tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7091068061465523762024-02-20T10:11:34.696+00:00A Few Kind WordsWEEKLY ADVENTURES IN LANGUAGE AND LIFEJamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.comBlogger125125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-88080373740308378922012-03-20T10:58:00.007+00:002012-03-21T10:50:55.518+00:00A Few Kind Words have moved ...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><i>. . .</i> to new and more salubrious quarters. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">You'll find new posts plus all the old ones with just one click - <a href="http://afewkindwords.me/">HERE</a>!</span></span></span></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-76314321747368171882012-03-15T23:17:00.013+00:002012-03-16T07:38:39.597+00:00The Witness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">When I came back to Scotland in 1990 after living in London for 20 years it seemed like a different country to the one I had left. The spirit of John Knox had finally been banished from the streets of Edinburgh. You could eat well (well, a lot better), get a drink on a Sunday, have a cup of coffee outside on the pavement on a sunny day. There were good clubs and gigs, plays and shows. The capital seemed to have acquired a cultural life outside of August and optimism was the order of the day.</span><br />
<div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Writing was undergoing a tremendous renaissance with the contemporary Scottish novel being hailed far and wide. The music scene was transformed too. In my own particular area of interest, traditional music, the change was nothing less than radical. I had left to the strains of Jimmy Shand and his ilk, the old guys, with their slick, strict tempo country dance band sound. Now the young guys (and girls) had thrillingly claimed it for themselves, doing dangerous things with their fingering and bowing and breathing, nonchalantly and expertly playing fast and loose with melody and tempo, making music worth listening, as well as dancing, to.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And then, of course, there was devolution. Donald Dewar was a much admired figure across the political spectrum, although his flagship legislation for the new Scottish parliament was causing some consternation outside the Central Belt. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Having been brought up among landowners I had never given a moment’s thought to the fact that, thanks to the Napoleonic code and other European inheritance laws, Scotland is the last place in Europe where it's still possible to buy a very large piece of wilderness, sit in the middle of it, and effectively keep out the rest of the world. But now the issue of landownership was squarely on the political agenda - not least because it was one area where the new parliament, with its limited powers, could make a significant change - and I found the whole issue fascinating. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Put simply, on the one hand, very large tracts of the Scottish countryside were in the possession of a very small number of private landowners; on the other hand those landowners with their deep pockets managed and maintained this largely unproductive wilderness as an amenity for everyone else. It was a polarising debate, and at the time I returned there were those on both sides who believed it heralded the revolution.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In the end the Land Reform Scotland Act did little more than enshrine the ages-old Scottish precept that as long as you were sensible and respectful you could go where you wanted; though it did raise people's awareness of the fact that in Scotland, ownership in law was philosophically underpinned by the notion of stewardship or custodianship, and it paved the way for some high-profile community buyouts, notably on the islands of Gigha and Eigg, and on the Assynt peninsula.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It also, however, gave me the background for the novel I wanted to write; my response in part to the whole experience of being back in Scotland again, in part to the Balkans conflict and the horrors of Sarajevo and Srebrenica (I think of Homs and Idlib today and despair). It enabled me to concoct an independent Scotland of the near future in which land had been nationalised and in which, after years of mismanagement, the disgruntled Highlanders had risen up, alongside their dispossessed former lairds, against the government - a civil war arising out of a kind of reverse Highland clearances.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The book was published in 2007. It did reasonably well, was shortlisted for several prizes, and despite being pitched by the publishers at the top end of the young adult market, was read by just as many adults as teenagers. At the time of writing it I never imagined that five years later the SNP would be in charge, much less that independence would be heading the agenda. Nor did I imagine that my publishers would have ditched me and that I would be free to republish the book myself for use on a then only-dimly-imagined electronic reading device.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="Body1"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: windowtext; font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> But that is what has come to pass and now <i>The Witness</i> is available on Kindle at a very modest £1.95. If you haven't already read it, it will give you an edge-of-the-seat glimpse into a possible, though I sincerely hope not probable, future Scotland. If you have already read and enjoyed it, you can help me bring it to the attention of other readers by adding it to your Kindle library for less than the price of a pair of Ratner's earrings. Well worth it I'd say ... but then I would, wouldn't I. I hope you'll agree. You can find out by c</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">licking <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/THE-WITNESS-ebook/dp/B007I5960U/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1331853519&sr=1-1">here</a>!</span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-46916705666153313392012-03-09T00:01:00.002+00:002012-03-09T00:08:48.367+00:00Chinese fairies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">My mother is in reminiscent mode. She’s got to the age, nearly 84 as she reminds me constantly, where that old cliché about having nothing left but the memories is starting to manifest itself.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In her day she was wildly active, forever starting this, chairing that, raising money for the other. Now she’s largely sedentary. The once constant flow of correspondence, in her large expressive hand, with much underlining and postscripts that curled round the corners and along the edges of the pages, has dried up. She doesn’t like using the telephone and is no longer interested in being sociable. It’s as if she has quietly and gently closed the door on the world – which is not to say she’s planning to leave it. She’s quite happy, she says, and thoroughly enjoying herself ‘being lazy’; as well she might now that she’s ensconced in her own fully serviced flat in the very nice care home five minutes walk from my house.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">She spends her day reading voraciously, watching television and, when she has a visitor – which most days is me, reminiscing. She returns frequently to the Clyde blitz and the bomb that brought down her bedroom ceiling on the night that she was providentially sleeping in another part of the house with her mother. The bomb, jettisoned by a plane returning after the main raid on Greenock, the other side of the river, fell in the garden at the east end of the house. But the blast, in the peculiar way of such things, travelled round the narrow space between the rear of the house and the grassy bank behind it, and demolished the west wing, leaving the east wing unscathed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It must have made the war personal for her in a way that nothing else could have done. She’s never said ‘I beat the Germans’, but I can’t help feeling that that’s there in the undertow of the story. It’s definitely a source of pride that she survived. Often she tells the story the same way, but last time she added an intriguing detail. ‘It didn’t break any of my possessions,’ she said, ‘except some Chinese fairies.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Chinese fairies? I was in a rush and didn’t follow it up at the time, but I will. In the 1930s her father served in China, commanding a flotilla of Royal Naval gunboats charged with keeping the West River free of pirates. She travelled out there with her mother, aged seven or eight. That journey must have been another hugely formative experience, and although I already know some of the stories, a little digging will undoubtedly throw up more.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">But the story that’s really caught my fancy recently is the one about their summer holidays in Scotland with her maternal grandparents, who used to take a shooting lodge near Callander, in the Trossachs. My mother and her parents were then in naval quarters in the south of England. Her grandfather, a City grandee, lived in Buckinghamshire. To ship the whole family, plus domestic entourage, north, he simply hired a private railway carriage. They embarked at Taplow station and sometime the following day disembarked at Callander, having presumably been towed up to London, unhitched at some terminus, then re-hitched to another train heading north – all without the inconvenience of once having to step down from their carriage. My mother shared a sleeping compartment with the cook and a chambermaid, and loved it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">When I’m talking to groups about stories, I invite them to imagine for a moment that they are books, in which each successive page and chapter contains the stories of the incidents and experiences, the encounters and relationships, that make up their lives. I then ask them to picture a giant coming along, wrenching the book from their hands, and rubbing out those stories, starting at the first and working through to the last page, when the book is empty. What then are they left with? I ask.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">As I watch my mother growing older I realise more and more how our identity is nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. Without them we are really no longer human.</span></span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-60995648287357408712012-03-02T08:39:00.010+00:002012-03-02T09:24:56.030+00:00Anecdotally speaking<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There’s a small agency in Melbourne, Australia called Anecdote. They use stories and storytelling to help businesses change and adapt, develop their strategies and undertake other manoeuvres that call for some plumbing of the corporate psyche.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I met one of the <a href="http://www.anecdote.com/" target="_blank">Anecdote</a> team in Edinburgh just before Christmas. Kevin Bishop is a former RBS executive who went to live on the other side of the world so that he could follow his new-found vocation as a business storyteller. An energetic and engaging chap in a smart suit, he had none of that whiff of the smoke-filled tepee that one sometimes associates with storytellers. Quite the opposite, everything about him suggested that Anecdote does serious work with some big global players, thank you very much.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We talked about what stories mean to people in business, and I was pleased to find that we shared a distaste for the recent rash of business ‘fables’ like Squirrel Inc and Who Moved My Cheese, which seem lumbering and contrived and largely devoid of the most basic ingredient of storytelling – the ability to create in the reader an emotional connection with the characters. Frankly, I don’t care enough about what happens to the wretched squirrels or mice to want to read beyond chapter one. These stories have been created in service of a message and, as such, are little more than propaganda. They have all the imaginative flair and pathos of a Pyongyang news bulletin.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Anecdote’s skill is in using real stories, often gathered from the dustiest, most neglected corners of businesses: priceless nuggets of organisational knowledge held in the head of one old security man who is about to retire, when they will be lost forever; a simple story of human behaviour recounted by a lowly office worker that changes management attitudes; personal stories that help colleagues understand one another better and bring teams together, and so on. These are stories – I know from my own work with clients and the work we do through Dark Angels – that have the power to change things because they have true human resonance.