It's been a while since I posted anything on here - or indeed anywhere else. No particular reason for this - just that other things have got in the way. For all those writing experts who insist that a writer should write something every day all I can say is, well that's the kind of writer (or, non-writer) that I have turned out to be. For the last year I have been a member of a writing group in my home city. It's run by a woman who is both a published novelist and a former creative writing teacher. Basically we have been getting a creative writing course delivered to us free of charge, but now she has decided to step down because she is going to do a full time PhD at a university in Wales. I admire her greatly for taking this on - she is probably in her early seventies - though it's not the kind of thing that I would want to do myself. This means that if the writing group is going to continue, us group members will need to take on more responsibility for running it, and I feel that I can hardly be a member of the group if I'm not doing any writing. This would be a shame because what the group has given me, prompted by my teachers emphasis on character driven fiction, is a whole stock of characters who are waiting for something to happen to them.
It seems to be widely accepted that an individual's personality or "character" is largely set by the time that they are five or six years old. At this point the personality is largely fixed and all that an individual can do is modify their behaviour to deal with new situations. Whether this is because of inherited characteristics or experiences gained in those first few formative years is open to debate. This certainly seems to be true for me and I feel a real sense of continuity in my being which has lasted through my childhood and adulthood through all of the challenges that life brings. To myself, I am still the same person as the nervous small boy who didn't want to enter the classroom on his first day of school. I am still the same person as the one who pined for weeks after he was dismissed by his first love. The fact that I am now a writer of fiction gives this a particular resonance. It's often said that a central tenet of fiction writing is that the main character (or characters) should experience change during the course of the storytelling. What I find in my writing is that the main character will experience change and will develop behaviours and strategies for dealing with that change while they stay very much in character. By the end of the story the world around them may have changed but they are still, very much the same person. It's likely that all of the characters that we develop in writing fiction end up being ourselves, in various guises, so I suppose it is only natural that this sense of continuity of personality will apply to these fictional versions of myself. I'm somebody who is largely happy with myself as I am but there are certainly some things about myself that I would change if I had a second chance. In particular I would do more to show my love for and appreciation of my parents. So, for one thing I would say something more to comfort my mother as she sat on the sofa in shock after the death of my father, while a priest clumsily tried to elicit information about him for the funeral service. This is where my sense of continuity in my character lets me down and I realise that to achieve this I would need to be reborn as a different person to the one that I am.
It's yesterday evening and I am in a queue at a supermarket checkout and the woman who is behind me in the line starts saying, in a low voice something about 'having no manners'. This is clearly directed at me but I have absolutely no idea what breach of queuing etiquette I have committed. Possibly I haven't moved forward quickly enough to allow her to put her items on the moving belt - or perhaps I knocked my empty basket against her when I leaned over to place it on the pile of empty baskets? I have no idea and if I were a better person, or at least a better communicator I would have turned to her and apologised in a general way, but I am confused and I just stare ahead and sulk. I sulk on the way home in the car and, now the next day it is still on my mind. I wish I were one of those effortlessly well mannered and courteous people (often they are americans) that you come across. They would know how to deal with this situation. Clearly I am not one of those people and I wonder how many times a day I am causing offence and not even realising it. I'll try to be more aware in the future but, world, I fear that this could happen again.
I don't sense that the future of urban transportation has been a hugely pressing issue on this site up until now - but here are some thoughts on the topic anyway. I read something a few weeks ago where it was suggested that we are coming to the end of the era of mass private car ownership. The argument was that with the growth of electric powered and driverless cars there will be less of a need for all of us to own a private car. In future when we need to get somewhere by car we will pre-book a shared driverless vehicle and pick it up from the nearest charging point, returning it when we are done. Or perhaps it will come to pick us up then return itself to its docking station when we are done with it? It is probably my generation that will find this most difficult, being as we are the most car obsessed of all groups, the ones that felt we had to learn to drive and acquire a car as soon as physically and financially possible. Of course what this also means is that it is my generation that are largely responsible for the environmental catastrophe that the internal combustion engine has created - the CO2 emissions, the poisonous exhaust fumes, the road deaths and the congestion that reduces quality of life in the cities just for starters. I hope that for me the end of the private car will have little impact. I live in a city with relatively easy access to public transportation - unreliable though it often is. When I was unable to drive (because of illness) for a couple of months it made hardly any difference to my life at all. It also seems to me that many young people are less concerned about owning a car. None of my children own one - they walk or cycle around the city and use trains and planes for longer distance travel. The end of private car ownership will not necessarily be a bad thing but where it is bound to have a major impact is on our popular culture - it will mean the end of the road trip movie as we have come to love it, and all those old teenage car crash death songs will be meaningless to future generations. On a more immediate level, young men's status will no longer centre on the performance of their cars and those endless office conversations about the best vehicle to transport kids, dogs and camping equipment will cease. There are, of course those who will never accept the change. Even in the small and densely built up UK that I live in there will be those who insist that their remote location or personal needs make private car ownership essential and what is more an inalienable right, so maybe it is this minority group that will need to rely on to keep the private car alive in popular culture in the future.
