RichardB

Now there’s interesting, as we say in Wales. Based on two short extracts from the last novel I wrote, I write either like James Joyce or (wait for it) Dan Brown. Not much difference…

Even after a year-plus of lockdown in various degrees I don’t do social media at all, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Zoom, no anything, so the Silence of the Denizens has been quite saddening for me. Not that I’ve been better (except in one respect) than anyone else. My problem is the opposite of that of several leading lights here: having…[Read more]

That’s probably one reason it was chosen as a refuge for the band. And yes, it does sound worth a visit.

If you’re curious, this page has a photo of the house as it was when the band was there, though it appears to have been taken from the back garden. A click will blow it up.

Libby said:

Thanks, Richard. Have you been to Farley Chamberlayne? It’s worth a trip for anyone in the area. I can’t remember what the house looks like, and the internet isn’t obliging, but FC is a deserted medieval village with a pretty church. It feels remote and wild despite close proximity to Winchester.

R

Libby said:

Thank you for the blog, Richard.
A school friend was a fan of Fairport and Denny. I enjoyed listening but not enough to keep up an interest after school. Was the house in Hampshire Headley ?Grange. Led Zep recorded there. I still listen to them occasionally but after I left school I switched to classical and have stayed there ever…[Read more]

I don’t think that parallel had occurred to me until I heard it pointed out by Ashley Hutchings himself. I recently found a video on YouTube of the song being performed at Cropredy, I think about five years ago, and before they begin Hutchings chats about how they discovered and recorded the song, ending with, ‘It was to take on a new meaning…[Read more]

As per Neil Gaiman’s fifth rule of writing:

‘Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.’

Having written an entire novel in colloquial first person a la Catcher in the Rye, having made a conscious effort to break through my inhibitions about departing from Oxford (or Queen’s, or formal – call it what you will) English to do so, and having found the process liberating and rather fun, I’ll give a heartfelt ‘Hear, hear!’ to that. Okay,…[Read more]

Well bugger me. Apparently, if you just copy and paste a URL into here, without bothering with that ‘link’ button, it links automatically. You live and learn.

It occurs to me that one reason for over-use of ‘I’, or any other pronoun come to that, is filtering. This is another cause of the ‘frustrating distance’ Libby mentions, and Emma Darwin (Who else?) explains it far better than I could.

My immediate and visceral reaction to both criticisms was ‘Bollocks!’ If writing in first person, what other pronoun is there for you to use? How are you going to avoid the pronoun? If writing in third person, does the same criticism apply to ‘he, ‘she’ or ‘they?’ I suspect the real problem is not with the pronoun itself but with the style. As for…[Read more]

‘Instant hit of relateable truth’: yes, that a good way of putting it.

Jane, if you got a result you haven’t been wasting your time, have You?

Jane, I suspect that, er, somewhere on the way you too encountered that anthology, so long ago you’d forgotten about it until my post reminded you.

Yes, I like the Liverpool Poets too. It’s only one aspect of his talent, but Roger McGough has raised that lowest form of wit, the pun, into an art form. Like this, from The Mersey Sound:

The Act of…[Read more]