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Real stories like these are things to be shared, and the more they are shared the more powerful they become. Anecdote publish an e-newsletter in which they generously share much of what they come across in the course of their business. There’s a fascinating item in the current issue about a study by a team of neuroscientists at Princeton University who have discovered that when you put someone through an fMRI scanner as they are telling a personal story, then play back the story to a series of subjects as they in turn go through the scanner, the same bits of the brain light up – in other words, the storyteller’s and listeners’ brains fall into sync. Further, while some listeners</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">’</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> brain patterns show a short lag as they catch up with the story, others’ actually precede those of the teller because they are predicting where the story will go. And finally, those listeners who do most predicting also score highest in the subsequent comprehension test.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Science, it seems, is starting to demonstrate what we know intuitively – that stories allow us not only to connect powerfully and deeply with one another, but also to absorb information very efficiently. If this helps businesses to overcome their fear of </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">something</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> they tend to see as alarming and unmeasurable, and move away from a slavish devotion to so-called objectivity, then three cheers for science.</span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-40528586497543222412012-02-25T09:09:00.002+00:002012-02-26T08:07:22.229+00:00Constant craving<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I was talking to my eldest daughter about last week's post and my South American travels. The conversation moved on to the 60s and 70s in general, and the music in particular.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">Sophie is 31 and the mother of my first and so far only grandchild. She's done her fair share of travelling, mainly in India and Southeast Asia, so she knows the score. She lives in the depths of rural Wales with her homeopath husband, and their musical tastes are fairly eclectic. Mainstream she is not.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">Even so, in her eyes I think my journey seemed somehow different, perhaps almost mythical, because of the era in which I made it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">"I know so many people of my generation who have a real nostalgia for that time, for the 60s and 70s," she said, "although of course it can't be nostalgia can it, because we weren't actually there."<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">Strictly speaking, no. But I know what she means. We've all experienced a longing for something past, a perceived age of innocence, a Camelot, a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">temps perdu</i> - whether or not we've actually experienced it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">But did we really have it easier in those days? I honestly don't know. It was easier to get jobs. The music was new and inventive and thrilling. The clothes – well they were simply ridiculous. You could still go to places where not many others had been before. There was a general sense of optimism. But the freedom... <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">Personally, much as I revelled in it, I also found it confusing, perhaps even rather frightening. How was one to know what to do with one's life when the only two certainties were that one was not going to do what one's parents had done, and that it was now possible to do practically anything else that took one's fancy? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">My Latin American journey was a profoundly formative experience, but it was also profoundly unsettling and six months after returning I had a nervous breakdown. There were other contributing factors, difficult family circumstances chief among them, but I think more than anything else I was overwhelmed by possibility.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">This was not a problem faced by my mother, now 83, whose house this weekend I'm clearing with my brother and sister; or others of her generation for that matter. Slated for Oxford in the late 40s, she had to give way to the older women returning from the war and settled for teacher's training instead, followed shortly by marriage. I was born four months after her 21st birthday.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">At the same age as I was setting off for South America, she was settling down in Edinburgh with her recently qualified and impoverished advocate husband, a two year-old child, the tail end of post-war rationing still in place, and that grim decade, the 1950s, ahead of her. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">It's not an era for which I harbour any nostalgia, actual or imagined. And yet, as I open yet another box of papers or books, and find a diary entry here, a newspaper cutting there, my curiosity is kindled. I want to know what it was like. I want to flesh out the stories of which these snippets offer such tantalising glimpses.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times; font-size: large;">That's really what forges our connection with the past, I realise. Our constant and endless craving for stories. They’re part of the glue that hold families together and give us a sense of continuity. Without them we become isolated, cast adrift.</span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-48594187416720841862012-02-17T09:55:00.007+00:002012-02-17T13:16:35.778+00:00Halfway to heaven<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Watching the YouTube film of my Latin American trip opened the floodgates again. There are still so many moments that remain clearly imprinted on my memory, almost forty years later: sailing to the Galapagos Islands on a cargo steamer, driving down out of the Andes into Amazonia in the rainy season, trying to change money in a Santiago back street a few months before the fall of the Allende government, being arrested in La Paz, hitching a lift with an opera-singing Peruvian madman, being handed a loaded revolver in a car in Guatemala and so on.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Much of our itinerary (though not all of what happened on it) is now routine for a gap year traveller, but it certainly wasn’t then, in 1973. We felt like the first European tourists ever to have set foot in some of the places where we ended up. The means of transport, rugged three-ton ex-army trucks, had a lot to do with it and never more so than when we crossed over from Chile into Bolivia. There are a couple of minutes on the film of what followed, but that really doesn’t begin to do justice to the experience.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The border was at a breathless 11,000 feet above sea-level, somewhere inland from Antofagasta, a town where it never rains, at the northern end of the Chilean Atacama desert. The Chilean side of the border crossing was manned but not the Bolivian side. We had to find our way to the town of Uyuni, we were told, where we would get our passports stamped. This proved a lot less easy than it sounded. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">At the border the metalled surface stopped abruptly. Beyond, a railway line and a tracery of vague dirt tracks disappeared into the distance, but there was nothing in the arid, mountainous landscape remotely resembling a road. The only map we’d managed to get hold of was Russian, I don’t know why. Uyuni was marked on it, but it was over 100 miles distant, there was what looked like a vast lake in the way, and there were no discernible features either on the map or in the landscape by which we could navigate.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It took us two days to get there – two days of driving sometimes in circles, sometimes through dusty baked-mud villages that from a distance resembled clumps of large boulders, sometimes through swamps of mud or sand, but mostly through the absolute emptiness of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">altiplano</i>, the high-altitude plateau of the central Andes. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">On the second day we had what still rates as one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. The lake marked on the map turned out to be the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flats in the world. Half the size of Yorkshire, it's a vast expanse of milky white water, a few inches deep, lying on a thick crust of salt at 12,000 feet above sea-level.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We had picked up a local guide and had been skirting the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">salar</i> for some time when, to our astonishment, he directed us out onto a short, rough causeway. We watched, hearts in mouths, as the lead truck bumped along the causeway and then down into the water. The crust did not give way. The truck rolled forward, picked up speed and we followed. Soon we were bowling along at a steady 20 miles an hour on a surface as smooth as a billiards table, the lead truck kicking up a fine salt spray that coated us from head to foot.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It took three-and-a-half hours to cross the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">salar</i>, a distance of 70 miles. In the thin air the sun burned down and the sky was brilliantly blue. Around us the salt was blindingly white. After a while the hills behind us dwindled to nothing. Then the horizon started to melt as a thin haze of cloud settled and met the water, and we found ourselves gliding through a surreal, uniformly milky world in which it was impossible to determine where land ended and sky began. In the middle of this, distant shapes came to life and floated upwards. It was a huge flock of scarlet flamingos. Later, a semi-circle of volcanoes began to materialise out of the haze.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Today, trips to the Salar de Uyuni are on every off-piste travel company’s itinerary. Recent photographs show squadrons of landrovers parked at one of the weird volcanic islands that rise out of the salt. I don’t doubt that these travellers marvel at the place just as we did, but I can’t help feeling a little sorry for them, and sorrier still for the desecrated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">salar.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">When we stumbled across it we had no idea of its existence. It seemed to us like a pristine wilderness. In 70 miles we saw nothing but a solitary man on a bicycle. We had no idea that when the causeway ended, the lead truck wouldn’t simply vanish through the crust, no idea how long it would take us to cross; and certainly no idea that we would spend the best part of three hours in this extraordinary saline limbo, literally suspended between heaven and earth. It was almost as if, for a short while, we’d left the planet.</span></span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-53148815817895218422012-02-09T23:45:00.006+00:002012-02-10T09:20:52.127+00:00Mind the gaps<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Last Saturday I took part in the final event of the 26 Treasures Scotland project, chairing a panel discussion at the Winter Words book festival in the Pitlochry Festival Theatre. February 4 is a date which, since university days, I have thought of as the absolute nadir of the year. True to form, it was a filthy afternoon, sleety and freezing. We were also up against the Calcutta Cup kick-off at Murrayfield, half-an-hour after we started. But still we got an audience of about 40 people in the main auditorium.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The panelists were historical novelist Sara Sheridan, who has been the driving force behind the project, Linda Cracknell, writer of short stories and radio plays, and Alison Weir, expert on the Tudors and one of the UK’s most successful writers of historical biographies and novels. Sara, Linda and I had all contributed to the project. Alison had not, but she was in Pitlochry anyway doing her own event and the organisers thought her presence would add something to ours. It did.