Launch of ‘The Chemist’s House’

My pamphlet, ‘The Chemist’s House’ published by V Press in June and also available to buy on this site,  has had a couple of outings — one at Novel Nights last month, where I read one of the longer flash fictions, ‘Mirela’ and one at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bath, where I read a slightly different version of the story, ‘At the Hospital’, that won the Retreat West flash fiction contest, judged by David Gaffney this year. Thank you to everyone who bought the book on those occasions. I’m holding an official launch of ‘The Chemist’s House’ at one of Bath Flash Fiction Award’s regular Flash Fridays at St James’ Wine Vaults, Bath on Friday 29th September, 7.30 pm – 9.30 pm. I’ll read for about ten minutes there, along with Meg Pokrass, Diane Simmons, Tino Prinzi, Alison Powell and Conor Haughton who’ll be reading some of their stories too.  It’s free this time, as it’s a launch. Plus a free glass of wine. Plus nibbles. Wonder if I can manage cup cakes?  Plus books for sale. Hope you can come!

The Flash Fiction Festival in Bath at the end of June was wonderful. I’m just getting back to writing now after sorting out post festival things and also thinking about next year’s festival. We are definitely going to organise another one, the feedback was great. I was just sorry not to be able to chat to other writers. It was so busy all the time. Must build in more chat time for 2018! Here’s a picture of me reading my story, ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Fish’, from NFFD anthology 2017, ‘Sleep is a Beautiful Colour’ to a big festival crowd.

My best reads 2015: from small details to the whole shebang

I’ve read  many stand-out stories this year so I’m limiting myself to one example from each of my categories.

RIFT-COVER smallerDetails:  There are  marvellous character details in the story ‘A Room With Many Small Beds’ by Kathy Fish, the first story in a newly published collection of flash fiction pieces, ‘Rift’, which also contains stories by Robert Vaughan. I’m eagerly waiting for Rift to arrive in the post, but you can read this first piece  online. The narrator’s father’s girlfriend, Pearl, ” …sits cross-legged in front of the television with her cigarettes and her nail file. Her hair is set in empty frozen orange juice cans. She looks like a space alien or a sea creature.”

It’s the orange juice can rollers that do it for me.

Sentences:

A few sentences in Dancing to the Shipping Forecast, Dan Powell’s second prize winning 2015-anthologystory in the Bath Short Story Award 2015, gave me a heart-stop moment. The narrator’s great love has disappeared in a storm – we don’t know how. She is still living his house near the sea. His sister wants her to leave  and eventually implies in a phone call, that because the relationship was new, she has no right to stay any longer. After a long, crackling silence we hear the narrator’s thoughts –

“Two months, three weeks, four days, fourteen hours and a few minutes. Two months, three weeks, four days, fourteen hours and a few minutes from the first kiss to the last…”

This account of time in the context of the piece, sums up the aching depth of the woman’s loss and desolation. It comes at around the mid-point. Read the whole story in the Bath Short Story Award Anthology, 2015.

Paragraph:

Dinosaurs coverThere are many great paragraphs in  ‘All About Alice’ one of Danielle McGoughlin’s stories in her acclaimed debut collection, ‘Dinosaurs on Other Planets’  Middle-aged Alice is trapped by the mistakes of her past, living without hope in the family home with her routine-bound father. In a rare week alone, when her father is on holiday, she ends up on a one-night stand with Jarlath.

“In the semi-darkness  of Jarlath’s bedroom, Alice lay on her back. She saw a large amoeba-shaped stain on the ceiling and, on top of the wardrobe, an orange traffic cone. Downstairs the two young men that Jarlath shared the house with had turned the music up louder. Jarlath lay next to her, his jeans still around his ankles. The music stopped downstairs and for a while there was silence except for the sound of a car going by on the street outside. Alice was overcome by a deadly urge to talk.”

Says it all.

Scenes

‘The Good Son’, by Paul McVeigh contains dozens of scenes that fizz with energy. He came Paul Mcveighto Bath for an evening of readings we organised at Bath Short Story Award and read from the beginning of the novel, making those initial scenes even more poignant and funny. Another  scene I enjoyed describes Mickey, the ten-year old protagonist, playing in his mother’s bedroom and dressing Killer, his dog, in a confirmation dress. But there are so many. In other scenes, I  learned  new words and phrases: ‘ lumbering’ and ‘hitting a redner’. If you don’t know what they mean, read the novel. Read it anyway, it’s so good. My copy is still with my neighbour, who loved it too.

