I’ve thought of a perfect story for Pumpkin Positive, though I’m going to need a lot of help. Prague, 2004, and my laptop packs up just as I’m planning to spend the summer - which will be slack for teaching - writing the novel I thought up hungover from a night drinking with my beginners students (what a tough class that was) the end of that first academic year I had begun when my friends were visiting shortly after I finished my CELTA when a former dentist, former stripper (she stripped with knickers she had knitted herself) teacher at the school had been sacked for bringing in bottles of vodka (or Slivovice or something) to class every morning. I had got the job through Ondrej whose wife Ema had contacted Blanka, their former teacher, for me when I was living at theirs - Ondrej had invited me to stay at theirs, taking me from the Prison Penzion, literally a former STB jail with the solid metal doors still intact, now painted an array of primary colours, it was listed as being run by nuns in my guidebook, but things had changed once again; Ondrej had been the most colourful character in our first class of students who paid far below the usual asking price to learn with novice native English speakers, and he was a serious anglophile.I was distraut. My writing has always been, to (mis?) quote a phrase from Tony Harrison, like a prick tease of the soul. Every time, I get a new idea, seem to be getting close to something, only for circumstances to get in my way, and if not circumstances, then my brain itself. I would have to go home, and that was something I had been hoping to avoid. Not only did I want to avoid getting sucked back into that life, which had killed me, I needed, too, to feel that I was surviving by myself somehow in this new country, rather than being bailed out at the first hurdle. Ok, so I was living in a dump with no curtains, living out of a suitcase on the floor, wearing the same awful clothes that had been worn out even before I’d left England, but I was surviving. Yes, I got depressed sometimes - I was depressed most of the time, but I mean got specifically depressed - about how my organisation was all over the place and I’d get the wrong time and the wrong day to see students, forget or get it wrong somehow, getting some sense of empathy for my father who had run his own television repair business for so long and irritated me so often with his memory, and knack of getting by jotting things down on envelopes, but I was getting by.
It had felt like I was getting somewhere. The novel had been planned out like never before. It hung together. It was in some ways, thinking about it now (and this strikes me now, but it surely must have done then, too), like an echo of Love Letter Bombs and Daisy Chain Mail and those earlier works which also fanned out from a central narrative to discrete stories, those works I have so much nostalgia for and which never made it beyond the working title stage, like the Canterbury Tales story, the Office Block story and of Rice and Zen. For that reason it was organic, a real part of me. It was political commentary, certainly, inspired in part by those try-hard American ex-pat magazines I found on the floor in that old mess of a house (Rene, the owner, and something of a mess of a man himself, tall, with crooked yellowed teeth and those worn out Jesus sandals, was moving to America to live with his girlfriend, indeed, to marry her, though he didn’t seem at all sure about that, and she had left a lot of books and czech graphic novels I started to work my way through, raiding the room with her stash of things upstairs while he was out), but despite the politics, it was human, full of stories and indeed, the short stories I had battled for so long to preserve in my writing when 9/11 changed my focus. (This, at least, is the narrative I have given myself, how true it is I can only guess.)
I called it Lord of the Flies. I remember there were a lot of flies and wasps in that room where I sat, once again without a desk, alternately trying to write, trying to plan lessons, and trying to read. I forget now if they were dead or alive. But on waking up that day at whatever time that was, the day after I had got drunk with the students, and got inappropriate with one of them, putting my hand on her leg, the day I had found two packs of Lucky Strikes in my pocket and realised I had inadvertently pinched one of them like one of Douglas Adam’s characters with a packet of biscuits, the day in fact where we went to a club and ended up sat around on benches, some of them cracking onto one of the girls, and then sliding down between the escalator handrails at I P Pavlova waiting for the first metro home, I was desperate to do something with the day despite my wretched state, and, inevitably, those stupid dead wasps I had ended up staring at far too many times came to assume some importance.
I was brainstorming as I often do in moments of desperation - desperate because I had the summer in front of me and perhaps a novel was dying on me, and desperate too because I had overslept, and still felt incapable of doing anything but having a shower and so I felt like I always do in these positions, like I needed to claw back the day.
I forget now what ideas I forced before one finally came to me, but I do remember thinking about being a fly on the wall, and then, still in the shower, thinking of a story, and a series of stories I could write, perhaps with this in mind. They were dumb, no doubt about it, I was still forcing it, but something was on its way.
