Higher Since Bucket

I was listening to a (somewhat commercial) programme on BBC Radio 2 the other day, and they (whoever they are) were talking about a 'Bucket List' which is apparently a list of things any of us might wish to accomplish before we 'kick the bucket'. Hmm, this is not something I've ever considered – well, not as a tangible list that is. Yes, like most people I have a number of items on a 'wish list' that is, of course, ever-changing and somewhat fluid – depending largely upon the mood I am in at the moment. So, maybe it's time to set it out in a more formal manner and invite myself to reflect upon this list and evaluate just how feasible any of it is.

The thing about making such a list is to try to identify the achievements that we really feel will shape our lives; or those that without which our lives will be incomplete. But doing this will surely expose ourselves to the scrutiny of others to our failings, won't it? Isn't the compilation of such a list tantamount to admitting what failures we all are? That there are things on our lists which we have not yet achieved is almost a declaration that we have, in fact, achieved very little. If the schemes in our inventory are too grandiloquent then we risk being seen as too ambitious or of holding ourselves in too much esteem; if they are too mundane then we could be accused of being too feeble, pathetic even.

Well, for what it is worth, here is my somewhat pitiable list:

• Learn Italian (properly, I mean – not like my half-hearted mastering of French, Spanish & Norwegian)
• Fall in love (reciprocally, I mean – after all, I've fallen in love unrequitedly more times than you could shake a stick at)
• Become a natural blonde (I can't tell you how much I spend at the hairdresser's)
• Have at least one novel published (I have something to say, but nobody wants to listen)
• Become a Muslim (what holds me back from this is my love of alcohol and my distrust of god – two aspects of my character which are somewhat incongruous with the principles of Islam, I fear)
• Launch myself over Niagara Falls in a barrel (did I learn nothing from my Great Aunt Dolores?)
• Stop arguing with people just because I think I'm right (which I rarely am)
• Ban all road freight (Eddie Stobart – I don't care if you lose your livelihood; it's not my problem)
• Save the planet (and no, I don't want to be Gordon Brown)
• Remove Sophie Dahl from the TV (oh sure, she's a pretty young thing, but who would give a fuck about her vacuous cooking efforts if it weren't for her Grand Pappy Roald?)
• Marry the lovely Professor Brian Cox (oops, that one is impossible I guess)
• Become more serious (is this list actually helping?)
• Give up alcohol and become more spiritual (oh dear – see 'Become a muslim' above)
• Stop writing lists (and just get on with it)

Have I said too much?

Do Not Rid Me Of This Fuddlesome Feast!

Well, I had probably the best dinner I've had in many years on Saturday evening. It was (our Producer) Richie's birthday and I had offered to cook for him one of my legendary paellas. Not so, Daniel - the intrepid Director of Triliteral (other stage-play festivals are available) - said that a simple paella was not an adequate treat for our dear boy Richie. Notwithstanding that my paellas are anything but simple, and are usually a tour de force – containing chicken, pork, seven different kinds of fish and seafood, saffron (the most expensive food commodity in the world), and many, many other exotic and tempting ingredients – I agreed with Daniel that to celebrate Richie's birthday, we needed something more; something much more special.

Imagine my amazement when Daniel presented us with twelve courses – yes twelve – each accompanied by a different wine, and each cooked to an absolute perfection. We had a soup course, a pâté course, there was sorbet, three different types of salmon (one marinated in beetroot juice), coq au vin, filet mignon, a pork medallion – the list goes on (and those that I have listed are in the wrong order anyway). The amount of work which had gone into the design and preparation of this diverse and fascinating menu is just overwhelming. We (the guests, that is) didn't care about that – we just sat back and enjoyed ourselves while Daniel did all the hard work – never flagging, he continued to pamper us with perfect dish after perfect dish of delights! To paraphrase one of the twentieth century's greatest statesmen: Never, in the field of gourmet confit, were so many courses, stowed by so few. A gastronomic triumph indeed.

But talking of things Triliteral, events with the festival are moving apace very nicely. The shortlisted scripts are with the judging panel as I write, and their deliberations will be revealed to us on March 31st. It's so exciting because we have no idea which plays will be selected, and as such we have no idea what kind of a cast we will require for the nine forthcoming productions. Even so, the call has gone out for the casting stage (see the website for details if you fancy your chances as an actor – click here), and everything is in place for the realisation of our master plan. The judges are: Nicola Monaghan, prizewinning Nottingham novelist and winner of the Betty Trask Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award; James K Walker, literary editor of the iconic arts magazine Left Lion; Ray Gosling, veteran BBC broadcaster and an old friend of the Triliteral team; and up-and-coming dramaturg Gareth Morgan who is currently doing some splendid work for the Nottingham Playhouse. A glittering panel indeed. We are all intrigued to see the final selection that they produce from their deliberations, and we're very excited.

