I live daily with the noises that produce those manicured lawns and straight hedges and smooth pathways and shiny cars.  I hear the many hives of a strange new service industry buzzing outside my window.  No errant blade of grass to be left, no peel of paint, no blip of mess, no overgrowth of gardens or rampantness of nature.

I see the results of all this human labour and I wonder why anyone bothers.  How often can you improve things?  How much can your house be shinier and newer and cleaner and neater than your neighbour’s?  How many Lamburghinis Porsches Bugattis do you need to show your neighbours who you are and what you are?  What are you again?  How smooth has your driveway your onsite parking area your pavement got to be to let your neighbours know you’re not something from the bottom of their garden?

I live in a town hell-bent on improvement.  Property here is a clear indication of which rung of the ladder you’re on.  So are the cars in the driveways.  When you make a few bob you don’t say a word you just get the building contractors, garden designers, path layers in, again and again and again and park two three four limousines on your driveway, silver silver silver silver.  There must be no peace.  Peace equals inertia in the eyes of those hell-bent on improving.

Leafy avenues must shed their leaves but their natural carpets lie for a short time removed quickly and relentlessly with great big noisy leaf-sucking hoovers ploughing backwards and forwards across the Stray, not leaving the tiniest of islands for wildflowers and wildlife.  I wonder if the seasons get as confused as I do.  Where is winter’s slush and spring’s havoc?  Or summer’s dust and autumn’s must?  All swept away and polished off every surface with spray and shine.

Is that verdant even green really attractive to the human eye?  What is grass for?  Grass is the world’s most successful plant but it’s beaten into submission here, cut down and down until the brown soil shows through.  Where are your curves, nature?  Where is the cheeky weed or the fallen log?  Where do you go to find the beauty of the surprise?  Where is random’s refuge?  Where is entropy’s hiding-place?

Perhaps everyone who lives or wants to live in this town, where I dread the sound of the strimmer, models their ideal ‘look’ on plastic grass and dolls houses.  If only things didn’t grow and change. If only the weather didn’t mark the windows.  Though not a pigeon lover, I appreciate how they do at least leave messages from randomness on the window panes, terraces and garden paths for everyone to see. 

I walk along the lawns and under the trees so coiffured and finished that I feel as if I should pay more attention to my appearance.  My hair needs a bit of strimming, my face could do with resurfacing, my clothes need re-shaping and I could do with remodelling generally.  Call in the improvers.  Pay money for more nonsense.  Make me smooth and bland and safe and plastic.

The dogs have fancy collars here and are called ‘Hugo’ and ‘Poppet’.  They gambol and frolic on the wide green open spaces and I wonder if there’s any good sniffs around for them to enjoy.  Or are the very trees sprayed with ‘Eau de Acceptable’ and not other dogs’ bottoms?  The supermarkets have a touch of the Truman Show about them.  You know when you go to Ikea and you get the feeling that lots of people are caught up in making a day of it?

Supermarket shopping here seems like that.  I don’t believe the women haven’t had their hair striped and their clothes pressed to glide round Waitrose with their trolleys full of exotic but safe foods that their neighbours would approve of.  Boxes with photographs of wonderfully successful food, some day soon maybe that’s all we’ll have to do to live here.  Glide about neatly with pictures of food on display in our trolleys.

Well my house is up for sale and I’m playing the upkeep game along with all the rest – shiniest windows and brightest surfaces.  Outside my window the strimmers, the lawnmowers, the hedge cutters waken from their night’s rest.  The paint strippers are turned on and the hot-tar machine plies its trade.  Keep up with the Jones’s or die!

I’d rather live and breathe somewhere a bit untidier and looser round its edges.  Here the flowerbeds of identical flowers in serried ranks march towards the centre of town and gather round the war memorial, squadrons of yellow pom-poms.  Every shop seduces your eyeballs with its painfully tidy boutique-ish chi-chi-ness.  If the tidy-town inspector calls, we’re ready. 

If the heart-and-soul agent is around, don’t bother with us.  We bought the wipe-clean low-maintenance version of that a long time ago.  It sets a stone to my heart.  Maybe I need to consult a specialist to have my eyes tested, an ophthalmic optician who can provide me with magic spectacles through which I see this town more benignly.  Then again, moving somewhere a bit untidier and looser round its edges may be the only escape.

It wasn’t just the consultant at the hospital shaking hands with me while still holding his ballpoint pen.  Of course that didn’t help to start the day feeling normal.  I asked him ‘Is there any significance in the way you shook my hand while still holding your ballpoint pen?’  He looked perplexed.  We were there to talk about my oesophagus and he obviously thought this was a trick question.  Handshake?  Ballpoint pen?

