April 2014

April 2014

Writings by the Say It Right Writers Circle themed around SPORT NON-FICTION: It’s Different Because It’s Ours – Orzak Bule NON-FICTION: Standing Still – Alan Marshall FICTION: Kahn – Ali H FICTION: Tag – Phil Chokeword NON-FICTION: Winning – Ben Smith

Find out more about the Say It Right Writers Circle: sayitrightwriterscircle.blogspot.com Get in contact: tensongspodcast@googlemail.com All work licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND

Different Because It’s Ours

By Orzak Bule I go into the bookshop to pick up the novel I’ve ordered – let’s call it The Exiles by Hilary Mckay, or something else that makes me sound intelligent. I go to the counter and give my name, the assistant searches for the book kept under the desk, then looks at me and says ‘Ozark, that’s such an interesting name!’

Mustering all my wit and charm I reply ‘that’s my name’. She laughs. Experience has taught me that this means I’ve mumbled. She has no idea what I’ve said, so out of politeness (and maybe because she finds social situations awkward too) she’s calculated that my inaudible comment was a light-hearted throwaway line. A bad move, because I almost never joke.

But she ploughs ahead: ‘Does that come from the Ozark mountains?’

I smile, she continues.

‘I’ve been to Oklahoma so have seen them briefly, but I guess they’re more in Arkansas?’

This is my life as I crawl past my mid-twenties. Strangers in bookshops know more about my own name than I do. The mantra I absorbed from the Ramones has reached its logical conclusion: outside of everything, even myself. * I left Worcester Books with a new comic novella and an old sinking feeling. It’s a feeling I’ve had (amongst other times) every time a co-worker or old friend has asked: ‘How are York doing?’

I should know, I have previously proclaimed myself to be a fan and now it’s coming back to haunt me. My colleague has devised this plan to entrap me. Have I lied not just about this fandom but about all sorts of previously concealed elements of my life? ‘Oh, sort of mid-table’, I say, and that seems to be enough. * Just as most people have no difficulty pronouncing their own names, everyone else seems to unproblematically pick a football team and then support them through the ensuing highs and lows. The fortunate ones pick their local side, the misinformed choose Manchester United – but they all seem relatively happy about it.

Why then did I find myself at Wembley Stadium on May 10th 2013 with the same puzzling yet repetitive feeling of unmitigated alienation? * Through a quirky series of fate, childhood Easter holidays and geographical miscalculations, I ended up choosing to support York City. It seemed a noble decision as an adolescent, I travelled around the South to every away game within a four hour radius of Southampton. A cup final or play off at Wembley were the stuff dreams were made of. Although, in my childhood fantasies I somehow imagined a full stadium.

There’s something a little depressing about seeing Wembley 4/5ths empty – like someone’s booked a large hall for their own birthday party and nobody’s showed up.

Initially there is the usual harmless banter between fans, we’re playing fellow no hopers Newport County; allegations of bestiality are made. But separated by a half empty ground, the rival defamation fails to find its way across the sea of empty red seats.

Faced with the bleak prospect of being unable to hurl abuse at fellow human beings for a whole ninety minutes, some fans start to seek targets amongst their own ranks.

Those whose scent they aim to track - and only because it is presumed that no soft southern bastards would be amongst them – are Day Trippers.

Sat there with my hummus sandwiches and thermos of tea I am forced to dwell once again on my apparent failure to pass myself off as a human being. I guess people support a football team for self-validation. For ninety minutes they can feel part of a larger mass, something bigger than themselves -which adds to, not subtracts from, their individual self. Above all, they fit in: this is our team, our city: ‘York, and we’re proud of it’. And here I am, an anxious Southerner, whose very being makes it impossible to be anything other than an outsider. And whilst I’m dwelling on this, York go 1-0 up, at Wembley.

Standing Still

By Alan Marshall I don’t enjoy sport – never did, don’t suppose I ever will. People don’t believe me but it is entirely true, I have no interest in any sport at all, no matter how diverse - football or tennis, snooker or skeleton luge – I am utterly indifferent.

Which is why, when I was asked at the belligerent and tender age of fifteen to represent my school at an athletics event to be held on our sports pitch I was at best bemused (and at worst filled with a mixture of lethargy and dread).

You see, I was always more of a geography and history swat – not that I was keen to admit it in the first flushes of teenage cool which I had no idea how to pull off.

