How To Get Ahead in Writing (I Think)

Despite the fact that there are probably more reasons for writing a work of fiction as there are actual works of fiction it seems to be the case that there is one thing they all must possess to be successful in any meaningful sense: an audience. This isn't to say that fiction becomes better or somehow more fictional as more people read it, rather it's simply to state the commonplace that a writer is always writing in the belief that someone else will be reading what he's written. Even in cases where the writer aims to create the most obscure work imaginable he or she is still conscious of the fact that they are responsible for what someone else will encounter on the page or screen. This is as true of Ulysees as it is of The Twits.

How then are writers of “literary” fiction to balance this obligation to make some kind of sense (or non-sense) to their audience against the imperative to preserve their artistic integrity? Having recently read Kevin Barry's There are Little Kingdoms and Paul Murray's Skippy Dies (and knowing that both have amassed relatively large audiences for their work) I thought it might be interesting to compare the two in terms of their likely appeal to their respective audiences.

The first thing that strikes you is that both writers are preoccupied by youth. In comparison with works by the likes of Sebastian Barry or Colm Tobin you'll not find any elderly women here. The closest you'll get to old age is one cruelly vital old priest and drunken Freddie Bliss, fondly recalling better days while his daughter tears apart his home. After that the oldest people we encounter are middle aged types refusing to recognise that they're rapidly approaching the point when youth culture will be completely alien to them. Youth, in all its conceited self obsession, reigns supreme and this illuminates part of the appeal of Barry and Murray: readers of “literary” fiction tend to be slightly more sceptical of youth culture than other consumers.

Another point of kinship between the two is their tentative embrace of post modernism. One never gets the sense that the narrative is unreliable beyond there being a strong sense that most of the characters (especially in Barry's work, a short story collection) are only interested in perpetuating some kind of self-deluding fantasy. This is most obvious in Barry's short story To The Hills, a tale of three single fortysomethings on a hiking trip:

Teresa decided that she was having a terrific time. This intimacy, she felt, was powerful stuff. Yes, she was greatly enjoying the whole experience but she would enjoy it al the more when she was at home on her couch, alone except for the cat, with the lights dimmed and a glass full to the brim and the late programme on Lyric playing low on the radio. Then she would savour it all truly.

Indeed, this fate of being dominated by the useless tendency to self-mythologise has already marked the cool-as-fuck Galwegian students in Party at Helen's, the doomed teenage hero of the “breeze-block” arcade in Atlantic City, and the randy farmer unable to help himself in Animal Needs. In recounting it all Barry adopts the tone of a sardonic pulp fiction narrator, despairing over the stupidity of his fictional charges but never doubting the ultimate worth of the story being told. Indeed, one of Barry's major assets as a storyteller is to ensure that the coolness of his stories is never in doubt; we're confident we can sneer smugly at his characters because they wouldn't understand the interest of their predicament if they encountered somebody else enduring it.

If it can be fairly said that Barry's aversion to post modernism arises from his contempt for his characters Murray's reticence concerning the unreliable narrator trope seems to come from a desire to be sincere. Like There Are Little Kingdoms, Skippy Dies features a doomed teenager (named Skippy, unsurprisingly). Unlike Kingdoms however, Murray's work explores in detail (it is not a concise work) the reasons for this death. In doing so, Skippy Dies makes clear what Kingdoms only implies: that meaningful communication between generations is impossible when youthfulness becomes a sovereign ideal. Murray explores this theme fully and the effect is that the teenagers resemble the kids in South Park: they're the only vaguely reasonable characters on display. Thus, we have the Howard “the coward” Fallon, a teacher working at his old secondary school who effectively endures a never ending adolescence because of a grisly teenage accident, the childishly ambitious school principal nicknamed “The Automator”, and Coach Roche, a former captain of the school rugby trading on his aura of faded glory. While not actively conniving in the propagation of teenage misery, the other adult characters seem completely ignorant of the mental and material well-being of their charges.