In my mind I felt a surgeon who’s not aware he’s still holding a pen in his hand when he shakes mine might be just the person to leave a pair of scissors, four needles and a few clamps in my gut and look perplexed when after a few weeks of rattling around doing no good at all they show up on the x-ray.  Scissors?  Clamps?  Needles?  Who me?

From the worry of Pen-in-hand-land I drove to the warm soft seductive Sainsbury’s with its lovely offers and gleaming cleanness.  I emerged unscathed with a minimum of shopping, not one item on special offer and no buy-two-for-one gimmicks.  The plastic bags went in the back of the car, the coat came off and joined the shopping on the back seat, this day was warming up.

Automatic window goes down for a cooling draught, window shudders up again and then down from its own volition.  Wind whistles past head building to crescendo, shopping bags and jacket on back seat lifting up from gusts.  The car’s just been fixed and garage what done the deed is but a roundabout or two away.  Windows go up and windows go down, all on their ownio. 

Eardrum is wind blasted and all sense swept from right side of face plus right hand.  Sainsbury’s bags now resembling Ha-hoos from the Night Garden.  Miss my roundabout as wind-whipped face now affecting my powers of navigation.  I know the garage is near Knaresborough, so why not go for a spin with the howling gales right round Knaresborough instead of taking that little turn left into the garage forecourt just before you get to the roundabout?

Windows go up and windows come down.  Sometimes they glide and sometimes they shudder.  Ballpoint pens jabbed into hand seem more agreeable to me at this stage than windows with a mind of their own.  I finally park in front of the garage and the windows miraculously close and even when I’ve glared at them through narrowed eyes, stay shut.  The garage laughs and books the car for a good talking-to on Thursday.

After a lunch of is-it-me or is there something funny about this doggone day? I tackle my broadband account.  O woe is me, click-click ring-ring friendly voice we both speak English but do we?  Is it me?  Why is it called a helpline?  After many a long click-click ring-ring round of phone calls, after an afternoon of talking to random people in this and that random department who know the right answers if only I could ask them what they know already, but I want to know what I want to know and it isn’t helpful to be transferred and start again and again and again, password place of birth date of birth post code first line of address, a saint would get tetchy let me tell you, o great helpline of all helplines! 

I will try from now on to ask only questions that they can answer.  It isn’t actually a helpline in the traditional sense of helping people.  Not many left of those, come to think of it.  They’re all pretty much the same nowadays, more like Chinese whispers, lines of technical gobbledegook and polite reassurance.

That was my yesterday and now this is my today.  I sit and write and think and wonder at that doggone day.  I realise there’s nothing I can do but accept with a laugh the numerical probability that unplanned events will occur in the randomly ordered plan of life.

My travel anxiety (or Reisefieber) which takes the form of a mild sense of unease when I think of going anywhere, probably has its roots in my mother fleeing from the bombs at the end of the war, she had to keep me safe, whatever cost to herself. 

OK….. My travel anxiety perhaps started then, but this amateur psychology of mine doesn’t help at all when I’m faced with the big ‘J’. The Journey. 

At one level I know I’m not in the grip of a hopelessly uncontrollable ever unfolding nightmare of tickets, planes, trains, cars, roads et al. But even as I’m writing this I know that what I’ve done all my life is translate my feelings of unease into an anxiety language that helps me bear it. 

I have methods and approaches, oh boy do I have methods and approaches to help me cope.  

The List!  My list is a good friend. I know that without a clearly delineated list I can achieve nothing. Often it is bullet pointed but preferably numbered as numbers give me a sense of priority. For example, ‘timing’ would always be number one and ‘bottle of water’ way down the list at perhaps seventeen. 

Note: bottle of water is for emergencies only, the secret is to drink as little as possible on journeys involving public transport so you never have to vacate your seat. 

The Timetable is central to my equanimity. I like to start early and get cracking. I’m happy to sit, bag at feet, a’watching the dawn come up rather than risk being ‘last minute’ in my approach. Anything I can have control over I control, but what can I do about trains not arriving on time? Missed connections? Late arrivals? Fire, flood, famine, attack by vagabonds or little green men? 

I take a professional attitude to thinking about what might occur on the journey. I worry. You name a natural disaster to me and I can already see it happening, even on the slow line from Harrogate to York. Pestilence? Plague? Meteor showers? Nothing would surprise me because I’ve been there in my head. People look out of the train window and see the rolling countryside. I look out of the train window and see fields drowning in a flood. 

