“Down the chimney,
‘neath the door
through the keyhole
more and more”

Among all of my father’s poems we found over the years, only one was written specifically for Children – “Wee Ann’s Fairies“.

Although it is unquestionably a “childrens poem”, as ever, the story that lies behind it shows it to be a whole lot more than that. Never judge a poem just by its rhyming couplets!

“Wee Ann’s Fairies” is written in a style most children should love, and it was indeed written for one in particular. But the poem was actually written as a present to a good friend of my father, on the birth of his first child. Think of all the presents you have had, or given, to mark a birth. Let me guess – you will probably find them on this list:

1. Pink Baby clothes.
2. Blue baby clothes.
3. Baby toys.
4. Mobiles or other nursery decoration
5. Cot sheets
6. Various baby changing artifacts/kits
7. The more expensive stuff – cots, pushchairs,baby bank accounts….

Now, there is nothing wrong with any of these things; they are all extremely useful to the fledgling parents. But what if, in addition, one of your best friends wrote a poem just for you and your new baby? And one as good as “Wee Ann’s Fairies”. I wasn’t yet born when my father presented his friend with the poem for his new daughter, so I can’t vouch for the reaction. But I think it’s a fair guess to say a few tears were shed, maybe combined with a tentative man hug. This was sometime around the mid 1940s-late 50s, so great big public man hugs were not so common!

Now, the same effect would not be seen if nearly everyone had written a poem. I’m sure the if the answer to the question “What did you get for the baby?” was “Oh, sixteen poems and a babygrow”, this would have garnered a very different response to:

“Oh, lots of lovely things for wee Ann, but our favourite was from Johnnie Mallaghan. He wrote a beautiful poem especially for her – we can’t wait to see her face when she reads it for herself”.

Who was wee Ann, and which friend was her father? To be honest we are not sure.  We have some theories, but as time goes on, memories fade and merge. My father was never one to tell the world about what he was up to – his own personal satisfaction was always enough. So if wee Ann herself is out there, or if her parents are still alive and well – get in touch!

I’ll leave you with the first verse of “Wee Ann’s Fairies”, and your own imagination.

Now, who would I most like to give a great present to, something unique, one that costs nothing except time and thought. Who will I write my poem for……..

One night a little girl was born
A fairy blew a tiny horn
And when the fairies heard the sound
They all came dancing gladly round
Down the chimney
‘Neath the door
Thro’ the keyhole
More and more.

Although the poem “The Knitter” had always struck a special chord with me that eventually led to the book of the same name, being objective – if that’s possible with your own family – it wasn’t my dad’s “best” poem. His war time poems would vie for that honour, and as always, there’s a story behind the words.

I had never come across either of my dad’s great second world war poems until I was almost finished the first draft of my book. Late one night I was sitting chatting with my mum about the old days, and the book, and how I was frustrated and felt I was “missing” a few good stories; I just didn’t know what they were! I sat, just listening to her clearly recall details of things that had happened 60-70 years before; She was 90 at the time, and is still going strong at 97 today! As she talked about the war, and some of her memories of that time, she suddenly got up, went to her bedroom, and pulled out an old shoe box. She produced a wrinkled, faded, ripped old leaflet – here’s the front page:

She told me – proudly – how dad had designed the leaflet for the V-Fund. This was the government scheme to encourage money raising for the war. The back page had a list of all of the planned events:

What really knocked me back were the two poems, written by my dad, that were printed inside the leaflet. It only took one reading to realise these were special, even by his standards. And to see them in their original published, if now somewhat bedraggled form, made them even more special. My version of the story of that leaflet, and the poems, is one of my own favorite sections of the book; this was the story I had felt was missing – you will find it in the “Fighting” chapter.
There’s a lot of my father in these poems. His attitude to war, and that clear distinction he had between wars and the politicians who start them, and the real, ordinary people asked to fight them, comes out clearly, especially in “We Didna Forget”. I’ll close with the original page from that leaflet, still proudly in my possession. In my biased but still humble opinion, the poem deserves a place up there with those of the great war poets we all know – Kipling, Brook, Owen, Sassoon…..and Mallaghan.

There’s a story worth knowing about behind each of my dad’s poems, and over time I plan to tell them all in this blog. To get things going, I wanted to start with a real piece of history – part of his world that you just don’t find anymore – at least in Britain.

