THE STORY SO FAR: PART 107

SETBACKS & SURVIVAL—I FIND IT HARD TO KNOW WHAT TO MAKE OF 2012—BUT HAVE ENDED UP SLIGHTLY AHEAD

Seattle specializes in gray, rainy days—but, paradoxically, there are enough truly gorgeous days to lift the heart. Today is such a day—though it is cold. I was out walking this morning doing various chores, and enjoyed it greatly. There is something quite uplifting about a brisk, cold, sunny day. Also, I am much relieved I can walk normally again. Earlier this year an old tendon injury flared up and, for over four months, I thought I might be limping into my old age. Not so, evidently; or not so just yet. I am much consoled. I love to walk. Perhaps an understatement.

The best holiday I ever had in my life was a walking holiday in Devon, England. I was based in an old inn in Chagford and made forays across Dartmoor. I love to walk. It’s a strange activity which leaves one exhausted—if you have walked enough—but feeling marvelous. As with so much of life, that seems to make scant sense—but there it is.

Dartmoor is famous for its beauty, its notorious prison—which I saw from a distance—and for The Hound of The Baskervilles—which I neither heard nor otherwise encountered. Nor, sadly, did I meet up with Sherlock Holmes.

2012 started badly with the tragic death of one of my nephews in January. That followed a veritable year of loss in 2011 to the point where I sent out a somewhat whimsical Christmas e-mail at the close of 2011 forbidding any recipient to die. It seems to have worked—though it was a near thing where my friend, Greg Wilcox was concerned. He was attending a Fiftieth reunion at West Point—a three day event—when he suffered a heart attack. Evidently what they say about the doings at such occasions is all true! Anyway, thanks to my e-mail—with a modest contribution from the medical profession—he has made an excellent recovery.

My old boss, Jack Clary, did die but he was 86 and had lived a long and productive life. I was quite upset nonetheless. I held Jack in high regard—and liked him personally. He gave me my first big break in life when he allowed me to set up and run Addmaster UK—the subsidiary of his company, the Addmaster Corporation of California (Fifty years in being this year). It—the British operation—was highly successful, though I left it eventually to write—a decision which made no financial sense, but which has brought me riches beyond dreams in other ways—with some financial success thrown in.

Such events apart, I wrote a 500 plus page website—which has still to see the light of day—did a great deal of planning and editing (vastly more time consuming than I expected, but well worth the effort) wrote over 150 blogs, consolidated my database approach (a subject of scant importance to anyone but yours truly), continued my research into the U.S. economy, engaged in extensive correspondence with siblings, relatives and friends—but did not write any new books (an omission I hope I will not repeat while I have strength). Unless I’m writing a major opus, I would like to think I can write a book a year these days.

That doesn’t seem much for a year’s hard work, but writing is rather like painting and decorating—it’s the preparation that takes the time. Actually, that is not entirely true. Preparations can be extremely time-consuming, but where the totality of writing is concerned, it is the preparation, writing, re-writing, editing, and marketing which consume one’s days—with marketing constituting the greatest distraction. How to reconcile writing with marketing is the writer’s dilemma in this internet age—especially as most writers are modest, introspective types who regard self-promotion as anathema. “Just not done, old boy,” as they used to say at school. Well, times have changed.

What constitutes preparation? Experiencing life, reading, focused research, interviewing, travel—together with all the work which goes into recording one’s impressions so that you can recall them on demand years later. Unless one is lucky enough to be born with outstanding recall, that requires developing a mindset which takes the trouble to remember any and all experiences. Given that most Americans seem to suffer from mass amnesia—certainly in relation to the news—that kind of recall is scarcely a common facility so developing it takes work.

I suffered a number of setbacks in 2012—both in health and financially—but also had a few lucky breaks so have ended up the year slightly ahead and looking forward to 2013. Why not, indeed. Despite the sorrows of the world, writing is such an extraordinarily uplifting activity—and the world is a fascinating place.

 

 

 

 

 

THE STORY SO FAR: PART 106

TAKE A MAILED KNIGHT, UNLIMITED AMBITION, AND WHAT DO YOU HAVE? IN A WORD—EUROPE (OR A GREAT DEAL OF IT)

As it happens, my Irish family tracks back to Calvados, Normandy, France—but I think I would have been fascinated by the Normans anyway.

They were both phenomenally aggressive where it came to the conquest of land—and their ambition seemed to have no bounds. And they were also devastatingly competent. They grew up learning to fight and by the time they were adults, their skills were both practiced and intuitive.