One of my signature characters came up, the aspergic computer kid - my understanding of my own condition was bubbling under just now, and I must have been puzzling back to my younger days as a computer-obsessed teenager before my nervous breakdown sent me reeling towards literature.
Here, the computer kid was the guy who had engineered a complex surveillance system for the US government. A system that relied upon nano technology (Prince Charles had made some credulous pronouncement about nano technology and I wanted to make a joke about this) to create a network of artificial insects, flies and wasps, capable of reproducing themselves by pooling the computing power of neighbouring insects. In one guise they could “surveil” (the word has been “verbed”), in another fly and navigate, in another reproduce, but they had to pool their resources to each task.
This guy was the crux of the story. His research group was a likeable bunch of nerdy eccentrics. One of his friends at one point is involved in making a plastic internal combustion engine, defending the enterprise as being more of a means than an end in itself, since the knowledge of materials would reap rewards. Together, too, they had a kind of fun which, though it might be alien and even rather gauche for many readers’ personal tastes, was amenable to sympathy. Neither was this sympathy forever on the verge of being rebuffed, since, like the protagonist in Our Man in Havana, this clique of nerds gradually sniff each other out as fellow dessenterss from the military industrial complex and the concomittant security state playing out in the real world and begin to play the game, making only so much progress as to ensure future funding whilst equally sucking up funds and delivering little or nothing - flies that fly as if they were drunk etc etc.
Each of them, though, is, of course, driven by science and the thrill of discovery, not to mention that 3am caffeinated buzz of debugging a problematic piece of code.
And it is with a probably caffeinated, certainly sleep deprived ebulliance and an anticipation of further bugs in the system that the wasps and slies are released one day for their first test flight outdoors, bets being taken as to how long they could last.
Only, in the grand tradition of Sci-Fi, they survive against all odds, and even replicate - something that, gasp, should not yet have been possible.
And all this means that our protagonist, whose name I forget, is able to escape to Europe (he too is a huge Anglophile, though I don’t think he went there(?)), to become something of a recluse and, the only one in the world, so far as he knows, with access to this new form of surveillance, to retreat into a disillusioned, apathetic depression doing little more than flicking between couples having sex before he picks up the thread of a story, and follows it.
The story he picked up on was, initially at least, pretty threadbare, little more than a mere schematic socialist denunciation of Blair’s England such that Mike Leigh may have been proud of and which I had long since (Pushkin vodka hangovers aside) considered myself to have transcended in my fiction.
It was the metafiction which grew. Now I have always disliked Postmodern fiction. I never took to magical realism and don’t like gimmickry and selfconsciousness in a novel. I agree with Amis Senior when he told his son that having a cameo in his own novel was “buggering about with the reader.” But for all that, somethimes it takes an iron will to stop these things quite naturally blooming in my mind, and whilst I would totally agree with anyone who would say that it is up to the writer to be ruthless with themselves, sometimes it is equally necessary to be true to yourself, to indulge, perhaps much in the way that successful dieters are those who make little rewards for themselves now and again whilst others will endeavour to let nothing slip, but break totally and binge every second or third day. And so, this second meta-fiction bloomed from this, my own night of excess, and something not perhaps postmodern so much as rather gothic came to assemble itself in my mind.
Because the next level then was a man who might have only written the forward or the postscript, the real author - because our protagonist, once he had seen enough of his story, came to be engaged, and write about it. He was more of a traveller. He had given up his job, and jettisoned his marriage which could only have kept him on the bourgeoise straight and level he had come to see as hypocritical somehow, because he had been working in intelligence and had needed to escape and to blow the whistle somehow. He had wanted, too, to see a little of Europe. Fiction had been the only safe way to do this.
Somewhere in here was a backstory about termites as a boy eating through the woodwork of his parents’ place, and a fascination which grew up, up until he fell in love with a blind women he met in a library somewhere in England. I forget where. There was a connection there with termites, given that they can’t see, and whether it was tenuous or not, I’m no longer fit to comment: the fact is that this was the next utopia. I can’t now recall if I ever got around to writing that post about a story idea that came to me from a reverie, where a woman I’ve coaxed into the house when she fell upon hard times, tells me that perhaps I don’t even want to write these stories, that perhaps that isn’t even the point, but its all about investing in a dream. Well, I would as it happens, be prepared to argue the toss over the artistic merit of Lord of the Flies and any one of the last five or sic or seven projects I have been working on, but whether it was or was not a publishable, valuable, readable, filmable or even writeable idea for a piece of fiction, it certainly had a lot of merit as a dream. And that was more or less lost when the display started freezing and collapsing on my iBook.
