No doubt you’ve realised that I haven’t been performing much of late. There are many small reasons for this, though the urge to perform remains as strong as ever, as does the enjoyment I get from it. At the beginning of last year, my day job role changed considerably, which means lots of daily travel and a level of uncertainty as to where I shall be on any particular day. In such a way, without booking days off, (of which I get a modest amount a year), I could not commit to being able to turn up at gigs, and the time that I would normally spend rehearsing, (early mornings before work), was now taken up with early morning trains and waits at station platforms.
On top of this, I now had to spend time away from home in hotels in small towns throughout the south of England, some of which I’d never heard of before. (Midsomer Norton?! They just made that one up, surely!). What this meant was that yes, I had less time to rehearse and faff about with props and learn lines, but it did mean that I had much, much more time to write.
You may know that before I was a performer, I was a writer, and that was all I ever wanted to be. When my school friends dreamed of playing football (or cricket, as I was brought up in Surrey), I only ever wanted to be a published writer and win the Booker Prize instead of the FU Cup.
About three years ago, I started work on a novel which resurrected a character I’d created when I was 12 years old. The character is called Bill. Bill started as a skier who solved crimes in his spare time, (yeah, I know). The first Bill story was written around 1985. By 1990, Bill was now a detective, (his skiing career was over), and I wrote the Bill stories all through my teenage years. I then promptly forgot all about him for thirty years. This new story, Bin, was about Bill’s efforts to get a recycling bin for his new flat, and that’s all that happened in the novel. It was more a test, so that I could get back into writing Bill stories, and seriously, it was like we’d never been apart.
Two years ago, using the tricks I’d learned with Bin, I started a new novel, which I hoped would be a hymn to seaside towns. Red Sand was the result, a novel in which Bill had come down to the seaside to spend time with his old friend Ed, (who was also in those teenage stories), only to find that Ed had gone missing. I’m incredibly happy with Red Sand, particularly its unusual premise in which the whole novel is narrated by Paignton Pier, who is a character in the narrative in their own right.
Last year, I applied to the Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course with Red Sand, and wouldn’t you know it, I was chosen. I was lucky enough to have a wonderful class of fellow students online and an amazing tutor in Suzannah Dunn, the author, who was very encouraging and who absolutely loved the novel, and in particular, Bill as a character. Her enthusiasm and kind words certainly made me think that I had the beginnings of something I could work with. She even contacted me when the course finished requesting a copy of a certain chapter which, she said, had stayed in her head long after the course had finished, which I took to be a very good sign.
Red Sand is now finished, (or at least, this draft of it). But I knew I could do better, and write something, well, easier to sell. Over the last few months an idea for a novel came to me, employing the tricks I’ve learned from Bin and Red Sand, and especially from the Curtis Brown course and my fellow students. I am currently working on a new novel called The Hibiscus Throne, again with Bill as the main character. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but it is ostensibly a romantasy fiction which plays around with the genre, with lots more going on under the bonnet. I’m currently deep in the writing of the first draft, churning out sometimes 2000 words a day and, as any writer of a novel will tell you, the characters live in my head constantly, vying for attention and commenting on the world around me.
My day currently looks like this: I get up at five, and write from six until eight. At eight, I go to the station and I catch a train, and I get a table seat on which I then pump in another half hour of writing. I work until five, catch a train home, have dinner, and then do another writing session from seven until nine. I’ve been doing this for the last two months, mostly ensconced in the narrative and writing, writing, writing. Every weekend I go and visit my mother in Brixham, and I spend the whole day writing again, in a room at the back of her garage which I previously used for rehearsing poems.
I cannot wait until The Hibiscus Throne is finished. I have never been interested in romance or fantasy, and while the premise of the story means that it is not really either, I do enjoy the ‘world building’ aspect of it. And I can’t wait for people to see it. It’s quite a departure from my two existing published novels, Reception and The Neon Yak, both of which are still out there.
So, will I get back to performing? Yes, I miss it dreadfully. I miss the people and I miss my poem friends, and I miss having an audience and immediate feedback. Writing often feels a solitary pursuit, somewhat insincere, but I kind of love the madness of that insincerity. Over the last few months I have exchanged letters with a very well-respected and famous writer in which he has imparted some amazing advice not only about what it is that we do as artists, but on life in general, too, the solitary nature of writing, and the worlds that we create.
