Write on spirits

Famously, Laurie Lee, one of the nation’s most beloved novelists, wrote ‘on wine’.  Whether or not he was ever drunk in charge of a typewriter is unclear but one has to entertain the possibility that, as a poet, he typed without due care and attention.  He did his writing in the Greek Islands, presumably because in the days before bargain booze, affordable New World wines or even Blue Nun, this was the only way he could become sufficiently inebriated to welcome the Muse should she come to visit.  Also, proximity to Mt Parnassus may have helped.

Rock stars smoke, inject, inhale and presumably occasionally insert for inspiration.  Writers drink.  Christ alone knows why, as excessive booze normally leads to feelings of alienation from the world and a profound sense of being under-appreciated and misunderstood, all of which is achievable through the simple act of publishing a slim volume of verse.  Alcohol also inhibits early morning creativity, and certain writers famously were at their creative peak at first light.  Presumably this meant they could post the latest chapter of their novel off to their publishers at eleven in the morning on their way to the pub.

However, in the spirit of enquiry G&P is embarking on a five-part special to explore the effects of various types of alcohol on writing, beyond those of not being able to remember that fantastic idea for a novel you had last night (something about a boy wizard?) just before you passed out, or not being able to decipher the notes scrawled on a beermat that could be a poem, or somebody’s e mail address.

We continue with…spirits.

Shall we mention ghost stories?  Let’s not.

Shall we mention Hemmingway?  Earnest, not Wayne.  Well, there’s a school of thought that spirits make one mean, and certainly EM appeared to have it in for bulls, fish, Big Game and many of God’s creatures that had never harmed him, but are we to blame that all on spirits?  Let’s not.

Spirits are a man’s drink.  Ignore those adverts that come on at Christmas featuring a girl in a glittery frock with a tumbler of some brownish liquid.  This is a game, but ultimately doomed, attempt to extend spirits sales past the saturated male market to women.  Does that advert also have the same woman, with perfect lipstick, pulling on a thick cigar?  Thought so, the famous and famously successful advertising company of Malefantasy and Wankjet (London, New York, Pontypool) strikes again.  The only spirit women drink is vodka, and that’s only because the makers of cranberry juice really, really know how to market that stuff.

No, spirits equal men.  Spirits, ingested, throw everything into sharp relief, including emotions.  That’s why gin makes women sad and why scotch, and any other spirit, at all, makes men angry.  The drinker of spirits writes about manly stuff.  Spies, war, sports, and of course, drinking.

The spirit drinker, one feels, is above all an adventurer.

Spirits are ideal when travelling to places where you need to take the maximum amount of drinkable alcohol for the minimum encumbrance.  When the first man lands on Mars, he’ll have scotch with him (this is after Scotland gains independence and launches a hilariously ambitious, but surprising successful, space programme).  If you need to go further, faster, spirits are your friend.

The same goes with drinking them.  If you don’t have time to faff around with beer, or enjoying your drink by droning on endlessly about the complexities of the nose, as you do with wine, then reach for the hard stuff.

Because drinking spirits is not enjoyable.  If it was, mixers wouldn’t exist.

Spirits also bring, as aforementioned, and depending on the spirit in question, a certain clarity of thought.

Gin.  Instant Hogarthian and Dickensian purity, being able to describe with absolute clarity the cruddy undersole of the human condition, be it sociatial or personal.

Vodka.  Ah, vodka.  The easy association would be with Russian novels so thick they look like normal novels that have fallen into the bath.  And that’s about right.  Always, always be suspicious of any alcohol that is clear.  Rule of thumb, if it looks like you could clean spark plugs with it, avoid ingesting it.

Bourbon.  Interestingly, not actually a drink in and of itself.  Bourbon is Scotch and sweetness, like the classic cocktail of Scotch and Irn Bru.  Bourbon is one of those wonderful drinks that foreigners make.  It’s like one of those ‘fuLl engliSH breaKFasts’ that you see advertised on Greek island tavernas, with an image of the Full English that the attempt on your plate bears little resemblance to.  The genius of bourbon production is this; just as Scotch is named for a geographical area which enables the purchaser to build brand loyalty based on faux clan association, so naming your beverage after a backwoods hillbilly, Confederate general or similar will enable your customers to decide whether they are Daniels or Beam, without realising that because of the amount of sugary syrup added to the booze required to make the muck drinkable, they are all Colas.

Scotch.  The associations are largely positive.  Spies (of the right sort).  Men with the right sort of beard.  The sort of chap who has an estate in the Highlands and who vacates London during August.

