Writer-insighter – Page 41 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

Dealing with rejection

Despite the fact that it’s St Valentine’s Day and once again, I am officially Less Attractive Than Hitler (Hitler had a girlfriend), the kind of rejection I was thinking of or at least I was until I had to think about that was the kind of rejection that goes like this:

Not in my schloss. — He was right up her strasse, apparently.

We received nearly 2900 scripts, (Why do so many people send us all this crap? I mean, honestly!)

and our team of readers have been working intensively to sift through all submissions. Like rarely, thanks for nothing, yah? We very nearly missed something interesting to do, rather than what we’re paid for every month.

Our readers were asked to consider what the opening of each script demonstrated about the writer’s voice and originality, their understanding of medium, form, genre and tone, and the strength of the world, story, characters and dialogue. Yours was obviously unoriginal and your world frankly isn‘t as good as ours.

Unfortunately, your script did not progress beyond the first 10-page sift which was the case with 85% of all submissions we received. Your unoriginal derivative pile of identikit characters, seen-it-before stories and less-than-credible dialogue was dumped along with all the stuff from all the other losers on the first read through .This means that your script will therefore not be considered further and will not receive any other feedback. This means your script was crap.

We hope you will not be too disappointed or discouraged; we appreciate it will be frustrating not to receive specific feedback. This does not mean that your script has no potential – rather, that the standard of the work that did progress was very high, yours wasn’t and we can only focus on the necessarily small proportion of work that most captured our attention and imagination. Maybe you could read it out at a village fete or something. Or a childrens party, so long as they’re not too old or discriminating.

It’s a rejection slip, or a rejection e-mail, anyway.

Compared to some of the non-Valentine rejections I’ve had in the past, quite mild. No throwing stuff. No slammed doors. No going around with that bloke I always had an idea about half an hour later. Nobody’s relations on the phone, no screamy phone calls and no silent weeping, on either side. In comparison there’s almost a thread of logic there, which is a refreshing change given the usual lack of anything apart from the central no-part-of-your-body-is-welcome-in-or-frankly-all-that-near-any-part-of-mine-notwithstanding-any-prior-events logic that accompanies the non-Valentine-type rejection. In my experience, anyway.

This one was from the BBC. I won the BBC Writers Room Screenplay competition last year (M/f as we used to say in journalist college. It means More Follows. I think you’re confusing it with something with more letters.) so I thought I’d send them No Batteries Required, written for radio.

It’s actually really rather good. Even people who take a very let’s say “objective” view of my charm, wit and sophistication say that. At volume, sometimes. The bits about my CW&S, at least.

But the BBC don’t want it. But they want submissions for The Show What You Wrote, their new BBC Radio 4’s comedy sketch show – written by you. Free, obviously.

“This is an opportunity for you to get involved in creating a show that sounds different from any other sketch show out there. The Show What You Wrote is open for anyone to enter, whatever your level of experience. If you have a good idea then write it up and send it to us.

The themes for each episode are:

1) Science and Nature

2) Geography

3) Art and Literature

4) Sport and Leisure

I would. I really would, but this rejection thing has made me wonder. I mean, the BBC comedy bar is set pretty high. It’s going to be pretty hard to beat the Today programme, putting Lord Lawson, whose scientific credentials include being a reporter for the Financial Times and er, that’s it really, against actual climate change scientists and saying that makes the programme balanced. It makes it the fat bloke in the subsidised bar four pints in against someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Although to be fair, while he doesn’t know any more about what makes it blow than anyone else, like a true Thatcherite daughter of her father Nigella Lawson certainly knows how much blow costs. And suddenly, I don’t mind that particular rejection at all.

The Less Attractive Than Hitler thing, that I do mind. Still. Shower, shave and get out there to do another open mic and another one on Sunday. It might work. Worth a shot, anyway.

Oh and the red type? That was revealed using my patented iMean™ app. I use it regularly. Want to borrow it?

Marriage, the Bishop and me

I couldn’t sleep last night so at 7:15 I turned the radio on. The Bishop of Bath & Wells is moving out of the Palace he lives in, into a house outside the city. Good thing or not. Discuss. It’s Sunday morning Radio 4.