It's in this void of mutual comprehension where Murray differs most strongly from Barry: he seems to have a faint hope that literature might have some relevant role in the lives of these characters. And so Fallon goes on a voyage of discovery concerning the lives and works of Robert Graves and Rudyard Kipling, a journey which concludes with him echoing Alyosha Karamazov in trying to explain to his pupils why people suffer. This is probably the loveliest section of the whole book and shows that at least some of Barry's characters are trying to understand their predicament. Alas though, the hope that literature mattes was faint indeed and Murray ultimately achieves the rare distinction of being bleaker than Dostoevsky by implicating Fallon in the grotesque cover up surrounding poor Skippy's death. Despite the abundance of teenage humour in Skippy Dies it's really about as grim a read as you would expect from a book dealing with teenage suicide.

It's not hard to understand the appeal of Barry and Murray for their audiences: both deal with a theme that is a natural fit for literary fiction, namely the unhealthy and unhelpful appeal of youth culture. By their lights it purveys, at best, self-deluding fantasies while at worst it can bring about a lethal sense of alienation in those who place too much faith in its promises and suggestions. In assuming fairly conventional narrative voices they manage to tell new stories through old forms, and broaden their appeal even further

The Wire and philosophy

Having wrecked many, many people's heads by lavishly praising The Wire I recently decided to actually try and write down the reasons why it appealed to me so much. A problem immediately presented itself though: I didn't know why I liked it. To be sure, its uniquely satisfying blend of long character arcs, labyrinthine complexity, brilliant acting, and outstanding writing all contributed to its appeal. Beyond this, I struggled to account for my proselytising zeal (I reckon I've now watched it six times). Its obvious pre-occupations with corruption being the root of all evil and men having to do what men have to do both struck me as being, well, kind of lame. I wondered if the show's mechanics of plot, character and style (dialogue, cinematography, etc.) were really the main reasons why I loved it so much, while simultaneously recognising that excellence in these areas are seen frequently enough in TV nowadays.

It was at this time that a strange irony struck me: despite the narrative conservatism of The Wire (unlike The Sopranos it has no surrealist reveries, unlike Mad Men it has no explanatory childhood flashbacks, and unlike Breaking Bad it has no madcap Top Gear-esque adventures), it seems to me to be the most philosophically literate of all these brilliantly made programmes. Without ever mentioning any thinker by name or explicitly expounding an argument it explores many issues that are familiar to any philosophy student: problems raised by thinkers like Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and Freud.

One of the most obvious thematic concerns of The Wire is its pre-occupation with surveillance. The title alone, in its allusion to wire tapping, makes this clear. Beyond this, nearly every episode features a scene in which someone is either being recorded or filmed for a purpose prejudicial to their own interests. Elsewhere, senior cops compile incriminating files on their subordinates to better manipulate them while one section of the FBI secretly keeps track of another section's investigation in order to undermine it. Reminiscent of the Danish court's obsession with monitoring Hamlet, something is clearly rotten in the state of Maryland.

Despite the prevalence of surveillance-based imagery the connection between the brutal and widespread violence on display and these monitoring techniques is never really made clear until season 4 when we encounter poor Namond Bryce, a teenager terrified by the environment in which he's forced to live. And this is the point at which The Wire and Freud intersect with the show's writers making it clear that a consequence of surveillance is that it ensures that those monitored are denied the chance to change as individuals. Where the motivation to monitor is due to atavistic impulses and drives in Freud  The Wire shows that this impulse to observe is tied to the far more prosaic need of ensuring that those watched don't change, lest they should no longer fulfil their assigned role in the system in which they've been reared to serve. Indeed, just to highlight their debt of gratitude to Freud, the show's writers show Namond being terrified of his “dragon lady” mother (who, in fairness to the lad, resembles Livia Soprano in her desire to seemingly want her son killed) before being able to flourish by identifying with the father figure of Bunny Colvin. The Freudian loop is even nicely closed off by the revelation that Namond's actual father is instrumental in creating the chaos on the streets that so terrifies him: his mother may be the proximate cause of his deep distress but his father is the ultimate cause. Namond's familial predicament is the same as society's predicament, whose members are constantly monitored by a brutally degrading system that ensures they can't exit.

