100 Works of Art: (Visual) IS.Akureyri 10.03.05, Adam Jeppesen

For details on what this series involves, please see the first post.

5. IS.Akureyri 10.03.05, Adam Jeppesen

This photograph comes from a rather beautiful book I bought in Magma on Longacre in central London, and which I bought pretty much by accident, or rather on a whim. The 100 Works of Art (Visual) section may give the impression that I tend to find the things I love by falling over them, and this is largely accurate. I do also find things by having them thrown at me by friends shouting “YOU WILL LOVE THIS, DELILAH!”, but Wake, the book which contains this photograph, is one of the beautiful accidents.

IS.Akureyri 10.03.05 by Adam Jeppesen

The rest of the book is also fascinating, with a particularly haunting shot of tire marks on a headlights-lit patch of snow hinting at some terrible accident, and an aerial shot of a car park in Roskilde evoking for me at least (as someone who was involved and interested in alternative musical festivals at the time) the events of the eponymous 2000 festival at which nine people died in a crowd. Especially alarming to me at least as the following summer I nearly ended up joining them in a similar manner (bad crowd management at Reading Festival 2001: oh boy was there ever).

The reason that this photograph of all the strange and haunting shots in this “monograph” struck me is also quite personal, which is what I believe all reactions to art should be in some way.

I grew up in a number of places, but after some fairly mobile early years (Nottingham, Frome, Plymouth, and a smattering of places in Sabarkantha district, Gujarat) we settled in West Devon, and in order to get anywhere usually took a train out of Plymouth, leaving the car there. This meant that on the way back, getting home involved driving away from the meagre city lights of a small city widely regarded as a post-apocalyptic hell-hole by touring comedians and bands, and into the pitch black of unlit moorlands. For various reasons this really never set well with me as a child, and if you’ve ever had an apparently suicidal sheep try to fling itself in front of your eggshell-fragile and freezing-cold Citroen Diane you will understand why streetlights are wonderful and so are fences.

The lights of the city would disappear from the horizon like a great glowing jellyfish on the surface of some dark sea, and I would be swallowed by the moors for a few miles.

Now I live in London, and have done for more than a decade. Few things say “home” to me quite as much as seeing the whole vast configuration of city lights growing ever-larger in the shrinking distance. It is the most welcoming thing I can think of in the glowering dark; even flying into Seattle, a city I had never visited before, after an unconscionably long time travelling in the winter dark, seeing the lights come up below me gave me the most primitive feeling of relief. I am sure it relates somehow to campfires and the safety of the tribe, and that is just fine.

This photograph brings back all those warm, fuzzy feelings of homecoming: it says “you have been on a long and exhausting journey, but the end is in sight. Here is the light, the lights at the end of the seemingly relentless tunnel, and they are the lights of home. You don’t have far to go now”.

A homage to this shot also makes up the cover of Pass the Parcel.

Filed under: content: essay, content: real life, content: review, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, adam jeppesen, art, cities, great big urbisexual, night photography, personal history, photograph, photography, review, reviews

A little update about nothing in particular

Hello, I’m not posting very much at the moment because I’m trying to force myself to edit; this is resulting in a lot of tantrum-throwing on Twitter and one-sided arguments with myself which sadly cannot be won by shouting “you’re not my real dad” and slamming a door. The process of editing is not being helped by the weather being blindingly nice and making me long to go and sit in a park and drink wine and not edit; by Word Starter on my netbook being held together with glue and stupidity and therefore crashing every few minutes; and by my own self-sabotaging need to start trying to draw bad cartoons of Loki from The Avengers crying on the floor at 1am with a copy of Photoshop 7.0 which only works after you’ve opened it and closed it three times (while drinking and watching 90s movies, because I am a cool cat).

I do have plans for partaking of the 100 Blog Things challenge on the subject of the Arts, but every day that I think “I shall write my first blog post on this challenge” is a day when I reach 1am and still haven’t finished editing whichever chapter I’m working on.