I walked round to the telephone box around the corner, overlooking the Zizkov television tower and the Saska arena and rang home, asking for help as ever, help and sympathy, perhaps.
I booked my tickets and came home, bringing my laptop back with me.
[note to self: I’ve just gone down for a fag for little reasons other than feelign that I was getting tired and would soon be incapable of writing, but its damaged my capacity to write more than calling it a day in half an hour would have done, and though taking my now trusty (well once) egg timer and doing some tidying or taking some other break for ten to fifteen minutes may have enabled me to come back to my desk, the smoking hasn’t helped at all and has only left me with aditional distracting reveries and the idea that I must write myself a sticky white note to go on my packet of tobacco in imitation of the government warnings such as SMOKING IS HIGHLY ADDICTIVE AND MAKES YOUR KNOB FALL OFF,” something such as “SMOKING INHIBITS YOUR CREATIVITY AND CAPACITY TO WRITE COHERENTLY.”]
Lord of the Flies died with the Apple Logic Board replacement programme. I had some of my ideas written down on notepads I hope I still have somewhere, but some others developed into Appleworks files (and even they were starting to corrupt, something they did more than once), and so, having let nobody know I was back, I started on another project.
As I said, the understanding that I was on the autistic spectrum was bubbling away, and so I sat in the foldable bed I would later share with M and started writing onto a A4 pad a story called His Master’s Voice. It was a strange story in the sense that it only had one half of the story. It was told in a variety of situations as if it were an overheard mobile phone conversation. That is, it only had one voice, one half of the variety of conversations.
The protagonist had worked for the power station at Ironbridge, a town I had visited with my ex when she had finally made it to my home town (that I had resisted this had become a standing joke, with her and my then (best?) friend, the guy who had visited me after I had finished my CELTA, and who I later, traumatically, lost contact with, feeling like I was burning all my bridges again, both of them reckoning I hadn’t told my parents about her at all.
The rumors had it that the powerstation was about to be mothballed, and he was likely as not to be put out of work. While he was still working there he brought his aspergic son to take a look around, something he felt he would enjoy. This was to form one of the scenes. Indeed, I had my parents look into the possibilities of having a tour round the site, something that would have been possible inside of a school term, but of course consequently not in the summer holidays (these working research bouts were a part of my trips back home, and I went to sit in the public gallery of Birmingham courts another time I was back, eventually seeing a rape trial which may, given the way my mind tends to process things and throws them up later, have informed Family Fortunes/The Die is Cast).
The writing was going well, but I was being cajoled to tell my best friends that I was back (pretending to friends to be away in order to find some unharrassed time to write was a feature of my life going back to my 18th year, and there was most often a lag of at least a few days, and as long as I could hold out, between coming back and letting others know). Eventually I did so, but something else was going on. Ondrej wanted to come over.
Ondrej did a hell of a lot for me when I was first over. Not only did I stay at his house, but after that, around the time my friend was coming over and I was staying out late, I stayed at his fathers’ place. I still feel immense gratitude and fondness for his parents, and immense guilt that I have been unable to see them, or bring them gifts the times I have since been back. They were charming hosts, wonderful people, and given that his father, a dissident who printed a newspaper from home at the time of the revolution and who has written books on, for example, the history of Metros was ill at the time, the fact that he used to prepare a breakfast for me and call me to it in English before feeding and calling his grandson’s hamster, Jerry, “Jerricko,” could bring a tear to my cheek now, and I’m sure it will have that effect over and over whenever I come to think of it.
I wanted to repay this debt, and yet, I didn’t remotely feel like hosting them.
Ondrej and his wife asked if they could come over, perhaps even stay at my parents’ place.
I felt it would be unfair to ask my parents after they had done so much for me, and yet I would have felt unjust to point out to them just how house proud and conservative my parents are, how it would not have come easily to them to play hosts in their own home to these two foreigners.
And so I asked. It pained me, but I asked. And yes, they could stay.
