity we see and recognise faces, and we can see the story that is told about them. 

There are only ever going to be a finite number of people that are widely recognised, for the media there is no more valuable commodity than fame, however thin the claim to fame, if the public care, then that is enough. 

Sunday 8 March 2015

celebrity

In the past most musicians would make more from their tours than their albums, and probably made more money out of tee shirts and programmes than selling tickets. The distance between what someone appears to do, and where they earn their money has now stretched out even further. There seem to be plenty of modern ‘stars’ for whom any music is at best an incidental part of what they are providing. The papers are filled with photos of Rita Ora and Nicky Minaj, out of all proportion to their significance as musicians. I don’t think we should view this as a negative, if they are smart enough to supply something that the media want, and will pay for, then good luck to them. They do at least seem to provide something in exchange for their celebrity, there are a phalanx of other celebrities who have only the most spurious of claims to notability, perhaps once being the girlfriend of a footballer, or being married to someone famous. 

 

Saturday 7 March 2015

what do writers do all day?

Many writers will mention a daily limit that they set themselves for writing, in interview JG Ballard suggests that he always wrote one thousand words a day, twice as many as Hemingway, but feeble in comparison to the six thousand that Trollope would write. On that basis Ballard could have written six novels a year which he did not, so presumably not every day was a writing day. Similarly pop / rock musicians now seem to go into the studio to write an album, when presumably they could pick up a pencil any time and write a song. 

Contrary to expectations then, most of what a professional writer probably does is not writing, it is proofing, editing, negotiating, marketing and promoting. Similarly even for a famous singer songwriter, most of what they actually do is probably promoting, touring and performing. 

 

Sunday 1 March 2015

Chapter one of The Garbageman

IMG 1276


herewith, chapter one, of The Garbageman, a novel I wrote in the 1990’s. I will give it a read over, and if I think it is upto scratch, will look to publish on Kindle. 

 


1.1

The killer had awoken early that morning. Although he had already prepared thoroughly, he cleaned and checked his revolver one last time before loading it. He left the revolver in his sleeping bag and went to shave. The air was still cold on the skin, and the nearby trees were faint in the morning mist. With luck the mist would not lift until much later in the day. He would have liked his normal holster but with his battered Barbour jacket and pullover it would have been impractical and conspicuous.

 

The black Range Rover was the second car in the convoy. At the head of the convoy was the Land Rover driven by the head beater, and containing the beaters for the day. The Land Rover had no radio, and the beaters were being bounced about on the wooden benches in the back. They were all cold and uncomfortable, their clothes still damp and clinging from the day before. The Land Rover kangarooed through a particularly large gully in the road. The tallest of the beaters crashed his head against one of the struts for the canvas awning. He cursed loudly, the other beaters smiled through their hangovers.

The Range Rover was driven by an officer from the security service, the passenger seat was empty, and in the back were Vincent Forsyth and his guest for the day, Sir David from the Cabinet Office. The Range Rover swooped and rose, passing the gully.

 

“Easy Gavin, I had a heavy night last night.” Vincent Forsyth turned to face Sir David again, and carried on talking sotto voce.

 

The final car was a Japanese Daihatsu, a poor man’s Range Rover. There were four men in it. One was a minder for Sir David, and the other three were there for Vincent Forsyth. The car effortlessly climbed out of the gully. They watched the surrounding woods, half expecting one of the looming shapes to turn and take a pot shot at them. None of them liked this trip. Even with the four men in the team, it would be impossible to provide adequate cover.

 

The trees were mostly birch, and a few conifers, it was light relatively open woodland. In the mist it felt like a white walled room. The noise of the cars seemed suddenly very close, and in a few minutes the convoy reached the destination. The Land Rover drove to the far side of the clearing and parked close to the trees. The Range Rover parked in the middle of the clearing. The driver got out of the car, and went round to the back, opening the hatch, and unwrapping the shot guns.

 

The final car parked askew blocking off the entrance to the clearing. The security men quickly got out and ran over to the Range Rover, it was only then that the passengers got out. It was perhaps their training that made the security men feel that the open space was more dangerous than the woods themselves. In the mist the clearing was probably a less threatening environment.

 

Twenty minutes later the shoot was ready to start. The beaters had fanned out across the far side of the woods, and Sir David and Forsyth were in position. Occasionally the air was punctuated by the stutter of walkie talkies, or the crackle of twigs broken under foot. Although the ground was normally sodden and marshy, the frost was severe enough to leave it crisp and hard.

