I have recently published a new novel, ‘Marielle’. It is set in Paris in the present day (or rather, about the turn of the millennium which was when I started it) and concerns a prosperous fifty-year-old dentist whose marriage has run into problems. Sadly it has not been published by a publisher as a print edition (I’m still trying!) but is available on Amazon Kindle and Kindle apps.

As always, I had trouble with the cover. Covers on e-books, it seems to me, are quite different to those on printed books in bookshops. Though often very beautiful, they are generally less subtle, more explicit and more directly related to the book's content. I tend instinctively to veer towards the former sort, which is probably why my sales are so low.

With ‘Marielle’ I was completely stumped. All the photos I had of Paris (whether they featured the Eiffel Tower or some bohemian back street in Montmartre) somehow looked corny. Also, the action of this novel moves away from the Paris of the tourists. Then I remembered staying in Senlis in 2007 and travelling by train to the Gard du Nord through the northern suburbs. This is the poor part of Paris – the equivalent of the London's East End before it was yuppified – with a very high immigrant population, mostly from France’s former colonies in North and Central Africa. It is also, to me, the graffiti capital of the world. Every wall, every door, every bridge, every girder and every junction box seems to be covered with it – some in the most incredibly inaccessible places – and there is no better way to view it than from the train.

As an artist, graffiti has always fascinated me – not obscenities scribbled on lavatory walls but the real thing. The idea that ordinary, poor, disadvantaged people should spend hours creating those lavish, complex, witty and often beautiful images knowing they’ll receive no financial reward or approbation from the art world, must testify to an extraordinary creative energy underlying the surface of these deprived areas. Of course, I’m aware that this underground, alternative art world has its own stars, its own heroes and some of them, such as Banksy, have finally been embraced into the ‘real’ art world. Street art has become fashionable but only on the surface. The real body of work is still subversive.

So I finally decided, what the hell? I’d use some of it as the cover for ‘Marielle’. The piece I chose looks quite effective, I thought. The thumbnail looks like a fire and it’s only when you open it that you realise it’s graffiti. It’s the sort of graffiti I like – colourful and textural, a bit messy and not too neat and clever. As a book cover people will probably either love it or hate it – mostly hate, I should imagine. Ah well! 

 

 

 

 

My dear old Volvo, about to incur a parking fine in the charming Norfolk market town of Fakenham

 

 

 

 

 MYSTERIES AND MIRACLES

 

This post was inspired by two recent events in my life. The first was the unlocking of my ageing Volvo from a distance of about thirty yards using the remote control button on the key (normally you have to be more like six inches away) and the second was a funeral.

First the unlocking thing: nothing remarkable about that, you might think – you, I, everybody does it a dozen times a day, every day, without a second thought. Yet if I were to travel back in time (taking my Volvo and its key with me) and demonstrate that feat to my five-year-old self, that scruffy little self would be utterly gobsmacked. It would seem like a miracle – a real miracle – not just some trick which seems baffling until you’re shown how it’s done, like when my great-uncle Lorny made his teeth disappear, horrifying us children until we were told by my mother that he wore dentures and had simply removed them. It would seem miraculous because it employed forces which weren’t fully understood and couldn’t be harnessed to our uses at that time. Yet remotely unlocking a car, using a mobile, having this blog post simultaneously ignored by millions of people all over the planet actually employs forces as natural and logical as that which makes an apple fall from a tree and which are now as familiar to us as the falling of said apple. Most of us still don’t understand them, of course, but we’re prepared to accept that somebody in some hi-tech factory does and to place our lives more and more trustingly in their hands. Those forces are not really miraculous at all. Or are they?

As to the funeral, it took place in the very tasteful chapel of a crematorium but was a first for me as it turned out to be a ‘humanist’ funeral. The charming old lady in the coffin – my aunt-in-law – was not a Christian and nor were her family, so it seemed inappropriate to give her a Christian send-off. Nonetheless, I found it all rather disconcerting at first, as I leafed through the order of service wondering which hymns they’d chosen and finding only a recording of something by Enya – the musical equivalent of very rich chocolate cake covered in honey and topped off with a dollop of syrup. Now, to me a funeral just isn’t a funeral without a few of those dreadful dirges delivered in that agonised, tuneless warble of which we English are such masters before being informed  by a beaming vicar that the deceased is being embraced into the love of Christ. For someone raised and educated in the Christian tradition there’s something familiar and reassuring about it even if, like me, you’re a bit lapsed in the old Christianity department. The proceedings were conducted by a very energetic gentleman who described himself as a ‘humanist minister’ and, though he fulfilled his task with warmth, dignity and feeling, he seemed a little vague as to the destination (spiritually-speaking) to which we were dispatching the deceased – not surprisingly, since it’s a subject which invokes vagueness in most of us.

It seemed to me, thinking about it afterwards, that my Christian education and upbringing had presented me with a view of life and death in which our time on earth in human form – subject as we are to the laws of nature – is somehow very material, very pot-bound, very limited and limiting and, of course, all tied up with the idea that we are born sinful. I’ve noticed that the clergy keep a bit quiet about original sin these days as it’s not a very good selling point for Christianity but nonetheless it’s always there, lurking in the background. Images like dust and ashes, common clay and mortal coils abound in the scriptures, and the spirit – which is capable of eternal life – is seen as separate, and separable, from the body which ages, dies and decays. The true life of the spirit which awaits us is something we can only glimpse occasionally beyond our corporeal confinement, through little gaps and apertures – ‘We see through a glass darkly… ’ as St Paul – Jesus’ tireless PR man – wrote to the Corinthians. We achieve eternal life by having faith in the miracle of divine grace. I believe that – particularly with my generation – this is a perception which is deeply embedded in the psyche even of those who claim to have intellectually outgrown religion.