Most working class villages in central Scotland before and even shortly after the second world war employed a “Chapper-Up” – a human alarm clock who would know all of the workers homes in the village, when they had to be out of bed to get to work or catch their bus, and would go around “chapping” – that is knocking to all non Scots reading this – loudly on their doors. You still find the equivalent of the chapper-up in some other countries – take a look at Rashid Malik and others in Kashmir who have being doing the same thing for years, in this case mainly around religious festivals..

Now some of you will be thinking, surely these people had normal alarm clocks? Well, many of them did, but what was different then was the importance of not missing that bus to work. Losing a days wage, or even losing your job, was something most families wanted to avoid at all costs. Unlike normal alarm clocks, you couldn’t ignore a chapper-up, even if you wanted to – not least because a good chapper-up would not move on until the person was out of bed. On the rare occasion someone refused to respond (something that would tend to correspond to a previous night spent too long down the pub), the whole village would know about it soon!. Once you were out of bed, they would stay around to update you on the weather, and any local news and gossip – including the latest on lazy neighbors who hadn’t budged that morning. So really the job spec went way beyond the alarm clock bit, taking in the additional roles of the free local newspapers and morning radio!

Calderbank’s best known chapper-up was old Micky Morris. Read the poem and you’ll feel like you’ve got to know Micky pretty well! The short quote below shows how old Micky didn’t give up easily!

“Should you lie a wee while before rising
Tae jump right away you are loth
The pow’r o’ his lungs is surprising
And the whole villages kens yer sloth”

The demise of the Chapper-up captures for me something about technology, something about relative affluence and attitudes to work, and something about the changing landscape of work in Britain. Less and less of us are involved in the tough, hard, shift work needed for productive steelworks, coal mines or shipyards. Less of us actually MAKE things. But I think there is something more significant that has been lost, maybe without us knowing it. At a time when some would claim technology has made communication, forming communities and generally knowing what others are up to in real time so much simpler, in a single generation we have almost lost the sort of tight knit local communities, where the chapper-up acted as one of the key parts of the fabric, – part of the glue that held things together; the kind of community and personal bonds that can only come when real people interact, something that might be simulated, but never replaced by Facebook and a bunch of i-phone Apps!

Modern politicians love to talk about how we need a “big society”. It seems to me we used to have one – and no one had to invent it or feel they had to pay for it. The Big Society was just how people lived. The Knitter – both the poem and book – try to speak to that same thing – the importance of family, and others, in helping us make some sense out of our own lives.

When I first published “The Knitter”, accompanied by this web site and blog, I was sent a beautiful email from an old resident of Calderbank, whom I won’t name. The email told of how this person’s grandfather had recently died, and how his grandfather had often told him as a young boy of Micky Morris, and the Chapper-ups in Calderbank. He had never known of my father’s poems, and it was obvious from the email of both his surprise to find that poem, and also how the poem would help keep the memory of his grandfather alive. Getting an email like that makes the 18 months it took to write the book worth it, all by itself. And it also confirmed for me something I’ve always believed – that great poems are the most effective way of preserving great memories.

So remember, the next time you hear the ear drum piercing sound of your alarm clock, and you drag your weary frame off to the train for your next joyous commute, just wonder for a minute whether you might have preferred to start the day with Old Micky Morris waking you up, seeing how you were and updating you on the local gossip before that first cup of coffee….

“Or maybe a neighbour’s been badly
Tae hospital she has been ta’en
He’ll shout in yer door very gladly
That so and so’s got a wee wean
Or wee Mrs Thingnamay’s laddie
His illness is o’er the worst
I telt them tae gie him some toddy
He’ll be fine if he’s carefully nursed”

From The poem “The Chapper Up”, by John Mallaghan (Snr)

It struck me as I started on my latest blog that – unsurprisingly -  I know a lot about my father, and that it might be useful to flesh out a few details for the vast majority of people out there who don’t! Reading The Knitter will tell you all of course, but even then, since the book is not written as, or structured like, a normal biography, I thought it might be time to offer a short bio of the man without whom The Knitter would not have happened. You know where you can find out more …….

John Mallaghan, know as Johnnie to most that knew him well, was born in 1915 near Holytown, a small working class village in Lanarkshire Scotland, shortly after the start of World War 1. Many of the residents worked in the nearby steelworks and coal mines after the war.

Johnnie grew up in a typically large Catholic family of the time, one of seven children. He went to work in the coal mines after leaving school. However he also began to show his talent in a broad spectrum of the arts at an early age, and started a 4 year correspondence course in Commercial Art from Bennett College Sheffield, being awarded the equivalent of a modern degree in May 1940. By this time of course, the Second World War had started, during which he served in the Home Guard.

