Best man

I'm the quiet one who sits in the corner and can't think of anything to say. When my brother asked me whether I'd like to be best man at his wedding, I agreed pretty quickly. ("I thought I'd ask you because you've always been quite... literary," he said). For all my quietness, during the preceding 8 years I'd slowly learned how to make presentations without drawing cries of "speak up!" from the audience. For me, the key is to deliver the speech enough times that it enters my vocal muscle memory, rehearsing for an imaginary audience, in a voice loud enough to fill a room. I always find those rehearsals very useful for learning exactly how incoherent the first draft of the speech is, and for learning where the stumbling blocks and embarrassments are. Then it's revision revision revision until they have been (mostly) cut out or adjusted.

Having made my first (moderately) acceptable presentation at a conference in 2005, I was in the right place, mentally and with regard to confidence, to accept the task of making the best man's speech at my brother's wedding. Having accepted, the work really started. I thought about it for weeks before even writing anything, serious under-the-shower alpha-wave thinking. I was going to include anecdotes, as many as I could, like a CV of our relationship as brothers. It would need to be entertaining. I also learned it needed not to offend him, his wife, or our severe in-laws to be. That was one half of the speech. An introduction of the groom and the groom's family to the bride's family.

The other half was about marriage. Its history and significance. What was a bridesmaid? What was a best man? Why were these rituals important? And so I read about the history and tried to bind it to the day and present the wedding as a part of this age-old tradition. I wish
I'd read about the symbolism of the rings. The fact that in medieval times, whenever people made promises or drew up business contracts, they would offer a ring as a token of the promise. The ring was the promise. In marriage, it still is.

One source of motivation for me in giving the best man's speech was that a few years earlier, a cousin had got married and had told his best man that he didn't need to give a speech if he didn't want to. His best man was so shy that he couldn't bear the thought of it and managed to avoid giving any speech. When the day of the wedding came, he regretted that decision and knew it was an opportunity missed. I didn't want to have the same regrets about my brother's wedding. The more I learned, the more privileged I felt to have been asked. The best man is like the groom's minder. His defender and assistant. The one who brushes off the dust, makes sure that lapels are straight and ties are fixed.

While I was preparing the speech, I actually attended another wedding, and made sure to pay special attention to the best man's speech there. It was a great help... well structured, short and sweet (quite a bit shorter than my final one). It made me realise that short speeches are much better than long ones and much less boring to listen to. I decided to adjust mine from roughly 20 minutes to roughly 10 minutes in length. There were some hard cuts, but nothing I regret now.

Overall, I'm happy with the speech. It's personal and true. I tried to make it light but at the same time to reflect the seriousness of the institution. It was fairly well received and I think that's all a best man can really hope for. You can see it (split across two youtube videos, a ten minute one and a two minute one) below:

A storm-lit sea

and the image I have is of the wild sea at night. It would be slate grey and impenetrable by day but in the moonlight it is as dark as a British winter's night, foam and spray glowing like phosphor in the occasional flash of lightning. It is terribly cold and terribly deep. It could be Baltic, but you and I know it is the English channel, but it is not there. It lies between the reefs of my mind. Thoughts and ideas tumble with the waves. But they are not there. Lightning is the occasional flash of inspiration. But it is not there. I am swimming amongst the surface of this sea now, tossed and turned.

Shortly, I know I am drowning. Breaths taken above the storm tossed surface are as watery and as aery as those taken beneath it. Beneath is tranquil. Not difficult. Easy. I am struggling but the struggle seems hopeless. In this dream, I know it is vital to stay alive. Not for the dream, but the dreamer. I never had a dream so important. This is something I know. My last image is of my pale clawed hand clutching at the air above the surface of the sea. I have hauled myself out of the dream into bed. I am drenched.

Too much insulin.