I must leave a sense of order behind me when embarking on a journey. My flat must be pristine. Of course I double-check locks, windows, plugs and water supplies. I like to know that all appliances are turned off. This has worked to my disadvantage as I helpfully applied my methods to my girlfriend’s house when we were going away for a few days. She was unhappy about the defrosted freezer and fridge that we came back to and I had to eat a lot of defrosted peas without complaining. 

Rye bread is my way of settling my stomach for a journey. No spiced foods, no beans. I can think of nothing worse than queuing for a toilet in an aeroplane with diarrhoea or being subjected to bursts of flatulence sitting next to a stranger on a train. 

But do you know what? I quite enjoy travelling my way. It makes every journey so eventful! 

Do you associate ‘surrealism’ with the visual, like a Salvador Dali painting or that French silent movie where a razor blade cuts across an eye? Do you think that ‘surreal’ means just ‘more real’? But does it?  I’m interested in those times in our lives when emotions are heightened. When as an adult you feel you’ve arrived somewhere and it makes you uncomfortable. You’re doing the right thing but it’s the wrong thing for you.

What if the natural order of life and death was unnatural for someone and he was trapped by the life he was in. What could he do? How do we break out of patterns that are destroying us? Do you run away in your mind or with your legs? I looked to surrealism for guidance. What if you jump out of your life, away from your wife, away from day, night, wrong, right, and let what will befall you befall you?

The surrealism you find in my novel LOVE LIES: A Journal is a device using words to explore one man’s fall from his conventional life.  I wasn’t using words to describe odd or surreal events. I wanted the events to read as surreal and unsettling. So the reader wouldn’t be sure if it was happening in someone’s mind or in actuality. To my mind, it’s immaterial. My words came out as the opposite of an easy read. It’s not just words that conjure up surreal images. It’s also using words in new iconoclastic ways.
 
So how can a novel or parts of a novel be made into a fish just as Dali created a phone from a lobster? Or how can a portrait not contain a face, like Margritte’s?  How do you write like that, so it’s not just a description of something extraordinary that’s visual? 

Why not write in a way that to the reader seems like random episodes? Who is to say how we should write? Things happen chronologically or do they?  Things happen one after another or do they?  Can the day begin at night or can a saucer grow a furry coat?  Saucers grow fur if you leave milk in them for long enough.

Time is just a concept we’ve imposed as a pattern on the universe. In the extreme north there is no night and day as we know it.  ’As we know it’ excites me.  Do we all know things the same way? Experience life the same way? Is your pain like my pain?

As for someone like André, the protagonist of my novel, he looks to other people to give him a clue, a glimmer, an insight into familiar behaviours that he could adopt or imitate to gain a sense of certainty or even peace of mind.  But does it work?  Can it work?
 
Surrealists attempt to express the unconscious and sort of mix and match this with the conscious mind.  They use the familiar as a frame of reference and mess it up, turn life as we know it on its head, distort it, show us images we recoil from as they don’t follow our expectations. The visual arts work immediately, a painting of the back of Margritte’s head makes us stop in our tracks. 

Writing is a different thing.  I struggle to combine, to synthesise the unconscious and the conscious and weave my words between the two.  I find beauty in the random, I feel it takes precedence over the pre-conceived.  That’s a huge freedom, step out of the box and see what forms on the page and what meanings can be made.

Whenever I feel hemmed in by life or by people or by circumstances or even by the glorious British climate I try to remember that the ‘hemming in’ isn’t real.  It’s a construct I’ve made, a story I’ve created about myself.

I suppose we all make meaning of what happens to us, of our lives.  We construct our perceptions into a shape that suits us at the time. I’ve begun to realise as I’ve got older that my construct of meaning has at times been a suit of armour holding me back.

My strict Lutheran parents (who else do you trust as a child?) guided me with principles that felt irrefutable.  Each one of these principles had the ring of absolute truth.

The horror that would befall me if I stepped from their path of righteousness was too terrible to contemplate.  Outwardly, as a boy, I conformed with only minor forays into the land of disobedience like buying jeans with my first pay packet.

I tried to shed that initial ‘imposed’ construct by running away from there to here and never really wanting to go back again.  But here’s a thing, those principles lived on in me even though I didn’t want them.

My back was against a wall of irrefutable truths and absolutes.  Good and bad, right and wrong, immorality and morality, work and laziness – the Protestant ethic.  That wall I had felt at my back as a child came with me into adulthood.  I have often felt driven into a corner, albeit a metaphorical one.