During and after the war, he continued to become well known in the local community for his paintings, poetry and musicianship, playing accordion, mouth organ, and piano at parties, weddings, and occasionally semi-professionally at various functions. Some of his best poems were written during the war, particularly the two written especially for the fund-raising effort for the “V-Fund” – “We Didna Forget” and “Why Can’t They Understand”. Interestingly his name was missspelt on the front page, which he would not have liked!

Johnnie married Margaret Shaw, from Calderbank – all of two miles away from Holytown – a few years after the war. He had returned to the coalmines, but was determined to make something better of his life and make use of his qualifications. However, the reality of post war life, and the fact that Margaret also came from an even larger Catholic family, made that difficult. He briefly left the mines to take a commercial design job in Glasgow, but a combination of his own concern about his colour blindness, and the birth of the first of his four children, soon saw him back in the coal mines until his eventual retirement in 1970.

He continued writing poems, painting wonderful pictures and playing his music right up until his death in 1994. The picture below shows him playing his accordion to two of his grandchildren (the authors two children) around 1985/6.

Before he died, his family helped him collect together his poems – or at least those we could find or he could remember – and had him record them on an old cassette recorder, complete with introductions and background, and with each poem interspersed with him playing some music. After this, we arranged to publish them in a limited edition, principally for the extended family.

Sixteen years after his death, his poems have inspired the book written by his son John, a book taking its name, structure and themes from one of his father’s poems, “The Knitter”. All of the poems, and the readings of them digitised from the original cassette recordings, can also now be found on the web site for the book
The poems finally have the “world-wide” audience they deserve.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” From “God Bless You Mr Rosewater”, Kurt Vonnegut

“Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the universe.” From “Hocus Pocus”, Kurt Vonnegut.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.” From “Mother Night”, Kurt Vonnegut

“Listen. We are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you any different”. From “Timequake” , Kurt Vonnegut

Some people I can admire. Some I can appreciate their true genius. But not many I would call heroes. At the head of that small band I would place Kurt Vonnegut. It’s now three years since he died, and re-reading one of his last published works, “A Man Without a Country” showed me again, as if I needed any reminding, what we are all missing. In a very slim and sparsely populated volume, he still manages to cram in more wisdom than you’ll find anywhere else. Except maybe in another Kurt Vonnegut book.

Kurt Vonnegut was to most of us “just” a writer. He was also an artist; an idealist; a sceptic; a humanist. He was to my mind the true master of the deceptively simple statement in service of a giant imagination. My father shared a lot of these same traits, and the thought kept surfacing reading “A Man Without a Country” that I wished I had spent some time when he was alive talking to him about Vonnegut’s books, and his thinking, and sharing some of his views on what’s important in life. Although he had enough heroes of his own to be going on with, and enough books to read, music to play and poems to write to keep him busy enough!

Maybe, when someone moves from the “admired” list to the much shorter “hero” list, that can only be a personal thing; the reasons, and feelings, can only be our own.

Even so, I’d have been disappointed if my Dad had told me he didn’t like Kurt Vonnegut, so maybe it’s just as well I didn’t spend that time sharing my thoughts with him.  It’s a comforting thought that they both, in their own unique voices, said the same things, and left such similar legacies. What my dad said to me a hundred times about politicians, trades union leaders and any other pompous blusterer is neatly summed up in a line from Cats Cradle :  “People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order…..in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.”

It might be comforting to think they are both somewhere else right now having a look down at us all, and having a “wee natter” about the mess we are all making back down here. But the humanist in both of them wouldn’t see things that way. They’ve both been here, done their bit, left behind great memories and a slightly better world after their visit.

“So it Goes”.

Remember, back in the day, it was all so much easier! Publishing seemed black and white – either you could convince a publisher to take your book, or not. Your percentage chance of success were low, but we all knew that. Your percentage chance of ever making any money were even lower – but although we all knew that too, we ignored it. Dream on – it’s the only way!

Now of course, it has always been possible to ” go it alone”. Way back when publishing first started, all books were “self published” – because the printer/publisher/author were the same people. That soon changed, and clear blue water – some might say a giant wall – appeared between the lonely author and the means of getting the words out to readers. Let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the industry, and say this wall is there to ensure that only the best quality gets into the minds of the public, and appears on the shelves of our book stores and libraries.

