Nothing to Write, Better Get it Done

There are two voices operating in my head this morning. The first says, “You have nothing to write about today.” The second says, “You better get on and do it so.”

Some of the best writing gets done when you don’t know what to write. If that’s the case, I have high hopes for this piece because the empty page stretches below this sentence like a deserted west of Ireland beach, and I have no idea whatsoever what the next paragraph will hold.

Write. Just write. Set something down. Use your brain and well as your fingers. What happened this week? What happened to you? What occurred?

This week was quite a bit about the telly I watched. There was ‘Adolescence’ of course. We all watched that. I thought it was excellent, particularly Episode One, although they were all very good. I am interested in how the series is presented to us. It reminds me, rather incongruously, of how the Mission Impossible movies are presented to us. In both, there is the product, the story, the drama but, quite deliberately, there is also the making of the product. How was that shot done? Where was the camera? Did anyone break a foot? And an emphasis, all the time, that it was real, real time, real action. Real. Real. I’m not being critical of the approach. I reckon ‘Adolescence’ is the best thing I’ve seen on telly in a long time. The drive to talk about the making of the series as much as the issues raised in it is interesting, that’s all.

I also got to the end of Season 2 of Severance. Jump these paragraphs if you’re getting there yourself. I’m not intending to go all spoiler-tastic on it, but I tend to believe that everything is a spoiler when you talk to someone about something they haven’t yet seen. A raised eyebrow, a wry smile, the side you dress on… anything can give your feelings away.

For me. Severance Season 1 was a rather perfect thing. I’ve watched it twice and I think it delivers its premise admirably, with pace and determination. If Severance had ended with Series 1, it would have entered my consciousness as a wonderful thing that I would aspire to revisit from time to time. Rather like Rubicon. Anyone remember that? One series, very good, would like to revisit but never did.

Severance Season 1 ended on a cliffhanger but, now that I’ve seen Season 2, I could have lived with it ending there. Don’t get me wrong, Season 2 has acres of stuff to commend it, and it tied up really well in the last episode but, at times, it struggled to make it to that last episode. It required all of the first two episodes to tidy up the melee left from the end of Season 1. Then it had a number of branches out and back story episodes (expect more of those next season, Milchick… Burt… Ricken, even). Several of the four central characters strayed from their stories and the whole thing became diluted and stretched. The sense was that it would all fall together for another fine frenzy in the final episode and that’s pretty much how it went down, and very good it was too. I’ll be there for Season 3, of course I will, but that Season 1, that was a thing of beauty.

Here we are, 570 words. I haven’t looked back since that “What occurred?” sentence. But I’m back in the world not with nothing to write and my cold…

Oh, yes, I had a cold last week and I’m just crawling out from under it. A medium to bad one, I’d say. I’m a bit of a bugger with colds because I don’t stop and sleep and drink hot drinks. I work on through. I drag myself around with the mistaken belief that the worst thing I could do would be to lie down under it. I know this is wrong. I should be resting, using my meagre resources to battle the lurgy inside instead of wasting them stumbling to work across the town green. Anyway, I’m getting better now. There’s a bit of a cough. Oh, and when I was in the library yesterday, a lady came out of the computer room and walked past me and then when she clocked me, she doubled back and opened the computer room door and held it for me. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s okay,” I said, “I’m not going in there.” I guess that’s how shit I looked. Like an old man with a cold. I didn’t enjoy that experience. I’m nobody’s old man, not for another few short years anyway.

The latest film that Richard Keaney made from one of my scripts got into its seventh film festival this week. So Bedford and Naas, here we come. ‘Joey Had Never Been Out of the City’ came from a little story which originated on this blog so it’s not all been a waste of Sunday mornings. I really love this little film and it’s great to see festival audiences embrace it too.

And here I am. The page is full. Little value to everyone, I know, but the contract has been fulfilled for another week. The promise has been kept. Thank you for coming this far down the page with me. I hope you have a happy and peaceful week.

Au Revoir…

Gently Down The Stream

Patrica has taken up rowing. Actually, she hasn’t, I only said that knowing she’ll come and correct me.

“It’s not rowing,” she’ll say, “It’s paddling.”

And, indeed, it is. The style of boat which Patricia paddles is a Dragon Boat which, according to Wikipedia, is a human-powered watercraft originating from the Pearl River Delta region of China's southern Guangdong Province. Fair enough. For me though, having seen them practice on our local lake, it will always be ‘Hawaii Five Oh’ style paddling, with that ‘dud duh duh duh duuuuuuh duh’ theme ringing in my brain.

Seeing Trish take up the paddle reminds me of how much rowing was a part of my own life as a kid and as a teen and not at all since. Trish can tell you more about Dragon Boating if you like. The rest of this post will be all me.