There was no inkling of latent talent or fledgling enthusiasm driving their decision of course. My inclusion was based solely on statistics, and not insignificantly the fact that everyone in the school was being forced to compete.

My fate was sealed.

I scanned the list of available sports on the amble home trying to sift the mildly uncomfortable from the downright torturous, and by the morning I had plumped on one event, the largely overlooked and exceptionally idle discipline of Standing Long-jump.

Outside the gym my mouth curled into a slackers smile as I added my scrawl to the brimming list under Mr Evans’ ballpoint gaze.

“Well done Marshall, standing still it is then,” his contempt was matched only by my own smugness.

“Let’s wait and see Sir,” I added cryptically.

Come sports day I slumped my way out to the parched field to mingle with willowy youths from assorted local schools, my claret running vest faded to a sickly salmon and pock-marked with moth holes, fourteen-up Dr Martens stretching up to my knobbly knees like incongruous gladiator’s boots.

My fellow combatants were clearly playing the same game as me. The sporting dregs – Fatty, Asthmatic, and Dispossessed Goth girl, ready for a day of mottled sunshine out in the slips, languid bouts of standing still interspersed with periodic leaping about.

We elected to slip away for a fag before the excitement got too much and left Asthmatic on watch.

Later, from our hedge-side sun-trap we watched each sprint and lump of iron launched skyward until it was our turn and Mr Evans alongside a brutal looking bearded Bullet Baxter type arrived in our world with an air of uncaring necessity.

“Right,” the bear announced to the straggling onlookers, most of who longed only for tepid showers or melting Mars bars. “Standing Long-jump. The principal of human accomplishment,” he smirked knowingly at Mr Evans. “Let’s see what these scruffy ha’porths are made of.”

Before my eyes the uncaring losers galvanised to their calling and one by one lined up on the tape measure to swing their arms like possessed apes and sail gracefully through two meters of summer air like accomplished athletes. I swear even Goth girl broke a sweat.

Eventually it was time to put my audacious plan into effect.

Evans eyed me suspiciously as if he could smell the smartarseness at a distance as I approached the line, and I relished his look of confusion as I turned swiftly around to

face the running track leaving my back to the graduated tape used to mark our airborne achievement.

I squatted low and whirled my arms like a demented combine harvester. My skinny legs quivered like coiled Slinkys and my Airware soles got ready to do their bouncing.

Then, with all the grace of a pouncing sea cucumber I thrust my way into space and landed a good five feet away on the patchy grass with a thud.

Bullet Baxter’s jaw opened and closed below his knitted brows in disbelief.

“A singularly outstanding achievement Marshall,” began Mr Evans with exasperation.

“Minus 186 centimetres. You are indeed a moron.”

I raised myself to full height and grinned. “I don’t think so Sir. I think you will find I was jumping to the west, which allowing for the rotation of the earth means I just jumped 29.8 km 186 centimetres Sir. I win.”

Evans reddened, with rage or embarrassment I could not tell, until a second later when a heavy Welsh hand clouted my ear leaving it ringing.

“Precocious little twat,” He sighed. “Detention, every night next week,” and strode away.

As I sat, wearing my bruised ear as a badge of pride, polishing rugby balls for two hours each evening, my dislike of sport festered. My sporting career was over.

My career as a trouble-making pedant however still knows no bounds.

Kahn

By Ali H Scott learned to climb in a fifteenth century church in Bristol. Even after everything – the smashed body, the intrusive dreams, Morgan’s tearful departure – even after he’d thrown his climbing shoes away and given up on it altogether, it still gave him a kind of aching pleasure to stand in the doorway of the church and watch people climb. The building itself had been converted to house four, huge climbing walls. The climbers bouldered between the sandstone arches and scaled the overhangs to arrive in the rafters, face-to-face with a stained-glass window. The colours from the glass splashed across the floor and caught the clouds of chalk dust and the faces of people ascending upwards, laced with ropes. Morgan once joked that it was the closest an atheist could ever get to God. Even from the beginning he had loved the transcendent, slightly ridiculous spectacle of it: the animal grace of the experienced climbers juxtaposed against the clumsy attempts of new arrivals to outwit gravity, the constant flow of bodies upwards and downwards.

He loved the language too: karabiner, belay, draw, daisy chain, hexes.

