Andrew Oldham

ARCHIVE: Editorial on Travel

I abhor travel. Maybe that is a little harsh but trust me when you’ve landed sideways in an air plane at O’Hare, buffeted by one of the worst hurricanes the USA has ever seen, it tends to put you off the act of travelling. I love to go places though, so I am in a Catch 22 situation. Many of us now baulk as we face the new guru catch word – carbon footprint; a catchphrase dreamt up in some PR company, to make us all feel guilty that the planet is indeed warming up, whilst human compassion, trust and love amongst fellow men and women is distinctly dropping down the temperature scale. Let’s face it, we’re stuffed.

So, how big is your carbon footprint? Is it so big that you can now actively brag to male friends about it? Is it big enough to make even China go weak at the knees? Let’s face it, this is how the whole travel problem is being pitched at us – we are being made to feel incredibly stupid and guilty but there is no real mention of the companies that are also to blame or even the governments.

Yet, our lust for travel and the throwaway lifestyle is contagious. Come on, who hasn’t amongst you told friends that you went to somewhere warm and sat by the pool for a fortnight, drinking bad wine and reading equally bad literature? And felt good about it? Openly braggedabout fucking up the country you holidayed in? And we all do it, we go to gems hidden amongst the lapping waves of some undiscovered place. These solitary hideaways where we find ourselves, find peace, discover beauty and feel at one with the world. And, a fortnight after returning home, we have told all our friends, family, colleagues, lovers and any passing stranger or old school friend what a great place we’ve just holidayed in. What do they do? They go there! The cheek. The sheer bravado! What happens then? They tell all their friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances of their pets about a great place they’ve just been too. Oh, the beaches! Oh, the people! The culture, the food, the warmth! – LOOK AT OUR TANS – and what happens then? They go! And then more people go there, then actually live there. Four years later, you meet the first person you recommended the gem to and say quite calmly and in that innocent voice, “I went back on holiday there, but I wouldn’t go again – it’s so commercial, there’s no culture left. There was even a burger bar next to a temple! The people have sold out”

What do you expect? You waved great fistfuls of dirty money in their faces. Sure, beauty is wonderful, empty tranquil beaches that stretch off to the blue horizon are great but you don’t live there all the time. You don’t realise how poor some of these countries are and how much the humble tourist has them over a barrel. Money or poverty? Money or starvation? The irony is though, that England too is becoming a tourist trap. It’s the fastest growing market in the UK at the moment. Will we adapt though to being the one’s accepting the money and bending backwards over a barrel to do it? Could we, after so many decades of package holidays, shouting for food in slow and clear English in the Costa del Sol, Lyon, Delhi, Rhodes and Paris actually welcome the same back? Package holidays are coming back to roost, and I wait with baited breath for the first Spanish Man to shout slow and clear in some greasy spoon, in Spanish of course, that he wants paella.

Tags: Act on CO2, Andrew Oldham, Carbon footprint, Catch 22, Editorial, Package holiday, Travel

ARCHIVE: Sex Editorial

You switch on the television, sex, you open the pages of a newspaper, sex, you tune into the Archers, sex. It seems that Benny Hill became so ingrained in our minds in the 1980s that his ghost has risen from the grave and he is being chased through every medium accompanied by a bevvy of scantily clad women. And now men are getting in on the act. Once there was the bimbo, now there is the himbo and years from now they will have populated the planet with good looking chavs. I know that last one is hard to imagine but trust me, they have devolved to a point where they can only go up or else dig holes in the ground and changed their names to Morlock. Which makes the rest of us the Eloi. For those of you unaware of H.G. Wells classic, The Time Machine, the Eloi where the good looking ones who fed from the Earth. They where apathetic, watched others drown as they sat on the perfect bums on a perfect riverbank and ate fruit. God, that sounds awfully familiar, does it remind anyone of celebrity culture? Where vacuous talentless Z list stars, whose only claim to fame is being racist or so talentless that they’ve come out the otherside in a post ironic thingy that they don’t understand but ain’t their Mum a bitch? And look at the new boobs they gave her. Ten grand they cost, so they can’t be a racist, can they? I pray for one of the new hybrid cars to run them over. At least it will cut down on polution. It angers me that they spill their pointless philosophy (which they could write on the side of a match) to every tabloid that can hold a crayon. I’m digressing, in fact it’s not a good idea to think of celebrity culture.

Really, when did putting people in a house for several weeks, with little food, little chance to wash their clothes become sexy? It wasn’t when you flat shared. We should just take ALL Big Brother contestants (they’re not stars) and just shit them into space. Brian and the twins could boldly go and piss off. Poor Davina, her soul has been sucked dry by endless line of mincemeat and suckers.

And that’s what sex is really about. At its essence, sex in the media is making a fool our of you. It preys on your base instincts, from every ad to every soap – come on, Hollyoaks, you didn’t think it was written? It’s just a group of images for frustrated teens – turn the sound off and you’ll see it’s just top shelf fodder not very well disguised.

But why shouldn’t we revel in sex? Let’s face it, it’s programmed into our DNA. I tell you all those stars who have been caught over the years, all those wives and husbands, and partners couldn’t help it. It’s bad enough that it’s our primal drive but when they start putting it on the back of buses and on mobile phones and in music videos, who stands a chance?

Tags: bums and tums, Editorial, Eloi, HG Wells, Sex, The Time Machine

ARCHIVE: In the City – Anthony Cropper, James Nash and Dee Rimbaud

Andrew interviewed Anthony Cropper, James Nash and Dee Rimbaud in 2005. ‘I remember this interview well,’ says Andrew, ‘It was an experiment, for weeks I had tried to arrange meeting all three writers together but our diaries wouldn’t marry up. In the end I interviewed them all by email and then created the location. It is common practice amongst journalists to do this, to add or subtract material after a meeting, via phone or email. I took it one step further, there was no pub but I created it! The writers in question where rather bemused by the interview. It just shows that all journalism is only one viewpoint of the truth. I wrote up the interview in a pub’.