In fact Scotch is the only spirit to write on, and to read on.  Picture an author with a tumbler of scotch by his (lady authors are also available) side.  Pull back.  Typewriter?  Helicopter extract?  Very possibly, and more importantly, possibly not just on the page.

Spirits, never in the form of ‘shorts’ which in any civilized society are never a measure of alcohol and only ever the apparel of adolescent schoolboys, but rather served as the more manly ‘large one’, are also the preferred drink, or ‘lunch’, as the technical term has it, of journalists.  In particular, whisky is the go-to drink of foreign correspondents.  This is because it not only helps them blot out any horrors of war they may encounter, but, back in the day when wars had not yet migrated to the dusty arsehole of the world where people didn’t drink (hence: war), whisky was currency.  Apparently during the 1970s, it was standard practice to produce at any border crossing, in this order; a litre of Johnny Walker, a carton of 200 fags, your passport, your press credentials.

Single malt may be the tipple of choice for fiction writers and for heroic explorers who publish bestselling accounts of their travels (possibly posthumously).  For the journalist though, it has to be whisky and for the epitome of the journalist, the foreign correspondent, it has to be Johnny Walker, named for the famous Radio 2 DeeJay.  Classy.

Of course, today, a foreign correspondent today is more likely to be holed up in Costa sipping latte, weaving a story out of unsubstantiated tweets and blog posts, Wiki entries and Google Earth snapshots than actual reportage.

Site-specific folklore

But is there anything as deliciously British as site-specific folklore?

 Maybe pork scratchings.

Every country has its folklore. Britain is a haunted country with a spook and a story hiding behind every bush. Creepy old houses, stone circles and telephone boxes that smell slightly of wee and the paranormal are standard issue.

 Continental Europe specialises in grimmer folk tales, from the trolls of Scandinavia to the unhappy happenings in the dark forests of the interior. The United States has some cracking folklore, from native American superstitions those those from the modern age: crossroads, prairie campfires and spectral locomotives being especially popular.

As for the Far East, they have so many batshit crazy wailing ghosts that they have formed the lynchpin of the continent’s film industry.

That stories (or can we use the term ‘tales’ in this context? yes, yes I think we can) about strange events or weird happenings attach themselves to certain locations should be no surprise; let’s be pragmatic here, people are always looking for some way to attach fame to a location for sound commercial reasons.  If Queen Elizabeth I actually did sleep in as many historic houses, now conveniently converted into boutique hotels, as claimed in the brochures, it’s amazing that she found any time at all to get out of bed, put on a ginger wig and twat the Spanish.

It’s when the locals seek to play down a place’s association or reputation that the stories are likely to be authentic.

Britain leads when it comes to the sheer volume of weird tales in the haunted landscape. Sometimes you are forced to conclude that every postcode has its own legend. Possibly this is because you can’t go far in Britain without seeing a spooky house, an oddly shaped tree or a sinister looking alley, country lane or bus stop. But more likely it’s because of the proliferation of public houses and the treasured local custom of talking bollocks and teasing tourists.

There are places though, both ancient and modern, where it doesn’t take much to imagine strange or sinister things happening.  This can be a crooked country lane at dusk but can just as easily be a grimy underpass, especially if it smells of cider-pee and hoodie.

Deserted rural landscapes provide a happy home for local legends, like Black Shuck, the devil dog of the Fens.  Black dogs are a popular myth in East Anglia, seen as harbingers of death, but Black Shuck, an enormous spectral hound that haunts the North Norfolk coast, has the distinction of being the legend that, when recounted to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he was staying in Cromer, inspired him to write ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, although SACD relocated the action from Norfolk to Dartmoor, possibly at the bidding of the Dartmoor tourist board, or the Norfolk tourist board, it's not clear.

It’s natural enough to imagine a landscape soaked in blood and history as the home of spooky tales, real or invented, but because all folktales have to start somewhere I don’t see why modern landmarks shouldn’t have their own gruesome tales attached, even if there are fewer ‘heritage and culture centres’, or ‘pubs’ as they are also known, than there used to be for those stories to be invented, told and retold.  

For instance, canal towpaths are more than places where condoms are discarded and fishermen take refuge from their unhappy marriages, they can be genuinely spooky places when deserted at twilight, even if they are only a graveyard for shopping trollies. A road laybys can be spooky too, and not just because they are the evidence disposal site of choice for lorry drivers.  I know of at least three laybys where the smell of bacon sandwiches has been reported, even though there are no cafes present.

