Christmas Flash

Tags

Christmas, Duet, short story collections, The Beach Hut Writers, The Beach Hut Writing Academy, Write by the Beach

A little bit of flash fiction for you at Christmas. I read this story at Rattle Tales last year, nice and festive. Remember when it was cold enough to snow? Here’s wishing you a fabulous Christmas and may all your dreams come true in 2016. I am looking forward to The Beach Hut Writing Academy’s first writer’s conference Write by The Beach in March which includes a short story workshop sponsored by The Brighton Prize which will be expanding this year. I’m also looking forward to finding a publisher for my short story collection. IT WILL HAPPEN. You can find out my thoughts on Christmas in BJournal 

DUET

It snowed all night. Angel-feather flakes have left a shag-pile of white on the ground. I walk into town because there were no buses in sight, just a never-ending line of frustrated cars bumper to bumper. It’s a necessary trip; I’ve left it very late to buy my son’s birthday present and the things I need for his party on Saturday. Besides, I like the crunch of snow under my boots and the tickle of fresh flakes on my nose. Snow makes me feel alive. I think it’s because it’s never here for long, it’s something you have to embrace there and then or it’ll be gone and you’ll regret you didn’t make the most of it.

Town is deserted, the shops empty. It’s like a dream. I wander through the toy store as if they have opened it just for me like I’m Tom Cruise or Kate Windsor, somebody important enough not to have to mix with the plebs. Shop assistants sit behind resting tills flicking through today’s Metro for the umpteenth time. I finish what I have to do by eleven o’clock and it’s cold out there now, the snow has stopped but the wind is brutal. Instead of walking home right away I decide to go to M&S for a latte, my usual shopping treat.

There are more people in the café, though not as many as usual, a few solitary pensioners and some care-worn mums duelling with toddlers intent on smearing cake on their faces. Easy listening pipes loudly through the speakers – Wham, Chicago, Maroon 5– interrupted by the chink of teaspoons on china and the whirr of the coffee machines on the production line. The waitress brings the coffee to my table because I have so many bags. How lovely it is to be waited on. It’s usually me doing the maid duties, kids, husband, my mother, the dogs, there’s always something needs doing. It’s nice sitting here sipping frothy coffee; an exhalation, sinking into a soft armchair like a hug. I close my eyes.

Ella Fitzgerald comes on, Every time We Say Goodbye. Ella Fitzgerald reminds me of my Dad. She was his favourite singer. Every Sunday at tea-time he’d play Ella Fitzgerald on the scratchy record player housed in the side-board. ‘No one sings like Ella,’ he used to say. ‘Ella could shatter glass!’ When he said this I would always roll my eyes (because back then the only music on earth was The Smiths) and I’d reply, ‘she must have been a right pain at parties.’ To which Dad would roll his eyes and then we’d chuckle at this ritual display of our surface incompatibility. This particular song was Dad’s requiem.

A man’s voice joins Ella’s from the corner of the café, softly at first, barely a murmur. I open my eyes and look in the direction of the sound. He’s an old man, sitting alone, wearing a stained jumper, brown shirt and tie tied a bit squiffy, bedraggled hunting hat jammed down tight on his head. His face is an ordinance survey of deep lines, fuzzed with the beginnings of a grey beard, his nose bulbous and pitted. A small tea sits untouched in front of him filmed with tannin scum. His voice grows with the song, deep and resonant. By the second chorus it booms loud and clear across the café, word-matched to Ella’s, rising and falling in time, the perfect duet. Everybody stops, even the baristas, and turns to watch him.

‘There’s no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor…’

The song ends too quickly, no glass is shattered, and the man looks down at his tea-cup failing to acknowledge the smattering of applause.

The Spice Girls are on next.

Creative Gifts At Forty Two Brighton

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ALarm Girl, Alexa De Castihlo, Alium B, AOH, Artists Open Houses, Christmas, Forty Two Bright, gifts, Hannah Vincent, Ian Williams, Lark Rising, Maria Tilyard, Modern Love, Myriad, One Must Dash, Penguin, Rattle Tales, Readings, Rob Mettler, salons, starlings, The Good Doctor, The Mysteriious Affair at Castaway House, Vivienne Ridley

This Christmas I am very proud to be a part of the creative community exhibiting at the Artists Open House known as Forty Two. Every year the city’s artists set up shop in their homes to provide an alternative to the mass-produced Christmas shopping experience. This year I am taking part in the house carefully curated by my good friend Vivienne Ridley. Vivienne (formerly of jewellery designers Ridley & Dowse) has launched her new collections at Forty Two. I am particularly pleased because one of these collections is a collaboration with me. I adore Vivienne’s jewellery and she has been nothing but supportive of my writing career, I’ve hardly done a public reading without her present. In the summer I suggested that we could combine jewellery and creative writing to produce stories inspired by unique pieces or vice-versa. I was sure she wouldn’t be interested but to my delight she was very interested and 6 months later we have The Riddler Collection.

