No Longer the Amazon

Have you ever realised that you are not the person you thought you were? Well, although I’d been having an inkling over the past few years, today was the final thump as I realised that I was not the Amazon that I thought I was, but actually a bit of a wuss.

                We’ve been having some scuttling going on in our cupboard and something has been snaffling our cashew nuts, nibbling a corner on each of my buy-four-get-one-free bags. I did the usual thing, cursed the devil, nearly took my finger off with a trap, scrubbed out the cupboard and then cheered as I heard a SNAP late that night.

                Then the little blighter was back (or at least one like him)… But this time, it seemed that his big brother had come with him. It wasn’t just my new stash of cashew nuts that copped it, it was every bag of flour, every packet of pasta, every pack of those rice noodle things that have been sitting there for three years that no-one knows what to do with. He’d even eaten through my clever device that was supposed to stop the little sods making it through into the back of the cupboard in the first place.

                So, it was back to the same routine: cursing, scrubbing out, putting packets up high, feeling relieved to chuck the rice noodles out legitimately. The trap went back down in my clever place down the side of the washing machine and then it was time to wait.

                In the meantime, Huw came home and made little sad noises about mice being people too, and why couldn’t I just get a humane trap and then pop the little fellow across a river and let him play in the grass for ever n ever.

                He was right. I was a shit. Why kill the little critter, when I could just get him to move house? So I went back to the washing machine – but it was too late. The trap was not just full, it had moved: it must have been a beast…  I thought about it all night, that poor little sod lying there amongst the fluff, whose last supper had been rice noodles, whilst I was in my nice cosy bed with a belly full of pizza. I made a few mouse-related humane decisions…

                However, before I could put my bit-of-chocolate-cake-into-a-humane-trap decisions into action, I still had to get rid of my rice-noodle eater.  The next day I zipped my coat up to the throat, put some boots on and started inching the washing machine forward, peeping behind with each wriggle in order to locate what had, by that time, turned into a thing the size of a badger in my mind.

                Luckily, there was a knock on the door. Great, reinforcements, I thought. “Just in time,” I said to my mate as she walked in, “you can help me get that out of here.”

                So, I the ex-Amazonian, watched as she picked up the washing machine and tossed it lightly out of the way. The she reached into all the fluff, rice crispies and mouse shit and picked up the critter –not the trap, note, but the stiff critter – and said, “This thing? It ain’t no mouse – it’s a rat, by the way,” and started to walk towards me.

                Having three brothers, I assumed that she was surely going to stuff it down my back and I ran out into the garden squealing a little and hid behind a car. It was at that point as I crouched there, trying to explain that I wasn’t really afraid, that I realised that I was no longer a woman to contend with, I was a bit nesh and quite a bit feeble.

                The reason that this has such an effect on me isn’t so much that I’ve got flippin’ rats scuttling around my kitchen, it’s more that I now have to reinvent myself. Sadly it’s not so much in the Madonna way, in that each time I do so, I hook another few million dollars, it’s more of the thing that if I’m no longer the brave strong Amazon, what am I?

Answers on a postcard please.

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lorraine-Jenkin/e/B0034PL5LG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Haunted by "Have I Got News for You".

There won’t be many people who’ve been haunted by Have I got News For You, but I’m one of them.

            It was a few years ago, but my memory is of Ian Hislop reading the “sexy bit” from some politician’s novel (if that’s not too much of a misnomer). In his cheeky little style, he mocked their hand-stretching, pulsating, sweating (or more probably glowing) and all the other clichés that go into making a book a bit raunchy. Everyone laughed and cringed and enjoyed imagining the discomfort of whichever politician it was. I was almost over that when it was time for Paul Merton to make us all cringe at the thought of Tony Blair being urgent with Cherie.

The Telegraph’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards is a good way to keep authors on their toes; it’s all too easy to think that stuffing a load of heaving and grunting into a text will make it more exciting and saleable. And of course, sometimes it does – Fifty Shades managed to do it very well but every time my characters start heading towards that bit I start getting all hot under the collar - for all the wrong reasons.

First I imagine my mum proof-reading it over afternoon tea and being convinced that I’ve done all of those things. Then I imagine myself on Have I Got News for You (see, good imagination us writers have, eh?) and Ian reaches under his desk and hauls out one of my books and it falls open at a certain page and his wicked little grin explodes across his face. This is enough to make my pen grind to a halt.

However, of course people do have sex and in books they also need to have sex. It is up to the reader as to whether they choose a book which guarantees to have it at least every three pages or whether it is veiled and glossed over in a stream of euphemisms: “As the sun set, Lady Petunia took a deep breath and let the dog see the rabbit”.

I had gotten a little bit English about it and in the book I’m currently editing, I’d struggled with my two main characters doing anything other than smiling and nodding at each other. When the time finally came whereby they had to do at least Something, I realised I’d written it through the eyes of woodland animals – just wrong on so many counts.

However, I (think) I’ve been saved. I’m currently reading Faulk’s “Birdsong” and that does have quite a bit of grunting going on and I’ve realised that it’s not cringey, it’s just part of a story and if you want your work to be good, you have to have all parts of it meaningful and that includes the intimate bits.

