Half marathon training – and eating more coco pops than you ever thought possible

I made three New Year’s resolutions this year. They went like this:

1. I will paint more, and better, than I ever have before

2. I will start to learn German

3. I will run a half marathon

My first task has been fairly easy to get to work on. I’ve set up several new portraits which are now starting to transform into something – it’s too early to say if they will emerge as boys, girls, or butterflies yet. As always, if you haven’t already you can check out my work at http://www.helenmaryperkins.com

Secondly, I signed up to my German class, where Dorothea is taking me through the wonders of German grammar with several other multi-culture-wannabees, while feeding us stollen and brandishing tense homework upon everyone (homework that helps you differentiate verbs – not homework that literally makes you tense…although). More on that later.

Finally, after all that snow-sky-snot got out the way, I got my trainers out the cupboard and stared long and hard at them.

This is me. Fortunately I'm just a blur caught on Chris' camera, rather than a fully focused, giraffe-like runner with a pained expression and a gait like Dumbo.

I should be perfectly fine to run a half marathon. It’s only 13 miles after all – that’s…well, not very far. I’ve been a pretty active person for the last few years, as far as swimming and running go. And I don’t eat KFC family buckets to myself. Forty-seven-year-old Eddie Izzard ran 43 marathons in 51 days for Sports Relief, so there really is no excuse.

Still, I’m hardly an athlete. I clearly remember Lizzie Carter telling me I ran like a giraffe in year 8 – because, as they say, an elephant never forgets. My previous idea of exercise was 33 lengths (half a mile) in a pool or about 20 minutes (about a mile) jogging round the houses. To make 13 I realise I am going to have to step it up a bit. So in 2010 I started to do a couple of half hour runs in the week and a long Sunday morning run at the weekend. Today this was 8 miles – roughly the distance from the far end of Lancaster town to the University and back again.

Here is what all my miles so far have taught me:

The worst part of running is the middle third. During the first third you’re not tired and during the last third you know you’re going to make it. But you need good music or a nice view for the middle third.

You will see loads of wildlife and be grateful that you made the effort. Bluetits, chickens, nuthatches, squirrels. Sometimes foxes. These will be real, live wildlife, unless you choose the M6 as your route.

Other runners will smile and say hey to you and inside you will feel like part of some weird, masochistic brethren. This is, I believe, one of the best reasons to run. I think, secretly, Wordsworth was a runner.

As 1912 Olympian George S Pattron said: “Now if you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired in the morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired.” I don’t know him but he sounds like a pretty scary guy.

Despite George’s inspiring words you will still gaze longingly at several bus stops on your route home and consider catching a lift back.

The next day you will be stiff and your body will tell you that this George is a deluded prat.

An hour after running you will start to feel hungry and you will then attempt tp consume everything within reach. This afternoon during what I like to call ‘recovery time’ I consumed no less than: two tuna sandwiches, a chocolate yazoo milkshake, half of one of those Soreen loaf things, a large bowl of coco pops, a 200g bag of peanuts, a curry with wraps, two yoghurts, two apples and a banana. Soon I will go and check out what else we’ve got. Like a pregnant woman, I have even started craving foods I previously despised. Peanut butter? Gouda cheese? (As a note: Chris, if you’re reading this I am definitely not pregnant and I’m sorry I’ve finished off your coco pops)

Despite spending most of the run wondering why on earth you do it, as soon as you see the house you will think ’that wasn’t bad at all, I’ll definitely go further next week!’

I’m so amateur it’s almost funny. If anyone (especially Eddie Izzard) has tips, quotes, biscuits to speed me on my way to 13 miles let me know.

Book review of the week: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Kafka’s ominous short story Metamorphosis is one of those weird semi-fables that keeps cropping up in your mind for the week after you’ve read it. 

It also contains what is considered to be the best first line ever written for a short story: 

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” 

Metamorphosis is probably Kafka's most famous short story

 

Gregor, another of Kafka’s literary victims, loses his travelling sales job after turning into some sort of cockroach or beetle – we’re never told specifically. His family neglect him and he is forced to live under the sofa in the spare room, partly through shame but also for fear of being assaulted. We track him through the year as he eventually meets his sad demise. The reader never finds out why he turned into a giant bug, and this change is never reconciled. 