We arranged for them to come over, and we helped them to book a rental car from one of the cheapest firms around, running out of a portacabin towards Birmingham or the other side of Dudley or somewhere. I remember going over and having a cooked breakfast with him where my Dad had generously offered to drop us off.
Ondrej, I should explain, certainly has ADHD. It was a curious fact of that CELTA course that not only did one of my five classmates have the disorder (she was American, and talked about it all of the time, that and proclaimed the benefits of caffeine and chocolate in ameliorating the symptoms and dropped pills which left her sometimes so subdued it was painful to wait for her to respond), but so did one of my first students, but then around that time, when I was becoming aware of the disorder, it was possible to see it in a surprising number of the people around me, including a elf-like 22-hole Doc Martin-wearing fascist warehouseman in Scab City till that Christmas I was preparing for going to Prague. Oh, and then there was the bristly course tutor, Scott, we narrowly avoided having, a man who had made a lot of enemies on the forums I had been reading on making my decision of whether and where to do a CELTA. Frankly, these people abound, characters all, and all of them with their problems.
Ondrej was by no means universally popular, in fact, quite the opposite, and I found myself defending him time and again.
He did have his uses. Others agreed with this when he made a thousand phone calls and organised people to come out that night - somewhere in Kacerov (?) - after the course had finished. He was a bank manager, after all, around forty years old when we first met (I would have been around 25), and good at making calls and organising people - though I’m sure he must have been very bad at some aspects of his job.
He would pipe up in the classes asking irrelevant questions that tested the patience of the seasoned teachers who were running the CELTA for us. His PDA cum English dictionary which he was forever tapping away at, though no word stuck in his head for more than a few minutes, should have been thrown out the window said one, a young but embittered Kiwi who was a passionate defender of her ADHD colleague, Scott, who was a handsome, if abrasive fellow, such that I wondered if they had been together at some time.
So too did he anger one other classmate of mine, one of the two I was living with, and one of the two I had erroneously assumed, from his name, was American (my ex, who had lived in California for a year and picked up there a quite intolerable accent, or rather perhaps, an exaggerated intonation, accused me of anti-americanism for the amount I seemed to worry about this month I would spend with these two*).
He had done this by talking about the time he had been living in Yorkshire, very near where those first, worst, race riots had been. Back then, when I finished my finals, I was so dead set on being a journalist and visiting some of the areas of the world afflicted by violence and trouble# that I set an alarm to go off so I could travel up to Bradford and, where was it now?, hoping to write on the aftermath. I never did go, and felt remiss. Back then when I identified with the working classes and fretted so much about my exact identity, it bothered me deeply that the working classes were on the one hand vilified for their illiberal views and yet, on the other, used as a mouthpiece for the taboo opinions the chattering classes held back from saying themselves. It was a subject I had thought of a lot.
He had been working in a factory, surrounded by muslims, and says they celebrated when the twin towers fell, and that they were against what the West stood for and held values we ourselves do not, cannot.
This was too much for my writer manque friend. (Yes, I don’t doubt I had to hate him to defend my own ambitions.) He had lived a privileged life in an area not famed for its islamic population (I doubt he had ever met a practicing muslim in the years he had lived there) and took exception to what Ondrej had to say. But he said it from experience, just as many working class people say what they say from the experience of the underprivileged and embittered working class muslims they meet in run down areas. I’d wager that fewer middle class people now would have so many inhibitions about hearing him out on this.
They arrived, and as ever I was quite gregarious at first. I remember how we went to the local pub and carried on drinking Becherovka when we got home (it’s a sugary liquor that left me fuzzy headed all next day). I was swearing in Czech with abandon (pathetic I know, but there’s many an intelligent language learner without wider communicative problems who have such a phase of falling on lowest common denominators) and we sat in the candlelit summer house after last orders and raced snails through matchstick Start and End markers on the glass table.
But I couldn’t take it. This time I couldn’t take Ondrej’s garolousness garulity [Christ, recently I simply haven’t been able to spell, and my spelling was always good; I have noticed before that when I read more Czech, I lose my spelling in English, something that was potentially embarrassing in the language classroom and so I wouldn’t mind so much, but I haven’t even been reading so much Czech, and that’s not to mention my vocabulary which has fallen away to nothing since my time in Prague, exacerbating the word-finding difficulties which are so often the trigger for my reveries], nor his constant questions about pronunciation. I couldn’t take the fact he didn’t listen. And, no doubt, I just couldn’t take people.
