At one point, long before 2015 when I quit journalism for good, I would fantasise, as a writer of columns here and there for national newspapers, about the idea of getting my most regular and significant income via a column on a more prominent and widely read page in one of those newspapers. At the time - especially the specific time when I lost almost all my other regular newspaper work and I was told I wasn’t allowed to write any more books - it seemed hugely attractive but I think it would have been one of the worst things that could have happened to my development as a writer. Trying to conjure, weekly, if not even more frequently, out of a box of - probably increasingly stagnant - air, strong opinions and feelings on people and events you don’t, deep down, even have half-arsed opinions and feelings on, for a readership consisting of a sizeable number of people who read such things just to intentionally annoy themselves? No thanks. I’m infinitely happier in books, or here on Substack, writing about old buildings, Moby Grape albums and sheep. Today I’ve been interviewed by Jane Ratcliffe who has asked me to guest on her Beyond Substack, where I’ve talked about this, some favourite songs and books, and a few other things. (For those of you who are new here it might provide a quick introduction to what I do)
Other news: in my archetypical clumsiness I appear to have fallen over and purchased yet more books…
Barbara Kingsolver has become (via The Poisonwood Bible, Demon Copperhead and - especially - The Lacuna) pretty much my favourite living author so I can’t wait to get stuck into Flight Behaviour and Prodigal Summer. (Incidentally, she turned 69 yesterday, which also makes her the same age as the main character in my next book.) I feel I need to read more novels by the misunderstood and underrated Anita Brookner than the two I have so far, especially after reading this excellent piece by
. I find it physically impossible to leave a paperback of Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick - a huge influence on my own Notebook - in a shop if I see it and have already given this one away via Substack Notes. I’ve been meaning to read Sour Sweet since my dad recommended it to me about a quarter of a century ago, but I couldn’t resist beginning with The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison so on Saturday - breaking off from the dizzyingly, densely brilliant audiobook of Erotic Vagrancy, Roger Lewis’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton - I took it up to the sliced onion roof Brent Knoll in Somerset on my way to a friend’s birthday party. However, I didn’t quite allow for the violence of the wind. A gust instantly blew the book out of my hands and across the valley and seemed capable of doing the same to my own not vastly heavier earthly encasement, flying me like a kite over to the similarly lofty Crook Peak a couple of miles to the north, where legend informs us a prehistoric giant engaged in geological missile warfare with his rival neighbouring giant on Brent Knoll until the practice ceased in the 1970s owing to niggling safety regulations associated with the extension of the M5 motorway and the attendant worries about some unsuspecting family in an Austin A40 Countryman on their way to the English Riviera being taken out by a 75 tonne boulder. On my way back down to sea level I passed a couple who, seeing the book in my hand, asked me what I was reading. I told them and they assured me it was brilliant. “They’re selling more up there,” I said, pointing to the top of the hill fort but, gleaning from the feverish glint in their eyes that they suffered from one of my own afflictions, admitted that I was kidding: there were no more hard-hitting 1970 novels on top of Brent Knoll. Just perspective and the leaden disgruntled breaths of the heavens.Another gratifying recent secondhand find for me was a small pile of Smash Hits magazines from late 1982 and early 1983: the exact era when, as a seven year-old, I was most obsessed with it. Seeing the covers all of these was like refinding little integral parts of myself miraculously intact, years after I’d carelessly dropped them. It also made me realise just how stone dead the internet has killed the beauty of the misheard lyric. I used to love the photos and interviews the facts (on the evening The Beatles made their TV debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, America’s juvenile crime rate was lower than it had been in a decade) in Smash Hits but just as exciting was the anticipation of reading its lyric sheets and discovering whether you’d been reinterpreting the songs of the day accurately after all, after hearing them on the top 40 while your parents vacuumed in the background. Some of the lyrics I misheard as a child include:
“We’re bringing brighter days. They're all in line waitin' for you. Can't you see? You're just another pot of meat.”
“I see my derriere walking away.”
“I know that I must do what’s right, as sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a lepress* above the Serengeti.”
“There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do.”
“I guess you’d say what could make me feel this way… Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, talking about… Maggie!”
*Weirdly the image that “a lepress” conjured up was not of a female leper but a female leopard: a large noticeably feminine cat, possibly in a nice spotted dress, levitating over a vast East African ecosystem.
I have to say it is lovely on this website to be able to communicate with thoughtful people who actually read stuff, who understand nuance, who, if they are going to try to read between the lines, at least take the time to read the lines first, who don’t grudgingly insist on seeing the world in only one of two ways and parp a big shit trumpet as they do so, who aren’t just skimming across the thinnest topsoil of everything and adding to the stultifying digital noise that grinds us down. I hope it continues. It’s such a vast contrast to the flailing, sludgeminded “let’s just yell about what we assume something is rather than taking the time to look into what something truly is!” outlook that’s been the way with social media for so long. I remember when I used to be on Twitter I felt extremely resentful of the seeming necessity of spending time on it, and how much it ate into writing time. I somehow don’t feel the same about Substack notes: frequently the days I am writing and replying most on there are the same days I am writing between 1000 and 2000 fufilling words of book.