Titles

Bath-Flash-Fiction-Award‘This Is How They Drown’

This title works well for a powerful piece of flashfiction by Eileen Merriman, which won second prize in the inaugural Bath Flash Fiction Award.  Although we know from the title that more than one person will drown, we don’t know how. There are layers of ‘drowning’ in this piece – the story lingers – what will happen to the girl who survives  this terrible event?  Go to ‘Winners’ on the website menu to read the story and to ‘Views’ to read what Eileen has to say about  how it came into being.

The whole Shebang

Galen PikeThe Redemption of Galen Pike’ by Carys Davies won the prestigious Frank O’Connor award this year. I’ve just bought a copy and read two stories so far, both of which knocked me out. The ends of each are so surprising and powerful. ‘Travellers’ begins in Siberia  but its heart is in Birmingham.  Read the beginning of  ‘The Quiet’, set somewhere in a remote homestead in Australia and you might think you know where the story is going to end. You’re wrong.  Timeless themes in different landscapes. Can’t wait to read more. Buy this.

Read/ buy all the other pieces too. They’re all wonderful.

Adverbs and Weasel Words

Renowned writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, famous for his lyrical prose, hated adverbs ending in ‘mente’ ( ‘ly’ in English). His novel,  ‘Love in the Time of The Cholera’ contains none.

Why are writers so attached to these ‘ly’ adverbs? The writing cliche ‘kill your darlings’ is easier to stomach  – we all know it’s essential to remove irrelevant chunks of descriptions and plot tangents. But modifiers often stay in  final drafts.  I entered a very short flash fiction in a competition last month, knowing every word counts. One of those words was an unecessary ‘ly-er’. I couldn’t bring myself  to ditch it.  I’ve given the judges a reason for  ruling my piece out of the contest.

When literary agent, Lucy Luck,  judge for The Bath Short Story Award 2014,  advised writers to avoid adverbs in their stories, she created an anxious twitter storm from potential entrants. But there’s nothing to love about adverbs – the  worn-out bras of writing, they offer no lift or support.

There are exceptions like the first sentence in Colin Barrett’s ‘Calm With Horses’ which I studied in an earlier post. He combines the adverb ‘politely’ with ‘hammered’. It unusual and  works in context showing something about the character, which is essential to the story.

Like adverbs, ‘Weasel words’,  make  prose mushy and are also hard to remove. David Michael Kaplan in his excellent book ‘Rewriting’ –a creative approach to writing fiction made a list:

about, actually, almost, almost like, already, appears, approximately, basically, close to, even eventually, exactly, finally, here, just, just then, kind of, nearly now, practically, really, seems, simply, somehow, somewhat, somewhat like, sort of, suddenly, then, there, truly, utterly.

Remove them all – they weaken your writing.  Notice your favourite words from the list your resistance to deleting them.  Mine are ‘just’, ‘now’ and ‘even’. They sneak in on the edge of my awareness, and I often miss them when editing or think they plead a case for staying. None of these words deserve a place in tight, polished prose. Dump them.

The ‘find’ button on your word processor is great for picking up how often you use ‘weasels’. I don’t think any have slipped in here…

Showing and Telling: The Mix

Back in 1960s, Fritz Perls, one of the founders of Gestalt Psychotherapy, coined the phrase ‘Lose your mind and come to your senses.’ He thought people were too much ‘in their heads.’ They should pay attention to body sensation; their whole experience. Intellectualism was frowned upon.  Later generations of Gestalt Psychotherapists and theorists understand that balance is best – body experience and thinking functions are of equal value.

Writers know that a mix of  well-judged ‘showing and telling’ is similarly important.  I’m currently interested in how short story writers and novelists create such balance in their work and have been re-reading Antony Doerr’s short  story collection ‘Memory Wall’ after finishing his wonderful Pullitzer Prize winning novel, ‘All the Light We Cannot See.’

This week, with Alex Wilson, I led a creative writing group session for Writing Events Bath on the theme of subtexts and showing versus telling.  We briefly studied the first paragraph of ‘Memory Wall’,  Doerr’s title story, to look at his mix of showing and telling.

