They say that art is sweat and tears
You have to work at it for years
You have to burn the midnight oil
You have to suffer pain and toil
You get distracted by the world
By every precious boy and girl
They just don't realise it's hard
To keep it up when times are bad
When you're tired, feeling low
And all you want's for them to go
You have to force yourself to work
You have to try until it hurts
The fleeting second of the scene
On the page or on the screen
Is all the readers ever see
It's a fucking joke, believe you me
You can’t be bored when you’re reading (Half an hour in the Arts Centre Café-bar on a Saturday night.)
A poem
This is one of those long tables near the bar.
It’s vaguely lively here now. (If there is such a thing?)
There’s a pint and a packet of crisps.
There’s an all-gender toilet where everyone avoids washing their hands –
unless they’ve been spotted coming out of a cubicle by another person.
Then they make a show with water and liquid soap and deranged hand-drying devices.
There’s hugs between fat men in their thirties wearing lumberjack shirts
and pretentious post-graduate artists stitching pieces of thick unbleached paper together over posh red wine and small packs of nuts
There’s tired staff cleaning up behind the café-bar and distracted bartenders tolerating semi-drunk bores
A trickle of filmgoers leave the cinema and a few of them grab halves of cider
A sad lonely alcoholic, burnt-out and lost, taps his phone hoping to discover the meaning of his life, finding nothing but more of the same banal content.
A bored security guard, hands in pockets, ambles up and down through the gaps between the tables.
The cinema projectionist has left his booth and meanders around the café-bar, suddenly realising he has to put a film on.
The staff are mostly bored and distracted by their phones or each other.
The sad alcoholic goes outside for a fag and decides to give up for the night and grabs a bottle from the corner shop (the booze is cheaper in there) then shuffles home to his empty room.
The Cinderella behind the bar shrugs her cardigan off her shoulder and hopes her Prince Charming will feel the pull.
Two freeloading young women walk in from the streets and glug the free water from the tap on the counter with fake eagerness.
The bored wife reads a library book, and sups a half pint across the table from her boring husband who is cradling a pint and writing crap in a notebook,
She says: “It’s not a library book,” and “You can’t be bored when you’re reading.”
And he thinks, ‘True, I’m reading (and writing) the room.’
In Search of Welshness – or a Welshman’s Quest for Welshness
Blackweir (Cardiff)
*Written in 1999
Huw Garmon and Sue Roderick, better known to some as Steffan and Cassie from Pobol y Cwm, two giants in the Welsh acting profession, and I’m sitting in the Green Room at the BBC in Cardiff rehearsing a scene with them. I’m only a non-speaking extra, but the director has given me a few lines; I’m sweating but my mouth is dry, my short term memory is shot to pieces, we’re on set in a few minutes – HELP! My quest for Welshness has landed me in this mess.
Until two years ago, I was just like the millions of other Anglo-Welsh people who make up the majority of the population of this fair land of ours, but I was lost in a cultural desert, neither truly Welsh or god forbid, English. Defining myself as merely British wasn’t good enough either, I wanted a definite cultural and national identity, I wanted to be Welsh. So my quest for Welshness began.
It’s a long journey and I don’t even know if it’s possible to get to the end of it, after all, R S Thomas has made a career out of the dichotomy of being a non-Welsh Language writer, yet having the heart of a true Welshman. Is it possible to be truly Welsh if you are not completely fluent in the language?
Things defined by the word Welsh surround us, but that word can carry a huge load of nuance and self-doubt for us poor Welsh people who are not masters of the ‘language of heaven’. It’s not easy to learn Welsh as an adult, even as an adult whose wife is a true Cymraes Cymraeg, and whose children were educated in Welsh Medium schools. I think that if I had to nominate one single motivating factor in my quest for Welshness it would be Pobol y Cwm. I’ve watched the programme from my sofa for years, first with the English subtitles, then with the special page 889 subtitles for Welsh learners, and finally with no subtitles, pretending I can understand more than I can, but getting the gist of the thing anyway.