In the City: Anthony Cropper, James Nash and Dee Rimbaud. Interview by Andrew Oldham

With the release of Naked City I took the opportunity to catch up with the editor of the collection, Anthony Cropper and two of the writers in an undisclosed location in the city.

I ask Dee Rimbaud and James Nash about their short stories, The Model Woman and Father and Sons which make an appearance in the new collection from Route, Naked City. Can you both tell us a little about the story?

“It was a bit of a tease really…” starts James.

“The Model Woman…” adds Dee, “Is about a waitress who works in an Italian Restaurant in Glasgow. Her world revolves around the restaurant, as she is engaged to one of the owner’s sons; and it would appear the trajectory of her life is already mapped out. Then, one day, she is confronted with the apparition of her fantasy-self in the flesh; an encounter that shakes her confidence and makes her doubt her chosen path.

“I’ve always been interested in the father and sons relationship, and that we have real and ‘pretend’ ones throughout our life. Some fathers are looking for sons, and some sons are looking for fathers, perhaps because they have lost their own, or theirs were unsatisfactory. I also wanted to show how some of these ‘pretend’ relationship can be pathological,” finishes James.

I turn my attention to the editor of the collection, the award winning writer, Anthony Cropper and ask the million dollar question that all writers want to know. What made you think ‘yes, this is good story’ when you read tDee Rimbaud’s The Model Woman and James Nash’s Fathers and Sons?

“Both were engaging right from the start. Both were detailed, close pieces with a strong sense of place and reality. Father and Sons offered much by way of suggestion, whereas Model Woman seemed more direct, more forceful in its prose”.

Where did the ideas for your stories come from?

“I knew someone once who sacked all his friends from time to time, and made new ones. He had been seriously damaged as a child, and his adult relationships reflected this. Brendan was loosely based on this person,” answers James.

“I was having a late lunch in Dino’s Restaurant in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. I was watching staff taking lunch, relaxing in between rush periods, and I just let my imagination take off from there” is Dee’s response.

Cropper watches them both as the two writers take a sip from their respective drinks. I have to ask them. How did you find Anthony as an editor? James nearly chokes and Dee smirks. Anthony sighs and looks out the window.

“He was a sympathetic and subtle editor, never intrusive, and always intelligent. Whenever he made a suggestion, it was a good one,” starts James.

“He and Ian Daley have done a fine job in putting together Naked City, and I am very pleased to have my story included in this collection,” answers Dee. They both watch Anthony, wait for his response, he sighs, laughs a little, reaches for his own drink – they wait – all writers crave praise, because their parents never actually figured out what they did and therefore couldn’t actually praise it.

“I can’t con myself. If I think something’s good, then I say so. Whether that’s objective or subjective I don’t know. I read stories, any stories, and I always think about how the writer has done things and how I do things. I’m pretty critical, but realise you’ve got to let writers have their own space. The main thing in this collection was getting a cohesive set of stories together, ones that would work as a whole to illustrate some aspects of life in these changing cities. The nit-picking wasn’t that important”.

Anthony, How hard was the editing process?

“It’s great to read some good stories. The surprises are well worth the effort, and seeing the collection come together as a whole is satisfying. The lows, well, reading through a lot of stories can be tiring, but I can’t complain too much. Again, the main thing was getting the stories together, getting them to fit, putting some sort of structure to the book. That’s the thing that took a lot of doing. Mostly, the stories needed minor changes, just some inconsistencies, but there were some which I thought could be made stronger with tightening them up, paring them down. When it comes down to it, you can only make suggestions. Reading a piece of work and seeing where it could be chopped and changed isn’t that hard. I’d pass on suggestions and wait to see what the writers made of them”.

If James and Dee could change anything in the stories, re-edit them, what would they choose to change? James whistles, Dee looks up at the ceiling starts to hum as Anthony sits back relieved of being the editor.

“I might spend more time on the relationship between the narrator and Brendan. It could be part of a much longer piece,” replies James.

Dee is more confident in his response, he knows what he wants and what he wants to write.

“There is nothing I would want to change in this story”.

Anthony, How do you feel the process of editing has helped you as an author?

“I think anything to do with working with writing is a help, whether it’s editing or running workshops or just reading. Anything that makes you think about your own work must be good. I’m very critical of my own material. I’ll write quickly but will chop and change a lot when I’ve pages to work with”.

And, what was the oddest submission you received?

“Nothing specific springs to mind, but there were a couple of stories which were way too long, more like novellas”.

What ‘drew’ you to edit the Naked City collection?

“The initial idea was Ian Daley’s. He’d discussed it with me some time ago and even then I thought it was a good idea. I’ve lived in a fair few cities, Manchester, Liverpool, Oxford, Chester, Bristol… and the rapid and dramatic changes were evident. I’d wanted to be involved, even before reading the stories. When I did get to go through them it was easy to see it would be a very good collection”.

James and Dee, when and how did you first start to write?

“First started to write as child,” says James, “I loved reading, and I used to tell my brother and sister stories while we were lying in bed with our bedroom doors open. Turned to poetry about ten years ago, and from there to short stories”.

And Dee?

“Really, as soon as I learned the alphabet,” he chuckles, “Prior to that, I used to act out elaborate stories with my toys. That said, a good Scottish comprehensive education soon knocked the stuffing out of the creative impulse; and I may never have written again, had it not been for the encouragement my third year English teacher, Maurice Cox. Initially, I wrote only poetry, as it more immediately served my need for instant gratification. I didn’t tackle fiction and its demands until I was in my early thirties”.

