Reliving the Old Times

Talk to an intellectual. It's cheap. It's uplifting

I was lousy at school. Didn't care, didn't study, avoided homework. English was OK but what the heck is English? Writing sentences that make sense and understanding books. Hardy's The Trumpet Major had characters that irritated me but I knew the plot back to front. And that's all you needed.

History? Just disconnected events. The Agricultural Revolution and Jethro Tull's spiffing seed drill. Not the singer you understand. And not enough for a GCE O-level.

Many teachers were ancient, the young ones were out fighting WW2. These whiskery dodderers had one commitment - to corporal punishment, often ingeniously contrived. One lurched away from their lessons in pain.

Later, reacting against my tormenters, I took up history. Read a tome (ie, a book with many footnotes) about the 1832 Reform Act; it's more racy than you think. I've thought a lot about history during The Plague. Is it repeating itself?

You see, for me the stay-at-home rules were already in place. All my interests are practised indoors. I don’t care if the sun shines or if it snows. I can sing Schubert regardless. One day resembles another.

Just a minute, though. Isn't this like life during the Stone Age? An Age which happened in history, like most Ages. Stone Man probably didn't sing, certainly not Schubert. But he got to know the inside of his cave very well. Might I turn into a fossil?

Of course I’m drinking more. Stone Man may have had mead, but you could tire of that. I’ve tasted mead, I know. For me there are thousand wines from France, beer, Armagnac. A singing pie-eyed fossil, then? Living in a reconstructed cave like a museum display. Look folks, a Stone Age computer monitor! £10 for the guided tour. Could be worse.

Pathological?

Book an on-line appointment with my doctors and you get a finish time as well as a start time. I had ten minutes. Walking over I concentrated on being concise.

She watched attentively, contributed detail that showed she'd been listening, did tests, reached her conclusion. But this isn't about medical matters. It's about my very being.

All done, I looked at my watch. I'd met the ten-minute deadline. Bumblingly, comically, I said I'd worried but was happy now, I hadn't wasted her time. It was unexpected but that's what I intended. She laughed. An extremely attractive woman, laughing became her.

In fact her gender was incidental, she could have been one of the male doctors. What was familiar was that in a socio/professional encounter I had sought to joke. More than that, I had sought to make her laugh.

That distinction is important. Anyone can tell a joke, most shouldn't. Ensuring laughter - I confess unashamedly, I'm good at it - demands technique. By far the best way is first to lull: to start out dully, banal, even a cliché, then snap out something outrageous in the last three or four words. It's the unexpectedness that does it. Involuntary laughter, which is easy to identify, gives you the proof.

But why do I do it? I'm not sure. Most people, but not all, enjoy laughing. Does their laughter make me more lovable? If so there's a darker side. Causing people to laugh is a way of controlling them. Ironically, with my rare failures, confusion is the most likely reaction and that too is a form of control.

I do it all the time. Did it in professional interviews where it is perhaps more explicable. Previous laughers laugh yet again. I love doing it, love the skill. But is it normal?

More incompetence but less bad-temper

VR's painting class takes place 11 miles away in the village hall at difficult-to-pronounce Ewyas Harold. I drive her there and pick her up two hours later. We'd just set out and the car computer pinged to announce loss of pressure in the rear left. I kicked the tyre, there wasn't much give and I reckoned it was safe enough for the remaining mileage.

It was raining when I dropped off VR and I didn't fancy putting on the spare. A local garage did the dirty work and charged me £5. This cheered me, I added a fiver, decided it was hardly worth going home now so I joined VR and her class. It seemed churlish not to attempt something artistic. I borrowed an 8B pencil (deliciously soft) and drew my left hand, not very well as you can see.

I have an O-level in art but that was in 1951. Gradually an important rule re-established itself - when working from real life take information only from the eyes, never from the imagination. It seems obvious, doesn't it? And yet untutored clods tend to draw lines where they think lines should go, rather than where lines do go.

Another thing. You draw a bum line, realise it's bum, then draw a better line closely adjacent. The drawing starts to look furry. Half-wittedly you tell yourself this is “art”.

I noticed the gap between the thumb and index finger was too wide. Time to start again but tables were already being folded. I’d enjoyed myself. I’d like to do it again but there just isn’t time. I rehearsed Hugo Wolf’s Nun Wandre, Maria and wrote this post.

VR makes time and did the pic below.

Schrödinger country

They - that ominous, all-knowing group of nobodies - say time passes more quickly in old age. Alarmingly there's confirmation.