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The three of us talked about the objects we had been allocated and then read our respective 62 words on Queen Mary’s harp, the Coigrich – a talismanic gold casing for the handle of a bishop’s crosier, and the Gown of Repentance. We had also asked Alison to choose an object and she had obligingly come up with 62 words of her own on a large lump of Lewisian Gneiss, at (appropriately) 2.6 billion years old, the most ancient of all the 26 treasures.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We then began a conversation about whether these short pieces of highly personal writing, essentially fictions created in response to the allocated objects, had any place in a museum whose chief purpose is the presentation of fact. To elaborate on the question, I asked Alison if she had ever written a novel about an historical character for whom she had also written a biography. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘more than once. It’s all about filling in the gaps, you see.’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And that, it seems to me, is what the whole 26 Treasures project has been about – filling in the gaps. Mostly we stand in front of objects in museums armed only with the factual information provided by curators. We may be intellectually or aesthetically engaged by them, but if our imaginations aren’t kindled we are seldom going to make the more human, more emotional connection with them and their time and place of origin. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">26 Treasures encouraged the writers, first, to imagine the stories around these objects, and then to communicate those to the museum’s visitors. The stories don’t alter the facts any more than Alison Weir’s novels alter their underlying historical truths, but they do enhance them. It’s no surprise that so many of the 26 writers came away from the project with a distinctly proprietary feeling about their objects; though the Gown of Repentance, unsurprisingly, stirred no such feelings for me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">But filling in the gaps is something we are naturally inclined to do as imaginative creatures. It’s what I constantly tell business writers. You don’t need to give us the kitchen sink. You can easily get rid of half of what you’ve said and your audience will still get it. We’re hard wired to read between the cracks. We imagine and intuit and do </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">very effectively </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">all those unmeasurable things that the business world finds so alarming. If we didn’t we would have been savaged by sabretooths or trampled by mammoths millennia ago.</span><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><i>T</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><i>o see all the 26 Treasures at the National Museum of Scotland click <a href="http://www.nms.ac.uk/our_museums/national_museum/exhibitions/26_treasures.aspx" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-28773187834407668532012-02-03T19:32:00.006+00:002012-02-04T10:53:30.443+00:00Close encounter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In December 1972 I quit my job at Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly and flew to Argentina with my girlfriend. There we met up with 30 other travellers of all nationalities and stripes who had signed up for a trip with the adventure travel company, Encounter Overland. With its fleet of orange-painted, blue-canvased three-ton Bedford ex-army trucks and trailers, the company had been driving the hippy trail to Afghanistan since the late 1960s. Now Latin America beckoned. At £500 a head for a five-month itinerary that would take us from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles, we were the guinea pigs.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In the event, my journey lasted nearly a year. Encounter Overland had miscalculated and by the time we got to Lima, three months into the trip, they realised they were going to have to drive 18 hours a day to make their deadline. My girlfriend and I jumped ship and continued on our own, eventually flying home from Toronto the following September.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It was a momentous year in more ways than I can describe. I was 23 and very unsure of what I wanted to do. I had a law degree but no interest in continuing with the law, I’d allowed myself to be shoehorned into articles with an accountancy firm which had lasted only a few months, and I’d tried bookselling which had just left me feeling restless. I’d had a couple of short stories published and had the vague notion that I wanted to write full length fiction, but not the faintest idea about what. So when, to my father’s dismay, my mother sent me an advertisement for the trip, I jumped at it. What I didn’t know, of course, was that on a journey like this one tends not so much to find answers as more questions. When I got back to the UK I was still none the wiser, but I was profoundly altered and the experiences are with me vividly 40 years later.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Apart from some articles published shortly after I returned, I’ve tried writing about it twice since. In both cases I’ve fictionalised the Latin American experience; and while I don’t know what will eventually happen with <i>The Artefact</i>, in the first instance the trip provided the backdrop for the one novel I’ve written which remains unpublished. And this, Dear Readers, is what I believe lies at the heart of the dilemma and my request for help – to which you responded so generously, almost overwhelmingly.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Some of your thoughts came as comments to the blog, others as emails or phone calls – and I’m deeply grateful for them all. Roughly a third of you said Carry on, for reasons ranging from ‘An unfinished story is a pitiful thing’ to ‘We’re desperate to know what happens’ to ‘At least give it one more try’. The other two-thirds said the more difficult thing: ‘Look within’. Well, I did – with the help of a patient wife, a long frosty walk and, among many splendid and considered pieces of advice, the words of Gillian Clelland who wrote: ‘Yer heart doesny always get it right, neither does yer head, I find yer tummy always tells ye whit tae dae. Listen tae yer tummy. You will feel what is right for you…’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I consulted the entrails, Dear Readers – my own – and divined that I need to revisit the journey more fully, more personally; that it would be valuable to understand more deeply the many ways in which that year shaped me, and that to fictionalise it is to trivialise it when it has quite clearly been knocking at my door, demanding my serious attention, for some time. Put simply, I need to connect with the emotion of the experience, rather than holding it at one remove.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This doesn’t mean that I won’t at some stage return to <i>The Artefact.</i> ‘It will wait if it’s really right,’ counselled Faye Sharpe, ‘artefacts do, believe me, I’m an archaeologist, remember?’ But it does mean that for the time being I have another writing job to do which may, as Neil Baker suggested, turn out to be something closer to memoir; though at this stage I’m reluctant to give it form. Meanwhile, my heartfelt thanks once more to all of you who responded to my plea. I’m flattered that there are that many of you who are even interested in my ruminations.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And now I shall obey Andy Milligan, who wrote: ‘… enough of this self-reflection, man. Away with you and start writing!’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">As a remarkable postscript to this, I have just Googled Encounter Overland to check some facts, and discovered that on YouTube there are three 10-minute episodes of a film made during our trip by the cameraman Peter Sinclair who travelled with us. I had completely forgotten about it and am not even sure whether I saw it at the time. I've just spent an utterly surreal half-hour watching my younger self and others pushing a three-ton truck out of axle-deep mud on the Bolivian altiplano. See <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqXM49TG85E" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><i><br />
</i></span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-81833705547725982732012-01-27T09:51:00.002+00:002012-01-29T17:35:11.755+00:00Breaking up is so hard to do<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: large;">I've been
dismembering one of my books, painstakingly taking it apart, page by page, so
that each comes away from the glue of the spine cleanly, a perfect rectangle.
It's a strange, not entirely comfortable, feeling. The book in question is a
paperback copy of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Witness</i>, my
post-Scottish-independence thriller. I'm doing it because I no longer have an
electronic version and the only way I can get the book onto Kindle is to have
the text scanned and create a new file from it.</span><br />
<div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">As
I remove the pages I can't help pausing when my eye is caught by a passage or
turn of phrase I remember particularly well or am especially proud of. I find
myself reliving the pleasure of writing it, and this throws into relief the
dilemma I face at the moment: should I abandon the novel I've been writing for
the last four years? I wrote here last year that 'the story demands to be
finished. It’s a living, growing thing, and to let it wither on the vine would
be tantamount to abortion. I feel morally obliged to it, such is the power and
energy of story.'<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hmm ...
now I'm not so sure. I think perhaps that this particular story has lost its
energy. More than that, I wonder about its relevance to me in 2012. When I
started it, in 2008, I had recently published two novels in quick succession,
both of which had been critically well received. A third in the same general
genre - the young adult thriller - seemed the obvious thing to do, especially
for someone whose literary career to date had followed a random trajectory to
say the least.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I
had two ideas gnawing at me. One was to mine the diaries I had written nearly
40 years previously, during a year travelling on a shoestring through Latin
America. The other was to examine the impulses that make someone steal. As a
small boy at boarding school I had stolen sweets, sometimes from the large jar
of favours that sat in the headmaster's study (fair game one might say),
sometimes, much more shamefully, from other boys. I had been caught and beaten
for it and it had troubled me, intermittently, ever since. What, at that moment
in my life, had made me do something I had never done before and have never
done since?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">My
story, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Artefact,</i> concerns a precocious eight-year-old who is taken by his parents on a scientific expedition to Amazonia where
the whole family suffers a trauma. Later, back in Scotland and growing up
neglected by his work-obsessed parents, he starts to steal compulsively. This
leads him into bad company and worse trouble. By the time he is about to leave
school he is staring into the abyss. It comes to him that he has been cursed,
that the only way to get out of trouble and rid himself of the compulsion is to return to South
America and right a wrong he had committed there as a child, ten years earlier.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Although
I’ve written around 70,000 words, hardly any of that has been over the last two
years. Other commitments and interests have taken over, not least <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Room 121</i>, the business book I co-wrote
with John Simmons, and this blog. Dipping back into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Artefact</i> now, some of it seems good, some less so, but - and
this may just be the time of year, though I suspect not - it feels stale; the
thought of returning to it does not make my pulse race. I know that to finish
it is still several months' work. Then there's the thorny question of whether
to find a publisher or self-publish. There’s promotion - can I face, indeed do
I have the time for, touring the secondary schools again. And there’s the commitment
to a follow-up, pretty much a given should I find a publisher.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> To some extent the project has already
done its job. I’ve come to understand through the research and writing that in
certain circumstances stealing can offer a form of comfort and a sense of self-connection - an explanation certainly, if not an exoneration.