The Riddler Collection consists of four stories paired with precious charms in the form of necklaces or cufflinks. They make truly unique presents. We have tried to connect each piece to life events, Sunflower makes a great gift for new mothers or anyone embarking on a new career. The Greyhound could be a retirement gift or a good luck charm. Indian Summer would make a beautiful heart-felt present for the man in your life, combining as it does etched silver cufflinks and the amusing tale of a doctor discovering the meaning of life. Especially for Christmas we have The Christmas Monkey, a pretty silver marmoset and a seasonal story of snow and charity. The jewellery is beautifully packaged in a deep blue box with the story printed on sumptuous heavy card, this is no ordinary Christmas present.

Vivienne’s other collections include Gumball Grandeur in which she takes low value 1950s gumball machine prizes and transforms them into lifelong treasures. With Buttons & Coins everyday vintage items are re-imagined as rings and necklaces and histroy is made current and wearable. Vivienne says, ‘ when I don’t know the history I like to imagine one.’ This is the ethos behind our collaboration. Forty Two is getting loads of local press attention (The Argus, Ect Magazine, We Love Brighton) and it’s no wonder, because it’s not only The Riddler Collection that offers the opportunity to pick up a unique gift. There is gorgeous jewellery from Alexa de Castilho, bright and bold pieces reminiscent of exotic holidays featuring gold and silver palm trees, sharks teeth and animal etchings. There’s plenty to wear with the jewellery too as local fashion labels Modern Love and Alium B are selling their much loved originals. Both labels already have a fond following locally and Forty Two stocks their current collections as well as discounted one offs. Lark Rising provide utterly unique knitwear, no one else will have a winter cardigan like it. Dress your new outfit with vintage wooden decoupage from Use & Take Care, who combine modern and traditional techniques to produce incomparable items.

Maria Tilyard makes heart-stealing creatures from re-cycled materials – foxes, greyhounds, the gorgeous elephant shrews, almost everyone left last week’s private view with a new pet under their arm. The same can be said of the monochrome prints from One Must Dash, who give us posters, T-towels, cards and bags, all in their distinctive quirky modern style. Take it to the other extreme with a handmade bird from Amanda Lawrence, her collection of tiny avains recalls the treasues of Victorian drawing rooms and prove very popular with all who see them. In keeping with the clever naturals theme are De Casa Limited Editions, showcasing bold silk print cushions, tea towels, lights and even deckchairs.

The sell out starat the private view was the work of Vivienne’s seven year old daughter Kitty with her still life collection Kitty Blossom – almost all gone I’m afraid.

I may be biased but my husband Robert Mettler is exhibiting his photographs at Forty Two and they really do have a rare and wonderful beauty. Rob reinvents Brighton’s familiar images by giving them a new and usually unseen quality. The West Pier is bared down into monochrome in Filigree Pier, floating like an apparation over an almost white sea. Scooby Doo Pier captures the modern one from below so that we see what is underneath the surface. Robert has prints that make particularly thoughful presents for locals, showing them a different side to the place we all share, far better to open one of these on Christmas morning than a pair of socks. Robert has collaborated with Rattle Tales on a number of times when we have asked members of Brighton & Hove Camera Club to provide images for the stories read at our events always with unexpected and striking results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the next two Sundays several authors will be reading at Forty Two. I will be reading stories from The Riddler Collection, Stephanie Lam will treat us to an extract from her Penguin published debut The Mysterious Affair At Castaway House, and Myriad Editions authors Hannah Vincent and Ian Williams will be reading from their latest books. You can also buy my Brighton-based novel Starlings. There are how to craft books on embroidery and print making from Super+Super. Come to these salons to hear inspiring tales, sample the refreshment provided by Brighton craft brewer Goldstone, scoff homemade cakes and afterwards meet the authors and stock up on signed books. We really hope you can join us in this very special shopping experience.

www.fortytwobrighton.co.uk

All I Want For Christmas…

Tags

Alice Cuninghame, BHT, Brighton, Brighton Housing Trust, chartity, Christmas, First Base, Homeless, Homelessness, Richardson's Yard, Shelter, shipping container homes, Stories For Homes, Threshold's Short Story Forum

I’m not going to write a Christmas post here this year. The lovely people at Threshold’s Short Story Forum have printed a piece I wrote about Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story  so that can serve for my thoughts on Christmas. Instead I’m posting about something very important and very close to my heart. I have been running a book group set up by City Reads at The First Base Centre in Brighton for the past eighteen months. I have really enjoyed working there but I feel it is time to move on so I recently hosted my last session (someone else is taking it over) however, I do want to highlight the work being done there.

