Writer-insighter – Page 43 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

Doing it standing up

It’s only the middle of January. So far this year my life’s changed quite a bit. Unexpectedly and most of it for the good. There’s still stuff to sort out, but when isn’t there? But most of it for the good.

It’s not just that it’s getting lighter, although that helps me massively. When it’s not pitch black at five o’clock I can see a point to being alive. That’s overly dramatic but those few weeks when you can’t see daylight at tea-time seem much, much longer than they possibly can be, and much more hopeless. Trendy Scandinavian affected daylight deficit ? SADD, as we call it? Maybe.

Two weekends ago I went to an Open Mic event in Woodbridge, at The Anchor. I’d been invited to perform some poetry at The Mariner by Justine de Mierre, who’s running one of her Tales and Tapas events on 29th January there. I was a bit nervous about it, so I thought I’d get a practice debut in first at the next open mic gig.

So I did. I ran through All Of Your S**t and Back To Ourselves. And while it didn’t have people swooning three other performers said it was good, I got invited to Woodbridge’s finest and most select soiree and only one person stopped speaking to me. Result! Nobody ever invited me to a soiree before.

So I’m doing more. One of the things about poetry is that it’s good therapy. If you get crossed in love you don’t just run down the contents of the biscuit tin (and we won’t talk about peanut butter ice-cream. It’s worth getting dumped for). You get new poems.

So tonight maybe I’ll get up behind the mic again. I’ll do All Of Your S**t and the other one again and maybe, just maybe a new one. It’s called In Silence. It’s about open mic gigs. Sort of.

Ebay Customer Service

The only thing I have altered in this exchange is my thick-fingered spelling. All of the rest of it is depressingly true. If you want to know why Bradley Manning et al are pilloried for telling the truth it’s not ‘national security’ that’s to blame. It’s the 1984 don’t-argue-it-won’t-make-any-difference culture that’s been sucked up and embraced wholesale. Was this the point of mass education? Please someone tell me it wasn’t.

Kieran Sears 20:48:24
Hello and welcome to eBay Live Help, my name is Kieran. How may I assist you?

yoxfordcafedeli 20:49:58
Hello, I wanted to bid on some cutlery. Ebay is insisting it does not know how old I am .

yoxfordcafedeli 20:50:16
and wants age verification by credit card. I do not possess a credit card.

Ebay demands age verification if you want to buy a knife. Including a knife and fork. But obviously, not all the time. Only when eBay feels like it. But anyway, let’s go with that for the moment.

yoxfordcafedeli 20:50:52
I do not believe in credit cards. I tried to give my VISA debit card details but Ebay claims it cannot recognise the card number.

Kieran Sears 20:53:25
Thank you for sharing your query. In this case you can use any other credit card, if your family members have it or a friends, if they are with you.

Any credit card other than the one I said I didn’t have, obviously.

Kieran Sears 20:55:01
If you have no access od Credit cards at all, in tha case, you can contact the seller and then ask them to provide you with any alternate payment method, so that you are able to pay for the item , however as perebay policies on UK, you have to put a Credit Card on file for the age verification, to bid or purchase a cutlery item

yoxfordcafedeli 20:56:43
So I can’t bid on it.

(And let’s ignore the fact eBay already has my age on file from other transactions in the past. But presumably they would pretend “Data Protection” wouldn’t let them use that information again, in more made-upness).
yoxfordcafedeli 20:57:13
Because Ebay demands I have a credit card.

Kieran Sears 20:57:36
If you can use any other credit card then you can bid any family members debit card will do

Kieran Sears 20:58:08
Ebay in accordance with policies of UK, in many other countries there is no such policy, an example can be Germany

yoxfordcafedeli 20:58:44
WHAT policy in the UK demands that I have a credit card, exactly?

yoxfordcafedeli 20:59:02
There is NO such policy.

yoxfordcafedeli 20:59:07
Except Ebay’s own.

yoxfordcafedeli 21:00:12
Let me get this right. You have just said I can use ‘any family member’s credit card.” You said this, not me. HOW will that verify MY age?

Kieran Sears 21:00:45
The system , will accept it , as it had happened with our members

yoxfordcafedeli 21:01:41
That does not answer my question. How will using someone else’s credit card verify my age?

Kieran Sears 21:04:05
This will, we give this workaround to our members so as to facilitate the buying , when it works then our members are able to purchase the cutlery items, there is no logic to it

yoxfordcafedeli 21:05:32
So why does Ebay have this policy?