It takes a certain something for a site to cross over from being sad to spooky. Caravan sites, children's playgrounds and concrete corners that are strangers to sunlight can all seem forlorn, and can even be tipped into tragic through the simple edition of half a dozen petrol garage bouquets left there, but to become spooky they need time and imagination. Or maybe just an unexpected creak.

Haunted household objects

Unless you’re a collector, an enthusiast or a nutter, it’s more than likely that the things that fill your home are a mixture of the essential, the useful and the occasional luxury. If you have extra soft quilted loo paper then you’re covering all three categories there.

If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie dolls still in their boxes then you are collector. If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie doll heads that have been wrenched off their bodies, then you are nutter.

For most folk though ordinary, everyday households are, by and large, filled with ordinary, everyday objects that are, on the whole, fairly innocuous. Occasionally something has the capacity to be odd, creepy or sinister, if you have something that’s antique, or stuffed, or both, then this can often be the case. Folk had a different aesthetic and the Victorians in particular thought that no home was complete without a stuffed raven or a hunting scene diorama. Such items look a little incongruous today when placed on Ikea furniture.

Then there are things that are just too jolly to ever be creepy, like clockwork chickens! What’s not to love?


Paintings though, can be odd, in any number of ways. There’s the portrait where there’s something just not quite right; on the plus side, it may hold the key to a puzzle that will point the way to lost treasure (if you’re lucky it’s a figure pointing to the base of a familiar tree while holding a spade, if you’re unlucky it’s a figure sitting at a chess table which has been set up with a problem, in an unfamiliar landscape, with notes in mirror writing in a foreign language and you just have to hope beyond hope that the painter wasn’t a practical joker). Occasionally of course paintings provide useful places with assassins – with exactly the same eyes as the person in the painting – to lurk behind, peeping and awaiting their pouncing opportunity.

Or the painting of somewhere that turns out to have something of a gruesome history, which you only find out about after you’ve bought it. Or, always my favourite, the painting that actually changes appearance when you’re not looking.






M.R. James combined these to great effect in his short story ‘The mezziotint’. If you thought the scariest thing about buying art was the price tag, think again.

Art, of course, is all about provenance. That creepy washed out sketch on the wall, the one that’s signed ‘Vincent’, that’s worth something. But giving an object an interesting back story can also boost value, and nobody wants any romantic crap – it’s got to be action, adventure or, best of all, horror.

Clocks are another good example of an ordinary object that can, with the twist of a pen, become far more interesting as you note that it has, on more than one occasion, struck thirteen. Grease in the mechanism or something more sinister?

The oddest object I know of? A mass produced camera from the 1930s.


Why? Well, it’s all because of a comic. ‘The Collector’ was a British horror anthology comic that ran for precisely one issue in 1977. The story goes that it was beset with misfortune from the outset. Competing with an already crowded comics scene, not only did a distribution cock up mean that only a few copies made it into the shops (the remainder somehow being delivered to a chicken rendering plant where they were put to a use that is as baffling as it is unappetising), but it was released in the summer of Star Wars, and if your comic didn’t have wookies, robots, glowing swords and space ships, you were toast.

Frankly, an old fart who owned a junk shop making Hitchcock-like appearances in comic strips about haunted, cursed or otherwise macabre objects wasn’t cutting it, and The Collector sank after just one issue.

But not without a trace. The comic came with a free gift – allegedly the very same cursed poker chip that featured in the lead story.

Not long after, gruesome tales started circulating the playgrounds that kids who had been lucky, or unlucky, to get hold of the issue had come to bad ends, just like the owners of the chip in the story. The only thing that kids like doing more than teasing other kids is delivering tales of misfortune about their peers with more relish than you’d find in McTavishe’s House of Condiments.

Not many people remember ‘The Collector’ these days, (it’s unlikely you’ll even find a reference to it on the web) and the only time you’re likely to see an issue is bagged at some comics fair. The copies with the free gift still attached don’t sell well.

As for why this makes the camera creepy? One of the other stories was about an investigator of the paranormal brought in to investigate a mysterious death at a church, where the warden has apparently been scared to death. The investigator, armed with a camera to collect evidence, spends a night in the crypt and is found, the next morning, stone dead, a look of terror on his face. The camera has taken one shot; could it be that a photograph exists of something with the power to kill men with sheer terror. Is there a photograph of the devil himself? The collector isn’t saying.

