Who dares ...

I have spent most of this week in Charlotte Square, home of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, drinking too much coffee, eating too many sandwiches, but revelling in my annual literary fix – the company of other writers.

Some are my good friends; some are acquaintances, to be caught up with once a year in the cluster of yurts that serve as the authors’ hospitality and backstage area; some are my heroes, literary giants whose mere presence reduces me to a state of tongue-tied awe; and some are those whose work intrigues me and whose events I feel brave enough to chair.

This year the latter include four household names – William Dalrymple, Roddy Doyle, Melvyn Bragg and Alexander McCall-Smith, and three less widely known but no less interesting writers – the veteran Scottish novelist Allan Massie, the linguistics professor David Crystal, and the Observer’s deputy editor Robert McCrum.

Why did I choose these seven? Hard to say. Their subjects range from the Irish Troubles to the South Bank Show, Indian mystics to Precious Ramotswe and the chattering classes of Scotland Street and Corduroy Mansions, the Royal Stuart dynasty to the King James Bible and a global version of English. Someone else might find a common thread, but right now I lack the energy or inclination to look for it myself.

One thing is obvious, though. They are all masters of their craft – or art, depending on how you see it. And it’s impossible to spend time here in Charlotte Square without - to return to last week's theme - reflecting on the gulf that exists between the way these writers communicate, and the kind of communication that goes on daily in offices, conference centres and other business venues around the country.

My interviewees are people who inspire because they do not stand apart from themselves. To hear them speak is to receive the whole of them, not some filtered version where their real personalities have been subordinated to the needs of the narrow interest group they serve, their language reined in by the processes and formulations of their professions. They know how to stand on the hill where they can see widely, and communicate their vision in simple but well chosen words. They’re not afraid to employ imagery, metaphor, humour – all the tools we use daily to communicate with one another as emotionally functional human beings.

Imagine the wonders that could be achieved if our business leaders could learn this one simple thing: that to communicate well, to inspire, one must commit all of oneself. One must dare to reveal one’s personality.

Unchained

Yesterday – to borrow the immortal words of the unknown football commentator – was a day of two halves. Well … seven-eighths and one-eighth to be more precise, but the contrast was less unevenly marked.

There’s an equation that goes: Edinburgh plus professions equals language that's utilitarian at best, anachronistic at worst. There are no high desks, wing collars or quill pens any longer but their traces linger in the Adam cornices, the panelling and picture frames of many a fine New Town building; and they make their presence felt in some of the more fustian turns of phrase – ‘upon receipt of’ for example – that are still liable to grace an accountant’s report or a lawyer’s letter.

I spent the large part of yesterday running a workshop for one of these august institutions, a professional body. I was there because they recognise that they need to bring their language into the 21st century, particularly at the point where they have to deal with their twenty-odd thousand members; although the waters are muddied by the fact that they are also the regulator for their profession, so the poor souls in the membership team lead a schizophrenic existence, wearing customer service smiles one moment and traffic warden’s frowns the next.

But the will to change was there and my small group worked hard to dust away the cobwebs and cast off the shackles of a century or more of institutionalised, functional language. ‘Members are people too,’ said one of them at one point, and I raised a silent cheer. No one was expecting this group to become poets or novelists overnight, but they recognised that there were human connections to be made, as well as a fight to be fought.

Once the workshop was over, I walked along to Charlotte Square for a restorative cup of tea at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Here in the magical tented village that springs up every August, there is not a linguistic shackle in sight. Far from being a constraint, language here is celebrated – and winged. It takes flight, it moves, inspires, tickles, infuriates, terrifies, thrills. It flows through the marquees like the life force itself and everywhere you look people are immersed in it, up to their necks in words, up to their eyes in stories, up to the crowns of their heads in ideas.

A mere half mile apart, here were two groups of people, the one effectively hemmed in by language, the other entirely liberated by it. And, not for the first time, I found myself thinking how much the world of work has to learn from the world of culture…

Lingua franca

For the second year running we have been on a walking holiday in the Italian Alps with a couple who are among my wife’s oldest friends. Our relationship is that relative rarity – a foursome in which all members get on with each other equally well.

Hughes is French and Caroline English, though she has lived in France for nearly four decades. My wife, Sarah, is Scottish but was raised in the French Alps. She and Caroline are bilingual. Hughes’s English has a certain idiosyncratic fluency all of its own. My French is the weakest link, though serviceable enough for most of our conversations to be conducted in a comfortable blend of both languages.