I’ve also discovered that my South American material bears revisiting, and
there are other arenas in which I could re-work it, this blog for example. Yet
a year ago a prominent children’s author for whom I have great respect,
insisted that I finish it and paid me the compliment of saying that the kind of
books I write are important to their audience.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">So
I’m stuck. Should I finish it simply because it's there? I need some other opinions – including yours, Dear Readers. I'm
posting the first couple of chapters <a href="http://afewkindwords.blogspot.com/p/artefact.html" target="_blank">here</a> to give a flavour of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Artefact</i>. If you can spare a few
moments, please read them and help me decide: carry on or let go?</span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-25313907215929620112012-01-19T23:44:00.002+00:002012-01-20T18:26:02.679+00:00A time for kindling<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There are some things you just have to take on the chin.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Ten days ago we had our annual Dark Angels
get-together. John comes up to Edinburgh from London. Stuart and I meet him at
the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. We plan the coming year and enjoy a good lunch.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">‘You’re such a geek,’ they said, as I produced my new
iPad. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It’s not quite how I see myself, but from their
perspectives I guess maybe it’s true. John cleverly avoids things technological
by having an obliging better half to whom he refers from time to time as his IT
manager. Stuart, the poet, simply scribbles things on the backs of envelopes.
Me … well, yes, I confess I enjoy things that do clever stuff. I like to be
properly tooled up for the job on hand (unfortunate turn of phrase, I know).</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The iPad was a Christmas present to myself, well-deserved
of course. That cut no ice with my 20-year-old son. He stole it at once and disappeared
on an Angry Birds binge. When I’d retrieved it, I set about downloading the
Kindle app (although in truth you don’t set about anything with an iPad; you
just tap the screen and whatever it is happens almost instantaneously). In any
case, this – Kindle – was the real reason, I’d persuaded myself, that I needed
an iPad.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A few weeks before, I’d had an e-publishing tutorial with
Edinburgh crime writer, Lin Anderson. Lin has had some decent results on Kindle
with her backlist and is now, generously, on a mission to spread the good word
to other writers. The good word is this: no writer need ever again suffer the
indignity of titles forlornly mouldering in that great literary boneyard known as 'out of-print'. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This is a revelation. Out-of-print titles, in my case
four out of six, are to all intents and purposes dead. No one’s promoting them
(not that anyone other than me ever did much for mine, anyway). No one can buy
them. No one can read them. All that effort and it’s as if, by declining to
reprint, the publishers have locked them away, out of sight forever.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Enter Amazon. Suddenly, with a little bit of
formatting I can upload my text and jacket image to the Kindle store, write the
blurb, set my own price (having first reverted the rights from the
publishers, of course) and the books can carry on selling forever. Now, here’s the really good bit. If that price is more
than £1.50, Kindle gives me back 70% (or 30% under £1.50). I can set the price
as high or low as I like, and change it every day if I want to test the market.
Furthermore, Amazon, with all its clever algorithms, will automatically, electronically
do at least as much promotion as my publishers did. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I’ve written in the past about the economics of
publishing fiction (see <a href="http://afewkindwords.blogspot.com/2011/04/summing-up.html" target="_blank">here</a>), but only in respect of my ten percent of the cover price and
what it has contributed to my overall income (practically nothing); not about
where the rest has gone. One swallows all kinds of things out of habit or
convention. In twenty years of being published I’d never really questioned the
obvious madness of giving away ninety percent of the income from work that I
had sweated blood over. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I do now.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Did I really need to help finance a glass-and-steel
office at King’s Cross, an editor of whose time I might get a couple of days per
book, a marketing department quite likely to commission a cover I hated, and a
publicity department staffed largely by eager but clueless teenagers? </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Clearly not, as I now understand. I can’t wait to get
my backlist up on Kindle, to bring these books I love and am proud of back to
life again. They won’t necessarily be my pension (though nothing’s impossible),
but they will at least be there for people to read once more. Perhaps I am a geek,
after all. If so, I’m a geek who doesn’t like not being read.</span></span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-92143588193338031462012-01-14T18:02:00.003+00:002012-01-14T18:15:21.571+00:00Life and Fate<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">We're two weeks into the new year and stories are everywhere, it seems. There's Melvyn Bragg and his Radio 4 series on the history of literature. It was the 4,000 year-old Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh, that set humanity off on its story-telling spree, he tells us. Then there's War Horse, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's children's novel. Amid all the publicity, the author has been seizing every opportunity to repeat his mantra that every primary school day should end with the children being read to for half an hour.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"> Back
on Radio 4 Sarah Wheeler has been introducing readings from the diaries of
various members of Scott's South Pole expedition, surely one of the most tragic
of exploration stories. And then there was Jeanette Winterson talking
passionately about why it matters to read. 'A book is a door,' she said. 'On
the other side lies somewhere else.'</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I
love that thought. The somewhere else, of course, exists only in our
imaginations. But how vivid and real it can feel. Over the Christmas holidays I
finished Life and Fate, the 800-page saga by Vassily Grossman set in 1942
during the battle for Stalingrad. Not the kind of thing I normally go for, I
have to admit; the last big Russian I read was Dostoevsky, in my early
twenties. But after Radio 4 recently gave over every drama slot for an entire
week to a dramatisation of Grossman's book, I mentioned that it sounded worth
reading and was promptly given it for my birthday.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"> During
the war Grossman worked as a journalist, reporting from the Eastern Front for
the Red Army press. Witnessing the deadening hand of state ideology, even in
the thick of battle, he was appalled by the similarities between Stalinist
Russia and Nazi Germany - and went on to describe them in the novel with an
almost Orwellian clarity. Before the book was even finished it had attracted
the attention of the KGB, who eventually confiscated it. Grossman died in 1964
but had made copies which were later smuggled to the west where it was first
published in 1980.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: large;"> It
tells the story of Viktor Strum, a Jewish theoretical physicist, and his
extended family who between them experience practically every shade of
existence in the Russia of the 1940s, from the front line to the labour camps,
the state-sponsored laboratory to the steppes, the Lubyanka to Treblinka. The
central scene is the desperate struggle for control of Stalingrad during the
pitiless winter of 1942/43; the central theme the erosion of individual destiny
by the relentlessly controlling mechanism of the communist state.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">As
'somewhere else' it wasn't always an easy place to be, but it was an equally
difficult place to leave. In my imagination I absolutely inhabited those
bombed-out factories, Siberian wastelands, crumbling apartments; I lived the
characters' <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>inner and outer struggles. The
scale and ambition of the book made most of the contemporary fiction I have
read seem puny and domestic. For the couple of months it took me to read it
majestically enriched my imaginative hinterland and I don't doubt that I've
expanded personally as a result. That's why we need to read. That's why the
bookless households inhabited by a third of children in the UK offer such a
bleak prospect.</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-6250107978380836482012-01-06T09:25:00.000+00:002012-01-06T09:33:29.635+00:00Community spirit<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: large;">For me the year began properly on Monday night with the annual
village dance. In the middle of Birnam is a large, ugly Victorian hotel with
one marvellous, possibly unique, feature – a huge first-floor baronial hall.
Here we gather every New Year to dance and greet those neighbours we didn’t
bump into in the car park of the Taybank pub which, complete with covered
stage, raucous band and compulsory inebriation, has now become the focal point
for Hogmanay itself.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The ceilidh, by contrast, is a family event.