Kieran Sears 21:06:30
eBay as per the norms of UK (under their influence) have this policy, let me give you a link of the same ‘

Kieran Sears 21:06:41
Pushing Url: http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/firearms-weapons-knives.html

Kieran Sears [Push Page] http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/firearms-weapons-knives.html21:06:41

yoxfordcafedeli 21:07:27
No, I know Ebay has this policy. I asked why.

Kieran Sears 21:07:58
Carl, I request you to please try by ading other Credit Card, discussing about the policy wont help here, if you have to purchase the item, then you can wirk on this solution, wont it be good to be able to purchase the item

yoxfordcafedeli 21:11:46
Yes it would, if I could bid on a cutlery set so I could eat my dinner without being made to go and get someone else’s credit card. Ebay’s idea of customer service is a joke. I asked a simple question. You can’t give me the answer and instead say discussing it won’t do any good. I am not discussing anything. I asked what law says I have to have a credit card and you just talk about ‘the norms of the UK’ which is totally meaningless. You then suggest I can validate my age by using someone else’s card and when I ask how that validates it you can’t answer that either. I am really looking forward to the email transcript of this. It will make a brilliant blog post.

System21:11:48
The chat session is being wrapped up.

System21:11:48
The chat session has ended.

System21:11:48
This chat was on 01/10/2014. All times in the above transcript are in the following time zone: (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London

Kieran speaks an interesting version of English. It’s almost as if his name is totally made-up and fictional. So now you know. Verification is meaningless. Debate is useless. Questions are an irrelevance. Make-up a rule and call it the law and pretend it’s totally normal, inevitable and inescapable. Above all, don’t argue. Resistance is useless.

In the year when we’re about to celebrate millions of people being killed for ‘freedom,’ this is the kind of freedom we’ve embraced. The freedom to do exactly what we’re told. Oh brave new world.

Still life

A quiet, still evening in Ipswich a few days ago. Unnaturally still at ten to five, waiting to see someone, waiting to see what I could do for the next year maybe. Maybe longer. The light only just going now as the street lights shone, the evenings spinning out longer each day, building towards the summer, a little more life as the clock turns, a little more promise every morning, every evening.

At a dockside on Christmas Day the same as in Ipswich town centre two days ago, the same thing. In the middle of the concrete, the cars, the sodium streetlights I can hear a nightingale sing its song for you.

Or for me. Or for any of us. But I like to pretend it was for you. Another you. My gift and one not mine to give. But now where there wasn’t last week there’s just time to walk in the last of this day, the last of the light of today.

There will be more tomorrow. That’s the promise.

Resolutions: 2014

There’s an old Wicca tradition about bad stuff. I know, I’m doing a lot about traditions at this time of year, but it’s a good time of year for it. Christmas is over and whatever you think about that, the days are going to get longer and longer until they’re magically, sleep-stealingly long, the way they were when I swapped stories and dreams with someone with a bottle of wine under a eucalyptus tree last summer.

After this year I have a lot less bad stuff to get rid of. But I’m going to write down some things I’m going to do this year and being a hip and happening kind of guy I thought I might as well put these things here, where everyone can see them and challenge me on them. So here they are. My resolutions for 2014. Or goals. My resolutions are for me and those they affect. My goals, well, this will kick me on along towards them. As we say down the stables.

1) I will direct and broadcast No Batteries Required on radio.

2) I will re-draft No Batteries Required as a screenplay and pitch it to Cascade, same as Not Your Heart Away.

3) I will find an independent publisher for Not Your Heart Away.

4) I will learn to play the ukelele. Actually, on advice from a friend who thinks my saxophone playing is pretty good, I’m sending the ukelele back and making a promise to myself to play the saxophone every single day. A quick blast through Kirsty McColl’s A New England was today’s effort, copied from the radio. The radio in my head, anyway.

5) I will perform 3 poems at the Open-Mic night at The Old Mariner, Woodbridge, 29th January.

6) I will write The Cloud Factory.

7) I will finish writing Janni Schenck, which started life as School Lane.

8) First I will decide the format for Janni Schenck, film, book or play.

9) While I’m there I might as well re-draft No Batteries Required as a stage play and get it performed, probably using the same actors and actresses who are doing it for radio.