Our walks this year were punctuated by stops to photograph the glossy, docile cows that graze the high summer pastures, whose softly clinking bells offer an almost constant accompaniment to our alpine rambles. An architect by profession, Hughes is also an artist who, as he approaches retirement from his architectural practice, is reacquainting himself with the easel by painting portraits of these delightful creatures.

But it’s not his buildings or paintings that we talk about so much as his novels, for Hughes is also a novelist. And this is where we’re limited by our respective linguistic proficiencies, for neither of us is really able to read the other’s work. So instead, we tell each other the stories of our books as we walk. This is a thoroughly companionable acitivity. It’s also energising: rather as work songs help fishermen haul in their nets, so storytelling is a wonderful aid to tired legs.

It can be instructive: hearing oneself speak aloud a story of one’s own creation throws its strengths and weaknesses into sharp relief. And in this context, the effort to make myself understood requires me to be more than usually precise, which in turn makes me more sensitive to the nuances, the authenticity and integrity, of the narrative. My listener's particular attentiveness heightens my comfort or discomfort in the telling of my own story, and there on the mountainside, issues I can fudge on the page come to stare me in the eye.

But most of all it’s revealing. We have probably learnt as much about one another from these fictions, as we have from all the conversations we’ve had over the years. They have enriched an already cherished friendship because to invent a serious story is to engage with one’s deepest human preoccupations; and whether we mean to or not, we lay ourselves bare in the telling of them.

A noble cause (2)

Well, my box-maker (see last week) has mellowed. He’s got over his irritation at having to construct such an awkward object – he’s made quite a lot of them, after all – and now he’s sounding much more like the contented craftsman he really is, a man fulfilled by his work. Perhaps on some level I myself felt indignant at the lack of proportion, the asymmetry necessitated by the royal seal; for whose voice could I really be hearing but my own?

It took me some time to understand that what I really wanted to say was that the nobleman didn’t have a monopoly on posterity. Even then, the box-maker at first sounded chippy and snarly (me again?). But eventually I got him to where I wanted him, which was pleased at the prospect of making something which he knows will last every bit as long as the earl’s grant of arms. His sense of self worth is just as well developed as his customer’s, but he doesn’t need the external validation of a title; his craft speaks for itself.

Forthcoming launch dates mean that I can’t yet share the result here, though I will once it’s all in the public domain. But I can thank Olivia Sprinkel, my editor for this project, for reassuring me that I had actually said what I wanted to. As an occasional writer of poetry I find that is not by any means a foregone conclusion. There’s many a slip between a thought and the clear expression of it.

In another part of the forest … my acupuncturist friend (Chinese medicine, June 24) pointed out an inaccuracy in my telling of his story: the person who wanted to give him the job on graduating was the head of acupuncture in the hospital attached to the university; the person who blocked him was the head of department at the university itself.

I’m making the correction publicly (though my friend may think I’m over-egging the pudding) because inaccuracies diminish a story, even if it’s only the teller who is aware of them. The power of a story is directly proportionate to its truth – even in, or perhaps particularly in, fiction, where the wholly made-up story must contain human truths for it to be plausible, to ‘ring true’.

On which note (ringing, I hope), I’m signing off until August 12, when I will return with my ruminatory gland duly refreshed.

A noble cause

By this time next week I have to have written a very short piece about an object in the British Galleries at the V&A. It’s another project organised by the indefatigable ideas wallahs at 26, the national organisation that champions a more inspiring use of language at work (so named for the alphabet, the DNA of language).

26 Treasures is a collaboration with the V&A and it’s designed to explore new, perhaps more creative and less literal, avenues of interpretation. Like all 26 projects it pairs writers with subjects, in this case items in the collection; and like all such projects it involves a constraint, which this time is an inversion of 26 itself – 62 words.

These constraints are a useful device. They concentrate the mind and the vocabulary wonderfully; very often they end up forcing the words into some kind of poetic form; and they make for short, sharp writing projects that seem manageable to even the busiest writers.

Yesterday I went to the V&A to look at my object. It’s a rather unusual document case, made in London in 1682, to hold the royal patent granted by Charles II to the first Earl of Abingdon. What makes it unusual, though, is not so much the contents as the shape. An ordinary vellum scroll would need a long thin box, but this one happens to be attached to a royal seal the size of a large saucer, so halfway down the thin, almost metre-long box is a large-saucer-shaped bulge.

The starting point for almost everything I write is the emergence of a voice of some sort. I need to hear the words being spoken by someone. In this case, standing before the glass case in the gallery, I hardly had time to wonder whether it would be the owner, the maker or the object itself before I heard this: ‘Oh no! Not another bleedin’ patent box. These things are an absolute bastard to make.’ It's true, it must have been a hideously awkward thing to construct, all the nice easy rectilinear proportions sabotaged by the circular excrescence.