First Base is part of Brighton Housing Trust. It is a drop in centre for those people around the city who find themselves without proper housing. First Base staff work tirelessly with their clients offering them practical help finding accommodation, health care, applying for benefits and training, anything to get people off the streets and into safety. Part of what they do is to provide cultural activities to help with the sheer boredom of being homeless, hence the book group. There are also classes in creative writing, photography, art and crafts and cookery. It is an amazing organisation and during my time there several members of the group were housed and well on the way to getting control of their lives back.

Let’s get something clear right away, homelessness is not a choice. Forget what certain people try to tell you, no-one lives on the street or in a hostel because it’s easier, it isn’t. No-one is there because they are too lazy to work or because they think the world owes them a living. Being on the street is generally about circumstance. Maybe it is the only option against a life of abuse. Maybe they lost their job, couldn’t afford the rent and didn’t have a loving family to catch them when they fell. Maybe they are an ex-con who can’t get a job, have psychological or physical problems, were shifted around a series of children’s homes until they were of age; there are as many reasons as there are individuals, every single one has their own unique story.

Okay, so sometimes it’s down to addiction, drugs or alcohol, and often they don’t seem that interested in giving up but seriously, it’s cold and dangerous out there – wouldn’t you want to block it out? Haven’t many of us had a drink as a way of coping with the stresses of life? What would happen if you kept on drinking, if that coping mechanism became the problem itself? And what if you didn’t have anyone to tell you to stop? Then what?

I also think that if the country carries on as it is doing there will be many more people on the street. People just can’t cope with the discrepancy between income and outgoings: the bedroom tax, fuel inflation, it’s all too much. Circumstance can change in a matter of weeks, never more so than now with the gap between rich and poor ever-widening. To use the National Lottery slogan, ‘it could be you,’ only in this case it’s not about winning a fortune.

This post isn’t about creative writing but in my experience most stories begin with the author asking, ‘what if?’ Give it a try, invent a chain of events that ends with you having no choice but to sleep rough and then think about how you would get back on track. First Base is one of the organisations that can help. Every day in the run up to Christmas Brighton Housing Trust is circulating the story of one of their clients, to let people know how much homelessness is about circumstance. To read these stories go to the BHT website, Facebook page or Twitter feed.

On occasion, when I have mentioned volunteering at First Base, people grimaced; I have even been told that the homeless are scum. There is certainly a lot of fear when they cross our paths. I’ll admit it, I was scared too, going into First Base for the first time and not knowing what to expect. It’s lively that’s for sure, we had a few disagreements in the group, sometimes the reading was punctuated with loud snores, or barking dogs or shouting from elsewhere in the building but in the main the people I met at First Base were intelligent, ordinary people who were down on their luck and just wanted to be treated like human beings. One of my group gave me a thank you card when I left and one of the things she thanked me for was the weekly conversations and the laughs. It’s not too much to ask is it?

If solutions for homelessness interest you (and I think they must if you have read this far) check out the new housing initiative in Brighton’s Richardson’s Yard designed by QED Property Solutions. It looks amazing, but remember there are at present only 36 units planned and the last city council count estimated that there could be up to 100 people sleeping in doorways and hundreds of others in transient emergency accommodation such as hostels and shelters.

First Base has a wish list with Amazon featuring essential items for the coming winter: hats, coats, socks, thermals, if you are buying something on site please add something from their list, items cost as little as 79p. If you live in Brighton you can donate items directly.  And if you don’t want anything to do with Amazon there are hundreds of homeless charities out there who could do with a little help.  My good friend Alice Cuninghame has a short story in the anthology Stories For Homes the proceeds of which go to Shelter, I think it makes a great Christmas present and not just for the person who unwraps it. If the weather forecast is right we’re in for a worst winter in decades and it’s going to get dangerously cold out there very soon.

