Hanging on Every Word: Why Minor Moments Matter
There you are. Stuck in prison for the rest of your life, a fraudster of the most despicable kind. For you, there’s only one way out, and that’s in a box. Since it’s only a question of when and not whether, you decide to end the suffering. Hanging it has to be.
But with what?
Cut to the future, where a couple of ‘lowlifes’ are busy quizzing your overwrought former wife about your demise. ‘What, did he use a belt?’ asks the short guy. A curt shake of the head. ‘A sheet, then,’ says the other, a muscled mechanic. The woman rounds on them. ‘No,’ she says, with a touch of pride. ‘He managed to get some rope.’
You did? What, then, does this tell you about yourself? That you wear suspenders? Probably not. That you wash your sheets daily? I doubt it. Nope, it tells you just what it told me: that you’re the kind of character you’re made out to be – a charming, well-connected confidence man.
Mission accomplished.
As writers, we’re told to make every word count. Here we see the mantra in action. It’s but a minor moment in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, and yet it sticks in my mind, a fine (and funny) illustration of how the masters have us hanging on every word.
Off the Couch: How I Saved Civilisation
In the ideal office, each and every drone would take messages. As it is, most simply leave them lying around, thus endangering the safety and security of all.
Not me. I safeguard civilisation by collecting, from desktops and drawers, these incendiary scraps of paper, which I publish on the internet as a service to society.
Here, then, is a message I removed from a desk today. Brace yourself…
Now that’s how you take a message!
A Tale with Teeth (Part 1): Putting the Bite Back into Fairy Stories
It was the last straw – again. There I was, blithely corralling kids’ books, when I came across a sheep in wolves’ clothing: yet another work in which an author has her wicked way with fairy tales. Enough’s enough, I thought, rough-housing the offending object into a corner; if I encounter another novel that neuters those venerable yarns, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll…
Do what? Scream like a girlie-man? Beat my hairy breast? Never! Such things are beneath me, as you well know. Instead, I thought, I’ll do my own bit of bastardising, so as to put the acid on these con-artists and the sting back where it belongs – in the tales, of course.
To my amazement and alarm, I got a chance to put my pen where my mouth is within hours. While ferrying Boy Wonder to a friend’s, I happened to put my daughter to sleep in the car. Rather than try and shoehorn the little dear out of her cosy capsule, I opted to ride it out – to sit behind the wheel and write.
It’s the fruit of this wee spree that I now want to share. Entitled ‘A Tale with Teeth’, the story goes something like this…
Once upon a time there was a wolf – a very sad wolf. His teeth were falling out, you see, and that’s enough to make any beast blue. One day the wolf woke up feeling so low that he just had to see a doctor.
‘Doc,’ he said, ‘I’m losing my teeth.’
‘Hmmm,’ said the doctor, fiddling with her phone. ‘I’d better run some tests.’
Tucking his tail under his furry flanks, the wolf sat and waited.
At last the doctor let out a shriek.
‘What is it?’ cried the wolf. ‘Give it to me straight, doc – I can take it.’
‘It’s my blood pressure,’ groaned the doctor. ‘It’s way too high. I need a holiday.’
And with that she raced from the room, grabbing her golf clubs as she went.
As you can imagine, that didn’t make the wolf feel any better. Not one to give up easily, though, he went straight to the dentist’s.
‘Come back when you’ve made an appointment,’ snapped the girl at the counter. The wolf sighed and did as he was told.
‘What seems to be the problem,’ asked the dentist, as he strapped the wolf down.
‘It’s my teeth,’ said the wolf. ‘They seem to be falling out.’
‘And I suppose you think I’m going to stick my head into your mouth to have a look,’ said the dentist.
The wolf nodded, miserably.
‘Gladly,’ said the dentist, and stuck his head right in.
He emerged a little later, feeling around in his ear for something sharp.
‘You weren’t foxing,’ he said, holding up a tooth. ‘Your fangs are dropping like flies.’
The wolf gave a groan. ‘But why?’
‘Not sure,’ said the dentist. ‘And don’t think I’m going in there again to find out. Who eats garlic for breakfast, anyway?’
It took the wolf a few months to pay his bill. As soon as it was settled, he rushed off to see a therapist.
‘I’m sad,’ the wolf told her, once he’d got comfortable on the couch. ‘And my teeth are falling out.’
‘Don’t let a little thing like that get you down,’ said the therapist, smoothing her slacks. ‘Is there anything else that might be making you unhappy? Your parents, perhaps?’
The wolf thought hard.
‘Well,’ he said, finally, ‘there is one little thing that’s been troubling me.’
‘Go on,’ said the therapist, pen poised above her iPad.
‘It’s just that I used to feel so big and bad. Hardly a week went by without me nibbling on a kid or two, and scaring some half to death.’
‘So that’s it,’ said the therapist, turning on her phone. ‘Nothing to do with your family at all.’
The wolf craned around to look at her.
‘Do you know what that does to a carnivore’s self-esteem?’ he said.
‘Yes, yes,’ said the therapist, briskly. ‘It’s an open-and-shut case. You’ve lost your identity and the new you doesn’t need teeth.’
