Sarah Pinborough

A moment.

North Africa. The sun falls fast. Minutes and it’s over, but the heat, the ghost of the sun, last long into the night. I remember the warmth in the tiles under my feet. The smell and grit of sand between my toes. Dust drifts in on the desert winds. My dad’s arms and face, tanned to black. Golfer’s tan gained by playing cricket on a ragged pitch in 40plus temperatures.  Mad Englishmen. He sits outside with the radio on, beer at his side. Whiles away the evenings.

The balcony is a terrace that runs around the house. Below, the generator hums and insects clack and hum in the dark grass. The dog sleeps while the nightwatchman sips strong sweet tea on the makeshift bed . No need for canvas over his head. The night is never cold.

Crickets chirrup. Hard-winged bugs crack against the bulbs. I come outside. My dad leans back in his chair, feet up on the wall as the radio barks messages in spurts of noise from planes somewhere far overhead. No music. I touch the blue metal rail above the low wall. It doesn’t burn any more but still has a long way to go to cool. I’m eight years old. Maybe nine.  My dad forty-four or forty-five.

I’m unhappy. Two weeks holiday evaporated to two days. Plane ride. School. Cold. England. They’re waiting. I don’t want to go back. In two days time, I will in fact try and get off the plane and be cajoled/forced/bullied back on by the pilot that I meet coming the other way on the steps. There will be a standoff for ten minutes. I will lose. Plane ride. School. Cold. England. But that’s the future. Two days away.

I’m wearing T-shirt and shorts. I crawl into my dad’s lap. He smells of beer and pipe tobacco and warmth and a trace of Old Spice or something similar. Most of all, he smells of safe. He talks to me about the radio. The airplanes. He explains how it works. I listen. I sip his beer. It has a bitter taste but I don’t care. I look up. The night is clear and the stars are bright. They hang low in the sky in Africa. Stars are always diamonds. To me. Cliche over-used but I don’t care. This time when I look they are like holes in the sheet of the night giving a glimpse to a brilliance beyond. Something forever out of reach. Something behind space.

Me and my dad, we don’t talk about school. We don’t talk about the ‘unhappy.’ Instead, we talk about the stars. The light. He tells me – and its the first time I’ve heard this and all the times I hear it after that I’m glad this was the first time – how what I’m looking at isn’t really there. He tells me, between sips of his beer, about the speed of light. About how what I’m looking at is time travel. Science fiction come to life. He tells me that if my eyes were strong enough then maybe I could see all the people on those planets living out their daily lives long after they were dead.

I stare at the sky for a long, long time, after that. I imagine the people and the creatures that I’m looking at even though I can’t see them. I wonder if any of the stars are really there at all. I talk in flurries, my childish imagination making up stories of places far away. My dad sips his beer and lights his pipe. I look at the stars with more respect. I like the story of light travel. It makes the stars magical. Fragile.

The years have evaporated, but on clear warm nights when I look at the stars, I still feel that dry air that has never known anything but heat. I hear the crickets chirping. I smell the ‘safe.’

I wonder if, one day, somewhere out there, someone so many millions of miles away will look through their telescope and see that moment long after my dad and me and this planet are just dust. The thought makes me smile.

Happy Friday,

SJP x

There seems to have been a sudden surge of school reunions in my world of late. Well, I say a surge. Three to be precise, but that’s three more than there have been in any of the other years since the education system and I happily parted company. It dawned on me that perhaps this was due to the impending arrival of 40. The biggie. The really-properly-grown-up-no-kidding-yourself-anymore age.

Forty. It’s supposed to mean something, isn’t it? Like 30 was. Turns out, where some people lock themselves away and sob at that birthday, I actually liked turning thirty. A whole new exciting decade lay ahead and I was determined to make the most of it. Seeing 40 looming I feel the same way. A new decade means time for a shake up. In my 30s I started writing, I went through a whole career in teaching, and then became a full-time writer. I’m expecting MORE from myself in my 40s. A decade of confidence maybe. A return to the ‘fuck it, let’s just give it a go’ attitude of my 20s.