I leave you with this short film, which went viral on social media recently, because it perfectly illustrates how easily we are shaped by circumstance.  Merry Christmas x

Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story

Tags

Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, Christmas, climate change, hope, It's A Wonderful Life, Paul Auster, short stories, The Christamas Dragon, tradition

As traditional in my house as It’s A Wonderful Life, The Grinch or Baileys with ice, when the shopping days dwindle and the nights draw in, I always find the time to settle down in an armchair and read Paul Auster’s Christmas story. I’m a big Auster fan, have been since The New York Trilogy all those years ago. I think he has a certain irresistible melancholy, a way of looking at the world that sums up the connections we have to everyone else, the little co-incidences that culminate to make life bearable. I also like the fluctuation of emotion; one minute amused, then puzzled, then sobbing uncontrollably, and there’s the beautiful sparse yet poetic prose, something every writer should aspire to create. My husband bought me a copy of the illustrated hardback edition of Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story a couple of years ago; the pictures, by the Argentinian artist Isol, are an excellent addition and somehow make you believe you are holding the story in your hands. The book is such a beautiful thing to own, pressed with a burgundy linen finish; the story unfolds over shiny black and white pages, pairs of which are given over entirely to the illustrations. It is an example of why some physical books will always endure. I love my kindle, but you can’t get the same frisson of excitement from the kindle edition, you don’t feel the weight and quality of what you are about to read, it’s like opening and expensively wrapped bar of chocolate and letting the first square melt in your mouth. The book is one of my all-time favourite Christmas presents and that’s before I even get to the story.

Initially written for the Christmas Day edition of the New York Times in 1990 (then used as a plot in the 1995 film Smoke) Auster has always maintained that he set out to write an unsentimental Christmas story (or, on reflection, perhaps that is just the character ‘Paul’ in the story). Whichever, I’m not sure he succeeded; the story is sentimental, heart-warming even, it gives you the required festive glow but there’s also a gritty side, an element of loneliness and desperation running throughout. For me this combination of hope and realism is what (plus an enviable mastery of structure) makes it a classic. Isn’t this what A Christmas Carol is all about, It’s A wonderful Life? That even in the depths of despair and loneliness there’s room for a little human kindness?

I won’t go into detail on the plot because you should really read it for yourself, suffice to say, it concerns a ‘fictional’ author trying to fulfil a commission to write a Christmas story for the New York Times. He is well and truly blocked and explains his predicament to the owner of a cigar store he frequents, Auggie Wren. Auggie takes photographs of the same spot every-day; the results are described thus;

‘Auggie was photographing time, I realized, both natural time and human time, and he was doing it by planting himself in one tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own.’

In the context of the story, Auggie’s photographs show us the connection of the individual to the bigger picture, as the seasons change and regulars mingle with unknown faces, ‘living an instant of their lives in the field of Auggie’s camera.’

It  goes on,

‘Once I got to know them, I began to study their postures, the way they carried themselves from one morning to the next, trying to discover their moods from these surface indications, as if I could imagine stories for them, as if I could penetrate the invisible dramas locked into their bodies.’

Auggie himself offers such a story, ‘the best Christmas story you ever heard,’ in exchange for lunch.

In the opening paragraph of the book, Auster sums up what is going to happen,

‘I heard this story from Auggie Wren. Since Auggie doesn’t come off too well in it, at least not as well as he’d like to, he’s asked me not to use his real name. Other than that, the whole business about the lost wallet and the blind woman and the Christmas dinner is just as he told me.’

Every Monday I run a reading group at the First Base homeless charity in Brighton, we read this story yesterday. They loved that bit, the idea that you could pre-empt your story in the first few sentences and still have people read on. But I think the way that opening is written makes it impossible for you not to read on; you know so much from it and yet, not enough. You know that Auggie doesn’t like the way he comes across, that there is some flaw in his behaviour, so from the off you know that the story isn’t all candles and mistletoe but you also have the potentially sentimental elements of a lost wallet, a blind woman and a Christmas dinner. Already you are guessing what will happen, you are participating in the invention of a Christmas tale. This is my favourite type of story, one in which the reader plays as big a part as the author. At the end of Auster’s story we (and Paul) are left wondering if Auggie hasn’t made the whole thing up to dupe his friend out of a free lunch. The reader is left to decide, is it true, made up or a little of both? Is Auggie a nice guy or not? Does it matter, so long as the story offers some insight into the human condition, a desire to spread goodwill amongst our neighbours, a little hope for the Christmas season? As Auster says, ‘As long as there’s one person to believe it, there’s no story that can’t be true.’

The story appears, wordless and in full at the end of Wayne Wang’s movie Smoke, overlaid with Tom Wait’s Innocent When You Dream.

I have written my own Christmas story, The Christmas Dragon. It’s nothing like this one, I’m not that good! It’s for children, for a start, I wrote it for my son’s last year and I hope it has, at least in part, achieved the goal of being in the main unsentimental. I wanted to make a real issue fun, so I wrote a kid’s story about climate change. There is Santa, polar bears and a dragon and, above all, there is hope.

 

Merry Christmas everyone!