Here’s the paragraph with my comments inserted in italics.

Memory Wall

Tall Man In The Yard

Seventy-Four year old Alma Konachek lives in Vredehoek, a suburb above Cape Town: a place of warm rains, big-windowed lofts and silent, predatory automobiles.

We’re told Alma’s age, where she lives and shown it’s a rich neighbourhood by the description, ‘big-windowed lofts.’ We are brilliantly shown the menace in this district by two adjectives –  ‘silent, predatory’, put with automobiles, not people.

Behind her garden, Table Mountain rises, huge green and corrugated; beyond her kitchen balcony, a thousand city lights wink and gutter behind sheets of fog like candleflames.

Again we are told more about the setting (Table Mountain) and  shown the look of the mountain (corrugated). Doerr uses the verbs ‘wink’, ‘gutter’  to show the way lights move and adds a simile, ‘like candleflames’ so we know it’s night-time in a big city.

One night in November, at three in the morning, Alma wakes to hear the rape gate across her front door rattle open and someone enter her house. Her arms jerk: she spills a glass of water across the nightstand. She hears what might be breathing. Water drips onto the floor.

Here we’re told the time of night (three am has a scary feel). Doerr names the ‘rape gate’ as if it is a  commonplace term. (A South African woman in the writing class said these outer door frames are more commonly called burglar bars) – but the use of ‘rape gate’  at the beginning of this story is chilling. The verb ‘rattle’ increases apprehension. We are shown Alma’s  fear by her actions –’arms jerk’ ,’she spills a glass of water’. Doerr conjures up Alma straining to hear by the short sentence, ‘She hears what might be breathing.’ The detail of water dripping on the floor from the spilled glass of water also evokes fear.

Alma manages a whisper. “Hello?”

A shadow flows across the hall. She hears the scrape of a shoe on the staircase and then nothing. Night air blows into the room – it smells of frangipani and charcoal. Alma presses a fist over her heart.

The use of the verb ‘manages’ suggests Alma’s frightened state – she summons up just enough courage to speak. Doerr now uses all the senses to suggest someone waiting in a state of heightened awareness. We know Alma is seeing the shadow flow. She hears ‘a scrape of a shoe.’ The mixture of smells is sweet yet dark.  There’s a great detail to show Alma’s bodily reaction – She ‘presses a fist over her heart.’

Beyond the balcony windows, moonlit pieces of clouds drift over the city. Spilled water creeps towards her bedroom door.

“Who’s there, is someone there?”

The grandfather clock in the living room pounds through the seconds. Alma’s pulse booms in her ears. Her bedroom seems to be rotating very slowly.

“Harold?” Alma remembers that Harold is dead, but she cannot help herself. “Harold?”

The imagery in these sentences increases the sinister atmosphere. ‘Spilled water creeps’ and the grandfather clock in the living room pounds’, again shows Alma’s heightened awareness of things around her. We  are then are shown Alma’s  inner experience with a strong verb ‘her pulse booms in her ears.’ Her perception is altered by fear: ‘Her bedroom seems to be rotating very slowly.’

The repetition of ‘Harold?’ is poignant and appears to show that she is alone. We are told that Harold is dead.

It’s masterful writing. I recommend you read this  story – the opening is a hook, but the events that ensue are entirely unpredicatable.

April: Join Jude in writing a month of flash fictions

April is poetry month – the task is to write a poem a day. Thirty pieces out there on  screen or on paper. I don’t write poems but flash fiction is a close cousin to prose poetry – some would say even its identical twin.

Anyone want to join me and write a Flash Fiction/Prose Poem a day? Flash fiction writer and director of National Flash Fiction Day, Calum Kerr, wrote one a day for a year. Thirty days is a a snip in comparison.  If you do want to complete thirty days of flash, tweet me on @judehwriter Perhaps we can arrange a regular cup-of-tea  tweet-time each day and compare notes? teapots 2

To get going, I’ll   be consulting my current favourite text on writing flash, the excellent Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. In this book, with regard to the ongoing debate concerning flash fiction and prose poetry, author, Kim Chinquee, says that although a “prose poem may be more about language and poetics, whereas a flash carries more narrative and story“, they are “interchangeable…more inclusive than exclusive – each of the other.