In my family for someone to say “You’re just like your dad” is not something that is likely to be all that well received. For a whole variety of reasons, we siblings have no wish to be too closely identified with him. Nevertheless, when I am sitting on the old sofa in the kitchen while my wife puts a meal together and I am apparently doing nothing much at all and she says “You look just like your dad,” I do know exactly what she means. She is referring to my father in the last few years of his life when he would sit at the kitchen table, next to the alcove, near the old bookcase with the Roberts Radio and his box of vegetable seeds on top, saying and doing nothing at all for hours at a time. When she says, “What did your dad do?” I have to take time to think this one through. In the summer I know that he spent a lot of time at his allotment garden, which he kept neat and weed free in a way that I could never achieve. Evenings were spent with mum watching TV until, around ten he would put a coat on and go to the pub for half an hour. Only ever one drink, unless I was there to persuade him to have a second. I don’t think he had any friends in there to talk to, though there was sometimes a nod to a man of his age who he called “the Welshman”, and that was as far as his social interactions went. In fact that seems to be about as far as his life went. In the winter his visits to the allotment garden diminished and as far as I can see he did very little at all. When I visited I would take him to a football match but I don’t think this is something that he would have contemplated doing without me. This is only a slice of my father’s life and there is much more that I could write about, but I sense that I am going to have to approach his story in small pieces. The problem is that when somebody says, “You’re just like your dad”, I can’t help but think of him living a life that had come to an end before its time, and I have no wish to be seen in that way.
I write a lot about places, and then I fit the people into those places. It should probably work the other way round. For now it’s Saturday evening and we are at the harbour festival. It’s a glorious evening of the kind that we’ve been experiencing all this summer and there’s an old-style reggae band playing on the stage in front of twenty thousand or so people to a backdrop of tall ships and dockyard cranes, while a procession of hot air balloons passes overhead. My partner turns to me and says that she can’t believe that there an event like this could happen in many cities. I look around, at the young and old, the black and white and brown people, who are talking in a dozen different languages, and the gay couples, the men and women and those in transition and I find that I sort of know what she means. “Maybe London or Brighton” I say, “but probably nowhere else.” I can’t claim that I was ever at the centre of any kind of 1970’s or 80’s radicalism. I wasn’t there when Bob Marley played the Hammersmith Apollo, never saw The Clash or the Sex Pistols, and as far as I can recall I was never at a Rock Against Racism event, but even living as I was in a midlands city with a young family there was still a feeling of being part of something positive as the country launched itself into the modern world and began to embrace what we now call diversity. As I look around I feel pleased with what my home city has become and then I feel a mounting anger towards those who are trying to steal this from us; to take us away from the rest of the world - out of history and back into some fantasy past. Just leave that to the writers, I think, and anyway none of the people at this festival would believe in that kind of thing.
For the past three years I have attended an oil painting class at a local community education centre. Whilst I have produced some work that I am quite pleased with I don't know whether I can call myself a real painter yet. Some of my classmates pursued art studies to quite a high level in the past and most have been painting for much longer than I have. I notice that when they talk about their own work or when they comment on other's work they use a language that I don't speak. When someone's work is described as "painterly" it seems to suggest that they are beyond the layman stage and are able to paint in a free and expressive way that goes beyond the beginner's attempt to create a photographic copy of the subject. I'm not qualified to add "painterly" to my vocabulary and don't expect the word to be used to describe my work anytime soon. In an environment of encouragement and positive feedback I have also had to learn to interpret my art tutor's comments to gain any impression of the merits of my work. I take, "you must be pleased with that, " to mean that she views the work positively, whilst "what are your feelings about this painting," is not so good. There are certain parallels with my writing endeavours. I think that I will only consider my self a "writer" when I am able to give useful feedback to others. At the moment I find myself held back from doing this and I suspect there are a couple of reasons for this: That my comments may be thought to be over-critical and therefore unhelpful. That my comments will make me appear naïve and inexperienced and therefore will be considered as being of little value. I clearly have some work to do.