Last week I went to a reunion lunch at the House of Lords (hell yes, my school was THAT posh) and caught up with a couple of friends I hadn’t seen in over twenty years. It was fun. We giggled. I drank wine. We giggled some more and reminisced and shared what we knew of other peoples life journeys since we’d snogged/shagged/smoked with them in the various nooks and crannies of The Edinburgh Academy.  The years folded in on themselves. We were the same, but different.

A month ago I went to a reunion at my first boarding school and again caught up with people from half a lifetime ago and looked through their photo albums to times gone by. Again it was fun, but I found I didn’t feel that overwhelming sense of nostalgia that a lot of people had. I didn’t come away with any major desire to keep in touch or see the old place again. I didn’t even go through the routine of kidding myself that I would. That place and those people were the past. A different country. Done.

The excitement is in the future.  The one thing that these trips into the past have made me realise is that I’m pretty happy with my life. I’m excited about the future. Sure, I’d like to lose a couple of pounds and get my house sold, but in the main, things are really good. I’m free from ties and work is taking me in different directions some of which keep me awake with ‘what if…’ style excitement. I get the feeling that change is just around the corner. And I’m a girl that loves change. I like that it scares me slightly. Sometimes a little fear is good.

When I was younger, I thought that ageing would really bother me. I thought I’d be reaching for the Botox or fillers and envying the next generation. I’m surprised and relieved that hasn’t turned out to be the case. Maybe that’s because I’ve done a lot in my time, had my adventures and am embarking on new ones. Getting older brings a confidence that youth, for all its bravery, just doesn’t have. And I’m thinking that 40 is going to be just fabulous. I’m using 39 to make sure that’s the case. Working hard, exercising, trying not to be ‘afraid’ of things any more. After all, life is short, and if you don’t learn to make the most of by the time you hit 40, you probably never will.

I read somewhere that the truly young are those that look forward and never back. I’m keeping that in mind. There’s nothing wrong with a quick sentimental reflection on times gone by, but if you spend more time living in those than you do planning for the future then buy yourself some slippers and be done with it.

We live in a world where we, especially women, are supposed to want to be twenty forever. Really?? My bottom may have been three inches higher then, but that was about all being twenty had going for it. Twenty was crap. Forty, however, forty is going to be just fine. I’m hoping that by then I’ll be living somewhere new and writing more stuff and dating fabulous men. I’m tired of people stressing about their upcoming birthdays. We need to start celebrating our ages, not panicking about them. We’re alive. The world is full of fun and wine and laughter. Enjoy it.

Remember, all those of you that worry about turning 30/40/50. The only alternative to getting older is being dead.

Here Endeth the Lesson/Rant/Hour of work avoidance/mildlyhungoverwaffle. (oh, and in book news The Traitor’s Gate (Silverwood) is out on Thursday, and The Shadow of the Soul will be reviewed in the Saturday Times this week.) x

SJP x

http://southsidebroadcasting.podbean.com/category/science-fictionfilmcult/

(Disclaimer: This is not a deep meaningful blog. If you’re looking for that, move right along, and come back another day x)

Before I start, let me qualify that I appreciate that The Big Lebowski is a LOT of people’s favourite film. I see it quoted it all the time. People giggle at shared jokes, and laugh at memories of various scenes. There are enough of these people for me to know that it’s probably a good film. A pretty good one. The quality of the film is not the point of this blog. So all you Lebowski lovers – take a deep breath and relax. This is not about  your film. This is about me and the Dude and that is all.

I really wanted to like The Big Lebowski. I REALLY did. I wanted to be part of that jokey gang. I tried watching it. Twice. Both times I dozed off in the middle. This disappointed me. The second time I had tried very hard to stay awake but to no avail. I tried to care about the Dude and the unfortunate series of events that had taken over his life. I didn’t. It was worse than that – I was really irritated by him.

