Freezings fiction pamphlet
A few copies of my 2013 pamphlet Freezings - containing edited versions of stories written between 2004-06 - are available from myself, and through Calderdale Libraries. In the fullness of time I will make them available elsewhere.
Described by Ian Brinton in international literary journal Tears in the Fence as dystopian landscapes bleakly transposed, the five stories all take concern solitary introspection, nocturnal encounters, or surreal imaginings, as when a man's tears bring forth the growth of fruit in a dream-like desert land, with violent consequences.
The opening piece, which takes its title from a line in a Shakespeare sonnet quoted forlornly by one of its care-worn characters (the pamphlet's title, in turn, taken from this line), begins:
A desolate expanse of disused warehouses and factories dribbled into the distance beyond the platform, the night air pinpricked by a few dim lights in the windows of peripheral blocks of flats.
This melancholy commencement pretty much distils the essence of the ensuing collection. Old December's Bareness concerns the return of a commercial traveller to a town he had departed two decades earlier, and, first written in 2005 but updated later, seems to be set in a somewhat undefined time period, slightly before the present, but not too deep in the past, as the protagonist recounts how he has tried tracking down a former love via well known online groups. The story follows the salesman's progress through the town, taking in the cantankerous landlady of a run-down bed-and-breakfast, and many old haunts now destroyed - garden terraces and bookshops, folk clubs and berberis hedges are now replaced by grey tower blocks and colourless estates, while the scenes of innocent young love have been supplanted by fast food outlets. Like many of my stories, it culminates on a railway platform, whose cold and shabby confines the central character finds himself sharing with a disconsolate pair of elderly men - one an Indian platform attendant, the other a downtrodden alcoholic. Their narratives grow interwoven, as his unlikely companions try to guide the narrator towards some sort of closure.
Old December's Bareness is the pamphlet's longest story, but even it is only two and a half pages long. The ensuing four pieces encompass the introspective imaginings of a widowed bookshop owner, whose nights are spent bewitched by tales of mythical monsters and implausible beings, a desert refugee, and the memories of a gay affair, evoked by the scent of a remembered aftershave. In amongst this succession of hostility and doomed love is the Cinema Veritee-style Pigeons, a six paragraph piece describing the comings and goings of a rowdy bunch of birds, largely inspired by my many afternoons of watching them patrol the slabs of Leeds Market, where during the 2000's I often worked on a family stall.
Described by Ian Brinton in international literary journal Tears in the Fence as dystopian landscapes bleakly transposed, the five stories all take concern solitary introspection, nocturnal encounters, or surreal imaginings, as when a man's tears bring forth the growth of fruit in a dream-like desert land, with violent consequences.
The opening piece, which takes its title from a line in a Shakespeare sonnet quoted forlornly by one of its care-worn characters (the pamphlet's title, in turn, taken from this line), begins:
A desolate expanse of disused warehouses and factories dribbled into the distance beyond the platform, the night air pinpricked by a few dim lights in the windows of peripheral blocks of flats.
This melancholy commencement pretty much distils the essence of the ensuing collection. Old December's Bareness concerns the return of a commercial traveller to a town he had departed two decades earlier, and, first written in 2005 but updated later, seems to be set in a somewhat undefined time period, slightly before the present, but not too deep in the past, as the protagonist recounts how he has tried tracking down a former love via well known online groups. The story follows the salesman's progress through the town, taking in the cantankerous landlady of a run-down bed-and-breakfast, and many old haunts now destroyed - garden terraces and bookshops, folk clubs and berberis hedges are now replaced by grey tower blocks and colourless estates, while the scenes of innocent young love have been supplanted by fast food outlets. Like many of my stories, it culminates on a railway platform, whose cold and shabby confines the central character finds himself sharing with a disconsolate pair of elderly men - one an Indian platform attendant, the other a downtrodden alcoholic. Their narratives grow interwoven, as his unlikely companions try to guide the narrator towards some sort of closure.
Old December's Bareness is the pamphlet's longest story, but even it is only two and a half pages long. The ensuing four pieces encompass the introspective imaginings of a widowed bookshop owner, whose nights are spent bewitched by tales of mythical monsters and implausible beings, a desert refugee, and the memories of a gay affair, evoked by the scent of a remembered aftershave. In amongst this succession of hostility and doomed love is the Cinema Veritee-style Pigeons, a six paragraph piece describing the comings and goings of a rowdy bunch of birds, largely inspired by my many afternoons of watching them patrol the slabs of Leeds Market, where during the 2000's I often worked on a family stall.
Like prehistoric avians, shrunken and grounded, they seem to hover on the market floor: each spindly foot slapping against the stone in awkward dances. One grasps a shred of sandwich with its razor-beak, poised before him like a javellin. Another - thinner, gaunter - looks on jealously. Soon the envious outsider breaks rank. It scuts towards the bins, overflowing with crammed cartons. Here, the gang is scruffier. Beady-eyed urchins, foreheads scuffed, wings shabbier, feathers frayed and hanging loose, they mass like quarrelsome drunkards. crowding round crumbs, they tuck in, a ratty band of jack-the-lads, loveable rogues, the type who can't be duped.
There is a double helping of Dickens characters - with pigeons compared to both Bumble and the Artful Dodger - and a dipping in and out of straightforward observation and fictional deviation, like a natural history essay written for the stage, but although it may seem outwardly incongruous among its mainly human-dominated neighbours, this story essentially springs from the same inter-species well of loneliness by which I would say the suite is emotionally defined.
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