Cycling News

A few months ago I quit running for good, because of a chronic problem with my right heel. Three weeks ago, I finally got ultrasounded, the upshots of which were a diagnosis of probable Achilles rupture, and my grateful acceptance of injections of cortisone and a saline solution. After a couple of days of discomfort, it's worked a dream. Thanks be to the NHS, and to Dr Hussain and the young lady assisting him.

During the episode, Dr Hussain remarked that he was very pleased that I had bought a bike, which is what we now turn our attention to. A few weeks after quitting running, while casting about for an alternative way of keeping fit without subjecting my heel to constant impact (hence Dr Hussain's approval), I bought an entry level £550 road bike.

Cycling has been great. I don't use my bike for commuting - just, two or three times a week, taking my bike out for fairly long rides, taking advantage whenever possible of the fairly extensive and growing network of bike paths around Bristol. I wear some moderately ridiculous luminous gear - for me it's all about the visibility, even if it makes me a bona-fide mid-50's MAMIL.

Last Sunday, as a guest of Justin, a friend and fellow ex-philosopher, I participated in the Bristol CTC 50-miler, from Blaise Castle over the Severn Bridge, detouring through several Welsh villages and hamlets to Tintern, where we had lunch before making our way back more directly to Chepstow and over the bridge back to Blaise Castle. I was absolutely knackered towards the end, and can only thank everyone for their forbearance, especially with my two punctures and impossible tyres. I must be quite fit all the same, because despite my Sunday prostration, I felt fully recovered on Monday, and quite looking forward to getting back on my bike.

Which brings us to Friday morning. I left home, and took my way down through Bristol city centre, where I very much like the dedicated cycle lanes. I got over onto Spike Island, behind the M Shed or whatever they call it now, and merged right towards the waterfront. The area is criss-crossed with tram lines, and I thought I was being scrupulous in riding quite slowly and avoiding them, but I'm guessing a wheel still got caught in one. It all happened very suddenly. My left hand, left ankle, and helmeted head struck the pavement.

And here's the thing. My helmet completely saved my head from any injury whatsoever. So from now on I am a vehement partisan of the compulsory wearing of helmets.

As to the rest, they x-rayed my ankle and wrist/hand. My ankle is ok except for being fairly swollen, and is in fact very walkable. My wrist/hand is in slightly worse shape. It's swollen and somewhat sprained, although thankfully I can type with it. The main thing is that I was wearing my helmet, as I always do, and as everyone should, and should be made to.

An Extract from Ch14 of Helix Folt the Conservative

Upon the morning following a further day’s elapse, Sir Hearty Luncheon broke his fast by making free with the haunch of an urchin slain and gibbeted for six weeks, and then frozen for the duration of its flight in the executive jet of Dives the Billionaire. It had arrived with an epslootly charming handwritten note from the Billionaire himself. Couldn’t thenk a chep enough for being an epsloot brick about one shedding one’s skin in the back of the poor chep’s Lexus, and, had m’beaters flush this one out from a system of culverts on the East side of the terroir: ten year old, which I trust you’ll agree has the makings of an excellent vintage. Baste well, blowtorch and serve with garlic, yak butter and parsley. Sir Hearty, crunching the grilled arse between his dental implants, rogering its soggy fragments with his tongue, swallowing them, inclined on the whole to share the Billionaire’s assessment. There was no suspicion of cant in la vie gourmandise. The sin, the cant if it must be insisted upon, lay only in the thoughtless persecution of innocent pleasures.

Very much contented with these ruminations, Sir Hearty looked up from Metal Bulletin tittle-tattle he had been reading on the screen propped up next to the remains of the urchin’s haunch. In a not unpleasurable abstraction, he gazed along the length of the very long and very shiny oak dining table at which he sat alone and in state, to where the French windows gave upon a sunlit lawn patrolled by three or four pairs of gentlemen in very sharp suits with submachine guns and guard dogs. It was all too delightfully perfect. Whither Arcadia, so transient and fleeting! The Second Law’s inexorability. All was vanity indeed which, when Sir Hearty came to think of it, bore a disconcertingly close relation to cant. Wherefore Sir Hearty Luncheon, who never did bear the cant, now forbore by effort of will to consider beauty’s transience or other similarly morbid abstractions.