This surprised me. Mainly, because I totally heart Jeff Bridges. To be fair, there is nothing that man couldn’t do to me if he asked nicely. Or not so nicely as it goes. But not as the Dude. Definitely not the Dude. The dude totally made me grit my teeth.  It took me a little while to figure it out, but after quite a bit of mulling I got there.

The dude is everything that confuses me about some people and leaves me cold. I guess in many ways he’s the antithesis of everything I am. Here’s my reasoning….

I can imagine nothing worse that the one exciting series of events in my life coming about because someone mistook me for someone else. I never want to be mistaken for someone else. If there’s two people like me, I want to be the one that people know about.

Things happen to the Dude. He doesn’t MAKE anything happen. So much passivity. Everyone else in that film is running around plotting and scheming but even when he’s in the midst of it, the dude just gets carried along by which ever group is using him at the time. Sure, we all have stuff in our lives that we can’t control, but in the main I can’t understand people that just let life roll over them. I like to make things happen. I like people who make things happen. I like the buzz that comes with the achievement of your goals. The satisfaction of trying to be the best you can be in what you choose. I don’t understand why people would want to just dream their lives away. Get stoned when you’re young. Get serious when you hit 25.

I don’t want the rug. I want the whole fucking house.

Even when exciting things start happening in the Dude’s world, he doesn’t wake up and think – wow – there is some stuff to explore out there and change his ways. He’s happy to go back to getting stoned and going bowling. It’s like none of it touches him.

I know that in many ways I could use being a little more like the dude. A little more chilling and a little less striving might not hurt me. I might even be happier. But I’m never going to think the Dude is cool…He’s way too off the mark for me. When I see the dude I just want to say, ‘Oh get off your fat arse and DO something!’

Just like I say to myself in the mirror every morning!

SP xx

When my gran was alive, I think it lived under her bed. It’s now in my mum’s attic room. A battered old suitcase. A valise. The kind with a hard shell and proper clips, not a zip, to close it. The sort you had to sit on to shut when they were overfilled, and then line up the flip down locks and hope for the satisfying click as they connected. Pink silk lining. The kind of suitcase used when planes had BOAC on the side and air hostessing was still considered a glamorous job.

The kind of suitcase with magic inside.

It’s highly possible that the suitcase that my gran had and the one in my mum’s house are completely different and always have been, but in the part of my brain that belongs to my childhood they’re the same, because their magic is the same. Both are filled with old photographs, letters and bits of lives gone by. Both exist mainly forgotten apart from occasional moments of nostalgic wonder. My grandmother’s was filled with the debris of three generations, and my mum’s is the same, the last of the driftwood in that one belonging to my sister’s and my own childhood.

I don’t have a suitcase. In the cupboard under the stairs however, I do have a couple of over-filled plastic bags. I got them out the other day. All my debris. Photographs from school, university, my childhood, pictures old pets almost forgotten, stubs from train and gig tickets, and letters and cards sent from friends and boyfriends. I used to keep all this stuff. Store it away. Safe to look back on in the future if I ever felt the urge.

In that battered magic suitcase I loved the letters best. The smell of the paper. The different handwritings that hinted at this kind of personality or that. The recounting of a snapshot of events. The way that the writing changed as the writer got older. The letters were the best, but the writing on the back of the old photos was second. Information that meant very little to anyone but those in the picture. The kind my gran would look at and frown for a second before the random description would jog a memory and there would be a story to recount about the faces and places frozen forever on that curling thick paper. Several lifetimes of stuff. Eighty years or more.

