A Blacksmith Courted Me

Running late again, sorry to all who read this with any regularity.  An ongoing house move situation is minimizing the time I have for this writing stuff, basically. So here's another older piece.

I've been fascinated by the folk song known as 'The Blacksmith' or 'A Blacksmith Courted Me' ever since I first heard it on an early Steeleye Span album.  Like so many ballads, it is riddled with narrative gaps and hints at most regarding what might fill them.  What interested me, apart from the beauty of the tune and the poetry of the words, was one of those hints: a suggestion that, despite the apparent betrayal or 'slighting' of the female narrator, she does not bear a grudge.  Of course the line: 'I wish them both much joy' could be taken for sarcasm in a bitter reproach.  But with my tendency to wilfully misunderstand, I imagined her taking a more philosophical point of view... perhaps.

In what follows, I tried in prose, but often quoting the song (in more than one version) to explore her mindset.  There is reference in the song to a period of nine months, an implication that her lovemaking with the blacksmith led to pregnancy and thus the stigma of an illegitimate child.  But this - it seems to me - is by no means clear, so in my piece I preferred to think that she had escaped that particular fate.  In which case, of course, forgiveness might have come a little more easily.

A Blacksmith Courted Me

Oh what’s the true meaning of all that transpires?

I look in the glass again and again, see only my own wan face, my dark ringed, uncomprehending eyes, and I shake my head once more.  And the curls and the tresses around my face do dance and waver as if there had never been strange news, as if he had never gone abroad or stooped to gather the sweet primeroses.

There are stages where these tales are forever acted out.  And there are acts, one after another, in which the stages of this tale unfold.  With what does it begin?  Ah, bliss.  It begins with faith, with hope, with love and trust.

It begins with his hammer, striking the anvil, so clever, so steady.  The sparks that flew across the smithy.  With his smile as he paused to hear my entreaty, a request from my father, shoes for the horses, equipment in need of repair.  And his tender eyes as he watched me, clutching my shawl close, a little afraid - for all the times I had walked past the smithy I had never once set foot inside.  His broad and sturdy arms.  The rosy glow in his cheeks.  Oh, I had seen him many a time before.  Ours is a small town.  But that day I saw as if for the first time.  I saw my love.

Said he: “Your father is a good man.  This work I’ll do and he’ll settle with me when he can.”

As soon as I was able, I hurried away – for I could barely remain stood fast upon my own two feet, such were the feelings that o’erwhelmed me.  Yet why should I mistake kindness for affection?  Better not to let imaginings rob me of my good senses.

The trust, it grows, as sapling does to oak, seeming sure and steady.  His ready smile and greeting whenever our paths did cross.  The light in his eyes that shone for me alone, as he played so neat and trim upon his pipes for the young girls to dance at the summer fair.  And then came his letter, the coarse paper near scorched by the ardour of which he wrote.  So mayhap the fault is mine.  I should not have lain beside him that night.  I should have listened to some better counsel.  I should not have believed him when he said he’d marry me.  When he said he’d not deny me.

And then comes the break - the call to other lands to fight for king and country.  Oh, with what concern he’d listen to my entreaties then.  “You must not go,” said I, “to where the sun will burn your beauty.”  “I cannot stay at home,” said he and spoke of duty.  Duty I know.  That cannot be denied.

The weeks of waiting.  The months.  The years.  And set to steer me through it all, my wedding plans, my hopes, my foolish dreams.  Whilst he did march to fife and drum from battlefield to battlefield.  And all would be well if only he lived, had not the call to gather primeroses come upon him.

At last came that news so strange, a whisper from lips to ears, a buzz of words that spreads through the town.  “He is married.”  How can this be?  My love is married to another and will not return to his forge, where I loved so well to watch him at swing with his hammer.  I can find no sound meaning in this.  And yet it is so.

What was there to be done?  A message, perchance?  A former claim to consider right well?  A protest to rend his heart?  Of these I thought, oft, at length, day after day, night after night.  But too well I knew what he might say.  For witness had I none of what he’d promised.  And of where he’d made that promise, I knew I dared not speak.

God may reward him well for the slighting of me.  I cannot speak for the Divine Will nor yet, like some practitioner of witchcraft or wizardry, can I seek to sway its course.

If love him still I do, and still do I, then all that’s to be achieved in this the final act is to wish him well.  Him and his new love, may they prosper and thrive, may their babies be happy and blessed with health.  May he deceive no more.