Talk of degrading systems brings us nicely to Marx. With characters frequently echoing the line “business, just business” (usually just before perpetrating some betrayal or horrific act of violence) it's clear that the creators of The Wire are very unhappy about capitalism indeed. Where it actually succeeds in providing insight into the nature of capitalism though is in its relentless depiction of money's awesome, protean force. In The Wire (as in The Communist Manifesto) money talks, incessantly and seductively. Thus, we have the despairing cycle of one generation following their antecedents into more or less identical roles (peaceful Dookie becomes Bubbles with his need to get money but not hurt anyone, Michael becomes Omar taxing the supra normal profits of the drug dealers, Carver becomes the responsible yet compromised middle manager like Daniels, while Sydnor follows McNulty's lead by giving valuable gossip to a judge) as the system determines which economic roles they'll fulfil. Similarly, we have the transition of authority from one drug running operation to another where, despite the violence involved in the handover of power, its clear that the only thing that is certain is that one group will ultimately end up victorious: markets, like drug addicts, abhor vacuums in supply.

Cyclical views of history and a keen appreciation for the potency of money aside, one element of The Wire that would surely have won the admiration of Marx is the former's treatment of “public opinion”. Here, the basic message is that “news” addresses only the concerns of the more prosperous elements of society while those in the socio-economic doldrums are rarely discussed. This is seen most clearly in those scenes where Tommy Carcetti is informed that his priorities as mayor are to get notional increases in certain key statistics and also ensure that he manges to organise construction of a landmark building. Discussions of the actual issues plaguing the city never really seem to take place and when these problems actually do break onto the news agenda there's only ever a battle to influence perception of how these issues are portrayed rather than actually addressed. The effect of all this is that participants within the brutalising system are completely disaffected from the media, correctly recognising that the media's interest really lies elsewhere regardless of whatever conceits it may have about its own crusading role in righting social wrongs. The author of The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte would undoubtedly have understood this point.

Max Weber too. His analysis of rationalisation and disenchantment with the bureaucratic world-view is closely linked to Marx's treatment of alienation. The Wire honours this intellectual affinity by highlighting how the obsession with reducing costs (“more, with less”) is now a major a feature in institutions that in the past weren't seen as needing to be profitable: the police and school boards juke the stats while the local paper self destructively seeks to replace valuable older reporters with younger, inexperienced newcomers. Similarly, the police headquarters is indistinguishable from any contemporary corporate office block. The result of this drive to homogenise all social institutions by denying their unique functions is that fantastical and illusory pre-occupations replace the real, more lethal concerns that ought to be addressed in public discourse (and which would be far more obvious if these institutions were honourably run). Public opinion thus shows itself to be outraged when drugs are tacitly legalised and also when an imaginary serial killer stalks the land, doing work more accurately attributable to combatants in a gang war. The fact that both of these phenomena were accomplished facts (drugs were freely available before the decriminalisation zones and murder was already a terrifyingly widespread instrument of conflict resolution before the advent of the fictional serial killer) didn't matter: public opinion had seen something it didn't like and was determined to console itself with futile displays of outrage that did nothing to address the underlying problems.

