by Wil Gritten.

In Henderson, with an hour to kill, I did what any self respecting cowboy outlaw would do: I toured the charity shops. In the first one I sat at a table made for children, on a chair made for a child, and flicked through five large boxes of old vinyl.

It was like flicking through Gideon’s bible for something to whack off over.

I don’t know whether there were ever any good records in Henderson or whether all the good records had already been plundered and the bad ones had settled into the charity shops like the heavier poo particles in a septic tank, but I can honestly say it was the least rewarding rummage I’ve ever had.

Feeling drained after my night on the floor of the Sky Lounge and soul-weary after the rigours of downtown Auckland I stumbled out into the street, still emitting great wafts of meaty belch.

The next charity shop was better. Once bitten I avoided the vinyl section and opted instead for books, of which there were hundreds, but that strange feeling of handling heavy poo particles clung to me and I veered away shortly after reaching an old VCR case with the letter B tippexed onto it. I lurched over a nearby clothes rack and whisked through a few foul-smelling tweeds before finding the real meat of the collection: farmwear. Never before have I seen so many different kinds of overalls, coveralls, jerkins and waxed jackets. Some of them were so localised and rural I could not tell for what purpose they had originally been made. Sadly there was nothing in my depressingly average size so I jingled out of the shop and into the tackle & bait shop next door.

Feeling buoyed by the thought that the real object of my mission was within reach at last I  produced my wallet  and dropped a C note on various extravagant pieces of tackle I didn’t really need. The young lout at the desk eyed me as if I was some kind of idiot and warbled in an awkward falsetto:

“Going fishing?”

“No.” I replied curtly.

His eyes bulged with surprise and he nodded at the unnaturally large pile of fishing tackle heaped between us on the counter.  I looked down at it and jumped, as if I was seeing it for the first time, then laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.

“’Course I’m going fishing.” I said, like an old pal. Then I added, so he’d know I wasn’t just some dumb tourist: “Got some buddies over in Piha.”

“Oh.” He said, without even making eye contact.

I managed to keep up the jovial façade until I was out the door and back in the street. Then the weariness overwhelmed me. I didn’t feel like a great explorer any more, I felt like a tired little man who needed a nice cup of tea. I dug my phone out of my pocket and looked at the time – still half an hour until I had to meet Pria. I considered walking across the street to the mall but instead I flopped down on a bench outside the train station and closed my eyes.

I don’t know about this ‘being the road’ crap, I said to myself, maybe I’m getting a bit old for it.

Bullshit, my other self waded in, as boisterously as ever, you’re just being a pussy. You’ve got days – weeks of this before you reach your breaking point.

Oh shut up, I said, what if I don’t want to reach my breaking point? What if I don’t like this aimless wandering any more? What if I want to go on holiday to some nice Third World resort with an en suite beach and armed security guards? What if that’s the kind of person I want to be?

The insufferable second voice said nothing. I knew I didn’t believe me for a second.

So I sat there on my bench with my eyes closed, probably making expressions relevant to the conversation inside my head, until someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Fancy a lift to Piha?” A voice asked. And what a voice: a lovely, deep, earthy voice belonging to a lovely, deep, earthy woman.

“Ha!” I yelled, leaping up, all cares and troubles falling away. “Pria!”

I embraced my stern little Maori/Russian/Australian love hobbit and danced around her, struck as always when I haven’t seen her for a long time by her utter loveliness. She was wearing muddy gumboots and a long poncho, and her black hair was tied in two pigtails like a Native American squaw.

“Get in.” She ordered, pulling open the door of the Ute and screaming at the frantic dog within: “GETINTHEBACKHONEY!” Then apologising:  “She’s not used to people.”

Smiling broadly and feeling my much depleted batteries already beginning to recharge I jumped in, bumped my head on a dream catcher hanging from the rear-view, slammed the door and we skidded off in a cloud of pebbles and dust.

“I’ve got to pick us up some meat,” Pria shouted over the noise of the engine and the whining of the dog in the back, “then we’ll get you home to Piha.”