In the Guardian's deaths ads I noted a guy I knew distantly. He was big in the National Union of Journalists, of which I was a member, but it was his wife I knew better. She edited a magazine across the corridor and I last saw her on the day the company closed her mag. I found her weeping, not for herself but for her staff. I gave her a hug which was unusual because I wasn't into hugging in those days.

Her husband's funeral was far away and I sent a commiserating letter (Not condolences - a lumbering word I've always hated.) via the funeral home. She responded, incidentally providing some dates I wasn't sure about.

Dates that occurred within my working life. I reflected. I started work on August 20 1951 and finished for good on about the same day in 1995. Forty-four years if I include two years spent serving my sovereign. NB, the latter phrase is ironic.

Much happened during those forty-four years. Rather less happened in the succeeding twenty-three years. Other than my astonishment. I've done nothing significant for a period equal to half my working life. When I fill in the Occupation slot on forms, Retired makes more sense than Former Journalist. I can't say I like "retired" as a profession. To be poetic I'm an ageing surfer riding a diminishing wave that will soon dissipate all its force on the beach. The place where, as Robert Burns said, "the sands of time gang dry".

But, hey, that's for tomorrow and, as those nobodies say, tomorrow never comes. That's Post 919 out of the way.

Journo links for Colette (or any anyone else who's interested)

Journalism 1
Journalism 2
Journalism 3
Journalism 4
Journalism 5
Journalism 6
Journalism 7
Journalism 8
Journalism 9
Journalism 10
Journalism 11

I did two posts on each of the days I wrote Journalism 1 and 8.These confusing and irrelevant "extras" cannot be disentangled from the links. Ignore them. Since I posted this list I have cut some and added others. Ever the editor.

Another day but no dollars

The composite RR day, aspired to, never attained.

Rise 06.25. In PJs and Totes respond to Tone Deaf commenters. A tiny treasured group which must be cosseted.

Assisted by Jonas Kauffman on YouTube, rehearse Schumann's Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome. Wearing earphones, singing sotto voce since VR sleepeth. The fast staccato bits especially hard.

Consider doing a post: a list with coloured cannonballs, it's easier than writing. My austere life? Must avoid referring to advanced age.

Complete final preparation of Opening Bars - how V taught me this and that. Dedication reads: "To V who made it happen. To VR who said it should happen". Despatch to printer.

To filling station for The Guardian

Ten pages of Fred Vargas' Pars vite et reviens tard. Alas, Pat, French teacher, not well so no Friday lesson. Write her note about linguistic misadventures chasing up three-pin plug adapters in France.

Diet-day lunch. Cuppa-Soup plus half-tsp chili sauce. Apple, satsuma, black coffee. Eagerly read about Trump foolery. Doze on couch, a sensuous delight.

Glance glancingly at novel, Second Hand, rejected by two dozen agents. Virtually ready for vanity printing.

Choose photo of two urinals for front cover of short-story collection, Two Homelands.

More Schumann.

Look longingly at fifth novel, Rictangular Lenses, 28,572 words done. A low priority at the moment.

Ensleeve two guest-room duvets as favour to VR, her arms being shorter than mine.

Read a sonnet written four years ago. Tiring now. Creativity at low ebb.

Go downstairs. Watch Simpsons re-run. Slaver at thought of  microwaved diet dinner.

Divorce and other things

Here's a gruesome definition of leisure: "when one is not working or occupied; free time."

The Great Vacancy?

I was last salaried in 1995; almost twenty-five years of being unoccupied. And since shortly I will be on holiday I must, if I were playing the game, face a different level of inoccupancy. The equivalent of a medically induced coma, perhaps.

The hard disk of my netbook (a laptop that shrank in the wash) says otherwise. Two files contain a novel and a non-fiction work, both awaiting their final, final, final read-through. I may never open them. In my head is an idea for a short story: a male actor and a female actor (The Guardian style-book condemns "actress") who hate each other must combine in a presentation of love poetry. I had fun trawling comparatively obscure poets for the raw material; I look forward to juxtaposing these over-charged lines with the two malevolent thespians.

The two books and the story (assuming it gets written) may be regarded as junk by others. But they have the potential to keep me occupied.

I'll also think melancholy thoughts. Ideologues are cutting me adrift (if only psychologically) from two personal resources: the homelands of Richard Strauss and Francois Truffaut. Hatred is said to be bad for you but it can confirm vital signs.

