Reading at Word Soup

I will be reading at Word Soup at The New Continental in Preston on 22nd December 09. The event starts at 8pm. Books are available for last minute Christmas presents etc. Nice.

Reading this Saturday

I know I've neglected the blog for some time....but here is some news! I will be reading at the Manchester Book Fair in St Anne's Sqaure on Saturday 18th July at 2.00 pm.

Review of Flax Picnic - 9th May

For those who are interested in the goings-on at the (wet) Flax Picnic held last month - I have written a review of the event for Preston Writing Network - go see.

Change of plan

Sarah informs me that Saturday's Lit Fest pickernick is now at the Tithebarn, opposite the church in Grasmere. It will be signposted, so there's no excuse.

Flax Picnic 9th May

It's picnic time again. Following the success of last September's event, Flax Books http://www.litfest.org/ are having another afternoon of readings this Saturday 9th May at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere 1.30-4.00.

Please come if you can. There were cakes last time.

And once you've enjoyed the readings, you can jostle for position at Wordsworth's grave and sample some of Sarah Nelson's gingerbread. If the shop is closed by that time, try some raisin filled sandpaper, it's much the same. http://www.grasmeregingerbread.co.uk/

A Happy Medium

It's often hard to find a happy medium in life, so here's one.

Reading tonight at the Spotlight, Lancaster

I will be reading at the Spotlight in Lancaster tonight. I've not been before, so I hope I can find it. Info here -----http://www.spotlightlancaster.co.uk/page2.htm

Frost/Hemingway

...in a strange dream I had last night, David Frost touched me up and gave me some stamps. Mind you at least he gave me the time of day. Hemingway didn't. He was eyeing up the waitress instead.

Culture in Preston

Hold onto your hats...On the back of recent cutting edge cultural events such as Muck and Brass: A tribute to the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, Sooty and Sweep's Magic Biscuits and The Nativity on Ice, Preston is now host to Plastic Culture - a collection of contemporary pop art at the Harris Museum. And, well, it's actually very good.

http://www.harrismuseum.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=327&Itemid=148

How did anyone survive the 70s?

In the 70s it was dangerous to...ride a bike, go swimming, play on farms, put rugs on newly polished floors, use escalators, hang shopping bags on pushchairs, mix radial and cross-ply tyres, cross the road, play with a frisbee, go camping, go fishing, go within thirty feet of a pylon/substation/plug socket, eat out of date cheese, fly a kite, have polystyrene tiles...It's a wonder I'm still here.

Following on from the last post about disturbing Usborne guides, here are just a few examples of the horror that was daily life in the 70s, courtesy of You Tube.

1. Escalators.

Notice how the escalator is made to look like something off Terminator - an emotionless machine whose only function is to kill kill kill. Were escalators ever this frightening? (after all 'escalators are everywhere', says the narrator) No - but that's the point, you couldn't take anything for granted in the 70s. There was danger everywhere. Mind you, I do remember being frightened of escalators, of being somehow digested by the teeth at the end and swallowed into its mechanical belly. They are, I suppose, great chomping machines to children. But was anyone ever killed? Did this actually happen to anyone? A squeak of a boot and little Billy dismembered and gone for good? Who the hell went shopping in their wellies anyway? Well, actually I did...it rained a lot where I lived.

2. Using matchsticks instead of a plug gives you the complexion of a zombie.

There's not much to say here, apart from who the hell ever stuck matchsticks into a plug socket? Was this a widespread problem in the 70s? Were men with Diabolo goatees up and down the country securing live electrical wires with bits of wood? Note the added danger of him using a very large power tool woo ha ha ha. And, hold on, who's the geezer who comes in to rescue him? He looks like a foreman of some sort. Is this a place of work? Christ and they can't even afford proper plugs? You think this credit crunch is bad. I love the withering final line from the narrator - "fix things properly" - it sounds like something your mum might have said as you lay there fitting on the floor.