I also like the following exercise  suggested by Steve Almond in the same book  – a  brilliant idea for revitalising a tired short story or one needing to loose its flab. He suggests that you ” stop whatever story you’re working on and convert the whole thing into a poem. It will end up as a much shorter piece, in which you bid various extra words, characters and subplots, goodbye.” The poem can be as bad as you like.When you’ve finished  you remove the line breaks and examine the resulting piece of prose. Leaner, tighter and now, perhaps, fizzing with energy. I’ve a few sad little pieces that could do with this treatment.

Inspiration also comes  from checking out current flash fiction competitions. It would be good to have 30 pieces to pick from when considering which to enter. It’s a shame I can’t enter Bath Flash Fiction Award – no-go – I’m organising it. ( I would if I could  though – even though I say it myself – with 3 different entry options it tries its best to get as many writers on board as possible. And there are big prizes and a great short list  judge , Annemarie Neary).

The Bridport Flash Fiction competition has its usual pull  – something good  may turn up for that and there are also the super fun competitions  at themolotovcocktail.com to inspire. A new competition, Flash Fury,  is kicking off tomorrow, April 1st and the results of their latest competition, Flash Fool, will be announced on the same day. The guidelines for general submission to the ezine on their site, as I said in a recent tweet on @bathflashaward, must be the most pertinent and funniest around.  For anyone wanting to  write a fresh-sounding story of any length, it’s great advice whether or not you like submitting to magazines. A recommended read.

All that remains is to write –  today, 31st March = warm-up day. I’ll go for a handwritten story in my under-used  new journal.

Overwriting versus Editing

I’ve killed off my latest flash fiction story. It’s been through so many drafts it’s lost its energy and expired. I couldn’t leave it alone. To use a cooking metaphor, it was like opening the oven door on a sponge cake so many times  it failed to rise.

The problem: This story began with an idea in my head – not a bad idea but I’d already chewed it over  a few times before it arrived through my fingers on to the screen. The emotional charge wasn’t there in the first draft. I then attempted to work a better, more coherent plot round the idea, but couldn’t find it. The story arc was far too complicated for the word length; it began in the wrong place. What was I trying to say? It was definitely too much.  Something about guilt, regret, grief?  I wrote down the essence in notes, cut away flab, introduced more drama, a different tense, better dialogue. All wrong.

The best remedy is to leave this flash fiction alone. It might be born again in some form at a later date. In my previous post I quoted Vanessa Gebbie who advocates writing first drafts fast with energy created from a prompt.  I’ve always liked the book ‘Fast Fiction:Creating Fiction in Five Minutes,’ 1997, by Roberta Allen. The ideas within the book aren’t unusual – there are visual prompts and about 300 word prompts – for example, write a story about a lie, write a story about a coward, but she has useful suggestions on ways of building up the pieces created from timed  five minute slots.

So what about editing? If the energy is there after the fast draft, I guess it’s  down to checking the plot shape, considering a title,looking at the first line, cutting out the flab and putting it away for a couple of days. On a second look I’ll follow the same process or put it away for longer.  The important thing is to keep writing the stories, rather than overwriting one poor specimen. I remember reading somewhere that the award winning Irish short story writer Kevin Barry wrote about 100 stories  in a year of which just a few lived to see the day.

Another obvious thing; It helps to read widely. I love reading short stories and organising the new Bath Flash Fiction Award, gives me the opportunity to read many different styles of flash fiction, note which ones impact and linger and assess why they work. Along with my colleagues who co-run the Bath Short Story Award, I  get to read longer short stories too. This is one of the reasons why both these competitions are so rewarding. I learn a great deal about short story writing as well as tapping in to the great short story writing community out there.

Writing Flash Fiction

It requires great skill  to achieve a flash that resonates long after reading  but first drafts are fun to write. Using a simple prompt is the way to go, according to author, Vanessa Gebbie. In a post from 2012 she says: “The vital process of ‘flash writing’ is that of not thinking before one writes, not planning, letting go and just writing focusing on the prompt.”Prompts can be anything of course, words, phrases, lines from poetry, objects, music.

The draft  will need  editing –  the well-known rule that ‘every word counts’ is essential here, but the whole shape of a story written fast can arrive in just ten minutes.

Tania Hershman, who is well known for her  flash fiction and for her tutoring on writing short fiction, ran a brilliant workshop for Writing Events Bath in 2013 and a participant who wrote a five minute fiction prompted by one of Tania’s exercises during the workshop, won third prize in a well-known competition soon afterwards. She’d never written to this length before. The constraint of writing within a timed exercise, helped something click for her.