I grew up right beside the Garavogue river in Sligo. We had boats on the river, and we used them to venture upriver and onto Lough Gill where we fished for Salmon and Trout and sometimes Pike, if there was a Pike competition. Dad had a boat, and my two older brothers also had boats. I didn’t ever have a boat, but I had the use of any of the three if I needed it and if I asked nicely. The boats were 18ft long, initially wooden but subsequently glass fibre construction with two bench seats for rowing and a sturdy stern which could bear an outboard motor of a couple of horsepower. Although it was many years before anyone got themselves up to owning a several horsepower outboard motor or ‘engine’ as we called them. The weapon of choice was a Seagull 40 Plus two stroke engine of about 3/4 of a horsepower.

But enough about mechanical propulsion and horsepower and such. The engines were used to accelerate the boats up the river and on to the fishing fields of the lake. Once there, and for the majority of the fishing day to follow, we would row. Both my Dad and my eldest brother Michael favoured using the Forty Plus at a low warble to gently troll their rods around the nooks and crevasses of the lake. But my elder brother Eddie, who I think I spent most lake time with, liked to row and row all day long. Whenever I went with him, we would bring two sets of wooden oars. He would sit on the bench seat nearest the engine, now tipped up out of the water to reduce drag. I would sit behind him on the bench that was nearest the bow. We had cushions wrapped in hard plastic for the necessary water proofing (it rained a lot) and we each had a two-by-two lath in the floor of the boat to brace our feet on. We had galvanised steel oarlocks that were dulled and burred, and which had a little dowel pushed through the bottom of them when they were in position, so that an errant oar would not pull one out and drop it into the black bottomless lake.

And we rowed.

No music. Very little chat. Three lines extending into the water behind, gentle trolling for the elusive Salmon. Eddie did the navigation and steering while I just provided a little low-wattage support to the pulling with my advanced bow position and my slightly too-short-to-be-entirely-effective oars.

But I learned.

I learned how to angle the oar slightly as it entered the water, to ease its passage, and to tilt the oar blade horizontal when it was out of the water again and on its back sweep, to ease turbulence on the blade. I learned to watch Eddie’s oars and keep time with his time so that our oars moved in close synchronicity and never-ever collided. I learned how to ease off on one oar and increase a little on the other when a change of direction was being made. I learned to love the deep whirlpools that were left in the water when the oar was removed, and I loved how those spinning holes in the water fell away behind the bow of the boat and persisted in their eddying until they were finally lost to sight.

Trout fishing was a completely different jam.

In late April and May, we would sit still in the boats in the sheltered bays of the lake and we would let the boat drift sidelong to the breeze, casting long lines out to the leeward side and dropping mayfly dressed hooks close to the mouths of the surface-sucking fish. I was never a good fly fisherman where my Dad and brothers were all highly skilled. I was generally happy being boatman* or ‘Gillie’ if you’re posh, which we clearly were not. I would operate with one oar, out the windward side, to allow the fly fishermen on either side of me to have a clear undisturbed palate on which to operate. With gentle motion of the oar, I would keep the boat straight up or ‘tip’ it laterally if fish were spotted feeding off to the side. When we reached the end of a drift run, I would pop out the other oar and take us back to the start as quickly as possible. No fish got caught on the row back to the end of the bay, so it was best done quickly.

Perhaps by osmosis, perhaps by practice, I became quite good at rowing. A good boatman. Able to guide and manoeuvre and turn with something close to instinct. As a teen, when I was allowed, I took to taking one of the boats out on the river after school. No engine, just the oars and oarlocks. I would bring a small rod and chase perch on the edge of the bullrushes across from the Back Avenue. I enjoyed the solitude and the gentle lapping of the river on the side of the boat. The perch I caught, I put back. They were no use to anyone for food. Their prickly back fins often inflicted a little reciprocal damage on me before they hurried away.

I haven’t rowed a boat in thirty years. Maybe forty at this stage. Maybe I never will again. But the memories of it all. The breeze and the waves and the time to think and dream – that’s all still in there. I’m grateful for the rather extraordinary upbringing I was gifted with.

So, paddle on, Patricia. I can see the attraction.

 

 

 

* Note: I am aware that I use‘men’ a lot in the above piece. ‘Boatmen’ ‘Oarsmen’ ‘Fishermen’. Of course ‘person’ would be much more appropriate. It’s just, in this case, I’m trying to evoke the way we spoke and even thought in the Seventies, on a river or on a lake. I’ll do better next time.

Lack of Courtesy Crossing

We have these things on the streets in our town called Courtesy Pedestrian Crossings. Do you have them too?

