July 2013 – Page 2 – Writer-insighter

Liz speaks

This is the review from the person whose voice I stole for Liz’s character:

Now that I have worked out the title of Not Your Not_Your_Heart_Away_Cover_for_Kindle Heart Away is taken from the wonderous A E Housman, I like this even more, except for the first bit which didn’t float my boat any more than it did Mr Bennett’s. And the end bit, which could do with tweaking. But the rest of it is really rather far out (as I am sure that Ben and Liz would have said in late 1970s, although probably not the posher Claire).

In so far as the writing is concerned, the style is journalistic and leaning towards being impressively taut; there’s a sort of “dashed off” Fitzgerald / Capote / Hemingway thing going on which makes you want to keep on reading notwithstanding your aggravation with one or two of the characters and the rather mesmeric plotlessness; all so resonant of late teenage years. As other reviewers have said, reading this book took you back to 1978, when so many 18 year olds lived lives dramatically different from their parents; when sixth formers had dreams and vagueish plans rather than A*s, focus and resumes, when you were allowed to drink illegally in pubs on the basis that the landlord kicked you out if you couldn’t at least pretend to be grownup.

Mesmeric Plotlessness

And what an insight into the mind of a boy / man – able to care about the rather uninspiring girlfriend who provided sex and wanted an engagement ring, whilst lusting after various others just because they were there and all the time being romantically obsessed with the vacuous posh totty. Which brings me to another Fitzgerald similarity – the way in which Claire drifts around carelessly in the manner of Daisy in Great Gatsby, oblivious to harm she causes; not least to the narrator by taking his heart away.

Loved the Salisbury Plain bits – anyone who was brought up in Wiltshire will confirm the night driving and Cradle Hill watching are truly evocative. And Peter was a beautifully drawn cameo role. Liz was absolutely fabulous and what a shame Ben didn’t listen to her sound advice – but what boys ever do listen to their good girl friends when dreamy posh girls are drifting by?
This book has a definite filmic quality – get the script written, Mr Bennett! And for the next book follow Ben on his adventures wherein a 1970s teenage boy becomes a man ………………..I just hope he keeps his fancies free from entanglements with vague, dim posh girlies, although somehow I rather suspect not.

Fourth of July

It’s a cold, blustery Fourth of July in England, American Independence Day. The day the middle-class revolutionaries from Cromwell and the Pilgrim Fathers onwards came up with a new world order based on democracy and reason, a republic free from the tyranny of kings and the right of a militia to bear arms in order to keep the government in check.

Yeah, right. Good luck with the project.

Like most social experiments it didn’t turn out quite the way the disconnected, well-off theorists thought it would. The same way it didn’t for the unemployed stacked in concrete brutalist tower blocks with piss-smelling broken lifts who bafflingly failed to appreciate the exciting statements in post-modern architecture they were stacked in against the day someone would want shipbuilders again, or find enough estate agencies to re-train them into.

Say goodbye, it’s Independence Day

I took a walk around my own not very urban manor today as the wind buffeted and only now and again brought warm gusts of wind smelling of the spice of summer trees. Someone who’s just reviewed Not Your Heart Away asked if there was going to be a sequel, a future past world where Ben goes to America to find Claire, in a fictional world where he doesn’t know he’s looking for her, except he always would. It made me remember another Independence Day very nearly thirty years ago, a summer so hot by a lake in Wisconsin that no-one could believe the thermometer by the basketball court, way over a hundred, when it was still hot when the PA system blew Taps and we hauled down the Stars and Bars for the day, the same way we did every day that summer on summer camp. It wasn’t quite like the Springsteen song but it was pretty close. We just didn’t believe nothing we could say or do wouldn’t change anything now. We were all a lot younger then.

The heat bent the light and weighed so heavy on us we could hardly get the energy to pile into my old Chevrolet station wagon and go down to Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn bar to see if Nancy-Jean and the other girls from the nearby summer camps were suffering from the heat too, after work, and how many clothes they’d be wearing to deal with it.

It was a long, good summer, a long time ago.

Customer Service

What a pile of utter BS.

I haven’t been online this week because OneBill’s idea of resolving customer disputes is to cut people’s phone line off if they don’t do as they are told.

A few years ago I signed up with OneBill when they promised £10 a month line rental and inclusive phone calls.

The last time I bothered to look at the bill it was £25, month after month. Which isn’t a lot, but I hardly ever use the phone given I’ve got an all-the-calls-you-can-eat package on the mobile. Well, on the new mobile. Vodafone had the same approach to customer service OneBill has. I told them I couldn’t get any signal and it had got worse over the past few years.

No problem sir. We’ll cancel your contract.

But you’re investing millions of pounds a day. Your website says so.

Not to worry sir, we’ll cancel your contract.

Why can’t I have the service I’ve paid for?

Don’t worry, we’ll cancel your contract.

I appreciate these people on the end of the phone don’t have any autonomy and they’re only doing their jobs. Actually I don’t. I don’t care what their problems are. I am paying their wages, and they’ve got a job this week, which is more than I have. If “I was only following orders” didn’t cut it as an excuse at Nuremberg I don’t see why it should now.

Consumer Units

We are being treated not even as consumer units, but disposable ones. Not by all companies, by any means. But some of the biggest, EBay, who simply don’t deign to answer queries, Amazon, more talking to a wall, the Post Office, so farcically over-priced and unproductive and so stupid they actually show a graph of the decline in postal volumes on the same page as a graph showing the increase in the CEO’s salary, all the way down to the ‘we’ll cancel your contract’ approach displayed by Vodafone and OneBill, it’s the same message: there are plenty more customers where you came from. Think yourself lucky. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.

It’s nice to be thought of as disposable, isn’t it? How many earnest young marketing executives do you think there are there, brightly debating customer churn and retention strategies, right this minute? The really dangerous thing is this: these companies employ lots of people. They’re some of the biggest employers in the UK. Just like the banks, when they lay people off and entrust them to the tender care of food banks and repossession sales, the way they’ve treated other people just makes most people think ‘good.’

Luckily for me there’s wifi at the local pub, 200 yards from my house, until I get another provider sorted-out. In state-of the art England today it takes an entire working week to push a button and connect the line. Honestly, it does. BT told me, with a straight face, not even crossing their finers behind their back and smirking while they said it. This isn’t a Third World country. In the Third World people treated like this would start burning down office blocks.