We all know what an occupied country is. What about an occupied person?

I'll also sing. More Mozart but then I have limited aims.

Magically transformed

Modern-day Eldwick. The self-conscious rock is very new.

As if it were a pebble in my shoe I grumble about my advanced age too much. Stupid. Here, in my blog I may be any age.

Bingley, Yorkshire, circa 1953. I wear a dull brown mac (short for mackintosh, ie, raincoat) like most local males. Not through lack of imagination, that's all there is in the shops. My hair, as dull brown as my mac, has been cut by a barber; it sits like a wedge atop my head. The sides are shorn bare. I'm on a bus for which I've paid pennies, climbing away from Bingley's mills to a village called Eldwick. Part of my weekly schedule as junior reporter with the Keighley News.

I call at Eldwick's newspaper shop, run by Robin Teasdale, once huntsman with the Airedale Beagles. "Any news?" I ask. He says no, as he always does. Outside I ignore rolling farmland leading up to moors which, I suppose, are exhilarating. For me familiarity has bred contempt.

The school’s headmaster sees me as a relief; he leaves his classroom and smokes a pipe in his office as we chat. He has an appropriate surname (Stone?) which I have now forgotten. Also a nervous tic causing him to grimace every couple of minutes. He seems unaware of this and does it in public before audiences, once caught in full contortion by the photographer from my newspaper.

For news of Eldwick Amateur Dramatic Society I call on one of two quite lovely women, blonde and brunette, in their thirties. One invites me in, the other keeps me on the doorstep. I'm a teenager, full of teenage juices, and I fantasise about both, leaving reluctantly.

These people must now be dead.

A long wait for the return bus. I may walk, since it’s downhill.

A mort for words?

My mother's first typewriter had no shift-key; capitals were mixed with lower-case letters on a huge shelf-like keyboard. From them, aged about eight, I picked out a story about a boxer fighting a cheat given to "heel-gouging".

Later, for the newspaper, using my own portable, I reviewed amateur plays, reported AGMs and court cases and transcribed interviews with local celebrities. For a slew of magazines I covered bike and motorbike races, described how to build a hi-fi loudspeaker enclosure and publicised apartment block developments. Towards retirement I explained how carefully-planned warehouses combined with forklift trucks could save companies cash, time and space.

I wrote many, many letters.

I learned facility: I could write a thousand-word article directly on to the typewriter in an hour.

In my spare time I wrote novels:

SHE sat on the sharp rim of the bath, balanced her odd little mirror on the window-sill, peered myopically and started to arrange her hair. This was how her day started.

Uncomfortably.

short stories:

When United gave away the second goal Taylor’s treble voice died and enthusiasm turned to fractiousness. He kicked the seat in front – happily unoccupied – and looked away from the pitch. She’d have bought him a burger if the price hadn’t been beyond her.

and sonnets:

It suits me well, the role of absentee.
One mention, then perhaps a genteel cough;
Soon lost in bouncing waves of repartee

Until this year I couldn't imagine not writing. Now I can. In exchange for being able to sing Quilter's setting of Oh Mistress Mine, in tune and with a solid tone.

Too many damned questions

Desserts. When it's up to me they never change: on non-diet days a raspberry-cranberry yoghurt (always eaten with the same thick-handled teaspoon), on diet days a Braeburn apple and a satsuma. However VR not only hates alimentary sameness she hates it on my behalf; yesterday she made us plum crumble.

I reflect. That yoghurt/fruit duo has persisted for several years, perhaps a decade. Partly due to old age, resistance to what's new. You could say repeated meals are in themselves harmless. But are they symptomatic of something more serious? Am I also sticking with the same literary diet? Should I really be watching As You Like It for the tenth time or relishing the new Don DeLillo? Worse still, am I now thinking the same thoughts?

Am I now left-wing by habit, not conviction? Do I reject new ideas if they are ungrammatically expressed? Is my liking for Germany born out of unrefreshed sentimentality? Are my fantasy women film-stars on the elderly side?

I took up singing recently. At age eighty. But did I want to prove I could do something radically new? A slightly ignoble reason.

Note in passing: this is not a post about yoghurt. Or Braeburns.

This is also familiar speculation. Hardening of the arteries goes with old bodies; hardening of opinion is equally prevalent. Ought I to seek out debate with younger, more energetic thinkers? Fine if they opened my eyes and my brain. But suppose I wiped the floor with them, for I am an unpleasant and tenacious arguer?