But as we all know, things have changed again. Technology, the web and the digitisation of all things have conspired to open up the world of publishing to all. Surely a great thing? Surely the democratisation of content, and knocking down the artificial wall between the author and the reader is good for all? That gets me to the real point of this post. I chose to “self publish” my first book, The Knitter. I did that for some well thought through reasons, including ensuring my own personal vision for what is a very personal book reached the page, wanting to test the market before putting my efforts into finding a publisher, and wanting to focus on the writing and not on the attempt to “get published” (both full time jobs!).

The Knitter is my first book, so like all good honest tech literate wannabe authors, I scoured the blogs, web sites and any other outlets I could find for all of those gurus, know-alls and battle hardened creatives, so I could learn from their combined wisdom. Now – there is plenty of good advice out there, and it’s needed; getting your masterpiece read may have become a lot easier, but it has also become a lot more complex with more choice than most of us want to be faced with. And choice and complexity always bring with them shysters, all eager and willing to help.

But here’s my problem. So much of the good advice out there is wrapped up in prejudice from the very people who are best placed to help. Like many others before me, my question was “What’s the best way for ME, in MY SITUATION, to get The Knitter out to the public?  There is no one right answer to that, but as I tried to answer the question, I became more and more annoyed at the kind of “help” I was offered. And nothing annoyed me more than that great pejorative term “vanity publishing”, and that collective term for all that’s allegedly bad in the industry the “vanity publisher”.  The first definition I saw of the term got my warning lights flashing:

“A vanity publisher is any company which charges a client to publish a book, or offers to include short stories, poems or other literary or artistic material in an anthology and then invites those included in it to buy a copy of that anthology.”

I’ll deal in future blogs with the pros and cons of the different choices available for publishing – and maybe even come up with some new terms in the process, because the current ones don’t work for me! It seems to me as an outsider that we are working with labels invented by the traditional publishing industry to place as much FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) out there as possible, while it gets its own response together to the tsunami of change it faces. There are reasons for going down any publishing route, and so long as you are clear on what makes most sense for you, and you keep your “shyster watch” switched on at all times, you will be fine. Watch out for more detail in future blogs, but for now, here are some commonly used definitions to be going on with:

Vanity publishing

Vanity publishing is a pejorative term, referring to a publisher contracting with authors regardless of the quality and marketability of their work. They appeal to the writer’s vanity and desire to become a published author, and make the majority of their money from fees rather than from sales. The author pays all of the cost of publication and undertakes all of the risk.

In his guide How to Publish Yourself author Peter Finch states that such presses are “to be avoided at all costs.” Because there is no independent entity making a judgment about their quality… vanity press works are often perceived as deserving skepticism from distributors, retailers, or readers. Some writers knowingly and willingly enter into such deals, placing more importance on getting their work published than on profiting from it. Authors normally retain all rights to the material, and the books printed are owned by the author.

Subsidy publishers

A subsidy publisher distributes books under its own imprint, and is therefore selective in deciding which books to publish. Subsidy publishers, like vanity publishers, take payment from the author to print and bind a book, but contribute a portion of the cost as well as adjunct services such as editing, distribution, warehousing, and some degree of marketing. As with commercial publishers, the books are owned by the publisher and remain in the publisher’s possession, with authors receiving royalties for any copies that are sold. Most subsidy publishers also keep a portion of the rights from any book that they publish. Generally, authors have little control over production aspects such as cover design.

“True self-publishing”

“True” self-publishing means authors undertake the entire cost of publication themselves, and handle all marketing, distribution, storage, etc. All rights remain with the author, the completed books are the writer’s property, and the writer gets all the proceeds of sales. Self-publishing can be more cost-effective than vanity or subsidy publishing and can result in a much higher-quality product, because authors can put every aspect of the process out to bid rather than accepting a preset package of services.

Print on Demand (POD)

Short run printing is also called Print-on-demand (POD) or Print Quantity Needed (PQN). Many major publishers use POD printing to produce small quantities of older titles, or to produce galleys for sending out to book reviewers and sales reps. Some innovative publishers are now using this technology to print initial orders for a new book until marketplace demand can be ascertained. It is now common to see the technology used for vanity and subsidy press operations—often referred to as POD publishers. POD publishers generally do not screen submissions prior to publication, and many are web-based. They accept uploaded digital content as Microsoft Word documents, text files, HTML or RTF files, as printing services for anyone who is willing to pay Authors choose from a selection of packages, or design a unique printing package that meets their requirements.  Many critics dismiss POD as another type of vanity press. One major difference is that POD publishers have a connection to retail outlets like Amazon and Books in Print that vanity presses generally do not.