As if on cue Lady Luncheon bustled in, and flopped down next to Sir Hearty.

“Wot-ho Luncheon.”

“Good morning Pandora, I trust you slept well.”

“What’s for brekkie?” she barked, peering over Sir Hearty’s elbow, “hmm, slum kid’s bum again. Did we epslootly establish once and for all that it was organic?”

“Since I considered the matter entirely jejune,” said Sir Hearty, “I naturally did not enquire further into it.”

“Well rilly,” said Lady Luncheon, “one would begin to incline to describe us as flirting with the margins of a brown study.”

“Not at all,” Sir Hearty replied, “It is quite otherwise. That to enquire into jejune matters is to engage in cant is a matter of analyticity, I would have thought. The embedded proposition is surely a member of the set of propositions which are true in virtue of the meanings of their parts. For this reason alone, I have made it my solemn and universalizeable principle to refrain from enquiry into jejune matters, seeing as I never did bear the cant.”

“Poo-poo,” said Lady Luncheon betraying certain marks of mild dudgeon, and “fiddlesticks.” There was a brief pause, while she fished from her cleavage a folded sheet of paper. “This came,” she said.

Sir Hearty Luncheon bestowed upon the sheet a cursory perusal.

“It is from that nasty old Communist of yours,” he said, “he claims to have found your little yap dog. What is that to me?”

Lady Luncheon drew a great breath.

“What is that to us, Luncheon? One suspects that our cursory perusal did not make us as thoroughly acquainted as perhaps we might have been with Golly Roger’s missive.”

But Sir Hearty would persist.

“I can personally attest to the strength of the correlation between adjacencies of communists and canines on the one hand, and endemic cant on the other hand. I never did bear,” he added very hollowly, “the cant.”

Lady Luncheon replaced her great breath.

“Poo-poo,” said she once more, and “fiddlesticks.”

Sir Hearty was nonetheless moved to further expatiation.

“Where once cant is suffered to encroach upon the perimeters of the Pale,” said the Mendip Marcus Crassus, “it proves virulent and becomes very soon endemic. Cant is virulent and becomes very soon endemic where once it is suffered to encroach upon the perimeters of the Pale, and for this reason alone it is imperative that cant be extirpated wherever and whenever we have the misfortune to encounter it. I never did,” he very hollowly added, “bear the cant.”

“Poo-poo,” said for a third time Lady Luncheon replacing her second great breath, “poo-poo and fiddlesticks. We are over-egging the pudding. And we are doing this,” said she, “this over-egging of the pudding, because of our callow milquetoast refusal to recognise a blatant affront.”

“I cannot be expected,” said Sir Hearty peevishly, “to concern myself with matters pertaining to your little yap dog. You might instruct a minion, Pandora. You might indeed.”

“This pertains to concerns,” said the Lady Macbeth of the Somerset Levels, with a certain froideur creeping into her tone, “this pertains to concerns rather wider than the restoration of Mr Widdles. Wider concerns about the sort of behaviour which we accept as respectful of our station in life, and equally about the sort of behaviour which we regard as an impertinent affront to our station in life. Golly Roger,” said she, “will not bring Mr Widdles to us. We are instead to go to him, as though we were his supplicants. It is all very base. One would have expected those of us pretending to a sensitivity to the infliction of cant to appreciate the impropriety of such a notion, one would indeed.”

“You might instruct a minion,” said Sir Hearty, “all the same.”

The Opening of Chapter 7 of Helix Folt the Conservative

Chapter 7

The Lexus, emissary of all that was polished and gleaming and gorgeous and above all good, smoothed its path through the desolation of the eastern suburbs. By Page Park, a brief coagulation of the traffic compelled that conveyance to tarry awhile. In the back thereof, Lady Luncheon, fat and floral, adjusted the malevolent chihuahua reposing in the handbag upon her adamantine thighs, and eyed through the glass the louts and common sluts congregating upon the pavement.

“Gracious,” she said, “such funny little people, it is almost like a different species. Rilly, Luncheon, one has positively no idea unless one ekshly prepared to sit down and take tay with the common folk.”