Some explanation of why I started this blog. Three years ago I moved back to my home city of Bristol after an absence of over forty years. For sixteen years prior to the move we had lived in a small market town in the Midlands. This is where our children had gone to school, reached adulthood and moved on into their own independent lives. We lived on the edge of the town, with our garden backing on to open fields and woodland, and from the front of the house we had views across the town to a wonderful 1oth century minster church. For many British people this will sound idyllic and I suppose that we had a lifestyle that many would aspire to, but after sixteen years my wife and I were ready to move on. It had been great while the kids were growing up and we both had a daily escape to work in a nearby city but that ended when I stepped down to part time work and later into full retirement. I often found myself walking around a town that was empty of people until the evening, when the commuters returned, and trying to engage in community activities with people who wanted nothing to change. Their every other word was "heritage", and it was quite clear that they felt the best days were in the past. In my work I had led many projects to improve peoples lives in disadvantaged areas and as time went on I found the air of self satisfaction and resistance to change in our home environment quite difficult to reconcile with my personal aims and beliefs. In a city, change is ever present and all pervasive and I find this a source of great creative energy. After the move I became aware that I was living in a city that in some ways looked like the one I grew up in, but actually was completely different. The buildings' might look the same but their insides had been stripped out and scoured to create homes for different lives. Like many cities it has become a divided city to an extent that was not evident in my childhood - a city divided by age and wealth and race: the original inhabitants, the people that I grew up with, pushed by the housing market to the periphery , where they are almost out of sight. In spite of all this, the city has a vitality and its people have a dynamism that was completely missing in the declining seaport that I grew up in. My growing understanding of the changes became increasingly evident in my writing and also in the oil paintings that I started to produce. I wrote a large number of pieces, reflecting on my experience of growing up in the city in the 1960s and 1970s and also about the tensions that I observed in the modern city. Later, I begun to explore the lives of the many and diverse people that the city is now home to. I have submitted a number of these stories to competitions, with no success at all to date, and now, for the first time I have posted two of the pieces on this blog.
BACK TO THE CITY Sweet cigar smoke weaving through the crowd at Ashton Gate on Boxing Day. Drooping floodlights illuminate a muddy pitch. I stand next to my father in winter coat, always on the left side for his good ear. Another time we are in the changing room at the North Baths, the sound of children echoing from the high ceiling. There is the reek of chlorine and I am undressed, inadequately dried, thinking of hot Bovril from the machine. The houses on the hills look the same to me, but they have been hollowed out while my eyes were averted, scoured and painted to make homes for people I’ve never met.
A brother and sister grew up on a South Bristol council estate in the 1920’s and 30’s and then their lives diverged. For those of us who grew up on one side of the divide it felt as if those on the other side were living a life that came out of a TV screen. When I was young we went to their Christmas parties. My sisters and I would huddle in a corner of the lounge while dad went downstairs to play snooker with our cousins and Uncle Fred held forth, nursing his whisky in front of a large television, his moustache and slicked hair making him look like Walt Disney, with Auntie Marion as his actress wife. They lived on what was then the eastern edge of the city, in the largest house of a housing estate that Uncle Fred had built, high above the River Avon. We arrived by bus and around 11 or midnight we were given a lift home, by one of my cousins. Our preference was for the American car, a pale blue Chevrolet, a bulbous model dating from the late 40’s or early 50’s. It seemed enormous by the standards of those times, with seats like sofas, automatic transmission and a soft bouncing motion. I remember a particular ride home in the American car, one cold night after Christmas. It was late and my eldest cousin Alan drove, smelling of beer. Down through the nearly empty streets travelling west, heading for the city centre, past the last stragglers on their way home from the pubs. Pedestrians occasionally turned to stare at the car, a symbol of the free enterprise society, as it slid down the long descent to Old Market. At St George’s Park Alan turned right and worked his way through residential areas, first to Eastville, by the stadium, then on to Muller Road. There had been snow almost from the beginning of the journey but as we got closer to home it grew thicker and, with almost no traffic to keep the road clear it was soon covered across its whole width. As we climbed, towards Gloucester Road, Alan struggled to control the car, which was losing traction and slewing from side to side. At the bottom of Springfield Avenue, Alan decided that he would go no further. The final climb to Gloucester Road was steep and he was clearly concerned that the car would get stuck and he would not be able to return to the party. For all its size the Chevrolet was underpowered and unsuited to the steep, unsalted roads. We walked the last few hundred yards home through deepening snow. At the house dad opened the door then went straight to the kitchen to start the paraffin stove, while mum moved us up the stairs to bed. The American car was soon gone, replaced by more conventional vehicles, the practicalities of maintaining an ageing foreign car in the England of the late 1950’s eventually defeating even Uncle Fred. The parties ended as well, at least as far as my sisters and I were concerned. We were told that it was not fair to expect one of the boys to drive us home. I suspect that there was another reason, which is that my parents were becoming uncomfortable with the apparent disparities in wealth and the lifestyle of the two families. We weren’t particularly concerned about the end of the parties. They were fairly adult affairs and my cousins, most of whom were a little older and more used to that kind of environment, largely ignored us. My parents continued to go to occasional parties without us, and later they spent some evenings at a pub in Somerset that Uncle Fred had bought, but we had little involvement in this. It was as if by this time the rules of engagement between the two families had been negotiated and my sisters and I were to play no substantial part in the settlement. Increasingly my parents seemed to make a virtue of our relative poverty, our lack of material goods. It was made very clear to us that money was not to be confused with worth. In my mind the American car stands at the centre of our family story. While my parents made a virtue of going without, it became an early emblem of the others’ wealth, a reminder of the origins of the lifestyle that they aspired to. The car was replaced by many others, but none of those marked the difference between brother and sister so starkly, or as startlingly as the blue Chevrolet.