And I lay back in my seat, already covered in dog hair, already beginning to relax, already letting myself be taken away. Away from Henderson and Auckland, away from ghastly neon signs and barren Vinyl boxes, away from it all, across the ranges, home to Piha. Via the meat shop.

Find out what happens next in the fourth instalment of King Of The World – a mini-series. Exclusively here on www.brightyoungthings.info.

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THE BYTs HAVE LIFT OFF!

‘Hello September 2010. How are you doing? I do hope you are going to be good to us Bright Young Things. What with our books being launched this month and all.’

‘You are? How marvellous!’

Yes that’s right folks, all four titles in the Parthian Bright Young Things range launch this month, starting on Friday 17^th at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea. So dust off your glad rags, and get yourselves some new dancing shoes. The BYT party season is upon us, and I for one, can’t wait. Clink, clink.

What other news do I have for you? Let me see.

GREEN MAN FESTIVAL

Photo by Rosie Reed Gold (2010)

Mother Nature tried damn hard, but I did not drown at Green Man 2010. Also, considering my general dislike of being cold and wet, I didn’t moan that much either. In fact I fear I may have had rather a fun time.  Get me. With my performer pass. And my guest tickets. And my seeing Wayne Flaming Lips under a tree backstage and all. Yes I saw the Flaming Lips. Yes they played that song that I appear to love for unknown reasons:

‘I know a girl who reminds me of Cher,
She’s always changing the colour of her hair,
She don’t use nothing
That ya buy at the store [...]
She uses tangerines...’

No I didn’t fall down in the mud. Yes I probably shouldn’t have had that last drink. Yes, that probably was the biggest audience I’ve had at one of my poetry readings SO FAR (Thanks Sunday Afternoon Literature Tent Crowd). Yes some of my friends really did say ‘We came at 3.30pm but you weren’t on stage so we left…’ Erm, guys, there were five poets on the bill, and we were in alphabetical order. D’oh. Yes we were listed as four of Patrick Jones’ favourite Welsh poets. Yes I know I’m not actually… Yes we were all women. Yes I think that was on purpose. Thanks to all who came along. Thanks also to my fellow performers Mab Jones, Rhian Edwards and Sophie McKeand. No I’m still really not at all bored of wearing The Tiger Hat. Yes Laura Dockrill and John Cooper Clarke really were that f’ing fantastic. So was In Chapters. Murder. M-U-R-D-E-R. Yes, you had to be there.  Yes the Comedy Tent can be a saviour in lifting spirits in damp festival times (Thanks going to Andrew Watts as one off-the-top-of-my-head example). Yes placing Comedy and Literature in the same tent may confuse Guardian Journalists like Nancy Groves. Yes, sometimes it is better when the bands are really noisy at a folk festival and wake you the hell up (Islet, you were brilliant). Rain or no rain, this is still a favourite festival of mine. They paid me this year. But not to say that.

BUGGED

I like eavesdropping and people watching. So I entered a poem about an overheard chat about a giant pencil into national eavesdropping project Bugged.org 10 minutes or so before the deadline. Guess what? Jo Bell (ace poet behind Bugged and National Poetry Day) only went and picked me to be in the book. Yay. I’ll be at the Birmingham Launch on the evening of 21^st October 2010. More details soon.

OTHER DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

I’ll be performing a fair whack in the next couple of months. As well as the BYT launches (Swansea, Bangor, Aberystwyth, and London), here are some more dates for your diary:

I will (rather appropriately) be reading extracts from The Art of Contraception at Sex Wales and Anarchy 3 on September 4th 2010 at The Coal Exchange, Cardiff Bay (I’m on sometime between 1 and 5pm).

I will be performing poems at Fair Play Festival in Cardiff on Sunday 26 Sept

I will be reading extracts from my book The Art of Contraception as the main feature at The Crunch, Mozart’s, Swansea on Thursday 14 October (8.30pm open mic sign up, 9pm start. Arrive early if you want a seat).

The Bright Young Things will be appearing at BayLit Festival: The Shock of the New 2010 (30 October, Cardiff).