Although I’ve  read a lot of very short fiction over the years, I’ve been hooked on writing flash fiction since Tania’s workshop and was thrilled to get an Honourable Mention in the Fish Flash Competition 2014. There are many different ways of experimenting with flash.  My story  had a punch line, often seen as something to avoid. However, it passed through the filter judges and reached the short list judge, Glenn Patterson, who gave it this feedback “punchlines don’t work, punchlines don’t work…then one does – another (supposed) rule gleefully binned.

My enthusiasm for flash fiction prompted me to set up the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a  new rolling competition with a limit of 300 words. Instead of a closing date, the award will come to an end when 1000 entries are reached. There’s a first prize of £1000, 2nd of £300 and a 3rd of £100. I’m excited to see what happens. My experience as one of the organisers of the Bath Short Story Award has shown that around 50% of writers enter stories during the last  weeks. Will it be different if there isn’t a closing date?  Will the competition end in a couple of weeks because writers are keen for it to finish or carry on for several months. It’s an experiment. I hope it works and inspires writers to try writing and reading more in this genre. I’ve a great admin team making sure everything works well.  More details about the competition on BathFlashFictionAward.com

It is fascinating to read very short fiction from different authors.The anthology ‘Scraps’  edited by Calum Kerr Director of National Flash Fiction Day, UK contains seventy short fictions and is an interesting read. The stories vary considerably in style and include stories by Tania Hershman and Vanessa Gebbie as well as Calum Kerr.  Calum’s online book ‘The World in A Flash’ – How to Write Flash Fiction’ is a useful guide, as is ‘The Rose Metal Field Guide To Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers,’ edited by Tara L. Marsh.

Stewart Lee and Lydia Davis – linguistically related.

I think the American International Booker prize winning writer, Lydia Davis and the British comedian, Stewart Lee are linguistically related in their approach to writing short pieces. They each often turn words and sentences round and round to make a point. This is illustrated in the following clip from The Comedy Vehicle, Lee’s 2013 British TV. Here he riffs on a sentence he has heard in a taxi driver’s cab:  “These days, if you say you are English, you can be arrested and thrown in jail”. He reports the ensuing conversation with the taxi driver, repeating this sentence again and again with different emphases and variations until the taxi driver is worn down. What’s so great about the piece is that, as a listener, you get worn down by the repetition too – a brilliant tiny short story. It’s worth listening to the entire half an hour show to get a further variation of the taxi driver sentence right at the end. Stewart Lee’s performances are master classes in showing not telling. And this is a perfect example.

Lydia Davis’s flash fiction ‘A Mown Lawn’ does something similar.  She plays on the two words ‘mown lawn’  until as a reader you are almost sick of the repetition but quite enthralled. In the process, she says a lot about the state of America, just as Lee, in his piece,  points out the state of things in this country regarding immigration and prejudice.  Neither of them have said anything overtly.  I’m excited to find a clip of Lydia reading this story. Click here to listen.

My 4* Review of ‘My Dear, I Wanted To Tell You’ and ‘The Heroes’ Welcome’, by Louisa Young.

‘The Heroes’ Welcome’ by Louisa Young is a sequel to ‘My Dear, I Wanted To Tell You’, the story of the lives of Peter, Riley, Nadine, Julia and Rose in the lead up to and during the Great War.  I recommended the first novel to my friend, journalist Lesley Gillilian who is writing a wonderful novel partly set during the second world war and she said it was the best book she’d read all year. I agree and think the sequel is equally as good.

Many themes are covered; Louisa Young explores the characters’ struggles with class difference both in love relationships and relationships between officers and men in the trenches. There’s a fascinating contrast between Riley’s facial reconstruction by a pioneering surgeon in a  military hospital and the devastating consequence of the botched face-job beautiful Julia undertakes to make herself look younger and more alluring to her traumatised husband, Peter.  Yes, rich women were having their faces covered in acid one hundred years ago to ‘improve their complexions’,  so it is all the more shocking to think that equally damaging ‘beauty’ procedures are promoted today. Conversely, it is all the more amazing to see the developments in plastic surgery – extraordinary events like the 3D printing of prosthetic limbs.