So as a show of faith or an “I ain’tnt dead”, here’s a brief run-down of Things What I Have Been Doing:

• A visit to the Natural History Museum to see the inside-out animals; plastinated animal bodies showing their capillaries (which looks astonishing and very artistic, like someone has grown a duck or a rabbit out of some delicate, vibrant red fern) or musculature and ligaments, the crowning glory of which are a pair: a running giraffe and a kind of three-dimensional exploded diagram of a female Asiatic elephant, which is made all the more exciting for being an actual elephant. My main criticism of this other than “not enough exhibition” which I would have said even if it had been the length of the Bayeux Tapestry (which I have seen and been enormously bored by), is that as with so many museum exhibitions, the level of information provided was decidedly entry-level. As remarked by my companion for the day, scientist-and-comedian-and-designer-and-general-polymath Holly Yagoda, if you know anything about biology it’s assumed that you don’t want to learn any more by coming to a museum.
• That same day out also included a walk through Hyde Park and a walk through St James Park, the latter of which involved an encounter with some wildfowl that I was unable to identity. Roughly the sound of a small goose/large duck, with a ruddy patch in the middle of a white breast, a very narrow black bar across a white area of the wing, dark head, and a cry like a car that won’t start. Any ideas?
• I’ve been reading The Persian Boy by Mary Renault. Another of Mary Renault’s books, The Charioteer, is one of my absolute favourites, and so I went into this with high expectations. As someone overly invested in the relationship between Alexander of Macedon and Hephaestion I find I’m irritated by the attitude of the narrator (shut up, Bagoas), but it seems very realistic of the character to behave and think that way considering the kind of person he is and life he has led. I have no criticisms to level at the author for this historical fiction, but my God I want to slap the narrator a lot.
• Continuing the theme of science, last night I accompanied a couple of people to see Robin Ince’s current stand up show, Happiness Through Science. I have seen several of his various tours and rank him close to the top of my favourite comedians list, if not the number one slot. I’d describe his style as “manic”, peppered with impressions and tangents and excitement and cynicism. A self-styled curmudgeon, he actually comes across as being extremely warm and enthusiastic (as many self-styled curmudgeons tend to), brimming with knowledge he wants to share, and of course appropriately self-effacing (we are after all British). It is always pleasant to spend an evening being talked to as an intelligent adult rather than a fool or a child, and more so when explanations for things one might not already know are presented as “things I didn’t know, I don’t know if you know them, you probably already do”. Stand out moments included Robin interrupting himself to wail “I wish this was a fucking character!” of his own babbling and self-distraction, and a member of the audience towards the end standing up to offer an evidence-based heckle about the correct order of amino acids in a genome. That is the kind of audience one can expect at a Robin Ince gig.
• Aside from being a consumer of entertainment and enjoyer of this sudden burst of sunshine, I have also been patiently trying to rein in my propensity for feeling guilty about reading things I enjoy “because I ought to be doing something else”. So far it’s not going very well.

Filed under: books, content: real life, content: review, music/gigs, animals, biology, books, comedy, ducks, education, geese, happiness through science, london, mary renault, museums, reading, reviews, robin ince, science, stand-up, the natural history museum, the persian boy, wildfowl, wildlife

Notes from the literary frontline

I’m editing. I hate editing. I will do almost anything to avoid editing, up to and including the washing up and Hoovering, which normally I have to be forced to do at gunpoint or at the very least the threat of turning off the internet. I will not bore anyone with just how much I hate editing because I could very much fill a book with it, and the worst part is that I can see why it’s necessary. Just looking over this manuscript is making me want to throw it out of the window, and objectively it’s one of the better if not best things I’ve written.

I will instead allow this quote to stand in:

Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream

and then we’ll move on. Assume that “humans” here is “editing”.

