about me

Woke up one morning and was pleasantly surprised to find I wasn't alone. There was a sentence in my bed. Of course it wasn't just line of words, that would be silly because they would be caught amongst the sheets with verbs and vowels between my toes. And as I hate bits in the bed, I can't imagine anything worse than dots and commas against my skin.

No, this was a sensible sentence, scribbled and strung together with lovely loops. I kicked off the covers to have a look and saw it naked without a verb. Shameless sounds and miss-spelt words, a rather disabled piece of verse. But I had never slept with a sentence before and fell in love with this crazy line of words. I asked it downstairs for breakfast, as if it could hear as well as talk. At the table I read it aloud and from its tone I knew it came from a dream and I could never let it go again. It was a long winding sentence with a foreign air, sort of talking dirty. It stretched across the page, turned around like a worm and came backwards along the next line. Strange and disturbing but it was certainly a sentence, starting with a capital letter and it finished with a full-stop, maybe two or three to keep it from flying off the page. And here and there it had a comma as if to make it decent.

Lust, love and longing for more, I was so obsessed that I took it with me when I went to work. In the factory I spoke to no one in case I uttered words without a verb. I was having an affair with the sentence in the toilet, taking out the crumpled paper, mumbling like a monk, and wondering was it really just a sentence. It seemed to be a paragraph, sprawled across the paper, several lines thick, leaving hardly any space to dot an I or cross a T. Then while hiding in the toilet, the sentence multiplied. It was a cancer growth, a bulging nonsense, soaking through the page until words came at me from two sides of wrinkled paper. Paragraphs grew political, preaching propaganda that threatened my promotion. I rushed from the toilet and across the factory floor. The foreman shouted but I had to reach for Yellow Pages and call a poet.

The poet told me it was a hopeless case, and what I had was a psycho sentence. Back in the toilet I had to cry, especially when I flushed the crazy words away. I was relieved when the foreman banged on the door, telling me to do some work. I laboured at my bench to forget about the words without a verb, which seduced me in my bed and tried to lure me from the factory floor. I began to speak again and have tea with the others. We laughed and played a game of cards. I went to the toilet like a normal man, to hide from the foreman and read graffiti on the back of the door. Then I saw the sentence and I nearly had a shit.

It had risen from the sewer and was scrawled across the paintwork. I took away the sentence to kill it beneath a train. The foreman chased me across the factory floor as I hurried with the toilet door beneath my arm. I went down steps to platform four where express trains come on the hour, and threw the words onto the track. The train came rushing into the station, like a long cruel sentence, never stopping or even slowing for a comma or colon. Each carriage was like a deadly word without meaning or purpose, just an endless cutting-remark, passing through, en-route to some distant full-stop.

I looked down on the track to see the toilet door cut to bits. But the sentence wasn't there. It was spread in spray paint across the wall on platform three. It had a new delinquent style, defacing posters and preaching to passengers. After distorting every advert, it reached across the ceiling with its disturbing words and came down ceramic walls to spread its dirty propaganda on platform four. I ran away, but like a snake, the sentence without a verb followed me up the stairs, trying to have me, eat me. I could feel the full stops coming up my trouser leg when the men in white coats arrived. They stabbed it with a syringe to inject a verb. With enormous pliers they extracted vowels to correct the spelling and tried to form some endearing words. But it wriggled and spoke the awful truth with spit and spite and splattered my face with sarcastic venom. So I chopped it, walloping it from skull to tail to make it stop, stop, stop. Chop, chop, chop, until we had a rather boring blurb for a book, stuck to a screen on some desk in someone’s house, some nut case writer saying oh my goodness, know what you mean.

Arriving soon, this part-time scribbler who has lived on three continents, worked in two war zones, and contributed to & edited English language rag mags in various places, and the odd High Street magazine and Small Press anthology. One novel published and sold out, having done exceptionally well on the Continent. Unfortunately, my little erratic experimental publisher crashed before reprinting, RIP. Other novels lost in the post or stuck with agents for ages and ages and ages, amen. Others returned without being read.

Currently engineering in London, living in a fast lane and not writing enough. But I have my moments, and love them to bits. I hope to have both my first-published & most recent novel onto this site soon and, yes, get some reading done.

Please let me know if you also have something not so gentle set in Africa. Set any where really, but awfully honest & brutal. ...really don't mind reading it if you don't mind equally honest, brutal but constructive replies.

In any case, good luck & happy sribbling,
John.

favourite books

Alice in Wonderland
Kelman (short stories)
Cement Garden
Heart of the Matter
Perfume
Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha
Metamorphosis
Breakfast at Tiffanys
Of Mice and Men
Flambards
Poisonwood Bible
Girl with Pearl Earring
Good Man in Africa. Well, at least all these were good at the time of reading them.

my websites