Outside was better though. He and Morgan spent most of their first summer together climbing the gorge, high on adrenaline and the excitement of a new relationship. They were thrilled by the slippery steepness of the limestone and the threatening mudflats that waited below, daring them to miss a footing and fall. Throughout August their arms and shoulders changed shape, and muscle grew as they learnt to pull their weight in and press their bodies up against the rock to keep their centre of gravity as close to it as possible. All summer they climbed up towards the sky.

In late September Morgan found a hole in the fence up by the Camera Obscura. The path was overgrown and shadowed by trees, drawing a muddy trail downwards towards the mouth of a cave. During the inquest and the police interviews it was referred to as Burwall’s Cave; back then they had just known it as Kahn’s. The mossy entrance was painted with symbols and decorated with prayer flags and candle stubs. Inside were sleeping bags and billycans watched over by statues of Krishna and Siddhartha, old berries and discarded beer bottles.

Following the path around the cave led to a tunnel of low branches and bracken and, finally, out into the light. An exposed ledge looked out across the river Avon, offering the first foothold up towards the sheerest part of the gorge. Scott had been ecstatic to find a place apparently so unknown by other climbers that they spent several days there, sharing chunks of bread and tins of tuna and watching the buzzards circle the updrafts above them.

They knew of Kahn before they saw him. They had heard stories about him from climbers who had seen him from a distance, further down the gorge. They had passed the cave several times to discover a fire smouldering in the opening. Once, Morgan had suggested they hang around so they could see what he was like for themselves, but it had been hot and Scott had wanted to get home.

It was the last evening in September when they discovered a series of handholds leading diagonally out from their ledge, and they stayed later than usual to tentatively explore their new route. The rock was damp and slippery from the morning’s rain.

Morgan noticed him first; a tall, long-haired figure scaling a stretch of rock far above them, silhouetted by the sinking sun as it edged behind the gorge. She had seemed flustered, Scott would recall later; tapping him repeatedly and pointing in the figure’s

direction. He had shielded his eyes from the light and looked up, just in time to catch a glimpse of a spider-like figure moving across the rocks before disappearing behind the lip of an overhang.

Everything that followed the next moment was terrible: the echo of a body breaking against the rocks, Morgan’s screams, the realisation of what had happened. Their memories of the moment itself were later hashed over so many times that they seemed to Scott to have merged completely to produce a singular, sublime image: a man’s figure, illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, falling head-first past their ledge and down into the gorge. His hair glowed as it caught the warmth of the last light and his eyes fixed momentarily on theirs as his flailing hands grasped at the air in front of them. Then he was gone.

Tag

By Phil Chokeword ...I want to tell Lucy about the book that my grandfather bought me when I was a kid about the borstal crim that loves to run cross country but eventually throws the race because he knows that the screw is getting all the glory for his hard work but I don’t because I don’t think she’d get it even though it’s pretty similar to how her bitch of a manager gets all the praise for the team meeting their targets whilst all she gets is a bit of overtime and some extra money to spend on bling but I can’t be arsed to explain it so we just sip our Starbucks lattes and I listen to her bitch about how she had to work another Sunday and how she should have bought that top in New Look after all and last Saturday night with Kyle in Franco’s and how Ryan got kicked off the XFactor and how he’s so hot but I’m not really listening because it’s boring to be honest the same endless shit everyone talks about sometimes I wonder why I even leave the office at lunch time until I remember how drab the shit coloured canteen is and it is nice to see Lucy I guess who I’ve known since school and yeah I do want to look in Topshop so we finish up and grab our matching clutches that I bought because Lucy told me it’d be cute and it kinda is but like most things I only felt good about it at the time then went home and felt as fed up as ever but we walk down the precinct past Footlocker with the new Adidas trainers I want in the window looking at my ass in the reflection wishing mine was round and tight like Lucy’s and I point out the graf that I told Lucy about earlier that was new and looked like shit really but I liked what it said anyhow buy less play more I didn’t even know what it meant really but I was feeling devo when I saw it my credit card bill had just come in so I couldn’t even buy those shoes to pick myself up but it perked me up a little it made me think of being in school and how we used to make do with a couple of quid a week pocket money how we used to play skipping and shit like that that was really pretty cringe but that was what you did at the time and how that skipping rope made me feel happy for a long time unlike that gold clutch that didn’t even cheer me up really it was more the bottle of vino I had that lunch time Lucy doesn’t get it of course and tells me to stop being a fucking gay and she’s right of course skipping is fucking gay unless your six years old so we go into the shopping centre up ahead I see there’s some shit going down two people dressed in black with weird bits sown on them like patch work are chasing each other probably crackheads or on the rob then they’re lost in the crowd it’s weirdly claustrophobic in here with the high roof and lots of echoing so I tell Lucy I’m going to the toilet and walk up to the centre bit that’s really open and you can see all the shops on all the floors and I see the two men in black again and there’s a security guard as well chasing them and it looks for a moment like one is going to catch the other and give him a battering but that’s not what happens instead the man touches him with his hand like we used to do when we played bull dog in the playground I can see it clearly from up here there’s a girl in black as well and the tagged man spots her then she runs off into Primark the man following her the security guard looking confused he doesn’t know where to go now because the first man has run back towards the escalators and it’s all very weird I reckon they must be on the rob or something maybe they’re terrorists maybe and I feel even more claustrophobic and a bit panicky so I text Lucy and tell her I’m going back to work and I hope she gets a nice dress for Saturday that Kyle likes and I briefly wonder if she’ll get blown up but I’m being silly and go and buy those trainers anyway...

