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Author Post - Jon Haylett

Stamina

Poor Lucy: it’s the 12^th day of Advent and she is, according to my limited knowledge of the Christian calendar, as long to go before she reaches the end of the daily grind of thinking of something to post on her Advent Calendar.  Has she the stamina?

 

Before we buried ourselves in this remote crafting community in western Scotland, in the days when we had four children at home plus sundry boyfriends turning up plus either set of our parents, that’s what Christmas was about: stamina.  It took stamina to last through the 364 shopping days that led up to it.  It took stamina to keep our youngest from eating the baubles that the cats continually stripped off the Christmas tree.  It took (my wife) a great deal of stamina to prepare the turkey, to go down in the early hours of the morning to stoke our multifuel cooker so it had time to work itself into a lather for a long day’s work.  It took stamina to keep the children away from the presents until we’d gorged ourselves on Christmas lunch and an excess of red wine, sweet dessert wine and port, washed up the dishes, and watched Her Majesty on the tele.  It took a failing stamina to make sure the rabble opened its presents in turn, so we could all enjoy seeing what everyone had been given.  By that time we’d run out of stamina so the older generation fell asleep, missing the best bit of Christmas, the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show with Angela Rippon showing off the lovely legs no-one knew she had.

 

So, has Lucy the stamina?  I thought she must have when I saw a post last Saturday which seemed to indicate an incredible devotion to duty – until Tom straightened me out on something called ‘post-timing’, something that Typepad offers so Lucy doesn’t have to be in the office on Saturday and Sunday to post her Advent efforts.

 

Has she the stamina?  Can she scrape together enough ‘Company best bits of the year’?  Did Legend/PaperBooks really have over twenty of them in 2008?  In my days in teaching there used to be only one: reaching the end of the summer term without dying or having a nervous breakdown.

 

And the cards: has Lucy the stamina to photocopy enough of last year’s Christmas cards to provide the visual effect?  Were it me, I’d have to dig around in my collection as far back as 2002 to raise the requisite number of printable cards.  Anyway, if she runs short, she could always re-use that lovely photo of Gary upended in a shopping trolley.

 

You’re doing a great job, Lucy, keeping us cheerful while the economic world collapses around us and our politicians fluff around like a crateload of chickens.  I, for one, hope you do have the stamina. 

Jon

Author Post: Jon Haylett

Conception

The story that became ‘Black Mongoose’, due to be published by PaperBooks in February, was conceived one lunchtime on a hard wooden seat in a pub on the south bank of the Thames, one of those run-down Victorian red-brick London hostelries tottering on the edge of what looked like a bomb site, to which I’d repaired while my wife and daughter pillaged the West End.

Conception requires a seed, and the seed in this case was a dance, an annual dance which takes place thousands of miles away from muddy Thames-side. I know you’ll say that likening what’s in this link to a seed is sadly inappropriate, because the clip features publicly-professed virgins – that’s why they’re carrying reeds, though one does rather wonder at those who drop theirs. Rather lovely virgins they are too, but the best part of this is definitely the singing. I love African singing for, however untutored they may be, both men and women sing like God’s angels, and all seem to have an innate ability to harmonise. See what you think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbj8lmWE5xY

This reed dance is the Swazi version, but the Zulus do a similar one, the main difference being that, in the Swazi version, the local King gets to choose one of the damsels as his latest wife. As a consequence, the current King, Mswati III, has thirteen wives and 23 children, which is rather slow going as his father, Mswati II, had no less than 70. Mswati III’s latest, a 17-year old schoolgirl, was a singularly unfortunate choice as, in the face of one of the worst AIDS epidemics in the whole of Africa, the Swazi Government had been preaching abstinence, particularly among the young.

Don’t ask me why this particular gem of African culture suddenly bobbed to the top of my mind in a grubby London pub, for I have no answer, but the description of just such a dance began to came out almost too fast for me to write it down. I was hampered by only having a tiny notebook in my pocket and the stub of a pencil. The notebook had been borrowed from my daughter, a blue, mock-suede covered thing with a large pink flower on the front, but each page was emblazoned with a very appropriate logo: ‘Go Girl!’

Jon

 

 

Author Post: On The Road Again - Jon Haylett

Writing is the conveyance of experience. For some, the story is here at home, its characters are around them, its sounds and sensations the everyday. For me, stories happen out there, someplace else, often triggered by a momentary observation that catches my imagination. So, for me to work, I have to remind myself of what the wider world is like. I have to leave this contented little place and travel.

There’s a delicious feeling, a combination of anticipation and anxiety, as one teeters on the edge of the sort of journey upon which we are about to embark. I remember it as a child, when the family boarded a Union Castle liner for a four or six-week voyage from East Africa to the UK, or that wonderful moment each July when, as a schoolboy, I hurried out of the Nissen huts and across the tarmac at the old Heathrow airport towards the waiting BOAC Argonaut, Britannia, 707 or Comet which would wing me back to my home in Mombasa for the summer holiday. Later, when looking back on some of the journeys I undertook in my teens, I wince: setting out from Salisbury, Rhodesia, for Mombasa on my first long-distance hitch-hike; or trundling down the road in an ancient Land Rover that was supposed to carry me down Europe, across the Sahara and the Congo to Central Africa – which, of course, it failed to do. Later still, our journeys became more sedate but were as packed with risk: flying down to Ian Smith’s rebellious Rhodesia to take a job in an African boys’ school deep in the bush; or boarding a cargo ship in Amsterdam to travel to an unknown post in the most violent city in the West Indies.

Back in the UK, as a pitifully paid teacher and father of four children, holidays were a week with my parents on the shingle beach at sunny Hastings. Only as I climbed the teaching tree and joined the monkeys near the top did our budget extend to something further afield – like the west Scottish Highlands, a holiday that caused us to jump sideways into the retailing tree. Now, with the last of our troupe off to university, we’ve started travelling seriously again: this time, a ship across the North Atlantic, via Shetland, Iceland, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to New York; trains, to Toronto then Edmonton; a car – a big, gas-guzzling Ford Explorer as the weather will be closing in – across the Rockies and Cascades to the Pacific coast of Washington; and, finally, a BA flight back to a modern Heathrow and a weeks’ wait for our luggage to catch up.

Exciting stuff, but there is a far better, a far more adventurous way to meet the world and its inhabitants. I wish I had the guts to pack my rucksack, step onto the roadside and, once again, hang out a hopeful thumb. I wish I were eighteen again.

Jon

And you can order Jon's novel Cry of the Justice Bird right here at a special discount:

Order your copy now - £5.99 

'High action served with no frills'

Since it's launch, The View From Here Magazine is quickly developing into one of the most exciting literary offerings around. And it was great to see a review of the great Cry of the Justice Bird by Jon Haylett, one of Paperbooks' top novels.

Read these comments just for starters:

'A dose of high action with no side orders'

'A book that taps into the sometimes dormant sense of adventure in the modern man'

'This is no A-Team adventure. It is gritty, messy, disturbing'

'It's a steak cooked rare, with no side salad'

This must have whetted your appetite! (OK, end of food pun theme, but you get a sense of how action-packed this novel is). And you can order your copy right here to add some extra excitement into your weekend and beyond:

Order your copy now - £5.99 

Tom

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