In fact, so excited that I feel another celebratory dinner coming on.... Chef! Get back to the kitchen!

A little bird told me....

I love hearing random snippets of other people's conversations and then trying to see whether some kind of story might emerge from them. I heard an absolute corker today. Listen to this:

"He never talks about his family, or anything personal. I mean, he never mentions a wife, or a girlfriend, or even things lower down the list that he could mention..."

What on earth was that all about? What do we learn about the subject of the conversation, and what does it tell us about the speaker? What do you suppose the speaker meant by "things lower down the list"? Is there some kind of prejudice being revealed here, or was the speaker simply referring to objects such as domestic pets, or dishwashers, or maybe just doing the ironing? Who knows? Later, whilst walking down a corridor, I heard an astonishing claim being made by someone talking with great authority to a colleague. I only heard a small part of this conversation which consisted of this:

"Well, you shouldn't have a banana every day anyway, but if you do... well, the best thing would be to have those really small ones..."

Make what you will of that one. I think I might have written before on here about the most astonishing snippet I once heard on a train. On that occasion, I was seriously tempted to stop, interrupt, and ask for an explanation of this particularly startling statement:

"Well of course as you know, I love history – but from 1603 to 1807 I know absolutely nothing at all."

I have long since tried to reconcile these two dates and work out what period in history they represent. Okay, so 1603 marked the end of the Tudor period when Elizabeth I died, but what happened in 1807 to mark the end of any identifiable period? I've Googled the year 1807, and the following results were thrown up:

1. Gunpowder-ship explodes in Leiden, Netherlands, 150 die
2. Napoleon convenes great Sanhedrin in Paris
3. London's Pall Mall is first street lit by gaslight
4. British squadron under Admiral Duckworth forces passage of Dardanelle
5. 1st performance of Ludwig von Beethoven's 4th Symphony in B
6. 1st railway passenger service began in England
7. British Parliament abolishes slave trade
8. Townsend Speakman first sells fruit-flavored carbonated drinks in Philadelphia
9. British board USS Chesapeake, a provocation leading to War of 1812
10. Lightning hits gunpowder warehouse in Luxembourg; 230 die
11. British troops lands at Ensenada, Argentina
12. France, Russia and Prussia sign Peace of Tilsit
13. Congress passes Embargo Act, to force peace between Britain and France

Perhaps point 7 (above) is something worthy of note, and it's interesting to see that there were two gunpowder explosions in the same year (points 1 & 10), but do these really stand out as a bookend of history, for which Good Queen Bess's death stands as the other? I don't think so. And why are the intervening years such a black hole for this young enthusiast of history on the train? What is so obscure about these years that they failed to hold the speaker's interest?

That's the beauty of eavesdropping – we hear such mouth-watering jewels of trivia that we can only be inspired about the complex tapestry of human thought and expression that leads, inevitably, to the foundations of fiction. Hurrah for a writer's life!

Who Was That Man?

My Great-Aunt Dolores claimed to have had a child once. She couldn't remember what she did with it though – she pretended to have lost it in the Blitz when she thought it may have fallen out of the pram as she was running for cover during an air-raid. I am immediately suspicious of this theory, however – there is more than one element to the story that doesn't quite add up. For a start, I've often heard Dolores state that she spent the entire war years abroad - sometimes claiming that she was working in occupied France for la Résistance; at other times boasting that she was in Casablanca for the whole duration, apparently drinking in some American bar run by a lugubrious ex-pat called 'Rick'. Either way, she seems to have avoided the London Blitz.

Another reason her story somewhat stinks is that in all the years I knew her, I never witnessed Dolores 'run for cover' in any situation. She always asserted that anyone who couldn't face danger with a stoic stance and gritted teeth was nothing more than a 'pathetic sissy'. I always remember the time we were caught in the crossfire of a gun-battle somewhere in the Sudan – whilst I was trying to hide my head in a discarded biscuit tin, Dolores stood on the roof of a battered old Peugeot, took out her revolver, and with her famous ivory cigarette-holder clamped firmly between her teeth, shot back. So the image of her running panic-stricken through the blacked-out streets of London, frantically pushing a pram towards the air-raid shelter, seems difficult to conjure.