In my plastic bags, the stuff ran out about ten years ago I guess. The letters went first. I have letters in there from when I was eighteen, and maybe a few years after, but none since I was thirty. We don’t write letters any more. We send emails. Texts. Sometimes I save texts if they’re ones that make me happy. But they only ever live the life of the phone and then Poof, delete. Gone forever. I don’t remember the last time I wrote a letter. Not the sort that you write simply to catch up with someone and tell them what’s been going on in your world and ask what’s been happening in theirs.  Why do we need to?  Email. Text. Facebook. I know what people ate for breakfast, watched on TV etc etc blah blah. (God forbid we end up using Facebook pages as the suitcases of the dead. Mine is entirely flippant and unafraid whereas I am pretty much entirely considered and afraid of everything…bless the facebook personality. She’s much more fun…but I digress.)

The photos died out with the advent of the digital camera. We all fought it for a while – diligently printing them out – but not anymore. If they don’t stay on your phone, they go straight to the hard drive (and of course facebook, yfrog, twitter, whatever is your internet drug of choice). I don’t think there are any pictures in my carrier bags taken in the last eight years or so. C’est la vie. The world moves on. Everything is instant and immediate and so quickly forgotten. Like life itself. Here. Gone. Over. A cheeky wink from the eye of the universe, that’s all we are.

I’m not mourning the loss of ‘being remembered’. That’s not it at all. In part because no one really is ever ‘remembered’, by the contents of those battered suitcases. Everything in them is merely a representation of a moment or a person, and people lie as well on paper as they do face to face, if not to someone else, then to themselves. For example, in my  plastic bags I found a letter and a Valentine’s card from a boyfriend I had when I was 20. If generations future were to find those, they would think he loved me so very, very much. In reality, he broke my ribs, picked me up by my throat and threw me down the stairs. Looking through lots of my photos, I realise I laugh hardest when my heart is breaking. How many of the letters and photos in my gran’s suitcase were the opposite of their truths? What was hidden behind the carefully written words of those letters?

Nothing in any of those battered suitcases are the ‘truths’ or ‘lies’ of a life. The truths and lies and grey areas are all wrapped up inside and die with us. As they should. We and our experiences are ephemeral. We shouldn’t worry about what is left behind and just get on with making the most of our time. Live the most we can. Love the most we can. When the sun finally decides it has had enough and packs it all in, the trail of who was who and who did what will be gone forever anyway.

No, the magic of the suitcases isn’t about us. It’s about them. The children that rummage, transfixed, through their insides. And it all comes back to story.

Story is the most important thing in my life. Essentially it’s the one part of my existence that I don’t tend to fuck up. I wake up thinking about stories and I go to sleep thinking about stories. The magic of my gran’s suitcase is that it was a time travel machine filled with jigsaw puzzle pieces of so many stories, that I could put together however I wanted.

As a child, sifting through the contents made me finally accept that there had been a real world out there before I was born, and people had lived in it and everything. They really had. The past was in many ways a more fascinating alternate reality than the future. There was treasure in it. All held in the suitcase. I would hold up an old picture and say, ‘Who was this?’ and my gran would look for a second and then nod and say, ‘Ah, that was my mother. When she was young. She killed herself, did you know that? She drank a bottle of Lysol.’ (I found out yesterday that it was my grandmother who had actually found her. She didn’t tell me that part as she put the photo back and pulled out another.) But the story stuck in my head. The why and the how of it all. So many bits of people in all that debris. So many bits of stories to mull over and imagine.

I don’t have kids.  I doubt there’ll be grandkids sifting through the rather paltry contents of my old Sainsbury carriers (although maybe I’ll buy one of those old suitcases just in case), but I feel sad for the grandkids of the future. I want them to feel that magic and I’m not sure that the old people of forty or fifty years time saying ‘Oh look, here’s all my old hard drives, children. I’ll see if I can find a way to get them started and you can look through my old emails and Facebook updates,’ really has the same feel to it.

Or maybe I’m just a grumpy old Luddite….

(written on my lovely new iPad2….)