The process of writing is often seen as a lonely, isolated occurrence. Can you both take us through, blow by blow, how the story first came to you, how you wrote it and where, how you resolved problems and crafted the final piece? James nods, opens his mouth to reply but Dee starts.

“The story first came to me in a restaurant. It was some time ago now, so I can’t remember the writing process in detail. However I can tell you that, in general, when the ‘muse’ comes to me, I will write the poem or story down without pausing for breath. After that, I’ll read it through, decide it’s ‘crap’ and then put it away in a folder for future revision. These first drafts can languish forgotten for months, years or even decades (I’m not exaggerating). On a semi-regular basis, I will look through all my folders, and re-read these first drafts. Usually, one story or poem will strike me, and I will be able to see the way forward with it. So I’ll work on a second draft, and the piece won’t seem so ‘crap’, but I know it’s still got some way to go, so I put it back in its folder… and so it goes, on and on, until I consider the piece to be finished. If memory serves me right, I wrote the first draft of The Model Woman somewhere between 1995 and 1998″.

James?

“I had an idea about a man, still mourning the death of his son, his marriage collapsed through the strain of mourning for the lost son. I also saw the man as someone who saw images of children and particularly boy children everywhere. He was unconsciously drawn to them. With a surviving younger son, and a demanding job, he takes time out at lunchtime to browse in a junkshop and he finds two Chinese figures, one perfect, the other with subtle internal damage. He meets a charming stranger in the shop who reminds him of his dead son. There follows a strange and uncomfortable ‘flirtation’ which ends in discomfort as he realises that this young man is not his son, and is very damaged. I have the two Chinese figures at home, and built the story around them. There may be something of my broken marriage in the story. But I have never had sons. The problem was all to do with indicating the themes but not shouting them out aloud. I kept removing and removing all the stuff which seemed to be too obvious. I wanted to allude to the issues, not tell my reader what to think”.

Before I can ask Anthony, he moves from his seat and heads for the bar. We all put in order before he’s five yards away and we turn back to the interview in hand, secure in the knowledge that vocal chords and vowels will soon flow easier.

How do you overcome the feeling of isolation as a writer?

“I work as a freelancer in schools, libraries, theatres, writing groups all the time. I wish there was more isolation,” bemoans James.

Dee laughs.

“Is isolation something that should be overcome? There is so much emphasis placed on the gregarious nature of humans and animals, that isolation is seen as a negative state of being. Gregariousness is, I believe, a primitive instinct that belongs to an era when we could only survive in a herd. This herd instinct requires that its members have a common purpose and, by extension, a common thought process (often dictated by the Alpha male). Gregariousness gives birth to monsters, be they crowds of football supporters or xenophobic Nazis. In truth, I believe we are all isolated, but some of us succumb to our loneliness and are willing to sacrifice our individuality for the warm, dangerous arms of the crowd”.

What do you both do for day to day job?

“Teacher, presenter, journalist, facilitator. Completely freelance,” answers James.

“I have done so many different day-to-day jobs I’ve lost count. My last working stint, as a propsman for film and television, came to an abrupt end when I suffered a brain haemorrhage and nearly died, back in 2001. Since then I have been mainly a house-husband and dad (although I do earn some ‘pin money’ through my writing, art, illustration and graphic design). Incidentally, my daughter, Rosie Sunshine, was born only two weeks after I had my brain haemorrhage,” adds Dee.

We watch Anthony at the bar for awhile, a debate has sprung up between the barman and the writer, none of us can make out what the two are arguing about. After much semaphore action by Anthony we move on.

Do you think a writer draws from their experiences or creates fantasy? If so, how do you do this?

“I think writers do both,” starts James, “consciously and unconsciously. I sometimes draw directly from experience or stories people have told me. My second poetry collection seemed to have nothing to do with my own life. I read it now and see the end of my second marriage”.

“Where does experience end and fantasy begin?,” asks Dee, “Everything we experience is registered and processed in the brain, which is a fantastically elaborate organic computer, made up of millions of hard drives, connected together by kazillions of USB cables. No-one knows how this network of mini super-computers is made up, or exactly how it processes information, but one thing I can say, without any hesitation, is that all fiction, even the wildest kind, has its origins in experience. All fiction and all fantasies (even extreme paranoid schizophrenic delusions) are by-products of experiences. Imagine, if our brains were made by Microsoft – we’d be safe from delusions and fantasies. We’d be safe from fiction too!”

If you could have received one piece of advice before you started writing what would it have been?

“Just keep doing it!!” barks James.

“Persevere,” adds Dee.

“Keep it simple,” says Anthony as he returns burgeoned with drinks, trays and a bar towel, “And read it through a number of times before submitting. And then there’s the old chestnut; stick a tenner in to oil the works”.

James and Dee you 20 words, in which to sell your story to potential readers, what would those 20 words be?

James?

“Does a loss or relationship nag at you daily? In this story one man transcends his bereavement through time”.

“‘Whatever you do, do NOT read this story!’ (this tactic always works with my 3 year old daughter). Seriously though, I don’t know what to say in response to this question. I don’t know how to sell a story, in twenty words or a hundred”.

And where next?

“I’m writing a novel. That takes up all my attention,” replies James reaching for his drink.

There is confusion between James and Anthony, something about the towel which is thankfully drowned out by Dee.

“I feel I’m coming to the end of a cycle with my writing. My novel, Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God has just recently been published, and my third collection of poetry is nearly complete. Where I go after that, I’m not sure. I’ve got a lot of projects bubbling away on the back burner, but I can’t think about them until the poetry collection is under wraps”.