However, in the course of the day so far, I have had two useful thoughts (while desperately trying to avoid editing 7 pages of single-spaced fiction that appears to be mostly descriptions of the quality of the wind over the North Sea: past self, I hate you and I wish you would die, and I don’t care what kind of paradox that would cause).

The first is that it turns out the absolute best way to try to construct a coherent, non-cheesy synopsis for a book that doesn’t ramble on is to imagine that you have been called upon by an impatient stand up comedian who will make fun of you no matter how you describe your work, but who will cut you off if you go on for too long and who may be persuaded to go easier on you if you stick to the facts, avoid the cliches, and don’t try to be self-effacing.

The second, drawn from a continuing argument about the death of the author vs  authorial intent, is this: the ultimate arbiter of the author’s intentions is the author. The ultimate arbiter of the reader’s experience and understanding of the text is the reader. Both of these positions are meaningless and mutable: the author’s belief about their intentions may alter, and the reader’s understanding of the text will almost certainly change with subsequent discussion or rereadings. The text, however, remains the text. Once the author and editors have finished tinkering, it is the Text Immutable. The words are the words, the story is the story, and the characters are the characters – whatever the author means them to stand for, or whatever the reader believes them to stand for.

Speaking of tinkering, I have to go back to hitting this paragraph with sticks until sense comes out of it.

Filed under: content: real life, barthes, being a writer sucks balls, editing, fiction, literary theory, publishing, synopses, the death of the author, the imminent death of the reader, tricks and tips, writing

Our Benighted Experiment In Universal Sufferage

Today is the day that Londoners vote on who we want to be Mayor; in previous Mayoral elections I’ve had a horse in the race, but this time Ken Livingston has been unable to keep his more odious opinions to himself and Boris Johnson continues to be a self-serving lizard creature, and I’m left with the option of either voting for that nice independent lady, or defacing my ballot paper (Paddick lost my vote when he wormily failed to give an opinion on whether or not Johnson did the right thing in withdrawing the “ex-gay” bus ads; Brian, you of all people I would expect to put your back behind the gay community).

Leaving aside my personal politics, however, this election has brought up an interesting question for me. How do you choose between two deeply unpleasant people? Assuming – falsely in this case – that one must vote for one or the other of a pair of people standing for an electoral position, let’s try this with a slightly analogous (although grossly exaggerated) pairing:

1. Actions: over all citizens of their constituency, this candidate exercises what brings good, regardless of their wealth, race, or crime rates. They work to defend even the communities towards whom they have personal feelings of antipathy, and do not aim to privilege their own wealth. Words: Unfortunately, they have some kind of prejudice against the group of people you personally come from; this does not come through in his actions, as discussed, but in his public addresses he is snide or rude repeatedly about your specific group in ways which you definitely find offensive.
2. Actions: this candidate seeks glory and wealth and preserves the money they give to their network of confiderates by depriving poverty-stricken areas. Their actions impact heavily on vulnerable people and, mysteriously, people who have voted against them in the past. Words: They are charming, affable, and evince whichever attitude sounds best. It is impossible to tell what they actually think, but they certainly always praise your personal group and are unlikely to ever show up on TV badmouthing you.

So who do you vote for? Of these caricatures – assuming nothing further about their policies, about their parties, about other matters: do you vote for the candidate whose actions benefit people but whose words insult and injure you, or do you vote for a candidate whose actions are to the detriment of many (including you) but whose words flatter and praise you?

Happily in reality this ridiculous choice does not exist in real life, and I am content to cast my lot in one of the other options that exist: after all, one can always spoil one’s ballot.

