John Dickinson

Dad’s got an OBE! Let’s take a little time out to celebrate.

When I spoke to him after the announcement he said he thought it had been given primarily for his time as Chairman of the Society of Authors. I’m sure that’s right. There has to be an element of public service for an award like this. But it also looks like one more recognition of his writing and poetry. And I may be just a little bit biased here, but I think he deserves it.

There is something a bit special about this wordsmith. His brain goes everywhere. I used to be shocked how little research he did before sending his heroes to 6th century Byzantium or war-torn contemporary Africa. He didn’t read up about these places, he imagined them. And people who’ve lived in Africa say how vividly he’s brought the place back to them. He’s imagined himself into the skull of a dying old woman and a child of a prehuman species 200,000 years ago. He’s also worked out and published a theory that to be able to fly and breathe fire dragons must have been lighter than air – flying gas-bags, in fact. I remember him telling me about the day he tried this theory of dragon evolution on David Attenborough. (Apparently Mr Attenborough was not convinced.)

He writes for adults, teenagers and young children. His books are mysteries, fantasies, science fiction, ghost stories, pet stories, historical and contemporary political. He doesn’t do cookbooks and he doesn’t do chick-lit but there’s not much else he hasn’t had a go at. He doesn’t pander to fantasies about power or sex. His lead characters are thoughtful, often meek. I can recall a rare one or two who have special talents or powers, but those powers are not used to slaughter enemies or shake the world. If you meet a larger-than-life figure in his pages it’s usually a baddie, or someone who is marked for destruction. And he writes well. His books are strong on setting and character. I won’t list the prizes he’s won – it gets rather boring after a bit – but he’s deserved those too.

He’s written poetry all his working life. When he was a journalist he did humorous pieces for Punch. But he kept writing the stuff after he became an author, even though there was no prospect of getting it published. He writes short, compact pieces with tightly-woven rhymes and images of love, time and the passing of generations. He also wrote a series of intense poems about my mother’s illness and death. There’s now a volume of his poetry available through his website.

Peter Dickinson, OBE. Hurrah!

As half term loomed, the work-daemon called me to his office in the upper reaches of my mind.

Half term is no excuse for laziness, he said. I agreed it wasn’t.

You can shut the door, he said. You can leave the world its own devices. I want to see you writing. I said I would.

Productivity is the key, he said. Rhythm. Discipline. Discipline, I said. Yes.

Last half term was a travesty, he snarled. And I nodded meekly. I would do better.

And?

Well Monday was Bank Holiday. Much-loved friends were staying. No work got done.

Tuesday I was taxi for daughter and friend who were shopping for their joint birthday party. Also I was shopping to replenish stores after much-loved friends had departed. There’s no reason why a trip to the supermarket, plus associated unpacking and putting away, should wipe out an entire working morning, but it did.

Can’t remember what happened to Tuesday afternoon. Must have been something important.

Wednesday I did get some words down. That was after being taxi for daughter and other friend who were going to joint birthday party. (Was saved from further depradations by friend’s parents, who valiantly took the job of trucking whole gaggle of friends into Bristol and back entirely on themselves. Both are office workers. It’s not only the work-from-home types who see their productivity suffer at half term.) Any way, writing got done. Ta-daah! It might have been a struggle finding that rhythm for so short a time after having done nothing for days, but I had thought what I wanted to say and for two pages I said it.

It was Wednesday evening that son came and asked me for gift-wrap. Gift-wrap? ‘For Mum’s birthday present,’ he said.

Now, I hadn’t forgotten Thursday was Pippa’s birthday. I am not that sort of husband. I am the sort of husband who knows very well when his wife’s birthday is and then forgets he has to do anything about it. Not only was there no gift-wrap in the house, there was no present from loving self either. Fortunately the taxi-run to pick up daughter was due. Pippa thought she was doing it but I claimed it, swung by B&Q in the last half-hour before it closed and secured nice new gardening gloves. On return with daughter found that daughter had not got her mother a present either. So Daughter got gardening gloves to give to Mother and Wife got an IOU from Loving Husband for a new mobile phone. At which she laughed. Pippa is wonderful and I don’t deserve her.

