What I Did On My Creative Writing Course

..Part one of an effort to convey moving away...

Dan left his flat quickly and easily, but it took him nearly five years to realize it. Hurriedly moving to the baltic states with just a rucksack had meant that he'd had to leave the bulk of his effects behind, in the flat, or more accurately the garage, in Stratford upon Avon. 

At least he'd thought to keep things up off the floor, thus avoiding the flood damage from the terrible rainstorms of 2000 and whenever. 

Through all this time he'd kept the flat, let out to tenants, and little by little it ceased to be his. But now he needed to sell, and the new owners were unreceptive to keeping on oily toolboxes, worn leather sofas and ikea tables.

He wasn't going to be able to do this clearing out task alone. Returning on a flight from Tallinn, midweek and at short notice, he could hardly ask the few people he still knew who lived and worked in the area to down tools and come and help. 

Fortunately for Dan, his Aunt Carmen lived in nearby Leamington Spa and hadn't seen him since he moved away – yes, she'd be delighted to help him, came the email. 

Childless herself, Aunt Carmen was fond of Dan ever since, as a little boy, he'd announced that she was his 'other mother'. His own mother had moved to the Northeast of England which made visiting from Tallinn even more difficult, and this time they only managed a phone conversation.

"I had SUCH a bad journey over here".. Aunt Carmen arrived, as she neatly slotted her bulky Subaru into the one parking space Dan had reserved by standing in it for 45 minutes, smoking. She was driving an automatic now, he noticed.. She'd only come about 5 miles.

"Ohhh you're smoking – don't tell your mother about that, she'll be upset". The guilt trip had hit the ground running.

"But I can see you've made a start on the clearing out already". 

Actually, although Dan was in his smelly work clothes he had done nothing at all since he arrived apart from sleep, eat and reminisce.

He was a natural idler who was expert at finding excuses instead of acting, but who strangely found himself warming up to a task once he'd actually started it.

He had, the evening before, thrown open the garage door; a small lock up affair too awkwardly placed for actual parking use – cars had grown quite a bit in the 40 years since it was built on the site of an old people's home. The stale air smelt like a crypt, and his eyes soon became accustomed enough to the dark to see that the looming, tumbled mountain of junk which had accumulated was much bigger in reality than he had anticipated. Feeling a bit nauseated, he shut the door again and went up to the flat to relax.

"Anything you want, you're welcome to" he announced, a phrase he was going to have to repeat many times throughout the day, as Aunt Carmen spied yet another item that would look good on her mantelpiece or would replace Uncle Peter's broken one.

"what about this?" she said, picking up a hole puncher "I think the Simmonds still have ours".

"Yes, anything you want, you're welcome to".

Dan was amazed how much they managed to accomplish in so short a time, contrasting with his earlier depression. He really did start to find it enjoyable and, whilst not bursting into song, he did have one particularly catchy tune in his head for a good twenty minutes.

It was time to make a trip to the local authority garbage tip. Aunt Carmen's car was practically filled with various strata of different stages of Dan's adult life – university days and some arcane books about Whigs and Tories; the first paycheck and his beloved hi fi separates, gorgeous vinyl originals from his serious record store days, photos of trips to Lisbon, Hamburg and Dublin marked the arrival of the budget flight. A colletion of nonsense as well, horrible brass looking lamps stands, inexplicable china dishes and old printers that had never worked, this combination of the sacred and the hated being Dan's whole life laid out like an archaeologists' dig.

"can I see your permit?" asked the refuse tip worker.

"You need a permit now?" asked Aunt Carmen.

"Yeah, all the residents were sent one last year. Godda have a permit to come in".

"But he's a ratepayer, he's got a flat here, it's just that he lives in Estonia."

Dan was burning up with embarrassment, not for the last time that day, at the horror of having his sixty something year old Aunt batting for him in the face of the crippling bureaucracy of Warwickshire County Council and its lumbering enforcers.

"Well you need a permit".

"He has to have a permit? He's a ratepayer here"

"Ok, mum's the word, you can go in" the attendant relented.

"Ok thanks – he's a ratepayer, we can bring proof of that".