3. Polish.

Even polishing a floor can be a deadly act. This one is a good example of the mind games these adverts played. It begins with the Carry On/Terry and June/Good Life happy-go-lucky twitterings of flute and xylophone, then a rug turns into a mantrap.

4. The cross-ply/radial problem.

I think the problem here is less that the odd-looking chap in the Morris has mixed cross-ply and radial tyres and more that he is driving like a knob. Not sure how his car ends up being dropped from a great height, though. Love the Hammer Horror mad professor.

More another time.

Corduroy and Vampires

When I touch corduroy I think about vampires. Sometime during the 80s, I went with my parents to buy some new furniture and after hours of looking at red leather and plastic they eventually settled on a suite fashioned out of chocolate brown corduroy and chrome tubing. While they arranged delivery I sat in the armchair and took out the book I carried with me everywhere at that time - The Usborne Guide to The Supernatural World.

It was split into three parts - Vampires, Werewolves and Demons - Haunted Houses, Ghosts and Spectres (not sure what the difference is between a ghost and a spectre) - and finally Mysterious Forces & Strange Powers. Part 3 was a bit tame - Uri Geller, astral projection, fakirs and ESP blah blah. But the other two parts scared the shit out of me. You think 'Usborne', you think 'engaging', 'educational', 'child-friendly', 'nicely illustrated'. Hmm.

There was something about the 70s and 80s. They were just really...unsettling. Everything seemed bleak and gritty, though that might just have been because I grew up in a very dull northern provincial town where grey was a primary colour. But it seemed perfectly acceptable to scare the bejesus out of kids. Think back to any of the Public Information films you used to watch at school - they took time to build up suspense and tension, they were meant to frighten you to death and give you weeks of nightmares. Cheers.

I sat there gripping the chunky corduroy, half fascinated half terrified. It was a muggy summer's afternoon. There was a thunderstorm outside. The lights in the shop flickered. I didn't sleep that night.

Iguanadon

The Fonz of the Early Cretaceous period.

Anomalies in Horror Top Trumps

King Kong beats Death on Physical Strength, Fear Factor and Killing Power?

OK King Kong's pretty handy, but he kills, what, half a dozen people? Swats a few biplanes? And by definition how can Death's Killing Power be anything less than 100% - does he have off days where he can only dish out nasty illnesses instead? Finally, I know there's only one percent in it, but how is an animatronic monkey more frightening than the great leveller, the only end of age, the Grim Reaper who unemotionally dispatches millions every year?

Still, Death whups Killer Rat and Incredible Melting Man

Alternatives for Oxfam

Alternatives for Oxfam suggested by Blogger's spellchecker:

Axum Oxford Exam Orgasm Axiom - which at Hogwarts opens the secret door in Gryffindor Tower.

Rigor Mortis

I ache everywhere. The muscles seemed to have twisted themselves around the bones. It feels as though they are gripping little by little, pulling and contracting. My body has clearly wanted to be a different shape all these years. I am not the natural shape of me.

The goldfish attains enlightenment

I hate looking after other people's pets. They nearly always die. Even though you check on them with paranoid regularity, rabbits tunnel out of their Blue Peter chicken wire runs and get themselves mullered by ravenous stray dogs, guinea pigs get foot rot from damp straw, hamsters just lose themselves somewhere in the house and then one day you feel yourself hoovering over a lump. But fish, you would think, would be easy. A sprinkling of fish flakes every day and leave them to it. No walking. No grooming. No having to pick up soft warm turds with an Asda bag over your hand and doing that clever inversion hand movement, tying the ends and leaving it on a wall. No, fish are easy.

I tap on the glass. Shrek, the rather anaemic-looking one from the semi-legal fun fair, eyeballs me for a moment and then drifts down to the pirate treasure chest. Princess Fiona, bought in from a pet shop for Shrek's pleasure, swims up to the flatulating filter, swims back to the other side, swims to bottom, swims to the filter. Such is the life of the goldfish. I always thought their three second memory a blessing. A new world every three seconds. You can imagine black and white Bono clicking his fingers - "every time I do this, a goldfish forgets and starts again." What a nice life. Where am I? Bowl, food, that other fish. Where am I? Bowl, food, that other fish. Kind of comforting and transcendental in its Zen-simplicity.