Poor mum and dad, they took the brunt. After I don’t know how long, and perhaps apart from the relative good cheer of breakfast when I suspect I would happily while away a little time as they brought out the salads they had made from the foodstuffs they had brought along with them (at brekfast time I’m not awake enough to work and the day is yet before me), but I simply couldn’t be around them. Mum and Dad knew this, and took Ondrej and Ema out for walks around the park, leaving me at home.
We played cards, fifteen, I think it’s called, a ludicrously complex game I used to play as a child, but whose rules I had completely forgotten. My Mum and Dad tried to explain but the fact that the hierarchy of cards switched with the suit confused me almost as much as it did them with the language barrier. We went for a ride too, and I remember that as a good day, even though I know for a fact it may very well not have been as I would have tried to get as much exercise as possible out of the day and may have been insufferable as I was the times I took M out in Prague.
But what will stay with me from that trip back home will be, more than anything, the fact that I allowed my awareness of Asperger’s to come to the surface. I remember that so well.
Because just as it’s possible to live for months on end in a submarine, to surface and to submerge with just a few preparations, so too is it possible to consciously repress knowledge, and to control the degree to which you are aware of a particular fact. I say consciously, but I’m not sure to what degree we are culpable. What I do know is that when I was sure that I was suffering from bipolar disorder, and I still do not know that I was wrong, especially given that I was reflecting just now on going for a cigarette on how much better I feel now when I am writing, compared to most of today, when I felt so low, and how I could see, perhaps with a repeat of the reverie that sees me being interviewed for a position in the kitchen at work, that food too sees me react with either depression or subdued elation+, I was not yet ready to acknowledge for long that I have a further mental infirmity.
I remember the handful of times before that trip home where Asperger’s had come out, and indeed the times I shoved it back in the drawer. Refusing to buy books on the disorder, say, and then crying and reading up on it in the computer room hoping my parents wouldn’t come in and see the state I was in. And then that lonely, anxious hour or two when I couldn’t sleep, and tracked back through all of my life, seeing signs of the precise communicative difficulties suffered by people on the autistic spectrum, and was sure.
With manic depression there is a dilemma. Lithium or no lithium. And you can play with that dilemma. At times it is a genuine dilemma, an anxious decision where neither side seems to be better than the other and yet a choice has to be made… eventually. At others it can be little more than a self-dramatising predicament: woe is me, I must choose whether to be mad with integrity, or sane with nothing but flint in the bosom and guts in the head (with apologies to Houseman). And then, too, with manic depression comes the promise of a kind of bohemian life, a creative life, and however deluded this may be it offers hope: I may be mad, but so too could I be a genius. None of which is to mention the gregariousness and flighty wit and feeling of being so alive that so often comes with early episodes of hypomania: again illusory promise. Asperger’s offers none of this, and ADHD qualifies the promise of manic depression: having endless ideas and never finishing them doesn’t seem quite such a pay off as not sleeping for a month and writing a novel before running naked through town with a burning olympic torch.
But how could I hide it from myself any more when I just couldn’t stand to be around people? I hid myself away and, listening to my parents speaking to Ondrej and Ema in the kitchen, signed on to an Asperger’s internet chat room.
I was vetted more or less as soon as I came on, a process designed to weed out interlopers and the merely curious which involves an administrator asking questions to ensure some genuine connection with Asperger’s syndrome.
I think I have the disorder, I explained, though I am undiagnosed. I also have bipolar disorder. Perhaps I mentioned ADHD, but that may have been submerged at that point.
It didn’t take long before I realised that I was surrounded by a lot of teenagers, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, all of whom were a great deal more familiar with computers than I was myself. Someone asked me how old I was. I answered by writing out in words. It took me a while to see why I had prompted so many ‘lol’s.
An administrator jumped in to point out that it must have been difficult, and nobody could know what I had experienced reaching such a grand old age. In effect, to hold off and leave grandpa be. I made a joke that I now had hair growing out of my nose and ears. They liked that. British sense of humour, they said.