Thanks James, Dee and Anthony, and now to drink and writing.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Anthony Cropper, James Nash and Dee Rimbaud, Naked City, Route

ARCHIVE: Formal Values – an interview with Ian Parks

Andrew interviewed Ian in 2004. ‘I have been friends with Ian for many years,’ says Andrew, ‘I do find it hard to interview friends and when I do I always go off script. What I remember of this interview is not the questions or the answers but the location. I interviewed Ian in a pub in Mexborough and a man was playing a fruit machine in the background, which can be heard on the original tape. The man in question halfway through a bet asked the barman for a spoon, which he started to jab into the fruit machine in a vain bid to get his money back. No one batted an eyelid. I have always wondered why he chose a spoon to attack a machine’.

Formal Values: an interview with Ian Parks. Interview by Andrew Oldham

Ian Parks is a unique poet with the skill and craft of Auden and the heart of Shelley. Parks has been published worldwide in such magazines as Agenda, The Observer, Oxford Poetry, New Welsh Review, Poetry (Chicago) and Cascando. His collections include, Gargoyles in Winter (Littlewood, 1985), A Climb Through Altered Landscapes (Blackwater 1998), The Angel of the North (Tarantula CD 2000). Parks has been described as “the finest love poet of his generation” (Chiron Review, USA) and is part of the collective of poets known as inc. I caught up with him on the eve of his new publication Shell Island (Waywiser Press) in a quiet pub in South Yorkshire where a young tattooed man was jamming a fork in a slot machine and old men were putting the world to right.

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a poet. My first exposure to poetry came from hearing my father recite it. He’d learned reams of it by heart at school and would repeat it when he was getting ready to go out. At school I discovered poems I liked and copied them into an exercise book, making a personal anthology”.

The thought arises of how much these early books would be worth now.

“My first poems were mainly imitations of the Victorian poets I was reading at the time. Then I came to Ted Hughes…,” Parks attended the same school as Hughes, “…and Thom Gunn via the First World War poets and realised that poetry could be written in what Wordsworth referred to as ‘a language really used by men’. That was a liberating experience. One of the first poems I had published was in the Poetry Review”.

In 2002, the poetry world was hit hard when Waterstones decided to stop stocking literary magazines, cutting the voices of a generation of poets dead. Many magazines are now fighting for survival as are poets trying to reach out to audiences that don’t know they’re there.

“I don’t think any poet can work in isolation. I was running a workshop once and this bloke came in and I asked him which poets he read and he replied by saying he wasn’t interested in reading poetry, only in writing it. It’s a view you come across quite often and it never fails to surprise me with its arrogance and stupidity”.

Now shelves are stocked with poets long dead or modern poets who have been writing for forty years and have only just been discovered but who will replace them in another forty years with no outlets.

“From a purely common sense point of view it seems counter productive to ignore what’s been done so well in the past, or to refuse to learn from it”

Ian Parks voice drips with South Yorkshire vowels, drawn out across the backwater of disused colliery fields.

“As far as my voice is concerned, I’m not sure where the idiosyncrasies of a poet’s voice come from. I guess they lie very close to the rhythms of the poet’s own speaking voice and that, in turn, interacts with a subject. What we call a poet’s voice arises from the tensions implicit in this situation. I think you have to be true to that voice. I think there’s a danger, with the proliferation of free verse, for poetry to end up as nothing more then chopped up prose”.

Who are the next generation of living poets?

“The poets I admire who are writing today: Thom Gunn, David Constantine, T.F. Griffin, Pauline Stainer, all have recognisable voices. They all seem to have an ear for the difference between poetry and prose”.

Parks’ poetry is born of the twentieth century and the upheaval of social changes of the 70s and 80s. The fleeting nature of the changing relationships in the home and workplace transferred to the page as he redefined love poetry for a new generation while learning from the past.

“I think Auden occupies a central place in the poetry of the last century. You can’t get around him. He is the first poet to feel at home in the twentieth century. The main thing I learned from Auden was that you can write love poetry that also has other dimensions. Auden understood that every love relationship has a social context of some kind and was therefore able to extend considerations usually confined to the private realm into the public realm of politics. In “Lay Your Sleeping Head”, for instance, he uses the very intimate form of address to say something about the ‘fashionable madmen’ who were at large in Europe during the 1930′s”.

Ian Parks is born from this tradition, marrying political and social image to a modern world.

“We’re living at a time when freedom and democracy are at threat – but this time from within. Except that this time around the very language of freedom is being appropriated by the powers that be in order to persuade us that what they’re doing is right. One of the main functions of poetry today, as I see it, is to defend the language of the heart from such blatant misappropriation”.

Ian Parks’ work breaks the stereotype of what most of think love poetry is.

“Even though people talk about me as a love poet I’d say the main theme running through everything is time. The apparent interest in history is really an interest in time and how it affects us at both a personal and collective level. At their deepest level, all the poems are about this. I think a very fine membrane exists between the present and what we call the past. Hardy understood this; he knew that a thin tissue separates us from what’s gone before. To be on the verge of being overwhelmed by the pressure exerted by the past on the present moment is there in my poem ‘Towton’; about a particularly bloody battle during the Wars of the Roses. It’s really an attempt to articulate the obsession with time and the fact that it has no linear properties as such. I was over in the USA on a Travelling Fellowship and came to the conclusion that the American Civil War is very much a living issue for the descendants of those who fought in it. You can visit any one of those battle sights and feel the tangible presence of the past. I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to mention Robert Graves. A little out of fashion now, Graves was probably the greatest love poet of the last century. I admire his unswerving dedication to poetry – and to his belief – encapsulated in ‘The White Goddess’ – that poetry is essentially a miraculous activity, the processes of which we can neither understand nor quantify”.

