I’ve had this theory for a while about why we would choose to read a particular work of fiction. I was discussing it last night with someone I work with, and he seemed to not disagree, so I shall expand on that theory here: I believe that there’s two reasons we read what we read: either it’s i) a well-written work or ii) it has an interesting story. Obviously these aren’t mutually exclusive criteria and a work can be both or neither, but I think that, to an extent, one can compensate for the other, although there’s a minimum level of each anyone would be willing to accept.

Here’s a bar chart I made illustrating the point, although the y-scale is comprised of competely meaningless arbitrary numbers:

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The wars of the future were mostly bloodless and mostly painless. With energy weapons that cauterised instantly, only the shock of loss and the pain of another human’s death persisted. And it was always painful to see a soldier suddenly missing an arm, a leg, too stunned to realise their loss or, worse, with a perfect hole through their stomach, barely aware they had been hit, not bleeding but with laboured breathing, faltering internal processes, fading, slipping into death. It might take them minutes, even hours to die this unnatural death, but it was inevitable; unpreventable in the heat of battle. And so, if fearful insanity did not first overtake them, the soldiers might record a frantic farewell to their loved ones on their helmet-mics, rarely anything more.

It’s hard to imagine the horrors of mustard gas in the 1910s, all those years ago. It seemed that since long before then mankind had been devising new ways to kill each other. Every now and then throughout the sordid history of war someone would invent a defensive measure; a new type of armour, a gas mask, a nuclear bunker. But this would only slow the mounting death-tolls until a bigger gun, a better bullet, was invented. Now he had the handheld laser rifles, and there was something uniquely terrible about their clean ineffeciency. They were bloodless, which made them, falsely, seem humane, and neither of those adjectives have any place in war. War should be bloody and it should be inhumane. Soldiers shouldn’t die in painless delirium: they should scream and writhe in the dirt, and when the people back home see the images on their screens, they should squirm and say “no, that’s not what I want for my children.”

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I don’t know where this came from and since I currently have little to no interest in writing either science fiction or war fiction, I doubt it will go any further. Still, I kind of like it.

One of my favourite genres of videogame is the ’survival horror’, which is a fairly odd choice considering that the protagonists of these games are frequently awkward to control, underpowered and die a lot, slowing the games to a crawl, and yet these often have some of the best stories in videogames, Silent Hill 2 showcasing one of the pinnacles of videogame narrative. Ironically, despite the necessarily fantastic horror-elements, survival horror games tend to be among the more realistic videogames, often featuring ordinary people as their main protagonists rather than super-human soldiers, world-class racing drivers or magic-wielding warriors. Being ordinary people, or, at the least, people unprepared for the horrors that await them (as in the Resident Evil series) they are never far from a potential death, and are forced either to make do with what they find lying around (a stick with nails in it and a large iron pipe in Silent Hill, an inordinate amount of progressively more damaging guns, beginning with a pistol and shotgun, all with very limited ammunition in Resident Evil) or run from anything and everything. Consequently, these games are all about caution and pedantic resource management.

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We wake up next to each other, sprawled out and overlapping like we’re each in bed alone, warm but not too hot. I roll over and your hand’s on my back. It’s eleven already. We kiss and I get up to fix you breakfast: Choco-Shreddies swimming in milk. I bring the bowls up, and cups of tea, on the tray with the oil-painted fruit on it. Your hair’s tousled and you get some chocolate on the corner of your mouth. I wipe it away with my thumb. We stream some cartoons on my PC, like we used to watch when we were kids, our knees bent up together like mountains under the duvet. Then we get dressed. You straighten your hair like you like it, even though I prefer your bed-hair. While you’re doing that I take the tray back down and go clean my teeth. When I come back I smooth out the duvet and we’re ready to leave.

I lock the door behind us, noticing as I hold back the handle so it shuts properly, that cracks of naked wood are beginning to show through the faded blue paint. I think maybe I’ll paint it tomorrow. We start walking towards town. The sky’s overcast and the air’s cold. You’re wrapped up in the red-brown scarf and hat and gloves I bought you last Christmas, and your black coat, but you still walk close by me for warmth, and squeeze my arm when a sharp breeze cuts across us and makes the leaves pitter-patter along the pavement.