These two plot threads bring us nicely to Nietzsche and his notion of transvaluation: that the professed morality of a given society can be so corrupt that only its opposite values can possibly redeem it. In this light Bunny Colvin's decriminalisation of drugs (an object of fetishistic and irrational hatred rather than a catch-all term for substances that include alcohol) and McNulty's invention of a serial killer make more sense when its born in mind that the professed morality is what's being targeted. While the basic intent of having a police force is benign the ways in which this motivation manifests itself in Baltimore are deeply damaging and wasteful, being more closely related to the conceits of the more prosperous classes than to any realistic assessment of the needs of society as a whole. This, the gulf in understanding between those fully engaged with the murderous trauma of inner city life and those in the comfortable suburbs, leads to an alienation and despair so deep that it can only be manifested by audacious stunts that attempt to spotlight the grotesque ugliness of society's self-image. The conceits of society's more prosperous citizens were as morally repugnant for Nietzsche as they are for The Wire's creators.

So, Baltimore seems to be a society where an abyss of communication (and, consequently, despair) exists between people who live and work only miles away from each other. Having drawn heavily on German philosophers to indict the place it thus seems strangely appropriate that the only vaguely positive philosophical insight (as opposed to bitter insights concerning the ultimate cruelty of the universe) offered is a quote attributed to “Fonzie” Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.” To people trapped in a nearly inescapable cycle of grinding degradation this may be about the only consolation that can be offered: that despite the entirely understandable urge to retreat into defensive individualism this may yet intensify the pain you feel by further isolating and alienating you from others.

In a world that daily becomes more and more obsessed with surveillance, nebulous notions of economic growth, the commodification of personal identity and with placating the wealthy The Wire seems to have an almost Cassandra-like relevance. It may not be perfect (season 2 has its longueurs, the villains in the newsroom are denied the sort of nuanced treatment the drug dealers are afforded, and it strikes me that there's something unsatisfactory about its treatment of women in general) but through its exploration of the above themes it is far superior to the glibly episodic “quality” TV shows it's frequently compared with.

The Wire is brilliantly made, relevant in a way fiction or drama normally doesn't seem able to achieve anymore, and humane. From the outset it's just not that obvious that a cop show could be all these things. 

Alone Again (Technologically)

Although it may be about as insightful as Homer Simpson's surprised remark that “they have the internet on computers now”, I still feel that it's sometimes worth pointing out that the world has become a bewilderingly abstract place. A moment's reflection on the significance of your mobile phone should suffice to illustrate the truth of this: in many regards it's a more effective representation of you than your own body is.

Hearteningly however (or traumatically, depending on your perspective), those instances where it's been unable to completely replace your flesh and bone you do still seem to be the most important: that varied grouping of experiences euphemistically referred to as intimacy. Despite the best efforts of robotics engineers, computer programmers and pornographers alike attempts at producing a computerised boy-, girl- or non-gender alignedfriend don't seem to have gained traction with the general public, yet.

On the other hand though, the algorithm producing sectors have seemingly enjoyed great success with the next best thing to intimacy: the practice formerly known as courtship. Indeed, it may simply be another sign of my advancing years but from discussions with friends and through the media in general it does seem as if internet dating is now a stronger presence in people's lives than it has ever been in the past. Certainly, dating or matchmaking services as institutions have a long history behind them but they've never before been advertised as heavily as they are now, which is just another way of saying that it's undoubtedly big business these days.

Having been single for a while some of the ad campaigns and my discussions with friends impressed me. I wondered if maybe Janis Iain was wrong and love wasn't just meant for beauty queens and high school girls with clear skin smiles.

Reader, I set up a profile. For one as verbose as I am I found this part oddly challenging. Unlike in person, you're obviously never quite sure just who you're addressing on the internet: a miserable situation (and the basic condition of all mass participation online) only made worse by the sense of vulnerability most people inevitably feel when hoping for intimacy. I must have been more lonely that I initially thought though as I persevered, eventually settling on a nice line in ironically self-aware nerdiness to describe myself. Let the truth set you free!