Poets are often seen as private people with public love lives. The work often reflects this but the argument still rages: when should the private become part of the public realm?

“There comes a time when the poem ceases to be the exclusive property of the poet and takes on a life of its own. I get people coming up to me at poetry readings describing a certain poem of mine, which I don’t recognise. When they tell me the title I know the poem they’re referring to, but their experience of it has been so unique, they’ve brought so much of themselves to it, that I have difficulty relating their description to the poem I wrote. There is, after all, no ‘correct’ reading of a poem. We’re not talking about maths where two and two will always make four. We’re in a highly subjective area where the poet’s intentions – such as they are – become secondary to the experience of the reader”.

Modern Literature has now spiralled away in packaging, making money and the cult of celebrity with poetry being wheeled out for Valentine’s Day, Christmas and the ubiquitous National Poetry Day. Are we seeing the death throes of poetry? Is Seamus Heaney right in his assumption that the likes of Eminem are the new face of verse and where does that leave love?

“The difference now is that we have a different set of ethics to the ones that existed when, say, Tennyson wrote his love poems. Then people were expected to marry for life and love poems tended to limit themselves to either praising the attributes of the loved one or dealing with the painful process of loss. People now expect to have several relationships in a lifetime and this effects how they think and feel about love. The love poet has to be in tune with this change. If the cultural atmosphere presents a less naive, more analytic approach to love then the love poet ought to reflect that. I guess I’m interested in transitory states; how one thing becomes another thing. Poetry seems to me to have the flexibility I require to explore all this. Love poetry provides us with a powerful continuum. It connects us by a very strong thread to the poetry of the past while, at the same time, acting as a sort of spirit level for our deepest feelings”.

Editors often have nightmares about working with poets, as they are often seen as temperamental. The poetry market in the UK is an incredibly small one and many of the big publishing houses no longer touch poetry for financial reasons. What are the processes you went through to select work for your new collected love poems?

“My first love poem was published in 1983 when I was twenty-four and the most recent earlier this year. Twenty years seemed like a nice round number. In a way, the selection process was complete before the collection was put together, in that I only sent out poems that I felt happy with at the time. So, in a sense, I’d made my mind up about them already. The problem wasn’t so much in selection as in deciding what, strictly speaking, constituted what should be in Shell Island – and how the collection should be organised. A couple of poems didn’t make it because they weren’t good enough; a couple more because they seemed to repeat what was done better in other pieces. You don’t want to keep writing the same poem forever. The temptation to do that is quite strong. Shell Island breaks from this”.

As we’ve talked about history, what one poem do you give up to it, which one do you think will stand the test of time?

“I’d have to opt for ‘The Mirrored Room’. It’s about the experience of visiting a tea-room in York and finding a wall of mirrors etched with the names of airmen from World War Two, and the names of their girlfriends, and knowing that they probably went off to die. Seeing those names imposed over your own features somehow provides an objective correlative for what I was saying earlier about the pressure of the past on the present”.

And with that the evening turns cold, the rain rattles against the glass panes, the young man jams a spoon in with the fork lodged in the slot machine, the old men order another round, and Ian Parks watches this, marking the moment he selected the one poem to stand up and take on history.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Ian Parks, Mexborough, Poetry, Shell Island, Waywiser Press

ARCHIVE: Louise Rennison Felt My Face

Andrew interviewed Louise in 2005. ‘This is one of the most fun interviews I’ve conducted,‘ says Andrew, ‘As we talked to each other we began to realise that we had met before. I was 17 and Louise was feeling Stevie Wonders face in Wigan and that was just the start of our laughter. You may not get that reference but it doesn’t matter, it makes me laugh’.

Louise Rennison Felt My Face. Interview by Andrew Oldham

Louise Rennison lives in Brighton, a place that she likes to think of as the San Francisco of the South Coast. Which is sad as it is nothing like San Francisco, being mainly pebbles and large people in tiny swimming knickers who have gone bright red in the sun. Although she lives in Brighton in reality, in her mind she lives somewhere exotic with a manservant called Juan. This is because she lost her mind after Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging catapulted her into the spotlight of fame.

Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging is the first book in the Georgia Nicolson series, written in a diary style. Georgia is fourteen and lives with her annoying parents, a three-year-old sister, who says things like, “Georgia did a big poo this morning” to prospective boyfriends, her half Scottish wildcat, Angus and has to wear a beret to school. She would, however, rather be blond, have a smaller nose, slimmer eyebrows and a have a Sex-God for a boyfriend.

The second book following Georgia’s exploits is It’s OK I’m Wearing Really Big Knickers, the third Knocked Out by My Nunga Nungas and the fourth Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants. Sales in the UK for the series have already topped 400,000. Sales in the US have passed the million mark and have reached Number 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

Louise based several episodes in the books on her own childhood in Leeds, where she was bought up in a three-bedroomed council house with her mum, dad, grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousin. When Louise was 15, her parents decided to emigrate to Wairakei in New Zealand. Its main claim to fame is that it had some of the most violent geothermal activity in the world. In her twenties, Louise lived in Notting Hill Gate. Louise rekindled a childhood dream and enrolled on a Performing Arts course in Brighton Her first one-woman autobiographical show, Stevie Wonder Felt My Face, won great acclaim and awards at the Edinburgh Festival in the 80s and millions watched the subsequent BBC2 special. Since then, Louise has continued to perform her own shows (Bob Marley’s Gardener Sold My Friend and Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head.) She works frequently for Radio 4.

In Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging you deal with the angst of being a teenager through your character Georgia Nicolson. How much is Georgia based on you or people you know?