PS

Isn’t it nice to have all the boys back on blog duty? I’m sure glad to see their words here, at any rate. Welcome back from summertime Tyler and James.

Roarmiaow for now,

Soooooooooooooz 

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Hi there, bloggy! It’s been a while! How the devil are you?

No, no, I’m fine. I’ve just been…

Yes, it is that time of year, and, well…

No, I know you’ve got expectations, but…

ALRIGHT. Listen: I’ve been busy. I’ve got a job now, a full-time one. After years of freelancing (read: working less, being poorer, but having bucketloads of time to write) I am now fully and gainfully employed, as a Writer/Narrative Designer for an exciting new computer game that I’m not allowed to say anything about. This meant an upheaval of almost every aspect of my life – moving from Cardiff to Portsmouth as the biggest change – and became an absolute thief of time, tearing it away from me and leaving me with a few evenings that I spent, internet-free, in guesthouses. While I can argue that it was formative (because I’ve never met so many odd people in my entire life), I can’t say it was wholly fun. Upshot of this is: I’m now in my house, and we’re nearly unpacked, and I have the internet. BLOG ON!

We’re super-close to launch of the books now – I’ve seen proofs, and final cover stuffs, and the lovely twitter account (@briteyungthings) has kept me up-to-date on the various processes (of printing stuff and press releases) that lead towards there being a physical, tangible book to stick on my shelves – and the shelves of Waterstones, independent booksellers, and, hopefully, yourselves. It’s idiotically exciting, and simultaneously terrifying. I’ve never had a review before. I mean, sure, people have told me that stuff I’ve written is rubbish or good or whatever, but I’ve never had anybody read my work with the express purpose of informing others whether it’s worth their time. Further to that, I’ve never had readers read my writing having spent their hard-earned on it.

Basically, what I’m saying is this: PRESSURE.

I am suddenly free of all authorial control over how people read the thing. They might think that I mean one thing when, in fact, I mean something else entirely. I can’t shout at them that any particular bit was meant to be funny or sad; they just have to take it as they find it. Weird. Same goes for all these authors, of course – and even more for Wil, as he won’t be at the launches, so can’t even shout at the small group who do hear us read about his intentions.

Oh, god, the launches. I’ve started thinking about them now – I’m only making it to the Swansea, Cardiff and London events, but I’m starting to think about what I want to read even now. Different sections for each launch (to keep it fresh for myself), and one reading from each timeline in the novel, as it were, but apart from that, I’m befuddled. My favourite bits of any novel are never the start, so I’m loathe to read that myself. How do you even go about picking? Random page, maybe? God knows. (Actually, that might work: random page, give it some context, bang. If you see me before an event hovering a pin over the book as I wildly flap the pages, you’ll now know why.)

Anyway, I’m back on blog duty. I’ll try to post more, promise. Promise.

Cross fingers.

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I’m having severe déjà vu today, since I’m out at UBC – the university where I did my undergrad degree in Vancouver. We drove out here so Naomi could meet with Kieran Egan, a leading educationist, to talk about the crisis Theatr Powys is facing due to the Welsh Arts Council cutbacks. When Nai was organizing the annual Theatre In Education Conference two years ago, she arranged for Kieran to fly out to Britain to give a keynote speech on the importance of drama in education. As a major figure in the field, he’s a good person to have on our side. He’s already said he’d like to help in any way he can. To start with we’re hoping he’ll sign a letter and petition, protesting against the Arts Council’s decision.

To kill time while they’re having their chat, I ducked into the university bookstore to see how they’d feel about carrying Fireball. I played the old alumni card. The bookstore buyer wasn’t in, but I got a name and contact details, so we’ll see how it pans out. Afterwards I found myself wandering over to the food court on University Boulevard, one of my old haunts. I felt a warm wash of nostalgia as I walked in. Most of the takeaway food stalls, and their dishes, are the same: Indian, Greek, sushi, kebabs. The pizza place (my staple) has moved upstairs and raised their prices, but other than that I could have been back in the year 2000.