Beside her, Sir Hearty Luncheon, doyen of provincial merchant banking, and this late forenoon very much resembling the form of an egg upon an exquisitely tailored boulder, drew breath, and then exhaled.

“I do wish, my dear,” said he finally, with in his tones something of the sepulchral, “I do wish that you would refrain from animadverting upon vulgar matters which quite properly fall beneath the notice of the cultivé. It is very near to being the grossest form of cant, and I never did bear the cant.”

So saying, Sir Hearty subsided into the naugahyde plush, which with a sigh evinced its sympathy.

Lady Luncheon bestowed upon the companion of her years a smile, then patted the chihuahua, deftly avoiding its fangs.

“Poo poo, Luncheon,” said she, “we must always exert ourselves so as not to lapse into one of our brown studies. Exertion, Luncheon, that is the key. Exertion. Isn’t that right, Mr Widdles?”

Being thus addressed, the chihuahua signified its dissent with a ear-splitting yap. Sir Hearty, flinching, held nonetheless his peace.

After an hiatus, the traffic commenced a tentative inching forwards and then, thinking the better of it, lapsed once more into petrification. Lady Luncheon, leaning forward and smothering the chihuahua beneath her magnificent embonpoint, vented her frustration at the turbaned neck in front.

“Rilly, Mr Singsong, is there no means by which we may exert ourselves so as to expedite progress? One confesses oneself epslootly wan.”

“Regrettably not, my lady,” murmured Mr Jagtar Singh, “ve are very much in the lap of the gods.”

Lady Luncheon flung herself back into the naugahyde plush, producing in that commodity a gasp, and in the chihuahua another murderous yelp.

“Well,” she said crossly, “well rilly. Time after time one forms the reasonable expectation that the functionaries will finally upon this one occasion exert themselves, and inevitably time after time it is only setting oneself up for further disappointment. One finds one’s personal reserves of exertion lamentably depleted. Isn’t that right, Mr Widdles?”

That canine Lazarus, being once more disinterred from its mistress’s embonpoint, now defiled the ears with an appalling shriek.

“I do wish, my dear,” said Sir Hearty very wretchedly, “I do wish that you would look into the means of rendering the brute placid. Is there not for such distemper a sedative capsule?”

“We are projecting, Luncheon,” said the redoubtable lady, “instead of exerting ourselves in order to escape our brown study, Luncheon, we are projecting our brown study upon an innocent creature which never hurt a fly. Isn’t that right, Mr Widdles?”

Sir Hearty, eyed the loathsome creature as it bared its fangs at him, yet held nonetheless his peace.

The traffic again bestirred itself, initiating this time a stuttering progress.

“Not bumped into Minnie Ledwitch in epslootly yonks,” said Lady Luncheon, rummaging beneath the hindquarters of the chihuahua and producing a packet of Bath Olivers, “rather went to ground, one feels, after she insisted on splicing herself to that sopping wet windbag of hers.”

“Quicksotte,” said Sir Hearty testily, “having more than once been put to the necessity of ejecting that certified cretin from my suite of offices, I have come to regard him as the epitome of cant,” and added by way of afterthought, “I never did bear the cant.”

“A most unfortunate match,” mumbled Lady Luncheon through crumbs of Bath Oliver, “lord alone knows what Minnie saw in him. It is rilly quite opaque to one,” and, proffering the packet, added “want biccie?”

“I most certainly do not,” snapped Sir Hearty, “want biccie. Nursery diminutives are the veriest acme of cant, concerning which,” he added querulously, “I believe that I have made my feelings clear. Others may bear it. I never did.”

Soft Cartel published my short story

My thanks to Soft Cartel, who have seen fit to publish my short story Contracts for the Design of Certain Vulgar Necessities. It's a very dense, rather nasty gimp/swinger-club reimagining of H.G.Wells's Island of Dr Moreau.

Soft Cartel to Publish My Short Story

I'm pleased to announce that Soft Cartel have agreed to publish my short story "Contracts for the Design of Certain Vulgar Necessities" in their June issue.