‘The Shadow of the Soul’ was officially unleashed onto the world yesterday and so should be available in all good book shops and probably some bad ones too. You can also get it from Amazon at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadow-Soul-Dog-Faced-Gods-Trilogy/dp/0575089504/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303455199&sr=1-1

I promise that at some point I will get back to blogging about something other than book stuff – there are a couple of things that have struck me of late that will probably get expelled onto this ‘page’ at some point –  but I seem to have filled my month off work with work (as you do…) and I should probably fill my life with less computer time rather than more.  The sun is shining after all…and thank fuck for that. The world always looks better in the sunshine, doesn’t it?

xxx

Just a quick note to let you know that my award-winning novella, The Language of Dying is now available as an ebook for only 1.99. Get it here:
http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/eshorts-32-c.asp

I don’t normally talk business on my blog, but given how my email inbox has been pinging away overnight with regards to Leisure, I thought I’d take two minutes to state my opinion here. Before I start, I have to reiterate that this is just my opinion and is entirely unemotional and I have no problems at all with the opinions of others on this matter, and can fully understand them.

My viewpoint is thus. While I would advise all authors not to sell any more books to Leisure, I can’t advise readers not to buy them. I have a very practical view of business and the way I see it is that the issues are between the authors who are owed monies and the publisher who owes the monies and that should be settled by agents and lawyers if necessary.

The reader has no responsibility for failed payments and rights issues, they are simply interested in the end product, and that’s the way it should stay. Therefore, as much as I have a huge amount of sympathy for those authors wanting what they are owed, I can’t join in a warcry that calls for readers to boycott Leisure’s list.

In my past life, I worked for a while with an official receiver and I used to go into failed businesses and see how they could be turned around enough to then be sold on as a going concern. Nothing in the way Leisure has behaved, or is behaving, comes as a surprise. They are a failing business, desperately trying to stay afloat long enough to turn themselves around. They’re not paying authors, they’re fighting to keep rights and people are having to chase for royalties and royalty statements (although to be fair, that’s always been the case with Leisure and been a bone of contention for their authors for years – but again – that wasn’t the readers responsibility.) It’s got nasty at Leisure, as things always do when a business is hanging on to stop from going under.

The thing is this. Would I sell any more books to Leisure? Hell, no. Would I like my rights back if I could get them? Hell, yes. Do I support the way they’re currently treating their authors? Absolutely not. But should I pass any of that onto the reader? For me, it’s a no. I just don’t work that way. Business is business, and our business isn’t the reader’s business.

Yes, I’ve been lucky and Leisure don’t currently owe me any money. But even if they did, I would still say the above. On one message board a week or two ago, some poor sod happened to mention how happy he was that he picked up some cheap Leisure paperbacks in Wal-Mart and was looking forward to reading them, and then got shot down in flames for it. That left a sour taste in my mouth. None of this is the reader’s issue.

So, to those people emailing me and asking whether it’s okay to buy my books from Leisure, the answer is go right ahead. And that answer will remain the same, even if I end up in a bitter legal battle with them at any time in the future.

I know that this post goes against the general feeling, but I’m simply stating my personal opinion on this so that my inbox will stop pinging. And yes I know it’s only 6 in the morning…yes, I do have insomnia. Is that writing related? More than likely. Is it the reader’s responsibility? Absolutely not…

As an aside I was totally impressed by German engineering on the breakfast front. You know how, when you go to an English hotel and have a buffet breakfast (the Brittania Nottingham springs to mind…),  in the trays with the bacon and stuff there’s always about an inch of grease?  Well, in the German ones they line the tray WITH SLICES OF BREAD. Grease soaked up. Simples.

Or Vorspring Dur Technik or whatever.

G’night y’all.

I will post more about this great event when I’ve cleared this week’s work back log – but I was overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of my German Publishers www.ueberreuter.at who looked after me so well and have worked so hard for me. Lovely company, lovely people. Here’s a short video of me reading in the Fantasy Island…I’m SO not born for reading..

Sarah’s Reading

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And I was totally blown away to see the the German Version of A Matter of Blood as their main image on the side of the stand. Kept me smiling all the way home.