I waited for a while, unsure of the etiquette, before plunging in. Having overcome the trauma of making my own profile and trying to second guess my unknown, prospective companion this part was only slightly less strange. I filtered through the female profiles, aware of the fact that these avatars may have been only tangenitally related to the truth and that women viewing my own profile must have felt something similar. It's a weird and giddy feeling, knowing that people may fully doubt the truth of your existence when you're being sincere.

Banishing this feeling, I ploughed ahead. One girl, about whom I'd had a pretty good feeling based on our complimentary music tastes, replied showing some interest in meeting up. After some mildly flirtatious e-mail exchanges we agreed on a date. My fear that this might all have been some elaborate set up and that the ghost of Jeremy Beadle might appear as one of my dates had calmed during the e-mail exchanges but came back strongly in the days and hours before our agreed meet up in a city centre bar one evening.

She showed up.

I relaxed, seeing that she was as described, and I expect she felt the same. Aside from a brief awkward moment at the start when I dithered over whether to offer to get her a drink and a few brief lulls in the conversation I enjoyed the evening. Truth be told, I would have liked to have seen her again but it never happened: my hopes of a second meeting died in a flurry of apologetic text messages.

For a while afterwards I once again found myself feeling confused. Mulling over my sorry predicament I wondered if I was upset with the girl for not being interested or with myself for bothering with the enterprise in the first place. Or, indeed, was I annoyed at the dating service itself? Something about the notion of meeting someone and finding them to be “as described” rankled with me, as if we were both some kind of commodity with the potential to provide spiritual fulfilment. The fact that our introduction was mediated through a numerical code rather than a human (as an old dating service would have worked) also irritated me.Surely, it would make just as much sense to go to a nightclub and flip a coin and allow that to decide whether or not I approached a seemingly unattached girl?

Such frustrated musings borne of confusion are undignified (as well as being unappealing to prospective partners. Ladies, I am still single you know) though so I'll leave it there.

The world is indeed a bewilderingly abstract place.

Soccernomics: a dull book that's not really worth reading

Ah football, that relentless generator of guff. As I get older I'm struck by the growth in the number of journalists willing to pretend that there's something high minded about it all though. Perhaps this dawning awareness of tasteful anorakdom is all a part of the ageing process, like experiencing awful hangovers and feeling profoundly alienated by ads for certain mobile phone networks. Or perhaps its one of those singular facts of the Age, a consequence of the potential extension of adolescence until one is well into one's thirties (at least). Did our fathers really spend hours analysing the merits of pundits? Did their fathers spend significant chunks of their weekly income on replica jerseys?

Regardless, the reach of the football “experience” extends ever more deeply into pockets of our lives that had previously been untroubled by its clammy grasp. One of the undoubted high priests of its hermeneutics is Simon Kuper, football correspondant for the FT and the co-author (alongside economist Stefan Szymanski) of the book under review today: Soccernomics. Channelling the spirit of a zany management consultant watching Sky Sports News they've set out to uncover the key determining statistics and economic trends that lie at the heart of the modern game.

The first thing to note about this irritatingly absorbing collection of expanded newspaper articles (sample chapter title: “Why Poor Countries are Poor at Sport”) is that the authors themselves seem deeply confused about the merits of their approach: “Football is neither big business nor good business. It arguably isn't even business at all.” Economics, however, is primarily concerned with the most efficient means by which goods and services are delivered to the public. But if football clubs don't really make sense as a business then they are presumably not run with the intent of maximising the return on investment for their owners. As a result, all attempts to analyse how they can be best run from an economic perspective will collapse into a confused pile of sentimental opinions. To put it another way, one could well imagine a scenario where K & S present their findings to an assembly of chairmen, and the chairmen simply reply: “Well, d'uh!”

Unfortunately, this section appearing near the start is probably the most interesting in the book. Having apparently not noticed that they've seriously damaged the underlying premise of the whole enterprise they blithely carry on with rapidly diminishing returns. Their answers to questions like “are black managers discriminated against?” (yes, managers have so little influence that the market can't punish discriminatory hiring behaviour) and “what countries in the west care most about football?” (Norway ad Iceland, who knew?) are interesting enough but the exhaustive description of the statistical analyses involved are eye wateringly tedious.