Enough. Enough. One of Roman Polanski's best movies ends with the words: "It's Chinatown, Jake." Here, something more old-fashioned: "It's anno domini, RR."

Mich! Moi!! Me!!!

There’s no one like you, is there? You feel that instinctively but how to prove it? Atomically it’s true, genetically too, probably. But you can’t easily check these matters.

One way is to see your uniqueness as a combination of features, qualities and achievements.

I am male, the world population is 7bn, therefore I need only compare myself with half that figure, the rest being female. I am almost 6 ft 2 in. tall and - I guess - that removes two-thirds of the male competition and I’m down to 1.2bn. I'm eighty which reduces my peers to 600m. Almost manageable.

Let's get more personal. Aged eleven I decided what job I wanted then, later, went ahead and did it. How many eighty-year-old, 6ft 2in men can claim that? A small percentage? Say 5% and we're down to 30m.

I lived several years in a foreign country. Perhaps 10%. My peers at this stage now only number 3m - say a large city.

I've written a couple of novels now in print. That's a real slasher: 500,000 is perhaps too generous, shall we say 100,000?

I've been married for over 50 years. I only know fewer haven't than have. Half? So: 50,000. Remember I’m moving towards a unique combination.

I never saw The Sound of Music. Game, set and match? No, even fewer people have seen TSOM run backwards through a projector; that could be easily arranged to juggle the numbers. Stick to stuff that matters or you’re proud of.

I’ve read Proust, Ulysses and War and Peace all more than once. Plus The Man Without Qualities just once; that was enough. That might just do it. Eight factors: can you do it in less?

No doubt, but observe the rules.

Pass me the Tums

Last night on a BBC4 programme about Socrates the name of the pre-christian Athenian general, Pericles, cropped up. I wondered if Shakespeare would have been surprised that one of his characters had figured in a reasonably serious nationwide discussion on philosophy. Wished I could have told him, watched his face.

In The Guardian, celebrity interviews are often presented in a standardised Q&A form, one question being: who would you invite to dinner. I've always had Graham Greene on my list (Yes, I know he's dead.) but now I've dropped him. The risks of my appearing too naive are just too great.

But time-travelled world greats do present amusing opportunities. I wouldn't bother with Beethoven: he always knew he was great and wouldn't be surprised that crowds assemble for the Waldstein. But how would Mozart react to the fact that Cosi is staged in Tokyo with Japanese sub-titles?

And fame can also go backwards. John Galsworthy (incredibly!) won the Nobel Prize and would be depressed to find he now depended mainly on TV drama adaptations. Mind you, I'd hate to point this out; a lousy trick on a dinner guest.

I'm not sure Kafka is read recreationally these days but did Franz expect this to be the case? I'd leave him off the dinner list; I feel 99% convinced he'd have obscure dietary requirements.

Quisling was executed in 1945 for betraying Norway during WW2. He’d sit far down the table (mine accommodates ten with both leaves installed), not talking. "Hey Vidkun," I'd say. "Your name lives on." Still morose, he’d demand more wine.

But suppose Isaac Newton  (a bit of a social bastard) asked: “And so, RR, what have you done with your life?”  Guess I too would reach for the decanter.

Tiny, barely adequate tribute

Trying not to be sexist The Guardian, my daily newspaper, has done away with "actress" - thus Helen Mirren and Benedict Cumberbatch are both actors on its pages. A small arguable matter.

Plodding behind I'd like to do away with "heroine" and talk about a hero, P, my French teacher. P is a woman.

Heroism is frequently seen on a grand scale but needn't be. Nor need it involve wars. It does involve courage but not necessarily in the face of physical danger; spouses who continue to love their "other" through Alzheimer's are courageous, thus heroes. Without losing myself in arid definitions my heroes are, by consensus, admirable as well as being devoted, sympathetic, skilled, generous, egalitarian and selfless.

On Friday mornings B, another woman, and I sit down in P's dining room, read alternate pages of our set book (presently Rien Ne S'oppose à la Nuit by Delphine de Vigan), then translate as accurately as we can. I've been doing this for about fifteen years, B for much longer. There is no pressure except from our own consciences. Wellbeing resides in how well we've prepared our translations.

When I err P corrects me with: "Not quite." P presides quietly (she is a Quaker) but with authority. She does this out of a love of the French language at £5 a pop. Her default state is to encourage, her patience is endless and she rides over raunchy passages briskly and with laughter.