And there I am, still pale and drawn, staring at myself from out of the glass.  Trying to make sense of what I cannot know, that tidal ebb and wash of the human heart, its vagaries, its weakness.

There is but one thing that I can be sure of.


If I was with my love, I’d do my duty.

'Famous Author Tours South Wales'

Blogging late this week, having only just returned from a six day trip to South Wales, where I’ve been attempting to promote and sell copies of ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’.  The most successful of these attempts was on the last day of the trip, where I’d set myself up as guest reader at the Poems and Pints evening - held on a monthly basis for most of the year at Pontardawe Arts Centre.

On the Saturday prior to that, I’d done a ten minute spot at the Ffwrnes Theatre in Llanelli, during an afternoon event going under the title ‘Spoken Word’.  This is usually a completely ‘open mike’ session at which contributors with books to sell have an opportunity to do so during the interval.  Rather late in the proceedings I found out that, on this particular day, the session had been merged with a book launch by children’s author Wendy White.  Published under the pen-name Sara Gethin, ‘Not Tomos’ is her first book for adults.  It deals with issues around child poverty, its narrator a convincingly written five year old boy.  On the basis of what I heard in her readings from ‘Not Tomos’ and the talks given by her publisher and Welsh journalist Jon Gower, it promises to be a first rate novel, deserving of success.

Lesson for myself was – don’t try to sell your books at an event like that again.  I felt like some weird kind of gatecrasher and it came as no surprise that no one so much as came to look at my book.  Why should they?  This was, quite rightly, Wendy’s day.  Nevertheless I enjoyed the event, from the handful of local readers with which it began to the eye-opening talk regarding the well thought out, enterprising Honno publishing company and the heart-felt speech by Mr. Gower.  It was also a pleasure for me to read one of my stories, all written during my time in Wales, to a predominantly Welsh audience.

The days between were partly a holiday for me and my good partner Rachel.  A great opportunity to show her some of my old haunts in the Gower.  We even got some sunshine.  It was also an opportunity to reconnect with old friends.  Monday found us in Loughor, guests of the redoubtable Dewi ‘Mav’ Bowen, musician, writer, activist and archaeologist.  In fact I’m really keen to big him up as, sociable fellow that he is, he made/answered several phone calls over the day in which all reference to me was as a ‘famous author’ on a ‘South Wales tour’.  I think he enjoyed seeing me cringe.

Among his innumerable and utterly splendid achievements, Mav co-runs a folk club which occurs every Monday night, as far as I know without fail, at the Loughor Boat Club on the shore of the estuary.  It attracts musicians and singers of mixed ability but strong commitment, and is invariably enjoyable.  You start the evening thinking: ‘Yes, this is quite pleasant,’ and then some time after 10pm you find yourself thinking: ‘Fuck me, there are some bloody good musicians in this neck of the woods.’  And that’s nothing to do with the beer because I was on orange juice.  Monday night was no exception.  We had a fine rendition of the (I suspect quite difficult to play) Mason Williams tune ‘Classical Gas’, two lovely unaccompanied songs by a local singer named Maggie, a sensitively and well played cover of a song from Lal and Mike Waterson’s ‘Bright Phoebus’ album, and finally some shit hot ragtime guitar numbers from a former protégé of Ralph McTell.  Oh, and round about the mid point of the evening I got to read out a story, the as-yet unpublished ‘Upright and Grand’.  It’s a musical piece, without being music, if you follow me.

Though I wasn’t entirely confident he’d make it, the famous archaeologist turned up on following night as people gathered for the Poems and Pints.  As he generally does, these days, Mav was looking stylish in a loudly patterned Californian beach shirt, dark jacket and wide brimmed white hat.  It felt good to have him aboard, along with a slew of other good friends who showed up – though it was by no means just my rentacrowd who were present.  I used to attend the P&P at Ponty fairly regularly during my time in Wales, and I was well pleased to see many of the old faces there, and a good many new ones too.  Amiably MC’d by the poet Glyn Roberts, as it has been now for some years, the event still seems to be thriving.

The way it works, the guest does a twenty minute opening spot, then after the interval there’s an open-mike before the guest closes with another twenty minutes.  I kicked off with ‘Enlightenment’ from Wilful Misunderstandings and followed it with three poems, one of which appeared in the Welsh poetry magazine ‘Roundyhouse’.  For my second set I did a couple of pieces that have appeared in this blog (‘Nothing’ and ‘I Hope to Write a Garden’), ‘The Long Haul’ from the book, and a poem about a Spanish waiter (Jorge, not Manuel).  I got the feeling that I didn’t seriously disappoint anyone and sold a good few books.