“I’ve had a warning from my mother this morning. She knows I’m doing this interview and told me to say that the book has nothing to do with me or my family. Actually, it’s highly based on me and also what’s even worse is when I wrote Angus, Thongs I didn’t actually know how to write a book, you know. I just got asked to do it, so I actually put real people’s names in and I thought, ‘oh I’ll change it before it gets published’ but I forgot. So, in addition to my family being featured. Also, all my teachers are too”.

What were you like as a teenager?

“Like Georgia actually, rather prone to accidents. I used to think I was very amusing; I’m not that sure that everyone else would agree with me. I went to an all girls’ school and it creates a very different atmosphere, somehow. And I think there’s a lot of the things in the book that come from this, there’s a bit in it, based on me going to a party dressed as a stuffed olive. I just thought that was a hilarious idea, it was only when I got to the party and I mixed with some boys that I realised that it was an utterly crap idea. The lads laughed along for a bit and then they completely ignored me for the rest of the night”.

Would you say that you were a bit naïve at that age?

“Yes, I think I probably was. I was quite excitable. I know when I see girls at signings; they do this thing that I remember doing, vividly. You know, that sort of mad laughing, when they get a joke between them and they start laughing and they can’t stop and they know they should stop because people are going to kill them, if they don’t stop laughing, but they still can’t. You just can’t stop. I think I was like that, excitable”.

Georgia could be seen as a bit naïve compared to other characters targeted at teenagers in literature.

“I think teenagers are a bit naïve. I think teenagers are if injured in someway, if something happens that forces them to face stuff. Generally speaking though, whoever thinks it’s a good idea to give them the vote at sixteen is just an arse. It’s stupid”.

Do you feel modern teenagers are bit more jaded and world-weary?

“I saw a very funny Dylan Moran thing about disenchanted people, oh god another party, no one looks at you, they’re just looking at your clothes and all that. Well, it’s difficult because I know a lot of teenagers. I think they’ve got more choice, definitely more choice and that’s a bit confusing, actually. As a grown up if I’m offered fifty different kinds of credit card it makes me go insane with choice and I think this is what they do. It’s a source of deep unhappiness I think in a way, and we didn’t have that. You know there was no bloody question of getting stuff off my parents. I used to try, god love me, but it was kind of ‘err, err, no’. Mum and Dad used to tease me, drove them insane, ‘so how much money do you think you’ll be getting to take away, pocket money wise on holiday?’ And, I’d go, ‘oh I don’t know, about fifty quid’ and they’d go, ‘You see, you see the world we live in?’ So I think on that level that parents found it easier to say, ‘err no’. They weren’t too transfixed with wanted to get on with you, I see parents now trying much more desperately to be nice to teenagers than mine were to me”.

That’s a big mistake.

“It is actually, you can’t be their mates”.

In On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God our heroine is now dating the sex god, Robbie. But who did you have a crush on when you were a teenager and who would you love to date now?

“It was him. He actually was a sex god, and in fact I saw him last weekend, he was my very first boyfriend and we went out. And I went back to Yorkshire, and I saw him”.

 What was that like?

“It was weird actually. You realise that there’s a bit of you that is forever fifteen. He was very nice, I would have probably have killed him if I’d have married him, you know because he is a real Yorkshire bloke”.

 Of course you had a crush on this guy, but if you could date anyone now. Who would that be?

“Oh no, that’s an impossible question. Let me think, I went to the Brian Wilson gig last night and I was thinking about the pop stars. I used to like a couple of the Motown singers because they used to wear really fantastic clothes. I used to really like that. I tell you who was there last night at that gig, who I did use to fancy, Roger Daltrey from The Who. He looked brilliant last night, dancing around to Brian. Oh, and Brian Ferry I used to fancy. The readers won’t be satisfied with that, they’ll want me to say someone from bloody Busted”

Or Justin Timberlake or Orlando Bloom?

“Oh no not Justin! And Orlando? I can’t get over the big ears (Lord of the Rings), I know they’re not his that they were moulded but I suspect that they might grow back. I quite like that Ben Affleck bloke”.

How hard is it to write for teenagers?

“It’s really easy. Actually when I start writing, which I am now, all my friends go, ‘oh god, here we go’. Because you can’t help but get into the mood of it and I was doing that the other day. I was sort of re-reading one of my books and my Mum said to me, she said, ‘Are you laughing at your own books?’ I write in this quite eccentric place in Brighton, it’s called ‘The Natural Health Centre’ and it has all kinds of alternative practices, and I’ve worked there for years because I know the owner. He used to let me rehearse there when I was at college, when I did comedy and everything. So, there’s all sorts of different things going on, like belly dancing and five rhythms, where middle aged blokes fling themselves around like loons. And I work right at the top of the building and I come down if I get a bit bored or restless, and snigger through the windows at what people are doing, childish. No, I just really look forward to it”.

What books did you read when you were a teenager?

“You know this another real big difference, there weren’t teenage books around really. There were a couple; I remember a series called Anna the Air Hostess, really the career choices! Like an Air Hostess and that’s it! I used to read a lot of magazines, it’s peculiar, I know her now, but do you know Jacqueline Wilson? She started a magazine called Jackie and we all used to read that and there was another one, the girls will really snigger about this one, called Bunty”

With the cut out clothes?

“Yes! These were all very weird images for a working class schoolgirl from Yorkshire. To have the four Mary’s for Mallory Towers, that was one of them. So, I had a very dislocated view of the world. I think, on one hand it was full of posh people and then there was me and my mates on the council estate. I used to do a lot of reading from school stuff”.

And what do you read now?

