February 2024 Newsletter – Parts of my skeleton I have seen
The piranha shoal behind the coats; our most cherished memories are seldom the most obvious; a spring cleaning mishap leads to a tragic parting of ways; happy February Christmas...
The hook was never found
My mother underwent a knee replacement in November. Afterwards there was a long recovery period that I would imagine at some subdermal level is still ongoing, as the muscles and deep tissues knit themselves back together. The Red Sea, having been parted by a higher power, must now close upon lost ground.
My fascination with human anatomy and how everything is layered and arranged, dates to when I fifteen years old. A friend, suddenly ashen-faced, told me that I needed to go to hospital, As he spoke these words, I felt a wetness on my upper left arm. I wiped it away with my hand; a transparent, silky fluid. We were in a Portakabin. For a moment I thought that the ceiling must be leaking. In our crumbling comprehensive school, it struck me as the most obvious explanation. The wetness had returned to my arm. Upon further investigation I was mildly surprised to be confronted by a glimpse of glistening bone, newborn to the world. It lay like buried treasure at the bottom of a ragged, horizontal gash – the crude butchery of a row of metal coat hooks that I had fallen against only moments before. There was surprisingly little blood. I showed the wound to my teacher, Mr Hill, and asked his permission to visit the school office. He agreed that I should go. On the way I told the friend, who had been assigned as my escort, that it was “just a normal sword wound”.
It is far from commonplace to be given a sneak preview of your own skeleton. All other glimpses and insights have occurred through the medium of x-ray: A pair of membranous negatives of my skull that were taken in South Vietnam after I fell in some caves and went temporarily blind. I also fell from the back of the motorcycle that was taking me to the hospital and so banged my head hard, twice within an hour, which actually explains a great deal. For a couple of years these images dangled from the curtain rail in my bedroom. They were eventually taken down by my sister-in-law when my young nephew slept in the room. I should dig them out and place them in clear picture frames
Venturing deeper into my past there is a vague, and possibly false, recollection of a doctor examining some abdominal x-rays that were taken in the afterglow of my fifth birthday. Among the gifts I had received was a Batman helicopter. Predictably, given Bruce Wayne's strong preference for form over function, it flew, at least in principle, on bat-winged rotors. There need to be more Batman stories in which the titular hero is stymied by equipment failures resulting from these items either being bat-shaped or bat-themed in some way; possibly a one-man intervention from his long-serving butler, Alfred, advising that “perhaps sir might consider going off-brand”.
The centrepiece of the helicopter was its winch – a metal hook attached to a length of string that could be raised or lowered using a finely-toothed dial set into the belly of the aircraft. In a stroke of genius that was perhaps inspired by the popular fishing boardgame – Junior Angler, in which one catches fish with a magnetic rod, I tilted back my head, held the helicopter over my mouth and lowered the string down my throat. When it was retracted the hook was disturbingly absent from it, necessitating a visit to the hospital. Despite the x-ray, the hook was never found. It has been lost in time or, along with the feet of the Imperial Stormtroopers that I couldn't stop myself from chewing off and eating, is forming the basis of an impressive tumour in the lining of my stomach.
The bright spark of the mundane
My mother, if you recall, before I abruptly dived off the beaten track and into the knotty thicket of the past, was, throughout November and December, recuperating from a knee operation. She was at least afforded a honeymoon period of approximately two weeks involving intermittent doses of mild opiates, though she would probably disagree with my cheerful analysis. There followed an interminable daily slog through a list of exercises that were intended to exercise her new knee and to gradually get her to the point where she could hold her leg straight again.
Before the operation took place, my thoughts were already turning toward what would need to be done in regard to the housework while she was recovering. My father, who is not a particularly empathetic individual, belongs to generation of men who adhered to long-established gender roles. I have never been able to determine whether he genuinely does not grasp how to perform certain basic household tasks, or quietly regards this work as beneath him. On one of the rare occasions when he loaded the dishwasher, he put his dinner plate in the centre of the bottom rack, preventing anything else from being stacked around it. I was astonished when laid eyes on it, rising like a white china sun from the white wire scaffold – the dawn of a new minimalist paradigm in washing up. My father's slightly younger peers are generally more domesticated and are good cooks. Given the likelihood that he will outlive myself and my mother, I bot wonder and worry about what he will do, if he has no choice other than to survive on his own wits.
I concluded that one area where my mother would most definitely require assistance was in doing the weekly shop. She couldn't be expected to manoeuvre an overloaded trolley around Sainsbury's on a poorly knee. I would have gone on my own if I had had access to a car.