The story rang a bell with me, because I’ve had dealings with the bishop before. Long long ago when if not the world then certainly I was young, and thought I was leaner (turns out I wasn’t, given the jacket I tried on in a shop this week was a bit loose despite being the same size I wore when I was 26) and had a Harley-Davidson, the last of a reasonably long line of Yamaha, Honda, Triumph, Norton, Triton, BMW and then the Sportster motorcycles (pronounced Arlo Guthrie stylee, to rhyme with pickles, as we young people say), I was romantic. In fact, I was incurably romantic and still am.

It’s something women say they want until they get it. Then they seem to find that what they really, really meant was planning a wedding reception at a Best Western, two bottles of Cava per head and a fortnight in Ibiza rather than anything I had in mind, so far as I can tell.

Orchardleigh, under a West Country sky that put a permanent crease in my forehead by the time I was twenty.

My idea for a wedding venue started when I was about fourteen, the first time I went to Orchardleigh. I don’t know why I went. It was just something we did a couple of times a year. It was an old family estate and no, of course it wasn’t my family’s. Ours was called Sycamore Grove, which isn’t really the same thing at all.

Orchrdleigh had a not very attractive early Victorian house, loads of rolling fields, a plaque saying how the house used to be one side of the lake until years and years ago the owners had grown sufficiently rich and more than sufficiently bored with their old house to tear it down and start again the other side of the lake. But where did they live while they did that? No-one could tell me. Thinking about it now they probably built the new house first, but I didn’t think like that then. Still don’t, all the time.

It had an oak tree with a heart carved into the bark of the trunk and a date and two sets of initials. I can’t remember the letters, but the date was 1805. It was almost always sunny when we went to Orchardleigh, except, perhaps predictably, the time I was attacked by a swan. No, it didn’t break my arm. But also no, there was no warning I could see or hear and I didn’t know what had happened, it happened so fast. I don’t think I’m really cut-out for fighting swans, even now. Luckily I’ve planned things so it’s not something I have to do in my life.

We had an old book in the car in those days, an Arthur Mee The Kings England, written in the 1930s, listing the towns and villages of England with a few lines about each. About Orchardleigh there was something about an old war horse living out his days in a field a long way from Flanders. I don’t know now whether it was true or not, given how many horses the Army killed rather than feed them once the war was over. I thought it was true then.

There was a grave by the lake, one of the last owners, with a recent headstone.

And sleep at last

Among the fields of home.

I’m tired as I write this, really tired after just three hours of sleep last night, propped up in bed and about to turn in, but even reading the inscription that’s stuck in my head I feel the same way I always felt when I saw it that time ago, and it’s nearly half my life away that I last went to the lake at Orchardleigh. Moved, respectful, a little something in my eye, just a speck I think, probably. And envious, envious that someone, somewhere, tried to make sure that the person under the headstone was at peace, however fatuously, in a way I’ve never been able to imagine anyone ever doing for me.

As if that wasn’t enough for one place it had a Bath stone Georgian boathouse on the lake, an island and a tiny church on it. Orchardleigh has loads of high trumps and it plays to flush them all out on the table right from the start. Back when I was fourteen I decided I’d get married in that church, if I ever did. And because that’s what I was going to do I didn’t take any girlfriends to Orchardleigh ever, until I met someone I thought I’d like to marry.

We rode down there on the Harley one early summer morning and parked the bike by the gatehouse, then walked up the drive and found the tree, eventually, still there fifteen years after I first saw it. The boathouse was still there and the lake and the plaque and the grave and the house. And of course, the island and the little church. It all sort-of looked like it was working.

We rode back to London at the end of that week and I started trying to find out what you do to get married somewhere you don’t live. I knew Orchardleigh was in the diocese of the Bishop of Bath & Wells and I’d heard about bans and people having to live where the bans are read or something, although I had a feeling that might just be in Hardy or Thackeray. Phone the Bishop’s office, I thought. They’ll know.

The first issue was that Directory Enquiries had just changed from being a nationalised utility staffed by stiff and imperious crisply-spoken authority figures to the Del Boy gertcha customer service model that everything in England has become, where it’s all the pretence of saying ‘sir’ and no service of any kind. The other difference, obviously, is you pay a lot more for the new, rubbish model. Unbelievably and utterly rubbishly, Directory Enquiries pretended (after they’d taken my money of course) that there was no number for the Bishop of Bath & Wells.

I pointed out that the bishopric was 800 years old and although they probably hadn’t had a phone for all of that time, I was pretty sure they had one now. Despite that, Del Boy’s Directories couldn’t give me the number

They had a number for Bishop of Bath though. I took that.