Thursday. Pippa’s birthday. No work got done.

So it’s Friday. Work-daemon is pacing his office, furiously chewing on his cigar (I don’t know why I let him smoke on the premises). Daughter is off. House is quiet. Son’s haircut is not due until the afternoon. Lawn is getting long, but its haircut can also wait till the afternoon. (Mem. Must do something about that mobile – but maybe the afternoon will have room for that too.) The week is lost but not all is lost. Some work of noble note may yet be done. The screen is open.

And I’ve remembered.

The in-laws are coming tomorrow.

I’ve been asked about the Flying Teddies.

It’s nothing to do with my writing. It’s the only thing on this site that has nothing to do with writing at all. But everything else I put in seemed so focused and Earnest that in the end I thought ‘The Heck with this - Let’s chuck a Teddy!’ So I did.

And let me assure you - in case you’ve never thrown a soft toy in your life - there’s something very satisfying about it. That moment when the little parachute mushrooms open the teddy comes swaying down under its brightly-coloured canopy… It’s better than alcohol. If a bit more trouble.

Now there are some things you have to get right. The parachute itself is fairly easy - all you need is the cloth from an old umbrella. You have to be a bit clever with the strings, because there must be six or eight of them at the parachute corners, but they have to come down to two behind the teddy’s back. You need a high place, a wide landing area, and light winds. (I mean that. Just imagine what chaos a teddy could cause by drifting at windscreen height across a busy main road. And trees and telephone wires have a strange attraction, too.) Above all this is a sport for soft toys, and only for soft toys. Do not repeat not think of trying this on the household cat! What you need is a teddy, or a toy rabbit or something like that. They don’t have to volunteer. I find they conscript quite readily.

Put them together and - Wheeee! There you go.

And you have time, as the parachute drifts downwards, just to think a few things. You can do that If you like. Wonder about life, and air, and the secrets of the universe. If you like. Or you can just stand there and love it.

Not everything has to make sense.

I am to attend a careers fair at my old school in a fortnight’s time.  This will mean sitting at a small table in a large room, surrounded by other tables at which will be seated stockbrokers, bankers, wine importers, possibly some civil servants and the occasional engineer.  I shall have a sign marked “AUTHOR” and a small pile of my books, and I shall look around expectantly while the fresh-faced children of stockbrokers, bankers, wine importers and possibly civil servants mill around among the tables trying to imagine what they are going to do with the rest of their lives.

At least that’s how I approached it last time.  This year I’m going for some more aggressive marketing.  The first thing I’m going to do is hide that sign “AUTHOR” and replace it with one of my own, which will read:

I AM AN AUTHOR
I DO NOT BITE
I DO NOT ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH

I reckon that will bring them running.

Then, for discussion, there will be a couple more signs.  One will read:

AUTHORS ARE:
-  Poor
-  Mad
-  Oppressed
-  Prone to Self Pity
Interested?  Ask HERE for details.

And a third will read: THE NOVEL YOU ARE WRITING MAY BE THE LAST EVER WRITTEN.  (That’s about the e-book and how story-telling may change in the future).

Now, I planned all this with the aid of half a bottle of wine, and maybe it shows. I am forced to admit that when I write these things down they look pretty negative about the profession I’m supposed to be pitching.  I may lose my nerve on the day and settle for the pile of books and expectant look.  But here’s a couple of reasons why I may not.

First, because I want to strike a different note, and I don’t want to be apologetic about it.  In that room of city professionals, I want to say ‘You don’t have to go for the respectable, high-salaried career.  You can shape your life into something quite different.  Let’s talk about what that might mean.’

And second, because when I do get someone who wants to write, they don’t need much persuading to give it a try. I’ll be happy to talk to them about writing and to encourage them in what they are doing.  But I don’t want to leave them with too many illusions.  When I say that authors are Poor/Mad/Oppressed - well, there’s a truth or two that maybe they should know before they set out on this path.

The Self Pity bit is, of course, pure hyperbole.