I took my usual seat, got out my notebook. This is where I’d spend my dinner hours, from five to seven, while reading my fellow students’ stories and waiting for my evening writing class to start. It was run by Murray Logan, Canadian author of the short story collection, King of Siam. I loved that book, and keep checking to see if he’s come out with something new, but he hasn’t yet. I don’t know why. I’ll be the first to snap it up if and when he does.

The class was mostly made up of adults doing part-time degrees, except for me and one or two other students. They were all good. Better than me. I didn’t know what I was doing. The others put up with me because I was so hapless and well-meaning. I only wrote one story that year that anybody liked. It was called Boxes. It was about a kid wandering around the Cove, feeling lonely and alienated. I remember Murray wrote on my manuscript: Very Holden Caufield – and that’s a good thing. I was confused. Who was this guy Holden Caufield? I found out, of course. And struck upon one of my major literary models (for better or for worse, depending on how much you like The Catcher in the Rye.) You can still feel the influence of Holden in Fireball, in Razor’s Cove-based vernacular.

Back then, Murray must have been about thirty. He was a good guy, a great teacher, but at the time he seemed so old to me. I remember thinking: I’m going to have more than one book to my name by the time I’m his age. I certainly didn’t see myself as a university lecturer. I was ready to take the literary world by storm and start selling my fictional hotcakes. My hapless and well-meaning hotcakes. Turn the clock forward, and right now I’m probably about the age Murray was then. My first book is coming out, I’m lecturing in Creative Writing at Gloucestershire, and thirty doesn’t seem so old anymore – for obvious reasons.

I’m sure some of my students look at me and think the same thing that I used to think about Murray. Hopefully the good ones are fired up and, like I was, ready to tackle the publishing world head-on. To ride the rocket of their pen to stardom. But it’s not easy, this writing thing. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be any fun. By the time you do sell something substantial, the act of selling has almost become incidental. To write anything you’re proud of, you have to let go of your ego and just get stoked on the process of writing itself – the zen-like aspects of the craft. Eventually you find you’re no longer doing it to make a sale, or gain recognition, or impress anybody. You’re just doing it because it’s become a habit, a ritual that keeps you happy and sane. In that way, it’s like a religion. A form of prayer or meditation. Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful that people are interested in hearing (or reading) some of my prayers. But even if those words – like the protests of Naomi and Theatr Powys – were falling on deaf ears, I’d still be saying them.

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By Wil Gritten.

The next morning, when I had peeled the synthetic material of my sleeping bag from my face and gawped with puffy eyes at my phone, I was surprised to find that I had managed to sleep until eight o’clock. My mouth felt like I’d spent the night sucking generations of dust mites out of the hideously patterned carpet and I could feel the red creases in my face left by the zip, but otherwise I felt well rested. Unsurprisingly the Sky Lounge was already buzzing with activity. Peoples of all different nationalities and faiths had gathered around me while I slept and now stood, some alone and others in small groups, to stare through the floor-to-ceiling windows and mutter sombre incantations.

“Look, Sanjay, it is construction site.”

“Qui, Vladimir, it is truly marvellous.”

“Oh Charles, I simply adore those breeze blocks.”

“Me too, Mai Ling, me too.”

Some of them turned and watched me with vaguely questioning, cowlike eyes as I rose and stretched and began stuffing my sleeping bag into my pack. Then I laced up my shoes and, muttering incantations of my own, rode the escalator out of the Sky Lounge and down to the relative sanity of the arrivals lounge.

I found a coffee shop and waited in line, trying to work up a bit of saliva, while the people around me eyed my zip-lined face with suspicion and kept their distance. I had only been away from the comforts of home for one night and already I’d regained the hard stare and wild countenance of the seasoned traveller. I was on the road again, cast loose and running free. A rebel. An explorer. I wasn’t just on the road now, I was the road.

In muted Clint Eastwood tones I ordered my flat white and asked if there was a shower nearby, then I sauntered on down to the corridor next to the florists and, with the careless air of an outlaw, used the shower without paying for a towel or soap. Gangster.