Aha though, a light has crept in through a chink in that wall.  That corner, that wall, that construct was, is, of my own making, a story I created.  If I I’ve created my construct, I could have a go at deconstructing it?

No, that’s more navel-gazing and reflecting on my narrow childhood and upbringing which aimed to keep me a ‘good boy’, colouring my life as I was growing up.  Instead of thinking woe is me, I’ve been done wrong to by them these parents, I’ve started constructing a different meaning to my life.

Maybe it will soon feel as if I’m in a corner again and this back of mine is again against a wall.  But do you know what?  My back has strengthened through a lifetime of being forced into corners and it’s ready for what life throws at it.

I still stop from time to time and wonder how the hell I got to where I am, but it’s no longer a set position.

Maybe I haven’t been a perfect Dad or even much of a friend but I’m looking, I’m moving.

My past is there and always will be, but it has come out of that corner and is now in the light.

N.B. Much of this has been described by me in my novel LOVE LIES: A Journal, where I’ve used Andre as a mirror image of myself.

(Originally published 17.12.2009.)

I love the works of Thomas Mann.  I languish in his language, I grasp at his thoughts, I am riveted by the force of his characters and the way he expresses himself.  My God, the way he expresses himself!

But I’m not Thomas Mann and anyway, when I wake up with the urge to write I want to write it raw.  All my life I’ve inhabited a strait-jacket of other people’s expectations: ‘Arnfrid is good at English’, ‘Arnfrid writes elegantly’, but writing blogs have freed me from the constrictions and convolutions of writing things ‘properly’.

I write things on my blog almost verbatim from my thoughts.

I’ve developed a healthy alter ego, I call him Joe Bloggo.  He’s quite ordinary and likes writing blogs about things I feel hot about.  Some of my thinking is convoluted and some of it probably verges on the mad, but that’s me.

Joe Bloggo inhabits a different world, a new world.  He writes bits.  Sometimes they’re clever bits, sometimes they’re bits of rants, but they are always fresh for me and feel like drinking a glass of cool water when I’m thirsty.

Thomas Mann I ain’t, but I feel more like Joe Bloggo, because I trust what he has to say.

(Originally published 17.12.2009.)

We ran four workshops based on Mindful Writing, all four were useful for our clients.  Our work raised as many questions as it offered solutions, but often it is more helpful simply to get a sense of where we are, to see how the land lies.  For in the seeing lie seeds of a new beginning.

It was wonderful to witness how all the clients, with the right prompting and listening, bloomed and grew, and their potential was tantalising.

I am tempted to think of ourselves as ‘Writing Doulas’.  ‘Doula’ is the Greek word for slave.  In our times, the word is usually associated with the growing trend to use ‘Birthing Doulas’ who support women during childbirth.  They give help and preparation, connect with the mother emotionally and mentally and support her through the birth step by step, just by being there.

When I read about them in the Observer*, I felt I was on familiar ground.  Everything ‘Birthing Doulas’ do, we do for our clients.  Maybe we are ‘Writing Doulas’.

With Mindful Writing we prepare people to look at themselves using their words as a mirror; we get to the heart of things; we spot potential and tease it out.  We accept things as they are, thus making it easy for our clients to accept their problems.

We’re amazed how much talent lies dormant in people.  Not just in terms of performance but simply by being more of themselves.  Somehow life has closed doors and set limits and lights have gone out that make people brave.

We always say ‘You don’t know what you know till you’ve written it down mindfully’.  That is, without judgement or anxiety or even much in the way of punctuation and grammar.  In effect, our clients are free to relinquish responsibility for what they write and they are somehow enabled by this approach to reach greater depths of memory and imagination.

We’re using Mindfulness practices to help people, professional as well as private, focus on themselves for a short time, or even initiate change.  Sharing both process and result with us as their ‘Writing Doulas’ is very confidence-building.  Their experience and creativity feels supported and valued.  Instead of a baby confidence ‘pops out’.

Instead of always looking at the changing, shifting outside world we encourage clients to look inwards, to express in their writing what they know at a deep level, to give birth, as it were, to new life within their lives.

*Observer 04.10.09, News, p.7, ‘Boom in Birth Coaches for Mothers’.

(Originally published 11.11.2009.)

Are you someone who likes to go deep as a writer or are you a writer of the world that passes by?  So are you inclined to be an ‘inny’ writer or an ‘outy’ writer?