Short fiction is a side of my work which I have slightly neglected over the last couple of years. In all, I have written 12-14 short stories, varying in length from 2,000-7,000 words. CftDoCVN will be only the fourth of these to have been published, after Curse of the Traffic Penis (Undertow) 25 years ago, and Lolitasaurus (Twisted Vol.1) and Disaster of the Will (Fictional Cafe) in the last couple of years.

It strikes me that my short fiction vs. long fiction prose styles are very different from eachother. When writing short fiction, I write in a very compressed and modernist style of the sort that you might expect to find in genre writing - e.g. science fiction. My long fiction tends to be much more florid and expansive, and reflective of my tastes as a reader, which lean very heavily towards the classics of the literary canon.

I translated my French sonnet into English

Here's my original Sonnet 141, published back in August in the French Literary Review No.28:-

Sonnet 141

Après avoir ces cent quarante écrits,

je suis épuisé et me considère

une langue craquée léchante, dedans, un puits

empli d’une boue visqueuse, d’une croûte grossière.

Il en reste quinze encore, coincés, cachés:

des crapauds rotants que les murs moussus

font résonner. Enfin, bloquée, fâchée,

la langue, toute sèche et vulgaire devenue,

va bifurquer, et désormais siffler.

Chaque midi, pour un instant, le soleil

éclaire cette vie grimpante - viens regarder!

Voilà en bas, frétillante et vermeille,

la langue, les crapauds fugitifs, la chasse

avant que l’ombre couvre la disgrâce.

And here's the translation, in which I've preserved intact both the iambic pentametrical meter and the conventional Shakespearean rhyme scheme. The numbering refers to the verse's place in a collection currently in construction, provisionally titled 'Bristolian Cantos & Epigrams':-

XVII

Sonnet 141 en englais, traduction de l’auteur

These forty and one hundred thus inscript,

being sore fatigued, myself I do conceive

as cracked tongue licking in a dirty crypt

filled with a slimy mud up to the eaves.

Just fifteen of them left, captive, concealed:

those toads whose croaking on the mossy walls

reverberates. At last, rancid, congealed,

the tongue, gone dry from talking utter balls,

will bifurcate, and like a serpent hiss

Each midday for an instant, the sunshine

illuminates the orgy - come, watch this!

Down there below, writhing and intertwined,

the tongue, the hunted toads, the brutish chase,

before the shadow covers the disgrace.

Excerpt from Helix Folt the Conservative - my novel in progress

Tad Curmudgeonly, lordly luminary of the local offices of that venerable campaigning organisation Greenwar, was delighted to make acquaintance with this johnny-come-lately whelp of his sister, and waxed exceedingly loquacious under the influence of the obscure and précieuse gin with which he was plied by the fellow. Apart from looking somewhat askance at the, shall we say, semitic appearance of the surname with which his nephew presented himself, he betrayed very little curiosity as to the provenance of the cove, being keen to expatiate at considerable length upon certain of his own interests - the iniquities of modern commercial agriculture, the numberless multitudes of benighted subcontinental farmer-wallahs whom the thraldom of modern crop science had driven to make away with themselves, and the spiritual desiccation of modern schooling with its gradgrindian fixation upon rote learning and competitive sports, practices serving only to gratify the instincts of the bloated Israelite bankster and the portly Israelite factory magnate. From these topics, he strayed as the fancy took him up and down many and diverse conversational lanes and by-ways, frequently finding himself in dialectical culs-de-sac, from which he only with difficulty extricated himself, and then only by means of summoning the aid of his nephew.

For his part, Mark Wankstain tolerated this imposition with his customary equanimity; and when, very late that night, he finally returned to the familial bungalow in Mangotsfield, it was with the consciousness of having gleaned from the tsunami of his uncle’s verbiage at least one nugget, namely that Uncle Curmudgeonly felt a profound personal distaste for Crass Cheseham.

“Ghastly jumped-up little plebeian, reeking of armpits and feet. Betrays his want of education in that unlettered filth which the Council’s culture-boobies pay him to spray all over the walls. Lord knows what your poor dear mama sees in him.” And now venting a sigh and a harrumph, he added, with his characteristic insensitivity, “at least he is not that palsied poltroon Quicksotte, I suppose. That is as much as can be said for him.”

Notwithstanding his animus against the dreadful oik, Uncle Curmudgeonly counselled against Cheseham’s summary rustication from the Ledwitch kraal.