Filed under: content: essay, content: real life, boris johnson, caricature, impossible choices, ken livingston, local politics, london, london mayor, london mayoral election, politics

National Poetry Month: Day 11

The Ballad of the Boy Who Wanted to Shove a Soldering Iron in My Face, and Why He Was Right

I stood in a bathroom (not mine)
a foot from the door and listened
while shampoo-water dripped on
the floor and my wet back glistened
under buzzing strip light;
my ex was outside and speaking
which that night was freaking me out;
he’d just told a friend, “if I
see that bitch again, I’ll take
my soldering iron to her face.”
In my place you might’ve taken
fright, or started to cry; not I.
I turned off the light and waited,
until, as anticipated, Sam and his
silent audience sauntered away,
and (cold, drying) I slipped
back to the room today’s sexual
partner – not a boyfriend, just
a friend whose kindness ends
once you stop having sex (I’ve
had a lot: that was the first
incarnation of the ex). It stops
the minute you close your legs,
the friendship turns out to be not.
On this occasion I was told I
was dreaming, whatever Sam had
been scheming about it wasn’t me;
never mind that behind every door
in the hall there was a male brain
with an axe to grind over and over
again – my mouth was trouble, my
presence resented, but when
everyone’s ire was vented, half-way
down the vodka bottle the hands
would move to “fuck” from “throttle”.

How do I know now that he was right?
It wasn’t much later, just some
average night at the union bar,
with far-from-resolved issues floating
among our crowd like tissues in the
sink of some proud masturbator (Erik).
This is how I knew: interrupting,
“Feelings? You? Don’t make me laugh,”
he said, about four minutes before
I snapped and punched him in the head,
“You’re not even a person in the
first place.” So I seized his ponytail,
and smacked him in the face; the
ensuing ruck promised me further
unwaited infamy, and he told his
friends, “She’s always had it in for me,”
with a soupcon of suggestion that,
crazy as I’d proven to be, there was
nothing but his wounded dignity to be
considered. Perhaps if I’d be sober
I’d not have been over-inclined to take
his side; but the vodka coated the
remnants of my much-battered pride,
slipped inside my head and told me,
they want you dead, and with
no friends to enfold me in calmer,
sensible thinking – with no friend at
all except what I was drinking – it
was less than a week after my bar-front
attack when I launched from a window
and broke my own back.

Had he only been equal to the threats
he kept making (instead of being fearful,
swaggering, and faking) he might have
seared off the source of this shite,
left me burned and pitied, not still
seeking fights. But a victim’s never
equal in the stakes of sympathy,
and if bound for the hospital, it
wouldn’t be me who took it, but
whoever looked at my prescence and
said they’d not brook it; I was
an infection, a tick, beneath contempt,
and in the inflection of my name
to this day, I know it takes little
to incline people that way. I
open my mouth, the conversation heads
south and I limp out of the world
in disgrace, ready to wait in the
dark for an unearned burned face.

– Delilah Des Anges

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Throughout this month I will be nagging readers to donate to MSF

Filed under: ballad, content: poetry, content: real life, april, creative, creative writing, doctors without borders, medecins sans frontiere, msf, narrative poem, national poetry month, personal history, poems, poetry, writing

Extract From a Letter 2

Life continues chaotic, busy, and wearing, meaning that all writing or planning outside of another long letter is simply not happening. This blog will see a little more action in a day or two when April starts and the infernal nuisance of National Poetry Month begins, but until then have another extract from the never-ending letter:

An odd question occurs to me: what is the earth like where you are? Is it hard or soft? Is there topsoil? Is it the acidic stuff of where I grew up, or the chalky alkaline that turns out blue flowers and spindly trees? The landscape of my childhood was a split between windswept moors with the odd bent tree – the stuff of Brontë novels (I know you love Wuthering Heights) – where the grass is sheep-cropped short and the bracken comes up to your shoulder and every time you fall over you don’t land on the springy heather but on a vicious gorse bush. It is a landscape of rain and continual up and down, with granite bursting out of the thin soil, and bogs you could (and have) lose a horse in.

These vast windswept mountain ranges were interspersed with deep valleys of the sort that end up in Lord of the Rings – shallow, fast-flowing rivers and moss-covered boulders, streams full of slippery round rocks, and mossy, old oak trees. An old landscape and according to some documentary or other it is a totally unique habitat, globally.