Ring out, wild bells

I was quite impressed when the bishop answered the phone himself on the third ring. More impressed, if a bit disconcerted, to find they’d picked a local man to do the job, judging by the sheepy noises he made bleating ‘Bishop of Bath.’ You have to have heard it to know how that sounds. I could do it now but it wouldn’t help you, reading this. Sorry.

I told the bishop what the problem was, that I wanted to get married at Orchardleigh, that it was in his diocese (‘if you say so’) and the bans and residency qualifications and how long and what was it all going to cost and could it be done at all. And stuff.

Don’t know, the bishop said. He could see the problem and he’d like to help, but he got three calls like this a week.

I thought that even for a busy bishop this wasn’t actually the most helpful thing I’d ever heard.

Me: How come?

BoB: ‘Cuz Bishop of Bath has been a motorcycle shop since 1926.

Tis a sign and/or a portent, I think. I only proposed to one other person. None of the three people I ever talked to about getting married ever took me up on it. I don’t think it’s going to happen now. Looking at this, I don’t think it’s supposed to.

Artwork and soirees

I scribbled Songs Without Music down after my shower on Sunday and used it to introduce the set that night, at The Anchor, Woodbridge, where almost everything started and very sadly, one thing stopped.

As soon as I stepped off the stage I was invited to an afternoon of song and art and poetry that half of Woodbridge wanted to go to. I think that might have been part of it. Pity. But it started the stand-up gigs and it got me this rather lovely artwork that flowed from my reading.

Raw and Hypnotic

I was more than a bit surprised to hear my stuff called this that. I’d done some work on the delivery, making it less converstaional even though I’m always a bit scared it’ll drift into ‘POETRY READING WITH VOICES’ territory, (you see what I mean?) which takes the life out of it and means people feel they have to clap even if it’s utter crap. Although I don’t think they’d do that in the pubs I’d played.

A tough-looking bloke half my age came up to me and said ‘you’re like me’ after this gig. A slightly drunk rocakbilly girl massaged my shoulders while I drank a pint of cider after. Never before. After the gig, you understand. After the gig.

It’s reaching people, somewhere in thier hearts. Poetry isn’t just for books in libraries. It’s for talking, maybe to yourself, or to the thing inside us all. It’s very, very flattering that so many different types of people are hearing this. I’m assuming of course that an entire pub going silent is a good thing. I could always be wrong.

Songs Without Music

I started using my iPhone as a voice recorder. The quality isn’t that great, but it’s good enough to get things down as you think of them and there are times when you just can’t find a pen and paper.

Doing stand-up poetry has shifted my brain into overdrive in some respects; it’s made me think about words a lot more. It’s also made me think about what poetry is and despite Google, I still don’t really know.

I always had problems with rhymes. When I first came to London I bought strange books. One of my first pay-packets got me Betjeman’s Summoned By Bells, which wasn’t his greatest stuff . Anything qualifying as that would have to include Invasion Exercises On A Chicken Farm. There’s a brilliant original recording on Spotify.

I used to hang around Motor Books, a small shop still down an alley off Haymarket, full of odd titles like Sniping Towards the Rhine and The Improvised Munitions Handbook, which they refused to sell me unless I could prove I was in the police or the Army, on Home Office orders, they claimed. I wasn’t, so I left empty-handed. And I still don’t know what poetry is.

Maybe it’s a song without music. I think it is.

Songs Without Music

Some people think that poetry

Should rhyme

But there’s more

To words than that.

Sometimes rhyming

Just produces doggerel

Or worse; very often

You could hardly call it verse.

Poetry was something inaccessible

At school when your least

Favourite English teacher

Used to play the fool

And do his funny voice

For recitation, which bored

Almost an entire generation

At my school.

Poetry my dear,

Poetry simply wasn’t cool.

So I don’t call this poetry;

I call this music without songs

Or songs without music

And just hope it may amuse

If you’re in the right mood for it.

You see what I mean about rhymes?

Let’s get on. It’s getting late.

Besides, we’ve all got other things to do

Like drinking wine and reading poetry to you.

Slightly Foxed

I like Sundays. This one is going to be busy. I’ve got a job interview tomorrow as well as the Lifeboat Party radio show, and I need to make sure all of my stuff, the ironed shirt, the three forms of identity, the polished shoes, are all ready for that.