But I digress. Wherever she did (or did not) lose the child, I have little doubt that it existed. Or rather, he existed – for she did once let slip that the baby was a boy. Her motivation for having the child was as bizarre as was her excuse for losing him. She claimed that she had no interest whatsoever in breeding (that was something you did to pigs, she said), but she was apparently interested in the physical act of childbirth. This is a strange impetus for pregnancy at the best of times, but Dolores professed not to believe other women when they described the deplorable pain that giving birth entailed. "I thought it was all poppycock," she said. "My view was that these moaning, whimpering women were just pathetic sissies with no balls. I can tell you now, boy – I couldn't have been more wrong. Ejecting that little bastard was the toughest, most unpleasant thing I've ever done in my entire life. Well, that is if you discount the time I had lunch with Barbara Cartland and had to perform the Heimlich Manoeuvre on her when she choked on a fishbone."

Despite my gentle probing however, she never revealed much more. She was resolutely tight-lipped on the subject of the identity of the baby's father. "Let's just say boy, that if the child had been legitimate – which it clearly was not - then it would have carried a very impressive title indeed, and I wouldn't have needed to have taken to robbing banks."

So who is this long-lost second-cousin of mine? Is he still alive? Did he marry? Did he make any sort of name for himself? Perhaps he's a famous actor, politician, or business mogul? Perhaps he was 'Xylophone Man' who used to sit on the pavement outside the Council House in Nottingham, bashing out one of only three tunes in his repertoire (badly) on his child's toy xylophone? Who knows? Dolores took this secret with her to the grave (actually, she didn't have a grave – we burned her, and only restraint on our part prevented us from carrying out the act while she was still alive, but you know what I mean).

So, if there is anyone out there reading this who was born to mysterious parentage in 1941, please get in touch. And please, please, change your will as soon as possible (in my favour, of course).

Ooh, am I about to become rich?

We Shall Fight Them On The Beaches!

I'm reading a biography of Winston Churchill at the moment. It's the third biography of this very famous man that I've read – one of the other two was Martin Gilbert's ridiculously over-detailed massive multi-volumed tome (of which the first two in the series were written by Churchill's son, Randolph) which took me an entire winter to read some years ago. It's quite extraordinary to re-visit this man's life – and to re-discover what a pompous, self-bloated ego-maniac he was. People's view of him is often that he was a genius. We all remember the famous quotes attributed to him, and see them as a display of his consummate wit and ability to spring forth with a clever riposte to anything and any situation. There's the one where Lady Nancy Astor is reputed to have said: "Winston, if you were my husband, I'd poison your tea!" to which his response is claimed to have been: "Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it.”

And then there's his famous rebuke to the Socialist MP Bessie Braddock who is quoted as saying to him at a party: “Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.” His reply has often been re-used by many an errant husband or similar miscreant who has been reprimanded for taking too much liquor: “And Bessie, you are ugly. You are very ugly. But I’ll be sober in the morning.” Add to these amusing anecdotes his undoubtedly inspiring orations that include such memorable phrases as: "We shall fight them on the beaches.." or "Never in the field of human conflict...." etc. and we see a man of razor-sharp insight and clarity. All good stuff. But such soundbites aside, it's his naked ambition and ruthless self-promotion that sets him apart from other luminaries in our political history.

I'm beginning to understand that at the genesis of his political career, WSC would write to anybody in power about any issue that he presumed to have an opinion on – and his assumption was (with his unshakeable confidence) that his political seniors would undoubtedly listen to him. In the main, it worked – even though most people disliked his boorish and arrogant approach, they seemed transfixed by his irresistible bombardment of correspondence on all matters ranging from free trade to the abolition of the House of Lords (strangely, he was unsuccessful in the latter campaign, bequeathing that particular quest to New Labour, some 85 years later).

This leads me to conclude that our dear Winston was no real genius – as anyone who lived through the Second World War might otherwise assert – but that he was simply consistent, dogged, and had an overflowing sense of his own importance. The odd thing about this revelation is that I actually recognize something of myself in our erstwhile hero – which brings me to the question: Why am I, Richard Pilgrim, not as famous or as successful as Mr C? After all, I have the same stubborn conviction that other people must be interested in what I have to say (hence this blog - pray indulge me, dear reader), and really that's all that Winston had at the time (no, not the blog – I mean the stubborn conviction etc...), so the parallel should be that I ought at least to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer by now, if not the Prime Minister.

My trouble, I suppose, is that I'm possibly not that much of a bully.

