Most people regard me as a typical Englishman, but, in reality I am, like many people born in the British Isles, a mixture of English, Scottish and Irish. It just happens that I grew up in Sussex in Southern England, with my father, Andy, who was a proud Scot and my mother, Irene, who is an equally proud English woman. I never knew my grandfathers, George, an Englishman and Archibald, a Scot from the Hebrides. The only grandmother I knew was my mother’s mother, Alice. She too was a proud English woman who told me many stories about her and my ancestors .

That, of course, wasn’t the whole story – I had another grandmother, Isabella, but she died in 1932, many years before I was born. This blog is about her and her role in my life.

My father, Andrew Bell (1896 – 1977), didn’t talk about the past very much. I was a child of his second marriage and was born after he had retired from his career as an army officer, serving mostly in India when it was still a part of the British Empire.

He had joined the army as a young Scotsman at the start of the First World War and was wounded in action at the Dardanelles. He was posted to India in 1919 where he married and had his first family. He never lived in Scotland again. His father, Archibald, had died in 1899, when he was a child, and his mother, Isabella, remarried. They only met again twice, but my father talked of her when he was in rare moments of emotion and he always carried her photograph in the small prayerbook that he’d taken with him into war. If he hadn’t, I would never have known what my paternal grandmother looked like.

Isabella Cherry was born in County Tyrone in 1869 and grew up on the family farm that she left as a young woman to make a new life in Glasgow, Scotland where she met my grandfather, a young man who had left his family farm on Islay in the Hebrides, to make his life too in Glasgow – which is where my father was born. She and my grandfather had a difficult life, I suspect, and my father, too, had seen bad things fighting through two world wars.

I, on the other hand, had the kind of war-free childhood that was a gift to me and millions of other ‘babv-boomers’ lucky enough to grow up in Western Europe. I loved to hear tales of the Hebrides, of Scotland and of Ireland from my father, mostly over a few drinks in my early adulthood, when he had mellowed into his anecdotal retirement. I felt at that time that I owed it to him, that I didn’t see myself as entirely English. He was a man who had travelled the world throughout his life, and, my brothers and I had inherited, he told us, a certain ‘Irish spirit’ – maybe it was the restlessness and a love of adventure that had sent him across the globe. I don’t know if that is true, but he encouraged me to look to the larger world.

As a rebellious young man I thought of myself as not just a child of England, Scotland and Ireland, but, in Thomas Paine’s great phrase, a ‘citizen of the world’. In my idealism, I saw the future as a slow journey towards equality and the abolition of state boundaries. Beethoven’s great Ode to Freedom made me cry and I was proud that it was adopted as the European anthem. Yes, we were all going to be citizens of the world.

Then, yes, sorry to remind you all, we had the BREXIT referendum in the now precariously disunited United Kingdom, and the country voted narrowly to leave the European Union. Theresa May became prime minister and the country descended into chaos. If this wasn’t depressing enough, she managed to push me even further into despondency when she scoffed at Thomas Paine and told a delighted Conservative Party conference that a citizen of the world was ‘a citizen of nowhere.’ It pushed me into action and in September 2018, I decided to look back to Isabella Cherry, my Irish grandmother, claim my Irish inheritance, and apply for joint Irish citizenship.

The certificate arrived last week and, sorry Mrs May, I am now a citizen of Britain, Ireland and Europe – still, I like to think, a citizen of the world and definitely not a citizen of nowhere. I am glad not to be deprived of my European citizenship if the dreaded BREXIT actually goes through. I am looking forward to my next visit to Ireland, celebrating a sense of belonging not just to my ancestry, but to my shared humanity, and hoping that I will not be seen as an interloper….I certainly don’t feel like one, and I know that my father, and hopefully my grandmother, would be proud of this decision.

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I was sad to hear of Peter Fonda’s death, not just because he starred in Easy Rider, one of my favourite films, or just because he was unusual for a Hollywood star (in those days) to take an active role in the counter revolution of the late 1960s, but also because I have personal memories of the time when I met him and filmed him in 1986 when making the British TV documentary, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today. He was fun and amusing and on my initial recce trip to meet him in Livingstone, Montana, he invited me to race him back to his ranch a few miles away. I had a big American car (can’t remember the make) and he had something fast and expensive. He sped off, a challenge I think, so I had to put my foot down to keep up with him. We spent the evening sitting in directors’ chairs, drinking Californian white wine, on the veranda of his house and watching the light fade over the Rocky Mountains. It was a truly memorable occasion. He was an old friend, it seemed, when we met again for the filming in Los Angeles. RIP Peter Fonda, you were a good man.

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This week sees the publication of my debut poetry collection, Remembering Blue by Ward Wood Publishing. The poems were written over a period of ten years (2008 – 2018) and, even though I am also lucky enough to have two novels published (Also by Ward Wood), with two more on the way, there is something very special about having a book of my poems in print.

