I have to admit that my first ‘expedition’ with
the air cadets was not what I had expected.
If I had given it some thought beforehand I would have realised that I
wasn’t there to enjoy myself but to supervise and manage the cadets. It was a pain having to keep an eye on them
all the time, but as my two boys had a fierce good time, I decided to pass the
whole thing off as a success, and we managed to bring all the cadets back alive
too, with no major injuries, so it was a plus on all fronts. It was nice to get home too; Irene didn’t
think so as James had been collecting ‘stuff’, without my knowledge. We had been told to dump our kit bags in the
kitchen where Irene would deal with them.
She simply began to tip the contents on the kitchen floor, from where
she would sort everything out, but instead started shrieking. James had been collecting animal skulls which
were now rolling about our kitchen floor spilling wriggling maggots out here,
there and everywhere.
Things were going pretty well on all
fronts. My daily word count was
increasing to the point where I was producing about five hundred words a day,
every day. I was very happy with my output, but still desperately afraid that I
would never hit the goal of seven hundred and fifty words per day. I made great use of our local library and one
day discovered that there was a local writer’s circle that met once a
fortnight, in the library. I found out
when the next meeting was and planned to attend it. I have to admit I was a little apprehensive
as I would be meeting real writers and there’s me not even producing seven
hundred and fifty words a day yet.
The writers circle or group, or whatever you
wanted to call it was a small affair with about six or seven regulars. The group had a chair person who was an
elderly Irish lady, Betty. People would
turn up with whatever they had been working on and read it out loud to the
group who would then comment on the piece.
Like the air cadets, we were part of a much larger organisation, the
Merseyside association of writer’s workshops.
Now and again a group from Liverpool would visit us and participate in
our workshops. We also had professional writers
visit and talk to us and give advice, so it was quite an important little group,
for me anyway. The Liverpool crowd
brought politics into the group, with a thump, which had normally concerned itself
with poems about bloody flowers, until I arrived.
Skelmersdale is an interesting place as you
have the full range of society plus a little bit extra. Most people are quite negative about Skelmersdale
saying that there’s nothing there, there’s nothing to do, there’s no jobs, no
social life, it’s dangerous and drug riddled.
I would have to disagree. There is
even a suggestion; you’re going to love this one, that Skelmersdale was a government
experiment in ADF, the Aspiration Dispersal Field. In the sixties when Skelmersdale was being
constructed it is claimed that professor Nathaniel Butler, the lead scientist
for the controversial Mind Reader experiments, Placed an ADF generator in a
disused mine shaft underneath Skelmersdale.
Skelmersdale was then drenched in a sort of
magnetic field which took away all aspiration from the inhabitants. This was so that the government could control
the population at any given time, turning the people into zombies almost. There were large stone sculptures placed on
the towns many roundabouts and it is claimed that the ADF was generated though
these monoliths. One claim is that as the population of Skelmersdale was the
dregs of society from the Liverpool slums that they had no aspiration in the
first place. These days most of the
population, not just in Skelmersdale, are turned into brain dead zombies by watching
utter tripe on the television such as the X Factor or Celebrities Cooking food
while dancing on ice in a jungle. It is
even suggested that to this day, if you visit Skelmersdale, you will notice a
low level background hum which is supposed to be the ADF still working away in
its mine shaft.
I was associating with people who were full of aspiration,
energy and drive, especially with the air cadets. The writers circle was full of great and
interesting characters and when the Liverpool lot came to visit there was a
great deal of energy about the place. There
was also another community, just across the road from us who I found very
strange indeed. A group of Transcendental
Meditators had decided to set up a community in Skelmersdale. They even had a dome shaped building as their
centre piece. The dome had some sort of
fantastic name like The Maharishi’s Golden Dome Of The North, or the like, but
was referred to by the locals as The Dome and the Transcendental Meditators as
Meddies.
We were lucky enough to have one or two Meddies
in the writers circle, this association evolved so that we would visit the Dome
and attend certain functions they would hold there. I was really interested in watching their
yogic flying which I have to admit I found an utter disappointment. I’ve seen better and more advanced flying in
a rugby club after eleventeen pints of best bitter. They had
their own companies and factories, where all the employees had to be members of
the TM community. I found them to be
quite dull, they all considered themselves to be highly intelligent and
therefore naturally superior to all others.
Once again I allowed my own personal experience to tell me what to think
about them. An Irish girl, from Newry,
lived across the road from us; they had two children who played with my
three. One day her two children announced
that they have to leave to go to the Dome for ‘conditioning.’ This is where you start taking one step
backwards.
The second incident concerned a young man who
was a TM and a member of the writers circle.
He wrote Haiku poetry, or at least he attempted to. On reflection he only wrote one Haiku poem
that I thought was brilliant, all his other attempts were quite run of the
mill. A Haiku, in English, is a short poem
written in a specific method. It can be
three lines of up to seventeen syllables usually in five, seven, five form. Most people associate the TM’s with the Beatles
when Maharishi Mashesh Yogi became their spiritual advisor. It was all about peace and love, so I was
quite surprised when I asked why our TM Haiku writer wasn’t turning up for
meetings anymore to be told that he had been banned from the library for
beating up one of the female librarians.
As you may have expected the writers circle ended
up with a bunch of people coming along to listen to what I had written. It was a little embarrassing and I tried to
get them to join in more, even at one point suggesting we all pitch in and
produce a novel. I was still scribbling
away with my fountain pen and I think I spent more time counting the words than
I did actually writing them. In those
days my only aspiration was to get a typewriter and no ADF generator was going
to stop me. The Merseyside group held a
short story competition and I entered. I
approached it in quite a different way to most others I think. I had been devouring books on writing and had
come across an interesting piece on how to win short story competitions.
Normally short story competitions will say that
entries have to be a certain length, sometimes they will give a subject but
most competitions tend to allow you to choose your own subject. The first thing you have to do is find out
who the judges are and then discover what they write or what they like to read. Once you understand what the judges write or like
to read then you can use that as a basis for your story. I understood that the judges were all quite
left wing, politically speaking, after all this was Liverpool, so I wrote a
real leftie focused story, with a smattering of humour.
We were invited to some meeting rooms in
Liverpool one evening for the presentation of the prizes. There was quite a good turnout of about two
hundred people and the prizes were to be presented by some actor from a popular
television series called Brookside. They
had provided gallons of free white wine, which Irene was getting stuck into; I
just sat there wondering if I had managed to get in to the top three. To hear that I had won the competition was
fantastic news, so good in fact I think Irene had another drink to celebrate, I
couldn’t as I was driving. It was
strange standing shaking hands with someone, the local Liverpool Echo newspaper taking our
photograph and I hadn’t a clue who it was or what they were famous for. I pretended that I knew who he was and smiled
and shook his hand but I have to admit that I did feel a little exposed standing
there in front of so many people. I nearly
fainted when he handed me a microphone and asked me to take centre stage and read
my story out. As I cleared my throat and
clenched my buttocks, I promised myself that I would always read the small
print in the future.
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