The rest of the time I lived in a land of chalk downs and long grass, but both were largely treeless landscapes characterised by butterflies of rarity: Dartmoor had the Common Fritillary (a misnomer, it is very rare), which is orange-brown, and Somerset had the Chalk Blues. These places are so close together by Australian standards, but geographically so different.

What you may take from my letter excerpts is that I spent a lot of time rambling about West Country landscapes in the vaguely nostalgic manner of someone who has absolutely no intention of ever leaving London again.

Filed under: content: real life, content: snippets, butterflies, dartmoor, devon, epistolary, letter, letters, quotes, somerset, west country, writing

T-shirts!

All of these are available from my Etsy shop for the terribly reasonable price of £14.99 plus P&P.

Click on image for listing

Navy blue stretch girly cut t-shirt to fit a UK12, with attached vintage rosary. Tired of having to constantly reposition your necklace to get it lying just so? Can’t quite achieve the perfect rakish angle? Fed up with necklaces irritating the back of your neck? Well, we’ve solved that for you: this rosary is affixed to the t-shirt in the option rake position, and the ends of this dainty little beauty stop at the shoulder – enough for a necklace effect, but not enough to scratch your skin.

Click on image for listing

Girly cut stretch t-shirt in grey, to fit UK size 12, featuring red thread, glass bead and acrylic bead embroidery on the shoulder. Perfect for convincing people – temporarily – that you’ve been mauled by a werewolf.

Click on image for listing

Fits a UK size 16, can be worn by women or particularly hip men, as demonstrated by the long-suffering model; features black and white embroidered swirls, and a triple string of beaded chains and a detachable cross charm on the shoulder.

 

Filed under: content: real life, beaded, black, blood, blue, clothes, clothing, craft, creative, embroidered, embroidery, etsy, fashion, grey, navy, red, rosary, sewing, t shirts, tank top, vampire, vest, werewolf, white

The Illustrated Woman

On Saturday I went to a tattoo studio in Greenwich, arriving via a series of unfortunate events just on time, whereupon my tattooist was late and we didn’t get started until an hour after we were supposed to.

I had not had any work done by this fellow previously, in part because he only moved to England in December, and one of the important parts of tattooing for me is being able to manage a reasonable conversation with the person tattooing me so that I don’t actually fall asleep. As it was I was overtired and became drowsy a few times (and oddly cold), but the conversation itself was satisfying as we dissected music, sound recording, legends and mythos of musicians, the difference between music performance and stand-up, the story-telling properties of songwriting, books we both liked, and cultural change.

The first of the two tattoos I received was discussed at length in a previous post:

quote from "The Ghost Road" by Pat Barker

The second, which I kept schtum about, is a depiction of Narcissus taken from a pencil drawing by Gillian Blekkenhorst, which I have had for several years, folding it and unfolding it as I move house. Narcissus was the subject of one of my Creative Writing projects at university, and naturally represents here the notion of self-love and also a caution against excessive self-involvement:

Narcissus by Gillian Blekkenhorst and Owen Williams

Filed under: content: real life, black and white, gillian blekkenhorst, greek legend, greek myth, illustration, ink, legend, myth, narcissus, pat barker, quotes, tattoo, tattooing, tattoos, the ghost road, the regeneration trilogy

Extract from a letter.

Our landlady has very kindly decided that since our house is, not to put too fine a point on it, falling down, we have to move out. She’s not given us the hugest of windows to get on with this, there aren’t many places I really want to live, and we own a lot of things (this is primarily my fault because I am to books what magpies are to tin foil). As a result of this I’m even less able to get my head around writing anything intelligent at the moment, so here’s an extract from a letter I started writing during my lunch break today.

Almost anything can be an act of devotion if you want it to be one.

We have beautiful churches here. What makes them ‘holy’, or gives them a sense of the divine, is the shape. It produces echoes that move upwards, and keeps the place cool and strangely silent: there is self-imposed order in these buildings designed to make you feel small but in touch with something bigger: Leonard Cohen captures it sometimes in his songs of adulation, sacrifice, and self-abasement. His passion is masochistic, religious – whether sanctified or decidedly profane, he understands that there is pleasure to be found in kneeling before something.

