Once upon a time there was a boy who worked in a pub in a small market town. And in this pub in the small market town drank a motley collection of elderly alcoholic perverts, philosophical gas-fitters, drunken cleaning ladies, avuncular portly homosexuals and a whole bunch of other folks. Their stories, banter, anecdotes and miscellaneous crap filled the air with a heady rich of accents and viewpoints utterly alien to the boy.
After a few years the boy got the idea to mythologise these people, and to cheerfully rip their lives off so he could pass his masters degree, then he read a poem called "on the neglect of figure composition" by Roy Fisher, which posited a "fresh matter of England" and told the story of an english civil war so absurd as to seem plausible, and so the ormskirk sequence was born.
I don't quite seem to be able to shift the sequence from my psyche, the mythologies and characters have burrowed to a level where they are dug in tight, and they aren't going anywhere. I've grown fond of them, anyway. I love the strangeness of the everyday (I recall an american friend of mine, who disbelieved me as to Ormskirk's incredibly high nutter per squrae mile ratio. So I took him out on an all-dayer which featured a small child shouing "Hail Caesar" at him for no resdily apparent reason, a scally loudly declaring that he'd left his fish in the bath and a man disco dancing on his own in Kwik Save car park at three in the morning. The american left town shortly after, still shaking his head in disbelief) and have long bored friends and acquaintances to tears with my theories on the beauty of mundanity, and the drama of the banal. Amplify them just a little and you get the Ormskirk poems.
I was a little miffed then, when reading last week's guardian review to note that there is a sequence of novels based in a parallel wales where a private eye contends with bizarre cases (this is a wales where they fought a patagonian war, and have a space program), rather felt like having my thunder stolen. But fuck it, I'm doing it anyway. The ormskirk stories project is begun, short vignettes really, 500-1000 words tops (yes, I have been reading a lot of James Kelman lately). There s already a novel ("Nothing Happens" written two years ago and still being edited, more of a Southport novel than Ormskirk really, but the principle is the same) and I'm working backwards, trying to distil it a bit. Give us a yell if you fancy a few, or I might stick some up here to see what you think. Either way it's back to the word processor for me.
After a few years the boy got the idea to mythologise these people, and to cheerfully rip their lives off so he could pass his masters degree, then he read a poem called "on the neglect of figure composition" by Roy Fisher, which posited a "fresh matter of England" and told the story of an english civil war so absurd as to seem plausible, and so the ormskirk sequence was born.
I don't quite seem to be able to shift the sequence from my psyche, the mythologies and characters have burrowed to a level where they are dug in tight, and they aren't going anywhere. I've grown fond of them, anyway. I love the strangeness of the everyday (I recall an american friend of mine, who disbelieved me as to Ormskirk's incredibly high nutter per squrae mile ratio. So I took him out on an all-dayer which featured a small child shouing "Hail Caesar" at him for no resdily apparent reason, a scally loudly declaring that he'd left his fish in the bath and a man disco dancing on his own in Kwik Save car park at three in the morning. The american left town shortly after, still shaking his head in disbelief) and have long bored friends and acquaintances to tears with my theories on the beauty of mundanity, and the drama of the banal. Amplify them just a little and you get the Ormskirk poems.
I was a little miffed then, when reading last week's guardian review to note that there is a sequence of novels based in a parallel wales where a private eye contends with bizarre cases (this is a wales where they fought a patagonian war, and have a space program), rather felt like having my thunder stolen. But fuck it, I'm doing it anyway. The ormskirk stories project is begun, short vignettes really, 500-1000 words tops (yes, I have been reading a lot of James Kelman lately). There s already a novel ("Nothing Happens" written two years ago and still being edited, more of a Southport novel than Ormskirk really, but the principle is the same) and I'm working backwards, trying to distil it a bit. Give us a yell if you fancy a few, or I might stick some up here to see what you think. Either way it's back to the word processor for me.
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