Tag: David Bowie

High Ideals

The songs that flit through my head as I write these little titbits have become a running theme and, because of that, I have started to look far more closely at the lyrics, small snatches of which have rounded off every post so far this year.  As a long-time fan of David Bowie I have always been a disciple of the beautifully crafted phrase.  (My first Bowie LP – Man of Words, Man of Music – came when I was no’but a child and simply because I had some birthday money left and I loved Space Oddity.  I will not pretend that, at that time, I understood what the words were really all about, but I liked the way that they sounded – and I still do.)  I would like to put in a word of my own here for the wonderful Guy Garvey of Elbow who writes lyrics that read like the very best of poetry: simple yet affecting.  Take almost any Elbow song and read the lyric sheet and you will see.  Try Puncture Repair, Magnificent, Weightless, Starlings or even the ubiquitous One Day Like This and you will understand.  I digress…

The God-like Alan Coren turned out buffed-up idioms like there was no tomorrow and the young Woody Allen used words in a way that rendered me speechless.  I love the simplicity of Orwell’s prose, but I cannot replicate it: somehow I always drift off towards the flowery end of the page.  Back in the day I was – I think – the same as all other teenage boys: I knew that I was going to be a professional footballer (I was ok but, if I’m honest, seldom the very best in any team I was a part of) or a rock star (despite the fact that I could not play an instrument more complicated than the G# chime bar and had a post-adolescent voice that was reminiscent of the whine of a recently neutered cat).  Punk came along for me at the perfect time, but I turned my back on it because by then I had decided that I wanted to be funny (or, as my then best friend suggested ‘weird’).  That I failed on all counts is no surprise.  Never mind, I play football with the kids, I sing (very badly) all the time and I scour the twilight zone between my ears most days to write this.  Who needs the fame I craved back then?

Of course my vision of fame then was slightly different to today’s.  Then it just meant getting girlfriends – which is everything to a pimply youth.  It was the only motivation.  I must admit that I’ve always been a bit bored by money.  I realise that I am exceedingly fortunate in that I have always had just enough to live how I would wish, but I have never had – nor desired – plenty.  The thought of all the husbandry that is required to care for stacks of lucre is not at all appealing.  Nor, for me, is the thought of spending shed-loads: I hate changing my car and the thought of voluntarily diving into the luxury housing market leaves me breathless (and not in a good way).  The thought of fussing over piles of dosh, ensuring that they always grow, is less appealing than an evening with Gemma Collins.  And you can’t even give the bloody stuff away: you don’t want to pass the problem onto your kids, but you cannot bypass them for charity as a) everyone will presume that you are the head of a disastrously dysfunctional dynasty, or b) that you are incredibly vain and prepared to part with huge wads of currency in order to buy admiration.  High ideals, it seems to me, are incompatible with riches.  Fortunately, I don’t have to make the decision…

there’s a laddered tear in my high ideals
like I took a chair on the battle field…  High Ideals – Elbow

Be born, grow, mature, die. Why?

 

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When I first saw the six word stories of PoojaG and Tetiana Aleksina/Tony Single I was, to say the least, intrigued. I am by nature an old windbag. I find it hard to stop myself before I have slopped six thousand words around the screen, never mind six. When I start, I seldom know where I’m heading until I get there. When I begin a piece I seldom have any idea of where I’m going to stop, until I hit the buffers.

So, what you have at the head of this page is my very own six word story. I was in some doubt as to whether what I had written actually qualified as a ‘story’, but when I looked it over it had a beginning, a middle and a definite end. It also had intrigue: it invited audience participation. (BTW, if you believe you know the answer, you are one of the lucky ones, don’t question your knowledge. Me? I struggle to understand the question.) It had, subject to your own imagination, the potential to encapsulate every possible plot device you can think of. I was quite pleased with it.

…And then my mind, as it does, skipped on. If I was to write an ‘average’ book-worth of such stories, it would contain ten thousand separate tales. Could any other author produce such an anthology? And if each story had a title? What if each title also included six words? A mere five thousand yarns in my collection. Not quite such an impressive tome perhaps, but still the source of a tale a day for within a whisker of fourteen years (allowing for bank holidays). More intriguingly, I could instead go for writing two blogs per hour, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, at my current output. (Obviously just one per hour with a six word title.)

But there is only so much one can take of a good thing, and God knows where that leaves me with just the fair-to-middling to offer.

I considered, briefly, the possibility of writing my blogs as I do now, before taking the scissors to them, à la David Bowie, and chopping out pithy six-word sections that would stand proud and profound in isolation. That, of course, threw up (or possibly down) yet another stumbling block: he was a genius, he could do that. I, in contrast, would probably end up with something that more closely resembled the contents of a six year old’s Scrabble board. Neither proud nor profound and probably, except in the most insubstantial of ways, not even a story.

And so, despite the manifold attractions of the six word way forward, I decided to return to the sort of claptrap that I am capable of producing, and to leave the six word stories to those who can do them, whilst I remain:

Watching what others do much better.