Nobody believes it possible that a novel, left unopened on the shelf of a library, say, or a private house, might alter its substance internally, subtly, change paragraphs here and there, the exact wording of certain phrases, even its slant or view on one subject or another, that the next time the book is read it has altered enough to be a new book entirely. Is it not conceivable that the human brain – surely a more complex and rich piece of equipment than a humble novel – might approach, each time, the novel in exactly the frame of mind, only to find the novel changed? Such a prognosis had to be investigated
It took years to find an institution where my ideas would find support. Most universities and research facilities shied away from such a controversial approach, while many did not even answer my letters of inquiry. As luck would have it, one of the last institutions I contacted responded with a letter not only of interest, but a research team of my own to investigate the phenomenon of literary self-reconfiguration. When I visited the institute and asked who it was who had shown such an interest in my ideas – for I hardly believed the news myself – I was introduced to a humble man by the name of Professor Zazzo Thim.
We hit it off immediately, the professor and I. He took me to a local cafe where, over steaming mugs of hot chocolate, he enthused over the implications that literary self-reconfiguration had on the world at large.
‘Don’t you understand’, he said. ‘For so long we have thought that each generation attempted a wealth of literature from the past from a slightly different angle. Now it seems that it is the books which change, that human consciousness remains the same’.
‘Indeed’, I agreed. ‘Is it not indicative of human weakness of character that we have assumed our race to be getting less intelligent when, all the time, it is literature itself which is altering, mutating? If you read subsection three of my report, you will find that I blame most chemicals used in the production of ink for the changes which are taking place in classical literature. It seems the older the volume, the more changes there have been. The character Polonius, for example, has almost been edited out of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, while Esmerelda has negotiated such a large part for herself in Hugo’s ‘Notre Dame’ that the whole hunchback issue is now nothing but a sub-plot. This is an important issue, and one which we must address with considerable haste’
The old professor looked down at his fingers on the surface of the cafe table. Feebly, he threw his scarf over his shoulder, then looked at me with sad, red eyes. ‘This’, he whispered, ‘Could very well be my last adventure in literature. Unlike the average novel, I am no more timeless than the common sparrow. This investigation will give me the chance to approach life with some meaning each morning, and I look forward to that one moment of discovery where all mysteries are solved’. He lifted up his hand, which I shook, delicately, in fear that I may hurt the old man’s fingers. At last he smiled, bravely. To us’, he said, ‘And literary self-reconfiguraton.’
We began our investigations on a windy Tuesday morning. The old library in which we’d set up our equipment seemed to shake and shudder with each gust, while the tall, gothic windows at the far end of the room whistled and moaned, as if the books themselves were trying to expel us from the building. An ethereal, overcast light spilled into the room, tinged green and red by the stained glass of the upper windows. Zazzo was in his element, scampering between the rows of books and leaning over the railings of the upper gallery, waving his walking stick in the air and declaring that literature shall hide no secrets from us!’ At last we settled around a large table on the ground floor, placing several books open, flat on the desk, under the omnipotent gaze of a high-powered lamp and several cameras.
‘And now’, I told the old man, ‘We sit back and wait.
Zazzo parked himself on an old librarian’s chair at the side of the table, and leaned his chin on the top of his cane. I sat on the other side of him, and, over our equipment, regarded his form somewhat enviously. How like Zazzo I truly wanted to be! A man who had dedicated his whole life to fiction, to the glare of words printed on the page, the honesty of their grammar, the timelessness of ancient stories, modernist experimentations. Likewise, Zazzo stared back at me, hardly shifting from his pose as if he didn’t want to budge an inch from his chair. How obstinate in character, how determined to have carved such a life for himself. He saw me, I was sure, as a rival, as an usurper wishing to take his crown, and claim his glory for myself.
Barely five minutes into our experiment, and I decided I would have to show the world that this was all my own work.
‘Why don’t you go home?’, I asked him, ‘And have yourself a rest?’
He looked up at me. ‘What for?’
‘It’s very unlikely that we shall make any advancements in our first few hours. You must be tired from your exertions’
‘Nonsense’, he laughed. ‘On the contrary, I am in my element. Having lived a life so defined by books and ancient volumes, fear it is you, my young friend, who should leave me be, that I may commune my soul to whatever internal spirit holds this magnificent library together’.
The crafty old man! Already he was trying to hide me from my moment of glory! How senseless I had been to the logic and temperament of this aged professor! That he, in his twilight years, should claim all the plaudits and the celebrations! I’m staying right here, I told him, crossing my arms, defiantly, across my chest.