Black Death

I guess it would have been in 1985 or 6 when I read an article in Scientific American about the influence of foreign trade, rats, and fleas in the spread of bubonic plague in medieval times. The front cover of the issue showed Pieter Bruegel's painting:




and the article itself mentioned (in passing) the outfits worn by physicians in medieval times that included protective "beaks" filled with petals to attempt to filter noxious vapours and spirits and attempt to stop the wearer from catching the plague.



The article served as the inspiration for an English assignment I would write a few weeks later (as it happened, I wrote the story first and submitted it opportunistically and far too long in page length for that assignment). The story was about two priests who believed in science and wanted to do what they could for the inhabitants of a plague stricken town (religion and science going hand in hand... the way God intended it to be). In their way was a charlatan witch doctor who believed that wearing that creepy attire would save him from the plague. In the end, a sanctuary house for plague victims burned down "accidentally" but actually thanks to the charlatan, killing everyone in it. One of the priests died tragically of the plague, the charlatan's belief in evil spirits brought an incarnation of the plague into existence. It possessed him. Finally, the last remaining priest and the charlatan have a fight outside a cottage in the snowswept village. The priest vanquishes the charlatan by smashing his head through a window and puching down so as to sever the charlatan's throat on the broken glass. The charlatan died with a scream gurgling through his lips.

Well, this memory of the mid-80s was all brought back by playing Assassin's Creed 2 on the PS3 (I completed the story part of the game a few days ago). It was great to see those renaissance physicians in their birdman regalia, but strange to have them as friends rather than foes in the game. They always did (and continue to) look quite creepy to me.

Still, Assassin's Creed 2 was a great game, great fun to play and so audacious in having you break into the Vatican and assassinate the Pope in the end. One of my favourite quotes from the game is a Venetian city guard telling his colleagues "take this man very seriously..."

Script

Many years ago I attended a weekly script writing workshop. To be honest, I would have preferred a novel writing workshop but there were none being run in my locality, so script writing it is. I did learn quite a lot about the differences between the script and the novel. At first it was frustrating realising that film makers don't care about characters' thoughts. For them, it's speech that's important. I've always considered dialogue to be the weakest part of my writing, so it was valuable to be forced to practice it. The document embedded here is my third script, a little experiment whose title, participants, and structure were generated automatically (to a certain extent) my a randomised plot generator. Let me know what you think: Last Bus 2

An Unfathomed Sky

A few years ago, I was in the final week of a summer holiday, shocked by how little I'd managed to accomplish in that time. It occurred to me that it was a good opportunity to begin realising my lifetime ambition to complete a piece of creative writing. An opus. It seemed I had two options:

One was to write a season of Doctor Who, though Russel T. Davies seemed to already be doing a great job on that. The more I thought about it, the less confident I became. It's a show with a massive history spanning back to the 1950s... there was too much established lore to consider.

The other option was to write an adaptation of a computer game, a MMORPG I'd been playing for some time, called Everquest 2. Particularly the quest line known as "The Claymore Quest". I imagined that it could be written within maybe 150 pages (if I stretched it out) and then I could move on to what I really wanted to do.

But

I didn't want to write this FOR fans/players of Everquest 2, I wanted to write it for the literary critics at The Times. I wanted a high level of authenticity, research, detail. I also wanted to remain faithful to the history and lore that has been established for EQ2. There is a LOT of it. More than I ever knew during that summer holiday. I wanted an emotionally satisfying and well motivated tale. Those wants of mine are difficult to realise all at once, but all I can say is that I am trying. I expect the final page length for this tale to be more than 1000 pages. For that reason, I am planning to divide it into at least two and maybe three volumes. What you see below is my first draft of chapter 1.

I already don't like the first 3 pages and I intend to make extensive cuts to them. The chapter itself will change as themes develop over subsequent chapters. I am almost ready to start writing chapter 2. I will almost certainly change the chapter titles as I go. Right now, they share the names of the quests within EQ2 that you play through in order to complete the Claymore quest.

An Unfathomed Sky

Reading aloud

Here, I'm reading from Justin Pollard's "The Interesting Bits", a diverse collection of small historical stories. The author is a researcher for BBC's QI.