Therefore, I will retrieve my manuscript, take out the squirrels saying, “Ooh, that looks like it might smart a bit”, the hedgehogs nodding at each other and raising their eyebrows, and the gang of slugs saying, “Pass him over when you’ve finished, love, we could use a bit of that.” And if Ian Hislop ever gets his cheeky little chops around any of mine, I will just sit back and enjoy the publicity.

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Jamie’s fifteen minute life lesson.

Jamie’s fifteen minute life lesson.

 

I’ve gone and done it again: I bought the quick fix and the damn thing didn’t work. It didn’t do what it said on the blurb – or at least what I thought it said on the blurb.

                Cooking in our house had gone shaky. There was more scrambled egg than roasts and even the roasts were becoming formulaic and greeted by groans from all around. I decided that I needed to address the problem and so I did what every busy person would do: I went and bought Jamie’s Fifteen Minute Meals.

                I leafed through it, hoping to see, “Take one packet of savoury rice, add two teaspoons of flour and some milk and mix together in a bowl.”  Sadly I saw page after page of recipes that included ingredients such as squid and medallions of pork.

                Of course, what I really wanted wasn’t a recipe that I could cook within fifteen minutes, I ideally wanted Jamie to do it for me too. I also felt it fair enough that he not only cook it, but bought the ingredients and manage to find a space in my cupboard rammed full of pasta shells to stack them all in.

                All that Jamie has done, bless him, has reminded me that there are no quick fixes for anything. He started cooking in his parents’ pub kitchen aged eight – I spent most of my eighth year trying to pull wheelies on a scooter that my dad had run over. That’s why Jamie’s a great cook and I can pull great wheelies (but only on a scooter that has crossed-over handlebars).  Sadly, great wheelies don’t make people inhale and say “oooh, lovely!” when they enter my kitchen. Mainly they say, “Can I smell rotting veg?” to which I reply, “Probably: I was going to roast it, but I didn’t get round to it – too busy making a ramp out of two planks and some wire netting for my scooter…”

                When I slapped my cash down on WHSmith’s counter, I of course should have also bought a pen and paper to make a shopping list on, then stopped by at a massive supermarket and bought some ingredients, then thrown out lots of pasta shells (or at least put them in the garage in case I regress at a later date), heated my pan and gotten on with it.

                Instead I grumbled a bit about the lack of squid in our local post office stores and decided that I’d write a blog about it instead. Surely that would equal the same effort? Perhaps the rules of fairness would mean that Jamie – or at least one of his little friends - would pop by and just point me in the right direction?

 **********************

Epilogue

Of course, the irony of moaning about doing things other than cooking when I need to do some cooking has not been lost. I have just returned, refreshed, from the kitchen. I did consult Jamie, but really didn’t have enough ingredients, so I compromised by making some flapjacks whilst the savoury rice was cooking. I also threw a few peas and a teaspoon of fenugreek or something into the rice, so that I can technically say that I’ve cooked from scratch. Jamie has pointed out the bleeding obvious and is now mocking me from the front of his cover: could this be the start of something tasty? Or will this be another cookery book gathering dust on my shelf whilst my harrissa paste goes slowly out of date?  

 

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How to Run a Wrting Workshop

How to Run a Successful Writing Workshop

I have recently been asked to run a few workshops and I have been very happy to do so. In my efforts to organise stimulating and interesting sessions, I did some research about how to run a workshop and tried to think back to ones I’ve attended myself in my past.

Having worked in the council, I have attended many workshops – indeed, in order to access a good buffet, the trade-off was the workshop. I learned how to mediate, manage my time, work safely and countless other pointless things that I forgot the finer detail of as soon as I devoured the vegetable and cheese bites. I couldn’t think of any that I wanted to organise my own workshops around.

I then tried to recall the writing workshops I’d attended to see if I could get inspiration / completely copy. It was then that I started to shudder …

The first one I went to was very nearly the last. It was held in the arse end of a damp skittle alley attached to a failing pub. The first session was about characterisation and it could have been OK, had it not been for the woman who was treating the whole day as a therapy session. “Write down your most embarrassing moment,” called out the tutor and everyone scribbled away (I could only bring myself to write my fifth most embarrassing moment and that was written in code). We then discussed in length the therapy patient’s most embarrassing moment (which was really really embarrassing and I had to stop myself staring at her with my mouth open).

Then we had to write our most joyous, and again we discussed this woman’s most joyous. Then the session ended and I never got to understand what the point of it was supposed to have been.

The next session was split into two and we had to choose which one to attend. I was intending to make my choice purely on which one the embarrassing woman wasn’t in: luckily she went Performing Poetry which left me in Writing Erotica – might be interesting, I smiled smuttily …

The tutor for my erotica workshop was dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, when I had expected at least a whore in a basque. She welcomed us all – seven women and one man – into a damp side room and spread two rolls of wallpaper out on the table: one had a drawing of a naked woman on, the other a naked man.

