I went to one of those boarding schools where pupils were expected to pray every day even when the act of praying was, to me at least, a bit of a mystery. We spend what seemed like hours, (but what was probably only around ten minutes) on our knees in the dormitory every night before bed. Later, at my secondary school, there was a short morning chapel service every day and, yet again, there we all were, on our knees, often praying for forgiveness for sins we planned to commit as soon as the next opportunity arose.

It’s no surprise that my mind wandered at time like these. At first it was:

Who is this God? Can he really hear me? I don’t want to stop being proud of some things. Why are some sins more fun than other? Why do we have to be on our knees? The floor boards are very uncomfortable to kneel on. Are we meant to be this uncomfortable? How long is this going to last?

Then, when I realised that there was no escape from the torture, I just gave it to my fears. I thought of being beaten (‘bend over, boy!’) and then I thought of all those people, mostly kings and queens, from history books having their heads cut off. King Charles I’s execution gave me nightmares. Even he had to kneel like this, I thought.

Praying became something scary. Kneeling in a church pew, head bowed over the shelf where the prayers books go, it was like putting your head on the block. Don’t close your eyes – something bad will will happen.

These memories came back to me when I wrote the poem Kneeling that is in my newly published poetry collection, Remembering Blue. I thought I would make a short film of the poem too – here it is:

These days, I seldom kneel except when I’m doing the weeding.

Remembering Blue (Ward Wood Publishing) can be bought in all the usual places – maybe it’s easiest to order online from Wordery who give free world-wide postage.

https://wordery.com/remembering-blue-colin-bell-9781908742704?cTrk=MTU4MTA4MjIwfDVkMzBhOTY1YTQwMTc6MTo1OjVkMzBhOTQzNWJjMDkxLjAzNDg4OTU1OjgzZTNlYjNl&fbclid=IwAR3b-2JitQhwRHeP77gwSr_V8egSKdczwZ-BMix97230qXZyiZ1rLgmTQKc

The digital edition is available on Kindle and can be ordered from Amazon in your country.

The post Kneeling can give you nightmares – I wrote a poem about it. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

My debut poetry collection is called Remembering Blue after a line in the opening poem, Haiku.

The poem was my first attempt at writing in this difficult Japanese short-form poetry style. I’m still not sure if I fulfil all the demands of Haiku traditionalists, but it works for me and it acts as an appropriate preface to the collection.

The poem had been around for a few years before it appeared in Remembering Blue – it has even been made into a little film by my talented friend Joseph Nussbaum in the virtual world Second Life. You can still see it on Youtube., along with other films he’s made with my poetry.

The paperback edition of Remembering Blue (published by Ward Wood Publishing) is, maybe, best purchased from Wordery for free worldwide postage:

https://wordery.com/remembering-blue-colin-bell-9781908742704?cTrk=MTU4MTA4MjIwfDVkMzBhOTY1YTQwMTc6MTo1OjVkMzBhOTQzNWJjMDkxLjAzNDg4OTU1OjgzZTNlYjNl&fbclid=IwAR3b-2JitQhwRHeP77gwSr_V8egSKdczwZ-BMix97230qXZyiZ1rLgmTQKc

The digital edition is available as a Kindle – buy it online from Amazon in your country.

The post My new poetry collection, Remembering Blue, begins with a haiku appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The temperatures were hot for an Englishman and, being car-less, the journey had to be taken on foot but, as I’ve discovered since having to give up driving, it is at walking pace that you really see the countryside in its many details but I tried to keep out of the sun as much as possible by walking on the shadowy side of the paths and roads sheltering under my trusty hat.

I had seen from my roof that there was another beach on the other side of these hills, one that looked a great deal more interesting than the rather tame resort atmosphere of Gabicce Mare. I had decided to find it in this wonderful  part of Italy where vast areas of green open out onto Adriatic blue.

Part of the way was by footpath but I also joined small and mostly empty winding roads where the only people I saw were passing and necessarily fit cyclists.