Every generation is there and most people know one another. There’s a great
atmosphere, excellent music from Edinburgh's Bella MacNab ceilidh band, pretty
well everyone dances, no one gets too drunk or shouts, and the feeling of
goodwill is palpable. I leave each time with the glowing sense of belonging to
a real community. It’s a constant delight and a novelty that never wears off
for someone brought up in the kind of rarefied circle where one was more likely
to have tea in a castle than mix with the local village folk.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It made me think what an elastic word ‘community’
has become. We talk of communities today to mean groups of people who are bound
together only by someone else’s idea. There’s much talk of community in the
corporate social responsibility report I’m currently writing for a large
manufacturing plc. They’re eager – quite understandably in these scrutinous
times – to be seen to be connecting with people beyond the factory walls, and
doing the right thing by them. But the members of these communities, be they
whole towns local to the factories, or particular common interest groups with
whom the company has dealings, or just, collectively, the people who buy their
products, have no knowledge of one another. So are they really communities? No,
of course not. In a real community everyone is known to everyone else and all
are nourished and supported by their membership of that group.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Which doesn’t, of course, mean that they must
live cheek-by-jowl. A community that flowered briefly but thrillingly, and
which I now miss greatly, was that of the musicians that gathered every Monday
night at my local pub, the Birnam Tap Inn, during the first five years I lived
in the village. Over the last few days I’ve been listening again to recordings
I made of those sessions and the feeling of nostalgia is, at moments, almost
unbearable.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We came together one evening a week to make
music in the most spontaneous, open, communal way possible. Everyone was
welcome, whatever their musical ability. There was no programme or agenda. We
simply played what we felt like on the night and because the place attracted
excellent musicians, the music was mostly of a much higher quality than usual
for a pub session. It was exhilarating and deeply connecting, not just for the
players but also for the audience of regulars and passers-by. We were all
enriched by the experience and on certain nights, when the energy was high and
the musicians hit a particular groove, there was an almost religious intensity
to the experience.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The session finally ended when the hotel to
which the pub belonged closed down. That was three years ago. Now the place is
a pizza parlour; home, perhaps, to a new community of regulars. Whatever brings
us together, most of us need communities - although it wasn't really until I returned
to Scotland, in my early 40s, that I realised it. Now I belong to several, the village of Dunkeld and Birnam, Dark
Angels and 26, to name but three. The thought warms me as we face the
uncertainties of 2012.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<br /></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-21660886842230344452011-12-16T11:26:00.001+00:002011-12-16T16:02:59.806+00:00Choosing your bees<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We had our last Edinburgh International Book Festival board meeting
of the year yesterday. It has been a fascinating year as world events swirl around
us and we’ve found ourselves debating issues as diverse as whether to initiate
a cultural exchange involving representatives of the Chinese government, and
what might be the pros and cons of a potential new media relationship with the Murdoch
organisation (this before the hacking scandal broke and vindicated our eventual
decision).</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Yesterday it was one of the smaller agenda items that intrigued
me most, a snippet in director Nick Barley’s report concerning our bookselling
operation. The temporary, tented bookshop in Charlotte Sq turns over nearly £600,000
in the 17 days of the festival. It’s an integral part of the proceedings, a large
airy space where you can browse, have coffee and meet authors at after-event
book signings. It carries a vast range of fiction and non-fiction, including of
course the current titles of all the 700-odd authors appearing. This year our
two bestselling titles, both at around 350 copies, were </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Liz Lochhead’s <i>A Choosing </i>and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Carol Ann Duffy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bees</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Two poetry titles. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Not fiction. Not memoir. Not biography. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Poetry.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">What does that say? That in times of uncertainty we
turn to poetry for meaning? That in an age of increasing digitisation, the role
of the book as artefact is still essential as the physical setting for poetry? Or
simply that a poet at the top of her game, as both these are, can say more to
us about the business of being human than any novelist, biographer or historian
ever can?</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It could be any or all of these things, though it may
not be indicative of a trend. Of all the places on the planet where
one is most likely to find a concentration of poetry buyers, it’s Charlotte Sq
in August.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Nevertheless, it’s heartening; particularly since, as
I mentioned last week, we’re hoping to produce a volume of all the writing from
the four 26 Treasures projects via the crowd-sourced publisher <a href="http://unbound.co.uk/" target="_blank">Unbound</a>. And
most of those pieces are poems – not necessarily because people set out to
write poems when first confronted with their museum objects, but because the
constraint of 62 words ends up shoe-horning most people’s thoughts into the poetic
form.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">As I write this I realise what an apt metaphor it is
for the approach of Christmas, the constraint of the last few days. Everything
gets shoe-horned into a frantic burst of last-minute activity. I’m hoping that
something creative comes out of it. Inspired present-buying would do. Kindness,
love and family togetherness would be better.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">See you in 2012.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><i>PS... Since first posting this, Tessa Ransford has emailed to remind me of this, which she has now designated her Christmas poem for 2011:</i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: large;"><b>A Cup of Kindness</b></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: large;">Faith, Hope and Charity</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: large;">wrote St Paul in his hymn to Love</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">these three abide</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In Iraq, explains Canon White on the radio,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Democracy is not what people yearn for</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">blasted on them as it was through missiles and bombs</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">What they most want, why can’t we understand,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">is water, electricity and kindness</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">life, communication, things working normally</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">God only knows</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Buddha only knows</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Mohammed only knows</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">everyone knows we want the kindness</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">which lies at the heart of our being</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In Scotland we have given a song to the world</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">‘a cup of kindness’</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">to take, to drink, to share</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Water, electricity and kindness,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">but the greatest of these is kindness</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b>Tessa Ransford</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-weight: bold;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-74562817186093879472011-12-08T20:07:00.001+00:002011-12-09T09:41:41.348+00:0026 Treasures Unbound<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A little over a year ago I went to see Sandy Richardson, head of
development at the National Museum of Scotland, to tell him about the 26
Treasures project and to ask if he might be interested in helping us repeat the
formula we had developed so successfully with the V&A in London.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This involved pairing 26 writers with 26 objects and inviting
them to write a personal response in 62 words, as a new and different way of
connecting visitors with objects in the collection. (A <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sestude</i> was the word newly minted for the 62-word form by 26 founder, John Simmons). Our plan was to take 26 Treasures not only to
Scotland, but also, simultaneously, to the Ulster Museum and the National
Library of Wales.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> Sandy put me in touch with the museum’s Learning Department and I
went along to our first meeting, taking with me 26 Scotland’s new secret weapon:
historical novelist, Sara Sheridan. Sara combines ferocious
energy, intelligence and organisational skills with irresistible charm and
determination. She and
the museum’s learning officer, Claire Allan, picked up the project and together headed for the
horizon, leaving me to offer the occasional cheer from the stands. (And in a
nice completing of the circle, Sandy Richardson has since moved on to a new development job –
where else but at the new V&A Dundee.)</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Last Saturday, in a long gallery at the museum, <a href="http://26treasures.com/scotland" target="_blank">26 Treasures Scotland</a> came together: 26 objects, 26 writers, 1,612 words, a virtuoso jazz saxophonist,
a recording of pipe marches and a number of intrigued, if slightly baffled passers-by
– the culmination of a year of hard work that was more, much more, than the sum
of the parts. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Writer Aimee Chalmers and her jazz accompanist Richard
Ingham opened the proceedings with a spellbinding performance, 26 minutes long,
in Scots, in the voice of Westlothiana Lizziae, a 340-million-year-old fossil
lizard. Then, at intervals over the next three hours, everyone in turn spoke
briefly about their object and read their 62 words. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We heard the rattle of shipyard drag chains, the words
of piper Daniel Laidlaw VC on the Battle of Loos, a catalogue of medieval cattle
diseases, the clattering descent of the Maiden’s blade onto its inventor’s neck,
the wry observations of a gilded 18th</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> century teapot, the anguish of
rejected would-be Highland emigrants – a chorus of voices as varied as the
objects that mark a trail through Scottish history from the Big Bang to the
present day. It was a wonderful afternoon, touching, funny and profoundly
moving by turns.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Now the exhibition runs through till the end of January. The trail is marked throughout the <a href="http://www.nms.ac.uk/our_museums/national_museum/exhibitions/26_treasures.aspx" target="_blank">National Museum of Scotland’s</a> Scottish collection, the words appear beside the exhibits, there’s a beautiful little
brochure, and a programme of events will bring museum visitors together with
the writers and their objects. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Then there’s Unbound, a new publishing company which
invites interested readers to buy subscriptions for a book and publishes it
only if, within 90 days, it reaches its funding target. In doing so, Unbound
creates stronger links between the books that writers want to see published and
that readers want to read. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> Just as Robert Burns persuaded friends to finance
his first collection of verse all those years ago, so now we’re hoping to raise
the money for the world’s first collection of sestudes – over 100 in all from
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It will be a beautiful reminder not
only of a wonderful project but also of how history can be brought alive
through the story an object has to tell.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Please visit <a href="http://unbound.co.uk/books/26-treasures" target="_blank">Unbound</a> and support us if you possibly
can.</span></span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-17779025060530827352011-12-01T19:58:00.001+00:002011-12-01T20:08:50.024+00:00Who cares wins<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Christie Watson must be very pleased. Her book,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Tiny Sunbirds Far Away</i>, about a Muslim family in Lagos, has been
shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Prize. Perhaps she has an advantage.
She’s a graduate of the famous University of East Anglia Creative Writing course
and she was on Radio 4 this morning alongside one of its most illustrious alumni,
Ian McEwan. With John Humphrys they were discussing that old chestnut: whether
creative writing can be taught.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Humphrys rounded off the conversation by asking Watson
what was the most valuable thing she had learnt on the course. ‘Write a book
that other people want to read,’ she replied without hesitation, adding that it
was not a tutor but an RLF fellow who had given her this piece of advice.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">That is interesting. The Royal Literary Fund fellows
do in universities a similar job to what I and many other readers of this blog
do in organisations. We help with the practicalities of communication, its
effectiveness, rather than its underlying messages. Our clients have the
thought (in theory), we help them express it to shareholders, customers,
colleagues. Similarly, the students have the thought (in theory), the RLF
fellows, all published writers, promote good writing practice, helping them
with structure and language – though one would earnestly hope that the creative
writing students don’t need much help in that department.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The advice may sound obvious. If you don’t write
something other people are going to want to read, then no one will read it. But
when you’re in the hothouse environment of a creative writing course, other
imperatives may take over and writing ‘what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i>
want to write’ may become irresistible. There’s an identical and equally
irresistible corporate impulse to say to the world, in exhaustive detail, ‘what
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we</i> want to say’.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The RLF fellow’s advice directly echoes what we spend
our lives telling people. Write what other people want to read (sub-text: not
what I or we want to say). For book just substitute report, email, website or anything else that people in business have to write. Those that
get the message communicate in a way that connects. Those that don’t don’t.