Although these definitions may be broadly accurate, they hide the real flexibility prospective authors have today. Too many commentators still appear to treat the world as being neatly split into strict categories like these, when in fact the distinctions are being constantly blurred. Take my case – I chose to publish through Authorhouse – knowing it probably wasn’t the cheapest option for me; but it suited me, with no publishing background, to deal with a one-stop-shop that gave me the flexibility I wanted. The Knitter is available from them, POD and e-book. It’s also on Amazon and pretty much everywhere else, and most important to me it is also available from my own web site. I own full rights to the book, and if my master plan works out, I will move to using a “traditional” publisher when I have proven I have a book that sells.

So which publishing bucket do Authorhouse fall in to? They are not a traditional publisher, but as many as 1 in 20 books sold in the US come from them! They charge the author for their services, so are the a “vanity publisher”? Are they a POD publisher? Are they even a “publisher”? The definitions are becoming a block in themselves. Authorhouse were in my case the right choice to get my masterpiece out to an unsuspecting world.

I may start a campaign to have the terms “vanity publisher” and “True self publishing” wiped from the vocabulary. There is nothing “true” about doing it all yourself. There is potentially something cheaper and more satisfying, but it does not result in something better. Never forget, the only important element of this whole thing is the quality of the book you are trying to publish. If you lose sight of that – if the process becomes more important to you – you will almost certainly fail.

Vanity is in the mind, not in the process.

There are countless sources to help you make your decision on what’s best for you, including some future blogs here!. A few to get you going -

http://www.vanitypublishing.info/index.html

http://writersdigest.coverleaf.com/writersdigest/20090304/?pg=39

http://dogearpublishing.net/resources_writers_digest_dog_ear.aspx – In the business, so be careful – but they do have a decent comparison of publishing companies.)

Back in the early 1960s, Marshal Mcluhan probably didn’t know just how prophetic he was being when he coined the phrase “The Medium is the Message”, talked about how technology would shape “the global village”, and mused over the effects new technologies – including the printing press – have had over the way we think. Although it’s often misinterpreted, the truth in that first famous statement is even more evident today – that the form and nature of the  “Medium” embeds itself in the “Message”, creating a relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. Saying something with a smile on your face in front of someone can be taken in a whole different way via email or posted on Twitter or Facebook! So it goes for the consumption of music, or the consumption of the written word in “books”.

Though the “World Wide Web” was invented almost thirty years after he wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy, and ten years after his death, McLuhan may have prophesied the web technology seen today as early as 1962:

“The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a salable kind”.  (Marshall McLuhan 1962)

The music industry has been going through a seismic shift in the last few years that has seen an end to most giant retailers, and caused panic across the industry. How can we make as much money as before? How can we stop kids just “stealing” our product? The same effects and reactions are now being seen in the publishing world. With my own first book “The Knitter” published this year, and seeing first hand how the industry was changing, made me think again about McLuhan.

I asked myself three questions.

1. Are we getting confused between the medium and the message?
2. Will the  digital world mean the death of the great album, or the classic novel?
3. In the long run, will the nature of the medium change us, and maybe even what we are capable of consuming?

First some data. In the first half of this year, there were almost twice as many physical books sold than e-books in the US, and five or six times as many in other parts of the world. So much for the death of the novel? But wait – most predictions say that at least in the US, e-Book sales will outstrip printed books by the end of 2011, with the rest of the world following suit not long after.  There are plenty of positives in this – prices for books will tumble, convenience and access to the written word will get easier, and maybe  most exciting of all, it has already become easier to publish, and so writing is likely to become more democratic with many more writers being encouraged to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard! My own first book, “The Knitter”, was published simultaneously in print and e-book formats.  One big downside should not be forgotten though – making it easier to publish makes it easier to publish rubbish! With volume comes quality control issues. That does not refer to “The Knitter” of course!

So what about those three questions?

