Patrick C. Notchtree's Blog: Patrick C Notchtree, page 5

It's been a long while since I posted here. Life has just been so hectic. "James" has been going through a a major crisis (another one!) and has needed a lot of support. He's come out the other end OK though. Really not please with "Elaine" though.
"Bernadette" devastated by the sudden of her husband "Neil". Came home to find him dead the chair, the day before they were due to holiday in Florida. "Karen" very supportive by phone, maybe she'll visit "Bernadette" in Canada later in the year.
On the recommendation of granddaughter "Donna", am now reading "The Fault in our Stars" by John Green. About half way through and I'll review when I'm done.
If you have no idea who these people are, you haven't read The Clouds Still Hang!

"The Clouds Still Hang" The Clouds Still Hang (http://www.thecloudsstillhang.com) has recently earned two five star reviews on Amazon.com.(http://www.amazon.com/Clouds-Still-Ha...)
Very pleasing.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is of course a classic and so it's hard to come to it completely open minded. Also I confess I read it after having first seen and loved the TV mini-series (which is infinitely better than the later film). I was surprised at first at how short the book is. But every page is full, there is not a wasted word.
It has so many themes that touch us all - status, religion, love, sexuality, nostalgia. Of course for me the developing relationship between Charles and Sebastian was of major interest, and while in the book and TV series the gay context is largely implied (and crudely and crassly exposed in the later film), one is never sure whether they did or didn't. Of course Waugh was writing at a time and of a time when homosexuality was illegal and meant social death. In my own writing I was able to be more open and honest about my protagonist's gay sexuality and loves. The love between Charles and Sebastian is clear but fails to save Sebastian from his own inner demons as Charles, who represents to him an escape from the weight of his family, their religion and expectations, becomes instead a part of that world he is trying to escape.
I recommend anyone to read this book although non-Brits may find its social setting harder to comprehend. It is not a long book. The watch the TV series. Not the film which will ruin it for you.




View all my reviews

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If anybody has read my book, they will know that my mother suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Memory is therefore precious to me as I am now at the age when – with hindsight – she first started to display symptoms.
I've recently watched a TV programme about this with actress Maureen Lipman investigating memory. Two things especially struck chords with me; the treatment of PTSD through ‘talking therapy’ and the way in which memory is recalled.
For my own PTSD, which remained undiagnosed for decades, I found talking was very hard. To speak about the ‘principal event’ was impossible for a long time and in the end it was my wise counsellor who suggested writing rather than talking. This painful process eventually managed to break the logjam in my head and of course eventually led to my book. It has been of benefit because not only can I now write about it as I have in detail in the book, but I can also talk about it, not easily and not in every situation, but writing therapy has worked.
Recall is interesting too. My book starts with my own earliest memory and it was interesting in the programme that all the experts said the science of brain development means that 3 is the earliest we can formulate long term memories because it is tied to the development of language. I’d never thought of that connection before. And of course, the memory that opens the book is when our protagonist is aged 3.
What I found as I started to write was that childhood memories might just start with a single image. For example the lido incident. All I thought I had was the image of me sinking under the water, eyes unexpectedly open, looking at the wall of the pool as I sank. I made a note of it but then as I thought about it I started to recall more about that day; running there, the lockers, the attempt to teach me to swim, his command “Follow me!” and as time went on, actual dialogue. As the book built up, this was happening all over the place, not just the lido but long division, the trauma of the night before we moved north, the ‘principal event’ referred to above and more recent memories.
Much later, the same happened in the police interview. Initially there was no memory of the incident in question leading to confusion and a series of “No comment” replies. There was of course good reason to suppress this memory but as time went by, that day in the forest came back in all its unwelcome gruesomeness. So this process doesn't just apply to childhood memories, but adult ones too.
It was as though all these memories formed some kind of chain and once one started to tug, the whole lot could be pulled out of their hitherto unknown recess back into daylight. Fascinating.
No wonder the book took nearly twenty years to write, but at least if my own memory fails in the future, it’s all there in print.

While I do not rejoice in the death of a human being, I am not about to mourn her passing. My mother suffered with a slow death through Alzheimer’s so I can sympathise with her family to that extent. There it ends.

Thatcher supported brutal regimes around the world, from the Khmer Rouge to Pinochet; she opposed sanctions on South Africa's apartheid regime while referring to Nelson Mandela and the ANC as "typical terrorists".

She even managed to scar her achievement in liberating the people of the Falkland Islands by shunning the maimed at the victory celebrations and service.

She exhibited the vindictive side of Conservatism, what I think of as the “Skylon Syndrome”. (You might have look up what happened to the Skylon, and why.)

She enacted the vicious anti-gay “Section 28” thankfully repealed by the Labour government. She embodied all the prejudices of the small minded lower middle class, fearful and contemptuous of the working classes only just removed from her, and jealous of the upper classes whom she scorned, eventually to her cost.

Her assault on the lower and working classes was never ending. She cut milk for school children, lowered the top tax rate while raising the bottom one, doubled VAT, and privatised pretty much everything she could without creating competition. She crushed the unions and then manufacturing industry, especially mining, the real crime being her indifference in what happened to those communities afterwards – after all, they were almost all Labour voting areas. She looked after what she called “our people”. There was no strategy to cater for those cast on the scrapheap by her accelerated drive to move from a manufacturing to a service economy, itself a flawed policy as it turns out. Those Conservatives who showed some social conscience were castigated as “wets” and derided.