Winning

By Ben Smith This life is not a competition.

Broccoli – 'Crackle Song' Last year I felt like I lost my way.

I am a cyclist, I have ridden a bike since I was 5 or 6 years old. I spent much of my teenage years jumping on my bike and riding off to various places around Dorset with my friends to see what mischief we could get into. The bicycle was our mode of transport and our freedom, it got us to the beach, the abandoned quarries and lost in the woods.

As I grew older despite periods of time of not having a bicycle that stuck with me. The bicycle gave me freedom to escape from everything. When I went to university my parents moved house so that returning home outside of term time was to a random town where I knew no one. The bicycle gave me an escape and a purpose and I remember spending days roaming the lanes of Hampshire exploring and riding with no destination.

During my mid-twenties I remember riding my bike around London, Southampton and Brisbane. Clearing my head by turning the pedals and letting my subconscious sift through my thoughts and find meaning. I do my thinking on a bicycle, which is often why I ride alone a lot. Even when I ride with others I am often withdrawn and quiet.

Inside though I'm buzzing, my brain is thinking of songs, poetry, written pieces and blog posts. Or alternatively it's solving work problems, ordering life, creating to do lists.

It rationalising my social and romantic interactions, analysing the past and then letting it go and thinking of the future. * Last year I joined a cycling club and then thought about racing a bicycle. I had raced some cyclocross in the past but there is something about cyclocross which makes it less serious. The race to me is a personal challenge in terms of bike handling, technique for dismounting and remounting and just trying to catch the bike in front of me irrespective of where we are in the field. Road racing requires staying with the pack, if you don't you won't finish the race. It involves concentration and generates pressure.

I didn't like it, I felt I had to ride my bike. I felt I needed to train to be fast enough to compete and then when I wasn't I was disappointed and felt depressed. I lost my way.

The bike stopped being my escape from the stresses of life and became an added stress with which to contend. I didn't have an overnight epiphany and just stop racing and training in fact it took me months to realise what was important to me about riding a bike and what elements weren't.

I realise now that I don't care about whether I'm faster than someone else - I'm still the teenager on the bike with my mates. I just want to ride around and socialise with friends. Talk about our lives and the world, order my thoughts, enjoy the world around us through which we travel. * I do watch competitive cycling on the TV, but I'd much rather be riding than watching and generally for me that is true of all sports. I haven't played football for over 3 years however again I would much rather have a disorganised kick about in the park than join a Sunday league team. Even the 5 a-side tournaments I've played in, the best were those with a focus on socialising where it didn't matter who won or lost and nothing was at stake.

Essentially sport even at a grass roots level as I see it is a microcosm of the world around it which isn't necessarily a positive thing. Many sports have the implicit element of winning and losing which isn't bad outright but we have attached status to being the winner which it doesn't deserve in the same way that accruing status symbols in the rest of our lives is seen as being advancement. Team sports can actively encourage and teach people to work collaboratively but like in modern work environments there is an undercurrent of striving to be the 'star', the linchpin and for the team to work towards your personal goals.

Essentially 'organised' grass roots sport doesn't appeal to me anymore and doesn't fit with my world view. I'll still race cyclocross occasionally as it's such a mixed field generally as to be essentially non-competitive. I'll ride events that are organised by friends and people I respect but I'm done with pressure to achieve or having competition orientated goals. So lets go for a run, a bike ride or maybe kick a football about together sometime.