Whoever the maker was – and history doesn’t relate – I don’t imagine him sharing much in the earl's delight at his own recent ennoblement. That said, there would surely still have been a craftsman’s satisfaction in completing such a solemn, if strange-looking, object with its fine covering of tooled Moroccan leather, hand-blocked paper lining and shiny brass lock. The story continues to unfold. More next week…

Attention citoyens!

Fixed to a telegraph pole at the foot of the hill below the chateau is a loudspeaker. At irregular intervals throughout the day it emits a two-tone chime like those that precede flight announcements, and then a voice booms out. ‘La population est informée…’ that the travelling butcher’s van is now parked in the village square and open for business, or that the post office will be closed tomorrow for training, or some other indispensable item of civic information.

It’s extraordinarily intrusive, as well as being mostly unintelligible on account of the fact that the amplified voice bounces off the chateau and its terraces, the walls of the Canal du Midi which flows below us, and any other solid surfaces within a fifty metre radius. It’s intrusive particularly because we’re here to write, the ten of us who have come together on retreat at Chateau Ventenac; though it must be equally irritating, I’m sure, for the ordinary holiday-makers staying nearby or moored in their barges on the canal.

Jolted each time from my thoughts, I find myself imagining we’re being summoned to a guillotining, or at the very least a village assembly and a couple of rousing choruses of the Marseillaise. Although it’s only information of a (moderately) useful nature, there’s a distinctly Orwellian feel to the whole thing. If it were to start ‘Attention citoyens!’ one wouldn’t be surprised. And it comes with an image of a prim woman in a khaki uniform sitting at a microphone in a booth somewhere in the bowels of the mairie, waiting for the next official to solemnly hand her a piece of paper.

Then there are the motocyclettes, the smirking, sniggering teenagers of two-wheeled transport, designed surely, with their defiant, hornet whine, for the sole purpose of deafening and infuriating. For all that, the benefits of Chateau Ventenac far outweigh its disadvantages: a building full of character, plenty of shady nooks and corners for working, a swimming pool, a superb chef. We are all managing to write and in the quiet hour before dinner we gather on the terrace with a drink and take turns to read. Then the loudspeaker is silent, the motos are garaged or parked outside bars, and we are alone with our words. That’s what we’ve come for.

Chinese medicine

Periodically I visit an acupuncturist for aches and pains. He’s a charming Chinese man who finds it a little hard to get his tongue round the English language, but he has a gentle manner, a lovely smile, and he fixes me every time.

Until recently I knew relatively little about him other than that he came to the UK eight or nine years ago and he’s in his forties, married with two children. Then, last time I went to see him, I asked him how he came to be a doctor. This is what he told me:

‘When I was a teenager two of my grandparents died, one on each side of the family. I was upset not just because I loved them, but because they needn’t have died. But where we lived there wasn’t the medical help that would have saved them.

‘My father was a teacher and he wanted me to follow him in his career. But when it was time to leave school I decided that I wanted to study medicine so I could do my bit to make sure my other two grandparents lived good long lives.

‘I got a place at university but when I arrived there I discovered they were teaching Chinese medicine. I’d done science at school and this was a whole new way of thinking. I hated it. I went home at half term – a nine-hour bus journey – and when I got there I burst into tears. I told my parents what the matter was, and my father was horrified. “You can’t quit,” he said. “You’re the first member of our family to go to university. Not just that, you’re the first person in the neighbourhood to go. Everyone here is so proud of you. Think of the shame.”

‘What could I do? I stuck it out and five years later I graduated, having studied both Chinese and Western medicine. I’d worked hard and I came top in my year. The head of my department was very pleased with me and wanted to give me a job, a good one. But it was 1990 and the previous year I’d organised the local support for the Tiananmen Square protesters. The head of the university was a party man. He wouldn’t allow me to be given the job. Instead I was sent to a big hospital in another region.

'It was all right there. I was left alone and I liked the work. I ended up setting up and running a whole new department in the hospital. But I didn’t like the politics and when the chance eventually arrived to come to the UK I jumped at it.’ Here he stopped and gestured at the little treatment cubicle. ‘I don’t have a big job now,’ he said, ‘and I don’t earn a lot of money.’ Then he smiled. ‘But I am free.’

Next time I go to him for treatment I will see this delightful man in a completely different light. Such is the power of stories.