And so we remained, for the next six hours, silent, quietly seething from across the desk. I decided I would have to take drastic measures.
I spent the night in a cheap hotel not far from the library where, amid the damp bedclothes and the peeling wallpaper, and entertained only by the music from passing cars, the rhythmical grunting from the brothel nextdoor, I carefully removed half a dozen pages from a number of volumes and then, under a magnifying glass, re-arranged certain words and nuances of grammar to create, while not a new work in themselves, a mere variation on the same theme.
It was eleven ‘o’clock when the pounding music started, a sleazy thump-thump through the thin walls which vibrated the table on which I worked and caused the cheap decorative pictures to swing ever so slightly in their frames. Yet I hardly noticed any of it, so intent was I in carrying out my fiendish plan.
And oh, what a joy I had in my endeavours! I went to bed that night with an image of the aged professor, Zazzo Thim, dressed in a mothballed tuxedo, explaining to the gathered scientists and members of literary circles his theory of self-reconfiguration, only to be shocked, dismayed as I stand, waving a pair of scissors and a stick of glue, declaring his whole research to be nothing but a hoax, an ill-timed, unmitigated disaster! And how I would chuckle to myself, using a scalpel to remove the words, the letters, even the punctuation of Jane Austen’s
‘Mansfield Park’, only to replace them just millimeters to the left or the right. The sweet joy of my conquest!
Yet my labours were not without stress. Each night, the tenant of the room next to my own would, quite regularly, indulge his passions with one of the young ladies from the lower floor. At first, the excitement of my quest meant that his exertions were nothing but a minor distraction, but soon I could concentrate on nothing else but his seemingly endless enthusiasm for the opposite sex, his insatiable desire to explore every avenue in his lovemaking repertoire.
As the season drew on the nights became hotter, until I reduced myself to banging on the wall with a hardback copy of Ivanhoe, desperately, the tears running down my sweating face, the tiny letters I had cut from the volume flying into the air and landing around me like a perfect snow. I knew I would have to finish my project very soon.
Slowly, I would replace the books in the library on the table in front of my aged colleague. Yet the old fool would not notice a change in them, nor did he spot the more glaring alterations – such as the new sub-plot in Wuthering Heights dealing with a harlequin on a pogo-stick. Yet he was so worried about his appearance to me that he would get up every now and then, tinker with the electronic gadgets we had assembled on the next table, adjust the lense of the camera, bend the light closer to the table.
‘Nothing again today’, he would say.
‘Really? Oh dear, what a shame. I must bow – as ever – to your superior knowledge’.
No matter how significant the change, Zazzo Thim did not spot a thing. And such lengths I went to! I changed the rhyme scheme of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets from iambic pentameter to twenty-five syllables each line. I removed all of the exclamation marks from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I inserted a product endorsement for Coca-Cola halfway through the Canterbury Tales. Yet nothing I could do registered with Zazzo Thim. How obstinate he remained in his ignorance.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, stranger things started to occur. In the odd moments that Zazzo left his post to visit the toilet, I would open some of the books at random to admire my handiwork, only to find that the novels had gone back to their original states, that the extra syllables had vanished, that certain lines were printed exactly as the original writers had intended. At first I was perplexed, but then I realised that there was a greater significance at work. Rather than reconfigure themselves, I now knew that books had the ability to heal themselves whatever damage had occurred to them. Oh, the possibilites! started to see that Zazzo’s supposed discovery would be nothing compared to this new twist!
Each night I left the gothic library and returned to my dreary hotel. I knew there was only the one course open to me – I would have to eradicate every mention of a whale from Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. Zazzo would discover this anomaly and present it to the world, only for me to step in with my greater discovery. It was a mammoth task and would need all night to carry out my fiendish plot before, that next morning, allowing Thim to discover the latest reconfiguration by himself. I sat down at the desk at eight ‘o’clock with a scalpel, a magnifying glass and a tube of Uhu, and began work on chapter one feeling within me the persistence of a marathon runner, the tenacity of a soldier in battle.