Two years ago I got serious about learning the language, I was born in Wales, of Welsh parents, I live in a typical Welsh village and my house is called Llwyncelyn (Holly Bush), so I thought it would be a relatively easy step to take. Now sitting in the Green Room with these great Actorion Cymraeg, I’m beginning to regret getting off the sofa.
It’s not just Pobol y Cwm of course. It’s cool to be Welsh now of course, but more than that it’s the cywilydd (shame), the feelings of failure, that half-baked feeling that comes when you realise you don’t know all the words of the National Anthem, (in English as well as Welsh). Or, even worse, the isolation that chills your soul when you realise your friends and family share a special secret that you’ll never be privy to.
We all come together on International days, when every channel, in both languages drives home the message, all Welshmen and Welshwomen are equal when it comes to the oval ball. But what happens after that? The two factions go their separate ways, back to the sheep, the committee rooms or the cosy little jobs in the media; back to the council estates, the factories or the double-glazing selling.
I’m not bothered about rugby or double-glazing, and I’m certainly not bothered about sheep, but I’m still Welsh. I’m as Welsh as Shirley Bassey or Bryn Terfel. I’m as Welsh as William Morgan or Ieuan Evans. I’m as Welsh as they come. Why then do I need to chase the buzz that comes from carrying out even the simplest conversation in Welsh? The Welsh Language Society and the Welsh Language Board have certainly done their job on me over the years. I now carry around an extra burden of guilt that can only be unloaded when I achieve that altered state of being truly Welsh speaking.
On the low seats in the Green Room, in the depths of the BBC in Cardiff, I’m nodding at the director as he gives me the lines. I’m a publican who’s come to buy beer from Steffan’s brewery, but the real story’s about Steffan’s preoccupation with some female or other. It doesn’t really matter what I say.
When I get on set the problems really begin, I scribbled the lines the director gave me on a copy of the script. During the rehearsals one of the production assistants speaks to me in Welsh and takes the script away. I just nod and smile, I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. I manage to garble my way through the scene and run out of the studio and back to the car park despairing at my performance and relieved that I’m out of there. They cut all but one and a half of my lines anyway.
That incident in the BBC happened over a year ago, and I’m still desperately searching for Welshness. My language skills have improved, I even choose the Welsh language option at the cashpoint. The burden is a bit lighter, It’s a long journey this quest, and Steffan is still preoccupied with some female.
I’ve done a bit more television work since then, but nothing in Welsh, they must have sussed me out and blacklisted me, but don’t worry, Pobol y Cwm, I’ll be back and I’ll play the best non-speaking publican you’ve ever seen.
Extract from Work in Progress novel – The Flying Boy
For audio (Podcast version) Click to play here:
Or read the transcript below below:
You. You.You. It’s all about you isn’t it? Yes of course, you think. Who else is it going to be about? There is only you, in your life anyway. Is that sociopathic? Or some kind of pathic? You only know about yourself. You can’t know about anyone else – only what you are allowed to know by whatever this universe is. Ah – there it is, it’s about a u-niverse, so, yes, it is all about you.
But you still have to breathe air, share, and even you admit you don’t know everything. In fact you know hardly anything, possibly nothing. For example you tell people you are writing meta fiction but you don’t even know what meta fiction is until you look it up in the great big dictionary in the sky, just to check that you aren’t talking crap and could be called out by a first year literature student. But you are talking crap aren’t you? You are talking crap because for one thing the great dictionary told you that what you think is meta fiction probably isn’t – for one thing it seems to be spelled metafiction as one word, and the rest of it, well, there’s too many subtleties in the definitions of the word and not many come close to the sort of thing you’re writing. So yeah, you are writing something that is probably not metafiction, but you’re not sure – maybe it’s meta fiction or even meta-fiction.