Now, in gaps between the trees, I could see the Adriatic Sea in the distance looking somehow more blue because of the green.

Then more cyclists who may be challenged by these hills but who usually greeted the straggling English pedestrian with a friendly “salve!” or even the less formal “ciao!”

This road is known as the Strada Panoramico Adriatica and is a great favourite for competitive cyclists and up here in the hills, they were more of them than walkers.

Walking though allowed me to  stop and to admire the wild flowers that were still growing in abundance along the sides of the road. Another advantage of being in Italy on the cusp between Spring and Summer.

The small gardens that I passed showed just how casually cultivated plants grow in these parts too like this cliff top rose garden that gave me my first view of my beach destination at Vallugola Bay.

On another day I was to see the beach from out at sea where I could put it into geographical context and see that it really was far from the madding crowd.

Now, though, I was ready to lie back on one of those sunbeds on a beach that was still remarkably free of tourists considering the perfect weather.

Italy does beaches well and, even though this was a relatively remote spot, civilised comforts were easily hired. Inevitably, as this is Italy and we weren’t near any towns, most of the sun-worshippers had arrived by motorbike.

First though I needed one of those rather smart umbrellas.

Much better.

Then it was really only a matter of self-indulgent relaxation. It took me a long time to discover the pleasures of lulling around on beaches but now it’s become an annual necessity. All I needed was some good coffee, a little shade and my now indispensable Kindle reading machine where daily copies of The Times of London and the The York Times were delivered by clicking a button.

My main reading experience this holiday was the great epic À la recherche du temps perdu – In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in the English translation by C.K. Scott Monchrieff. A massive novel (or really seven novels) written between 1909 and his death in 1922.

So not very Italian, this great French masterpiece that studies memories involuntarily brought into our conscious state by moments such as the famous incident early in the series when the author tastes a madeleine cake with his tea. When finishing the book, the notoriously nocturnal Proust spent three years mostly lying in bed during daylight hours writing.  I thought it was appropriate enough then to read it lying down even if I was allowing more than a bit of daylight onto my skin.

The morbidly nocturnal Marcel Proust was remarkably unlike the two charmingly lively salvataggi (life guards) at Vallugola beach but reading his languorous, long-limbed prose in such a setting, I could imagine Monsieur Proust lying out there on one of those sunbeds conjuring images of moodily timeless Summer days.

Proust is a good awakener of our senses and it was not long before I was drawn to the pleasures of swimming in warm Southern European waters.

It isn’t really very surprizing that human beings like hanging out on beaches.

Soon I was venturing in, delighted to find that the water had been prepared by some mythical butler to the perfect temperature. If only our sea was like that in England.

Adriatic Sea, I’m missing you already.

So there it was, the sun, the sea, some coffee and my Kindle. What else could I possibly crave? Well, music of course. Luckily I had my iPod with me stocked up with holiday listening.

This year it was the always inspiring Joni Mitchell and, new to me, her powerfully moving and very beautiful album Turbulent Indigo (1994) (my Summer project is my own private Proust and Mitchell festival).  Those of you who know might think I’m dodging “the light like Blanche Dubois” but then, I’m reading Proust so no apologies. Turbulent Indigo will now, in true Proustian style, conjure up images of Italian beaches. I had to have some Italian music with me too though and the exciting Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli came up with the answer just for me when she released her thrilling new recording of what is possibly my favourite opera: Norma (1831) by the Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801 -1835).

It might not be perfect (what is?) but Cecilia Bartoli’s version of this glorious music is genuinely thrilling and, also as Proust would expect, Bellini’s aria, Casta Diva,  about the Moon will now always remind me of bright golden sunlight on warm Italian waters. More Italian experiences next week.

Meanwhile, I’m getting into gear for the imminent publication (in October)  of my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can already pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

The post Walking cross-country to an Italian Beach with Marcel Proust, Cecilia Bartoli and Joni Mitchell appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

My delightfully wicked breakfast the other day inspired a lot of interest and more than a little envy in my blog followers so I’m sorry to report that breakfast has returned to normal: my wholesomely respectable home-made muesli with skimmed milk and a mug of Italian coffee from freshly ground beans.

