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I remember peeking through the crack
of a half-closed door, looking down the hall,
when mother came back, crying.
Father, why did you die?
(from Angst Cycle)
Both my parents are now dead.
I was bought up in the happy emptiness of a small village in Bedfordshire;
I prefer to live in open space. Like most village kids,
I wanted to try the big city, so I went to college at Thames Poly
(now Greenwich University) in
Woolwich. After three weeks I realised the hype of London was utterly
unmet by reality, but it took me eleven trapped years of college and work
to escape---completing my Computing Science course, failing to complete a
postgrad, and---a small improvement---spending a few years in working and
living by Runnymede under the ache of the M25.
I used to adore politics, having got very active in the Young Liberals, doing international things as International ViceChair amongst other things, and ending up being the Returning Officer. This required me to organise internal elections, be serious, and tell all the excited hothead candidates exactly what they could do, literally and metaphorically.
Come to think of it, I also lead the Young Liberal side of the merger discussions
with the Young Social Democrats. 'tis a long time ago.
After silent years
the dissettled apparachiks
agitate words
conhiding true motives.
(from Scenes from a Blackpool Conference)
I ended up becoming Electoral Returning Officer for the Green Party too.
However, the Green Party's personality-based infighting destroyed my enthusiasm for politics (not that the Young Liberals were any different), and I've never gone back, despite a deep hatred of the destructive nationalism of the loonies controlling the Tories. My only recent political activity was being an official speaker of the Electoral Reform Society, and writing the occasional rant.
My name is little Willie and I lead the Tory mob,
I face the future backwards, which I do not think is odd.
To see where I am going my genetics were recast,
and now my facial features have migrated to my arse.
(from Little Willie)
I helped fund a travel business ("The Air Line"). Unfortunately, the chap who ran it day-to-day
believed his own pitches, turning out to be the prospective patron saint of incompetence.
I've put it down to experience---I was too trusting; next time, and I'll check someone out first
to see if he's an idiot rather than find it out afterwards, if I bother with a next time (I'm currently concentrating on poetry).
Still, my main business activities are in the software industry through my company Cyberspace Services Ltd..
If you really want to know the details, consult my CV.
I've been vegetarian since college days, sometime around 1980. I don't believe in causing unnecessary
suffering. I will not eat meat, fish, etc., whilst alternatives are available.
Clichés have it that all vegetarians are so thin that dogs mistake them for lamp-posts, which amuses
me no end since, at 17 stone, I'm actually so fat that Norwegian whalers
mistake me for a commercial opportunity. Anyway, I also exhibit curly hair, brown eyes, and such a
dreadful clothing sense
that my mother used to alternate between being in despair and being in stitches.
Fate has cursed me with a pretty nasty heterosexuality, quite opposite to the roots of my vegetarianism. Yet this darkness is at the heart of evolution's humanity dance.
My lust, a violating fire of force,
can burn from silent calm in dark forlorn
to whims of torment striking out. A course
to deepest guilt, perhaps, but I was born
this way, and love this way, I must. That rare
courageous one, I seek, a phoenix from
the gulls, who gains her smaller death in fear
and suffered flames: we'll share our burning wrong.
(from Her Catching Eyes)
As I'm sure a cliché somewhere goes: you're born the way you're born; you either accept it or go loopy.
If you haven't read Iain M Banks's Look To Windward, and you might
do so, bypass this paragraph, since it gives away part of the plot.
To quote the dead Hadesh Huyler, he complains he had
"an accursed weakness for smart, proud and insufficiently patriotic females…
They could always tell my first love was for the Army, not them… If I'd only
had the basic common sense to have been taken with airheads I'd have been happily
married with---and probably even more happily survived by---a doting wife and several grown-up children". Substitute his army and patriotism for my creation,
whether software or the arts, and you'll find me. Mind you, I'm not a spy for Special Circumstances. Honest.
You'll find me inhabiting an olden house in gentle and ancient Suffolk
with no boxes alongside imprisoning streets,
no brick wall bigotry from some chattering suburb;
no metropolitan clutter, no town crowds, just distance.
(from Fenland Sketch 2)
Well, that's that, then. I hope you're suitably impressed? Oh.
Well, in the unlikely event you want to contact me after this little one-sided chat,
you should visit my feedback page.
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