I love to read other people’s innermost thoughts.  I enjoy the turmoil and pain of a good think.  I want to know as much as possible about the workings of my internal world and less about the machinations of what’s out there.  I’m an Inny, for sure.

Everywhere I look, newspapers, magazines, books, TV, films, are stories with beginnings, middles and ends.  The characters always remain the same.  There is little inner development with the promise of a qualitative change in these characters.

What appears like change is a set of stereotypical personalities being moved around in the various episodes of the stories like so many pieces of furniture repositioned again and again to produce different visual effects.

A historical setting for a story will not do much for the characters, either.  The same stereotypes keep reappearing, being driven by the plot, beginning, middle and end, pain and pleasure, misery and happiness, it’s all there, and often superbly crafted.  But to what end?

I know we make meaning with stories and they help us deal with difficulties in our lives.  Or do they?  Well, what can I say?  Repositioning the furniture is not the kind of change I am interested in, nor would it help me find any meaning in my life.

I love just sitting there in my thoughts, in a world of my own creation.  Sometimes there is a bit of navel-gazing, I cannot deny it.  But more often than not it’s the antics of the mind – my mind – that I watch performing on my inner stage.

Philosophers and mathematicians are brilliant at dealing with thought.  They can take a thought back to its illogical conclusion and start again, asking question upon question.  They too write a story, but they call it theory or hypothesis.

If you look at my novel LOVE LIES: A Journal, you’ll find I have done just that.  I’ve used Andre, the protagonist, as a device to illustrate the antics characteristic of the human mind.  This has led to the novel becoming a series of illogical conclusions and restarts.

How does the book work for you, the reader?  Well, as the dyed-in-the-wool Inny that I am, I invite you into the magic space of my imagination but don’t tell you the rules of the game.  You have to pick up clues as you go along, figuring out for yourself what’s really happening to Andre.

Keep watching Andre as he goes in and out of his flat and in and out of his mind.  Trying to make sense of him is a creative enterprise.  You may discover something of yourself in the process.  That is the author’s intention for the reader.

(Originally published 09.11.2009.)

When I eat out, I choose pork.  I’ve been known to gaze longingly at the pork sections in supermarkets and I am guilty of trying to start conversations about my experience of working on a pig farm when Adam was a lad…  I drone on about ‘the pigs in their quarters’, but I wonder if I’m really thinking about the tasty quarters of pigs.

So, to come back to my starting point, when I eat out I invariably choose a nice pork dish.  Well, apart from the odd sausage/mash/gastro-trendy offering, there’s usually only one glorious porky dish on the menu.

I used to frequent a pub in Yorkshire.  It’s surrounded by corkers of porkers farms, you’d think you’d be guaranteed a nice bit of pork.  You see, when I pay ten quid for my pork I expect a beautiful section of pig to dominate the plate.  Aha, I say, well sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.  Or, to put it another way, it used to.

The recession has hit my lovely porklings!  That’s the only explanation I can think of.  Of course, when you read on a menu ‘Thick-cut pork chops with apple sauce served with mixed vegetables and chips and/or new potatoes’, you expect the mighty pig to smack you in the eye.

OK, it’s not just about quantity any more, as we now like our piggies to be smaller and leaner than the fat chaps of my youth.  But at least you expect to be able to spot the chop, to spear a succulent mouthful on your fork and then, to find it so tender and white you don’t need a knife.

Oh, I have been woefully disappointed of late! The pig, he gets smaller and he gets nastier to eat.  My pig has started to come riddled with gristle and lines of fat camouflaged by tempting outer crusts.  And the vegetables!  They now have such power on your plate.

They seem to have taken notice of the government’s health campaign and used it for their own ends by shouting their fibrous message ‘Eat all five of us, mate, because you’ll have to as there isn’t enough protein on this plate to fill a spoon.’

It’s the recession, restaurants still want to give you a big plateful at the same price, but something has had to give, and it’s my beloved piggy-wiggy.  They wouldn’t mess with a lamb chop or a beefsteak as we’re used to the size of their portions on our plates, but the pig seems to be up for grabs.

I believe it was the custom in Yorkshire to fill up on Yorkshire pud covered in thick gravy as a first course so that you didn’t need as much meat on your plate.  God help me if, as a German, I end up being served a great waffly thing with greasy gravy giving off a whiff of bacon as my starter.

My main course then comes as a plate of soupy vegetables with a token bright orange bread-crumbed square masking the ‘white gold of pork’.

I’ll have to eat at home more…

(Originally published 05.10.2009.)