Spooky enough? Well, the thing is, the story itself is based on a local myth from the area where I grew up. Okay, so I’m sure that just about every postcode with an old building of some sort has a story like that issued by the Department of Tourism. Heritage ghost stories are probably handed out to churches just like anyone with an interest in promoting tourism near a body of water bigger than a puddle can whip up a story about the creature in the lake. If you have a hotel on a moor or heath, it’s a difficult balancing act between making sure there are regular blurred photographs of ‘The Beast’ to intrigue visitors and hoping that nobody recognises that for the last one, you forgot to take Mr Tibbles’s collar off.

Thing is, and a friend of mine picked up a camera, just like the one in the story, at a church fete many years ago.

He’s never opened it but apparently it’s taken one exposure.

So the question I like to tease him with is this: did he buy a camera or did he buy the camera?

Does he have a camera, sitting on a shelf in his shed, that has a photograph of whatever was in that crypt?

He’s fairly pragmatic about it. Apparently he was expecting to pick up an antique, collectable, camera at the fete and flog it on Ebay, netting a tidy profit. Unfortunately the cameras were mass produced, are incredibly hard wearing and, as a result, they go for peanuts on auction sites. What he needs, he assures me, is a rumour that it’s not just a camera, it’s a camera with a story, a camera with a secret.

I asked him: do you really think I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than make up some tosh about a haunted camera and post it on my blog?

Tut.

The Christmas Horror

There’s a time and a place for horror and this is not, apparently, when you are putting your nine year old nephew to bed and you tell him the story of the ghost of the little boy who haunts his house, a little boy who was beaten to death by his enraged uncle with a hammer because he would not go to bed when he was told. (Success with this story? You’ll probably need the sequel: the ghost of the boy who drowned in his own pee because he kept wetting the bed).

M.R. James wrote horror stories that are traditionally associated with Christmas. Not because they take place at Christmas but because he was a house master at Eton and, on Christmas Eve, would invite the senior boys to his study and after plying them with sherry tell them ghost stories. At the turn of the century such behaviour was quite normal, well, about as normal as having one of the greatest masters of the ghost story genre who ever lived being a house master. OFSTEAD would, I am sure, have something to say about such behaviour but judging by the behaviour of today’s senior boys at public school, you’d have a hell of a job getting the spliff out of their mouths for long enough to ply them with sherry.

The Christmas connection has been reinforced by the BBC who, on and off for the past decade or two, have broadcast MR James stories in their ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’ slot. Sometimes an eminent ac-tor plays James himself (memorably Christopher Lee and Robert Powell) narrating a story from a cosy looking study. If you think it’s shocking to regale your nephew with ‘the story of the hammered child’, that’s as bloody nothing to the effect of an impressionable young teen, up late because it’s Christmas, tuning innocently into BBC2 and hearing, all unprepared, the story of ‘the Mezziotint’. I’ve been terrified of paintings, the BBC, MR James, Robert Powell and Christmas ever since.

James’s stories, good on teevee, are great on the page but reading them at any other time of year just feels, well, wrong.

The same has to be said for that other master of horror, H P Lovecraft. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing quite like an initial impression and the first time I read Lovecraft was on a summer holiday in a caravan park in Great Yarmouth. It was, I seem to recall, great weather almost every day, not that this mattered to me because I had discovered that the campsite’s amusement arcade had a Star Wars video game and was spending quite a lot of time using the force, and most of my pocket money, trying to blow up that freaking Death Star.

One day though the fog rolled in and we were pretty much confined to the caravan – never a problem for a family that likes to read. So I read my Lovecraft omnibus; mostly about old sea-towns on the New England coast that, cut off by geography fog and inbreeding, are hosts to diabolical going on. I think I finally got to sleep about seven years later.

Since that formative/traumatic experience I’ve always associated Lovecraft with the season of mists, except The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I associate with beads of rain falling against a car window. But all the stories are associated with a sort of nagging dread.

Judging from their proliferation on the shelves of most bookshops (and that’s just Stephen King), people still love a good horror story, or even a mediocre horror story. There’s something about reading a horror story and I think it may be that one can always close the book and trap the horror safely between the pages. Certainly if you want horror in real life, you can simply watch the news or the ‘Why? Factor’ or something. Of course, sometimes the horror escapes the page and follows you, which is why it’s perfectly acceptable to check under the bed and inside the closet before retiring and to always keep handy the ultimate ghost deterrent – a camera, I mean, have you ever seen a convincing picture of one?