People Watching (Part 1; first draft)

This is another story for the collection I mentioned last time - it's probably going to have a second part, but I don't know if they'll come together to make one story or if they'll be companion pieces.  It's based, I guess obviously, just on the idea of people watching, and of the weird voyeurism of it, which I guess is similar to any reading experience - you're completely separate from someone, but you still watch them and come to know them and care about them.  It's set on a loose reconstruction (from memory!) of Ballycastle Beach, hence the picture

It's very much a rough-and-ready first draft, so apologies for typos, repetition and just plain rubbishness.  And as ever, opinions and comments very welcome.

It’s sort of snowing, but it’s not quite cold enough, so it’s more like sleet.  It doesn’t lie on the ground in a nice white sheet, but instead clumps in semi-melted puddles which semi-blur into a very shallow semi-lake in the carpark.

If you turn your gaze out to sea (which isn’t pleasant, as there’s a stiff coastal breeze), you’re rewarded with a view which is subtly greyer than the one they put on the postcard.  The sea is stormy, but not as wildly as you might expect, and the waves wash up harmlessly on the long sandy beach which curls away from you to the right, it’s smooth curve broken only by the solitary large rock, which locals will tell you was thrown there in days gone by in a battle of the giants, where the local hero had defeated his rival from behind the headland.  Behind the headland they have a similar but slightly different story, involving a baby cow.

The headland ought to be in sight, but the weather is such that it isn’t even a shadow, as the beach eventually fades into an eerie mist.  It looks completely deserted, but if you look a little closer you’ll see that just beyond the rock there is a figure, swimming in the sea.  He’s too far away to make out clearly, he surely must be youngster to be doing something so ridiculous, or perhaps an old man, who has swam on the beach every day for fifty years, and no winter chill’s stopped him then and it won’t now neither.

Short story number two: Elysium (draft)

(This first draft of the second story I've written for a collection that will hopefully be out at the end of Summer.  It's a bit scrappy, but I like putting stuff up as a marker that I've gotten the first draft out of the way.  If you have any feedback feel free to let me know in the comments!)

“Are you alright, Jack?”

Jack glanced up, surprised to be called by name, until a second later he re-noticed the large badge on his chest.  It was the girl who had been sat in front of him for the tutorial.  Jess, he gleaned from staring (not for too long) at her chest.

“Ah I’m fine.  I miss them, you know, but so does everyone else.”

She nodded, smiling a mouth-closed smile.  “Well I do.  I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one though.  People are so good at soldiering on, aren’t they?”

“You’d be surprised.”  The gruff voice came from over Jess’s shoulder; neither of them had seen their tutor approach as his students departed.  Paul.  He would have been old before to Jack’s eyes, middle-aged to a more generous observer, but now in this reshaped society he was positively ancient.  Neither of the youths spoke, flustered that they had been overheard, wondering if they had transgressed.

The Taming of the Shrew at Reading School

Lucia McAnespie (Katherine), David Davies (Petruchio) and Tom Kay (Hortensio)

What could be better than watching Shakespeare performed on the picturesque playing fields of Reading School, with the evening sun gently warming your back and a glass of wine in your hand?  Well, that was a moot point tonight, as the evening began with a desperate plea for the huddled audience to lower their umbrellas, at which point more than one bedraggled spectator decided they had already had enough.

It is thus to the enormous credit of the GB Theatre Company that they managed to perform at all, let alone that they put on such a good show.  On multiple occasions actors slipped, slid and fell on the soaking stage, but each time they managed to see the funny side, as indeed they did with the whole play.  It goes without saying that humour is indispensable in comedy, but where some adaptations of Shakespeare rely on their audience to simply ‘get the jokes’, this production ran the comic gamut from start to finish, from well-staged wordplay to nudging innuendo to those clearly unplanned slapstick falls.

Review: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

Widely regarded as an ‘instant classic’ when it came out in 1995, High Fidelity was especially noted for its ability to capture ‘every second of its own present’.  However seventeen years down the line, does it stand the test of time?

In terms of plot, it might have been written at any point.  Rob, a record store owner, has recently split up with girlfriend Laura, and goes through (as one of his ex-girlfriends puts it) ‘some kind of what-does-it-all-mean thing’, with Laura lurking all the while in the background, and Rob himself lurking just outside her house.

Hornby’s writing style also certainly endures.  He ingeniously captures the self-conscious internal monologue of anti-hero Rob, particularly in the virtuoso opening where Rob recounts his ‘all-time, top five most memorable split-ups’: ‘Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breasts that I would try to touch her between her legs, a gesture that had a sort of self-parodying wit about it: it was like trying to borrow a fiver, getting turned down, and asking to borrow fifty quid instead’.

Review: Oriel Ball 2012 - Titanic

It might have lacked Magdalen’s price tag, backdrop and (as we heard midway through the night) fireworks, but Oriel’s Titanic themed ball proved a night to remember.

After the pain of finding a White Tie suit to hire on a night with two balls (note to self: don’t procrastinate so long next time, and don’t use web companies which send it a day late and without a waistcoat… Thanks Hire Society) and the drama of getting ready in time (7.30 seems very early for a night out) we taxied our way past the huge line of Magdalen-goers (with many a top hat in evidence) and arrived at Oriel for a queue of our own.

Smooth, first draft

[Comments and opinions very welcome!]

She smiled at me, I think.  It was hard to tell, because she might have been smiling already and just happened to glance up and catch my eye, but I think it was for me.

Of course, that wasn’t why I walked over.  I was with Danny, who was meeting Amy, and since the girls’ school broke up at 3.20 and we were in until 3.45 they would always come and wait outside the gates for us to come out.

It was quite a sight actually, with hindsight.  Small groups of heavenly angels (surely they must have been as spotty as us?) would constellate outside the gates, each keeping furtively to themselves, applying make-up and touching up their hair in the grimy and fractured mirror of the vandalised bus stop.

Smooth - part one

She smiled at me, I think.  It was hard to tell, because she might have been smiling already and just happened to glance up and catch my eye, but I think it was for me.

Of course, that wasn’t why I walked over.  I was with Danny, who was meeting Amy, and since the girls’ school broke up at 3.20 and we were in until 3.45 they would always come and wait outside the gates for us to come out.

It was quite a sight actually, with hindsight.  Small groups of heavenly angels (surely they must have been as spotty as us?) would constellate outside the gates, each keeping furtively to themselves, applying make-up and touching up their hair in the grimy and fractured mirror of the vandalised bus stop.