Don’t think badly of me and accuse me of obsessive behaviour when you see the muesli shelves that provide the raw ingredients for my morning routine – seeds, nuts, some oats, wheat germ and dried cranberries or apricots and prunes. I like everything to be in its right place because then my brain can have a lie in.

The other part of the routine is a look through The Times (of London) and The New York Times  (of New York) on my wonderfully portable Renaissance library, my Kindle. Any self-respecting democrat should read at least two daily papers if they want to try and find out what is really going on out there.

The post Breakfast returns to normal – phew. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I find anniversary excuses in the arts often dull and unoriginal and, dare I say it, lazy as far as the arts world is concerned. I like the novels of Charles Dickens, for instance, because most of them have thrilled and entertained me over most of my life and I’m not reading Claire Tomalin’s lucidly written biography of the man just because this is the bicentennial year of his birth. The trouble is that we get drowned in an artist when the arts planners and publishers settle on someone with a big birthday and then when the party’s over, we get nothing.

Dickens for me is something to celebrate every year but if this anniversary brings in a few new readers to be as thrilled as I have been then I’ll stop moaning about it.

Something that has also amazed me re-reading the great man, is not just his genius (and flaws, to be honest, the sloppiness that came from some of his dangerous deadlines and sometimes too, his sentimentality). No it’s not just his genius that I’m celebrating today but I am also excited that I can read M’s Tomalin’s book on my Kindle machine and take it everywhere with me. She wouldn’t want to know some of the places where I’ve been reading it.

Every so often, she writes about one of the novels and I struggle to remember the original. Now though, again through the wonders of Kindle, I just flip to The Complete Works Of Charles Dickens with the original illustrations. I bought it from Kindle for the ridiculous sum of £1.92 whilst the Tomalin biography, pre-ordered before publication, cost me a mere £5.99. I hope this doesn’t have painful consequences for the publishing industry because I can’t see how this can be profitable but then again, it must be helping to get Dickens an army of new readers – I hope so.

It is an extraordinary thought for this simple-minded soul, that I can now travel around with my curent reading list but also with the Oxford English Dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Ibsen, Chekhov and George Bernard Shaw. All this and I’ve only just begun. Marvellous.

The post What the Dickens! This is cheap at any price. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Once upon a time, as Edwardian plays, British costume dramas and distant collective memories tell us, the morning newspaper, usually The Times (of London) was ironed by the butler and then delivered on a silver platter to the man of the house, the head of the family, some portly, ennobled, gentleman with a lot of facial hair and a tight collar who would read it, snorting his disapproval at any article that hinted at modern ways, new inventions and, worst of all, anything that might change his entrenched habits. This was usually accompanied by the crunch of toast, lightly buttered and spread with marmalade.

These days, the paper, once known as The Thunderer, first published in 1785 as the Daily Universal Register before its first radical change, in 1788, when it became known simply as The Times. I’m sorry to disappoint all those other newspapers like the splendid New York Times (1851) or the evocatively named The Times Of India (1845) but The Times, no matter what any other paper proclaims, was the first with that name and therefore is entitled to be knows as, simply, The Times.

Now, of course, it has changed and changed again. It is, that Edwardian gentleman has already started to splutter, now owned by a less than pleasant Australian called Rupert and it has shrunk its pages down to a handy to handle but tabloid size. It has coloured photographs and, horror of horrors, unlike the traditional journal, articles on the front page instead of those densely printed announcements.

I try not to splutter over controversial news stories but I do read The Times over breakfast and I do usually consume some toast and marmalade whilst I do it. I have come to accept the inevitable, and, after-all, an historical truth, that newspaper proprietors are not saintly fellows and many of them were probably at least nearly as unpleasant as Rupert Murdoch, so I ignore his presence behind the scenes and continue to read his newspaper.