Our tutorial exercise was to think of all the names that we could call the private parts on the drawings and we started very politely suggesting bottom or foo foo and the woman in the sweatshirt would write them down with her marker pen in the appropriate place. It didn’t take long for me to get bored and start shouting out NORKS! or RINGPIECE! Then the only man in the group started getting a bit over-excited and left for the toilet. I shouted COCK as he left and then the session shut down as we all decided it was all a bit uncomfortable and that we should call it a day.

By the time the bloke returned, we were chatting about the weather like the erotica writers we were. Twat.

But now to some serious points about writing workshops – through extensive experience, research and feedback, I have found out the following:  

1.       People actually don’t want to do much work. They say they do, but they don’t. They don’t want to write things of no value in ten minutes and then discuss the work of the noisiest person in the group.

2.       If you are going to have a discussion, chair it like a demon. Don’t let it be a conversation between the host and the noisy person.

3.       Teach – asking everyone’s opinion all the time is a cop out: they’re there to learn from the tutor, otherwise they would just ask their mates. People’s experience is good to hear, but that can’t be the main content of your session.

4.       I ask people to write their names on a folded piece of paper in front of them, so that I can use their names and make sure that I’m including every person, rather than just asking an open question that the noisy one answers every time.

5.       Make sure you speak to every person as they arrive / leave and thank them for coming. Be in charge, even if you feel a bit of a fraud for being so – attendees are expecting you to be in charge, so pretend that you are!

6.       Don’t base your whole workshop on naming rude parts. NOB!

7.       Demonstrate points through popular fiction: most people at a writing workshop will probably be well-read, and a good way to illustrate your points are through well-known texts.

8.       I try and break a workshop down into chunks so that themes and the tempo changes. After a dry old lecturing bit, I give people an exercise to do – finding common mistakes (that I’ve just discussed) in a piece of text. We can then discuss the mistakes in the text – rather than discussing one person’s work, thus there is common ground and everyone can join in without feeling shy / embarrassed / fed up with the noisy one.

9.       We have a tea break and I use this to make sure I’m on track time wise – if I’m ahead of time, I drag out the tea-break. If I’m behind, I get them to bring their cuppas back to the table.

10.   After a bit more talking, I get them to do a fun task – like a haiku or something they can do in five minutes. Then more talking, then the haiku’s get read out and judged, splitting up the talking again.

11.   Finally, a question and answer session allows the workshop to finish on time – as it can be two minutes or an hour, depending on how badly the tutor has kept time!

I hope that the above is useful. But if it’s made you realise that you can’t run a workshop, and would be far better to pay someone experienced and lovely like me to do it, please let me know.  I promise not to do anything on wallpaper. WILLY!

OK – who’s taken a bite out of my sausage?

The other day we woke up and realised it was breakfast-out day. We all piled in the car and had the usual arguments about where to go. The adults wanted somewhere nice, the kids wanted somewhere with one of those Dyson hand-driers in the toilets. Eventually they won and off we went, Huw bought off by the selection of all-day-breakfasts and me by the fact that the coffees could be large.

We settled down and ordered. All was very nice and Huw and I both ordered the veggie breakfast, and we chatted away like the pleasant family we are. In the far corner was an older couple and three of what looked like their grandkids, also having a pleasant time. 

The lad came out from the kitchen and shouted, “NUMBER mumble mumble, TWO VEGGIE BREAKFASTS!” We were about to raise our hands, when the older couple did and he checked with them, put the meals down and went back to the kitchen. I thought nothing else of it. Huw watched with a suspicious look on his face. The lad then came out of the kitchen with the exact combination of what our kids had ordered. “What a coincidence,” I smiled, ever the well-meaning fool.

Huw was more cynical: “That’s our food.” 

The waiter was discussing the order with the older couple and eventually he picked up the two plates and walked back to the kitchen. Then he fetched the children’s order and brought it over to our table. “Beans on toast and two bacon sandwiches?” He put the food down and muttered about going back to fetch ours.

With a flaming red face he walked back to our table and put two veggie breakfasts down and mumbled about fetching the toast. Huw and I looked at each other. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Normally I would tuck into my breakfast with the same way that I tuck into everything – with abandonment and very little thought. But this time, something didn’t feel right…

Maybe it was the fact that my hash brown was already cut up. Maybe it was the sprinkling of pepper over my beans, or maybe it was just the bite-sized chunk that was missing out of my veggie sausage, but something wasn’t right…

I looked over to the older couple. The man was still chewing, although he had no meal in front of him. His wife was still telling him off. The kids were looking at our table longingly.

"This isn’t the breakfast that was just over there, is it?” Huw asked the waiter when he dumped the toast on our table as he ran past.

 “No! Good lord, no…”

“Then why’s it got pepper on and a bite out of my sausage?”

“Er, I’ll just check in the kitchen – they might have got it wrong by mistake…”

Ten minutes later, another two breakfasts arrived and we felt a little redeemed – especially as my plate had an extra sausage on.

 

The moral of the story? If you are not sure it’s yours – eat the whole sausage…

 

 

 

"The various twists and turns of each plot meant that I could hardly stop reading each night!"
The Western Mail