Sadly the latter are still in the majority.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Towards the end of the programme there was talk of
another book. This, for me at any rate, had more uplifting associations. It’s
by David Jones, chief executive of global advertising giant Havas, and it was
called, in a parody of the SAS motto, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Who
Cares Wins</i>. Its theme is that the really successful businesses of the
future will be those who do more than pay lip service to corporate social
responsibility; those who can demonstrate in deed that their drive for growth
and gain benefits a far wider community than simply their shareholders.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">If the tide really is turning this way, and David
Jones certainly believes it is, then telling people what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">they</i> want to hear, writing what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">they</i>
want to read, is going to become more important than ever. At its most basic it’s
the difference between monologue and dialogue.</span></span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-88420634827978700812011-11-27T19:52:00.001+00:002011-11-27T20:01:53.283+00:00Pencil or pills?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It’s nice to hear that now there’s validation from the health
professionals for an exercise we’ve used since we first started Dark Angels; an
exercise that’s also used by teachers of creative writing the world over.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Faye Sharpe, who came on the recent Dark Angels
course, sent us a link to a blog by Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi Worldwide,
who had picked up on an article in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/write-the-wrongs-20111006-1la6q.html#ixzz1bwMnWvU6" target="_blank">Sydney Morning Herald</a></i> – such is the way that information whizzes round the globe these
days – which, in turn, reported on 20 years’ research into the therapeutic
power of writing regularly about what we think and feel.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">‘Expressive writing’ the psychologists call it and 15
minutes a day, they say, is enough to make you feel better about yourself. Not
only that, it can also be good for blood pressure, the immune system and
memory. Over a more prolonged period it can even tackle physical ailments, for
example, helping to control cancer-related pain, reduce the severity of
rheumatoid arthritis and increase lung function amongst the asthmatic. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The trick is to write down whatever is in your head,
and keep writing without stopping for a set amount of time. A recipe for
gibberish one might think. But no. You may not believe you know the story you
want to tell yourself, but at some sub-conscious level you usually do, and the
results tend to make more sense than you might think they would.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We don’t use the exercise for therapeutic purposes
with Dark Angels, more to stimulate creative expression. It encourages people
to write more freely, unfettered by the remembrance of rules or the
anticipation of readers. But the researchers suggest that the therapeutic value
lies in the fact that writing this way allows us to externalise our
preoccupations, so that we can see and examine them, almost as if they belonged
to someone else.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">An American, Julia Cameron, wrote a famous book called
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Artist’s Way</i> about leading the
creative life. In its slightly less famous companion, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Right to Write</i>, she advocates what she calls ‘daily pages’.
This is precisely the kind of expressive writing described by the research: half an
hour a day of letting it all out onto paper, best done first thing in the
morning, before the working day kicks in properly.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In half an hour you can write three sides of A4 in
longhand, if you do as much physical writing and as little stopping and
thinking as possible. I know. I did it for six months, a few years ago, and the
results were really quite dramatic. I couldn’t speak for the health benefits
because I wasn’t alert to that possibility then, but I know it enabled me to resolve
a number of preoccupations that had been rumbling away, unaddressed, for a good
long time. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Over time, the daily rhythm took hold and put me in
contact with a deeper part of myself, helping change the way I saw a variety of
things that were going on in my life. It also occasionally rewarded me with a
moment of penetrating insight, as on the occasion when I found myself seeing
and describing </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">a spring of pure, clear water, bubbling up in a pool of light </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">at the bottom of a deep, dark cave.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> This I took to be my own creative source, my life force.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Writing this now makes me think I should start doing
it again. In fact, we all should. Who needs pills when we’ve got pencils and
paper?</span></span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-43576560557735408072011-11-17T23:28:00.001+00:002011-11-18T17:11:18.584+00:00Bring on the clowns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Here's a terrific story that surfaced in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Guardian</i> this week in the context of the Pakistan match-fixing convictions, and the fact that corruption and gambling in Asian </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">cricket </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">is seen as a cultural problem.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In 1995 a new mayor took office in Bogota. Among the
many seemingly intractable problems he faced was the Colombian dislike of
traffic regulations, and the propensity of drivers and pedestrians to flaunt them as a
matter almost of civic duty. The resulting chaos on Bogota’s roads was chronic
and indescribable.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The mayor, an eccentric mathematician and former
rector of the National University, who had been sacked for dropping his
trousers in front of a lecture theatre full of noisy students, recognised that
a conventional approach would cut no ice with Bogota’s testosterone-fuelled
motorists and lawless pedestrians. This called for cultural change. Eccentric
though he was, the mayor was smart enough to know that no culture has
ever, in the history of the world, been changed by laying on extra policemen.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">He duly hired 420 clowns and mime artists to wait at strategic road
junctions and traffic lights. When they spotted jay-walkers, they walked after
them, imitating their movements. Reckless drivers were also subjected to
mocking treatment. It worked beautifully. No one, no matter how macho, was
going to be seen thumping a Marcel Marceau lookalike. Within a short time,
three-quarters of Bogota’s pedestrians were meekly obeying the traffic signals.
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Reading this reminded me that so often when I go into an
organisation to run a writing or storytelling workshop, the underlying
requirement, even though it’s seldom acknowledged as such, is one of cultural
change. The alien language, the inability to talk in an interesting way about
practically anything, is symptomatic of something far deeper than a failure of
vocabulary or a paucity of imagination. It’s about the way that people who are
perfectly bold and assertive as individuals, when thrown together in large
groups, develop a collective aversion to risk – so they seek refuge in the
banalities and convolutions of business speak.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I can’t help thinking that this is an area in which the mayor’s
tactics would work a treat. Imagine a board meeting or sales conference with
roving clowns who tooted on a hooter or turned a somersault or pulled a sad face
at every cliché, absurd neologism or meaningless abstraction. People would soon
start to speak like ordinary human beings again. Laughing at wrong behaviour
seems so much better than trying to punish or correct it. After all, by
any normal standards, business speak is wrong behaviour.</span></span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-19841985678992121872011-11-12T10:24:00.001+00:002011-11-14T17:23:56.766+00:00The rabble<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There was a time when I imagined that in my sixties life would have started
to become a pleasant, carefree stroll through the sunlit uplands. Ah well …</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This is what has been competing for space in my head
this week. Why collagen makes better sausage skins than animal gut. Why you
should leave your money to a famous university. How to teach a group of
administrators in Zurich to write better reports. What to call a new bottling
of a famous whisky. How to be interesting and witty about a firm of stockbrokers.
Why you should send your children to a certain well-known school. How to
encourage groups of chief executives to tell stories. How to market a Dark
Angels course in Sweden (not difficult). How to teach 3,000 Indian managers to
make better contact with their customers and colleagues (more difficult). What
to do about my elderly mother who is losing the plot five hundred miles away in
Kent (very difficult). How to finish the almost finished novel I haven’t been finishing
for the last eighteen months (impossible). What to do about an epileptic iPhone. And what to
write about in this blog.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">These are no vague musings, rather a platoon of small
but highly trained attention-seekers armed with megaphones. They shout at me
first thing in the morning. They whisper and nag me last thing at night. And
they know nothing about collaboration. It’s each one for himself and may the
loudest, the most insistent win. I was wrong. They’re a rabble, not a platoon.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Earlier this week I sent through the first draft of an
interview to its subject, one of the people whose stories feature in the school recruitment brochure. He rang me a couple of days later. It made him
anxious, he said. He had talked about certain family issues. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It was very personal. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I replied that the interest for the reader, and the
value to the school, lay precisely in the personal aspect of his story; that
without it, it might end up reading simply like a CV. He agreed, but still
felt that some of what I had written was too close to the bone. We duly toned
it down – without, I hope, losing any of the warmth and candour he
had transmitted during the interview. The story still makes the point that the
school had equipped him well to deal with the challenges of adult life.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">On which subject, I spent last night with my son in Newcastle. He’s in his
second year of a business studies course. We went out to dinner and he talked
about his preoccupations, all entirely real and deserving of serious consideration.
I listened to him and thought of my rabble. What a good thing it is, I thought, that we only really acknowledge the things we know we can deal with.</span></span></div>
<br /></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-69456954404102875172011-11-03T23:39:00.000+00:002011-11-04T08:04:24.806+00:00A small rebellion<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-US">The ripples from our last Dark Angels course continue to spread. Two
weeks after leaving Inverness-shire, the glue that binds the group together
seems to be setting firmer rather than weakening, as is more often the case.
