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| The Buddha of Sainsbury's | |
| By zmbbw | ||||||||||||
| 02 January 2008 | ||||||||||||
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Pretend it's July for a minute please.
I am a writer and I write and I write and I write. I’m not very imaginative, I can’t make things up, so I write about people I know or once knew who were either funny or mad or both and about things that I’ve done, like being in Amsterdam with Chill and watching old men visiting the brothel opposite the hostel; arriving on their bicycles, removing their bicycle-clips and going inside. I also fictionalise news stories I hear on the radio like the man who broke his community apart because he couldn’t stand his neighbour’s dog littering the village pavements or the Japanese soldier forgotten on a Pacific island until 1981. Alice says I mostly write about school days and girls who didn’t love me.
I have a friend and she is a writer too. We’re not lovers, if that’s what you’re thinking; we’ve never met in person, only electronically. In any case she prefers Italian-footballer types, whereas I’m a thin-milky-white-Englishman type. I don’t have a girlfriend at the moment. I may drink a little too much to be honest, but there are worse crimes – I don’t mug old ladies or sell hard drugs or vote Tory – how bad can I be? We fire off titles at each other Alice and I. Over the internet. Random titles. The current title is The First of July. We call them distraction-busters and we say we need them to keep our mental machinery ticking over and to keep the distractions of our daily lives at bay; the laundry, the washing-up and the supermarket run. I can’t speak for Alice, I barely know her, but for me that’s bollocks actually. I need to write to distract me from the fact that life is on the whole grey and drizzly with only occasional bright spells. Being lost in uncharted woods of words with nothing to help you pick your way through but a slowly unravelling ball of hope makes up for that somehow. I love the stuff that Alice writes. She has an intelligent and witty turn of phrase and occasionally she absolutely floors me with something, honestly. I do get frustrated sometimes though – I think she knows – because she doesn’t take her talent seriously. It’s funny how we’ve changed over the time that we’ve been writing together. She used to write about old people and death a lot. She doesn’t do that so much since I pointed it out. Unless she’s still doing it off-piste of course; she doesn’t have to show me everything she writes – it’s a free country. I wouldn’t want to presume too much but I think Alice and I became friends rather than just writing acquaintances, when I wrote a story about an old hippy called Lorraine sitting in an armchair wrapped in a blanket, staring out at her garden. She was sipping tea laced with cannabis resin and thinking about a disastrous blind-date she’d had with a bigot called Roger. Alice wrote back “oh my goodness, that’s me that is. I am Lorraine Cave!” I felt as though I knew her a little better after that. Lorraine had a dog called Ben, Alice has a rabbit. Or maybe it’s the other way round – I get them muddled up sometimes. The things you notice as a writer are no different to the things everyone else notices; I think people are mistaken when they think writers are super-observant. It’s just that writers collect things and try and link them together. For example the supermarket checkout assistant this morning looked like a young Hanif Kureishi. ‘The Buddha of Sainsbury’s’ I thought. And I did think to say to him “listen man, if you don’t make a success of your life looking like that, you deserve a pistol putting to your head.” I’m sure most people think things like that but they forget them almost instantly. Me, I thought it would be great in a piece of fiction. All the way home, through the flea-market and down Kay Brow, I turned it over in my mind wondering how I could make it fit into a piece called The First of July. I was more than a little distracted by my right trainer which was making a squelchy-flatulent noise every time I took a step. I must have punctured it somehow. At first reading I assumed Alice meant The First of July as in the date. I Googled it and it turns out an extraordinary number of battles started on that date not least of which the Battle of Gettysburg and the Battle of the Somme. That’s pretty heavy-weight material that; I can’t see the Buddha of Sainsbury’s fitting in there. Alice could however have meant The First of July as in the first cup of tea or the first random-title exercise which it is … or the first shag. Now then.
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