“It pains me to say this, but the man’s gorn bush. Bosom pals with all the big chief bone-in-the-nose blackamoors in St Pauls. Fact of the matter is, dear boy, squalid and distasteful though the business be, you’re best off appointing him your agent for the ward contest.”

In response to this, Mark Wankstain smiled most toothsomely, and reflected upon the leverage which he enjoyed over the truffle-boar in question, in virtue of his appointment as dispenser-in-chief of ponce-making patronage.

The revelation of young Wankstain’s intention to forsake the Greens, the socialists, and even the liberals, in order to stand as, of all things, a Tory, was initially somewhat discombobulating to his uncle. However, and chiefly by dint of several further and commendably liberal applications of the obscure and précieuse gin, Mr Curmudgeonly had within the space of thirty or forty minutes reconciled himself to the notion that it was not altogether a mean thing to switch a succession of hobbled mounts for a fresh one.

“There has of course been no green politics worthy of the name,” he announced, “since the present shower of sock-’n’-sandal namby-pambies disavowed their roots in the honest old British Union of Fascists.”

Labour and the Liberal Democrats came in for like deprecations. Socialism had been an empty vessel ever since those middle-manager thugs in their shiny off-the-peg suits had chucked good old Wedgie Benn overboard. And Lord knew what the Liberals stood for these days - Uncle Curmudgeonly never could abide buggers, and most especially not buggers who went in for shooting eachother’s dogs; which being so and by process of elimination, there remained but one course open to the blue-blooded bien penseur feeling himself obliged to do whatever he found necessary to retard the degeneration of this once great realm.

Sonnet 24 accepted by Zoetic Press

I'm pleased to announce that Lise Quintana and her colleagues at Zoetic Press, the publishers of the Non-Binary Review, have accepted Sonnet 24 for publication as a feature in their forthcoming Alphanumeric, focussing on the life & works of Antoine de Saint Exupéry. I'm given to understand that links to Sonnet 24 will be forthcoming. Here, meanwhile, is a link to Zoetic's main website.

The state of play with regard to my sonnet cycle is that to date the following have been published, or have publication pending:-

Sonnet 74         Commended entry Sentinel Literary Quarterly Competition March 2017
Sonnet 142       2nd Prize SLQ Competition August 2017
Sonnet 141       Published in French Literary Review August 2017
Sonnet 24         Publication pending, Zoetic Press/Non-Binary Review/Alphanumeric

It is quite clear to me that four publications, gratifying as they have been and continue to be, are not as yet enough to justify publishing the entire 155 sonnet cycle as a collection. For this happen requires, I would think, at least another half-dozen individual publications. Accordingly, I'll carry on submitting sonnets to journals. I'm presently also getting stuck into the plotting of Helix Folt the conservative, which will turn my Bristolian trilogy - Amoeba Dick, Pretty Poli, and Odour Issues, into a tetralogy,

Sonnet 16. Insipid, Lamentable Jeremy, Odour Issues, and Helix Folt the Conservative

Here's a Petrarchan sonnet which I wrote a good 18 months ago, but which seems a little bit more relevant than in those halcyon days before the Red Menace became quite so immanent.

Sonnet 16

Insipid, lamentable Jeremy

gird thou thy loins in shell suit of a beige

appropriate for this heroic age,

and thus accoutred smite the Pharisees.

Compassed was Sir de Montfort all about

with lounging scribes, makers of likenesses,

and gentlemen from the Daily Express,

and Watson: spectacles, disposed to shout.

Insipid, lamentable Jeremiah,

Milne’s glove puppet, who fists you as you flail.

Your praises shall be warbled by no choir,

instead your epitaph’s “utter betrayal”.

Who protest’s luxuries has long enjoyed,

is by burdens of duty soon annoyed.

I'm also delighted and relieved to be able to say that I've finished Odour Issues. I'm spending the next couple of weeks giving it a final read-through before publishing the first Kindle edition. This could probably happen within the next few days, were I not simultaneously engaged in some fairly extensive landscaping and wall rebuilding at home. I'm also looking forward to starting work on my next project, my George Eliot-parodying Rees-Mogg satire Helix Folt the Conservative.