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A stiff sporadic wind blew sand against Joe’s bare chest and whipped the crests of the breaking waves into a froth. Some of the sand caught in the thick hairs that covered his chest and shoulders, most of which were black, but a few of which, particularly in the bright August sunshine, had a silver sheen. Joe brushed the sand away, felt it scratch against his skin as it resisted the movement of his hand. It seemed strange to him, when he thought about it, that all sand had once been rocks, as big as boulders, or as big as the cliffs that guarded this eroding stretch of coastline, or as big as anything, and all these rocks had been worn down and worn down until they could not be worn down any more and all that was left was these minute grains; millions and billions of them.

When he was a child, Joe’s father had once told him that there were more stars in the universe than there were grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. Joe had looked out across the yellow-grey expanse and thought that on any beach alone there must be millions of grains of sand. That had been forty or so miles up the coast, near Scarborough, where Joe had spent his childhood summer holidays, and nearly the same number of years ago. He rarely went up there now, having little cause to, but knew the town had changed with the years that had passed. Time changed stars and sand too: stars burned out and all sand would eventually be pushed deeper and deeper underground until it was again pressed back into rock.

Joe’s reverie was broken when he saw a girl, perhaps fourteen, maybe younger, wading into the chocolate-coloured waves. A full bust, that belied her apparent age, protruded awkwardly from her chest, covered by a dark-coloured vest-top. Joe watched her, thought she was pretty, thought she was the type of girl he would once have stared at with a beating heart across the classroom, but not the type of girl he had married.

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I rarely write poetry, mostly because I’m not very good at it and rarely enjoy it. Here’s one I found the other day that I wrote a while ago though. I can’t tell if it’s any good or not by any standards other than my own, but I would say it’s ‘alright’ if nothing better:

Bank Holidays

I don’t think many people die on bank holidays
leastways, they probably don’t have funerals on bank holidays.
Rain excites me on those days, but mostly the clouds
seem too bored to drop it, or even move aside for the sun.
I wish the shops didn’t close; I wanted some tea.
I wanted rose tea, because of the soft petal-taste
and the bitter black after-taste.
Cathode Ray pixels brand my eyeballs when I close them,
so I look out the window and the trees look back,
forlorn now, since the wind took their feathers.
I mean leaves. It’s not a day for poetry.

A few months ago, while walking home from Sainsbury’s, I passed a wall upon which was a tray of basil seedlings in little pots, with a note saying to help oneself. Never one to pass up anything free, I took one and put it on the kitchen windowsill. When it got bigger I re-potted it into a cleaned-out yogurt pot, using soil I dug up from my garden. It continued to grow, and eventually had to be replanted in its current receptacle: the bottom half of a Tango bottle.

There’s not really a point to this story, except that I think it’s pretty cool that the whole venture cost my nothing and in exchange for the daily sprinkling of water I get fresh basil leaves to add to pasta sauces or whatever. And plants in general are pretty cool because all they need is soil, water and air and sunlight, and from just that they create new organic matter. Just my thought for the day.

I just watched the extended version of The Two Towers, having watched The Fellowship of the Ring last Saturday. If nothing else, those films are epic. Really, the sheer scale of them is immense, and the cohesiveness of all the elements, any one of which could so easily be rendered ridiculous through cliche or insincerity, is nothing short of a marvel. Of course, by now, you’ve probably either seen the films or have no interest in seeing them, and, either way, have a firm opinion of them which I am unlikely to change, and have no desire to.

For my part, I’d kind of forgotten how good they were. Though each of the extended films runs to around two-hundred minutes, just twenty minutes shorter than Sergione Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, a masterpiece which I have the utmost respect for, the Lord of the Rings films do not seem to last nearly as long: with Once Upon a Time in America, admittedly an emotionally draining film, you feel like you’ve been there a long time, a life-time in fact; but with Lord of the Rings, time seems to disappear.

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I just updated the About page quite significantly, including a longer contact section and an analysis of what my work is about and why.

Go check it out and tell me what you think, either through email or in the comment box on this post.

I’ve also recently added to the Highlights section and, if you hadn’t noticed yet, added some more icons to my blog’s sidebar, linking you directly to my RSS feed, Facebook page, Twitter and Email.

Hope everyone’s enjoying the site and, as ever, leave me feedback on anything and I shall respond in an appropriate manner,

Henry.

You may have heard of Twitter, apparently it’s quite popular, and yet almost no one I know uses it. Almost everyone I talk to about it asks something along the lines of “it’s just facebook status updates on their own, isn’t it?” Kind of, with about 92% more Stephen Fry, but kind of not. Facebook is more focused around you and your circle of friends and is a communication tool, while Twitter is not about you, but about people you’re interested in, and is therefore more of a personally tailored information tool.

Here’s why I think Twitter is cool:

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