“I was just thinking if someone comes in, I’m lying in bed at the minute, if someone came in to my bedroom they’d have a very odd idea of me. Let me just tell you what I’ve got, I’ve got How To Be A Goddess, it’s one of those self help book things, Three Men in a Boat, Zen Questions. Janet Evanovich, do you know her? I like her a lot. I read Agatha Christie and just whatever’s near. I do like thrillers. Actually, I have got a childhood book here which is called, Naughty Princess, which I think is the funniest book ever written, it’s by…hangon, there used to be a magazine in the nineteen forties called Strand Magazine, do you remember it? I must find out more about this author, he’s called Anthony Armstrong, and he wrote the Naughty Princess. It’s got those fantastic ink etchings. I love all that stuff. It’s a bizarre thing, just by the by, I was talking to, I can’t remember his name, but he’s the bloke who wrote a book called The Books That Build A Child, or something like that and he’s a very erudite bloke and I had to be in a sort of debate with him. They usually wheel me in for the superficial viewpoint, but he was very bright, we had to say what books had influenced us as children and I’d brought along this Anthony Armstrong, Naughty Princess book and he said, ‘Why did you like it?’ and I said, ‘There’s a drawing, an ink drawing of this fairy at this christening party but she’s had too much nectar and she’s slumped at the bar’, and apparently in the same story the fairies get so pissed on nectar and everything that they think the baby’s twins. But it’s marvelous, and this bloke said, ‘Oh I see you like,’ what did he call it? ‘Ecstatic chaos’”.

How long do you take to write a novel?

“I’m hoping it’s going to be about four months because my deadline is looming but normally I sit down by myself, for about twelve weeks and generally I turn the first draft over to the editors and they come back with questions and stuff like that. I’ll do a couple of rewrites after that. So maybe all in all, five months. When I settle down to it, but I take a lot of settling down. I have what I call my research period, which everyone sniggers at, which mainly means I watch comedy and you know read anything, joke books and I count that as research. So that probably goes on for a month”.

Georgia Nicholson is pretty much a love/hate character (typical teenager) but who/what do you love and hate at the moment?

“Tricky isn’t it? I’ve sort of got a love/hate relationship with those reality shows, I suppose. That Celebrity Love Island, I really really vowed I wouldn’t watch that, I was so bored with the people and everything, and yet, inevitably I ended up watching it. You get a fascination with people, just to see what they’re going to do. I’m less of a love/hate person and more of a love/love or hate/hate person. I just like people or I don’t and I tend not to bother with them if I don’t like them”.

Do you feel that Georgia Nicholson is a Bridget Jones in waiting? What can we learn from Georgia?

“I don’t think she’s middle-class enough really. You can learn a lot from her sense of humour. I honestly think if you’re a teenager, in particular, I think humour keeps you safe. It keeps you from being too stupid as well”.

In Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas we see a more mature Georgia dealing with being ignored by her boyfriend and starting to have feelings about her ex. What annoys you about men?

“Everything used to annoy me about men, honestly. But now I’ve got a bit more philosophical, I’m quite fascinated; I just think, ‘My goodness!’. My brain just doesn’t work like mens. I’ve got much more tolerant, I think and also much better at guessing, you know. I’ve got this boyfriend at the minute who said something, like, ‘How are you?’ in a text and I sent back, ‘Oh well, you know, today I mostly did my eyebrows…’ and just rambling on which took me about fifty years to write, I’m so crap at texting. And then I just didn’t hear from him! And I thought, ‘What’s happened?’ and then a bit later on I thought, ‘He was just asking a question, I answered it, end of story!’ He’s probably thinking, ‘Fine’, would have been good because he’s just checking in with me. I asked my very first boyfriend, I asked him because he went to an all boys’ school, can you imagine the planning of this? I went to an all girls school and there were two all boys schools directly up the road and down the road…why? I put this in the book actually, why did the boys run into our legs with their bikes? And I said to this boyfriend, ‘Why would they do that?’ and he said, ‘Oh cos they fancy you’ and I said, ‘Why do they cripple us? Why don’t they just say?’. But I did ask him what did they all talk about at break time? And he went, ‘Err we don’t talk at break time’. He said, ‘We play football or occasionally have a fight’”. That’s why I live in Brighton because down here the boys actually really talk to you, sometimes you think, ‘Shut up and talk about football’”.

The use of slang is important in your books, what are your favourite sayings? And what slang words do you miss?

“The thing is they are around because I have personally made it my mission to reintroduce them into the language. It’s terribly catching, everyone I know uses the word ‘fab’, I am singly responsible for that one. Even in America, I’m influencing them, I get letters, ‘Dear Ms Rennison, please could you send us some more British words?’ They’re practising being British! They have their little clubs, their little café clubs, and they go and speak British together, so they sign their letters, ‘pip, pip’. I’ve even managed to introduce First World War slang to their vocabulary now, ‘toodle pip’”.

They’re going to be using ‘whizzer’ next.

“I haven’t used ‘whizzer’, just for you I’m going to put that in. ‘Chocks away,’ I say quite a lot, I remember saying that to Douglas Barder, when I live in Notting Hill, he’d lost his legs and everything. He was driving his car, at the traffic lights and it was summer so he had the windows down and when the lights changed, I shouted, ‘Chocks away!’. I tell you who uses a lot of those expressions, Terry Wogan, and he an absolute font of those old expressions, he’s cracking, he’s got them all in his brain”.

Can you take us through the early days of your career, what did you do before writing novels and how long did it take to get published?

“I actually have a lucky story really, I went to Art College and did performing arts, and I started writing my own show and that’s what I did for a long time. At first, I was in a cabaret group called ‘Women With Beards’ which was a bit of a legend in its own lunchtime actually. Essentially, there was four of us wearing false beards and I think we literally went on stage and said, ‘All men are crap, thank you,’ and then left the stage to massive lesbian applause”.