My first instinct when it came out was to hide, but I’m over that now that it is time to tell people about it, and to say how thrilling it is to hold such a stylishly-produced book in my hands. Thanks are especially due to Ward Wood and its inspirational publisher Adele Ward, who was the first to suggest that I try my hand at writing poetry.

I must also thank the book’s cover designer, Kayla Bell. I think it’s simply beautiful. If you see a resemblance to the cover for my second novel, Blue Notes, Still Frames, that’s because Kayla designed that cover too. Many thanks!

When the publishers’ asked me to write some suggestions for the back cover blurb, I felt stumped, and wondered if I even knew what these poems were ‘about’ – I’m probably the last one to know but I scribbled this and it will do, I guess.

‘These poems were written during ten years recovering from a life-threatening brain haemorrhage. Poetry writing itself began for me then. The severity of the injury released hidden and repressed feelings, it began a process of rewiring my brain, focusing my mind on what life really meant, or should mean, for me.  I was warned that I would probably cry more easily than before. That was both true and beneficial. The poems began before I left hospital. They document, often tangentially, that period, from awakening from a six-hour coma with a mysteriously fractured spine, through several years of rehabilitation, remembering and decoding – the good things as well as the bad: childhood and adolescence revisited, adult relationships reassessed, and most importantly, what is important now that I am fully recovered. Awakening from that death-like coma was a rebirth. When things were difficult, it helped to remember blue.

The title comes from the opening poem:

Haiku

This blank page is grey

I shall write rain and cloud here

but remember blue.

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I know, it’s been too long, but I’m back. I noticed in amazement and a touch of horror, that I last posted a blog on this site last December. Forgive me. I’ve been busy with various writing projects – a third novel all but completed, a fourth on its way and a poetry collection coming out very soon. So yes, busy. I’ve also been doing my weekly poetry readings online every Thursday and, until Christmas, most Fridays.  I’m getting ready for one now. Each week, for over a year now I’ve been starting the hour with a Shakespeare Sonnet, read in chronological order of publication. This week we’re at Sonnet 63. In that time I’ve also been reading Blakes’ Songs of Innocence and Experience, Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen prose poems and now, Shakespeare continues, of course, but he’s joined by Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Rimbaut’s Les Illuminations in John Ashbery’s translation. It’s been truly inspiring focusing on each individual poem in these collections, one at a time, each week. Inspiring too the wide range of poets from all over the world who attend and, often, read.  Poetry is far from dead. Hurrah! Anyway, I’m back.

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Here is one of them, Tulips:

The post Two more Fibonacci poems published in June’s The Fib Review appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Here it is:

The post My Fibonacci poem Music of the Spheres is set to music. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Have A Host, Ellis Collins with Octopuses and me at the Blue Notes, Still Frames launch.

It was a great night, last Thursday, when my new Brighton novel, Blue Notes, Still Frames (Ward Wood Publishing) was launched at Have A Word in Brighton’s smart Latest Music Bar. I was reading from the novel along with friends and fellow Sussex novelists, Vg Lee  and Allie Roberts. The evening ended with a terrific set from my son, Adam Bell’s Brighton based band, Octopuses. It wasn’t just me who thought it was a great night – that was the general consensus too.

I was reading from my new Brighton novel, Blue Notes, Still Frames.

I think it must’ve been a world first for a novel to be launched by the novelist and the novelist’s son’s rock band – if this is a precedent, I recommend it highly.

It was appropriate for a number of reasons; my novels and the band are based in Brighton and the book has an important music theme – thus the blue notes. The main character, Joe Edevane, is a flautist busker and Octopuses have a flautist in their line-up.  So the  event was full of shared themes and interests. Octopuses played from their current album, Yes Please, and they brought the evening to a rousing conclusion.

Here’s one of their latest videos – take a look:

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My thanks to Nnamdi Nwachukwu, my very clever friend, who has designed and sorted my websites which we are unveiling today. There will be much more to follow but please take a moment to look round.

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I was thrilled this week to read a truly encouraging review in the popular Huffington Post for my novel Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love from Dr Michael Petry, the director of London’s Museum of Contemporary Arts. It was equally encouraging and terrifying as it came just before the announcement of the short list for this year’s Polari Prize. I was lucky enough to appear on the long list of 12 books and next week I will discover if I’ve made it to the short list of five. I keep telling myself it is great even being on the long list so I’m turning my face to the wall but not holding my breath. Whatever the outcome, it is so pleasing to receive such an understanding review from someone who obviously “got it” as far as I’m concerned. It is great to have my work compared to that well-known author Philip Hensher too. I know that my much put-upon character Stephen Dearsley would have been happy to have known that he has a such a supporter in his troublesome life trying to find himself in the late 1960s.

Here is a section of Michael Petry’s article:

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I’ve written this page to keep people up to speed with my writing activities thinking it might be useful to make a list of my publications along with links to the publishers’ websites. I shall keep it here up at the top of this page under HOME and shall try to keep it up to date. I might as well begin by telling you who I am.

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