October, 2006

Twinkle twinkle

Dying to know the results, aren't you? How did the old boy fare between the sticks? Well let me say that in the Writers' World Cup finals held in Florence this year there were four teams, and we came fifth.

Well. 'Sonly a game.

Actually it was fair brilliant. No doubt the Swedes, who ran out victors on the day are still slamming their tankards and clashing their inlaid horn-drinking vessels and reciting poetry in skaldic meter about how they won on heroic penalties; and no doubt the Italians, whose squeaky tremolo voices rose several octaves every time they slipped a ball past me in their 5-1 trouncing of us Brits will be reclining in their chairs like Caligula and sucking on gelati; and no doubt the Hungarians will be chain-smoking and smoothing their nicotine-stained moustaches and reflecting on whether the scoreline of 2-0 was a greater victory than the clever passing off of paint-stripper-type herb-bitters to us before the game... no doubt all of this, but let me remind you of an old saw: when all the tales are told by the white hunter, the lion's story is never heard.

Well, we did get a chance to put out own case. Errr.. this was penned by one of our team, and he says we were crap. And he must know, because he writes for the Observer Review: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1879557,00.html

The team was an extraordinary assemblage of beautiful writing misfits, though I could have predicted that when I was invited to join after the Milwall manager Nigel Spackman was contacted for advice and said - and this is true - "You do realise you need a goalkeeper?" Plus a couple of my old muckers Nick Royle and Conrad Williams were in the team so I knew the experience was going to be a dark one. Writers and football are not normally two things you string together, and because so many scribblers turn out to be miserable, dreary disappointments it was a delight to find a superb bunch of blokes. There were novelists, biographers, travel writers, sports writers and thank the b'jesus not a poet in sight. Except on the Swedish team.

"Could we just run through some of the rules?" Said seriously, the evening before the first game, by one of the team.

"All Italian women of a certain age look like transvestites." Said by another, after the last game. I'm thinking about naming names.

The Italians used the old Roman trick. Or was it Greek? Yes that's it: 'With Greekish wine I'll heat his blood, and with my scimitar tomorrow cool it." By which I'm not suggesting they recited to us passages from Troilus and Cressida, but they saturated us with free wine and beer the night before our 5-1 drubbing. Actually it wasn't the wine that distracted us, it was the wretched performance poetry they dragooned us into listening to. In what was probably the third worst night of my entire life I found myself imprisoned in a beautifully restored Florentine theatre while grown men, many favouring beards, indulged themselves in an invective poetry festival, lashing the stage with (untranslated) Hungarian, Swedish and Italian poetry, as we hung, dying and murmuring, from an ornate upholstered box like those two old boys in the Muppet Show My spittle-soaked co-condemned team-mates said it was only three hours but it felt like a lifetime, especially when one of the bearded above... I can hardly bare to type this... gyrated his hips and delivered his spleen in some kind of unsavoury approximation of hip-hop. I don't know why but I haven't felt quite like it since I last heard Chris De Burgh's song Lady In Red at a wedding.

Now a lot has been said about Lady In Red. Sometimes when I'm getting ready to write I will locate this timeless classic on my Ipod (stored next to Captain Beefheart classsics) and use it to nudge open up the synapses in readiness for the day's creative rush. Only truly inspirational Art can be of help in this way, and if there IS a heaven, I confidently expect that on every street corner there will be a loudspeaker playing this song over and over, and Tony Blair and George Bush, as good Christians would be made to listen to it. In fact they could deconstruct the meaning of the lyric: And I've never seen that dress you're wearing/Or the highlights in your hair/That catch your eyes/I have been blind. So it comes as no surprise to me to find out that Chris now reports that he has "healing hands" and the ability to make the lame walk and the blind see. Chris revealed this little known truth about his amazing talents on Gloria Hunniford's BBC Sunday religious programme pointing out to several million viewers that he prefers to play this particular talent down. Quite so. To do so would be somewhat aggrandising, so well done to you Chris, I say. I've simply no truck with those people who say they can't listen to the song without wanting to drag out their own intestines with meat hooks before flaying themselves alive with a blunt cheese grater.

Not all celebs are pillocks. The wonderful Jane Horrocks was on Desert Island Discs the other day. One of the nation's top mimics she could have easily erased her Lancashire accent in favour of "received pronunciation" but has reesisted. Despite being a very successful and very busy TV, film and stage actor she was saying she prefers to look after her own kids rather than to hire childcare. When pressed on this by the female interviewer she said, "Look, in the modern world not all nannies are like Julie Andrews."

Here's something very interesting said by a number of the football team, about why they love playing football: it stops them from thinking about anything else. We agreed that it switched off the interior monologue which is the writer's affliction. The idiot murmuring is stopped. The internal monkey gets strangled. For the period of the game you think about nothing but the game and the position of the ball. It's a blessed relief to have some time off from yourself.

British Fantasy Convention was very spirited this year. One of the guests was Neil Gaiman. Fine bloke. Lucky I'd just given his new book a good review in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/28/AR2006092801423.html because I was seated next to him in the curry house. With the convention taking place in Nottingham I was also able to march some of the overseas members of the convention, like my French editors at Braggelone, Stephane and Alain, and Joe Hill from the US, to The Olde Trip To Jerusalem. Now the Trip is reputed to be - and probably is - the oldest authentic pub in the land. Richard the Lionheart is said to have refreshed there on his way to the Crusdades. Its cave-like rooms are scooped out of the living rock underneath the castle and as I stumbled through the door with Mark Chadbourn, Alain and Stephane in tow, we were seized upon by two drunken local lasses who seemed also to be themselves in some mental twelfth century and doing their very best to live up to the whole Merrie England pageant. (No, they weren't dressed up for the occasion, they were just having a night on the town.) Anyway there's a bull's horn mounted on the cave wall, and a metal ring on a rope. You have to swing said ring onto the horn, and since Chabourne was the most lusty and handsome man amongst us, the lewd maids of Nottingham did challenge him to fit ye ring on ye horn. I'faith he failed, whereupon ye maids did mock and roundly abuse him as one of no merit and did avail themselves freely of his purse that they may drink more freely thereof. (Enough!) Anyway, I fared no better at this horribly sexually loaded pagan distraction and did my very best to make them drag Stephane into the game, it being his birthday, and anyway I couldn't see any other way out since they were sort of scary and had us cornered. Stephane merely blinked at the women's rowdy inducements to do better. "Non," he said, with dismissive Gallic self-possession, before turning to his drink on the bar. And I thought it was the English who were supposed to be phlegmatic! "Let's go," I head one of the women say, " we ain't gonna pull 'ere."

No m'duck.

Austin, Texas, coming up, for the World Fantasy Convention. The Limits of Enchantment is short-listed for the best novel award, but I must say the opposition is formidable: http://www.worldfantasy.org/awards/ Anyway I'm sure you're all going to be there. Do come up and say hello. I'm honestly not as sour as it might appear in these updates. One of my students at Nottingham told me she found these pages a little intimidating; but that I twinkle more in real life.

There you are then.

Graham Joyce can be contacted by emailing graham@grahamjoyce.net