Today, though I hear the ghosts of Edwardian splutterers because I have taken out a two week trial subscription to The Times on my wonderful Kindle reading machine and this morning I compared it with my printed copy of the same edition.

My Edwardian ancestors, after the initial shock, might even have approved. It is certainly free from colour photographs and, in fact, has very few illustrations and when there are photographs they are in a tasteful black and white. The Kindle version of  The Times reminds me of those 18th and 19th Century editions which lingered on well into the 20th Century where the words are preeminent. I think I am going to love it.

There are so many advantages with the new system.

It arrives electronically every morning, not crumpled on the doormate with wet pages on a rainy day, or absent altogether because the newspaper boy has ‘flu; it doesn’t need ironing so the butler can get on with more useful early morning duties like polishing the silver; it can be read outside on a windy day out in the garden when you are having breakfast alfresco or on the train or the London underground (the subway) without forcing the reader into the next passenger’s body space and you can even get it delivered when you are away on holiday in remote island kingdoms or on a business trip to Iceland or worse. It is also considerably cheaper than the one made from pulped trees.

Instead of having to take a shopping bag full of old newspapers every week to the paper recycling point here in my home town of Lewes as I do every week along with another bag full of, er, bottles, I simply press the delete button and yesterday’s news is history.

The only disadvantages are if you want to do some creative papier maché sculpture or to pack up the china before moving house or, let’s not forget, if you are house-training a puppy dog. Mostly though, old newspapers turn into dust-collecting clutter.

I am already been reading The New York Times this way and enjoying it a lot – why don’t we Brits realize that it might be the best paper in the World? –  so I will probably continue my progress towards being paper-free. I will still have toast for breakfast, of course, still with marmalade too and it is also perfectly easy to splutter over your Kindle – it has a convenient wipe-free surface. So this change, like most great changes, is really no change at all.

Meanwhile, I’m getting into gear for the imminent publication (in October)  of my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can already pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

The post Reading The Times on my Kindle – enough to make my ancestors splutter over their breakfast. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Well! I didn’t think I would have got this far but I have emptied some of my bookshelves in the first episode in the great Spring clearance. This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg though because there are other bookshelves on the two floors below my study.

I am doing a major rethink about the books I need to keep.

Novels – well no, there just isn’t the room so hundreds of books have been committed to the Oxfam shop pile. All the novels except, well, Ulysses, of course, because that is more than a novel more a manifesto for why I first wanted to be a writer – that and Joyce’s other life-changing book, The Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man. i cannot live in a house without either of those books.

Oh, yes, and Middlemarch – is there a better Nineteenth century English novel? I think not but i need to keep Wuthering Heights too.

So I will be a good boy with the novels – oh yes, I forgot, I will have to keep the novels of Patricia Heighsmith, Strangers On A Train and the Ripley books, the Saki short stories, Graham Greene’s Our Man  In Havana, and, also no question, all of Scott Fitzgerald and E.M. Forster. Well, I love all of these books and, if it doesn’t sound too pompous, refer to them constantly as sources of original inspiration.

So I will try to get rid of most of the rest….well maybe not Berlin Alexanderplatz or Ulverton or Goodbye To Berlin or even the books written by  some of the novelists I have been lucky enough to have met – William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Scott Thurow and Garrison Keillor.

Then, I will let most of the rest go – I promise.

Apart from novels, I will keep my poetry collection, my Arden editions of Shakespeare, art books and exhibition catalogues, and books about classical music, gardening, martial arts, reference  books and dictionaries, natural history and either the most modern books about world history or the works that I have loved since I was a student.

I am still in a quandary about biographies….can I get rid of Alfred Hitchcock, Dennis Potter,  Joan Sutherland or David Lynch even Quentin Tarrantino? I think not.

One day, of course, I shall buy a Kindle (a computer book, if you don’t know about these things) but I shall never totally forget my love of paper books.

Wish me luck.

The post Can I, dare I, get rid of my books? appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.