So what. You’re not writing according to some spurious literary rule. You are writing the truth. You don’t know who Jill is. This is important. Because Jill is . . . Jill is what? Hmm. You can’t deal with all this now. You have bigger fish to fry, or maybe you would if you fried fish. But you don’t fry fish; you don’t do anything with or to fish except look at them now and again in a friend’s pond or dead on the slabs of a fishmonger in the market.
There was that time, maybe thirty years ago, when you were involved with fish more than you wanted to be, more than you should have been. It was an actual fishing competition organised by your brother. He was a fisherman. Not a professional fisherman. He didn’t sell them or anything, though he no doubt traded the odd fish for some other advantage because that’s the sort of person he was, but he had a boat and loads of tackle, and he organised a sea fishing competition. You helped him by creating and managing a little computer database to record the details of the fish the competitors brought back to the weigh-in.
Stop! Pardon. Pause at least. OK.
When you’re writing like this it’s like applying the first daubs/splodges/lines of paint of an abstract painting on a canvas. You step back to look and at first it’s just random marks, random colours, random shapes and textures. Then you catch a hint of form. It starts to mean something and you start to realise that that meaning was there all along, it possessed your hands, your eyes, your brain. It used you to express itself. This is a divine thing – its form and its meaning will reveal themselves.
Restart.
(Martin Amis is your inspiration. Is he? Yes. Every time you read something about him or by him or see his name on a book cover you find yourself writing seconds later. Is that true? You’re doing it now. Ah! OK.)
Now really restart, resume maybe.
So helping your brother out at the fishing competition means sitting in a damp portakabin behind a makeshift desk, typing bits of information into a computer database. Things like contestant name and number, boat name, time of weigh, species of fish weighed, weight of fish.
Each species of fish has a specimen weight attached to it. So, a sardine say, has a specimen weight of a few grams, while a great white shark has a specimen weight of almost two tonnes or whatever. Not that you weigh any sardines or great white sharks, though there is a shark the size of a spaniel dog and some kind of flatfish with the circumference of a saucer.
At the end of the day there is a winner, the person whose fish is bigger than its species’ specimen weight by the largest factor. The spaniel-sized shark doesn’t win but the saucer sized flatfish might do. You can’t remember. You don’t want to remember.
All that must have been around the same time , late 80s, early 90s, that you read the book London Fields by Martin Amis, coincidentally, you’ve just read an interview with him in the Guardian (online) about the film that has just been released based on that book – London Fields (the film is rubbish apparently). Maybe that’s the reason you’re thinking about your brother’s fishing competition, some feint connection from three decades ago.
So yeah, maybe you have to admit that Martin Amis is your inspiration, your muse perhaps? I wonder what he would think about that? Being a muse for an also-ran novelist. You know what he is. He’s not a muse, he’s the sort of arrogant male artist who employs muses, uses them at least. He’s as much a muse as a jockey is a horse or a fish is bait.
But there you are, there he is, each in your respective universes, and there you will remain. Though Mr Amis does remind you of a dope-smoking friend you had for a while as a dope-smoking teenager. That friend was called Martin as well. He was not a tall person and used to walk around in a thick woollen coat that was too big for him.
Your Martin used to knock around with Jill. Hold on. You’d better stop there to think about it. Jill? Even that far back? Half a century? Is that possible? Are your memories real?
If all the sub-atomic particles in my fingernail grew to the size of a small orange how big would my fingernail be?
If every molecule of water in a full bath grew to the size of a drop of water how many baths would it take to hold them all?
If you could read the mind of a mosquito how would you describe its thoughts?
If the earth was the size of a hydrogen atom how big would the universe be?
If time is eternal when did it begin?
How many years would it take to cross the universe at the speed of light?
If the universe is endless and time is infinite how long would it take travelling at the speed of light to find another version of me identical except with green eyes?
If there was no light would there be anything to see?
When will human beings stop evolving?
If human beings stop evolving how long will they survive?
