Read and Destroy

You don't get to my age iwithout having a pretty clear idea of what sort of person you are, even if you are powerless to do much about it. What sort of person am I? Do you know anything about the nine types of personality according to the Enneagram model? I myself am a Type 9 of almost comical proportions, that is to say that my besetting sin is congenital laziness as in bone idle. I should add that the model doesn't pronounce on the vexed question of intelligence. It is quite possible, for example, to be both bone idle and relatively thick. 

Why am I telling you all this? It is to explain my behaviour when it was first suggested I submit something for the Writing for Fun group. My first reaction was one of blind panic. How could I possibly be expected to write anything around the five key words of Thunderstorm, Charleton, Hug, Eagle and Gold? (Incidentally, if you are ever asked to complete a word whose middle letters are "nderstr" thunderstruck may come in handy.) 

My second reaction, as a true Type 9 personality,  was to look around for some old effort that I could fob off as original material written specially for the occasion. I had a short story in mind called The Origins of The Third World War which might have been suitable but unfortunately, having allowed it to gather dust for the best part of a quarter of a century, I had thrown it away barely a month ago. It was a very stupid thing to do, almost as stupid as getting rid of the old Amstrad PCW on which it was written.

I don't know whether you are familiar with these contraptions which first brought Alan Sugar to prominence? For the first time, they put the glories of word processing within the grasp of the common mortal. Before that, you had to make do with at best an electronic typewriter. Incidentally, the first novelist to use a word processor was Len Deighton as long ago as 1968. It (the word processor) weighed 200 pounds and had to be hoisted into his London home by means of a crane. When we bought our house a few years later the title deeds were printed out on a word processing machine about the size of a cathedral organ. The funny thing is that in the intervening years the computers have got smaller and smaller while their memories have got bigger and bigger. Over the same lapse of time my own mortal envelope has expanded almost out of recognition just as my memory now resembles that of a gnat.

Where was I?

In the circumstances, I thought I might try my hand at some automatic writing. In accordance with this technique, I  sit down in front of a blank sheet of paper or latterly a computer screen and start to write whatever comes into, or in my case, out of my mind. It is, in short, writing without thinking, an activity for which I feel eminently equipped....



.... Pretty, demure, sweet but impoverished Austrian Princess Theresa-Maria von Pfaffenstein (Tess to her intimates) was not altogether enamoured with the prospect of settling down on the sprawling ancestral estate stretching out along the lush heartland of the Danube valley close to the Hungarian border, yet neither was she altogether set against the hand that destiny had dealt her. If such was to be her lot then she was totally OK with that. Why then did her thoughts stray incessantly back to handsome, debonair late night talk show host Guy Fane? Guy had started life as a dry cleaner and was now intent on pressing his suit with an ardour she felt bound to rebuff if for no other reason than the huge disparity in social background that divided them. On the one hand she was drawn to his raffish charm, finding him an all-round awesome guy, but on the other she was acutely aware that he was, in a phrase of which her mother the late countess had been inordinately fond, not quite the true potato. Guy for his part was not insensitive to Tessa's charm or at least charms. They had first met in the glittering surroundings of the Vienna New Year's Ball. He had introduced himself and said he was of the opinion that she was a comely winch. A comely winch? Had she heard correctly? For a moment she thought she was going to faint, but then generations of inbreeding came to her rescue and she found the strength to retort with words to the effect that she might indeed be a comely winch but at least she was not a dissolute retrobate. She further intimated that his continued presence in Vienna was a matter of complete indifference to her. It was, she assured him, no skin off her nose, any road.

I had better stop there as I have been asked to log off.