Mission accomplished, but what also really stirred me was the open-mike session.  Some of my highlights follow.  An elderly gent from Bridgend named Wes whose poems I don’t always quite get, but whose passion and delivery invariably move me.  A fine and well crafted poem from another reader about a day with his young daughters in Ambleside.  Mav’s co-opted chauffeur, the writer John Jenkins reading selections from his words for the ‘Glo Coal’ word, dance, film and song event.  And another Ponty regular, the ranting Phil Knight whose quickfire ‘I love Wales’ poem had us all laughing, but contained some nicely presented ironies regarding twenty first century Wales.  This is, always has been and will be for as long as it lasts, bloody good stuff.  There is, as many have observed, a powerful literary tradition in South Wales, and I feel honoured to have had a taste of it and been allowed a little participation.

And so ended the… uhrm…’famous author’ tour.  Next day we were off back to England, visiting one final old friend en route – with whom I’d also met up for the Deke Leonard Memorial Concert in Port Talbot on the previous Saturday night (see my review of that in the next issue of online magazine ‘Gonzo Weekly).

Though I’m resident now for the second time in my life in Dorset, I often say there’s a piece of my heart that I left in South Wales.  It appears to be still beating.

Stoned Again at Stanton Drew

An inevitably wet UK bank holiday curtailed an expedition to take a look at the Maes Knoll hill and then the stone circles at Stanton Drew in Somerset earlier this week.  My fellow traveller and I only got to look at two out of the three circles, and missed the ‘Cove’ and the ‘Quoit’ entirely.  But hey, we’d already got soaked going up to the Knoll and we had to make a dash for the church porch to shelter from a further torrential downpour.  We hadn’t anticipated the need for total waterproofing.  Smartphone predictions let us down.  Another such expedition is called for, as and when.

So this is no neo-antiquarian well-informed write-up of serious research, nosirree.  This is a bit more personal.  I’m trying to figure out what it is that attracts me to these sites, these relics, these objects…  Am I doing it because that’s what people do?  People of certain types that is, whether Glasto-revering hippies old and young or strictly academic archaeological authorities or those who straddle the divide or just plain sightseers…  I can identify to some extent with any of them.  Am I romancing?  Am I looking for clues in the ever-elusive quest to figure out why us human beings do the things we do?  Is it some kind of compulsion to which I’ve succumbed over the years?

I guess it started for me with Stonehenge.  I still have, somewhere amongst my random archives, a 60s guide book or leaflet.  School trip or family outing, I don’t remember but - as in those days you could - I walked among those megaliths and felt something that stayed with me.  Awe?  Excitement? A sense of the mystery of pre-history – those stories that we can only speculate upon, based on fragmentary clues with multiple possible interpretations?  Some kind of link, in the presence of these objects, with ancestors who placed them in such locations?  A sense of the sheer sweat and blood involved, and the conceptual sophistication of their construction?  Not only that but the realisation that these things were built to last.  Planned obsolescence, the curse of modern times, was not part of their makers’ thinking (an observation I must accredit to my partner, by the way).

So there were values in operation here.  Were they values that I might share?  Who knows?  There are only these elusive clues.  Do they have anything in common with that which has been built within times of historical record in the way of locations for divine contemplation – cathedrals, monasteries, temples and the like?  It seems hard to deny this possibility.  Yet archaeologists joke amongst themselves that ‘ritual significance’ is a catch-all term for ‘we’re not quite sure’.

In my youth, enthralled by psychedelia, I was prepared to buy into the then current speculations about leys (or ‘ley-lines’ as I now gather we mistakenly called them) as energy channels, the earth’s meridians.  I can remember a visit to Avebury, some time in the 70s, and touching the stones there, ready to believe that something vaguely mystical would seep into my consciousness and bring me to enlightenment.  Didn’t work, I’m sorry to say.  Enlightenment requires a bit more effort than stone stroking.

With age, I read more, spoke with enthusiasts for whom a somewhat nuanced view became the norm.  And still I sought the stones.  The Rollrights, the burial chambers and megaliths and smaller circles that abound in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, and – not so long ago – my first visit to Long Meg and her Daughters up near Penrith.  The folkloric tales that abound around these sites are always fun – people turned to stone for various misdemeanours or whatever, the devil hurling boulders from nearby hills.  They wind their way into my imagination and I daydream of these stones coming to life and animation when no one save the dreamer is looking.  I’m not sure Mike Parker Pearson would approve, but even he must have his more whimsical moments.