 

“Okay Sir David, they should be setting off now.” Vincent Forsyth stopped looking at his watch and loaded his Purdey. He left the Purdey broken. There was unlikely to be much to aim at for a while. “You take the left flank Sir David, and I’ll take the right, and will you bloody security men keep quiet. You’ll put the wind up all the bloody game this side of London.”

 

“I hope that the shooting is as good as you promised.” Sir David looked towards Forsyth to see the direction in which he was heading.

 

“The keeper raised nearly a hundred pheasant this year, I think we should be in for a few.”

 

Vincent Forsyth had served a long time in the army, after Sandhurst he had risen fairly effortlessly through the ranks. At the appropriate time he had moved sideways into covert operations, when they were rapidly becoming anything but covert. He had dropped his military title in the firm expectation that he would soon be gaining a mention in the Honours list. For services to the Crown, and Home Office. He had served in Northern Ireland, on various operations, but it was his membership of the R23 Committee that had merited the security personnel, and the potential gong.

 

For Sir David the whole expedition was a bloody pantomime, the shooting in this glorified swamp was indifferent at the best of times, and with half the security service here, a herd of elephants would have been spooked by now. It promised to be a long day. There was doubtless an ulterior motive for this invitation. He would be buttered up all day, before some words to slip in the right ear for the gong committee, or some other such nonsense came up over the port, purely coincidentally. If Vincent Forsyth thought that the goons from the security service were impressing anyone, he was sadly mistaken.

 

Back at the cars, Sir David’s guard sat listening to the Archers on Radio Four. The other security service officer was wandering the perimeter of the clearing. The day was gradually warming, Sir David might not even catch the cold, that he had told his wife would be the only prize for the day. The Archers eventually came to a close, as the beaters were trying their second traverse of the woods.

 

Vincent Forsyth had got ahead of the others in his search for game. He had just shot his first pheasant of the day, and was hoping for some more. His gun was empty and broken. Apart from the single pheasant, he had seen nothing else apart from the crows, which he had left for now. A twig snapped. He started and turned. One of the beaters was standing behind him. A broken twig in his hands.

 

“What the hell are you doing here, ...” Forsyth was more angry than anything.

 

“Don’t you recognise me after what you did ?”

 

“You’re not bloody Teague are you ?” Recognition dawned slowly on Forsyth. “You must be mad to come here. There are men all around us.”

 

Teague had his hands in his pockets, he lifted the remote control device clear, and pressed the button.

Forsyth could recognise the sound of distant gunfire, in the mist it was difficult to tell the direction. Almost instantly they were surrounded by the cackle of walkie talkies and shouted commands.

 

“You know what you did to me, I just came to get an explanation or an apology.” Teague threw the remote control device away, his hands were empty and clear of his body.

 

Forsyth had a cartridge in his hand, in almost a single move, he loaded the cartridge, and with the Purdey still in his left hand, snapped it shut. The barrel was pointing at Teague, as he changed his grip. “You know what happens to one of your sort when they go rogue, we just have to put you down, like the animal you are. What was it they called you Teague, the garbageman. I’ve got better things to do than waste my bloody time on trash like you.”

 

The Purdey fired once, the noise was suddenly deafening, then gone, except for the echoes caught hanging in the mist. Teague was caught by the force of the blast, and punched back, like a string puppet prodded with an iron finger. Hisempty hands were still outstretched.


Forsyth broke the Purdey open, and ejected the spent cartridge. The securitymen would be there within sixty seconds. He looked up from the Purdey, Teague was on his feet again. The Barbour and tatty jersey were pitted and torn, and he was bleeding, in his hand was the revolver. As Vincent’s crows circled round their heads, Teague spoke. “I’ve got something to say to you and you better listen ...”

 

The revolver fired three times, only the final shot missed Vincent’s head, he was already dead and falling. Teague dropped the revolver, and stripped off the Barbour jacket and what was left of the jersey. He took off the kevlar body shield, and put the Barbour back on. He would bruise all over his torso, and he was bleeding from some peripheral pellets. He turned and vanished into the mist.

 

Ten seconds later the settling crows were startled again by the security men reaching the corpse that was Vincent Forsyth.