"Ok no worries, go on".

"It's just that he lives in Estonia, he's got a flat here".

"ok".

The tip was a little world unto itself; drop off points for all manner of different things with helpful attendants buzzing around ensuring that something glass didn't go in with something metallic. Chatter in a variety of languages added to this sense of transitoriness. It was nice to see that some things weren't going to be merely crushed; there was much that could be recycled or restored or given to charity. They'd done electrical and other bulky items first, the job was going to necessitate at least one return to this bustling little yard.

"Can we come in again later?"

"Sorry?"
"Will you let us in a second time?" asked Aunt Carmen, this time leaning across Dan to yell out of the half opened window.

"yeah of course I will love" the harrassed attendant replied.

Back at the garage, after stopping to check that the twisted piece of plastic netting that they'd driven over leaving the refuse tip indeed hadn't got tangled somewhere in the car's undertray, the next layer of Dan's life, now everything was separated into the 'keep' pile and the far bigger 'chuck' pile, was to be removed.

"What about this electric sander, I think Peter's one is on its last legs" said Aunt Carmen, having exhumed the oversized plastic box and dusted off the cobwebs.

"Just help yourself - anything you want, you're welcome to".

But now the most painful part, the books and records. There was in fact a charity box for the books, so Dan was feeling much brighter than earlier.

"Don't forget to bring your council tax statement as proof"..

The green overalled attendant waved us through without a look.

"Here's the council tax statement, for proof" Aunt Carmen waved the fluttering piece of paper whilst passing, which must have looked like any old piece of A4.

..to be continued..

Food For Thought

..some statistics I read recently:

No. of Allied (i.e. US, British and others) Divisions in France and the Low countries in late 1944:   91
No. of German divisions facing them:  65   (the numbers in a division varied hugely depending on what type of division, e.g. infantry or armoured, and whether it was at full strength, a lot of the German ones in particular wouldn't have been by this time, but we're talking thousands of men).
Length of front:   c. 400 km

compared with..



No. of Soviet divisions on the Eastern front at the same time:  560
No. of German divisions facing them:  235
Length of front:   c.  3200 km


or, earlier than that, in August 1944 not long after D Day, 38 Allied divisions encircled 20 German divisions on a 120 km front and took c 90,000 prisoners in 27 days
.
..compare that with the three Soviet offensives happening concurrently:

1) 92 Soviet divisions and 6 tank/mechanised corps (a corps was/is made up of multiple divisions) attacked 47 German and Romanian divisions on a 700 km front in South Eastern Europe, encircling 18 divisions and taking 100,000 prisoners in a week.
2) 86 Soviet divisions and 10 tank/mechanised corps attacked in Southern Poland, destroying 40 German divisions.
3) the biggest of all, launched on 22 June 1944 in Belarus and Eastern Poland, the third anniversary of the German invasion and named 'Bagration' after a general from Napoleonic times, comprised, according to the figures I have, saw 172 Soviet divisions and 12 tank/mechanised corps advancing 600 km in about two months, on a 1000 km front, defeating 67 German divisions in the process (17 of which disappeared altogether).

...now, I don't know about you but that seems a huge disparity. I had to chuckle to myself the other day when I saw a youtube poster, unfortunately I've lost the link, but I assume an American, thanking the Russians for 'watching our backs' during the war. Hmm, we must have had a hell of a big back.

The fact remains that, galling though it may be from a Western perspective, it probably wouldn't have made any difference at all if the Western theatre hadn't been opened. What would've happened if there had been no Western alliance at all, or if they'd been knocked out earlier by the Germans, is more speculative still, but presumably all of Germany would have fallen to the Soviets, not just the East, and if Germany why not France and...

Thought For The Day No. 29 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

Scholarly life, education, and science can turn into leaves on the tree of your life, and still not bring any fruit.

George C. Lichtenberg

Always Baikalade...

..this is the drink for me ... 'Baikal', I call it Baikalade, tee hee hee...

According to wikipedia it's been produced for the last 40 years or so in Russia and was re-branded (or whatever they had instead of rebranding in the USSR) in 1973 when Pepsi arrived there.

