I’m not sure whether she likes me or not, I mean, she made love to me on the living room floor, but she might have just been being polite.

Willowy, slight as one of the twigs bristling at the end of her nostalgically-fashioned broom, camouflaged against the day, she stood, sweeping. In her ears, as if straight into her conciousness, music played through tiny white earphones. Her hips swayed with the rhythm of music and sweeping, her eyes down-turned towards the sodden leaves that plastered the concrete. A black plastic sack rustled next to her, its crumpled surface rippling in the November breeze. It was a warm day, the first after two of wind and rain.

She did not see how it happened, heard only, above the sound of her earphones, the cry of surprise, the sharp scrape of metal on concrete: the sound of a bicycle losing its traction on the decaying leaves and throwing its rider to the floor. She looked up, pulled out her earphones, saw a student lying in the road, curled into the foetal position. She gasped, dropped her broom, ran towards him. There was no one else around. Already the student was picking himself up, assessing the damage. He wore an open chequered shirt over his t-shirt, the sleeve of which had been ripped by the fall.

(more…)

I was wondering, as I read a long introduction to Erich Auerbach’s critical study of reality in western literature, if other people have little techniques and quirks for keeping their place when reading. Obviously, most people use bookmarks, the sensible, purpose-built tool for reliable book navigation, although some others, horror of horrors!, actually deface books by folding over the corners of their pages. My mother does this occasionally with her second-hand thrillers; my father has at several times expressed a severe distaste for the act. Personally, I can’t bring myself to damage any book, however poor its writing may be. I remember once last year, at a private view I attended, I believe for the Visual Studies course, my heart gave a lurch when I saw an artwork involving the cultivation of cress upon the partially-shredded pages of an open book. I experienced another cardiological shudder when, after reading only a few lines between the vibrant foliage, I realised the book was none other than Richard Adams’ Watership Down, doubtlessly one of the best books about talking rabbits ever written. Fortunately, my consternation was somewhat mitigated by the relative merit of the piece, which was actually rather well executed.

(more…)

A week ago I was pretty definitely doing the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Now I’m not so sure. It seemed logical: finish my BA in writing, don’t get a job; go part-time for two years on an MA course, use that time to write a novel and then hopefully get it published when I leave. But how old am I? Twenty. And how good a writer am I? I don’t know. Unpublished, still, but I’ve never sent anything off anywhere, never known where to send something to, and never have anything I want to send off. My course leader said a while ago that I was the best prose writer the course had had in ‘at least a couple of years’, but he seemed less confident in my ability to get onto UEA’s MA than I was. Big fish in a small pond? Maybe.

Besides, he suggested it’s usually better to take a break between BA and MA. But what to do in a break? I don’t want to work in a shop, I’m especially sure of that after the over-time I did in a co-op shop I’d never been in before. I want a job that either makes use of whatever writing ability I have, or one at least that I have to do some training for. Something semi- rather than un-skilled. I have no idea what, however. That’s why I’m going to see our uni’s careers adviser next Tuesday, a man I’d never considered seeing until he came to give us a brief seminar last week. He suggested that one shouldn’t do an MA just because one can’t think of anything else to do.
(more…)