This presented me with a problem that endures to this day: I keep a nocturnal schedule and welcome the solitude of these quiet nighttime hours where I hammer away at the computer keyboard like a man demented, or watch films, or read, or, if the weather is passable, venture into the garden and exercise with my kettlebell to the consternation of any foxes who were hoping to pass through. On Thursday mornings, if I feel that I can't make it to 9am, then I will crawl into bed at around 5, sleep for an hour an a half, then rise and head into town with my mum and her shopping list that is longer than The Book of Life.
At half-past six in the morning, a few days before Christmas, having not slept at all in over thirty-six hours, and having walked half-asleep (to paraphrase Wilfred Owen) through the no-man's land of Sainsbury's, I experienced one of those moments where you become acutely aware of the minutiae of your own existence, and where familiar surroundings suddenly seem strange, as if they are being gazed upon for the first time. I was standing in the bread aisle; my hands curled around the shiny plastic handle of the trolley; the faux wooden flooring underfoot diffusing the glow of the ceiling lights. Around me, the pickers, locust like in their efficiency, were emptying entire shelf displays into maroon crates for sorting and eventual delivery. My mother, who had ventured further along the aisle, was openly debating the different types of bread that would be required to see our suddenly-extended family through the Christmas week; drawing on some practical formula that she had perhaps learned at evening classes after she was first married, or that is known a priori but requires decades of housekeeping before it come properly into focus in the mind, to establish a hierarchy of brioche products. As she weighed-up what seemed to be identical packets of vacuum-sealed, unbaked ciabatta loafs, one in each hand, a tiredness came over me and I wanted desperately to go home and lie down.
Almost in the same moment I was struck by an epiphany: This is important. I will remember this. Because it is always the odd moments in life – the ones that catch you off-guard – that would appear meaningless if you photographed or filmed them with your mobile phone (not that I have one) that form the most potent memories. Those attempts at curating the past – the holidays, the meticulously planned celebrations never put down roots as deep or as resonant in the mind.
Last week, my mother informed me she was okay to go back to shopping on her own after she returned from her holiday. A few days later, she was diagnosed with a heart murmur. No holiday and no reprive from my company in the supermarket. This Thursday, I did as I have done for the past three months and crawled from my bed having only lain down an hour earlier, shaking off a dream I had been having about purchasing a large quantity of water biscuits, as I pulled on my socks.
An accidental eviction
With my mother in her present impaired state, I have been doing a lot of hoovering and polishing, the latter often taking place at strange hours of the night, and the former on a more sociable schedule. As I run a duster, damp with Pledge multisurface cleaner, over the bones of the old house, and see the cloth returning lightly bruised with smoulderings of dirt, I often think of a line penned by Neil Finn, who is best known as the lead singer of Crowded House: ”and I lost my regard for the good things that I had”. I try my best to see past the drudgery of the work; to take notice of the care that was evidently taken in the carpentry and construction of the stairs when they were assembled many decades ago by men who have long since passed on from this world; the corner of the hallway, where as a consequence of some grounded force or material shrinkage, the wood floor has separated from the wall. I have been fortunate to live here. I remind myself of that.
In my room, a gap of approximately half a centimetre has opened up between the smaller of the two wooden sills and the base of the window. A spider about the size of a ten pence coin took up residence in the crack sometime towards the end of last year. I used to see it at certain times of times of day poised in its web, and was very happy for it to be there. Ever since I re-potted some small plants using outdoor compost, I have been beset by a plague of tiny flies that are difficult to kill and which appear to be inexhaustible in number – an unacceptable soil-to-fly ratio. The spider proved extremely efficient in capturing these pests.
Recently, I undertook a dramatic, premature spring clean. When the time came to dust the sill, I opened the window so that I could better clean around the frame. I managed to upset the spider when I took down the curtains which haven't been drawn in years and might as well go. I assumed that it had retreated into its wooden fissure and would return in due course. It did not appear that day, nor the day after. Three days later, in the small hours of the morning, a fox set off the security light in the garden. As I looked down on it, first sniffing around the flower beds and then pissing on them, I noticed the spider on the opposite side of the glass. It must have fled there to escape my jasmine-scented blasts of polish. Now it was outside in the cold and the rain and I felt bloody awful about it. The older I get, the more sensitive I am becoming to the precious fragility of living things. Even the locusts that formed the staple of Frederic's diet when he was alive, were well-looked after, given appropriate light, heat, food, and water. I thought that I might be able to lure the spider back inside. However, when I opened the window, I disturbed a part of the web that was attached to the glass and it scuttled away into the darkness. I have not seen it since.