1. I think too often the arguments do get confused between the medium and the message. I still own hundreds of vinyl albums, some of which I also taped on cassettes I still own, moving on via a short sojourn with mini- discs I am now the proud owner of a thousand or so CDs, all of which are now digitised. As I type this blog, I am listening to  the Stones Exile on Main Street on my PC – which I own on all aforementioned formats. Leaving aside the fact I should never have been forced to give Mr Jagger some of my hard earned cash multiple times, I can safely say it is still one of the great albums of all time, whatever the “medium”. Although I have to say I still think it sounds best on vinyl.
2. Will the digital world spell the end for the great novel or the classic album?  It won’t be the end for either – but this is where I start to get just a little worried. The ways that young people are consuming music today has made it a much more transient exercise for many.  The same can be said for the written word. That doesn’t mean no-one is making great music or writing great books; it does mean the cultural importance of the “book” and the “album” is diminishing, and the act of surfing through information, dabbling in music, and a mass media driven from the basic assumption of short attention spans, are all becoming the norm.
3. That bring us to one of McLuhan’s key points – is the nature of the medium affecting us in ways we might not yet understand? That’s an easy one – yes of course it is. And there’s little doubt over time this will result in some permanent changes in how we think, how we interact, how we learn, how we “read”. The important question is – does this mean things are “getting worse”?

E-Books + Kindle + Sony E-Reader + iPAD = The death of books? That was the question posed in the title of this post, and the answer is -only if we let it happen. Great books do not come from great devices. They come from great authors. The printing press fueled an explosion in the written word.  The combination of the web and electronic publishing has fueled an even bigger explosion. Although I am personally always going to prefer the physical feeling of reading owning “books”, and will always want a library at home with actual printed copies of books I love,  I know this will be married to the convenience of e-readers and heading off on holiday with 100 books in my pocket. But surely there is something about the medium of the printed book that brings the depth, the uniqueness, the “special” nature of a favorite novel that an invisible string of bits inside a Kindle never can?

That’s why we should remember McLuhan’s words – the medium may not be the message, but it does effect how we interpret it, how we consume it and in the end how we perceive it. And that’s what we have to be wary of – if we let the short term, the “easy”, the dipping in and out, the surface skimming that new media drags us towards dominate too much, then we could really see quality being squeezed out to the periphery. We have to make sure great authors are not lost in the fog of mediocrity; making writing and publishing easy does not make everyone a great writer.

Ever the optimist, let me finish on a positive note. At a recent Apple launch, Steve Jobs noted that “kids don’t read books anymore!”. Well, not for the first time, Mr Jobs has gotten it badly wrong – or at least he has put it in a way that puts helping the Apple share price above all else. I think what kids are actually doing is something their parents, and Steve, get wrong too often – they are  not confusing the medium and the message; they are just starting to consume books in different ways. What we must do is make sure that this and the next few generations aren’t molded by new media into habits  & social activities that make the writing and consumption of complex,  multi-layered novels more and more difficult. But as McLuhan understood, what if they end up creating something even more exciting and challenging? Maybe both good and poor quality can multiply at the same time. What if his “global village” starts to create new forms of the novel together. What if the answer to the equation is that we spawn a new sort of creativity, without giving up the old way?

What if the next “Great American Novel” is written by 100 great novelists sparking off each others creativity? What odds for a Pulitzer Prize being won by a “Wiki – Novel” in the next ten years? Maybe even one that keeps on growing, and changing, with new authors popping up all of the time, and constantly surprising readers long after it wins. Don’t bet against it.

If “The Knitter” is about one thing above everything else crammed in there, it’s about memories. What they are, how important they are, how they can play tricks on us, but most of all how in the end they are what define us all and how much our lives were really worth.

More important than our own stored memories of events are the ones we leave behind; how others remember us and how we have managed to touch others along the way and maybe make just a little difference. Now I’m sure some readers will be thinking of switching off at the moment, thinking here we go, another drippy new age post! Well read on, because that’s not where this is going.

By constructing The Knitter as a “memory tale”, one woven out of all kinds of random strands of personal memories, stories told, my father’s poems and some imagination thrown in to try to fill in the gaps, I think I have ended up with a much more interesting and worthwhile book. And in the process of writing it, I became completely convinced of something I hadn’t really thought about up to then – memories were never designed to capture the fine details of events, but to cling on to how things felt. There is a moment in Chapter 10 of the book that sums this up, when the author’s father, Johnnie, says to him:  “Don’t trust your memory John. It’s the last thing you should trust for the details of anything, but the only thing to trust for the feelings.”

Any attempt to distinguish what’s “true” from what’s almost true or way off the mark would be missing the point of the book, and explaining those differences is not something I ever plan to do.  Readers might be very surprised to learn which events happened exactly as written!  Some of the stories in there were entirely imagined; but every single word in there feels like the absolute truth. And that’s what is important.