A State of Febrile Excitement

Gosh, what a week and a half that was! It was such a trauma to my normal languid routine, to return to the rigours of gainful employment, that I fell into a state of immediate nervous exhaustion. Unfortunately, I was unable to abandon my responsibilities as I would have liked – which would have been simply to take to my bed and hide from the world – because I had other pressing duties to deal with. There were reports to write, accounts to prepare, books to review, meetings to attend, paperwork to catch up on, places to go, people to meet, fish to fry, and sausages to stuff – an entirely crowded tableau and cornucopia of urgent obligation.

A simple remedy to all of this would have been to have had a relaxing and languorous weekend with some effortless R&R to restore the ebbing energies. But it was not to be so. Friday evening brought a visit from the stray cat, and thereby bringing all the normal chaos and disarray that such visits from him ensue. Very little sleep is ever secured when the cat is here – he demands such attention and victuals that I seem to be forever attending to his needs. This interruption was especially unwelcome in view of the fact that I was scheduled to attend a big writing conference on Saturday, some miles away. I managed to get there on time, but felt bleary-eyed and slightly dazed when I did. The conference was still good though, and I had a private meeting with a literary agent who was able to give me some great advice about what to do with my latest novel. I prefer not to interpret her very astute comments as: "This needs re-writing", but more optimistically to take what she said as positive encouragement.

Regrettably, the day at the conference – whilst enjoyable and informative - completely drained me of all energy, and I therefore failed to make it to the birthday bash of super-group Captain Dangerous's lead singer Adam Clarkson, later that evening. This was a disappointment to me, but I just couldn't summon up the vigour to get my body or mind to move. I ended up sleeping for a full twelve hours (although of course, this was with a few interruptions as I intermittently woke up, screaming, with the usual night terrors).

Sunday was spent rushing through shopping and chores, a luncheon engagement, visiting a friend in hospital, and delivering presents for the aforesaid Adam's birthday (somewhat late). I now have a spreadsheet to detail the 1001 upcoming tasks for today, and trying to sort through the priorities is turning into what Daniel has just called a 'logistical nightmare'. There'll be no time to eat, I expect, but fear not gentle and sensitive reader – I have built into the timetable an adequate time to shower and to conduct other such ablutions. It would help greatly if I didn't have to return to the orifice tomorrow, but sadly the almighty dollar calls.

So, nothing of much interest or excitement to report to you – but I will try to improve matters before the end of the week. I daren't even use my blood pressure monitor today – the results might bring on the day terrors too!

Oh, and finally - my daughter Sophie now has her own little weekly show on French TV. She's quite stunning and I'm turning into a very proud dad. Check it out by clicking here.

Somewhere, Over The Hurdle

Well, I've survived my first day back into the forays of commercial living. If it hadn't been for the goddamn awful drive there and back, it would have been a rather gentle re-introduction to the normal rigours of gainful employment. I wasn't given a great deal to do – in fact, I'm not even sure that my clients actually know what it is they want me to do – so I didn't feel too taxed by the day. That notwithstanding, I'd have sooner been at home waving my legs in the air instead.

Yesterday, my last one of freedom, we had a marathon meeting at my flat about the Triliteral Festival. The competition closed at twelve noon and I met with the rest of the executive committee to begin the long task of shortlisting the submissions. Well we had made some preparations already, of course, because as the scripts had been arriving during the previous weeks we had been reading them in advance and making notes in readiness for our mutual deliberations. My apartment was now knee-deep in paper as we jointly considered the merits of each submission, and the air was thick with argument and disagreement (all in the friendliest possible manner, of course). Despite the fact that it should have been my ultimate day of leisure, I was also charged with the duty of cooking a full roast dinner for my colleagues amidst this snowdrift of paperwork. Not an easy task.

Well, we enjoyed a passable repast at least (although no alcohol to accompany the feast, lest our judgement should become impaired) and we eventually emerged from the deluge of hopeful scripts with a shortlist that we felt were worthy enough to be forwarded to our panel of independent judges. So, now the waiting begins – the judges will have to return the scored script sheets and then we'll have to begin the task of auditioning, casting, rehearsals and finally, production of the Festival itself in June. Then there's the Edinburgh Fringe to come, so we've still a long way to go as far as the amount of hard work is concerned. Why do we punish ourselves thus?

I don't know – there's my own play to finish (not the one about the Great Barrack Street Tullamore Balloon Fire Disaster of 1785, but another one), AND my novel to finish (not the one about the rent boys, but another one), AND the finances for the studio to complete, AND a mountain of my own paperwork to wade through too. And now – working for a living as well! No wonder I'm reaching for the bottle of scotch. Can you blame me?