Up at the Long Meg site I tried to channel whatever it was that brought me there.  I wrote a poem that touched on some of the questions I’ve listed here.  It raised the concept that even the most solid of rock, when looked at in the longest of terms where tectonic plates cause continents to shift and reshape, is mutable.  As it will be too in about six billion years, when the sun becomes a ‘subgiant’, doubling in size.  In another couple of billion, it is estimated, our planet will melt into it.  In this light, there’s a poetic resonance I find to those tales of transformation.

No answers then, just fascination.  And the stones themselves – the sheer beauty in their shapes and surfaces.  At Stanton Drew, according to the useful write up on the stone-circles.org.uk website, the stones are a mix of limestone, sandstone and breccia – a sort of conglomerate.  They are intricately weathered, often pock-marked by erosion, and then – like any rock surface – coloured and patterned by lichens, mosses and other small growing things that lodge in cracks or on ledges.  My eye-to-brain channels are in love with the endless abstractions thus created.  Nature has been doing Jackson Pollock just about since the world began.

And a final thought.  If ever there was room for wilful misunderstandings, surely these are the places.  Archaeology constantly refines its comprehension with new equipment, new ideas and interpretations – but mostly, I think, acknowledges that there will never be enough information to give a definitive interpretation.  There will always be room for wedding guests or knight-errants turned to stone and for Satan lobbing his lumps of rock.

So maybe I’ve answered my question.  But as readers of this blog may have gathered by now, my place is permanently set amongst the bewildered, so I can never quite be sure…

________________________________________________________________________________

If you want to know more about the middle path approach of neo-antiquarianism, check out www.northernearth.co.uk/ and maybe take out a sub.  With regard to Stonehenge and the apparently
inadequate proposal to tunnel the A303 below it you might want to take a look at www.stonehengealliance.
org.uk where there's a petition you can sign if it's a concern of yours.

Comedy and Politics

I should think most of you have heard it by now, the little joke about what President Trump’s bodyguards would have to shout if he came under fire.  Yes, of course you have.  “Donald!  Duck!”  It’s actually one of those ones where, if you give it some thought, you realise they probably wouldn’t shout that at all.  It would be more like: “Lower yourself, Mr President!”  Or perhaps, given the reportedly regal nature of his audiences with the media of late, “Get down, your highness.”

But of course, Donald doesn’t duck.  He would not so much as consider lowering himself.  He’s so high he can’t get down.  And if he remains standing, bold and pugnacious, and there’s an accurate shot, perhaps his last words will be: “You’re fired!”

So there we are, at this point the joke backfires completely.

As probably - if some of the complaints I’ve heard from some comedians are to be accepted - do most jokes about the current incumbent.  “You can’t make it up,” they say.  “Reality outstrips you every time.”  Which feels about right – many of the darkest, funniest routines about Trump seem merely to involve straight description of the activities and pronouncements of the president and his cohorts.  A bit of canned laughter can be added to the soundtrack to keep us chuckling - if, at any point, we forget to think it’s funny.

I love a bit of satirical comedy as much as the next vaguely leftie old hippie, but here’s the thing.  Sometimes when I appreciate the commentary it’s making, I find myself thinking: ‘These men and women are so wise, thoughtful and observant.  They make their observations with insight, their deductions hold logic.  Why can’t they run the country instead of…?’ (conclude with an expletive of your own choice concerning politicians).  And it seems to me just about credible that they could do a better job.  And of course the media coverage would be lively and fun.  It would boost public interest no end.  In the UK we could have Jeremy Hardy and Alexi Sayle as the Corbyn and McDonnell of the labour party; Stephen Fry heading the lib dems and Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown helming what’s left of UKIP into oblivion.  Though for some reason I find myself struggling to think who might do for the conservatives.  Jim Davidson?

In fact it probably wouldn’t work out.  I’ve been a great admirer of Eddie Izzard for many years (even if I don’t always get his space age approach to cross dressing) and have observed with some interest his efforts to get involved with political activism on behalf of the labour party and the ‘remain’ campaign during the run up to last year’s referendum.  But he doesn’t appear to have distinguished himself on this front or to have added a great deal of worth to the debate as yet.  Maybe the crossover requires a character with a bit more grit.  Mark Thomas springs to mind.  Or perhaps (and it has occurred to me that I’ve so far failed to include any female comedians) Josie Long.