The ritual of the broken egg
Though it may sometimes appear as though February Christmas arrives earlier with each passing year, this is an illusion brought on by the way the light falls during the winter months, accelerated by deterioration in the optic nerve, the result of encroaching old age. Unlike Easter, with whom February Christmas shares common symbolism (some refer to it as the harbinger of Easter) the holiday always falls upon the same date, February 25th, and therefore does not fuck around with the school holidays. You may have seen February Christmas cards in the shops that echo these sentiments.
A few days ago, after I had established the February Christmas tree by the doors to the conservatory (an artificial spruce of German provenance, the property of my grandparents who are both long dead) and was in the process of decorating it, one of the pieces of green wool, that I use to hang the baubles, pulled through its own knot as I stretched it over a sheaf of plastic needles. I was reaching around the tree at the time and so did not see what happened next. I only heard the abrupt metallic slapping noise as it struck the cold tiles – a sound so self-contained that I convinced myself that there had been no breakage. I paced around the tree. The bauble was in pieces – one large, jagged fragment cradling smaller shards of itself, the dulled silver interior dimly mirroring the plastic foliage overhead; a broken egg from which the life-force of what some call true Christmas had emerged and then immediately concealed itself among the artificial branches. Throughout the summer this larval form of the festive spirit will conceal itself in nooks and crannies until the temperature drops and the days shorten and December once again takes its turn.
I am writing too many novels
As some readers may be aware, I am in the process of writing a psychedelic pirate novel, set primarily in the South Atlantic, during the aftermath of the Golden Age of Piracy, and exploring Biblical themes. In common with all other works of fiction I have produced, I have done absolutely fuck all research and am leaning hard upon my own copious imagination, along with any threads of knowledge at my disposal.
When I began writing the novel, I believed that it would weigh-in at around 70,000 words and that a first draft could be achieved within a single month. While I did write around 72,000 words in November (while concurrently cleaning a very large house) it became clear that the book would be at least twice that length. I was slowed down in December and early January by my illness – the chronic pain I can manage – the days when it seems as though I am gazing at myself though a dense fog are harder to turn towards any productive end, and offer a sobering glimpse of what the eventual conclusion to my own story might look like. In an attempt to craft a lively and believable world beyond that of the protagonists, many of the crewmen on their respective ships experience their own minor story arcs. To pull this off I have had to stop writing while I create character timelines. This is background work is already paying dividends, with certain plot threads being braided together like minor ocean currents, to the overall benefit of the story.
In addition to this, I am considering overhauling a 60,000 word novel that I wrote in November, 2022, set in a re-imagination of the Soviet Union during the 1980s. If I can polish it to something approaching a shine, then I may publish it as a very cheap book.
There also exists 400 pages of chapter and character notes for a book set in West London, focusing on the fortunes of an African ex-pat community as they face-up to a crisis of leadership. The story is a loose sequel to my first self-published novel 'The Missionary Dune' in that certain objects and characters from that book make fleeting appearances.
In the burgeoning plotting stages is a novel set in Peru that incorporates a character from 'The Missionary Dune' (Cassia Munnoch) in a principle role. It is a book about motherhood, a subject on which I am wholly ignorant yet intend to pontificate upon at length.
Narratives are coalescing around a trio of other long-form stories, set respectively in London, Hackney, a fantasy realm modelled on medieval Luxembourg, and the Argentinian interior.
There are also two themed collections of short stories that are mostly written but that require a ton of editing.
Which of these will draw my focus, once the pirate book is finished, remains to be seen. I do know that in November 2024, I will participate in National Novel Writing Month (commonly referred to as NaNoWriMo) though I will remain aloof from the NaNoWriMo organisation itself. In 2023 some very unsavoury revelations of child grooming by one of their forum moderators came to light. The organisation initially seems to have done very little to address these accusations, and some of the young forum users who brought the actions of this individual to the attention of NaNoWriMo staff were actually banned from the site.
Nonetheless, I will attempt to turn what is currently 17 pages of typed notes, saved under the filename 'Untitled Cyberpunk Story' into a book that will hopefully be shorter than the current behemoth I am working on.
There is a strong case to be made for writing just one fucking book, thought I don't think this is realistic. I work hard and always have, but I am undisciplined.
Next week there may be a review of The Geraldine Fibbers' eccentric second (and final) album – Butch. A record that boasts the second-best opening line in Western pop music.