One of the beaches we used to drive to in the evenings was a long narrow scar cutting inland between a huge high cliff and a lower one made of sandwiches of dark rock run through with wide quartz seams. It was a terrible place for swimming – I nearly drowned myself on a number of occasions – but on our way in and out of the deep valley there was a graveyard up on the cliff top.

It was small, full, and completely surrounded by a stone wall that came up to my chest – filled with plants and birds’ nests – and with a roofed-over gateway of the sort that is common in churchyards in Southern England. But if there was a church it had gone. The graves lay in a sort of order, but the rows had grown higgledy-piggledy and everywhere long pale grass was taking over the land of the dead, just as the branches scaled the walls. I have always loved cemeteries of the old English sort because they are quiet, empty, and home to exciting wildlife, but this one, with its view to endless blue skies and nodding ox-eye daisies, with the wind bringing the sea into my hair at sunset, was always my favourite.

It was unusual for an English graveyard for its lack of trees, specifically the heavy yew that haunts most. Somehow the bright and breezy loneliness of it seemed more appropriate than the stifling mourning-scent of yew, a bit like the Chinese preference for white for mourning being somehow more sensible than the European predilection for black.

It is a very long and meandering letter of the sort I haven’t written in a good long time, and I’m fairly pleased to find myself in the right frame of mind for writing to people at all. It places the sci-fi short out of commission for the time being, perhaps, but there was no deadline on that.

Currently reading: The Charioteer by Mary Renault (a reread and a comfort read, which I’d already found I needed before the eviction notice), and Where Angels Fear To Tread by E M Forster, with occasional digressions into David Cronenberg by John Costello as I have returned to my old, bad habit of reading several books at once.

Currently listening to: A return to obsessive re-listenings of Virtue by Emmy the Great, although I have promised a friend I would give her my thoughts on England Keep My Bones by Frank Turner.

Currently watching: No television, although I intend to catch up with The 10 O’Clock Show to mitigate the poisonous seepings of the newspapers I can’t help seeing on the way to work, and a kind of fervent fascination with cut scenes from the 1987 film adaptation of Maurice.

And a small favour: If you have been eyeballing anything in my shop, between now and early May would be a lovely time for you to buy it, as I need to get stock out of my house before I move.

Filed under: content: real life, content: snippets, beach, books, cemeteries, churches, cornwall, e.m. forster, friends, graveyards, jewellery, letters, mary renault, personal, real life, religious architecture, shopping, the charioteer, the west country, where angels fear to tread

Personal Post: A World Of Meaning In Four Words

Yesterday I took the train from my workplace (Elephant and Castle) to my tattooist (Greenwich, or more specifically Maze Hill) in order to book an appointment, as one of the rituals of acquiring paid employment for me these days is to waste large chunks of my income on permanent additions to the body I’ve been left with by genes and circumstance.

On my return from this brisk, slightly disorienting visit to Living Image Tattoo, I found two things: one, that the train passing from Greenwich station to Deptford headed directly into the setting sun – a ball of red and orange balanced precariously on the skyline of the incoming city – and gave me the powerful sensation that I was living inside a poem, and two, that it being the season of short sleeves on the Underground once more, I was back to catching people trying to read my tattoos without me noticing.

The woman I caught examining the tattoo on my left inside elbow (“every time i let myself lose, i have won“) gave me an embarrassed look (she was wearing a mustard-coloured duffel coat and had the keen expression of someone who knows she is intelligent but hasn’t often been told that she is attractive). I merely rotated my arm so that she could read it, and said, “Is that better?”