I guess my conclusion is that it’s obviously one thing to diss the politicians, quite another to replace them.  It isn’t that difficult to take the piss or point out the flaws, especially if you ignore the fact that not all politicians are 100% venally motivated.  Pockets of integrity do crop up amongst them and sometimes even endure – providing they don’t get assassinated, as one of ours did last June.  The simple logic of my initial thought dissolves into the complexity of the world as we know it.

It helps to have a laugh, as one despairing friend of mine remarked after I’d re-posted a video clip of Mark Steele doing one of his affably scathing rants about Teresa May’s election u-turn on my Facebook page.  That inane joke around Trump’s first name with which I began this piece certainly made me laugh the first time I heard it.  And there’s not much that causes me to laugh about DT, or the power structure that now finds it advantageous to have him presiding.

Laughter does put it into a different perspective, presents another facet of reality in which foibles are made transparent.  I’m not talking about caricature so much here, which often slips too easily into insult alone.  It’s the observational comedy that works best for me, the stuff that points out the inconsistencies, contradictions, self-interest and deceits that lie behind the pompous facades.  Comedians can do that pretty well, even if they’d be no better at running human affairs than anyone else.

Of course, ‘Donald!  Duck!’ doesn’t fit into that category.  That’s just silly.

But then, I think there’s room for a bit of silliness as well.

Averse to verse? Then look elsewhere!

My Opposable Thumb

You ask what does my thumb oppose?

A set of fingers, I suppose.

It’s likely that I’d let things slip,

if I failed to get a grip.

If this digit was a critic,

would it tend to be arthritic?

If I took a strong position,

would it rise in opposition?

And should I need to offer thanks,

would it wag a stern phalanx?

Take me to task by hitching lifts,

instead of buying thank-you gifts?

Though there’s no reason why it ought

to be equipped with conscious thought,

it’s still my opposable thumb –

and I suspect it just plays dumb.

_____________

My Hand-Me-Down Phone

The things are everywhere.  On the streets people are talking into them.  On the train, they’re watching movies or tapping messages on finger sensing screens.  At any time of day they’re pulling them out of pockets, bags or those whaddyacallit slipcases they keep them in to see if there are any incoming messages.  If they lack information of any kind, they’re there for googling.  If they want to know the weather, the screen throws up cloud, sun and raindrop icons to guide them through the remaining hours of the day.  If they want to know where on earth they actually are, the things can tell them with seeming pinpoint accuracy.  If they want to know how something’s done, the things have videos to show them.

I’ve tried to keep up with technology.  I went from an Amstrad to a PC with all of a massive two gigabytes of hard drive memory, to the laptops I use today with their squidgywiggabytes and more.  But somewhere in the last decade or so I found I’d stopped being an up-to-date sort of guy.

At first I was up for resisting them altogether.  I didn’t need them.  Good grief, I’d lived for a full fifty years without them and I was still here to tell the tale.  Why should the future be any different?

The first crack in my defences was driving.  I have next to no idea what happens under the bonnet of my car and if it goes wrong, the job goes to a rescue service.  Some bugger or other pointed out to me that phone boxes are getting pretty thin on the ground these days, and if I had a phone with me in the car…

Damn!  I could not deny the logic.  I think my younger sister had something to do with that.  She’d ‘updated’ and had an old one I could have.  It was a clunky great thing compared to what’s around today and when you charged up the battery it would last up to a good… ooh… ten minutes or so.  But fine.  I could keep it in the car, switched off.  Just use it in dire need.  I didn’t want to go a step further.  I could just about handle it.

It got broken.  I forget how.  By then my sister had got her first smartphone and was cultivating a taste for it.  The road of temptation for her began with the inbuilt solitaire game.  Now she plays Scrabble on it with people from the USA.  And checks for messages, and the weather, and…  Yes.  She’s hooked.

So I got my next hand-me-down.  A Nokia something something something, I believe it’s called.  Somehow against my better judgement I was forced to learn to text message on it, which I still do clumsily and slowly with a lot of cursing.  By day, I use it to make phonecalls, because somewhere along the line I got on a ‘contract’ which I have no idea how to get out of, and my landline costs money if used before 7pm on weekdays.

But that’s it.  I’ve reached my limit.  I don’t want to tap screens with greasy fingermarks.  I don’t want to make things get bigger and smaller by sweeping with my fingertips.  I just…  I just don’t.