Writing The Knitter led me back to appreciate again the great poems my father wrote – and at the same time made me realise what a perfect medium great poetry is to preserve memories. Poems, even more than novels and memoirs, seem to work in the same way memories do. They bring out the truth of the feelings, where the nature of novels maybe forces too much focus on the details. What better way than the poem The Stiff Hutch to get to the core what coal mining was really about around the time of nationalisation? What better way than The Travers to capture what a family was really all about? And how better to preserve a part of culture now gone than with The Chapper Up?

I’m going to leave the final words to a direct quote from The Knitter. The other thing that seemed to fall out naturally from constructing the book as a memory tale was that it never at any point evolved as a time ordered story. It came together in much the same way as memories conspire to work over time – as a patchwork of feelings, events and other happenings that take on their own sequence – or more to the point where the exact order of things becomes meaningless. The quote below comes right from the final page of The Knitter”:

“Thoughts flooded his mind simultaneously, jostling to find their own space in the queue. Not clear pictures and events, just a torrent of bits and pieces, some standing by themselves, others connected in all kinds of unpredictable ways which, if they could be pieced together, would all add up to a life. He didn’t want to start piecing them together though, and he definitely didn’t feel he had to, because that’s how he had always seen life anyway. Who wants a nice, safe, cosy, ordered, predictable sequence of things, all neatly under control, when you can have a jumbled, chaotic, messy pot of stew? The mess would do just fine, so long as the memories all add up to a life you can feel good about.”

So the next time you find yourself screwing your face up trying to remember some precise detail of what someone said or what happened a long time before – just relax and try to remember the feeling.

A fair amount of The Knitter is set around a small area of West Lothian that just happened to sit on some enormous coal seams. I’ve talked a lot in the book, and in previous blogs, about the talent that has been produced, and gone largely unnoticed, from among the coal miners – including my father.

There’s a little triangle of fairly non-descript towns within a couple of miles of each other: Whitburn, Blackburn and Bathgate. They are non-descript not because of the people, but just because they look and feel like so many similar villages and towns in the area. A bit worse for wear; like an old guy you pass on a street corner – obviously been through a lot, not ended up as anything special, but is probably hiding an interesting history if you took the time to find out some more.

So apart from a few coal mines producing the odd coal miner-poet, surely nothing of interest has come out of there? Surely that little triangle of ordinariness can’t have inspired anything out of the ordinary? You’d be surprised:

• Dario Franchitti is one of the most famous racing car drivers in the USA and won the Indianapolis 500 this year (2010). His name doesn’t give it away, but Dario was born in Bathgate – and he has won more races in the USA than any other British driver in History.
• David John Mcdonald was also born in Bathgate to the local minister. Later as David Tennant he became a great actor, as well as spending years hurtling around time and space in a police box as Doctor Who.
• A Bathgate doctor, James Young Simpson discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform and successfully introduced it for safe medical use.

Now that might be enough for most small towns. But the West Lothian triangle’s achievements go much further. What other two square miles of Britain has produced two winners of the Simon Cowell star making machine? In truth it was only one actual winner, but given that the “loser” was none other than Susan Boyle, best known scot since Sean Connery and watched on youtube more than all other Scots put together, I’ll call her a winner too! Susan was born and by all accounts still hangs around a lot in Blackburn, a couple of miles from Leon Jackson’s house. Leon who? some will say – but Leon actually won X -Factor.

So there we are – the “non-descript triangle” has given us among other things safe surgery, a superstar sportsman, a couple of modern “stars” and Doctor Who – not bad for a clutch of wee working class towns in central Scotland! Not to mention of course a person I’d argue was at least as talented as any of them – my father – not born there, didn’t live there, but felt a part of the area nonetheless having jumped off a bus most weekdays to work in the mines.

Does any of this mean these places were special somehow? Is there something about them that has made them produce more than there expected share of talent? I think not. What can make places like this special is their very ordinariness. For some that can make you want to push for something better; for others it can make you start believing you might really have some talent in comparison to what you see around you; for others still it probably makes them want to dream a bit about what might be. For most of course life changing things won’t happen.

But if you ever find yourself driving through Whitburn, on through Blackburn and into Bathgate, don’t look down on any of it. Don’t be tempted to think “this looks a bit shabby, a bit boring, nothing interesting could ever happen here”. Remind yourself that this is a hell of a place! A place that gave us Doctor Who, Chloroform, an Indy 500 winner and Susan Boyle! And that coal miner poet I heard about. What was his name again?

Music features in so many ways in The Knitter, as it has done throughout my life. My dad playing his accordion or mouth organ was a constant memory growing up; singing at parties; singing in Church; gyrating to Tamla Motown songs at the dancing on a Saturday night; even the way memories of music plays a key part at my dad’s funeral.