10) I can’t actually think of a tenth thing. I mean, I can, but I can’t really put that on here publically so not that, not here. Instead, I will get better at playing my old low tone saxophone. I might even team up with someone who can do the music while I do a 1940s crooner set. This is a thing in my head. In a progress update I’ ve found someone, but she’s a bit committed. Life stuff. You know. Stuff.

I don’t know why when I was 14 the first album I ever bought was original 1944 RCA Victor Glenn Miller recordings. But it was and they were and they’ve stuck in my head forever. And I thought the other day that a Christmas present to myself might usefully be a mic-ed-up concert uke to accompany the songs I’ve always known. The Nearness of You. Fools Rush In. The Glenn Miller version obviously, not the pathetic Bow Wow Wow lift musak one. And probably Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens, the song my disappeared friend Simon Talbot used to introduce his radio show in Florida, about a thousand years ago. Or maybe How Long Will I Love You? If you want to do something useful in 2014, find Simon and tell me where he is. A lot of people who love him would like to know. And we don’t. It’s been years now. We miss him. A lot.

When the animals talk

I took a trip back through time this Christmas. In those strange days between Christmas itself and the New Year, when nothing is as it should be, when it’s too late to do much about this year and too early to do much about the next I drove to Poole to see an old friend, then up to Warminster to see an even older friend, one whose voice I used as Liz in Not Your Heart Away. I took two of her children to Bath. They wanted to do some shopping and I wanted to see yet another friend in the city. They were about the age Ben and Claire and Liz were in the book.

Along the way I turned off the A36 in Rode and took the old route I’d driven a hundred times and more, the same way Claire and Ben drove in the book to find The Red Lion. It’s fiction. I should have known. And I should have known better. It’s not just that the past is another country and they do things differently there. Whoever wrote that didn’t say ‘and they build executive homes in the car park of the Red Lion and ponce-up what was a brilliant pub into someone’s Disney fantasy of a baronial hall to live in.’

But things are never exactly as they seem. It all reminded me of a Christmas tradition we have or had in my family. I don’t know if anyone else still keeps it. I couldn’t, this year. Our tradition goes that at midnight on Christmas Eve, the animals talk. The year before I was born my mother and father stayed on my aunt’s farm and nearing midnight went into their stable to see if it was true, that the animals really did speak.

Last Christmas I went to church close to midnight but this is a dying village. The church was closed. As I got near the dark and silent building I remembered that Midnight Mass had been brought forward to six pm, a more convenient time for the old people who make up most of the village and all of the congregation. As I walked home along the empty road I remembered my family’s story. I got a torch and went to the tree where my chickens roosted then and shone it on the big young cockerel. I heard the church clock strike and as the light caught him the cockerel stirred and put his head back.

And is it true? Do the animals speak, remembering a stable in a story?

What sort of question is that? Of course it’s true. Nobody ever said they have to speak with a human voice.

Year End

A bit like the end of term round-up, this post. If I was marking up 2013 though, I’d have to have a word with its parents and note ‘must try harder’ on its report.

What did I do this year? Some of the things I set out to do. Got rid of my house. Re-homed most of the chickens. Won the BBC Writers Room competition. Did I mention that? Oh. Ok. Well, actually, I won the BBC Writers Room competition.

With a screenplay based on my book, Not Your Heart Away, which I also finished and published this past year.

Wrote some poems. Got a radio show. Wrote No Batteries Required, about a bankrupt chicken farmer who decides to kidnap a celebrity chef the same day the Prime Minister he was at school with goes to offer him a job as Minister of Food.

Anything else? Quite a lot. Tried to help. Lost my heart. Found it again. Put it in trust for someone who might appreciate it. Tried to stop acting like an arse quite as much as I managed to do for several months this year. Vowed to listen more and decide less. Walked a lot. I liked that. Took some decent photos. Got a new house to live in, that I think is nicer than the one I moved out of. Saw some old friends, made some old friends (no, not like that), caught up with some old friends and realised how fantastically valuable they are when you need them.

Tried to write School Lane, a story that started in Not Your Heart Away, a story about an old man who had been a young boy when he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, like almost every other small boy in Germany. And I couldn’t do it. Maybe I can next year. It became too complex, too involved, too much about Janni Schenck, the boy whose teacher beat him and his classmates up to stop them being killed by the American patrol coming to their village. Janni’s story expanded to include the Edelweiss Pirates, which meant I had to get him from Hamburg where they hung out to a small village in the mountains, where the real story, the one I heard from an old man in a pub long ago now was set, which was a story in itself.