One thing haunts me.  What will I do when my Nokia something something something finally gives up the ghost?  Will my sister have one of those things ready and waiting for me, because she’s updated to a device on which she can play Hyper-Scrabble with creatures from Proxima Centauri?

Oh, good grief…  Will I finally have to crawl, protesting grouchily all the way, into the twenty first century?


Okay, behind all this 'grumpy old man' foolery there's a serious point to be made on this topic, which returned to my attention after reading a review in New Scientist magazine of a film shown at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London.  'Complicit', the film, documents the suffering of Chinese workers in the factories where smartphones are manufactured.  They are exposed to toxic chemicals on the production line, chiefly benzene and n-hexane, which give rise to leukemia, nerve damage and paralysis.  In addition, anyone making a protest is subject to often brutal repression.  Although Apple have, since 2014, banned benzene and n-hexane in final assembly manufacturing processes, these are by no means the only unethical aspects of most smartphone production.  Should I ever find myself having finally to 'update' to one of these devices I would go to a company known as Fairphone (https://shop.fairphone.com/en/) which appears to be bringing the principles of fair trade to smartphone production, along with considerations around re-use and repair issues.  So they probably deserve this plug.
                

Wilful Misunderstandings - One Year On

‘Wilful Misunderstandings’, my collection of short stories was published a year ago more or less to the day.  Regular readers of this blog will know that hard sell is something I find rather difficult to take on seriously, which may have proved to my detriment sales-wise.  Nevertheless on the whole I prefer to live with myself as I am, rather than aspire to any kind of slickness.  Sales, I tell myself, are not a reflection of quality, and it’s quality that jolly well counts.

Besides, ask any writer who isn’t in a position in which s/he doesn’t have to self promote, and you’re likely to hear a similar story.  We’re mainly into knocking the stuff up, not pushing it through people’s letterbox slots. Hence the fact that I generally prefer to fill this blog with anything that it crosses my mind to write about, rather than the book it was set up to promote.  However, now and again, bullets have to be bitten.

So here we go.

Accolades (not the kind you drink):

“Richard Foreman’s Wilful Misunderstandings comprises thirty four stories based around the twist or misunderstanding of an English word or phrase.  They are utterly beguiling and often unsettling, combining quirky humour and philosophical thoughts within slightly off-centre fictional worlds.  The stories veer between fantasy and surrealism yet somehow hold a balance of credibility that make them disturbing.  This variant Oulipo fiction with added humour is simply a tour de force of storytelling.”  David Caddy, editor Tears in the Fence magazine, issue 65, spring 2017.

“Within five minutes of picking the book up and reading it for the first time I was immediately entranced. These stories are a delight, and I have spent much of the ‘Festive Season’ proselytising about Foreman to anyone who would listen. I have found myself using the words ‘delight’ and ‘delightful’ far more often than I would have wanted to, but I truly cannot think of a better adjective. My life has been enriched for having read these stories. I cannot wait for the next volume.” Jonathan Downes, editor Gonzo Weekly magazine, issue 215/6, January 2017..

“Expect the unexpected while reading Wilful Misunderstandings.  The oddball characters and their quirky concerns will attract your attention. Richard Foreman demonstrates how deep his imagination is, and how the simplest of ideas can make interesting prose. He writes fluently, wittily, and his stories tend to approach the dark side in a humorous way.”  Michelle Stanley, Readers’ Favorite website.

And from Amazon reviews and some reader correspondence:

“Stories like dreams half remembered, tapping into a seam (or seeming) of the unconscious mind.”

“I love the feeling of shifting, malleable realities.  It is so much fun and encourages thinking in new ways about the world.”

“The book is bloody brilliant. I read it in nearly one sitting. It totally messed with my head.”

“This is a collection to reread, a book to tickle and amaze, to ruffle and amuse and sometimes to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.”

“Unafraid to tread off the beaten track into vivid, unsettling worlds where nothing can be taken for granted.  Where anything can happen.”

There, now that wasn’t too painful, I guess, being a simple copy and paste operation.  So you’re reading this and you still haven’t bought yourself a copy?  You can get it from online retailers and even order it through bookshops, but by far the best way is through Lepus books.  Just go to

http://lepusbooks.co.uk/wilful-misunderstandings/

skip the blurb because you’ll have already read most of it here, click on the relevant payment buttons and you’ll get a pristine copy, lovingly signed by me (ask if you want a message).  And I’ll get to use up some of the padded envelopes I bought in specially.  Win-win or what?