On a bus to the city I watched the cold winter sunshine play amongst the pebble-dash and pampas grasses of suburban Auckland. My plan, such as it was, was to kill time until my friend Pria finished work at one-thirty. We’d arranged to meet at a train station outside town and drive back over the ranges to Piha.

While still in Sydney I’d pictured myself idling away the hours in a little bookshop café somewhere, chatting with colourful locals and impressing everyone with my profoundly witty conversation skills. But at this time of day the cold streets of downtown Auckland had other ideas. They didn’t care about my little café fantasy and they certainly didn’t give a flying frick about any smart-alec fricking wittiness. I sat in my seat and watched as one nasty bus stop replaced another until there were none left and the bus driver turned in his seat and politely asked me to get the frick off the bus because we’d reached the last fricking stop.

I stood on the wet pavement of the ferry terminal and watched a group of cheerful young backpackers being herded cowboy-style into a minibus. Their wranglers, a pair of portly bus drivers whose impressive guts peaked out from under their matching sweaters, grumbled and swore at them listlessly. As I passed one of them spat in the gutter at my feet and glared up at me, obviously under the impression that I too was some kind of backpacker. I fixed him with an outlaw squint and bared my teeth and he backed quickly away.

Out in the street things were worse. There was nobody about but downtrodden tourists and local ner-do-wells in rugby shirts, limping leprously and without direction. Above me neon signs buzzed and flashed, irrelevant in the morning light, advertising outlandish combination establishments: a Chinese restaurant which doubled as a Sex Shop and a fish and chip shop which was also a massage parlour.

Reeling with horror I walked on, feeling at once light headed with hunger and sickened by the pools of vomit and stale booze lining the pavement. My carefree dream of a little café with potted ferns and a rosy cheeked patron lay naked in an alleyway, shivering and convulsing in its own retch, while I staggered on, avoiding eye contact and empty ‘French-style’ patisseries, looking for someone who didn’t smell of piss to ask directions of, or at least a place serving morning orientated foodstuffs with more than one person in it. Auckland was either tourist traps or lecherous dives and I was lost in it, with my knapsack on my back.

Eventually though I found a place. Admittedly it was a Chinese restaurant, but it did serve breakfast and there were a lot of people eating it – construction workers and warfies, and a few students to boot. And so, sighing with a forced and hollow contentment, I acted out a pantomime of my plan and sat with my book at a table facing the street, and devoured a plate of deep fried delicacies. Then, wincing slightly and belching great wafts of unusually meaty vapour, I waddled to the train station and rode through yet more crumbling, asbestos-ridden suburbs until I reached the town of Henderson, a stone heavier and an hour early, to meet my friend Pria.

Find out what happens next in the third instalment of King Of The World – a mini-series. Exclusively here on www.brightyoungthings.info.

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by Wil Gritten.

I did what I was supposed to do and worked, and wrote and played the fool. Then I flipped a coin to choose between a trip home to self promote or a trip to New Zealand to go fishing. The coin chose fishing. I flipped again and again the coin chose fishing. Naughty coin.

So I wrote a little note apologising to my publishers, packed a pack, kissed my wife and cat, boarded a new plane and rode it to New Zealand. Sorry about that, planet Earth.

The flight was cheap and they served no food and I arrived in Auckland at midnight. But my loving saviour, the queen of forethought, had packed me a few supplies, and in keeping with my well developed spirit of adventure I had chosen not to book a hotel room but to camp on the airport floor instead. You’re not thirty yet, I told myself, perhaps when you’re thirty you can allow yourself such luxuries. But for now, Willy, toughen up.

Stupidly I left my bag of food on the plane and, feeling disproportionately sentimental about it, I pulled my sleeping bag over my head and drifted into an uncomfortable sleep, on a bench in what I thought would be the most overlooked part of the airport – a place called the Sky Lounge, whose floor-to-ceiling windows may once have been functional but now opened only onto a splendid view of some air-con ducts and a construction site. Little did I know.

I was awoken from troubled sleep by a pack of universally porky teenagers who had inexplicably decided to surround my bench and talk in mild voices on topics varied and extraneous.