She cast an eye over the wolf’s lithe figure.
‘Just out of curiosity, what do you eat?’
‘Shakes, mostly,’ said the wolf. ‘It’s a complete diet, only minus the children.’
‘Might be worth a try,’ murmured the therapist. ‘My sister’s getting married next month, you know, and I’d like to be looking my best.’
‘You go grrrl,’ said the wolf, giving her knee a squeeze.
The therapist threw him a grateful smile.
‘It’s just that my mother had such enormous –’
‘Hams?’ said the wolf.
‘Expectations.’
The wolf nodded, sympathetically.
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘but what about me?’
‘You? You’ve just got to find yourself again. Get back to being the real you. If, that is, you want to keep your canines.’
‘I get it,’ said the wolf. ‘I’m an open-and-shut case.’
The therapist looked at the clock.
‘Start now,’ she said. ‘Just open the door and shut it once you’re through.’
The wolf got up from the couch, feeling a little stiff, and padded out into the waiting room.
‘Hello,’ he said to a witch, her warty nose buried in a dog-eared Reader’s Digest. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’
Thank me later.
Sleep On It: How I Stopped Bowing to the God of Nod
Here’s something my biographers don’t tell you: sleep used to keep me awake at night. For a time there in my twenties I’d sit up half the night reading books about the stuff and about all the sweetness and light it sheds on human life. The experts would tell me that –
Happily, I can’t remember what they told me, if anything. I seem to recall, though, that their texts were dotted with cautionary tales from history, just to give me nightmares. Titanic tales, you might call them. For if that iceberg hadn’t been asleep at the seal, then the ship of the century might never have sailed into the movies. Yes, that’s the kind of ‘experts’ they were.
I was worried, you see, because I seemed to be sleep-walking through life, unable to awaken. Something was wrong, I knew – I’m perceptive like that – but rather than blame my misfortunes on, say, me, I decided the problem was sheep.
Not sheep, but sleep. It’s funny, though, how often one concept invokes the other. Trust me, the link is more than linguistic.
Sleep. Opium of the masses, drug of the nation. Sleep. Superfine wool you pull over your own eyes. (That sounds pretty sheepish, doesn’t it.) Sleep. An alluring apparition you can have but not hold, and which shows itself only when your back is turned. Sleep. The word I keep repeating.
Shut-eye. Clearly, I was short of it. But how much did I need? In the end I came to a radical conclusion: none was enough – nay, more than enough. Sleep, I decided, was a waste of precious time, time I’d be better off wasting myself. Impressed by my logic, I wrote ‘Think like a bull’ on a piece of paper, pinning it to the wall with my horns. Then, in one extended sitting, I set out to finish the novel I was writing.
The sound I’m making now is the sound my brain made when it broke. Did I tell you my brain broke? Good, because it’s a secret.
Okay, it was a bad idea – having since heard about Operation Sandman, I now know that sleep deprivation is a form of torture, a fate worse than tickling. So, yes, I made an ass of myself, and, yes, my thinking was a load of bull. (My ‘novel’ was nothing to write home about either.) Verily, I had sinned against sleep and paid the price, my ship-like cerebellum being brained by the immovable iceberg that is science, or nature, or something. Unlike the Titanic, though, I got a second shot at going under…
Fast forward to the future, to the here and the now. My life is wide awake and fully dressed, even if my fly is undone. I’m a homemaker, a father, a husband; I’m the owner of a lonely blog. I am living, it would seem, at the coal-face of life. And yet (he writes in hushed tones) I’m still not completely sold on this sleep thing.
Fact is, I’ve had a bellyful of the whole palaver. Chased from the matrimonial couch by the late-season fruit of that union (a real little peach), I’m lucky to fit in twenty-two winks a night, let alone the full forty. Then there are bumptious beagles that bay, nocturnally, and an inner writer that mercilessly wags the dog – the Timm who tumbles me from my makeshift mattress in the early hours, so I can pen piffle like this. The wee early hours.
Sometimes, I’m just too damned tired to sleep. And, yes, I have tried counting to sheep, but, gee, they’re slow learners.
There’s a lamb nearby now, as it happens, in a neighbouring yard. A real one, I think, and not just an ethereal ewe sent to mock me. The little nitwit bleats mournfully at any hour of the day or night, weighed down, no doubt, by its woolly woes. Like me, the poor thing seems to struggle with sleep. Would some simple mathematical task help it nod off? Counting people, perhaps, as they jump through hoops? After all, what works for worn-out public servants ought to do for Ewe too…
See what I mean about sleep and sheep?
Chop, chop, I hear you say. My point, if you insist on hearing it half-baked, is this: the Sandman has feet of clay and the experts are dreaming – sleep just ain’t the holy grail it’s made out to be. Look at me. Six hours’ shut-eye and I feel terrific: I’m at one with the world and, best of all, the words are flowing, every one a winner. Enough said?
So here’s my advice if you’re thinking of bowing to the god of nod by going to bed early. Sleep on it, for heaven’s sake.
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