I was taken aside - into a private chat - by a Portugese kid. He thought he might be bipolar as well. We chatted about a few things, about how Mum and Dad were speaking v e r y v e r y s l o w l y t o t h e m n e x t d o o r; about how I know so little about computers, how I used to love them but had an old Acorn BBC and then an Acorn Archimedes, but that I lost that interest when I had a breakdown and came over all arty, I had learned little about PCs since I had been using them for little but Microsoft Word; we talked about English teaching, and about how he thought his own English teacher, a native speaker and I think English, had mental problems. That brought it back to me. People move countries sometimes to escape themselves and their inability to cope back home - because, let’s face it, however twisted a culture may be, most of the people who grow up in it take it as it is and become a part of it, people get used to anything, that’s how it becomes so twisted in the first place; even if it may be clear why people want to escape from their restrictive routine lives, and especially clear why they want to escape to something that may challenge them more, still it remains the case that many of these people do so because of a problem in themselves. It put a different spin on my sojourn in the Czech Republic, and also, perhaps, led me to see that, however well I tried to mask my problems, they were as obvious as Ondrej’s were to me.
I don’t know now if I cried, but I do remember the feeling of not being able to cope with life and the realisation that I had been just keeping my head above water for so so long.
I remember, too, the feeling that I was a minority of one somehow. This kid in Portugal kept on asking me about how those with Asperger’s have to find it so hard, be so anxious all the time. He kept on telling me about a friend of his and how everything came easily to him. I tried to suggest that for some people like that they crack later when they come across problems, because they have had no experience of them, but he said, no, this lad has problems, and he deals with them. Why can’t I be like that, he was asking.
I don’t think I was able to tell a callow lad like that that it’s because life is hard. Soon he started to ask for my MSN. I didn’t have one. And to say that we would have to hook up on line again sometime. It was then I started backpeddling. I had to go outside to see how Mum and Dad, Ondrej and Ema were getting on. I was spending less time with them than Mum and Dad, and that wasn’t fair. I started judging him, as I judge people who place demands on me, going through the Aspergic series of questions, I suppose, about whether this was a friendship that could contribute something to me and my interests. Could I learn from him, or would he just be learning from me. I suppose everybody makes these kind of calculations to some extent in deciding how far to take a friendship - how much do we have in common, how far would they get on with my other friends etc. - but in taking on another friend, except in those rare cases where I really click with somebody, I really need to know that I will get something from the friendship. (I write it down like that and think it is substantially true, but it’s possible to take different perspectives on things at different times and it may be an overstatement caused by looking back to that time that everything first bubbled up.)
In any case what happened is something that has happened with me a lot. I shrugged him off, finished the conversation abruptly or perhaps with no sign off at all. I may merely have been distracted by Ondrej and Ema.
My parents’ firewall after that time was detecting a lot of intrusion attempts the rest of the time I was there. Far more than usual. I wondered if he was behind them. I no doubt worried about the stories and material on the hard disk.
My computer came back. I returned to Prague. Another novel blossomed in my mind. Another novel died. I filled up my computer with a thousand unfinished files and fragments.
* * *
Once again I find that my newest ideas came so quickly and so soon established themselves as something I take for granted that I have not yet adequately explained them.
Pumpkin Positive is an idea for a comic strip or graphic novel or collection of autobiographical short stories that came for several reasons which I will here try and explain:
> I have come to love graphic novels. Not only are they easier for me to read, and allow me to combine two loves, because I can read them in Czech, and even, at a push, in French, but the common themes and tone of graphic novels tally with my own. Many of the popular graphic novels are often narrated by a sensitive outsider, often a loner. I could see some of my autobiographical stories fitting in well with the form.
> An extension of this is the feeling I have that the profound wistful mood I fall into, as I did when I reflected on this part of my life yesterday, when I look back on certain episodes of my life, a mood that is in part regretful, in part nostalgic, can be represented well by certain kinds of drawing, one of which is a scratchy, inky style.
> Graphic novels, too, came into my thinking and my imaginings of works of fiction such as Family Fortunes/the Die is Cast when I began to see these with illustration at the very least, in the way, say, that Joseph Lada’s illustrations have come to be very strongly associated with Jaroslav Hasek’s The Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk.
> The wrongheaded notion, which comes from these endless attempts I make to conquer depression by imagining myself into the future with strategies I haven’t yet tried and found to be ineffective, that drawing might either be less work than writing (if a certain scratchy, ingenuous, simplified style is employed) or more amenable to my temperament.
> As a kid I loved reading comics, and, consequently, drawing. My first notebooks were usually comics, or were at least accompanied by drawings.
All this and more led to the idea for Pumpkin Positive. I had been looking in the back of my mind for an angle, a title, say, and visual hook.
