D i a r y A r c h i v e : M a r / A p r 0 7 'More Tales' - Monday 30th April 2007 I'll post more details about this in a couple of weeks, but I thought some of you might appreciate advance warning of the fact that I'll be reading a short story at Tales Of The DeCongested at Foyles in London on Friday 25th May. Please do come along if you possibly can. 'Soup' - Saturday 21st April 2007
Unfortunately, last week the ban had to come to an end. I say unfortunately, because I'd come to enjoy my cocoon-like state. Somehow, I'd managed to maintain a pretty decent handle on all the world's major events, so I had no reason to fear that I was losing touch with everything around me. But I'd cut myself off from the ceaseless onslaught of emotive detail, which is why turning on the Today programme felt a little like raising arms. Sure enough, my first reaction was to want to retreat into my shell where things had been silent. My second reaction was to roll my eyes and mutter "plus ca change": the names and places were different, but these were essentially the same stories as the ones I'd been listening to weeks ago. But after about half an hour I found myself feeling increasingly angered by the content of one news item after another. First it was the MPs who don't want to have to reveal the amount of taxpayers' money spent on drowning the Houses Of Parliament in booze. Then it was the father who's been found guilty of feeding his children some tinned soup which he had laced with anti-depressants and lighter fluid in the hope of making them ill... and then suing the soup producer. And so on... Peace and silence are all well and good, but a book by Timothy Radcliffe which I'm currently reading reminded me that anger is important too. So maybe it's just as well that I've re-introduced myself to my daily dose of wrath-inducement. If it worked for Mr Orwell, then it might also work for me. 'The Benefits Of Fiction' - Wednesday 21st March 2007 My tall friend T shared another bit of jaw-dropping info with me today: the story on which I based half of my last post is totally untrue. Click on this sentence to find out what I mean. Oh well... apologies to those of you who found the tale inspirational. I guess the only thing this proves is that, by our very nature, we like to find self-serving patterns and connections and narratives in all the events around us. I knew I should have gone to watch Inland Empire tonight... 'The Handicap Of Hindsight' - Tuesday 20th March 2007
Apparently, in 1890, the young Wintson Churchill was saved from drowning by another, far less privileged lad. To thank him for his bravery, Churchill's parents decided to help the youngster fulfil his ambition of becoming a doctor. In short, they paid for his education. The lad's name was Alexander Fleming: the man who later discovered penicillin. Fifty-three years later, Winston Churchill contracted pneumonia and would quite likely have died... had it not been for the intervention of none other than Dr Fleming. According to the story, Churchill proclaimed, "Rarely has one man owed his life twice to the same rescuer." I thought this extraordinary story paired up quite well with an article I read last week about Dubai's property market. It quoted a woman as saying that when she moved to the city ten years ago, there was hardly anything there: no modern roads, no skyscrapers, no shopping malls etc. Let's put aside for the moment the implications of the equation "no skyscrapers = nothing". What I found more worrying is that the woman was just plain wrong. When I left Dubai in 1995 the place was most certainly not devoid of tall buildings. In fact, there wasn't very much of which it was devoid, materialistically speaking. I guess what I like about these two anecdotes is their suggestion that sometimes, if we take a leap of faith - perhaps without even realising we're doing so - we can 'see' into the future with far greater clarity than if we look into the past. The Churchills couldn't have had the slightest clue that their actions would help create one of the key figures in the world of medicine. But somewehere in their decision to act as patrons was some modicum of hope, and surely that is the clearest 'seer' of the future. The woman quoted in the article was looking into the past from a standpoint of what she considered to be irrefutable facts, but she got her 'seeing' entirely wrong. She saw the past through her own selfish appraisal of the present, whereas the Churchills saw the future through a selfless engagement with the present. And although they didn't know it at the time, what they saw was 'right'. 'The Sound Of Sky ' - Friday 2nd March 2007
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I recently decided to ban myself from listening to the radio for several weeks. As I tend not to read newspapers and watch next to no television, this was, in effect, an almost total media ban, or, to express it more positively, it was a period of protection from the arguing, muck-raking and hystrionics which all too often constitute news. 
The Divine L recently shared a jaw-dropping bit of info with me. Well, I thought it was jaw-dropping...
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