Yet it seems to me that this life, this earth, this universe, is the miracle. The evidence of that is all around us, from the bursting of a seed in spring to the remote unlocking of my ancient Volvo. If an apple detached itself from a tree and went upwards instead of downwards, it might be seen as a miracle, but the fact that it falls to the ground is the real miracle, the fact that the earth and moon and stars and galaxies are bound together in an eternal dance by a force called gravity which is turning out to be stranger than anyone could have imagined.

Human beings will always explore, research and endeavour to explain the unexplainable then harness some of those explanations to practical uses. If my grandchildren or greatgrandchildren (not that I have any yet, I hasten to add) could travel back from fifty or a hundred years in the future, the tricks they could show me would seem mind-bogglingly miraculous to me. Teleporting? Taking a three-hour Ryanair flight to Mars using a wormhole while one’s luggage lands up on Venus? Who knows? Yet mysteries will always remain, even for them. No discovery will ever provide the final answer, only lead on to new questions. Every child of every generation has looked up at the stars and wondered what ultimately happens ‘out there’. How can the universe just go on and on forever – billions upon billions of light years of it? Yet there cannot be some sort of boundary, some perimeter fence around the universe or – even if there could – what would lie beyond that? No one – child or professor of astrophysics armed with a Higgs Boson – can get their head around it (however much they claim they can), yet it now seems to me, at the ripe old age of 65, that it’s fitting that we can’t. It is a mystery and that is how it should remain because mysteries are good.

So what about the destination of the dear old lady disappearing behind the tastefully closing curtains in the crematorium? On the drive home from the funeral, my wife said, ‘I do hope I don’t go to Heaven because I can’t face spending all eternity being criticised by your mother.’ I suggested that things probably didn’t work like that but I wasn’t speaking with any authority. The truth is I have no idea what happens when we die and, to me, anyone who claims to know – and to force that knowledge on others – is not only crassly stupid but guilty of the most dangerous and despicable form of religious dogmatism. Then again, if this earth, and this life, is miraculous, maybe we are not simply extinguished. Maybe something else – something quite unexpected and even rather amazing happens – like my unlocking my Volvo from thirty yards away. Who knows? We just have to have faith in miracles – which should not be difficult since they’re all around us.               



COLD


  Cold

the sense of never knowing

how another sees; though each human eye

can fold about the stars, project

a kind of homespun order on the void,

and though our features flow

in other veins, still

remains the chill sense

that, even skin to skin, a space divides us wider

than the sky; is this shade of blue

your shade of green, my world 

your world? Each child alone in darkness,

father, daughter, son

conjoined by love while every sight and scent

is formed by memories of what alone is ours,

  cold

frightening 

 

IF WE MOVE TOWARDS ETERNITY


If we move towards eternity
eternity is not
here, in blazing finches' wings
in thistledown

If we move towards eternity
eternity is not within
each stone, each drifting seed
nor turn of tide and time, the seasons
turning ever on themselves

If we move towards eternity
eternity does not endow
the planet's poise, the slow majestic round
of sun and moon

If we move towards eternity
eternity is not within
each moment we are here, now
alone and not alone.

 

 

 

 

Near the Windmill, Winchelsea

 

 

Bone hard the earth this autumn

rattle
of the wind through blown
thistles


balm
for burning grass
but not the long-awaited cold
rain


clatter
of the wings
of dragonflies

IN OLD ROMNEY CHURCH

The clock beats, leafy shadows wave
upon a sunlit wall; can all of human history be held
within one moment of a summer's afternoon?
The clock's beat
which bore our planet out of emptiness
will bear it back again - the clouds, the trees,
the birds chattering beyond the window-pane;
yet, growing older, time
is crossed and recrossed constantly with hints
of something else, imbued by every scent and texture
of this ancient place; experience
and dreams, and memories
and new experience attained through art
are more real to me now
than time and space
and shadows of reality we move among

 

Memories of the Marlborough Downs


Sometimes in memory I see
those boundless skylines, hilltop woods and distant knots of trees
whose echoes linger on the sky,
a rutted road
receding over folding hills
beneath a baking sun.

And as the memory expands and breathes I see
an afternoon progressing through the hours of heat,
a golden haze upon the stippled corn, a silence counterpointed only
by the song of skylarks and the drone of bees
and all the creatures which abound
among the stalks.

Yet, reaching back, the memory grows weak
as I attempt to see the evening and the setting sun
bestow a ray of gold on every bush, on every leaf,
the haze dispersing - colours, textures, shapes of sun and shadow growing sharper,
more distinct. The dots of trees along the farthest ridge,
the flawless downs, the hilltop camps arranged in cosmic silence seem to gain
a power greater even than before and, for an instant, all of time
is held within a point of timelessness.

Yet memory alone cannot retain
what moved, so long ago, through head and heart and feet, I just recall,
as clouds process across the western sky,
a breath of hope.   




Washmore Hill, June


The wind moves
unhindered on these open, empty hills,
its ripples, tides and currents
echoed in the convolutions of the turning corn,
now deepest green is swept with silver grey
and warmer green with russet, russet gold
and gold with cream. The downs are swirling,
seething like the sea, awaiting harvest when the earth
is still