It was when I went to my doctors to look over my medical records and came back to look into medical abbreviations and acronyms to discover the meaning of the frequent notation DNA that I came upon the abbreviation PP, for pumpkin positive, which is used to describe an individual so lacking in intellect that a light shone in the mouth would light up the skull like a pumpkin on Halloween. (DNA, incidentally, means did not attend, and presumeably therefore turns up so often because of my ADD organisational skills).
This struck me as appropriate for a number of reasons.
First among them, perhaps, was the fact that, if I was to really go for it and draw the strip myself, then pumpkins were easy enough to draw, at least, should be a lot easier than drawing faces and, being expressionless, they stood in well for asperger’s and for the way I feel myself standing out around others, who would be drawn normally.
Another was the import of the phrase itself, which, if it did not describe me, described the way people so often see me. It brought in the medical angle, too.
Anyway, this story, I think, could be told well in this medium. It could begin with the kyvadlo, the pendulum at Letna on the top of Prague where the largest statue in the world, a statue of Stalin surrounded by heroic workers once stood - it was dynamited in the Krushchev era, I think, certainly long before the revolution. That was where I was drawn to again and again when writing and reading that time before I came back. With skateboarders behind it, graffiti upon it, the whole of Prague on both sides of the Vlatava laid out in front of it, roller bladers and couples with dogs walking by underneath, and tourists of all nationalities stood looking out either side of it, it’s a good setting, I think, and suggests the theme of time moving on.
The other settings to the story are equally visually interesting, I think, and there are several setpieces, such as the time Ondrej went out for a run. He was a marathon runner and ran, I believe, every day before work - without this he would be agitated all day long. He had forgotten his shoes, something he usually packed first thing before going away somewhere, and dragged me and my Dad off to Macro to get some knew ones, running up and down the shop with a grin on his face in front of the tills with the one shoe on and the other tagged to it. We went out for a run only I got tired after a mere few hundred metres (though I’ve always enjoyed exercise and tried to get enough, for years I have found it hard to prioritise it, and running was the most difficult for me to get into being as I am a natural sprinter rather than a long distance runner) and left him to tackle my old cross-country routes with scarcely any recollection of my address. He turned up several hours later having got lost in town and the surrounding villages, turning up at some bloke’s door to ask directions to my obscure little cul-de-sac. Having done so, he stood outside happily to have Ema hose him down naked in the middle of the garden, something my parents only found out later when we were watching their home video.
I would love, sometime, to be able to collaborate with somebody, an amateur artist, say, or perhaps two, one in Prague and one in Britain, to write such stories. It’s another dream, of course, but one I’m happy to nurse for the moment.
*The truth is, as my relationship with my ex attests, that I struggled with my compatriots as much as anyone, and especially those from London. I don’t think I have ever told anyone why I chose Prague, talking instead about how I remember my friends visiting the city on a tour of Eastern Europe I would have wished to go on but which I ducked out of to try and stand on my own two feet a little more by working in my hated home town. That much was true, but the real reason related to the fact that I didn’t trust anyone around me to understand where I was coming from and to be on my level, because I thought that they had had it too easy. My experiences at university, where I had one of the worst periods of my life, formed me in this regard. I figured that a country coming out of Communism was more likely to understand, and to be less taken by superficiality and this knowing big-muff fuzz wit and post-ironic tone of discourse I hated so much.
# Not as silly as it sounds, since someone with Aperger’s is perpetually afraid and already alien from society. I really do see this as an alternative path, something I really could have been if things had worked out differently. Indeed, if my writing career does take off, perhaps it remains something I could do. I hope so. Indeed, only last night, unable to sleep from the cigarettes, I picked up a copy of the Observer Magazine the main feature of which was Robert McCrum interviewing V S Naipaul and though I can’t find the passage now [the search for it took me away from the computer and, distracted, to have another fag] I felt jealous about the time he had travelled out with, was it James Fenton?, to a trouble spot to report on it.
+ I still maintain that lifestyle and diet can ameliorate bipolar disorder to such a degree that it may seem almost to disappear completely. Indeed, I was reflecting on this earlier today, perhaps when clearing away and waiting for my curry and rice to warm up in a bain marie and listening to a programme on Radio four on the nutritionists presented by Ben Goldacre, something I would love to blog about if only I find time.