Our inboxes bulge daily with new banter, ruminations and aper</span><span lang="EN-US">ç</span><span lang="EN-US">us.</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This wonderful exchange came in today from Neil Baker,
the one full-time professional business writer on the course, also an
accomplished writer of short stories (click <a href="http://www.metazen.ca/">here</a> to read his latest). ‘Thought
I'd report this small act of successful Dark Angels rebellion,’ Neil said.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Client (in a
galaxy far, far way - aka New York): "Neil, there's good news and not so
good news. I love some of this enormously big thing you've written for me, but
it's not working. The case studies are excellent, but the body copy just has
too much information."<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Me
(exasperated): "That is what you asked for. You wanted all that
data."<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Client: "I
know. I was wrong."<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Me (at least
he's admitted it): "Let me point something out: in the case studies, which
you like, I'm telling a story. In the rest, which you don't like, I'm reporting
data. People like stories, they don't like data."<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Client (after a
long, worrying pause, the sound of a penny dropping): "Yes, you're
right."<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Me: "So why
don't I write the whole thing like that? A bit of data where we need it, but
let me tell stories. People will like it. They'll want to read it."<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Client:
"Sure. That's great. That's what I want!"<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Me (pushing my
luck): "While I'm at it, can I cut out all the business jargon?"<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Client:
"Can you do that?! You'd make me so happy."<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Me: "Yes.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Quod erat, Tenebris Angelis, demonstrandum.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In another part of the forest … I visited my
acupuncturist friend Wenbo Xu for a treatment earlier on this week. I’ve
written about him in previous posts. One of these found its way into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Room 121, </i>whose title, as well as being
a pun on one-to-one, is a nod to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1984</i>, where society is controlled by the language of Big Brother and opponents of the regime are tortured by being confronted with their worst
fears in </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">the dreaded Room 101.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I was touched to find that Wenbo had bought a copy of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Room 121</i>, which he asked me to sign. As
he opened the book a small piece of paper fluttered out. It was the head and
shoulders of a man, painstakingly cut out in silhouette from an article Wenbo had
read and which he was now using as a bookmark. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The man was George Orwell. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">My Chinese friend had no idea of the connection.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Such are life’s delights.</span></span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-52716379246772223552011-10-28T09:23:00.000+01:002011-10-28T10:03:47.502+01:00Murder was there none<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">‘What are the types of people who come on your courses?’ asked a
prospective Dark Angels student a couple of days ago.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: large;">With last week’s course fresh in my mind I was able to
reel off the following list: an archaeologist turned business consultant; a
writer of web content for an oil giant; a professor of mental health; a
business coach and trainer; a marketing assistant with a firm of fund managers;
the owner of a small branding and communications consultancy; an arts curator
currently on a Clore leadership programme; and three freelances, one a writer,
one a corporate video producer and one a PR agent.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: large;">Ten people with extraordinarily different
personalities, professional backgrounds and levels of writing experience. A
group for whom five nights together in a remote Highland farmhouse might easily
have had the makings of an Agatha Christie mystery. But murder was there none.
Quite the opposite in fact. They got to know one another and stayed up late drinking,
telling stories and singing songs. During the day they listened appreciatively
to each other’s writing and supported one another when the going got a little
rough. They cooked together and collaborated in pairs on joint writing
projects. They embraced fondly, some even shed a tear, when it was time to
part. And nearly a week later the emails continue to circulate.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: large;">So what actually happened? Was it really just a week
long lock-in, a love-in, a bonding session for a non-existent team? No. What
happened – what always happens on Dark Angels courses – was that we offered
them the freedom and encouragement to discover the connecting power of words.
They used words to dig deep into ideas, to reach for half-buried feelings, to
say what they really, really meant about their lives, their loves, their work.
Through this newly polished lens they could see the words of the world they had
temporarily left behind for the lazy, lacklustre, tepid half-truths that so
often pass for communication in businesss. And through that newly polished lens
they connected with one another, heart, mind and imagination.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: large;">That’s the point of Dark Angels and they all got it.
To choose the words that make the real human connections, in business, at home
or anywhere else. When he came to the final chapter of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Howard’s End, </i>EM Forster could have written
it just for us. 'Only connect.' </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It’s all that matters – and now there are ten newly fledged Dark Angels that know it. </span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-87060112886289093852011-10-21T08:59:00.000+01:002011-10-21T09:10:36.803+01:00What's the point?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">On Tuesday night we took the students on our Dark Angels course to
the theatre. We left our lofty perch and plummeted down the hill to Loch Ness,
then drove five miles along the lochside to the Victorian community hall in the
village of Drumnadrochit (population 813 and known by musicians of my
acquaintance as Dropmadrumkit, though more famous as the home of competing Loch
Ness Monster centres).</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This was no mere amateur dramatics evening. The
residents of north Loch Ness-side owe much to the indefatigable Jennie Macfie
who, amid a slew of other activities, finds time to programme events at the
Glen Urquhart Public Hall, putting on some of the best music and drama that comes
to the Highlands. This week it was
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Six and A Tanner</i>, a one-man show
featuring the Glaswegian actor David Hayman, fresh from the Donmar Warehouse
where he’d been appearing with Jude Law in Eugene O’Neill’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anna Christie.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It was a searing, deeply moving, and at times
hilarious portrayal of a Glaswegian man ranting at the coffin of his brutal,
abusive father, written largely from personal experience by the actor’s friend
Rony Bridges. David Hayman held us enthralled for fifty minutes with the power
and magnetism of his performance and then, with scarcely a pause, took
questions from us for a further forty minutes. As well as talking about the play
and his craft, he told us about his work in Afghanistan for the charity, Spirit
Aid, which he founded in 2001 to help children whose lives have been devastated
by war, genocide, poverty or abuse. This is no celebrity posturing. I learnt
afterwards that for several years until his charity gained official
recognition, he used to go there illegally, in disguise, so that he could do
the work he wanted to.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">As we left it occurred to me that there was one
question he hadn’t been asked but which would have been of interest to us all:
how did his political activism and charity work, which seem to represent the
greater purpose in his life, feed into his performances as an actor? The answer
might possibly have been something to do with a strong sense of injustice,
which was certainly present in the way he portrayed the relationship of the
character with his dead father.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Purpose has been a recurring theme in our discussions
this week. How can an organisation communicate authentically and effectively to
any audience, internal or external, if it isn’t clear about its purpose? To say
that the purpose is to make money for shareholders simply isn’t enough any
longer. People want to know, quite
reasonably, why the world would be a poorer place without it. Yet it’s a
question many organisations seem incapable of answering; and then they wonder
why they are in disarray. They could learn much from people like David Hayman,
whose purpose seems to infuse every aspect of his thinking and being. In his
stage performance and subsequent conversation with us he felt truly joined up. How many
businesses or organisations can you think of that really feel that way?</span></span></div>
</div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-75686765702740729362011-10-13T23:29:00.003+01:002011-10-14T07:15:34.038+01:00Getting traction<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">On Monday I’m driving up to the writers’ centre at Moniack Mhor, in Inverness-shire, to run a Dark Angels course. There are several reasons why I’m particularly looking forward to it.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Firstly, I missed not being involved in the Advanced Course in Spain much more than I thought I was going to. Photos, glimpses of the writing produced there, and the flurry of euphoric emails that followed the course, did nothing to alleviate the pinch of something missed or lost. So I’m looking on Moniack Mhor rather like the breaking of a fast.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">On which theme, secondly, we haven’t been there for five years and it’s one of my favourite of all the Dark Angels venues. A converted farm and croft house, perched high on a hillside between Loch Ness and Beauly with spectacular views north to Ben Wyvis and the big hills of Wester Ross, it feels wild and remote and quintessentially Highland. I’m even secretly hoping we get some snow next week.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Thirdly, it’s the original and longest in duration (five nights, four days) of all our courses – which is why we haven’t run it since 2006. We felt that in a tougher economic climate people might have difficulty taking so much time off work; though having reinstated it this year we’ve filled it without any trouble, which we now suspect may be the </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><i>In Business</i> d</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">ividend, the payoff from the programme BBC Radio 4 made about Dark Angels back in the summer. In any event, we call this one the Full Foundation Course and it runs from Monday evening to Saturday morning. It’s long enough to take people on a proper journey of creative and personal discovery; to get some real traction, as they say.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This is the nub of Dark Angels, this traction. Yes, our courses are about the words, about honing the craft, dusting off the vocabulary, polishing the syntax – those are all good things for any writer to do. But beyond that they’re about the kindness of the words – the humankindness (as in the title of this blog), that allows us as writers and communicators to make the powerful connections we seek with others who, whether we work with them or share our lives with them in other ways, are mostly just like us; people who become engaged, moved, bored by the same things as we do.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN-US">And the best reward for us as tutors is when we see our students first making that connection with themselves, understanding that the very greatest value those words, that vocabulary, that syntax can have is to provide the lens through which they start to see clearly their own purpose. Because only then are they ready to start using the words to make powerful connections with others.</span> </span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-3170405107371331772011-10-07T09:27:00.003+01:002011-10-07T09:56:00.009+01:00Autumn tales<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I often write this on the train on the way back from Edinburgh. It’s a picturesque journey, across the Forth Bridge and east along the Fife coast, then inland through the soft, fertile farmland of central Fife, a short climb and down again to the glint of the Tay estuary and Perth, and finally into the hills for fifteen miles before the train deposits me at Dunkeld and heads on through the Highlands for Inverness.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">Today there’s a real breath of autumn on the air. We’ve had sunshine, cold squally rain, and now a ragged sunset. The geese have been back from Greenland for a couple of weeks and today, the forecasters said, the first snow would dust the high hilltops.