“I saw a fella slip on a banana skin the other day.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought that only happened in cartoons.”

“No, I really saw it.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got to get the banana skin up the right way, otherwise it doesn’t work.”

“True?”

“Yeah. I saw it on Mythbusters.”

“No.”

“I saw it at school.”

“Yeah?”

By this time I had removed the Taliban scarf from my eyes, propped myself up on one elbow and glared at them. They stared mildly back at me.

“Do you know what time it is?” I asked.

They said nothing.

“It’s one-thirty.” I said. “And obviously I’m trying to sleep here.”

They said nothing.

“I don’t mean to be rude.” I said. “But can’t you go and sit somewhere else?”

The whole time their expressions hadn’t changed. It wasn’t until I’d lain back and pulled the scarf over my eyes that they started whispering and giggling.

Balls. I thought. They’re going to spit on me or kick me or nick my bag.

I tried to make my prostrate form look as masculine and formidable as possible. No mean feat in a baby blue sleeping bag with a shawl over my eyes. Eventually and without incident the giggling and whispering moved away and I fell back to sleep, warmed by my rekindled spirit of adventure.

Twenty minutes later a gang of what can only be described as Russians surrounded me, obviously attracted by some kind of residual allure left over from the Sky Lounge of old. Like a species of eel that has migrated to and from the Sargasso Sea for so many generations, as continental drift has dragged it further and further away, these people still flocked here to stare with dull eyes at a sheet of insulating wool swinging lazily in the midnight breeze.

“I cannot see runway now.”

“No.”

“It is just construction site.”

“Yes.”

“Look at new duty free shopping area.”

“Yes.”

“It is nice.”

This wonderful conversation may have continued well into the night but I had long since torn the rag from my eyes and stalked furiously off to find rest among the potted plants and faded pictures at the far end of the Sky Lounge.

Find out what happens in the morning in the next installment of King Of The World – a mini-series.

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“I don’t know about you, but Summer is turning out to be pretty hectic for me. What with going to festivals as a journalist, going to festivals as a performer, editorial work and preparations for the Bright Young Things book launches, I’ve got very little time for working on The Novel or slobbing about watching iPlayer. Let alone ploughing through my review pile of books. I did make time to write a short poem that was selected by Bugged though, yay, and I thought I ought to make time to blog here because I have some Literary Wales news…”

Read my latest Mslexia Blog in full

In other news, I now also write for theatre bible The Stage and ace literary magazine The Raconteur have asked me to be a regular blogger for them on their all new digital edition website, so look forward to that from September.

It is Green Man festival this weekend. I’m reading poems with Patrick Jones, Mab Jones and Rhian Edwards at The Literature Tent on Sunday at 3pm. See you there!

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Just a quick note to say that there are extracts from two of the Bright Young Things in the current (Summer) issue of Welsh lads mag RedHanded Magazine. Read words by Tyler and myself on Page 12. I also have bar and restaurant reviews further back. You can pick it up for FREE in shops, pubs, and venues across South Wales.

LONDON was great by the way, hello new and old London fans I’m really looking forward to our BYT London launch. Date to be announced shortly. Ooooooooooooh exciting.

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I’ve got a new theory.  I’ve decided being a writer is similar to being a warlock.  A male witch.  Not to be confused with a wizard, which has lame modern connotations: Harry Potter and Gandalf and crap like that.  Warlock is more archaic, comical, and appropriate – in application to writers, at least.  I’m basing this theory on the reaction I get when I tell people I have a book coming out.  I’m going through this process at the moment, since I’m back home in Vancouver on holiday. 

It’s not easy to ‘out’ yourself as a novelist.  It doesn’t occur to me to raise the subject most of the time.  My friends and I don’t really talk about books.  We talk about hockey and films and beer.  So to drop my book into these conversations seems kind of inappropriate – even impolite.  When it does come up, I usually admit to its existence apologetically.  Like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a novel coming out.  Weird, eh?’