She nodded at the tattoo in a worried fashion as if reading something that she would be examined on later, and looked away. I am used to a variety of reactions to my tattoos, although happily since moving to London the majority of them have been salutatory or curious rather than, as in my more provincial hometown, abusive. Once, at the Comedy Store in Piccadilly Circus a woman in the queue for the toilets during an interval struck up a long conversation with me because she was curious as to the meaning of the opposite number in text tattoos: the right inner elbow, which reads “anything you do to me, i will learn to enjoy“.

As almost every one of the more visible text tattoos I have can be interpreted in a number of ways, I’m usually at ease with explaining them to strangers, but this woman was so inquisitive and so delighted in hearing that it came from a story I’d written (I didn’t dare tell her it was a lurid piece of Torchwood fan fiction!) that I grew nervous and was eager to get away…

This latest appointment will “deface” (as my mother so disdainfully describes it) my upper left arm, and the inside bones of my right wrist. The left arm is to be an image, although of what I wish to leave a surprise as I rather enjoy surprising my friends with tattoos (I also enjoy buying them tattoos as birthday presents, when I can afford to). The right wrist is a quote from my best-beloved series of books:

from "The Ghost Road" by Pat Barker

As with all my text tattoos there are myriad reasons for this specific sentence fragment. First, context - which will contain spoilers for The Ghost Road - this is part of a slightly longer sentiment:

I think it’s a way of claiming immunity. First-person narrators can’t die, so as long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we’re safe. Ha bloody fucking ha.

The Ghost Road, Pat Barker

The words are written by Billy Prior, the protagonist of the series (or one of them), in reference to all his fellow-soldiers on the WW1 Western Front who are compulsively keeping diaries, scribbling poems, sending lengthy descriptive letters home. His theory is that by turning their sufferings into stories they are granting themselves some notional escape from the near-inevitability of their death and (subtextually) their total lack of control over the situation they are in.

For this reason, first, the quote is a good one for a tattoo: I have been keeping diaries for fifteen years now, and can attest to the power of writing down events in turning them into manageable fictions rather than unmanageable horrors (even if I have quite obviously never experienced anything so mind-destroyingly dire as the young men at the Front). The claiming of safety created by story is a powerful delusion, and in part it is an accurate one, for in fictionalising our traumas we remove them from the forefront of experience and turn them into someone else’s problem.

Secondly, Prior is a character with whom I have a great deal of sympathy. Vicious at times, intelligent, belligerent, underestimated, “neither fish nor fowl” both in terms of sexuality (he is bisexual) and class (educated working class, exceeding his parents but acutely aware that he does not “pass” for the middle classes’ requirements), suffering from PTSD and utterly disdaining his own misery, he is filled with conflict so acute that he develops, for a time, a protective split personality.

Prior’s bitter, bitter cynicism and fatalism expressed in the four words are what draws me most inexorably to this quote: ha bloody fucking ha. It is very English, to make humour out of one’s own pain, and the statement – dry and without mirth – speaks of so many layered-on emotions it’s almost impossible to unpick them all.

He has been wrestling with himself over the morality of what he is doing, and with the knowledge that his desire to return to the Front is for what others might deem squalid, ungallant reasons. He is, whether he chooses to accept it or not, afraid of going forward, and unable to go back. He continues onward because he has been given no choice, but strove, fought, and argued to have that particular choice removed from him. He seeks both annihilation and survival, experiences both vicious self-loathing and a strange freedom in the terror of oncoming combat, and embodies in ha bloody fucking ha an unspoken, unneeded torrent of words. Billy Prior has fought for his right to surrender to the decisions of people he does not trust; he has everything to live for back in England and pushes towards death. He remains, even in the midst of the “bloodiest conflict in human history”, at war with himself.

And he acknowledges this, the absurdity of his mental state and the absurdity of the war, his anger and his resignation, in four words:

ha bloody fucking ha

Not only is this a tribute to my favourite series of books, and my most-studied period of history, but it is to me at least the phrase which best reflects the combination of nihilism and dark humour with which I find it most sensible to live my life.

I’m looking forwards to it.

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