No, wait, wait, stop, stop.

I just did that thing there and I hate it when I do that thing, and I hate it when other people do that thing. You know what it is. Ask a question of your audience or readership. God, it winds me up and I just did it there. “Do you have them too?” Complete arsery on my part.

Richard Osman does it all the time on his House of Games show. Nobody likes Richard Osman more than I do, except possibly you, and I don’t want to criticise the lovely bloke unnecessarily. But he does this thing, and it’s clearly a production decision on the show. All the lonely people sitting at home, enjoying the quiz over their tea tray, waiting to die… let’s get them involved, lets ask them a question directly. ‘Did you get that answer?’ ‘What did you, at home, think that was?’ No. Fuck off. To me, it’s condescending and false. 

I can relate to your show well enough without you pretending you’re in the back of my telly, actually talking to me. And what happens when your show is repeated (for the twentieth time) on Dave in several years’ time and I’m dead and cremated and floating on the breeze over some weed-infested lake. Are you still talking to me then, or are you now talking to my offspring, themselves now sitting in a Lazy Boy recliner, waiting for their tea?

You can see how this shit might trigger me.

Don’t be talking to your audience as if they’re really there. Just say your piece and move on, it’s not a conversation and the more you pretend it is, the worse my eczema gets.

(clears throat)

So, yes, courtesy crossings. We have them and I don’t really care if you have them or not, or at least I’m not asking. The next paragraph is intended to tell you what a courtesy crossing is but, instead of typing it, I figured I’d copy and paste it from the road safety website, and thus save me some typing. But the aggregate time taken in typing this paragraph and in finding the paragraph to cut and paste has been far greater, so this has all been a complete waste of time. Sorry… I’m still annoyed about the Osman thing. Can you tell?

Generally, uncontrolled crossing places or courtesy crossings are designated shared areas of road. They are usually coloured, slightly raised, patterned, or cobbled sections of road. You should be aware of the potential dangers when approaching or crossing them.

Yeah. Too right. Funnily enough, the photo that goes with the cut and paste bit is from Westport, the town next to mine. So, I guess they have them too. Good to know, as Reacher says (a lot).

Pedestrian crossings are a good idea, I reckon. I’m all for ‘em. Give me a badge and a tee shirt, I’ll wear ‘em out. There’s only one real problem with them. People don’t have a fucking clue how they work. They haven’t read and digested my cut and paste paragraph and the other explanatory paragraphs that go along with it. So here’s my own cockeyed version of the rules. Perhaps the Road Safety Authority might like to adopt it as Canon. I’d do them a good deal. Anyway, here’s how they work.

a) The pedestrian has no right of way on the courtesy crossing. You present yourself at the kerb and hope that some fucker stops for you. They don’t have to.

b) Car drivers have an obligation to be at least 25% awake at the wheel, when approaching a courtesy crossing, to try to notice the poor fucker standing in the rain trying to get across the fucking road.

The non observance of these rules was demonstrated to me recently at the courtesy crossing outside of my office. An old guy waltzed straight out onto the road as a lady in a car approached him at considerable speed. The lady (it could equally have been a man) looked up from her phone and saw the guy and swerved around him like some impromptu French Connection tribute act. Then she jammed on the brakes and jumped out.

“You dozy old twat,” she roared and the old man (it could equally have been an old woman… or a young woman… you get my point). “You dozy old twat, I nearly ran you down.

The dozy old twat, sorry, old man, responded in kind.

“I was on the crossing, and you nearly ran me down.”

The lady stared at him, mouth agape. “This isn’t a crossing! It’s a… it’s a…,” she looked down at it, momentarily confused, “it’s a speed bump.”

I chipped in, rather like a Smokey Bear of courtesy crossings. (I hope my references are hitting okay today) “Sir,” I said, “you have no right of way here.” The lady smirked.

“And you, madam,” I now felt like that Inspector in An Inspector Calls, “this most certainly is not a ‘Speed Bump’. They both looked suitably cowed.

“I suggest you both go home and refamilarise yourselves with the Rules of the Road,” I concluded. And then I jumped on my white horse and rode off, remaining vigilant of road conditions at all times as I went.

Of course this isn’t quite how it went.

I think I told the old bloke to wake up and get some sense for himself and I told the wan in the car to go and read about courtesy crossings and get off her poxy phone. The truth is somewhere in there.

Look, here's the point I want to make about courtesy crossings. 

I have the measure of courtesy crossings. I use them several times every day. And if I swear in your side window as you whizz past me when I’m standing there, just know this. I’m not mad at you because you didn’t stop. I know you didn’t have to.

But I absolutely detest the fact that, as you drove past me, you never even noticed that I was there.