True, an armored knight was extremely hard to kill for a period—until the longbow, crossbow and then gunpowder came along and were widely available—but even so their sheer chutzpah is what is so remarkable. They would dare practically anything, and they had a system of administering the lands they conquered that proved to be highly effective—though it wasn’t much fun if you were at the bottom of the pile. Little has changed in the latter regard.

Their best known conquest was England in 1066—after the Battle of Hastings—but they seem to have ended up the length and breadth of Europe, though they scarcely shined when it came to the crusades. There, they encountered maneuver warfare—an area of debate even today—a hostile climate, and were heavily outnumbered—but they still remained formidable. Unfortunately, they had a bad habit of sacking places which did not necessarily belong to their enemies. Cyprus was one. There were others. They were, so to speak, somewhat impulsive in that regard. One might almost say bloodthirsty. Once the tactically necessary killing stopped, it was exceptionally hard to rein it in. Killing was what knights did—and they were exceptionally good at it. 

One of the best historical novelists who wrote about the Normans—and much else besides—is Alfred Duggan. Highly recommended.

The above keep is broadly similar to that of Fitzduane—as described in GAMES OF THE HANGMAN. As it happens, this particular specimen is located in Adrano, Sicily. Distance was no barrier to the Normans. If there were lands to conquer, they sought them out—seemingly regardless of the forces they were up against. I’m not sure they made for very comforting neighbors, but they were amazing people—brave, resolute, disciplined and ruthless. Better to read about than to know. Fascinating nonetheless.

 

THE STORY SO FAR: PART 105

THE MYSTERY OF THE INEDIBLE BISCUIT—A SOLID SELLER NONETHELESS—BUT WHY?

We are divided by a common language. A biscuit—in my world—is a hard cookie whereas a biscuit in the U.S. world is more like a scone. Think hard cookie in this case. Very hard; several inches across; perhaps half an inch thick; and tasteless.

After I graduated from university—and had flirted somewhat disastrously with opening a restaurant and Ireland’s first disco—the madness of youth—I  decided that formal training in something useful might be appropriate. Mind you, I still wanted to write; but writing paid so badly, it was a pipedream. Little did I know then that writing was an obsession—and that practicality would be rendered irrelevant. This was my period of trying to do the right thing, the decent thing, the morally correct thing—as in holding down a sensible corporate job. The gods laughed. They knew full well that I was doomed to execute the inevitable thing—to become a writer. They were playing with me.

It took me about a month to find a job, and it would have been impossible except that I stayed with my much loved grandmother. But she housed me and kept me fed—and suddenly, after filling in many forms and knocking on doors (you have no pride when you are desperate) I was offered a job with Meredith & Drew—a newly acquired subsidiary of United Biscuits, a food multinational.

I was hired to be a Product Development Manager but, before long, I was promoted to the ranks of Brand Manager—and dealt with Marks & Spencer—a legendary U.K. retailer whose ethics were extraordinary. Good grief! They were obsessed with quality; actually cared for their staff; paid well; and were obsessional about their customers. And they were profitable. I thought they were wonderful—and still do.

One of my jobs was to find new products for M&S. We had an excellent research department, but I also scoured existing products. Was there anything that we currently sold that we could re-package under the M&S label?

The one item that truly baffled me was an amazingly tough baked item that, apparently, had originally been a ship’s biscuit—or sea biscuit. It had been designed to last almost indefinitely, but it had been the practice in the navy, in days gone by, to tap the thing a couple of times on the table in order to eject the weevils—unless you really needed the protein.

But why did it sell in the late twentieth century? It practically needed a chisel to break; its taste was bland in the extreme; it wasn’t flavored with anything; and all you could say in its favor was that it was a good chew.

All we knew was that it sold best through pubs—so we surmised that it was munched to soak up an excess of liquor.

Research was commissioned. Of course it should have been done earlier but the item hovered below best-selling lines and really didn’t justify the expenditure. But several of us pushed, We really wanted to know why a nearly inedible product sold so well.

It transpired that our guesses were wrong. Subject to rare exceptions, the ship’s biscuit wasn’t eaten by humans at at all. Primarily, it was bought to keep the dog quiet while the dog owner enjoyed a few pints.

It’s amazing what companies don’t know about their own products.

Think of this as a crumbly dog story.