Yes, the goldfish is well on its way to attaining enlightenment. It can only live in the moment. Past and Future are concepts utterly incomprehensible to it. It cannot grasp at anything, because as soon as it does it forgets what it is to grasp. It can form no attachments. It cannot feel envy or anger or grief or love. Becoming a goldfish is the penultimate stage on the road to Nirvana.

But Shrek seems rather still. Princess Fiona is staring at the minature Titanic buried nose first into the red shingle at the bottom of the tank. Neither seem to have the same amount of scales as they did this morning. Both of them have bits missing. Do the scales grow back? Have I overfed them? They have been gnawing at each other all day - is this some perfectly normal goldfish S & M?

Then, I realise that Shrek is dead, and he is dead because Princess Fiona has been eating him.

1980s Video Shop

In 1985, when we bought our first video recorder, there was only one place in the whole town to rent videos - an ex-hair salon squashed into a row of terraces. It had a sign above the door with Charley's Videos hand-painted very badly in a grammatical mangle of extras es and apostrophes.

Inside, everything was impromptu, as though they might have to pack up at any moment, stuff all the videos into a suitcase and leg it from the police. The wooden counter, on which a rack of sweets and popcorn attempted to convince you that watching a film on your seventeen inch Japanese TV with wood veneer panelling was exactly the same as watching it on the big screen, gave you splinters if you weren't careful. The carpet had damp stains, and white dots from accidents with peroxide, and there were velvet curtains at the back, through which the owner disappeared to find the right cassette for the case you passed to him. It had the musty smell of a charity shop - not Oxfam, but something less well known, like The Cats' Protection League or Arthritis Awareness - old women's perfume, sweat, damp dogs, fags.

The videos were set out in a kind of mathematical way - a Cartesian coordinate system born out of the Video Recordings Act (1984). The x axis went in alphabetical order, the y axis rose in age restriction, so that the 18s were at the top, well away from curious fingers, with Aaron the Axe Killer at one end and innumerate zombie films at the other. But the shop was so small that you could see the covers quite clearly and while my sister was choosing the Disney film she wanted, I would gaze at the images of gore, my little brain extrapolating from the picture on the front what the film would be like. Even aged ten, it wasn't all that difficult.

Nowadays, the promotional posters for horror films tend to be subtly suggestive of the gore content (OK, I'll give you Saw and Hostel). Resident Evil shows two young ladies that, take away the enormous Aliens guns, might be off clubbing. Take away the name of the film from the poster too and it could be advertising Trance Nation Volume 5. The Ring has, er, a ring, a glowing, spooky-looking ring though, it has to be said. 28 Days Later shows a solitary figure wandering in front of a London skyline. It's quite nice really, all done in red and black, almost like a woodblock print. Take away the movie blather and you might have it on your wall.

In the 80s, though, things were pretty literal. It was a much easier age. Things were explained. If you were wondering what Psycho Stripper might be about, the cover of a woman in stockings and suspenders holding a bloody knife in one hand and a man's head in the other, made the decision about whether it was something grandma might like so much easier. There must have been a prevailing Ronseal/Catchphrase sensibility amongst graphic designers at the time - does what it says on the tin / say what you see.

Zombie Marines = half decayed geezers in military gear.

Devil Cheerleaders = Cheerleaders with red pointy horns and tails.

Head Vice Hell = head inside a vice, flames, possibly, in the background.

Golden rules:

Women must always be half naked.

There must be at least one expression of hammed up terror.

There must be lots and lots of blood and the blood must always be very very red.

You get the idea.

Eventually my sister chose Dumbo and the man disappeared behind the velvet curtains. I got a palm full of splinters from the counter. The blood was redder than real blood. It ran down my wrist. And I started thinking about the plot for Stigmata Boy.