Beyond the “football isn't really business” point highlights are hard to identify. The discussion of re-location consultants and the refusal by clubs to appoint them is instructive though as it actually shows the authors getting excited about something. Regardless of the frequently obscene sums of money involved in player transfers many of these deals fail because the purchasing club refuses to spend a franction more in attempting to reduce the unease inevitably felt by what are usually heavily sheltered young men in alien environments. Yet Kuper & Szymanski's estimable anger at clubs refusing to pay a relatively small amount of good money after wasting huge amounts of bad money is all too rare.

The absence of this vaguely ethical sense is also evident in their discussion of the shrewdest operators in the transfer market as great play is made of the “regression to the mean”. Despite the authors' insistance on how significant this tool is much of the insights advanced are most vividly explained through references to Peter Taylor's memoir of his time with Brian Clough. As other names like Wenger, Ferguson and Moyes frequently appear with disconcerting regularity the feeling that this whole section would work better simply as a description of their transfer policies only grows. Contrary to their assertion that managers don't really matter it would appear that they actually do have a fair amount of influence. Indeed, any self respecting economist would point out that it could hardly be otherwise in any well developed capitalist economy, obsessed as they are with marginal returns. Personality, or the ethical business of getting the most out of people, is all important when other resources are more or less equal.

Ultimately this obsession with the median seems to be a failing common to many of these “stats will change your life” books (and one hardly discernible at all in Kuper's “Football Men”). Rather than focusing on those who do well and considering the reasons for their success they emphasise life's dutiful trudgers. The effect of this is that they create a sort of mystery gap between the good and the middling and the only way to bridge this gap is to BUY THIS BOOK AND YOU WILL UNDERSTAND! In truth though the basic point seems to be that there's little to understand, generally the fields of endeavour in question aren't profoundly difficult and those under observation simply need to pay more attention to what their betters are already doing.

So, to recap before I sign off: the joy of stats - a fairly thin conceit for an entire book.

The Loneliness of The Middle Distance door to door Salesman

Oh Jessie J, how wrong you are! It's the final day of my week and I'm sat here in my car waiting for the rain to stop so that I can begin my canvass of this estate in a northwest Dublin suburb. I'm a door to door salesman who's three shy of his weekly target and your warbling from the radio about how it's not “about the money” is doing nothing for my mood. For me, today most assuredly is all about the money.

The key to understanding this job is to appreciate the cruel arithmetic of sales garnered divided by households canvassed. For example, last week it seemed as if I could expect one sale from at least every twenty doors knocked upon. The result was that the bonus for that week was particularly lucrative.

I began this week with similar hopes as I started canvassing in the next estate over from the one where I'd finished the week before. By Wednesday such dreams had died on the hard and unforgiving suburban pavement, my meagre figures for the first days bearing little resemblance to the fulsome numbers that had preceded them the week before. Today my only realistic strategy is one of damage limitation as I seek to get the lowest bonus attainable so that the pay packet for my 20 hour week is greater than what I would ordinarily get had I just signed on instead. Never before have I felt more keenly the absurdity of the phrase “running to stand still”.

The rain stops and I can begin. In truth, the actual work itself isn't that bad. People are generally patient and willing to listen to the opening gambit at least: “Hi I'm just doing a canvass on behalf of Mr X to see if you're interested in Y”. And then they smile in response to my slightly manic grin and say “sorry, not interested”.

In terms of interacting with the customers the most demoralising times are when you knock at a row of houses where nobody comes to the door. Some of these are vacant properties but others actually have occupants who see me coming with my clipboard and simply decide to play a game of reverse knick knacks at my expense by not answering the door. On one or two occassions some inhabitants have even made ostentatious displays of not budging at all in spite of the fact that I've just rung their doorbell and it's obvious that we're both looking at each other.