Named after the lake, which is often cited as being the lake with the largest volume of freshwater in the world; if the appearance of lake Baikal on a map were a scar you wouldn't bother with corrective surgery, but the key to all that water is the depth, apparently it extends more or less to the centre of the earth).

I like to think it's actually made from water direct from the lake, which may account for its muddy hue, but it also contains such healthy sounding ingredients as essential oil of eucalyptus and essential oil of bay laurel. Not sure if pepsi has that. It's doing wonders for the raging cold I incongrously seem to have contracted in the summer heat, and I should imagine it would be good for a hangover too..

Western palates might find it a little odd at first, its taste is rather subtle for those of us who are used to the corn syrup that sweetens coke and the others (corn syrup is a lot less sweet than cane sugar, which explains the confusion I've always had about how much sugar they say goes into coke; after all I couldn't imagine eating a whole cupful of cane sugar, but that's 'cos it isn't actualy cane sugar that goes into the drink. They have to put so much corn syrup to make it sweet). But I swear by it now.

Available in comfortingly old-style 0.33l glass bottles (remember when coke came in those?!) and a bigger 2 litre plastic bottle, I hope this guy that I posted about all those months ago stocks it too..

Baikalade - Enjoy.

Thought For The Day No. 28 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to Fourteen: - O man! place not thy confidence in this present world!

Abd Ar Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba 912-961

Off-White Nights of St Petersburg

...reusing material which was originally a course assignment (written this morning!) but passes the PMC quality control (i.e. has it been run through spellchecker?) on more or less all counts..describes day one of a recent trip to St Petersburg.

It's hard to apprehend the fact that I've arrived in the biggest country, by land area, in the world. By far the biggest; Russia is twice the size of Canada and yet the arrival here couldn't be more underwhelming. It starts gradually, and sullenly, like the people. The main road from the border to Petersburg has the consistency of a flapjack left in a rusty tin for nine months, I discover much later that corruption is such that all the backhanders at each stage of production make it such that it would quite literally be more cost effective to build a road surfaced with caviar, or a canal flowing with cognac. So noone invests in roads. The tangle of forest that begins where a pavement or verge would be in other countries is quite different from Estonian forests. This is Tolkienian bad forest, not a place to wander romantically yearning to bump into dryads, satyrs or Herne the Hunter.

Petersburg starts gradually too; I was expecting it to rear up suddenly like the concrete wall of Manhattan, for no particular reason, but it doesn't. Indeed I still thought I was in yet another small town for several kilometres, before I saw the light – of the sun bursting off the golden cupolas, real gold, of the signature Orthodox sobor, plonked down, not incongruously, but only as Russians could, in an area which at an uninterested glance could be mistaken for the west midlands. Except there would be a mosque there not a cathedral. Slava bogoo. But it seems Petersburg is a big village too, not only Moscow.

The hotel is megalithic, which suits me because I'm only small, and perfectly spruce and businesslike inside, but not a place to spend a lot of time in, Alan Partridge-like. We head out, in spite of the fatigue which makes one feel cheated for having spent so much time and effort to travel such an insignificant distance on the map, and all is gloriously chaotic after the calm and order of the Finnic lands.

Claustrophobic shopping arcades, minus the familiar chains of banks or pharmacies, the smoking ban in cafes has yet to reach Russia, but oh how zealously it might be enforced if it ever does (unlikely think). This gives eateries a shiftless feel that evokes to me the boarding house landscape of London in the 1950s, fortunately for me I'm neither black nor Irish, nor a dog; this phenomenon is however offset by a rather more verdant and healthy menu – soups with sour cream to mix in (I never do). Chopped dill, melted cheese, potatoes potatoes...

The canals and cobbles – when will they film a Bond movie here?! A kid screams past on a jet ski, under bridges, to hammer the point home. The Saviour on Spilled blood church, an ill fitting piece of muscovy in this most European looking of cities, as if small boy, being one action man short for the skirmish he has in mind, substitutes one of his sister's barbies..