I have been told by some people that the reason my first novel hasn’t sold more and crossed over into what is sometimes called “the literary mainstream” is that it was too weird, the kind of niche book that a small number of individuals intensely love but the average person in the street just doesn’t get or gel with at all, and although it’s not out until August, I have a strong suspicion that people might have similar sentiments about my second novel, which I finished last year, so, taking all this into careful consideration, after a long and hard think about my future, I decided to make my third novel significantly weirder than both of them. I can’t convey how much I’m enjoying it right now, although many days it leaves me emotionally ragged, partly due to something else it appears to have freed in me. My aim for my novels, I increasingly realise, is to create something that, however lifelike or supernatural, seems to me, during the course of the writing, more real than reality. My wish for my novels, meanwhile, is that I have somehow managed to share at least some of the vivid thrill of that hallucination with others and for enough of them to enjoy it to permit me to go on experiencing other diverse versions of it for the remainder of my life.
Last Thursday I walked from the ticklishly named village of Newton Poppleford along the River Otter to the sea and back, down footpaths who’d come in fancy dress as streams, through waterside copses reeking of wld garlic. I had been at the walk’s towering midpoint once before, around a decade ago, up above the eastern edge of Sidmouth, the old smuggling and fishing town where Tolkien wrote some early parts of Lord Of The Rings and Beatrix Potter based Little Pig Robinson. What happened was this: a magazine sent me there to write about a golf course. Having played 12 of the 18 holes, fairly unsuccessfully if you overlook the 300 yard drive I smashed towards Budleigh Salterton while watched by a snooty club member who’d a minute earlier taken one look at my ungolfy clothes and wild hair and beard and accused me of trespassing, I figured that would suffice, stashed my rusty clubs in some bushes and went off to explore the intriguing land beyond that private kingdom, lured away by the blood red cliffs and the way the hills seemed to Toblerone off into some great arboreal enigma asking to be solved. This is the point where the South West Peninsula begins to earnestly make its break from the rest of the UK, in vain pursuit of a fleeing France, and I love its cob barns and secret mossy crevices and shipwrecked shingle ghosts and the 60something woman taking her mum somewhere in her car who slows down to pass me with the utmost care on the narrowest of lanes and gives me a big smile. But I hate its spilled Tory sewage and overindulged sheep-murdering dogs (or, more specifically, the delusional owners that permit them to tear across pastureland in pursuit of livestock). Ultimately, I feel like an outsider here, at this midpoint of my walk, just like I did on the golf course in 2015: an outsider to people who only walk because they need to exercise thinly disguised wolves they have told themselves would never hurt another living thing, an outsider to massive cars driven too fast along lanes that never anticipated their invention, an outsider to walking only in a place that tells people, in some controlled way, ‘Here Is A Place Where You Can Walk, Maybe Even For As Much as One And A Half Miles, Where Everyone Else Will Walk Too’. I am - though far from alone in the wider scheme of ramblers - the befuddling anomaly in a ten mile stretch of footpaths like the one I have chosen today: the person who parks in the place nobody else parks for the start of a walk and walks for the sake of walking, to seek the company of only a sparrow and an Alsatian-fearing sheep, to knacker himself out in a pleasurable wind-tossed rain-blessed way and add texture to the weird books he writes that, even though he has learned to explain lots of things quite well in the books, can’t seem to offer a satisfying explanation about them to a stranger when they say to him, ‘Oh you write books? What kind?’ And In having these thoughts I hear how they might make me sound like a misanthrope or hiking elitist to someone reading just one of the thoughts, without the cushioning factor of other contextualising thoughts, and how many would not suspect I am someone who often exhausts himself with his own sociability, who loves conversations on walks no less than he loves trees or the sea or good food, but who is constantly trying to fight for time alone to work and think somewhere in the balance of maintaining and nourishing friendships that he is thankful for. And I hear also the pattern of my own long evolution: a pattern of intentionally putting myself in outside places, places people haven’t expected me to go, places that haven’t been as easy as the places people have expected and told me to go, places to watch from, because they are the only places I want to write books from, and writing books is what I have predominantly designed myself for over the course of many hard and soft years.
This pretty much epitomizes why your writing appeals to me. Your mind, somewhat like mine, darts around like a butterfly, sipping nectar from one flower after another, no matter how odd those flowers are.
Of course a lepress is a female leopard. No other meaning crossed my mind when I read this.
I love that after deciding your first two novels were niche because it was too weird for most people, you made the sensible decision to make the next one even weirder. How else are you going to find your tribe?
Your humorous way of looking at and describing things tickles me and creates delightful pictures in my mind: footpaths in fancy dress as streams, the southwest peninsula in pursuit of a fleeing France, missile-throwing contests by giants. You are inimitable, which is possibly just another way of agreeing that yes, you are weird. So much better than being mundanely human.
You had me at Moby Grape albums.