And alarmingly, bought an electro-acoustic ukelele to do an open-mic 1940s crooner set comprising Fools Rush In, The Nearness of You and either Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens or How Much Do I Love You. Maybe. Or April Played The Fiddle. That bit might need some work. Like learning the ukelele for a start. And it’s sung impossibly high for me. I could do it fine when I was fourteen. Can’t do it now.

So this year coming, 2014 is a new start. New house. A new heart and some new friends. See you there.

Back to Ourselves

It’s been a hectic time, this Christmas, with a house move, a move into a hotel, a trip to Wiltshire and back, some 600 miles, then another house move and just time to meet some incredible new people and glimpse a life I know. So sorry, I haven’t posted anything recently. But as I was going through my stuff I found time to post up this poem what I wrote recently. It’s a bit Hugo Williams derivative, but I like Hugo Williams. It’s not about anybody specifically, just the end of summer, the end of holidays and the way people change, too.

Back to Ourselves

When one of us or both decide

That the songs don’t matter,

That it’s done, that we do have

A choice and somehow we don’t

Have to do the things that last week

Or last month or even yesterday we had

To do instead of everything else;

On the last day we start packing for

The trek back to ourselves after

Our little holiday, sand between

Our toes, another little white line,

And something sticking at the corner

Of our eyes; I expect it’s just a speck,

Probably. But you know, glad we went.

But we’re tired now and grateful to

Be home again, bags unpacked now

That we’ve shut the door;

Time to turn the lights on soon.

It gets so dark so early now.

I can’t quite see where I am at all.

Carl Bennett 2013

The enemy within

There was a miners’ strike 30 years ago. Now you have to explain to people what miners actually were. They were the British men who dug the coal we were told we didn’t have that is imported now instead of digging out the 200 years of the stuff sitting underground. Ten years back before that the government switched the electricity off to make people believe the miners were ‘holding the country to ransom’ in a way that banks and financial fraud never does. Chiefly because the banks had lawyers who would shut your mouth for you if you mentioned it and the NUM didn’t.

When you watch this video you will see a Britain that a lot of people who lived here then can recognise while few foreigner can. I still hate Thatcher’s voice, along with every single one of her policies. That whining, artificial, hypocritical drone filled the airwaves with lies.

“We don’t talk to terrorists. The IRA must be denied the oxygen of publicity” while the government was talking to them all of the time for just one single example. Oh actually, ‘violence doesn’t pay’ for another. It was supposed to pay for Our Brave Boys who were sent to fill bodybags in the Falklands, a place the Foreign Office had been discussing giving away to Argentina since 1946, when the election would have been lost otherwise.

It wasn’t the miners who were the enemy within. It was the lying media that chose to report one side and not the other, time and again. Back then, 30 years ago, a friend of mine worked for BBC TV. He was a young news reporter in the thick of a demo that was kicking off when he walked past a police van with the back doors open. It was full of guns. Not confiscated guns from arrested miners. The miners didn’t have any guns. These were guns the state’s enforcers had decided they’d take to the demo to shoot miners with. There was never even a public allegation that the miners had guns and what happened next showed that would have been all over the media if any government minister had even suggested it, or there was any police intelligence to back it up.

My friend saw the police guns. He had the camera. He didn’t switch it on. His boss said it wasn’t even interesting.

About six years after that a man called Michael Ryan went berserk in a small town and shot lots of people with guns he should never have been licensed to have, given the list of offences and complaints to the police that had been made about him. In those days it usually took about six weeks to get a firearms certificate. Ryan got his in a few days, for reasons that the police have never seen fit to discuss. But then, a lot of what happened at Hungerford isn’t discussed. One of the tabloids showed American armoured vehicles on the streets of this small English town, although since when Hungerford became part of the jurisdiction of Greenham airbase was never mentioned.

There was a rumour the SAS were involved in ending the proceedings that day. That a helicopter had taken off from Hereford and somebody onboard had sniped Ryan, which was at odds with the official version that he had shot himself. Pictures of the body were only shown in camera at the inquest. There was never, ever an official enquiry. But the media didn’t want to talk about that either. I met a man who totally legally built sniper rifles for a comfortable living. He sold them, perfectly legitimately, to armed forces around the world. So when someone came to him with some information that what happened at Hungerford was extra-judicial murder, the same way it had been in Gibralter, when IRA suspects had been gunned down in a carpark by the SAS, with photos of a neat high-velocity hole through a school window to back it up, he tried to get it made public.