But no matter how unassuming my attempt, the reaction is always the same.  You get that look.  The same look (I’m convinced) warlocks received in the old days, when they admitted to dabbling in spell-casting.  People are shocked, at first.  Even the ones who are vaguely aware that I’ve been writing while in Wales.  ‘A book?  No way!’  It’s a mix of incredulity and disbelief, which usually gives rise to the question: ‘How long is it?’  Almost everybody’s asked me that at some point.  I can only assume that they’re politely checking to make sure my book is actually a book – and that I’m not using the term in an exaggerated way, to describe 34 typed pages I’ve photocopied and stapled together myself.  They seem even more surprised when I tell them it’s around 300 pages.  That sounds like a hell of a lot of typing – to them as well as me.  For a while we’ll both sit in silence, wondering how I managed to perform this feat.  The questions that come next – and my answers – are always fairly similar.

“How long did it take you?”

“I don’t know.  A long time, I guess.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s a sort of first-person coming of age story, set in Vancouver.”

“So it’s about you…”

“No.  Not really.  It’s fiction.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

As you can probably tell, I’m not that great at explaining the witchery of writing.  Conversations about the book generally peak with a final burst of enthusiasm and congratulations, before tapering off into awkward silence.  That’s the point when we’ll open another beer, change the channel, or go back to whatever it is we’ve been doing.  Pretty soon we can forget about the existence of the novel, and that fact that I dabble in literary witchcraft.

It’s my fault, really.  Maybe if I was more bombastic I could toss the notion of my novel out there, flaunt it around a little.  Accept my writer’s cloak with a little pomp and swagger.  I’m going to have to get better at that, at least for Parthian’s sake, if I want to promote the book and shift some copies.  It could be a Canadian thing.  Alice Munro has talked about it, and written about it in stories like ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’  The title comes from a recurring phrase in her childhood, a constant reminder for her not to get above herself, or put on airs.  The Cove – where I’m from, and where the novel is set – is no different.  We spend most of our time ripping the piss out of each other, knocking one another down a peg or two.  Or three.  If you stick your head up too high, you feel like one of the animals in that Whack-A-Mole arcade game.  Just asking for it.  So you learn to keep your head down, keep a low profile.  Especially when it comes to something like writing.  That’s what I did growing up, and that’s what I’ve been doing while back here: keeping a low profile.  And every so often cautiously admitting to having written something resembling a novel.

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‘Little people. Little people. Everywhere.

‘That was my first impression of Camp Bestival. There was also quite a lot of screaming, and not of the crowd loving a good band kind. More the ‘I’m teething waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah’ kind. Still, I’m a big kid at heart. I figured I’d survive as a childless punter at a child-friendly festival. I pictured balloon animals and top notch fancy dress.  I was not let down.’

I went to Camp Bestival in my ‘Top Music Journalist’ role at the weekend.

You can read my review about it over on Artrocker.tv … word count was teeny tiny so here are some other observations…

*Little people wake up early. This is worth remembering if you go to bed late AKA early, the kind of early that is perhaps a few minutes before those little people are up screaming, and playing tag around your tent. Loudly. I’d suggest stealing a pair of those brightly coloured kids’ headphones that you see on the children sprawled out practically unconscious by the mainstage speakers of an evening. They seem to work well at drowning out all noise. I failed to do that so got up early too. So early that the shower queue was only 2 hours long.

*Scroobius Pip doing his spoken word stuff without dan le sac is AMAZING. I had a nice chat with him after his packed out Lit Tent set and let him keep my pen for all the signings that were demanded of him. Proper good.

*Ellie Goulding: Besides the fact that she sings in that ‘allwordsrunintoone’ way that annoys the crap out of me, the fact that her trousers are badly ill-fitting distracts me too much. I walk away.
*These are some of the creatures I saw at Animal Farm: peacocks and hens and roosters and bunny rabbits and goats and ponies and pigs and birds that look a bit like emus, but aren’t emus. My favourite was Oscar the Rabbit. He looked fierce.

I’m performing in London Town this weekend at my pal’s fundraiser in Chalk Farm. There’s loads of top acts, music, fancy dress and fun and frolics. Come along

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