It's hard to resent such attitudes for long though. As a salesman hoping to capitalise on his cheerful disposition it's important not to obsess over these things by remembering that these are in fact unsolicited house calls that I'm making. On a row of empty houses this can sometimes be difficult however. More typically I find myself cultivating an appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of doorbells (there are some truly wretched doorbells out there) or simply being thankful that the weather's fine rather than obsessing over such perceived petty slights.

The day drags on and the monotony of garden-doorstep-garden establishes itself; the suburban sameness of it all only broken by the slight variations in the design of each row of houses and by their proximity to the estate's communal green area.

After an hour I come onto a road of houses that ends in a cul de sac and my heart leaps. For the service I'm selling young families, three or four kids to working parents under the age of thirty, are undoubtedly the most lucrative market and houses situated on closes are generally the preferred dwellings for such families. I put my shiniest smile on and begin. On the sixth house I get a sale. Things are looking up. The smile now beams of its own volition. On the second last house I've left on the road the customer replies “Yeah, I suppose I am interested.” Not expecting another sale in such quick succession I almost say “Ah well, thanks for your time” and walk off but catch myself in time. I make the sale. All I need is one more before I can happily call it quits for the day, content in the knowledge that there is actually some tangible reason (a reward greater than what I could hope to get on the dole) as to why I'm doing this.

Things don't go well for the next two hours though. Fewer people answer their door and the smiles become rarer and rarer when they do. Another aspect of the cruelty of the sums is that of previous form and expectation management and how this, more than any unpleasant customer behaviour, can seriously serve to undermine one's cheerful disposition.

Today's experience is a nice case study in how this happens. I begin the day with vague hopes of hitting my target but, after an hour, I become resigned to the possibility that perhaps this wouldn't occur. Then I get two sales and the hopes revived stronger than ever before. The mind races; between two and a half and three hours to get one sale? Easy. I'd never gotten zero sales from any previous canvasses (four hour periods) so with three hours left I'm more or less guaranteed one sale at least, I believe. Armed with this inspiring but deeply suspicious mathematical proof that my success is inevitable I set off with a new urgency in my stride. The sooner I got this sale, the sooner I got to go home.

Abstract reasoning is a bugger to dislodge from one's thinking though, regardless of whether it's right or wrong. “I'm certain to get one” becomes my mantra and with every failed housecall I repeat it more vociferously to myself. The fact that I'm now talking to myself should be a warning sign on its own but the frustration continues to build as I focus on my mantra to the exclusion of all the other signs indicating that perhaps I probably won't get that last one.

With thirty minutes left I come onto a familiar looking road facing the communal green area. This is the one I passed on the way in and avoided until the end. For reasons of safety young families generally tend to avoid living on the first road into an estate due to traffic volumes. There aren't many cars in driveways and most have their blinds drawn. I've no more houses left after this row. I begin.

40 minutes later I'm sat in the car again listening to the radio. I'm in a Eurospar car park eating the roll I've just bought and reading the newspaper. The article's interesting, the song playing is one I like, the sun is shining and the drive home will be a pleasant one. I didn't get the sale. Maybe Jessie J was right.

fucksticks

Okay, it would appear that that Maguire piece was neither saved nor published. Boy is my face red? I'll endeavour to have it tomorrow anyway.

Toodles,
Alan

groping towards a mission statement...

In my days at The Dubliner magazine it was my lot to do up a rough, first draft of what would later become the listings pages for that week's edition. As part of this role I encountered the work of painter Brian Maguire and was sufficiently intrigued by what I saw to make a resolution to visit his exhibition at the Kerlin gallery at some point in the future. So, rather belatedly, I got around to doing this yesterday. Happily, I can report that it's well worth a visit but, less happily, the window of opportunity for doing so will slam shut on Saturday when the exhibition ends.