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">The journey reminds me why I choose not to live in the city, and never more so than after a day like today. There were three long meetings, each one stimulating in its own way, but now I need to be out of the buzz to digest them and let my mind clear. The movement of the train and the passing view of the darkening countryside helps.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">The first meeting was with one of the world’s largest producers of collagen casings – which you or I know better as sausage skins. Collagen holds us mammals together. It’s what our connective tissue is made of. And if you scrape it off the underside of cowhide, then subject it to clever chemistry, you can spin it into incredible lengths of absolutely uniform, unblemished, edible sheathing for sausage meat. In a single year this company makes enough to go to the moon and back five times.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">The second meeting was with a designer colleague who has worked for a number of years with one of Scotland’s more famous hotels. Now it’s looking for a new voice – and more specifically a fictional character to embody the brand and provide that voice. If the project comes off it will stretch my imagination in enjoyable ways. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">The third meeting was with my branding expert friend and another designer colleague. We were tidying up loose ends on projects we’ve undertaken together for several different educational establishments, all of which, for differing reasons, need to raise either funds or student numbers. Robert is a genius at helping them identify their unique selling propositions, which we then work together to articulate.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sausage skins, a luxury hotel, an Oxford college and two private schools, one of them for children with specific learning difficulties. What could they possibly have in common? The answer, it struck me as we left Edinburgh, is that they are all searching for stories to tell. Stories that connect them with their audiences just as firmly as that extraordinary monument to Victorian engineering, across which we now rattled, connects the two sides of the Forth.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">Take away our stories and we are nothing but husks. The same is just as true for organisations as it is for people. The trick, as I said here a few weeks ago, is knowing which one to tell when.</span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-37379216920167327532011-09-29T20:31:00.006+01:002011-09-30T13:36:22.037+01:00My friend the visionary<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Almost exactly forty years ago to this day I started my first job in London. Improbable as it seems now, it was as an articled clerk with one of the big London-Scottish firms of accountants. I’ve written about this in a previous post (<a href="http://afewkindwords.blogspot.com/2010/11/deja-vu.html">click here</a>) and I don’t want to repeat myself, other than to say that had I known how to go about doing the things I really wanted to do, I wouldn’t have ended up in the City. As it was, it seemed like a good enough way for a law graduate from Aberdeen University to get himself to London.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">I nervously scanned my fellow novices on that first day, and there was one in particular who caught my eye. It was partly because he was the only Indian; partly also because there was a spark there, a hint of mischief and slightly baffled amusement, that set him apart from the otherwise rather stodgy-seeming crowd.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">Over the next few weeks we got to know one another well. Almost immediately we were sent off for a fortnight to an accountancy boot-camp somewhere deep in the Worcestershire countryside. It was run by a blustering Yorkshireman called Mick Worthington who couldn’t get his tongue around my new friend’s name, Pramod, and instead referred to him as Ramrod.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">In our own ways we were both square pegs in round holes. I was fascinated by his eastern-ness, the music, the joss sticks, the mythology and words of Hindi. He introduced me to good Indian food and eating with my fingers. I took him to my stepfather’s grand house in the Scottish borders over the Christmas holidays and we went pheasant shooting and danced reels.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">I lasted only three months in the job but by then our friendship was firmly cemented and we continued to see each other regularly for several years until he qualified and his work took him off to the Gulf. We lost touch then for a couple of years, only to discover, quite by chance, that he was back in London again and living in the same Notting Hill street as me, three doors down. We vowed then not to lose touch again, and we haven’t, despite his subsequently spending a decade in the States, before finally returning to Delhi about fifteen years ago.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">Today it’s his business that I travel to India to work for, or rather it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> his business until June of this year, when he stood down as CEO of India’s first and biggest outsourcing company. It’s a remarkable story and I’ll tell it another time, but my friend, Pramod Bhasin, my skinny, unassuming, twenty year-old Indian friend, is now a global business leader, revered in Indian business circles as the father of that country’s outsourcing industry, the founder of Genpact, a company that turns over more than $1bn and employs 54,000 people across the globe.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">During my trip this week to Hyderabad and Genpact’s newly re-named <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pramod Bhasin Learning and Development Centre</i>, I heard this story. On his recent valedictory tour of the company’s many facilities, he visited the training campus. The main building has a large cafeteria where ‘town hall’ meetings, as they’re called, usually take place. On these occasions it tends to fill slowly, a little reluctantly, and people have to be coaxed forward into the proximity of the speaker. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">When the word went round that it was Pramod – as he is known by everyone in the business – who was coming, the cafeteria quickly filled to bursting and the people who couldn’t get in spilled back up the stairs and along the corridors, so tightly packed that when he arrived he could hardly make his way through them. When at last he reached the cafeteria, the applause started and wouldn’t stop. It went on and on and on, and all he could do was stand there and wait, visibly moved.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span style="font-size: large;">My friend Pramod, the visionary. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I wish I’d been there to see it.</span><o:p></o:p></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-709106806146552376.post-32085219784645080732011-09-23T18:21:00.006+01:002011-09-23T18:36:36.985+01:00Finca Banega<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Today John Simmons and Stuart Delves are in Spain with the Dark Angels advanced group and I’m preparing to leave for Hyderabad in the morning. It has been a strange day, knowing they’re there in that beautiful place, basking in warm autumn sunshine. Much of the time I’ve been wishing heartily I was with them. But I have a different journey to make, and there’s much to look forward to in India.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Right now though, on a grey afternoon in Perthshire, I’m feeling in limbo, caught between those two worlds – or should I say continents. Perhaps because I’ve been to Spain more recently, my thoughts are pulled to southern Europe, and in particular to the private <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">finca</i> that a small group of students will visit tomorrow morning. It’s a beautiful stretch of wild, rolling countryside, mantled with small oak trees, and populated by lazy cattle and black Iberian pigs. A good five miles down a dirt track stands the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cortijo,</i> an elegant whitewashed house with a terracotta roof and a large central courtyard. It was built sixty or seventy years ago entirely from materials found on the estate, not just the stone and timber, but even the clay from which the floor tiles were fired.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 14.2pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The land at Finca Banega has been generous with its resources for a long time. Up the hill from the house is a Roman quarry where you can still see the shapes of the millstones that were hewn from the granite, two thousand years ago. The first time we went there, six years ago, and climbed the hill, I was transported back at once. Later, I imagined this scene that might have played itself out there:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We woke at first light<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Gracchus and I<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Shivered in the Iberian dawn<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Unfurled our cloaks<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Rose yawning from the bony ground<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And broke our fast with sweet, ripe figs<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Plucked from the tree<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Still cool with dew<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Mist hung like bull’s breath<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Among the holm oaks<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">As we hefted satchels on our backs<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And climbed the rock-strewn path<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Scattering sleepy piglets at our step<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Sun rose, shadows melted<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Light trickled down the hill<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Warming the dust-dry earth<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And on the scrawny plain below<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Goat bells broke the silence<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">With their gurgling song<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Ahead, a pocked loaf of granite<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Reared into the deepening blue<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In its shadow lesser boulders<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Crouched like pagan worshippers<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We downed our satchels, lit a fire<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And cooked our porridge<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In a haze of aromatic smoke<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A small brown scorpion<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Scuttled from a crevice<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And watched us as we ate<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Gracchus crushed it with his sandal<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We spat on hands and set to work<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">All that long hot morning<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We bored stone<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Wrestling augers <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Till our muscles cracked<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The air grew thick with dust<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And sweat ran down our backs<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Our necks and thighs<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">When the holes were deep enough<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I took the twenty-seven oaken pegs<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And hammered hard<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Driving them one by one<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Into their beds of stone<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Gracchus lugged the leather bucket<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">To the spring<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Filling it with sweet cool water<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">That would swell the oak<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And split the rock<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And conjure rough-hewn millstones<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">To grind our daily bread<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">At last we rested in the shade<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Dreaming of wives and home<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We waited as the sun beat down<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And nature’s forces took their course<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">While far from this forgotten place<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Amid the seven hills of Rome<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">More skilful hands than ours<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Made gods of men<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And carved their likenesses<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In marble from Liguria</span></div></div>Jamie Jaunceyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10487256106040012552noreply@blogger.com1