At eleven ‘o’clock the man next door began his aerobics. At first I tried to expel it from my mind, and concentrate on the task at hand. Yet the more resolved to dedicate myself to my work, the more his grunting and pleasured yelping began to intensity, until the bedsprings seemed as if they were attached to my eardrums and the banging of the bedhead against the wall was occurring right on the very top of my scalp. The sweat began to pour from my head and my clumsy fingers began to miss their mark, until I accidentally edited Queueg from a vital scene involving a bar-room brawl. In trying to make amends for this error, went too tar and gave Captain Ahab two legs, and then, when trying to cut one of them off again, forgot which one it was that he had originally lost. Bang, bang, bang, grunt, grunt, grunt. I wiped my arm across my eyes, the tiny scissors stuck on my thumb. Oh, Melissa! Melissa. Grunt, grunt, grunt! I picked up a spare page to fan myself only to see Jim from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island insert himself in the text. Grunt, grunt, grunt! And that’s when I flipped. I stood up, opened my door, marched down the passageway and pounded on the door of my neighbour. ‘For God’s sake!’, I yelled, ‘Cease this unending barrage of noise! Rest for an hour, and allow the female species at least some respite from your neverending appetite! For goodness sake, what stamina can a man possibly have to keep up such endeavours hour after hour! Can’t you see, you’re driving me mad?’.
The door opened at last, and Professor Zazzo Thim stood before me, quite naked apart from a towel, while Melissa looked over his shoulder.
‘Was I keeping you up?’ he asked
‘Don’t you understand what you have done to me?’, I asked. ‘You’ve made my life a living hell! How can I possibly work when you are busily satisfying whatever cravings that ancient body can still afford? You have ruined these last few weeks for me, and caused a hole deep in my psyche! How can I ever finish my work?’
‘What work?’, he asked.
‘Well, erm…. The point is, your incessant lovemaking has been a severe distraction to me!’
‘Lovemaking?’, the old man asked. ‘Melissa, here, is showing me how to use the pogo stick. It’s something l.. read somewhere.
‘Pogo stick?’, I stuttered
‘In any case, what work could you possibly have away from the library?’
The moment I looked over his shoulder, I knew what was occurring. On the desk against the wall I saw, much like in my own room, a couple of volumes, a scalpel, a magnifying glass, and a tube of Uhu. The old fool was taking the books I had altered home from the library, and changing them back! So keen was he that I should not discover the self-reconfiguration, that he was eliminating all evidence before I could find it! Or was it all a trap? Was he making me believe that the books were mending themselves, that I should announce to the world this miraculous literary discovery only to be laughed at, as I had planned for him? He glared at me, and I glared right back at him.
‘I’m putting the kettle on’, Melissa said.
Of course, the part that hurt the most was that he was able to spend more time on his hobbies than on the execution of his own plan. No wonder he looked so tired at the library, I told myself.
And yet, what a genius, that he should carry out such a plan with such elan, with such cunning and dedication to his task.
We met at the library again the next day, and sat on either side of the table. And there we sat, for the next five months, not noticing anything except the arrival of dust mites, until our funding was, eventually, transferred to another area.
Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . .
Believe it or not that was my dad’s favourite song. he used to sing it all the time when we were kids.
Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . . A-aye yi a-aye yi aye yi
I had no idea what it was about. Neither did my sister. neither did my dad. what even is a bassman? I was too young to know much about music. I just thought it was a man who really liked skirting boards.
Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . . A-aye yi a-aye yi aye yi I wanna be a bassman too.
I think he only sung it to us because it had weird sounds in it. The only other song he sang a lot was I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. no time to say hello goodbye I’m late I’m late I’m late. But Mr Bassman. Oh, Mr Bassman was the thing.
Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . . A-aye yi a-aye yi aye yi I wanna be a bassman too. Bur b-b-bur b-b-bur b-b-bur b-bur bur
I was listening to the radio. It was Sounds of the Sixties presented by Brian Mathews. (‘This is your old mate Brian Mathews saying, that’s your lot for this week, see you next week’). And he said, The next song is from 1961 And it was a minor hit for Johnny Cymbal and it’s called Mr Bassman, and seriously, it was like a kick in the goolies.
And the song started. and the song played. and the song came out of the radio and all this time I’d thought it was just a song that my dad had made up and all the time I thought it was a piece of genius that my dad had made up and I tell you that a small piece of my childhood suddenly dissolved.
but the more I listened, the more I thought, oh, he’s doing it wrong. Johnny Cymbal has cocked it up. Johnny Cymbal is singing the wrong words. This is nothing like the song my dad used to sing. this is not how the song goes. this is not how the song goes. THIS is how the song goes.
Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . . A-aye yi a-aye yi aye yi I wanna be a bassman too. Bur b-b-bur b-b-bur b-b-bur b-bur bur BUR BUR BURRR B-B-B-BURR BURR!