 

 

 

THE STORY SO FAR: PART 104

MASTERS OF THE ART—THOROUGHLY ENTERTAINING INTO THE BARGAIN—AND SOMEWHAT FORGOTTEN

One of the great regrets of my life has been that I have never succeeded in keeping a diary for longer than a year. Given the imperfections of memory, it just seems to me that life unrecorded is life lost.

That is not exactly true, of course, because the fact that an event has not been recorded does not mean it has not happened—but, it is just the way I feel. Call it a writer’s bias, if you will. It is actually a rather odd notion because it suggests that the written word is necessary to confirm the validity of something happening, or even that the written word is more important than the event itself.  Arguably, it frequently is—in the sense that by its communicating to others it enhances both the perceived veracity and the significance of the act in question.

These musings stem from my just having re-read Hornblower and The Hotspur by C.S. Forester and being struck—yet again—by what an extraordinarily fine writer Forester was. It wasn’t just that he wrote a series of fast-paced and fascinating naval adventures—set in and around the Napoleonic wars—about the fictional Horatio Hornblower. It was more that he was a maestro of the written word. He not only knew what word to use, but he excelled at pacing a story; and knowing what to leave out; and his sense of place was phenomenal. If you want to know what it was like to command a man of war in the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries—down to the last weevil in your sea biscuit—Forrester is the man to read. He was also astonishingly prolific and achieved an output that would put most authors to shame even though he died at the relatively early age of 66. He had yet another claim to fame in that he was also the author of a work that is probably best known as a movie, The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.

I wish I had kept a diary if only to recall the truly remarkable writers who introduced me to the craft of storytelling. There is now so much choice that my sense is that some of the finest—widely read in their day—are in danger of being forgotten.

In future posts, I shall try and recall some of my favorites in this blog. It is the least I can do.

By the way, the actor who played Hornblower in the TV series is Ioan Gruffudd—illustrated above. He was a fine choice.

 

THE STORY SO FAR: PART 103

A TERRIBLE EVENT—TIME TO THINK A LITTLE DEEPER

We live in a highly stressful society—unnecessarily so, in my opinion—so consequences are inevitable. Add in serious mental problems, and the chances of negative—even disastrous—consequences are high.

It has been reported than no less than one in five American children suffer from some kind of mental condition. That, in itself, is an appalling statistic which should have us all asking: Why? What are we doing wrong? Or is there something wrong with the medical profession?

Instead, we are focusing, yet again, on gun control—albeit an important issue in itself—instead of questioning the American way of life which seems to lead to so many adverse situations. Let me advance the view that if we are poisoning ourselves—and our children—tragic consequences are inevitable. And that is just what we are doing. If you are uncomfortable at my choice of the word “poisoning,” feel free to pick “contaminating” or “polluting.” The end result is equally lethal.

But this is a staggering accusation. Prove it.

A blog is scarcely the place to go into detail—but let me proffer some areas worthy of further investigation:

• All of the U.S. is polluted by some chemical or other—whether it be by rocket fuel, pesticides, the detritus of cold-fired power stations—or some toxic brew made up of all the contaminants we release without thought into society.
• The side effects of most chemicals are not researched—the situation is different in Europe—and we know almost nothing about the effect of combinations of such pollutants. However, where we do have research—as on lead or asbestos, for example—the findings are terrifying. For instance, we know that lead significantly impedes neural development.
• Half of adult Americans, and virtually all seniors, are on legal medications—and frequently cocktails of such items. Not only do these have unknown side effects, especially when used in combination, but the resultant excreta contaminate the water supply—which we have no way of filtering as matters stand. In effect, we are poisoning ourselves and our water supply—and our children (both unborn and born). We don’t understand the full implications of this, but we already know some of the consequences are hideous.
• We have opted, or have been conditioned to accept, Industrial Food. Whether eaten in a home or a restaurant or fast food outlet, this is inexpensive—but equally we know that the raw material is sub-standard—and that the end result, where the food is processed in any way, is laden with fats, fillers, salt, sugar and sundry other additives and chemicals to an extent that is actively harmful to our health (and that of our children).

Pump powerful chemicals and bad food into children, and it is inevitable that there will be adverse consequences; and that some will end in tragedy. Does that mean that guns are not to blame. I don’t know the answer to that, but I am fairly sure that deeper issues are involved—and that they are receiving inadequate attention.

 

THE STORY SO FAR: PART 102

I’M CONSTANTLY SURPRISED BY THE APPARENT FATALISM OF THE AVERAGE AMERICAN.

