I read it and wept. The main character is supposed to be an Indonesian man looking back to when he was a twelve year old. It’s written in first person. Great Expectations it is not. I just couldn’t believe it! It’s like listening to people who put on a Goodness Gracious Me accent in Indian restaurants to order egg and chips.

“Now I see it was hard for him to tell me.”

“I crossed the high bridge over the motorway that was swarming with beeping cars.”

Imperialist twaddle. I know many people are back from their hols and want to write about places they’ve been, but please, why do people think they can write in the voice of other people? You’re not an Indonesian man. You never will be an Indonesian man. You’re a white, middle-class woman from the Thames Valley. Get over it.

Here’s the antidote to all that, the extraordinary No Worries Have a Curry by Jyoti Thanjal.

And I don’t claim the voices in Tiger Hugs are the true voices of Hackney, but at least I’ve written about something I know.

Tiger Hugs

Or a light bulb that signifies a bright idea.

Or a robot that can walk upstairs backwards.

Or running naked into waves on a very cold day.

Or driving a VW camper van. No seriously! I mean it. Wow!

Or a mini adventure. It’s really tiny and there’s an adventurous element.

Or wearing a woolly hat on your AVI. Go on be a devil.

Or your neighbour’s faces when they see your car with five wheels.

Or old people. Smiling old people always sitting down.

Or a talking baby that has brand awareness.

Or flying without falling out of the sky.

Or dreaming without waking and forgetting the beginning.

Or a bank that opens sometimes.

Harness the power of that horse with an extra leg.

That’s bad PR, I know, but I’m reading Steve Jobs’s biography and one of many interesting moments was when Steve wirehead Wozniak wrote a spoof marketing PR campaign for a non-existent computer that apparently rivalled the Apple II. Jobs didn’t get the joke. Ever. The strap line was, “Imagine a Car With Five Wheels”. I cannot hope to spoof as well as Wozniak, but I am pleased to be able to harness the power of bad PR and bring you a plug for my novel Tiger Hugs which is soaring like an eagle in the sky on authonomy.

Imagine a world without clothes.

Release the inner you and completely overdo it.

Own something that others want so much they’ll kill you for it.

Be the envy of your neighbours and flaunt it.

The essence of life is a deodoriser.

Free the spirit and light a quasi-religious candle.

Imagination is only limited by the things that stop you imagining.

Personalise the number plate, now.

Be someone interesting for a day.

Don’t waste money on PR.

Tiger Hugs

That’s fine. I’ve responded to every criticism with revision. The latest, recurring criticism is, “it’s like a film script”. One reviewer did admit to making that comment in absence of any other comment. But Tiger Hugs definitely cannot be compared to a film script because there is actually quite a lot of narrative.

My aim was to write something completely different in the belief that publishers want new and original. So you laugh! Cynic! But it’s true. Tiger Hugs kicks ass. I don’t trust narrative, and narrative is fashionable and boring. Everyone’s doing it. So I did something different.

The result is a lot less narrative than people are used to. Were people ‘used to’ the stream of consciousness in Ulysses, or the blast of humanity in On the Road, or the slice of life in Great Expectations?

I guess the proportion of narrative to dialogue is 50:50. No matter. People will still say, “It’s all dialogue” because that’s the effect of slimming down the kind of encircling narrative that inspires a sense of, “where the f— are we?” in most novels.

I find most novels are really dodgy. We’re all supposed to be wooed by the suave narrator to believe in his, “safe hands”. The narrator asserts that he’s qualified for the job in terms of status, location and voice, a quiet, reassuring, patriarchal drone. I never get the sense I’m “in safe hands” when a patriarchal writer starts up. I just get a sense of utter desperation.

So let’s make the dialogue stand out because the things people say generally stand out. When you travel on trains, go to football matches, pubs or theatre, voices stand out. And let’s make something happen. What happens in most novels? Nothing!

At least, “it’s all dialogue” is better than being lost in the narrative. I couldn’t do that to my readers. I coudn’t start in the middle and then say, “never mind, dear, you’re in safe hands, I’ll guide you out”. I do bombard them with sequential events and dialogue because that’s what makes life interesting. Readers always fail to say exactly where they get a sense that it’s all dialogue. My guess is it they can’t say where because they don’t know. They’re really suffering a sense of loss for the patriarchal narrator. The shock of the new.

So generally I’m pleased. There was a time when I couldn’t write dialogue for toffee. There was no sense of drama, and I had no ideas. Now people say my novel is as crazy as a runaway horse. It’s still the same novel it was in September when it was called The Marquis of Queensbury Rules Okay, but it’s grown up a lot and that’s carrying it forwards. Even though it’s wrapped in an attractive cover with a USP, a blurb and a smooth synopsis, it’s still actually about something. There is still a moral purpose.

Above all, it’s the antithesis of the same old same old. It’s the work of a writer with an MA in Creative Writing, Goldsmith’s, University of London, who has 30 plus short stories published and who’s decided to do something different. And that isn’t an apology.

Read Tiger Hugs on authonomy. It’s a comedy, but it’s also a bit different.

I haven’t got a kindle-doodledo. Should I flay myself?

My meaningless and ridiculous novel Tiger Hugs is racing up the charts on authonomy, the Harper Collins online farrago. As the dubious and tactless Jessie J says in her song about the price tag being inconsequential when you know you can afford everything, if you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it, darling. Tiger Hugs is free but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap, and you get another one free when you read it. You can’t say fairer than that, so why’s everyone so serious? I mean, lighten-up!

Okay so I didn’t get a Kockadoodle-Kindle for Christmas when everyone else got two and then used them in the shower – so hedonistic, but hey ho! Who cares? I’m so out of step I still wear flares from the first time round. I actually don’t like drainpipe trousers. They make me look like Max Wall so I avoid them. The only good thing about drainpipes is … there are no good things about drainpipes, and history warns me that whenever fashion obliterates flares there has to be something deeply wrong with society. You have been warned, after all, it’s not about the price tag because money can’t buy you love or class.

PS My favourite Christmas TV show was Ab-Fab back again and wonderful, especially the pisstake of MLE Jafaican, or as it’s known here in Wiltshire, Wilja innit.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 20 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

On the second day of Christmas … the TV looks bust but it’s just constant re-runs of Only Fools and Horses in narrow screen format.

On the third day of Christmas … another meat eater grumbles that turkey is dull. Try giving up meat till next year, then see how dull turkey is.

On the fourth day of Christmas … nauseating pompous prats Walliams, James May, Jeremy Clarkson, Miranda Hart again and again and again and again and again and again again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and I’m not exaggerating.

On the fifth day of Christmas … why watch Eastenders when you can see people throw things at each other in your local?

On the sixth day of Christmas … looking up Christmas recycling dates online.

On the seventh day of Christmas … looking at the pile of recycling that wasn’t collected on the scheduled date.

On the eighth day of Christmas … saying thank you for the Slimmer’s World calendar and not meaning it.

On the ninth day of Christmas … hearing well-off people say they’re depressed at Christmas. Please!

On the tenth day of Christmas … interesting cocktail – fruit-flavoured Rennies mashed into gin and tonic.

On the eleventh day of Christmas … where does the dust come from? Hit by avalanche on stairs.

On the twelfth day of Christmas … thinks voice has gone but actually just haven’t talked to anyone for 12 days.

Happy New Year!

It’s not much but it is officially on page 20 of the Treasury report:

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/european_union_finances_2010.pdf

The treasury figures don’t go to town on the private sector benefits which could be quite a lot depending on how well they’re doing. Membership of the EU means there are no tariffs on trade across borders, so it costs nothing to trade in the biggest economic sector in the world. Someone must do quite well. Is that figure not included because it’s not known? Maybe the private sector is so weighed down with EU bureaucracy it fails on the main benefit of the single market.

The official cost of free trade that EU membership gives is £12 billion, a fraction of the national budget of £703 billion.  The cost hardly even registers in the scale of things:

Pensions £129.3 billion

Health Care £123.8 billion

Education £93.3 billion

Defence £47.2 billion

Welfare £111.0 billion

Listen to the Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies backing up the facts on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15387495

But those are just the “official” figures. They would say that wouldn’t they. The Euro-skeptics, who also happen to be very right wing, provide figures they claim to be “real” and speak up for the “burdened” private sector. They also claim that their figures are based on the official figures in some way. I checked the link. They aren’t in any way based on anything. Their so-called, “real, underestimated and hidden” figures are speculation, dogma and propaganda.

The leaders of the pack are the Telegraph and the Taxpayer’s Alliance who claim that the “real” cost of free trade in the EU is immense. They slap a figure of hundreds of billions thus making the man in the street think he’s expert in something he knows nothing about. It’s malicious manipulation and it’s just going to end with a lot of people losing their jobs.

There’s a moment when sensible people might go, “Oh I see. That’s what they’re on about!” but then there are also those who have a grudge about Eurovision, or the World Cup, and despite Britain starting more wars than any country in Europe, they go on hating the Germans and the French and anyone. It really is laughable but it probably will give Cameron the landslide he wants. Then he can forget them all again.

Editor’s note:  Since writing this I’ve been thinking about the, “real, hidden, underestimated” cost and thinking that it could just as easily apply to the benefits of the EU.

So I took their advice, and I’m still working on version X, but while I’ve been away Tiger Hugs has climbed steadily to 595.

One comment came in via authonomy messages saying “Keep up your Christian work”. It’s no surprise it’s read as “Christian work”, in the way that Boys From the Black Stuff, or Auf Wiedersehn might be read as “Christian work”. It’s about the path of most resistance, taking a leaf out of Grayson Perry’s notebook.

http://www.authonomy.com/books/35451/tiger-hugs/

Going off the beaten path in any former industrial city in the UK can be like stepping into a dystopian world. This area, by Bridgewater Canal in Ancoats isn’t far from Piccadilly Gardens, and was once heavily populated.

New flats have been built to attract people back to the city centre.

Here’s the result of some of those efforts. Ducie Street Apartments.

And here’s a snap of a shop front in Dale Street that always makes me smile because of the … well

You get the picture. 

The comment that’s making the news is his ‘executing striking pubic sector workers in front of their families’. Imagine saying that live on a family show. The exact quote has been removed by Yahoo, probably because Unison are threatening legal action. It wouldn’t upset me one bit to see Clarkson hung out to dry by the BBC. I really can’t stand the bloke.