Was this the eighties?

“Yes! You know, honestly, it was a very big thing, why?”

Thatcher?

“Yes, we used to do performances against Margaret Thatcher. I used to dress up in a ball gown, with a union jack on my head and go down to Brighton Conservative Headquarters and there’d be all these terribly old Tories. Poor sods really, and they’d becoming in for just a drink, probably with their mates and I’d hurl myself in front of them and say, ‘Be what you were born to be, be a nobody,’ sort of thing and they’d step over me. I’d like to think it brought the Thatcher government down. Then I did a one person show called Stevie Wonder Felt My Face which was again, based on my life”.

I’ve seen you! I’ve got the poster still, beehive, mascara, little checked dressed, you were one of my first reviews!

“Really, you should have come and said hello, reviews meant so much”.

I saw you in Wigan!

“I remember Wigan so vividly. I’ll tell you why, I don’t know if you remember…”

It was Wigan’s only Art Festival. Thank God. You and the Graeae Theatre Company where the only highlights, it was a real mess of a festival.

“…Yes, I think this was the venue and I tell people when I do shows now. I arrived there and the technician, you know I’ve been on the road a long time, and you get to know the signs of imminent disaster. And the technician went through my lighting spec and sound cues, and then he went, ‘yeah okay, lights up bish bosh and all done’. See you on the night sort of thing and I’m thinking, ‘hmmmmmmm’. So he went off, and I didn’t see him, I came on to the sound of the music from my second half and I looked up into the lighting box, and he was there, pissed, waved at me cheerily and then fell off his stool and I didn’t see him again. I didn’t know if it was the night but I had to get the audience to sing Pink Floyd songs, I had no music. People think I make this up but thankfully you’re here to prove it. I actually did make a living from it. It was hard work; I used to have to do four or five gigs a week. Someone said to me, ‘do you miss doing performance?’ and when I finished, I didn’t because I was so tired going around by myself, it’s quite tough but just lately there’s been some talk of me doing a one person show of Georgia. I can’t believe you were there”.

You had a beehive and a little checked dress with thigh boots.

“That dress was pornographic, I can’t believe you were there. It’s a small world”.

What compels you to write?

“Actually that’s interesting, I think probably would do it even if I wasn’t paid. I’m just very fascinated with people. I just love people’s conversation, I’m a bit like Alan Bennett. When I go to Yorkshire I go and stay in this hotel called The Majestic Hotel in Harrogate and I just sit in foyer there and I piss myself. The amount of funny stories people inadvertently tell, and I always want to record them. The Georgia books are like that, they’re recordings of incidents and pictures of life and things, and that’s why I like to do it. I’ve done it all my life really. I used to work with the late John Peel on Home Truths, he was very instrumental really, he used to let me have free range. I’d tell him a story and he’d say, ‘Please tell that story on the air’. So I learnt how to tell stories in sort of three minutes and I think I learnt a lot about dialogue doing that. If I was proud of anything, it would be the way I write conversations because I think it’s true, that’s how people speak. Especially in the North, in this foyer, only last week, I’d been out an brought a beret, it was quite a fancy sort of thing and I came in and this woman said, ‘Ohh, I admire your confidence’. A complete stranger! Nothing to do with me and it had nothing to do with her what I was wearing on my head. If there’s someone pretending to be an ambulance siren, they’ll be the one to sit next to me”.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?

“So many. Actually some cheeky pig said to me the other day, ‘Oh, you’ve never had a job’. I have! I worked for a bank in New Zealand because that’s all the jobs there was. I was so unsuited to it and the banks in New Zealand open late on Friday nights or they used to, to nine o’clock and the pubs closed at ten. So it meant you only had an hour of fun, really. But we had a tea break, so I decided in my tea break that I’d go home and I’d have a bottle of wine to sort of set me off for the evening. So, by the time I got back to work, to the bank, I was quite drunk and this woman came in and she didn’t have any money in her account, so I gave her some money. This old woman. I remember clearly thinking in my head, ‘Well, that doesn’t seem fair, I know lots of people who have lots and lots of money in their accounts, and they never use it’. So, I gave her this money and then of course I got found out, about two days later and I thought, ‘Good. They’ll deport me back to England because I don’t want to stay in scummy New Zealand anyway,’ but they didn’t. They made me stay on in the bank and pay it off! That was my worst job really”.

If you couldn’t write what would you do?

“I tell you, strangely, this takes us full circle. When I started work, I used to work with teenagers. I used to work in Brixton in the really rough housing estates, we’d build all those jungle gyms, the kids would watch us put them up and then take them back down. Someone should have written ‘cunts’ on our forehead with an indelible marker. But I really enjoyed it, in a strange kind of way and last night I was talking to mate of mine at the Brian Wilson gig, and he said, ‘I saw Graeme something or other’, ‘Oh what’s he doing?’, ‘He’s out in Africa setting up playgrounds for kids,’ and I had they just real, ‘God I’d like to do that’ moment. The other thing that’s happened to me, which came right out of the blue, is the Holiday Show, they’ve asked me to guest present and I really want to do it! I don’t know why, I don’t fly; it will be good fun if I can write it myself. I won’t fly and nor should anyone else. They said, ‘For your first assignment you can go round a South African vineyards on the back of Harley Davidson’”.

To which you said?

“No! I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to show myself up that way. I would like to do that show though and be the anti-Judith Charmers, I’m going for the pasty look”.

Tags: Angus Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, Georgia Nicholson, Louise Rennison, Margaret Thatcher, Stevie Wonder Felt My Face