From having the safest and most technically advanced coal mining industry in the world – and yes, there was a cost to that – we now import 50 million tons of coal a year from countries where thousands die in mines extracting it. It’s cheap of course, while we walk around on an island with millions of tons still in the ground.

She deregulated almost everything she could, ignoring why the regulations were there in the first place. The classic example being the need to superheat animal feed, which was costly. When these regulations were relaxed, what did we get? Surviving prions and Mad Cow disease and human deaths from CJD; with its long incubation period, how many more are to come? Mad Cow indeed!

The right to buy was a charter for profiteering landlords. Once homes were cheaply bought out of the social housing stock, what incentive was there for councils to build more homes? And many of those who bought now find they have houses they can only sell at a loss to private investors who are rubbing their hands at each auction of repossessed homes.

And then she launched the 'Big Bang', pushing high risk financial deregulation of the financial industry that directly led to the global recession, bailouts, and cuts we're facing today.

She destroyed the social consensus, dividing a society that by and large had held to a single set of values. This was replaced by the “loads-a-money”, yuppie culture where all that mattered was your bank balance. The price of everything but the value of nothing. The yobbery we see today, epitomised by the growing number of ‘neets’ and the social disorder affecting so many town centres in the evenings – these are Thatcher’s children, raised in the era when “me first” became socially acceptable.

Thatcher is the reason for today's housing crisis, the welfare crisis, the financial crisis, and the rising unemployment and hardship in today’s Britain.

She spent her post later years as a consultant for Phillip Morris, pedlars of death by tobacco. Her much vaunted bravery was nothing of the sort. Frankly, she just didn’t give a damn!

Thatcher’s legacy? We’re living it.

Something of a setback, but Smashwords have in effect censored The Secret Catamite 1, The Book of Daniel. I have 'unpublished' it from Smashwords.
This is because it contains descriptions of sex between underage boys. These are a part of the story but it is not an erotic book, in fact I was as careful as I could be to avoid pornographic narrative and most reviewers have been positive about a sensitive and caring portrayal of adolescent love.
The book would make no sense without these scenes and neither would the rest of the trilogy which describe Simon's later life.
The whole thrust of the trilogy is the damage that early sexualisation can do, even when not coercive, and this is developed at length in the chapter in the last book where Simon goes over the past with a psychiatrist.
The book is clearly advertised as adult in nature and Book 1 even has a large, red "18" logo on the cover.

Some good news – my book The Clouds Still Hang has now been published by Amazon on CreateSpace. I must have read their terms too quickly at first and decided against CreateSpace because my book does contain some explicit sexual narrative. But thanks to the forums here where someone wrote “just tick the over 18s box” I decided to have a go.
It was a generally easy process. My cover wasn’t quite the right dimensions, instead of bouncing it as an error like some others, they corrected it for me. This helpful attitude pervaded the whole process. Based on advice here I decided to wait for a hard copy proof, which arrived the other day. Because of the caveats they placed I was wary but when it arrived it was fine – fully bound too. Other hard copy proofs have arrived ‘loose leaf’’ – don’t drop it!
The main benefit though is that the CreateSpace edition is priced at about 60% of the Lulu price and is of at least equal quality. While I still expect the bulk of sales, such as they are, to continue to be digital, the CreateSpace edition does offer hope of better sales for the paperback.

My trilogy, The Clouds Still Hang received an interesting and thought provoking review this week. He had started by reading the free download of The Secret Catamite 1, The Book of Daniel which was “one of the more enjoyable reads I have had in some time”. When he reached the end of that, “I immediately went to the LULU site and bought the complete book in both the print and eBook versions. That attests to how eager I was to follow the story of Simon and Daniel, and how obligated I felt to the author for providing me with such a wonderful experience.” All good so far.
Sadly the story doesn’t continue as the author wanted. Real life often doesn’t, and “The Clouds Still Hang” is a real story. So I wrote to him pointing this out, and was quite surprised when he replied. It seems he has had some experiences that echo some of Simon’s in my book, as he wrote, “Your book touched me deeply; it dealt with the subject of coming of age with a similar attitude to my own. Until lately, that was unknown in the published world, and it is still rare. You were able to engage me as a reader and as a person; that is special, and it would have been ungrateful and unforgivable of me to remain silent about what you have written.”
He went on saying he felt awful for making some negative comments about the book, saying, “Naturally, I would like it to be perfect; but the inherent beauty and humanity is compelling and more than sufficient to engage the reader.”
I wish I could write the perfect book. Is there such a thing? Harper Lee? I am no Harper Lee. In a later email, he wants me to continue writing an entirely fictional story about how the relationship between Simon and Daniel continues. Yes, although “The Clouds Still Hang” is listed as fictional, this is because I did not want it to be taken completely literally as a factual biography of the author. There are always those pedants (I know because I am sometimes very pedantic) who will pick out some historical anachronism or argue that this or that didn’t happen just like that. As I wrote back to him concerning our relative ages, “As you no doubt realise, I am 'Simon' and I was born, like him, in 1946. It is my life, but the names have been changed to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.” I also feared that indulging in such a wishful fantasy would blunt the hardness of the book and end up being rather “cheesy”.
But it seems he and I have a lot in common although half a world apart and we are now exchanging more emails – but the content of those is not for this public forum.

As promised I have now reviewed this book.
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...