(Pause).
Anyway, Just thought I’d tell you that. I’d better be off, now. I’d better be off.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
Put some feta cheese in there, Put some Camembert in there Put some other things in there It's very very quiet.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
Bought it from a man from Bern The man from Bern his name was Bern Fridge freezer, Swiss geezer So so quiet.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
Have you turned it on? Of course I’ve turned it on. Have you plugged it in? What am I, daft or something?
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
The old one went chigga chum chigga chum The old one went witty witty woo The old one went chigga chum chigga chum The old one went to the tip.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
As 2025 lumbers to a wimpering snuff, many of us see a world that seems almost unrecognisable to the one we’ve always known. Division and hatred, thinly veiled racism, outright transphobia, and the prevalence of the ego have combined to create a cultural environment in which core principles of neighbourliness and humanity have taken a back seat. Other and better writers have written about this and to much greater effect. It’s hard not to see our lives, dominated as they are by so many distractions, and consumed mostly by looking at a screen or a mobile phone, as being the primary reason for this. But I’m not a psychologist. Nor an analyst. I just believe that it’s so much easier to tell a lie than it is to disprove it. And quicker, too. Do I despair of the world? All I can say is that people get bored very quickly. They want instant gratification, and now. The shock of the new.
As for me, 2025 has been, well, unnecessarily interesting. I’d had a good life for the last fifteen years, writing and performing poems while working in my job, in retail management at the same branch of a charity for almost thirty years. 2024 was marked by the drug dealers who lived in the flat above my shop. There were frequent fights, arguments, knives, needles, gangs of ne’erdowells to contend with, all happening right above the shop. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, and then, all of a sudden, it did. In February of this year, the drug dealers upset someone, (an ex-girlfriend, apparently), who then announced on social media that she was going to burn down their flat that very evening. (Incidentally, this was Valentine’s Day. How symbolic). So the drug dealers did the right and humane thing, and moved out for the night taking their possessions with them. I watched them go through the security peephole in our back door. They loaded their possessions into a car. I hope they don’t burn the place down, to cover their tracks, I thought. So it was no surprise when I got a phone call first thing the next morning to say that the shop had burned down.
Yes, it was arson. But now I found myself in a tentative position. Would I still have a job, especially in the current financial climate? What would happen to my staff, would they still have a job? The company could very well have ‘let us go’ then and there, but they were understanding. I was made into a floating manager. My job was now to travel through the south west and cover at any branch where a manager was absent. Over the course of 2025, I worked in almost every town you can think of between Bournemouth and Cornwall. Some of them I thought they’d just made up. (Midsomer pNorton?!). I spent a lot of 2025 living in hotel rooms and eating buffet breakfasts. So yes, I still had a job.
But it was my performing which suffered. I could not commit to gigs because I never knew where I was going to be staying or working. I could not rehearse, because I used to use the shop to rehearse every single morning while I was getting the place ready. I couldn’t learn lines, especially in a hotel room. I had a few wonderful gigs which I had to book time off for, including Penzance, and a quick trip to Edinburgh. I had a good enough time.
The one thing I did, though, was to work on a novel. I’d already written the first draft when I applied to Curtis Brown Creative, and amazingly, I was let on the course. Over the summer we developed the novel, and it’s looking very good indeed. I am now tinkering with it and hoping that an agent or a publisher sees enough in it to accept it. I’m very happy with it, indeed.
This last month, I was made temporary manager of the shop in Torquay. This is much closer to home, and all of a sudden, I have time now to rehearse again. It feels like things have turned a corner. They’re even due to begin building work on my old shop, (the landlord died over the summer and nobody owned the place, thereby everything came to a shuddering halt). Which is to say, I’m starting to feel like my old self again. The whimsy is returning.
So what did I get out of 2025? A lot of memories meeting people all over the south west, and a novel, and the benefit of the tutelage of Suzannah Dunn, (who really liked my novel), and a huge amount of time sat on trains. (Working in TIverton for three months meant five hours on trains and buses a day). And time to look at my fellow passengers, all watching TikTok.
The world will not change and I cannot make it. I just know that there are civil people out there, concerned for humans and humanity, opposed to stupid wars and political bullying, opposed to toxicity, big business, politics in general. Sometimes it is better to whisper than it is to shout, but I only say this because I’ve never felt entitled to shout, and that there are others who are much better at it than me.
Robert Garnham 