The class is tiny yet her influence - for good - is indisputable. All three of us are of an age but it is P who best shows there can be benefits in growing older. P is one of a tiny band I call my heroes; unassailable in virtue but witty with it.

Piped anthem

Sonnet: The Pragmatist’s Prayer

Oh Lord, preserve us all from those who write,
Who glory in overt loquacity,
Whose self-abuse, hand-driven, blocks the light
That shines from plumbing's greater honesty.

Regard the waste pipe's simple unity,
See how it carries merde from here to there,
Then look at this corrupted minstrelsy
Adrift from zero on the way to – where?

Within all work syntax cannot compete
With solder’s certainty in fixing things,
Where olive joints – so apt, so neat –
Link taps to souls and gives them wings.

Stilsons as sceptres! Copper - king of life!
Tubes defeat odes in times when thirst is rife

Just passing through

Can't say I've led an adventurous life.

Rock-climbing? Sounds exciting but I was the worst rock-climber I knew and never pushed the limits, never risked much.

Repairing radio gear in Singapore? All I can see are the restraints of communal life in the RAF - the need to co-exist with others, most of whom I'd have ignored as civilians.

Seeking work in the USA as a married man with one small child? The idea was adventurous but the planning was meticulous; things went very smoothly. And there was central heating.

Deciding to find out, very late in life, whether I could write? Hell, what else? Herbaceous borders?

Just once I tip-toed on to the edges of a new old world. In the West Virginian Panhandle the roads had grass in the middle, then became dirt tracks. We passed wooden hovels with forty-year-old car shells for garden ornaments. People watched speculatively from their stoops as if guessing what we'd taste like. Suppose we break down? VR asked. Then we were back on the expressway.

Adventure? Pretty dull really.

JOE'S NUDGE

Rookhope stands in a pleasant place,

If the false thieves wad let it be,
But away they steal our goods apace,
And ever an ill death may they dee!

It's almost a year now. I failed to listen to Joe's poetic voice for most of his life. Now when I’m faced with poetry I apply myself, unguided, often in confusion. The last line above is a curse which makes me smile. Would Joe approve? He was never vindictive. I have no way of knowing.  

 

Anon. 

Twenty-first century luxury

Sonnet: The completed loop

As to my aims I go for sonorous,
Rising at times to Falstaff’s forgetive*:
That soft gee, there, hard proof I’m serious,
I picked it up, it helps the narrative.

I’ve stripped decades of ancient memory,
Unlayering facts that cover other layers:
Pity, self-love and youthful misery,
A funless helter-skelter down the years.

The bare bones of a hollow threnody,
The ragbag sound of rhyme and integer,
Both given form and sense – a rhapsody –
By virtue of my silent listener.

I talk, we talk, it is our tendency,
But being heard is our necessity.

*  A good sherris sack...  makes (my brain) apprehensive,
quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes. Henry IV, part two

I feel better for it

What did I learn in 2013? Here’s a list.

SEXIEST EVER Marlon Brando in the latter part of Guys and Dolls, when he wears a black suit. VR will brook no other view.

WARMTH = FUEL Twice a week the 2/5 diet reduces me to 600 calories per day compared with a normal 2000 calories/day. Initially the weather was quite warm, now it isn’t. Despite central heating my body temperature drops as the day endures. Two nights ago I lay cold in bed. Extra blankets would not have been the answer. There was no heat to retain.

IBSEN – JURY STILL OUT The Hedda Gabler DVD, featuring  gorgeous Diana Rigg in her prime, was all over in a spritely 83 minutes. But then it had been rewritten for telly by John Osborne.  I cannot believe such breathlessness is typical.

LAW-BREAKERS It was my impression that airborne fire lanterns had been banned as an accidental arson risk. Last night (NYE) suggests differently. Secretly VR and I were glad.

PORTRAITS I am drawn to a portrait style: pale flesh colours; facial features (eyes, lips, nose, ears) finely outlined in a dark colour. Like a filled-in child’s colouring book except the features are larger than one might expect, given the facial area. Any clues?

EVEREST I only recently discovered that the Sherpas on Everest expeditions referred to the oxygen cylinders as “British air”.

FRENCH TOAST There is a limit to the number of slices I can eat but it is quite high.

WIP Second Hand (53,218 words)
But even when they were seated there was no sense of relaxation. Teenagers passed by on roller blades, dog owners let their pets defecate in the grass. Frustrated, Wyss pointed to an ice-cream van. “Let’s do something childish. How about a cone?” That helped.