And today after I get some sleep there’s a music thing at the local pub a mile away, then at four nine miles in the other direction a party and then another open-mic gig at The Anchor in Woodbridge. The big question is cab or car? I don’t drink until after I’m not performing, or only one drink, but I might want a drink afterwards.

I talked to a friend yesterday, someone I’ve known since school. “Do something about living in Tony Blair’s Isington,” she said. “I used to read your email rants and laugh out loud.” She still has them from 15 years ago. Maybe we need to talk but we’ve never quite got around to it somehow.

Her advice was don’t be one-dimensional. Despite describing my stand-up stuff as cathartic and affirming and transformational ( I know, I’ve got to look all that up in a minute as well….) she told me to write stuff not just about my stream of not-quite gelling relationships. Even Wordsworth wrote about daffodils and Coleridge, my West Country dope-addled literary hero above all others, the man who melted and moulded words to create something more akin to a 1980s Tom Petty video than something people in crinolines might read, he wrote about all kinds of stuff. Gardens. Ships. Albatrosses. Crossbows. Caverns, if you’ll pardon the expression, measureless to man.

For years I’ve been fascinated by old photos. At last I think what I meant to write about them has come out properly. Almost. It’ll probably change a little soon but this draft is almost there. I think I’m going to do this one tonight and see how it goes.

Slightly Foxed

Box Brownies, Linda Eastman,

Cartier-Bresson, Fox-Talbot;

Just the names talk of pictures.

Photo-gravures and glass plates,

Fox-Talbot patented film and wrote a paper

For the Edinburgh Journal of Science

In 1826 bewitching “Some Experiments

On Coloured Flame”; To the Quarterly Journal of Science

In 1827 a paper on “Monochromatic Light”;

And to the Philosophical Magazine

“Chemical Changes of Colour.”

What did it mean?

Long exposures, pained expressions

And the blur of a small boy moving,

Too bored and too young to be so still.

It was the only way they could take pictures

Back when cameras were on tripods

And photographers wore a thick black veil.

Some people thought the camera

Stole their souls. Chief Skittiwash

In the Pacific Northwest, remembered now

Not for his photo but for his mention

In another text, “Demonstrating a conceptual

Link between Wilderness and” something else

I hadn’t the time or inclination to read.

The image was fading and blurred, foxed

Before my eyes like Mr Talbot and the rest.

Fading monochromes spoke of the same;

An instant etched for all time

As if we could stop the clock hands turning.

As if the picture of the people we loved

Could stop them leaving or ageing.

As if seeing their smile, or the way their lip

Curved, framing the flash of their teeth

In the streetlight could bring back their laughter

And that thing she said in the garden,

The day before the sleet.

The daguerrotypes of steam-haunted

Railway stations, the double-engined

Monster bomber about as big now

As the average car, if a car had wings.

These pictures become the images of death.

Not in the machines or even the guns

But the uniformed men, the unformed lives;

The old, the young, the not with us now

The blank expressions and glassy eyes

Trapped on tables and mantlepieces,

The charity shop or the skip,

Staring stiff and still at the sky

From where their picture fell.

And sometimes you know they’re still there.

You can see them. You’ll be taken unawares

In a junk shop or a museum, in a place you’ve

Never been before and suddenly

You see them in the place

Where you dropped your keys

Staring past you out of their years:

A dog, a cart, an older man and a girl

Holding the back of a chair,

A woman frowning as she stands

For the photographer with better things

To do before she was fixed forever there.

“The popularity of picture postcards showing Indian women weaving baskets or digging clams attests to a growing nostalgia relating to Indians. Historians have demonstrated a conceptual link between the disappearing American wilderness and a changing attitude toward Native Americas by looking at both popular literature and the federal government’s Indian policies. The Indian came to symbolize America’s lost youth, and his image commemorated that unspoiled past.”

Still Life

I was thinking about old photographs, the way you’ll maybe find a picture of a place you know well, but taken years before you were even born. How sometimes you’ll find a photo of people long, long dead, standing with their dog or a basket of washing on your own front doorstep, this place they knew, this place you know.

Boulevard de Temple, Paris, taken at 8 am by Daguerre, either in 1838 or 1839. We know the time of day but not the year.

And this poem just didn’t come out the way I thought it would. The one I meant to write is still waiting to be written.