Actually I think bankers etc may also know about Self Pity at the moment

Look, I like the careers fair.  I like meeting these young people.  And once I get going I can’t help being positive about writing. My eyes will sparkle and I shall be aiming to make theirs sparkle too.  I shall say to them that (never mind the future of the novel) there were story-tellers long before there were stockbrokers and there will be story-tellers long after stockbrokers have been forgotten. It may be film, it may be song, it may be theatre.  It may be some medium we cannot yet imagine.  But people will always want stories.  After food gatherers and shelter-builders, ours is the most essential profession of all.

It’s going to be fun.  And I may get a word with that wine-importer too.

Just because you only work three hours a day - at home, what’s more - it doesn’t mean you don’t get to have holidays.  Holidays are Allowed.  Sometimes they are Enforced.  I am in the middle of a stop-go holiday that threatens to take all February.  The cause is Kids.

First there was the snow.  There wasn’t very much of it, by some standards, but there was more than  Gloucestershire was equipped to cope with.  Roads blocked, ice formed, cars skidded - and schools closed.  Even the gritty headmaster of no. 2 child’s school was forced to close in the end.  He was about the last head standing in all of the county.  (I have this mental image of him going down at the salute while he and his school were gently buried in drifts of - well, not of snow, but of e-mails from parents and teachers alike saying Sorry, they were not going to make it today Because.)  And now the snow has melted, it’s half term.  So for much of the last three weeks I have been sharing my workspace with two young teenagers for whom entertainment these days is only entertainment if it comes through a screen(1).  Family policy is no computers in bedrooms.  They stay in the shared spaces where we can all at least be a part of what each other is doing.   And there are just two computers.  And there are three of us.

In theory this is simple.  The order of precedence is Work, Homework, Communication and then Goofing Off.  So if I’m working I get one and the kids can rip each other’s eyeballs out about who gets the other.  In practice - well, the truth is I’ve become spoiled.  There was a time when I could work away in a busy office whatever the chatter around me.  I would then come home and write a few pages of novel in the fifteen minutes while Pippa was in the bath or whatever.  I could do it then, because that was the only way I was going to get it done.  Now I’m used to empty rooms, a quiet lane outside and hours of time for Deep Thought.  The very presence of others in the house is enough to distract me.  Ten times more so if I know that soon I’ll be getting another tirade about how unreasonable the sibling is being.   It makes me tremble to the very core of my sensitive writer’s soul.  Oh, for a hut at the bottom of the garden - and I’m going to move the boiler down there too.

But aha!  An opportunity!  Older teenager has organised with friends to take the day out.  The forces of Hades are halved at a stroke.  All that remains is to neutralise the younger.  And I think of the bathrooms, and a slow smile spreads across my face.  The bathrooms, yes, yes.  The surfaces are coated with hairs and soap scum, the toilets are - well, let’s not be too explicit.  Get him started on that and I’ll be at peace for hours!  With a parents’ cunning, I stalk and pounce.  Negotiations.  A threat.  A bribe.  The deal is done.  Off he goes.  And I can settle with a sigh, fingers poised over the keyboard, mind beginning to fumble for whatever it was I had planned to get done this week.  I’m between manuscripts, aren’t I?  So it must be…

Door opens.  He’s back, willing but implacable.

“How do I clean a bathroom?”

Another sigh, but not of contentment.  The Holiday continues.

(1) Books are an honourable exception.  The thing about a book is that you can read a few pages and then go back to whoever’s hogging the screen and complain that they are hogging the screen.  Somehow this makes the next few pages that bit more satisfying.

I know a Little Old Lady in Painswick. I have a Long-Suffering Nephew in Leeds . I inhabit the gulf between them.

I go to the Little Old Lady when she needs help with e-mail. I show her how to attach a document. She ask how she can be sure it’s been received, and I tell her about read receipts. We got into this when I found she had typed out a page’s worth of text into her e-mail because she didn’t know about copy and paste. (Up to last year she had left all this to her husband.) She can at least manage the double-click on the mouse. Go, Little Old Lady! Not everyone can.