The refuge of a scoundrel? Pt. 1

I had three goes at Anthony Powell's twelve-volume series, A Dance to The Music of Time, and failed each one. Mainly due to his appalling writing style (eg, His manner of asking personal questions was of that kind not uncommonly to be found which is completely divorced from any interest in the answer.), an upper middle-class avalanche, and a huge cast of characters.

The key turned with vol. 10 (Books Do Furnish a Room), once I discovered how that memorable title came into being. Since then I've read the series two or three times.

Why did I persist? Well, Evelyn Waugh liked the books and reviewed the later volumes as they appeared. For another they are genuinely funny but indirectly, as with Proust's great series which Powell admired. Funny in an English (note: not British) way, often very cruel: for instance, an academic has a stroke at a formal dinner and comedy emerges from the way others react. Vols. 6 - 8 (The Kindly Ones, The Valley of Bones, A Soldier's Art) contain a sharp and frequently mordant account of our country at war. And, overtopping everything else, the series gives birth to one of the greatest fictional creations ever: Widmerpool.

It's a decade since I last read the books and my judgment may be deliquescing. But - how peculiar! - they make me quietly proud to be English. Foreigners (and many Anglos) who have tried and failed may be astonished and outraged by that. In my defence I can only say I am not and never have been a natural patriot; National Service taught me not to be.

Would I recommend the series? Only I fear after receiving satisfactory responses to a set of questions/tests. In short: no. But if your curiosity is aroused, well, let's take partners. 

To which I plead guity

From time to time I am able to make VR laugh and that, as much as anything else, has helped promote my acceptability for a half century.

But there are lapses into what VR calls my "public schoolboy sense of humour", frequently to do with body secretions. Her judgement always brings me up short since I am unable to see myself as a true alumnus of a public (ie, private) school. Even though it's partly true.

However the temptation is never entirely suppressed. Having bought Lid-Care wipes online I now receive spam from the supplier. The website is divided into predictable sub-sections: Medicine, Toiletries, Vitamins and - intriguingly - Embarrassing. I could no more resist a click at venture than voluntarily stop breathing.

The label was short for embarrassing symptoms and listed specifics which could be ordered by name rather than description. These include products claiming to reverse hair loss and over-the-counter solutions to impotence. Neither remotely funny, though my grab-bag was moderately enriched by “itchy anus”.

Our local pharmacy has a consulting room. My favourite pharmacist, Frances, a tiny, rather gay woman dressed in black, her accent the quintessence of Welshness, likes to eliminate the solemnity from her offerings. In particular (see pic) toe-spacers ("You could make yourself a fortune," she joked in response to my description.) Would I dare admit jock itch to Frances behind the frosted windows?

I dare say I’d falter. But there's a short story there.

WIP Hand Signals. "Outside, on the moped and within the vault of her crash helmet, Francine had time and privacy to consider a truer account of how she and Martin Ibanez had parted. Below, the 50 cc engine crackled inoffensively and traffic was light; for once she wasn't required to be totally alert ... "

RR sets out his stall - again

My current desktop photo, above, covers three major interests: rock climbing (a practice long since abandoned), high school physics and the curious nature of being a woman. Click pic to enlarge.

This is advanced climbing demanding great strengths. Imagine climbing the wall of your living room and then climbing (The verb is no longer apt: proceeding?) across the underneath of the ceiling. Unnatural? Indeed! If she falls (but she isn't going to) she will only dangle from the closest metal clip attached to the rock, provided the other end of the rope is secure.

The comparatively slack rope isn't supporting her, only her hands and (to a lesser extent) her feet are doing that. The left appears to grip a conventional handhold, but the other handhold consists of two fingers inserted into a small hole. Now note the muscle definition in her arms and shoulders.

She's wearing lycra pants, a golden bangle and has dyed her hair. Male climbers do these things. She however takes advantage of her gender by wearing a decorative sports bra. I am not drawn to this photo for conventional sexual reasons, rather because it blurs previous gender-defined roles. Oh yeah? Yeah!

Blest Redeemer (123,985 words written; target 150,000 approx, say about 400 pages) is about a woman pushed to the limit and beyond. It’s quite horrible. So I’m a sadist? Not that I know of (Want to psycho-analyse me?) since it’s her resistance to events that’s of interest. As with Jana in Risen on Wings. I realise this sounds like dubious territory and perhaps both books are lousy. But there’s no point in writing purely for the money; you’ve got to enjoy the process. And of course the subject.