Still Life

Louis-Jacques Daguerre

First captured souls

When men wore promade

And greased the anti-macassars

On chairbacks with their hair.

The image is projected onto a silvered surface,

Shone on the fakery of Sheffield plate

Exposed to iodine fumes and

Tobromine and chlorine,

Half the firmament of Victorian chemistry

To produce a halide coating,

Carried to the camera

In a light-tight plate holder.

Sensitive in the dark

Like a tender girl.

Then like a magician’s trick.

The light is let in,

An invisible image on the silver plate

A tarnish of light arrested by sodium thiosulphate

Or a hot saturated solution of common salt,

And uncommon liquid gold

Poured onto the ghost’s face

Heated then drained and rinsed and dried.

Underneath the silver will always tarnish.

The picture must be kept under glass.

You can always tell a daguerrotype

Or teep, more properly, as Louis was

Unfortunately French.

A century and more on

The image is still bright,

The mirrored surface mirroring past lives.

Long after their last goodnight.

After last night

Well, the night before, anyway. My very, very first paid-for stand-up poetry gig was at Justine de Meirre’s Tapas & Tales event at the Old Mariner in Woodbridge. Ok, it wasn’t much, just petrol money, but something of a landmark event, the first time anyone’s put their hand in their pocket and said ‘here, that was worth my money.’

Which isn’t why I do it, but it’s nice, despite the monetisation of something I’m not quite sure what it is. There’s a good, edgy feeling before you go on. I kicked it off with All Of Your S**t, the one that started it all, the one that gets the audience wondering if they’re allowed to laugh.

I need to put more theatricality into the delivery, I think. I’ve always resisted that ‘this is my stage voice’ thing, the booming Brian Blessed oration and now I’m up on a stage doing it I can see exactly why it’s done. I talk as if it’s late and everyone’s had a couple of drinks and we’re relaxed and sitting on a sofa and I’m not at all sure that totally works as a delivery to a room full of people. Let’s face it, it doesn’t always work on a sofa, depending on your definition of ‘works’, of course. There have been some memorable sofas, it must be said. But it’s not that kind of show.

Songs without music

Back To Ourselves followed up, which is a bit Hugo Williams but I like Hugo Williams anyway. It’s a little bit about the end of the summer holidays, which is to say that of course it really isn’t at all. Then In Silence, and then the one that really does silence, When The Phone Rings.

That poem, if these are poems and I’m not at all sure about the definition, so I call them songs without music as I can’t sing and play a guitar at the same time, doesn’t just silence the entire room every time I do it. People come up to me and touch my arm afterwards. Always my left arm, just above the elbow. Men, women, always the same reaction. This time I recorded it and there are even people saying ‘oh!’ at the end.

I don’t know whether it’s ‘oh that was so moving’ or ‘oh god, poor you,’ or both, but it seems to speak to people. So I really ought not to canter through it because I’ve heard it so many times, and I also really ought to remember that not everybody has and although the more impressionable women might go for that whispered in their ear, the person at the bar can’t actually hear it unless I BrianlyBlessedly boom it out a bit. Which is a performance in itself, because first of all it’s quite a despairing, non-shouty, sensitive piece and also because when I put some volume into my voice it cuts across every conversation in a pub, which was quite useful in places like the Sloaney Pony (oh come on, the White Horse on Parsons Green, you do know, rarely…) in the ’80s, when girls wore a single string of pearls outside the turned-up collar of their borrowed stripey shirt under a tight jumper, and jeans, blazer, a rugby shirt, RayBans and Topsiders were actually cool (what do you mean, they aren’t now?), it does sound a bit as if I practice scaring Labradors across three fields.

So some work on the delivery needed. But a night when other story tellers told me they liked my stuff, when the monetisation didn’t matter, when you get through the pre-stage nerves (there’s a simple cure, just tell yourself ‘ok, if you feel like that just don’t do it, just don’t get up there. You don’t have to. Nobody’s going to make you do it.’ That cures it), when you feel genuinely that we’re all in this together, that like Bronze Age people, we’re huddled here out of the storm in this little pool of light and we’re telling the tales of our tribe, sharing what it is to feel in all the different ways there are.

And I felt ‘this is what I do.’ Just such a pity the person who helped me do it wasn’t there. So all that after last night. At least nobody said ‘we need to talk.’ Even though we all did. I do, anyway.