Recently—technically from December 2007 to June 2009, but actually much longer—we experienced the worst recession since the Great Depression at a cost to the country of something in the order of $13 trillion. That is such a large number it is virtually impossible to grasp, but in practical terms house values dropped like a stone, personal net worth was slashed, and millions were arbitrarily put out of work. The scale of human misery was gargantuan—and, to a substantial extent, it continues; and will do so for a considerable time.

The Great Recession was not only a disaster for the period of the recession itself, but it stole much of our future growth potential for years, and vastly increased the National Debt. All in all, it inflicted truly terrible damage on the the economic welfare of most Americans—apart from the Ultra Rich who, along with the Big Banks and Big Business, have come out of the whole affair even richer.

Now you might think there would be coast to coast fury at such a development, and that those responsible would have been imprisoned—but instead the perpetrators were bailed out with taxpayer money, and the rest of the population largely left to sink or swim on their own.

And as for the outpouring of rage one might expect after such a financial Pearl Harbor, in practice there has been nothing of the sort apart from the Occupy movement, which seems to have fizzled. That is rather as if we had rewarded the Japanese for the attack on Pearl Harbor—and added a line of credit so they could buy more ships and aircraft with which to attack us once again; and that particular act of infamy had far less direct economic impact on the U.S. economy that the 2008 Great Recession.

Frankly, I don’t understand it; and I’m far from sure it indicates either a healthy democracy, or a well informed electorate. Instead, it smacks of deep disillusionment compounded by apathy—matched with a political system and media which are both either owned or dominated by the very same group whose actions cause the Great Recession in the first place. In effect the foxes are in charge of the hen house.

Well, maybe they will leave us alone. No, they won’t. Foxes naturally prey on hens and they will continue to do so until the hens realize there are more of them—and counter-attack.

The logical person to rally the population and lead the counter-attack is the president, but so far he has been such a cautious centrist that it begs the question: Is President Obama a fox or a hen?

Let me leave you with a few rather shattering data points taken from an Economic Policy Institute press release.

Between 1979 and 2008

• Average incomes in the U.S. grew by $10,401.
• ALL GROWTH went to the richest 10%.
• Income for the bottom 90% DECLINED.

The situation has further deteriorated since 2008—and costs for the average family have risen. A reasonable person might be forgiven for questioning the fairness and validity of an economic system which delivers such a dubious result. Yet the national silence on this crucial matter is deafening.

 

THE STORY SO FAR: PART 101

WE HAVE LIFT-OFF—AND AN EXCESS OF CABLES

The above photo features the Wright brothers’ first flight. Orville was at the controls and the aircraft flew 120 feet in 12 seconds on December 17 1903. That was scarcely an impressive distance, but subsequent progress was truly astonishing. All in all, it’s a fascinating story.

Yes, I do know that “Lift-off” really applies to rocketry, but I was searching for a metaphor to match my cheerful mood, and “We have lift-off” seemed to fit the bill. Good grief, the effects of the dreaded bug seem to be receding and my strength is coming back; the cats from hell are gone; and I am gradually getting Spinnaker to work the way I want it to. True, there is still a long way to go, but currently I’m feeling like Orville—and it’s a wonderful feeling after a difficult few months.

Yesterday, I got my second monitor up and running so I can now have reference material up on one screen and write on the other. The only trouble is that I have had to put the second monitor on the right instead of on the left—where it normally goes—because my mouse wouldn’t cooperate otherwise. I’m sure there is a solution to that; but, so far, it has eluded me. Meanwhile, I’m wondering if the right might not be better after all. I pay a great deal of attention to the layout and ergonomics of my work area and find the effort well rewarded. Writers tend to be nutty about such things—which is scarcely surprising given the amount of time we spend in such surroundings; not to mention the peculiar qualities of our respective personalities.

I’m truly amazed at the number of cables I seem to be finding. I seem to have more cables than gadgets. Do cables procreate? One can but wonder. Actually, I think it is more a case of my detaching some device as no longer being necessary without bothering to crawl around the floor to remove the cable. Very human, but the end result is confusing.

What do I have attached to Spinnaker?

• Second monitor – Samsung
• Wireless laser mouse – a Logitech
• Altec Lansing mono speaker
• Seagate 500GB external hard drive for backup
• Brother Duplex Laser Printer
• Epson Workforce Inkjet Printer
• Seiko Smart Label Printer
• LinkSys Phone Adapter
• Yeti Microphone
• Belkin USB hub
• LinkSys Wireless Network Router

Eleven peripherals—and that is before factoring in thumb drives. Mind-boggling!