I go to the Long-Suffereing Nephew when I need help - chiefly with my website. Long-Suffering Nephew was building websites in the small hours every night from the age of about ten. As far as I am concerned this was time well invested, because it means I can go to him and say : “Dear nephew, sweet nephew, come and talk to your doddering uncle about style sheets…”

I won’t have a webmaster. I do the thing myself, for the same reason that I do my accounts myself. I want to be in control. Insofoar as I can be in control when I don’t know really know what I’m doing. Juggling between page editor and paint.net, trying to get the same effect on Firefox that you do on Internet Explorer - it’s a bit like wandering round inside a nuclear command bunker wondering which button turns on the light. This is why the site has a rather DIY look, and why I’m trying to improve it in the run-up to publication of The Fatal Child. It will also explain why it may shortly look as if there has been an accidental nuclear strike. (”It wasn’t meant to be that kind of launch.”) The book-like format I have adopted causes all sorts of problems, but I like it so I’m going to keep it. I talked wistfully to the nephew about putting in a page-turning effect, so that the page actually, you know, “turns” when you click on the link? He gave me the sort of look that happens in Transylvanian inns all festooned with garlic, when the passing traveller asks about the creepy-looking castle on the hill. Uncle, you don’t want to go there.

Well maybe I won’t. Not yet. Not while accidentally deleting the wrong <div> tag has the same effect as pulling out a brick from the bottom of a tower. But one day, who knows? Keep trying things. Never admit that you are beaten. In the words of W E Henley’s Invictus

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Or in my case: I am the master of my web/I am the captain of my screen.

I haven’t heard from the Little Old Lady for a while. Maybe she’s hunched beady-eyed over her own computer, building her own website with lots of glitzy effects that will make my jaw drop when I see them.

Another birthday yesterday. Forty-six isn’t a very significant number. Except that it was twenty-three years ago, give or take a month, that a twenty-three year old young man turned up at the Ministry of Defence to begin his first real job. I knew very little about what I would be doing, and nothing at all about who I was going to meet or what working with them would be like. I still remember with affection the dozen or so extraordinary individuals who greeted me and that dusty and dingy set of offices. They were all nice to me, but they were extraordinary, in ways that I cannot record here for fear that some of it may be actionable.

The DFC is a new story-telling comic for 9-12 year olds. It will be launched by my editor, David Fickling, at the end of May. This is David’s bid to revive quality comics in this country and to bring stories to children who do not normally read much. I’ve seen some early mock-ups and they look good. And I wasn’t very surprised when David asked me to do something for it. He’s probably asked pretty well everybody he sees on a regular basis.

I was poking around inside a computer file that someone else had written. It’s not something I do very much. I felt like a trespasser. I also felt a bit of a dunce, since I could only guess at what most of the lines meant and yet I knew that I was about to take this neat bit of work and make a monkey’s nest of it with some coding of my own, in an effort to get this blog to look the way I wanted it.And then there, among the organised clumps of barely-intelligible computer language, were some words I knew perfectly well. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do…”  The chorus of an old music-hall song, at the bottom of a screenful of code. A thing from a completely different time and era, like the doodle of some Victorian explorer on the wall of a mysterious temple. It wasn’t going to change the way the programme ran. It was just there, bright and happy and utterly unlike the jumble of words and symbols that preceded it. Ninety-nine percent of people who run that programme will never see it. Why had the programmer done it?Well it may be that this is a done thing among programme writers. You complete your programme and then add a few lines of poetry like a signature. When I had finished mangling my colleague’s infinitely-superior creation with my own tweaks I did the same, replacing Daisy’s simple optimism with some obscurities from Yeats.  Holla!  Now I too, am one of the secret society of poetic computer geeks. But actually I don’t think it’s that.I have also, in WE, played with the idea that works of art are like species in evolution. Their purpose is to make copies of themselves. As their time runs out and extinction nears, they get copies of themselves made even in the most desperate of places, so in fifty years’ time the only place you will find operas is bundled in with the latest computer security programme. So wham! Was this, suddenly, a real example of exactly the thing I have written about? It does uncanny when this happens - an idea that you think you’ve had for yourself, suddenly leaping into being in the real world. But in fact it’s not that unusual. If writers’ imaginations don’t from time to time anticipate developments in the world, then either the world or their imagination has somehow gone wrong. And in this case, it’s probably not that either.