The long evenings; the white nights proper haven't begun yet but these off-white nights can be deceptive too. It's late already. Trying to get a meal at 9pm; everything is shut. One old Russian woman addresses us, unsolicited in the street. The Russians are much friendlier and more open than in Tallinn. 'Eto doroga?' - I ask if it is expensive – it isn't, it turns out, but it IS shut when we arrive. Settle on a place full of young people. Two boys dressed as sailors walk by. Actually they ARE sailors. Survivors of the Kursk? Of course not. I wonder what their lives are worth to their superiors. More than the borsch which I'm slurping down? Not much I fear. As Leningrad more people died here during the siege of world war two than currently populate Estonia. Eating rats and soup made from the glue scraped from cheap furniture. I shudder.

Deep, choppy, guiness-coloured water, the skeletons of the cities builders are getting restless, and surreally bronze sunlight. The spire of the church of the Peter and Paul fortress fulfills the role of the ubiquitous TV tower in the Baltic capitals. Stranded in the centre because the swing bridges are up. That never happens at Tower Bridge in London, as if cabbies need any excuses not to go south of the river. But we can't get back to the Vasilevsky island, in the absence of a boat. How long will we be stranded here, could be hours. Espresso from a kiosk to stay awake. Empty beer bottles everywhere, the detritus of what had been a huge crowd not half an hour ago, watching the party ships coming up the Neva, now dispersed like so many pigeons or starlings. A friendly drunk accosts us. Two Lamborghinis, no Ferraris. An unstable toilet truck behind the Winter palace. Haggling with a taxi driver to take us back to the hotel (for the bridges are coming down!) He is very pious, not only an icon on the dashboard of the virgin with child but another of Sai Baba. So I guess we'll be safe, despite his kamikaze hurtle towards the impending roadblock (the bridges are coming up again already). Back at the hotel. It's deserted. I think Petersburg was like this on the night of 25^th October 1917, despite what that film depicts. I have my my three revolutions walking tour, 1905, February and October 1917, planned, but I think that has to go out of the window. Petersburg is still Russia. I don't want to blaspheme by planning anything..

60 Years Of The PMC - A New Contributor

2010 marks the 60th anniversary of the launch of the PMC. Yes, it's impossible to believe, but that's because it is impossible. To mark this auspicious occasion the PMC will be taking a retrospective of some of the outstanding posts of the past six decades. From Cold War to Coldplay and from Ban the Bomb to Ban the Burka, every decade will be represented, and includes highlights from some of the most talked about of contributors...Bertrand Russell, Hunter S. Thompson, Roman Polanski, Roald Dahl and Limahl from Kajagoogoo, to name but a few - none of them contributed to the PMC's pages (oh, hold on a second, Limahl had a regular section in the early 80s). 1973 saw the addition of a new member to the PMC bureau. Andrew Whyte was a youth just out of hospital, who was initially set to the tasks that noone else had thought of doing, and, in the face of overwhelming criticism from the old school (Benedict Francis Kentigern in particular) stuck it out through thick and thin (mosly thick) and still tenuously holds his post today.. First posted on 11 December 1973.
 

Right. What am I going to write about, can't find anything in my book of quotations for the day to purloin. Hmm, did anyone insult me today. No. Is there a TV show I've just remembered which I can nostalgically place a youtube clip about? No, not that either. Hmm, and I'm not going to resort to sarcasm, that's just something I wouldn't ever do. Well, let's just resort to the default approach of ridiculing people in the public eye...ok, anyone notice how that Martin McGuiness from the IRA looks like a kind of bucolic Art Garfunkel? Ha ha, maybe they should cover one of their songs, not Bridge Over Troubled Water, that's for sure, Homeward Bound, for the day they get out of prison..or maybe 'semtex, mace armalite and lime' to the tune of Parsley, Sage etc. Ha ha..

Whyte went into hiding for 21 years following this post, following a threat of a 'panel beating', not from the IRA but from the rest of the PMC staff.

Ym etiruovaf Dab Srennam gnos

Yadot sah neeb etiuq a ysub yad dna os tsuj a yrev trohs tsop siht emit, tub ton na ynnufnu plic ot ynapmocca ti, ecnis s'ti yadirf gnineve...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVIXraaqXPU