Performance poet and Professor of Whimsy
In 2010, on the way back from Australia, I stopped in Tokyo for a few days, arriving at midnight. I’d booked a hotel but they lost my booking and so began a strange few days of existentialist angst when I started asking, who am I? What is my history? Do I exist? I started writing this novel.
A few weeks later, of course, once the novel was finished, the tsunami hit, so reading this novel again always gives me a strange sense of foreboding.
Anyway, you can now read Reception as an ebook!
Twenty years ago, I wrote a novel. And some of that novel had material in it from fifteen years before that. It’s lived at the bottom of a drawer for most of that time. Thanks to technology, I can now bring this to you. I will be sharing a chapter a week.
Here is a brief synopsis:
A comedy novel set at His Nibs, a fictional shop at a seaside town which sells only pencils. Assistant manager Robert once had a steamy and passionate romance with his colleague Matt. Matt is now with Clarissa, and it must be serious because they have got a cat. Meanwhile someone has burned down the pier, which means there are no tourists, and the shop is not making its targets. It rains a lot. Manager Carol has gone off the rails and harks back to the glory days of pencil retail. Robert is determined to win Matt back, or at least recreate the romance with someone else, while area manager Mona is determined to turn things round at the shop. Standing in their way are mystery shoppers, angry refunders, the company auditor, weird customers, light-fingered gang members, the local protection racket, increasingly bizarre memos from head office and the joys of the twice-annual stock take.
Chapter One
The Stock Take
We haven’t sold a pencil in hours yet we’re not supposed to start counting them until six o‘clock. It’s quite worrying that we haven’t sold a pencil in hours because the whole shop exists just to sell pencils. It’s a pencil shop. Pencils and the very minimum of pencil accessories. Pencil sharpeners. Pencil erasers. Pencil cases. And pencils. If we sold some pencils then there would be less to count, obviously. If we sold two pencils in the last hour then that would be two less pencils. The shop has probably got thirty thousand pencils in it. We will find out in the next six or seven hours. How long does it take to count one pencil?
But that’s life. The tills are all computerised now and if we were to sell a pencil after the stock take had started, then it would bugger everything up. The count would be wrong and we’d have gaps in the stock list where more pencils should be. And the area manager, Mona, she would get awfully sarcastic and make us do it all over again. And a part of me would understand the world a little better while simultaneously bemoaning its perpetual unpleasantness. A part of me would wish that the world would have less pencils in it. A part of me would want to be at home luxuriating in the freedom associated with a man who does not have to do a stock take. For some reason the company likes to know how many pencils it has.
‘Right, I’m off home’, Carol says. ‘Let me know how it goes’.
Carol’s the boss, the Manager. Carol is a canny operator. Carol has come up with a theory that when it comes to a stock take, it’s more accurate to have two people doing it instead of three. Two people can easily get on and do it. Three people would just complicate things. That’s what Carol says. And she lives furthest from the shop, so it only makes sense that she be the one to forego such nocturnal delights.
The door closes behind her. She locks it on the way out.
I’m not looking forward to it, obviously. One pencil starts to look like another after a while. There’s really been no innovation in the pencil industry for quite some time. Some have got rubbers on the end and some haven’t and that’s really the only source of variety, otherwise they’re all straight and made of wood and they’ve all got a pointy end which draws or writes. I’ve been working in pencils for over ten years and I still don’t know what the pointy end which draws or writes is called. I mean, the technical term. It’s easy to lose enthusiasm for pencils when you’re around them for as much as I am.
I’ve got Matt helping me with the stock take, though. That’s something, at least. I like Matt for a number of reasons. The first reason that I like Matt is that he’s accurate and occasionally conscientious. The second reason that I like Matt is that we’d sometimes stop counting for a bit and lose ourselves to the simmering sexual tensions that have existed between us since the very first day he walked into the shop with his CV and his boyish grin and his impetuosity and his fashionable hair and his love of life and the rumbling sense of innate masculine ecstatic oblivion I feel whenever I’m in his company which makes each nerve tingle and the air itself crack with hormonal longing. The third reason I like Matt is that he lifts some of the heavier boxes.
Alas, the chemistry between us has been somewhat depleted these last few months.
‘How’s Clarissa?’ I ask.
Because it’s only polite to ask.
‘She’s great’, he replies. ‘She’s perfect. We‘re thinking of buying a cat.’
Which is disappointing, because as well as being conscientious, masculine and impetuous, Matt is also alarmingly moral. Our stock-room trysts, foibles and peccadilloes are now a thing of the past. Clarissa is his life. A cat only compounds that.
‘Let’s start this thing’, he says, picking up a pen and a clipboard. (Carol doesn’t like us using pencils during a stock take for fear of accidentally using shop stock). ‘Let’s put this baby to sleep!’
It’s an unusual metaphor. This baby wont be asleep for another six or seven hours just yet.
Dextrously, Matt’s fingers pour over boxes of stock. His large brown eyes – the eyes of a particularly obedient puppy, eyes which have always seemed far, far too big for the rest of him – concentrate on the task at hand. One pencil, two pencils, et cetera. There’s no guess work, no cutting corners with Matt. He always goes for the maximum. If he wants it, he gets it. He does things properly.
I think back to a couple of years before, when Matt brought a sudden burst of romance into my life. Perhaps he was drunk on the wooden smell of all the pencils. He couldn’t control himself. What started out as a gentle re-organisation of the pencil case shelf in the stock room blossomed into full-blown rumpy pumpy. He became a floppy love machine, curling himself around me and oozing warmth and sensuous impossibility, it was all I could do to put down the pricing gun.
This happened again the next night, after Carol had seen the reorganised pencil case shelf in the stock room and told us to put it all back again. And then it happened once more the night afterwards, though we didn’t touch the pencil case shelf or reorganise anything, and Matt had brought some whipped cream along with him, you know, for some added pizzazz. It was only on the eighth night that we began to ask ourselves why we were using the stock room of a pencil shop when we could easily just go back to my flat and use the bedroom.
It kind of slowed down a bit after that.
But every now and then, perhaps excited by the sight of so many pencils in a kind of as yet undiagnosed drawing implement fetish, Matt and I would give vent to all kinds of ingenious desires, until Carol got suspicious at all the time we were spending together and thought that we were only doing it for the overtime. Then Clarissa sauntered in one day looking for a pen, (seriously!), and Matt didn’t seem to get quite so excitable around me any more.
‘1147367’.
‘HB hexagonal shaft blue with a white stripe?’
‘Six’.
‘1147374’.
‘HB hexagonal shaft red with a white stripe’.
‘Nine’.
It took us two hours to work out that all of the numbers started with ‘1147’. The stock count started to go a little bit quicker after this.
‘479’.
‘HB hexagonal shaft yellow with rubber’.
‘Seven’.
Matt is seemingly unflustered by the fact that we shared so many intimate moments in this very room. Yet I cannot get over the lack of passion he now shows. I pretend to count, gazing up from the boxes of pencils, and I cannot envisage anything beyond the madness to which we would willingly succumb. There are seven pencils in the box but I manage to lose count, and he makes me do it again. Two years before, we would have been all over one another. There’s nothing more sensual than a box of pencil sharpeners when you’re both naked and gagging for it. His new-found professionalism is an affront to the memory of our passion. If only a switch might be activated ensuring his sudden interest in matters other than the rigours of a damn good stock take.
‘532’.
‘HB round shaft novelty Spongebob Squarepants squeaky tip’.
‘Eighteen’.
But there’s no let up in his demeanour. Never before have I seen anyone so intent on the counting of pencils. It’s not that he wants to finish the job any quicker, though. It’s almost as if he relishes the opportunity to lose himself in stationery. This cheers me up for a little while, repays some of the faith that I have previously lost in the human spirit. But then I realise that he’s probably concentrating so intently so as to ward off some of the emotion he might otherwise feel on returning to the scene of our many romantic escapades.
‘45, er . . .’.
‘Yes?’
The thought has jarred me a little.
‘458. No. 459’.
‘So what is it?’
‘459’.
‘There is no 459’.
‘Ah. It’s 458. There was a bit of dandruff or something on the code number. It made the eight look like a nine’.
‘How many?’
‘I don’t suppose it matters’, I tell him. ‘There’s only one. And it’s snapped in half’.
‘It’s still got to be counted’.
‘But it’s snapped. It’s either one, or two halves. It wont make any difference in our overall figure whatever we decide to do with it’.
‘We will have to write it off. But first we need to count it. The Damaged Stock Form will arrive at head office after the stock take, so it’s officially still a part of the stock’.
‘I can fill out the Damaged Stock Form now and send it this moment. Then we wont have to count it at all’.
‘But it would be wrong’.
‘It’s one pencil’.
‘You know the procedure’.
‘It will cost more in postage and work hours filling out the form than the worth of the pencil’.
‘Procedures must be adhered to’.
‘Why don’t I just buy the pencil?’
‘The shop isn’t open. So therefore the pencil is officially part of the shop’s stock at the time of the stock take’.
Matt does not appear very happy for someone with a girlfriend and the chance of getting a cat.
As the evening wears on I feel the insanity of our chore become ever more evident until I cannot see the world except through the subtle variations and design of the pencils that we are counting. Chair legs, skirting boards, anything straight or wooden or both present themselves to my mind which then, automatically, starts looking for a serial code. Another hour and life itself – nay, existence – seems secondary to the task of counting all the pencils in the shop. 1147001, big bang, celestial detonation : one. 1147002, universe, (expanding), infinite : one. I start to wonder if counting the universe in our stock take might automatically nullify the need to carry on with the stock take, but Matt says no. It has to be done. It is the reason why we are here. It is our aim and our purpose. Without the stock take, we are as nothing.
And then a secondary madness takes over in which it becomes obvious, or at least, it feels obvious, that those at His Nibs head office damn well knows how many sodding pencils we have and that this is all some kind of cruel test or punishment inflicted on us just because we had the temerity to work for their company. And the company, oh, how it becomes in our minds so powerful and so all-consuming, directing us with its bulletins and conducting the whole shape of our lives with the list of items that we, us mere mortals, have to count, through the fabled, legendary stock take sheets. There’s no room for error, no room for improvisation. How deliriously do our managers sit in their offices compiling this list, laughing at themselves as they envisage the mayhem that it will bring to our lives! Oh, great and mighty stock-take co-ordinator, oh, you saintly powerful all-knowing New Goods department, how we aim to please you with our pitiful late-night counting!
Matt tells me to snap out of it.
‘1147859’.
‘HB round shaft, silver coloured embellished edge’.
‘Yes’.
‘Well?’
‘Sorry. Eight’.
I wish I was dead.
A couple of years before Matt had been a completely different person. There had been something sly about him. It was as if he were throwing subtle hints all the time. I would catch them in the way that he would look at me at certain moments, or the way he’d brush a stray hair away from my shoulder while we were making a display of pencils, or perhaps it was the fact that whenever we were alone he’d run his hands under my shirt and beg for ten minutes of ecstatic human physical companionship as if enraptured by the pounding, constant sensuality conferred on all like-minded sexed-up individuals. Such subtlety. But things are much different now. There’s nothing.
I find myself looking at him as we embark into our fourth hour of counting. The clock on the wall nudges inexorable towards midnight. He opens boxes of pencils and spends a couple of seconds running his fingers lovingly through the stock within, and it is the first sign I’ve seen of him wavering from his professionalism. He’s almost mesmerised by the pencils. He used to be mesmerised by me. But this was all before Clarissa and the promise of a kitty.
‘Are you OK?’, I ask.
‘Often’, he says, ‘I get a feeling of . . .’.
An achingly long gap. He doesn’t say anything. Oh, the emotion, it must weigh heavily on his soul. My heart pounds with excitement.
‘Yes?’
He puts down the clipboard. This alone is significant. And all of a sudden I can feel the last two years peeling away. This is how we used to be, so eager to share our private feelings and comfortable in each other’s emotional presence. He was so unsure of himself back then, so driven by the needs of the moment. He needed guidance in the ways of the world and I was always there for him. The night starts to feel slightly different. It’s as if Clarissa and the cat don’t exist at all. I can feel that he wants to say something significant, yet the new version of himself that he has created over the past couple of years would never be so forthcoming.
He lets out a big sigh.
‘There are things in this life’, he says, ‘That I’m really not sure of’.
‘Such as?’
Silence again.
‘You can tell me’.
Much silence.
Emotional silence is all very well, but this is bordering on plain rude. At last, he says:
‘Have you ever looked at the world and thought that it’s been put together just ever so slightly askew? And that certain components of it were – how do I put this? – meant for some other plain of existence, and used in a kind of half-hearted attempt to cobble the world together – and by ‘the world’ I mean the way that we live our lives, the philosophies and strictures which we adopt to govern our behaviour?’
It’s not the most coherent question I’ve ever been asked.
‘What I mean is, do you often think there’s more to living than just this?’
Not going so well with Clarissa, then, I feel like saying.
‘Well . . .’.
‘Because for a while I’ve thought that even though I’ve got all the things I’ve always wanted, I’ve still been missing out on . . .’.
‘Yes?’
‘Life’.
It’s not the sort of thing that I’d been expecting him to say. I’d seen him become a machine over the last couple of years, a unit designed for living normally. And yes, I want to agree wholeheartedly with his sentiments. He’d gone chasing after the life that culture has told him to live, quite forgetting that he would still be the same person underneath.
‘Do you remember how it used to be?’ I ask. ‘The fun we used to have? Do you remember?’
‘To be honest’, he replies, ‘Not entirely’.
‘All those nights reorganising the pencil case shelf?’
‘Doesn’t ring any bells’.
‘And you’d say, gosh, it’s so hot, do you mind if I take my shirt off?’
‘Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I’d say.’
He’s right, of course. It doesn’t. Not any more.
‘And anyway, what’s that got to do with . . With what I’ve just said?’
‘I’m just trying to remind you of the times that we used to have together, the fun and the physical nature of our relationship, and how you used to live for the nights and you’d come in to work and you’d whisper to me, hey, let’s reorganise the pencil case shelf tonight, and all day long I’d be longing for the moment when Carol went home and we could lose ourselves to the absolute bliss of each other’s company, and some times we got so into it that we’d finish reorganising the pencil case shelf and then start all over again, and the world seemed right and the night stretched before us with all its promise, and we’d be both so incredibly happy that we’d had the fortune to find each other, that the world should be a place where constant adventure could happen right here, right here, in this crappy little town’.
‘To be honest, I don’t remember any of that’.
‘You don’t remember?’
‘Not in the slightest’.
‘It was the highlight of my year!’
His eyes narrow.
‘If you must know’, he says, ‘It sounds a bit far-fetched’.
Far-fetched. I can remember every second of our many encounters. Emblazoned as they are on my memory in all of their vivid detail, there can be nothing more real than the exquisite mix of heart-felt longing and rampant masculinity, blending as they did into a fine madness into which we both so willingly succumbed. And yet, yes, he’s right. It does all sound magnificently far-fetched.
‘Often’, he says, ‘When something is very horrific, the mind shuts it out completely’.
‘But you must remember some of it’.
‘Well . . .’.
More silence.
‘What has all this got to do with what I was saying? I trust you enough to delve right down to the deepest part of my soul and you highjack the moment just to concoct some bizarre story about us having a relationship which I can’t even remember. It can’t have been that special, really. That’s what I’m thinking. It probably wasn’t even with me, was it? I don’t go around shagging work colleagues in the store room of a pencil shop. And just at the moment when I need some help in trying to understand the world, you go and make it even more complicated. Well, thanks. Thanks for that.’
‘So you don’t remember any of it, then?’
‘The only thing I remember is . . .’ He stops for a second. ‘Did you hear something?’
‘We need to talk about this. I don’t think you understand how important this is to me’.
‘Can you hear it? Movement, out the back. And it sounds very much like . . .’.
Please, no. Of all the times.
‘Bin robbers!’
‘You said yourself, Matt. You said that you weren’t sure about life. You said it just now, that there was something else. Well, there was. And you don’t remember any of it. I showed you what it was that you were missing. I showed you, two years ago, but . . .’
‘Bin robber!’
They come every night, the bin robbers. They rummage, standing on upturned milk crates in order to delve deeper into the mysterious delights of the pencil shop skip. They’re looking for pencils, obviously, or anything else that may have been thrown away during the day. It’s a wonder they find anything amid the boxes and the packaging and the assorted detritus of a pencil shop skip, but every now and then they find what they’re looking for. Pencils. Only the pencils have been broken in half, as per company guidelines. Go to any car boot sale and you’ll find a stall of short stubby pencils, sharpened, perhaps, at both ends. Discontinued lines from pencil shop skips, pencils with health and safety issues now illegal to trade, dug out from the bottom of pencil shop skips and sold by shady looking gentlemen with stubble and inappropriate piercings. Some of these gentlemen might even have tattoos. There’s money in pencils, obviously. The internet hasn’t killed everything.
But they’re nasty, too. There’s many a report of bin robbers threatening shop staff, managers holed up in their offices on the phone to the police or, god forbid, violence against any hapless employee who should go out after dark to empty a waste-paper bin and come across a bin robber. Territorial, occasionally hyped up on various concoctions, there are even stories of rival bin robbers fighting each other in front of bemused His Nibs shop staff. They leave a mess behind them and throw the non-pencil-related skip contents across the back yard in order to get to their bounty. Sometimes they even turn the bin upside down and empty it, which is no small task what with it being made from solid steel and as large as a small car. They threaten anyone who tries to stop them. Many a time a lowly His Nibs shop employee has had to call the old bill because a particularly nasty bin robber has promised some admittedly quite inventive form of personal injury while filling up their pockets with faulty pencil sharpeners or pencil cases that have been withdrawn from sale due to copyright issues. Illegally mass-produced Scooby Doo pencil cases that head office have bought cheaply and sold at quite a mark up until threatened with court action by the intellectual property owners of the Scooby Doo franchise, now filling up the Lidl’s carrier bags of the common bin robber. It’s a vicious circle.
It’s recycling, at least.
And tonight’s is a fine specimen. In his woollen cap and bomber jacket, he looks every inch the scrote. We watch through the back door as he sets up a powerful torch, climbs on his milk crate, then dives into the bowels of the skip, his army boots sticking out as he has a good rummage. You might think that it would be safe just to let him get on with it, but there are moral forces at work, a sense of personal violation which comes from seeing such an atrocity, particularly in the private enclosure of the back yard. Indeed, as the police have pointed out, each pencil sold by a bin robber feeds violence and drug abuse, underhand dealings, and the powerful local organised crime syndicates, and that it is our duty to prevent all further bin incursions. The police have better things to do.
Matt’s fingers reach for the door handle.
‘It’s not safe’, I tell him. ‘He might get violent’.
‘He’s upside down in a bin. We’ve got the tactical upper hand at the moment’.
‘He might have an accomplice’.
‘It’s a chance we have to take’.
‘We don’t have to. We’re not here to fight crime’.
The bin robber throws a sack of waste paper over his shoulder. It lands on the ground and scatters everywhere.
‘If we don’t make an effort’, Matt says, ‘Then it will just carry on’.
‘He might be armed, and dangerous . . .’
‘What better way is there to go?’
I can think of several other options rather than being knifed by a bin robber next to a rubbish skip out the back of a pencil shop at two ‘o’ clock in the morning in a deserted seaside town. It’s not an iconic death. But Matt is starting to open the door now.
‘Matt!’
‘Tell my parents that I love them’.
‘And what about Clarissa?’
‘Yeah, her to’.
I can only assume that the worst will occur. The bin robber will lunge at him, perhaps shouting, perhaps incomprehensible, no doubt far too stoned for any rational response other than shooting at us with a concealed weapon, or perhaps a bow and arrow. (The mind does funny things during moments of stress). And already I can envisage having to phone Matt’s parents and telling them the bad news, the police helicopter hovering overhead with spotlights trying to track down the ruthless bin robber, the whole thing conveyed live to local television.
‘Hey!’, Matt says, whipping the back door open.
‘All right?’, the bin robber asks.
‘What you doing?’
‘I’m robbing your pencils’.
‘From the bin?’
‘Yeah’.
‘But they’re broken’.
‘That’s the thing with pencils’, he replies. ‘They’re never really broken. You just sharpen the jagged ends and you’ve got yourself two new pencils. Hey. My name’s Dave’.
Dave holds out his hand and, amazingly, Matt shakes it.
‘That’s all very well’, Matt says, ‘But then you’ll end up with stumpy pencils’.
‘I know’.
‘What good’s a stumpy pencil?’
‘There’s a lot of people out there with SFS. Horribly afflicted. They can’t handle full sized pencils. They’re crying out for shortened pencils. I’m only happy to help them’.
‘SFS?’
‘Stumpy Finger Syndrome’.
‘You know, you really can’t do that. It’s stealing’.
‘But you’re throwing them away’.
‘It’s still stealing. That’s the law. And I’m here to uphold the law.’
‘It’s recycling. That’s what I’m doing. Otherwise it would all go into landfill, and do you know how long it takes for a pencil to biodegrade? I‘m saving the planet, my good friend, that’s what I’m doing’.
‘Go on’.
‘What?’
‘How long does it take for a pencil to biodegrade?’
‘Hey, I’m too busy bringing hope and comfort to those with SFS to worry about minor details like that’.
Dave takes out two more pencils from the bin and holds them up to the light.
‘Right, then. I’ll wish you two gentlemen a pleasant evening’.
He closes the lid of the bin and saunters away. Matt watches him leave for a couple of seconds.
‘Well’, he says, ‘I don’t think he’s going to mess with us again’.
This whole night has been profoundly confusing.
We count through the night. The Earth spins round one more time. The count is completed by five in the morning, the last pencil located in a plastic display case next to the till area at the front of the shop. What mystical powers that one pencil holds! I place it back in its case feeling a sense of ceremonial duty, for now we have completed our task. Yet the world seems just the same. I look out the plate glass window at the front of the shop floor at the dark, deserted street, the sodium lighting and the parked cars, the fascias of the other shops unlit, silent fashion shop dummies just standing there like memories of parties past, and it all looks like hardly anything has changed at all.
‘We are free’, I whisper.
Two hour’s sleep, and a new day starts.
It’s just as well that my tiny flat is over the road from the shop itself. It’s a constant joy to open the curtains each morning and see the little shop sitting there, taunting me with its pencils and its sense of constant dread. I dream of bin robbers screaming through several surrealist situations, none of which I can particularly remember within seconds of waking.
One of the eternal mysteries of retail is the stock count. The head office New Goods department has a figure which is supposed to match the number of pencils held in stock. In all likelihood, the shop will have this figure with a slight margin of error. Yet it all depends on how great this margin of error is. If it’s a lot more or a lot less, then there will have to be an investigation and it will be assumed that the stock has gone missing, somehow. If there are three thousand less pencils in stock than the paperwork says, then it means that someone has come in and robbed the shop of three thousand pencils. And this is rightly seen as an example of gross misconduct on behalf of the shop staff. But if the figure is, say, out by fifty or so, then that’s seen as officially All Right. It could easily be a mis-count. Fifty-one or more and there’s a problem. The area manager will demand that we do it all over again.
Our total is out by two hundred and fifty six.
This is when it’s wise to begin a subtle manipulation of the paperwork. The first thing to do is to look at the last Breakages list and assume that it hasn’t got to Head Office just yet. So if there’s eight pencils on the Breakages list, then these can be added to the stock count, therefore making it out only by two hundred and forty eight.
Then one has to look at the other stock that has been written off. Out of date pencils, deleted pencils, pencils that have been recalled due to various health and safety investigations. If a child somewhere gets a splinter from a pencil, then the pencil is withdrawn from sale. If an artist on a remote island artist’s community puts a pencil in their mouth and has an allergic reaction to the paint, then the pencil is withdrawn from sale. This can usually add another twenty or thirty to the final figure. And then there’s the stock that has been transferred to another branch. If shop A phones up shop B and asks for a box of two hundred HB red and white striped pencils, they will often be so relieved to receive the stock that they might quite forget to process the paperwork that comes with it until a couple of months later when it’s found at the bottom of the in-tray next to a mouldy bacon sandwich, the one that’s been funking up the office for the last few weeks. So these transfers, also, and quite cunningly, are added to the grand total of the stock count.
But Head Office gets its revenge. The stock count sheets themselves are incredibly long, a concertina of computer print-outs. A fully unfolded stock count sheet will stretch from here to halfway down the street. On each page are fifty serial codes of the different types of pencil held in stock, and there are three columns which must be filled in: stock in shop [A], stock in store room [B], and total stock [C]. Easy enough, you might think. But for a start, column [A] and [B] must add up to column [C], and each column must add up to the sub total at the bottom of each page, and then each page must add up to the grand total.
There are so many serial numbers that most of them will not be carried by the shop in question. Therefore, the total for each column will be zero. Except Head Office doesn’t like the number zero. They say that it can easily be mistaken for a six, especially if written hurriedly. Every time a zero occurs in the paperwork, the word ‘zero’ has to be written in the space allocated, rather than the number. A typical row will therefore read ‘zero zero zero’, which means that most of a stock count is taken up not with counting, but by writing the word ‘zero’ a couple of thousand times.
Oh, the unique joys of the stock take.
There’s always the dread of the familiar on arriving back at work, whatever the circumstances. The shop seems just to sit there over night, ostensibly inanimate yet filling itself with more reasons for you to hate it. There’s a crushing sense of obligation in every detail as if it’s playing with you, saying, ‘Forget any hopes and dreams you might once have had, forget anything else which might seem important in your life, because you exist for me now, and nothing else’. And while some might argue that in the modern economic climate it might be seen as advantageous and perhaps even privileged to have a job at all, there’s also something emasculating about putting so much energy and thought and worry and paranoia and everything else which makes us human and makes us function as individuals into the selling of pencils. As if to compound the delirium, there are emails from Mona.
She does a good line in sarcasm.
Indeed, it seems a pre-requisite that an area manager should dabble in the black art of sarcasm. Perhaps they teach it at Area Manager School. And like any art movement, it’s not just dependent on content, but also the circumstance and the delivery. An Area Manager standing in the doorway of a shop and saying ‘it looks like a herd of bulls has rampaged through this place’, seems to have a greater effect than merely, ‘Looks like you might need to tidy up in here’. Or then there’s the old classic ‘am I speaking a foreign language? Do you want me to provide a translation?’ This one works especially well when the simplest command has been seemingly ignored, Mona once again standing there with her hands on her hips, demonstrating that as well as being an expert in retail management, sales patterns and category space analysis, and all those other minutiae which make such middle managers feel important in the grand scheme of things, she is also something of a comedian. This morning’s email is profound with such literary shenanigans.
‘Yet again it would seem that most simple of tasks – counting stock – is beyond your capabilities’, is the cheerful phrase she uses to begin her message. I imagine her sitting at home, a plate full of cream buns next to her laptop and Wagner playing on the stereo, firing off this latest communication. ‘It’s not hard to keep a tally. Maybe I should run a seminar on it. Or perhaps not. Go into any good book shop and they will have a volume on simple mathematics’. She then has the sense to end the email with the phrase, ‘kind regards’.
Carol has called in sick. She always calls in sick the day after a stock count, you know, just in case. We open the shop. Matt goes on the till and fumes to himself for the whole of the morning. We have one customer in the first hour, getting a refund on a 25p pencil sharpener that she bought in another branch. Matt is somewhat abrupt with her. Then he’s somewhat abrupt with me when I quip that this is one more pencil sharpener that we will have to count. The fluorescent lights make my eyes hurt.
By midday we have come up with a plan to do the count again that night.
‘We’ll have to be more methodical’, Matt says. ‘Every time we count a box, I will attach a yellow sticky notelet to the side of it so that we can gauge where we have been and what has been counted’.
‘Oh yes, so that’s going to be the answer to everything, is it?’
‘I can’t see you coming up with any better suggestions’.
‘To be honest, I’m beyond caring’.
‘A sticky yellow notelet. And then we will write on all of these notelets, ‘counted’, which will act as a double check’.
I yawn.
‘You’re right’, I tell him. ‘That will be the answer to everything. Problem solved. Every problem the world has ever had, solved, just like that. Sticky yellow notelets’.
‘And they have to be yellow. No other colour will show up in the dark confines of the stock room’.
‘Another night together, then’.
He smiles.
The prospect of spending it in such a way fills me not with dread, but with a rising sense of excitement, especially as the afternoon rolls on. It’s all I can do to stop my heart from beating, seeing him there and knowing that we will be together again. Maybe it’s sleep deprivation, but the world seems suddenly filled with promise and excitement. Because last night, oh yes, last night, Matt came so close to admitting the truth. So incredibly close. And if he doesn’t do it again tonight, I might just sabotage the result myself just to make sure that it all goes in to a third night.
‘Yellow’, I repeat, ‘Notelets’.
Early evening, I find a box of two hundred and fifty pencil erasers in the kitchen microwave. I decide to hide them. Often it’s best not to admit to such things.
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Hello,
Here’s the first chapter of my novel, The Neon Yak
You can order the book here https://www.lulu.com/shop/robert-garnham/the-neon-yak/paperback/product-jewwrd5.html?q=The+neon+yak&page=1&pageSize=4
Hello, here’s another excerpt from my new novel, which you can purchase here https://www.lulu.com/shop/robert-garnham/the-neon-yak/paperback/product-jewwrd5.html?q=The+neon+yak&page=1&pageSize=4
I first started writing The Neon Yak about three years ago. I was going through some old poems that I had written while staying with my Grandmother in Surrey, she lived in an old two up two down cottage in the woods and there were glimpses of London in the distance, and I realised what a magic place it all was. And then I started to think about all of the emotions a teenager has at the time, and the events which occur which, looking back, seem magical in themselves. Add to these the usual teenage longings, and the inner struggle of accepting my own homosexuality, and the story just seemed to seep into my consciousness.
The Neon Yak is heavily autobiographical, but not totally. Some of the things which happen in the novel actually did happen to me. In fact, I would say that about three quarters of the ‘supernatural’ events in the novel happened. I’m not sure whether they took place in that strange realm of half dream, half awake, or in actuality, but they felt real and they still feel real now.
And what of The Neon Yak itself? This entity is something I created for my 2017 Edinburgh show, In the Glare of the Neon Yak, but it is based on the local legends and folklore which were prevalent in the area where I grew up of Herne the Hunter. If you’ve never heard of Herne, then a Google search will prove enlightening, though there are theories that he was invented by William Shakespeare for The Merry Wives of Windsor. Whatever the origins, Herne the Hunter seemed real for us kids growing up, and any visit to the woods always carried the risk of being confronted by The Hunter.
The novel takes place during the summer between middle school and secondary school, which is always a strange time when you are growing up. For me it was especially auspicious, because it meant commuting to a busy town in the suburbs of west London instead of staying in our cosy little Surrey village surrounded by woods. The secondary school felt like another world and of course, along with it came a growing sense of my own sexuality, and my own denial of that. The events which are laid out during that summer, in actuality, probably occurred over the space of a few years. If you ask me nicely one day, I might tell you which are real and which are works of imagination.
I wrote the first draft of the novel over a frenetic month in 2023, and then spent the next year refining it and editing. I am hugely grateful to Stoat Books for publishing it.
You can order a copy here https://www.lulu.com/shop/robert-garnham/the-neon-yak/paperback/product-2m4jj2e.html?q=The+Neon+Yak&page=1&pageSize=4&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR24JqIowDGJ-t10StfCY8FSIrOKB3Pn7k9momkiK_AYBZBVfAwUS8Icivk_aem_aXHTimgkDLXM2AXc8pzPCA
I started my writing career in 1981. I was seven. In a style which I have later adopted in my poetry, my first novel didn’t have a title, it just had a giant R on the cover, which stood for Robert. I can’t remember much about if except that the villain was an entity known only as the Blue Moo. The Blue Moo was what I used to call my sister, because she wore a blue coat. Which is kind of cruel, seeing as though she was only five at the time.
I would write at school during playtime, whenever it was raining. It rained a lot, I remember, when I was a kid. I’d always get excited about rainy days because it meant that I could write. I still get excited shout rainy days, even now.
By 1984 I was at middle school and I used to fill notebooks with stories. I was encouraged to do this by my teacher, Mr Shaw, who would then let me read my stories out in class. The first of these was called Bully Bulldog’s Ship, and for reasons which I’m still not sure, all of the characters were dogs. And secret agents. The cover for Billy Bulldog’s Ship shows explosions and a radar screen and has he tag line, ‘Featuring car chases, underwater bases, kings and prime ministers and that sort of thing’. It was rubbish.
By 1986 I was still at middle school, but now I’d progressed to writing about humans. I wrote a whole series of short novels about a skier, called William Board, and his friend Ed Butf, and how they would get into all kinds of adventures during and after skiing tournaments. I have no idea why I picked skiing tournaments, but I did watch an awful lot of Ski Sunday back in the day.
In 1988 my grandparents gave me a typewriter, which I still use now whenever I’m Poet In Residence anywhere. By now William had left the skiing circuit and was a policeman in a small Surrey village called Englemede. I’d type up these stories and inject as much humour as possible, because this would make my English teacher, Mr Smith, laugh as he read them. This was probably a big moment in my adoption of comedy. The stories were still rubbish, but my grammar and spelling had improved.
By the time I got to sixth form I was still plugging away, and remarkably, William Board was still the focus of the stories, his ineptitude as a policeman and his promotion to detective providing much mirth. My magnum opus of this time was Impending Headache, set at a sixth form college in Surrey much like the one I attended. And in between chapters I’d write over the top comedic poetry.
By 1992 I had my first job and, amazingly, William Board was still my main focus. By now his detective work would take him to a supermarket in Surrey, round about the time that I worked at a supermarket in Surrey, in a novel called Bar Code Blues.
In 1994 I got a job in a village shop in the suburb of Englefield Green, and I wrote a new novel with a new main character, the trainee guardian angel Genre Philips. The novel was called Englefield Green Blues, and like Impending Headache, it would be influential on my writing career in that I’d re-use chapters and stories to form the novel I’ve been working on this year.
At this stage, I’d started sending novels off to publishers and agents, and one or two were very supportive but would ultimately say no.
By now I’d dabbled in comedy poetry, filling up notebooks with poems written with a pen I’d been using since sixth form. I’d stay at my grandmothers house in the hot summer, she lived on a hill overlooking the whole of London from the airport to Canary Wharf, and I’d listen to the jazz stations and just write whatever I felt like. This would form the basis of my one man show, Static, in 2016.
In 1995 my Grandfather passed away. I went to see the pathologist and watched as he signed the death certificate with a cartridge pen, and that afternoon I went out and bought one for myself. Amazingly, this is the same pen I use today for anything creative, and it has written every poem, short story, novel and play since 1995.
In 1996 I moved to Devon. By now I’d discovered Kafka, Camus, Beckett, and my writing became dense, impenetrable. I used my own system of punctuation which made even the reading of it impossible, and to further add to the misery, my novels had numbers instead of names. RD05, RD06, RD07, and so on. I’d send these off to publishers and I could never understand why they’d come right back.
I joined a band of local amateur actors and I would write short sketches and funny monologues for them, we’d rehearse and make cassettes, but never got anywhere near the stage. One of my monologues was about a rocket scientist who’d fallen in love with his rocket. Not phallic at all.
I came out in 2000. I didn’t write much at all for a while. I was busy with other things.
By now I had a job, and I’d studied a-levels, undergraduate and postgraduate at night school, so I didn’t have much time for writing. For a laugh, I got a part in a professional play, and while it meant I would never act again, (oh, it was so traumatic!), it led me to write a play called Fuselage. Amazingly, it won a playwriting competition at the Northcott Theatre. I remember getting off the train in Exeter thinking, wow, it’s my writing that has got me here. This all happened in 2008.
In 2009 I discovered performance poetry, accidentally, and kind of got in to that. Around the same time I wrote a short novel called Reception, based on an ill fated trip I took to Tokyo, but by now my main focus was performance poetry and spoken word, shows and comedy one liners. In 2010 I had my first paid gig, at an Apples and Snakes event in London, and amazingly, this was the first time I made any money from my writing since I was 8!
So that brings me up to date, more or less. I now write every day, still with the same pen, and I still use the same typewriter every now and then, though mostly for performance. And I’ve kept a diary, every day writing something about the previous day, which I’ve kept up since 1985 uninterrupted. It’s only taken 37 years to find the one thing I’m halfway decent at!
Another one from the archives. 2008, to be exact.
Perfection
The fact that the whole of humanity had lived for this did not trouble him in the slightest. All of thought and philosophy, all of art, everything, including warfare and religion, had gone in to the construction of this one place, this hallowed, magnificent building where he would remain, living a life of idyllic bounty in an environment of absolute perfection. It wasn’t luck, nor was it heaven : it was the result of every virtuous thought there had ever been, and he, as the most perfect human who had ever existed, had been allowed to reside within its walls.
The whole place was spotlessly white, and painted so as to appear almost clinical in the equatorial sun. Yet there was a rosy hue which permeated everything, and a smell of jasmine which lifted into the air much like the smell of a summer garden after the rain. The corridors were decorated with classical statues, finely sculpted evocations of masculine beauty and workmanship which, bathed either in the sun or in the shadows which, thrown down by the angles of the building, hide within them the joy which comes from beholding without malice the achievements of a master. The floor is tiled, pleasantly. In the centre of the building there is a courtyard garden where soft fountains sprinkle water which, in the sun, cast rainbows and prisms of light, while the foliage is home to such wondrous birds of paradise as to mesmerise the casual viewer. Cushions and seats are provided, that the scene may be contemplated from whichever angle suits him best. Through two doors at the southern end of the courtyard is the library, an old, oak affair with a running balcony and a sliding ladder on wheels, where the greatest works of literature may be read or studied. In the centre of the library are desks with brass lamps and a leather armchair angled at such a degree as to facilitate unforced comprehension. There is an art gallery further on, and a small museum. The whole place is perfect.
He, too, is perfect. He has led a life of virtuous study and concern for his fellow man. In all of his relationships and dealings with other people he has been the most trustworthy and honest character, and yet he has been careful not to appear as too pious or pompous. He has never felt the need to bury himself within a certain political or religious organisation – (he sees, quite rightly, that to do so is to cede control of his character to a pre-conceived set of ideals or beliefs) – nor has he ever been overtly charitable – (for he is not one of those who prefers, rather than doing good, to be seen as doing good). He has always dressed smartly, and yet not too smart. He has never associated himself with one particular economic group, or racial group, or artistic group, or political convention. He has never felt malice towards anyone, and he tries all the time to see both sides of an argument before speaking his mind on any subject. He has never wanted to hurt anyone. In such a way he, too, is the ideal of perfection, the culmination of humanity.
He feels no guilt at living in the house, nor does he feel any guilt at having felt no guilt. At the same time he is conscious that guilt might have been a factor in his residing there. He wanders from room to room and fills himself with the ideals of perfection with which he has been identified. The food is perfect and it is textured just so, that he might relish each mouth-full without indulging. The temperature is well-maintained and there is hardly any noise at all save for the fountain, the birds in the courtyard, perhaps some soft jazz which emanates, at night, from somewhere ethereal. He has never felt happier.
It is especially gratifying to realise that the human race has existed just for this. So many philosophies and movements in both art and design have culminated in the perfect existence. Psychologists have toiled for centuries in the hope of discovering the most perfect, well-balanced way of spending one’s time. Artists have toiled, writers have written, in order only that the libraries and galleries of the house remain stocked with the finest of their achievements. And when he becomes bored of the house, there are sandy beaches and coves in which to wander, tropical islands, luscious, dense forests in which to wander. Nor is he alone. There are people nearby, friendly individuals, learned types, amiable fellows, beautiful men and women with whom he might converse or even fall in love with, people who care for him and want the best for him. Some nights he throws parties and entertains them, and they all drink and eat and they are very merry indeed, and they dance in the moonlight, under the stars, to the soft jazz or to whatever music might suit the occasion. Everything – it bears repeating – everything is perfect.
One day he went for a walk along one of the wings of the house. He stopped for a while to admire a classical statue, and he could hardly see the marks left by the sculptor on the marble from which it was cast. Likewise, the paintings in the gallery seemed hardly touched by human hands, even though they were signed and catalogued. How wonderful the human race could be, he thought to himself. And the house itself – each angle was carefully considered that the play of light and shadow be worked in unison with something else, some mental approximation of fine living. He walked slowly. He walked, taking in the atmosphere. He could feel time itself stretching, becoming null and void. That afternoon he would sit and write haiku, he decided, and then he might call some friends and they would come round, and they would eat spaghetti Bolognese. At the end of the corridor he sat for a while on a stone bench and he closed his eyes, allowing the sun to stream in through his eyelids. It was warm, it was beautiful, it reminded him of something distant. Perfect, he said to himself. Absolutely perfect.
Very faintly, he heard a soft, stifled belch.
Would you believe it’s been a year since my first collection, Nice, came out? It hardly seems it. I’m immensely proud of it and every time I see the cover I really have to remind myself that it contains all my own work.
I was a weird kid. While all my friends wanted to win the FA Cup or Becky fighter pilots, the only thing I wanted was to be a published writer. I just loved the idea of holding a book knowing that it was representative of me and my imagination. And all through my teenage years I would write, bashing out short stories and novels on an old typewriter, which I still have, and all to no avail. But the dream persisted.
I was in Bristol when I got the email saying that Nice was going to be published. I was getting ready to support Vanessa Kisuule at Hammer and Tongue. I did a camp little dance around the hotel room, and Vanessa was the first person I told.
So Nice was launched last year, the official launch being on January 8th. I’d chosen the date specifically because it was David Bowie’s birthday and that his new album was coming out the same day, so that I could always remember the date. Naturally, people remember the date now for different reasons, but it was a great night, performing poems from Nice supported by all my friends. I’d had a book signing a couple of weeks before in my home town of Paignton, but the official launch was the big event that I’d always dreamed about.
The book still seems fresh. There are stories behind some of the poems, of course. Personal stories. I purposefully only chose upbeat, vibrant, funny poems because I imagined the book as being similar to a dance record. Clive Birnie told me that he saw Burning Eye as a record company and the books as albums, so I thought, well, let’s have a dance record, with computerised disco beats and flashing lasers. Let’s give it a throwaway title. Let’s not get too bogged down. And I think Nice has achieved this.
The last twelve months have been amazing, I’ve been all over the Uk with a back pack full of Nices and it’s been so well received. I’m still incredibly happy with it.
So pick up your copy of Nice today! It will help you get through those winter blues, I assure you!
http://burningeye.bigcartel.com/product/nice-by-robert-garnham
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’ve got a book out. Indeed, it is my first published book, my first proper collection from a real publisher, Burning Eye Books, rather than a self published effort. I can’t begin to describe how great it feels! Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be a published writer. While other kids would daydream and talk about winning some football match or scoring a winning goal, I would dream about there being a book out there with my name on the cover. I would repeat, over and over to myself on those long suburban sultry nights, the image of opening a box from the publishers and seeing all the books there inside, ready to go out into the world.
It’s taken a while!
Burning Eye are the most dynamic and wonderful company I can imagine. They’ve published all my favourite names in the spoken word community, such as Megan Beech, Vanessa Kisuule, Rob Auton, Salena Godden. I have devoured every volume over the years, and when the chance came up to send them some material, I didn’t hesitate. I heard nothing for a while and I thought, well, on to the next thing, then.
Then last year, while staying in Bristol and supporting Vanessa Kisuule at the Hammer and Tongue event, I received an email from Clive Birnie inviting me to send in a manuscript, because he’d chosen me to be published! I was so happy, but I didn’t want to jinx it by telling anyone. The only person I told was Vanessa, and then I carried the secret around for months!
I cannot stress how incredibly professional Burning Eye have been. I’ve worked with editors and proofreaders, going through the poems and clarifying every last mark of punctuation or dodgy example of bad grammar. (Like this sentence). Hours spent enchanting emails about the rules on brackets and semicolons, hyphens, and the fact that one poem had to change its content in order not to be sued by a large film company which has a mouse shaped logo! Burning Eye were brilliant, it felt so good to be a part of their system.
So, what is Nice?
First of all, the title. I’ve always hated the word ‘nice’, because it’s so floppy and undescriptive, and it can be used sarcastically. But I wanted the book to be positive, to contain only funny or life affirming poems, and I needed a one word title that was positive in itself. The original title was ‘Nice One’, then I went with ‘Responsible’, and then back to ‘Nice’. I was also going to call it ‘Poems’.
So, Nice is a collection of fantastic upbeat silly funny poems which don’t tax the brain and make no claims to literary excellence, but they are the ones that I enjoy performing the most and the ones that the audiences like. There are also one or two brand new pieces in there which I’ve not yet performed, such as a rap about fuchsias originally written for my music group Croydon Tourist Office, and another about, ahem, weird sexual fetishes. Indeed, a first read of the manuscript shocked me at the amount of sex mentioned in the book, although there was nothing exactly graphic. I did wonder what a psychologist might think!
The cover is deliberately bright and clean. It’s based on the sort of design that you might see on a 1980s album cover, I wanted to create something simple and iconic, easy to replicate, and easy to put on posters. I think it looks clean and fresh, and the motif is repeated on the back. The colouring also could represent the rainbow flag, though this is not explicit and I only thought of it after I’d designed the cover!
On the whole, Nice represents the last two or three years of my performances, and now it’s out there in the open for the whole world to enjoy, and I can go on to the next thing.
I’m hugely proud of the book and the reception so far has been great. I’ve been working on it for a year and it still hasn’t lost its magic with me, so I hoping that this remains the case for the reader, too. The next step is a couple of events to help launch it, such as a book signing in Paignton in December, and a mini book tour taking in Torquay, Exeter, Bovey Tracey and Woking.
You can buy the book here http://burningeye.bigcartel.com/product/nice-by-robert-garnham
Robert Garnham