Tapas & Tales

Tomorrow night sees the event I was practising for. I wanted to get some practice before I stood up and performed my poetry at Tapas Tales at The Old Mariner in Woodbridge tomorrow.

So I got up on my hind legs at The Anchor, Woodbridge (5th January), DPs in Aldeburgh (17th), the Anchor again (19th) and a new venue, the Golden Key at Snape on 25th. I think I’ve had some practice now.

It’s been strange. I never do a poem if anyone in the audience could possibly recognise people or circumstances it could have been about. And almost every time All Of Your S**t gets the laughs it was supposed to, In Silence seems to shock, Back To Ourselves makes women look thoughtful and When The Phone Rings, which I’ve only done twice, silences the entire audience.

Men and women are coming up to me afterwards and touching my arm. Always my left arm, above the elbow. I don’t know why, except obviously it speaks to them. Which it was supposed to.

When The Phone Rings is from the heart. They all are, but that one, I think it’s the best I’ve ever done, from the first line onwards. I’m a bit dubious about the one-line stanza in the middle, but it seems to work.

And yes, obviously it’s about a real person. No, she’s never read it to my knowledge or heard it. Which is a pity, because it’s quite a moving poem.

If it or any of them are poems at all. I’m not sure what a poem should be. I know I’m not a good enough musician to play an instrument and sing at the same time. My guitar playing isn’t that good although my sax playing is a bit better, but I still can’t do that and sing at the same time. So I’m calling these pieces words without music. It makes sense to me. The thing that prompted When The Phone Rings still doesn’t.

Either way, this public catharsis is fun once I’ve got past the stage nerves and get behind the mic again. I had to bowdlerise AOYS for the Golden Key and it wasn’t the place to give Minimum Wage its first outing, given it looked and sounded like Conservative Central Office. Still. Might get paid one day. And it’s all good practice and exposure for something that would be so fabulous if it came off I can’t even write about it, here or anywhere else. Just fingers crossed.

And come and see me tomorrow night at The Old Mariner.

Today’s Lifeboat Party Show

Here you go. Back onair after Christmas. Do what dolphins do and click here.

When the phone rings

I wrote this this week and performed it for its first time out today at The Anchor in Woodbridge. It seemed to go down ok. In fact, it went down pretty well. With women especially. I like that.

When The Phone Rings

I hate it when the phone rings

Just in case it’s you.

I don’t want to remember

A bright crisp day

Not too long ago but

Somehow far too far away

To get back there now

When all we could do was light a fire

And sit holding hands that afternoon

Talking almost in whispers,

Feeding logs into the stove.

You should have been at work.

And I had things to do,

Both forgetting that this spell

Would break, as all spells have to.

That afternoon shone with promises

While the winter sun bleached

Our hearts clear and new.

And then the phone rings.

And maybe it’s you.

Have I thought again about life insurance?

You wanted to insure your car for me

And I wanted to insure my life for you;

It’s who we are. Or more properly

That’s who we were.

Maybe you never knew.

I so much wanted that for you.

That’s how we were,

When if I’d died I’d have wanted you

Quite rich if I couldn’t want you

Any more. It was all I could think

To give you. Apart from me.

So no, actually, I mean I have,

But all things considered

And I don’t really want to go into this

Too much on the phone

With a stranger somehow

But I feel as if all I have left

Is being polite right now,

Being English.

So I don’t really need

My life insured. Thanks.

Or not for you, anyway. Not now.

Make some more tea

And now you’re not here

It seems I don’t really need

To wash the cup clean.

There’s a missed call on my phone

But it’s not your number.

It never is now.

And no-one there anyway.

Especially not you.

It never will be somehow.

I’ll be ok, you know? I’ll be ok.

But just for a while,

Until I can forget the logs

And the stove and the bright sun

And your dog and all

Of the glory we could see

That afternoon so full of crystal light

So cold; you held my hand

And told me over and again:

“It’ll be alright”;

Just until then I hate it

When the phone rings.

Just in case it’s you.

And yes, of course it’s about a real person. And no, she wasn’t there and hasn’t heard it. A pity.

Update:

It’s not quite as in-your-face as this violinist’s reaction to a phone ringing. My stuff was described once as making me ‘the king of passive aggression’ but I think Lukas Kmit must be the emperor. Oh, and she still hasn’t heard it, so far as I know.