A life – all 58 years so far – surrounded by music could only ever lead to one thing of course. It’s almost June – it’s Glastonbury time! Glastonbury is probably the only place on earth where I can get access to the range of music that’s filled all those years up to now, crammed into one long weekend

And it’s a roasting hot day, which can only fill me with hope – blind unfulfilled hope I’d guess – that this year will be rain free, and full of end to end “Glastonbury Moments”.  It’s probably the sheer scale and variety of the festival that has led to the endless discussions and arguments over the greatest “Glastonbury Moment” – that definitive time where something more than just a great concert, or a great performance happens. This has to be something that transcends just the music; transcends even having to have “been there”. I didn’t see Radiohead in 1997 – but I can believe that is up there with the best. Most people assume that all great Glastonbury moments must take place on the Pyramid stage, but as great an amphitheatre as that is, some of the great moments happen when you least expect them. And they are personal moments – one man’s Glastonbury Moment has the next man scratching his head wondering what’s the big deal? Just like some of the best “Archie Gemmill Moments“.

So that got me thinking – what would I say is my favourite “Glastonbury moment” – and would it deserve to be described as a real Archie Gemmill Moment? Just taking the last few years alone, there have been so many great moments – no doubt some of mine related to approaching pensionable age, and dragging some heroes from the 60s and 70s who look uncomfortably like the average Glasto goer’s dad (or even granddad!)  Here are just a few:

• Neil Young’s endless finale to “Rocking in the free world” followed by “A day in the life”.
• Being right at the front for Bruce, and seeing the sweat rise from him like a fog as he sang “The River”.
• Watching Brian Wilson in the only dry period at that years Glastonbury – and seeing the look on his face every time he started an old Beach Boys classic – and two girls jumped on surf boards for some real “crowd surfing”!
• A sequence of The Hold Steady,  Arcade Fire and Bjork that was as varied and inspiring as great rock can get, and made me feel sorry for people who look down on “pop” as something second class.
• Watching Leonard Cohen with a group of like minded people – worried beforehand the old man wouldn’t be able to sing any more, but blown away by the entire concert. And try NOT to cry like a baby as 75,000 people sing along to “Hallelujah”!
• Jay-Zs entrance – and a concert that proved that great performers are great performers, no matter what sort of music they play.

I could go on and on. One of my fondest memories, and in my top 10 Glastonbury Moments, was early one morning when Billy Bragg showed up and serenaded us over breakfast in “Henry’s Beard”. I’m not sure I could ever hand on heart say there was just one moment that deserves to be up there as my top Glastonbury Moment. But I forced myself – and the answer has surprised even me. It was in 2007 – a rain sodden, mud bath of a Glastonbury. I was watching Rodrigo Y Gabriella headlining on the Jazz World Stage. All through the concert there was a horrible, seeping drizzle that somehow seemed to complement the fact we were standing rock still, wellies cemented in two feet of mud and wondering if we’d have to just fall asleep in that position. Although I’d been admiring their playing, it wasn’t the right time, place or weather for that kind of music. Any kind of music. Then something happened. A very simple acoustic intro signalled the start of a tune we thought we might have recognised. And with a simple, silent hand gesture, Rodrigo invited the audience to join in. And 25,000 people started singing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”, accompanied only by a couple of acoustic guitars strumming in the background. It was unexpected. It was spontaneous. And it was as uplifting as music can get. And we got all the words right, I’ m sure! You can almost get a feeling for it from this youtube clip.

So are all Glastonbury moments worthy of “Archie Gemmill” status? Never. But a few of them are, and that drizzly, soaking rendition of an old Pink Floyd song is one of them. It came from out of nowhere, and took me to somewhere I couldn’t have imagined just a few minutes before.

So next month, it’s back down to Pilton Farm. Whatever the weather, it will be great. Walking through the gates sometime on the Wednesday is an annual Glastonbury Moment all by itself! I’m already looking forward to The Hold Steady.  The Flaming Lips will be as great live as ever. And the Leftfield is back! There are lower key gems like the Unthanks and Midlake, and closing with Stevie Wonder on Sunday should be a joy. But best of all is that I know there will be a clutch of totally unexpected, glorious moments that just happen. I don’t know on what day, or on which stage – but I know they will happen. And it’s those Glastonbury moments I’m looking forward to most of all.

So – once more with feeling:

“How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have you found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.”