My friend came and interviewed him. I was there. We all looked at the photos. I wouldn’t know one type of bullet hole through glass from another, but remember what one of us did for a living.

My friend made some notes. Went back to the BBC. We’re not going to run it. It’s ‘not in the public interest.’

So now you know. When your government decides to shoot people without a trial the BBC don’t want all the fuss of telling anyone about it. And the miners are supposed to be the enemy within. That makes sense to me.

Somewhat overshadowed

Not to be confused with sloightly on th’oof, whatever that bit of fake Suffolk dialect means this week’s Lifeboat Party show as slightly overshadowed by the fact that as of 16th December I become homeless. It’s not an experiment and I haven’t messed up my life more than usual for the rest of this year, although frankly that’s not saying much.

I’m selling my house. My stuff is going into storage and I have somewhere to live as of the new year, but right now, now, very now, as Shakespeare put it, I’m a bit stuck.

So I was a bit bothered about the show. We had a baking ukelele player on first, or maybe a ukelele playing baker, Martin Clarke, who had the decency to drop his bombshell half an hour after we came off air, telling me he’d been a radio presenter for 17 years. Yes. Ok. Cheers Martin.

Then I tried to interview Emma Thomson again, after I totally messed up the sound in her first interview. Emma’s plan to race cyclocross for Elmy Cycles in Ipswich, as well as raising money for cancer research ahs been a bit altered by the fact that someone has stolen all three of her bikes. These aren’t exactly the kind of thing that you can get in Halfords or Tesco, even if it is Christmas.

Just checking the recording now and I think it’s going to be ok.

Mega line-up next week, with not just Justine de Meirre but Buckshee as well. Check-out their sounds. See how down with the kids I am?

It’s going to (folk) rock. Sorry. Meanwhile I still need somewhere to live for jsut over Christmas. A dog is for life. I’m not. Ask anyone. Or actually, maybe don’t.

All Of Your S**t

Years ago I read an ad in the Personals. No, honestly, it really was years ago, although it’s probably time to start reading them again. There really was a real ad from a woman who took about a quarter page ad, telling everyone about her children and how devoted she was to them (as if anyone was asking) and how she would always put them first (as she should) and how nobody would get between her and them (as if they’d want to).

It just went on and on and on, as if someone kept suggesting the opposite, over her shoulder. I don’t know if anyone ever replied. I didn’t. The saddest thing was also the funniest thing, the very last line:

I’m looking for a man with no baggage.

It’s always stayed with me. So I updated it a little, in case that poor woman is still out there somewhere, still going on about her adult children. I should say now, this poem, if that’s what it is, is NOT based on or about anyone I have ever known, met, spoken to or done anything else with. Ever.

All Of Your S**t

I’m looking for someone

Without any baggage

I am a man woman couple looking for a fun

Reliable person partner soulmate

Who is tall short and dark light

Who is funny serious adventurous

And likes staying at home

And going out with friends,

Just chilling, doing the same things.

They say opposites attract lol.

I love my children, my home, my family

My car my job I would give the world

Lay down my life for or

Never forgive them or someone, for something.

I love my pets and

I don’t want any ties right now.

I like walking on beaches in the mountains.

I love going on Citybreaks in the countryside.

I want someone to be there for me

When I need them and I can’t handle commitment

Right now. I love having no responsibilities

And caring and going away

Whenever I like.

I love staying at home.

I am looking for a life

Partner a serious relationship

A one-night stand

Who knows let’s see. Fun.

I am married, single, divorced,

Separated, just looking.

And widowed. It’s complicated.

Delete as appropriate.

Delete as inappropriate.

Friend me. Chat. Txt. IM me.

Review my post and report me to Facebook.

Delete my posts on your timeline.

Remove your profile and change

Your privacy settings

Even as you change mine.

Forever and ever,

Or until the next time.

Mark me as flagged until that thing happens when

First the Xs disappear from your msgs

And quickly then the txts get shorter

And less often until sooner than you thought

There’s no reply at all and quite finally

Without appeal and irrevocably,

You just unfriend me.

So I’m looking for someone

Without any baggage.

(c) Carl Bennett 2013

Looking back I can see I posted this on November 28th. That was the day I went to the Blaxhall Ship and my life changed quite considerably.