Other women’s issues are covered: Rose works as a nurse, and post-war is offered a scholarship to train as a doctor – almost unheard of then. She is torn. Surely her role is to look after others, rather than remain unmarried and follow her own career path?  All Julia can do is be beautiful – she didn’t get an education.  With little support, it’s hard for her to be a mother and a wife. Nadine struggles hard against her mother’s disapproval  to marry ‘beneath her’ and become an artist.

The most striking element of both novels is the way the impact of war is shown on all the characters in different ways – psychological scarring, physical disability, ruined marriages and their affect on the next generation, alcoholism as well as the strong determination to survive and flourish against the odds.  The first book shows the damage as it occurs, the second shows continuing trauma and steps to recovery. I found both books an emotional read and became very involved with the characters, so wanting ‘everything to be all right.’ Of course, as a reader, I would have been disappointed if recovery had progressed easily in a linear way.  A hanky is definitely required – a retro cotton one,  Dad or Grandpa sized.  About two thirds of the way through ‘The Heroes’ Welcome, there’s an event that gave me such a shock, I felt almost I was witnessing it, as part of the fictional family. ‘Oh no,’ I thought. ‘That can’t be happening…things were just getting on an even keel.’ It’s a masterly stroke on the part of the author, brilliantly written.

The book does end on a hopeful note although things are not neatly tied up. Maybe Louisa Young will write a third novel charting the story of the same characters and their children up until World War Two. I can’t wait.

Borrowing from George Borrow

One hundred and sixty years ago today, 27th July, the Victorian gentleman writer, George Borrow, set off with his wife and daughter to travel around Wales. ‘Wild Wales’ the travelogue he wrote about his journey, has a wonderfully intimate and chatty style which starts at chapter one.  It’s a classic and I found a copy in its great 1950’s paper cover, in Wells market.

image

There is much to learn about voice in George Borrow’s writing.  His strong preferences come across from the beginning and  he is charmingly manipulative with his wife and daughter. (Yes somewhat sexist, but you have to forgive him because he is a man of his times).

Here’s the first paragraph from Chapter One.

In the summer of the year 1854 myself, wife, and daughter determined upon going into Wales, to pass a few months there. We are country people of a corner of East Anglia, and, at the time of which I am speaking, had been residing so long on our own little estate, that we had become tired of the objects around us, and conceived that we should be all the better for changing the scene for a short period. We were undetermined for some time with respect to where we should go. I proposed Wales from the first, but my wife and daughter, who have always had rather a hankering after what is fashionable, said they thought it would be more advisable to go to Harrowgate, or Leamington. On my observing that those were terrible places for expense, they replied that, though the price of corn had of late been shamefully low, we had a spare hundred pounds or two in our pockets, and could afford to pay for a little insight into fashionable life. I told them that there was nothing I so much hated as fashionable life, but that, as I was anything but a selfish person, I would endeavour to stifle my abhorrence of it for a time, and attend them either to Leamington or Harrowgate. By this speech I obtained my wish, even as I knew I should, for my wife and daughter instantly observed, that, after all, they thought we had better go into Wales, which, though not so fashionable as either Leamington or Harrowgate, was a very nice picturesque country, where, they had no doubt, they should get on very well, more especially as I was acquainted with the Welsh language.”

It’s a good opening.  I think it’s always worth trying out a modern day version of a classic/ You might include details or sentence structures you don’t normally use.

e.g.  In the summer of 2014, my husband and I  decided to go to Wales  for a long weekend. We are city people, living in the country not too far from Bristol and at the time of which I am speaking, were tired of all the familiar distractions of our house, with its shelves of unread books, the washing up that always needed doing, the garden thick with weeds. We didn’t know where we would go to start with. I proposed Wales from the first, but my husband wanted to stay in Herefordshire and go to Hay on Wye. I said he’d spend too much money on books and he should be cutting down, it was like an addiction, but he said because we’d been eating vegetarian for the last month, we had money to spare. I  then said I was being selfish – of course he should go to Hay. He might pick up something he really wanted with the spare cash. Of course, he backed down then and said he had too much to read already. Why didn’t we go to Aberystwyth and visit Nanteos Mansion where I used to live as a student…

Oh that was fun. I should carry on with that if only for the energy, copying an opening creates.  And I might go to Wales, inspired by George Borrow.