What a peaceful and relaxing weekend. A short break in Devon with some still relatively recent but increasingly good and sincere friends was exactly what I needed after the past few hectic weeks. I had been totally exhausted with all the work needed to be done with regard to the launches of our major report. Over a month in fact – that astounded me. I thought I’d only been working intensively on it all for about two weeks. I have had no time to write, been getting very little sleep, and had generally become nervous, stressed and irritable. I’ve been snapping at so many of my friends. Now it’s finally all over (in terms of my responsibility anyway), this weekend seems like the first real break I’ve had in months as a result.
It was cathartic in more ways that just work. I feel I’ve begun to put some old ghosts to rest, some demons who had been running riot now back to bed. Helen’s big bump for a tummy makes it impossible to forget that she and Chris are now entering this stupendous new phase of their lives, and the idea of a new baby (the first baby born to any of my friends) makes me think very much of the future – a reminder that life will always go on, and you never know what’s around the corner or how your life can change. The fact that I’ve known them both for only two years, and in that time they have not only got married, relocated to Devon and decided to start a family together but also become very good friends of mine has reminded me to appreciate the things I take for granted. As Sally said on the way back, kindly driving me back to the station, I’ve become an individual now in that tight little group, and I can visit them all as a friend in my own right, rather than someone who once went out with someone they were at university with.
There was also my journal – my little red book, the handwritten diary I last used in January of this year. A beautifully peaceful train journey with hardly anyone in the carriage – just the hills and fields sweeping past the window under an intensely blue May sky – provided the peace of mind I needed to pick the book up again and start to write. Once I did I was surprised by how much I kept on writing – stuff I’d never say on my blog, big important private Ben stuff, most of which I think most of my friends (and probably a few strangers) could make an educated guess about, some of which I think remains stuff that is blissfully and forever just mine. The problem with any kind of online journal is that you’re usually either writing what you want other people to read, or are merely writing about stuff that you know will be read by others. Usually I just let my fingers do my thinking, and it all appears on screen – I just go back over it afterwards and take out anything I’d rather keep private. So it was nice to get back to old fashioned book and biro outpouring, both writing and reading over old entries for first time in ages.
It also made a change from reading Coupland. Douglas Coupland used to be one of my favourite authors. I still maintain that Life After God in particular is a modern masterpiece. You can then imagine my surprise (imagine my surprise!) when I picked up JPod. I don’t know if he was trying to do something terribly clever with it and I entirely missed the point, or the final printed version is entirely different from the pre-publication advance copy that Mr B so kindly sent me, but as a work of literature it read with all the credibility, pace and intrigue of a long yawn across unbrushed teeth. I read it quite quickly towards the end, simply because I was desperate to get through it as I have a moral to always finish a book or a film once I’ve started it. A few minor irritations that added up into one big fat annoyance:
1) The author has his characters talk about him continually through the novel – “this is starting to sound like a Douglas Coupland novel”, “isn’t that what Douglas Coupland did once in his last novel that got ripped off by someone or other?” etc. After the first of these you’re just annoyed. Suspension of disbelief is the means by which you enter into a tacit agreement of trust with the author of the book you’re reading – you’re saying “I’m dedicating a portion of my life to read this, I’m devoting my mental and emotional resources to something you’ve had bound and printed, and are thus saying is worth reading. Don’t let me down.” To then completely dick all over that with repeated references to yourself and how great and clever you are is quite curious. Like I said, after it happens the first time it’s irritating, and leaves you feeling slightly bewildered, as if a long loved friend has just inexplicably slapped you hard across the face. By the third time you come across one of the smug little self-congratulatory messages, you get the sense that Doug would like nothing more than to replace all further pages of the book with images of him leaning forward and fellating himself. By the time he even introduces himself as a character in the novel, you no longer really care. You’re just wishing you were reading Tom Baker’s The Boy Who Kicked Pigs or Memoirs of a Geisha instead.
2) The books is frequently filled with pages and pages of twaddle, an example being that one character announces in the office that they have hidden an erroneous digit in several thousand lines of code, which are then printed in full on the following pages. Towards the end I became increasingly grateful for these because it meant I could just skip past them and there was less to read.
3) The characters all seem to be giving themselves haemorrhoids straining to appear individual. They’re like characters I invented when I was 13 – utterly fantastical to the point of being totally removed from reality and quite overly comic bookish. Some of them (e.g. the Chinese gangster with the fondness for kareoke and giving people expensive gifts, or the lesbian uberfeminist mother) made the novel read like a bad 1970s British sitcom. None of the characters grow or develop in any way. They’re all caricatures.
4) There’s no apparent plot. Not that you necessarily need a plot to make a good book. Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle has next to no apparent plot that I can see, yet at times I really couldn’t put it down. This is just a ploppy and incredibly unlikely series of people doing stuff, and none of it makes any sense or at all contributes to the overall sense of the novel.
5) Bonnie Tyler is not Scottish. She’s Welsh. Even though you’re Canadian, I’m still trying to understand how you got that wrong.
All in all it left a bad taste in my mouth. I wouldn’t have bought another Coupland novel for some time if I hadn’t gone across to the park and the May fair with Helen, Chris and Sally this Sunday, and seen a dog-eared copy of Miss Wyoming. I went back and forth from the stall (which as a point of trivia was a St John’s ambulance charity stall) before I ultimately decided to buy it, expecting it to be about £2:
“Excuse me, how much is this?”
“20.”
“20?!”
“Yeah.”
“Oh… you mean 20p, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow.”
“You can make it 50p if you like.”
“How about 40p?”
“Done.”
Once you get under 50p for a book that was priced at £10 only 5 years ago, you haggle for the love of haggling, even if it means you’re haggling upwards, particularly if it’s written by someone who recently left you with the somehow literary equivalent of a beautiful new marriage degenerated into adultery and overflowing dirty sock baskets.
Overall the weekend’s left me with the certainty that I don’t want to waste any more time. I want to be a writer. I want to, I know I want nothing else. I want to make money from doing what I love. I want to have the time and the energy and the resources to go places I want to see and let them influence me. I want to make people and places and plots from them. I want to work with Little One in theatre, I want to get a voice over agent, I want to finish my novel, I want to get back into magic, I want to touch god again. I think I even secretly want a boyfriend again – someone accomplished and handsome, but not too human at the same time. And can I not do or have all of these things? This is surely the reason why I’ve been getting so depressed and down and irritable recently. I’m being forced to do things I don’t want to do, so I can continue to afford to live the kind of life I no longer want to live. When you put it like that, doing what you want to do sounds far more of an imperative than an aspiration.