This theme of becoming something other than yourself – and unrecognisable to your peers, your family and society at large - has been played out in other stories to suggest a whole range of human fears. 

There are several films that focus on the fear of aging. These films don’t just suggest the human dread of mortality, they also play out a fear of a loss of innocence or a loss of young feminine sexuality – because there’s no way you can be sexy once you’re 30, right? The 1988 hit film Big, sees Tom Hanks play an American 13-year-old who wishes he was older and then wakes up to find he’s suddenly a fully grown adult, quickly beginning to wish he was younger. 13 Going on 30 has a similar theme of suddenly realising you’ve become, literally, your parent and desperately wanting to roll back the clock. 

Added to these examples there’s a great superhero tradition (Superman, Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, Batman) of characters gaining superhuman powers – making them different - and preventing them from ever fitting in with the society they grew up in. 

These films, comics and books all share the idea that once you have transgressed – not necessarily by committing a conscious crime, but often simply by wandering into a different demographic, species or social group - you will be rejected by the loving people you thought you were close to. Metamorphosis paints a bleak picture of the human race and the family as a disloyal group of unsympathetic creatures. 

The weird thing about Kafka’s stories, I find, is that as a reader you’re very tempted, when you first read about the flawed main character, to assume he’s done something wrong to end up in the sorry predicament he finds himself in. In this particular story Gregor is a bit of a wet sop. He’s gone into a tiresome and uninspiring job for a boss he can’t stand, he’s too much of a coward to tell his manager what he thinks of him and he’s prone to self-pity. However, just as in Kafka’s novel The Trial, there’s no suggestion in this story that Gregor has earned the persecution he faces. You can’t help thinking that the lead character has just been terribly unlucky and wondering why the author has inflicted his terrible situation upon him. 

While Gregor’s family are at first very concerned for his wellbeing, by the end of the story and Gregor’s short life they have already moved on to consider their own futures. So has the narrator – who is busy talking about a bright future for Gregor’s young sister Grete. Even I was bored of Gregor by the time I had read 60 pages of his bug’s life.  He was a bug…there’s a limited novelty to that plot. 

Metamorphosis…to change form…to move on…

Narrative art: an experiment in the world between visual and written language

I have a story but I don’t want to write it – I want to tell it in images. This marks the beginning of my experiments in ‘narrative art’ – art which seeks to tell a tale beyond the confines of its frame.

The first image from my narrative art sequence entitled 'The Union' - this sequence aims to represent elements of a written fiction

I suppose photo journalists are always trying to suggest the wider world through images. Pictures of starving children in Africa are supposed to portray a devastated and neglected nation, images of Peter Mandelson, too, suggest a certain type of politics. I won’t go into what his image represents – but I’m sure he conjures up a certain view of UK democracy. Certain images represent more than their total pixels.

In the case of the starving African children, though, I wonder if some images have been repeated into meaninglessness – in the way Andy Warhol’s 1960s work suggested. Their overuse, partly as a consequence of a mass culture that over uses them (particularly in advertising), has made the photograph and the ’iconic image’ increasingly meaningless, eroding its impact with each repitition.

So my experiment will be to see the effects of creating a narrative in oils. This is time consuming, highly reliant on patience - and of course even these images can be stolen and multiplied – as any poster website selling hundreds on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings proves. Still, I hope a narrative in oils will hold a different sort of power to the photo – that the time spent making it will give it a sort of stored narrative kinesis. I hope, perhaps, that it’s attachment to a narrative may change its effect.

Above is the first of my story images – there will be around 10 in total when I am finished. The paintings’ fiction has already been written – though not published through any public site – and is just under 2000 words long. The images will be in sequence and are not created in order to simplify the story but to illuminate elements undescribed in the narrative and to provide details of perspective and tone.

As I’ve said, this is an experiment – perhaps at its most basic it’s an experiment in the different artistic methods through which an artist communicates with their audience. I do wonder which stories a viewer/reader will find in these images – if it will be very similar to mine or completely different.

I’m a Fine Art painter practising in the North West of England. You can see a selection of my paintings here, along with a selection of my drawings. Please feel free to leave messages or comments here, on my website or at helen.perkins@hotmail.com.

If you quit you’re a failure…and other stories.

After saying so long to my full time PR management job last Thursday I was met with a range of responses. I thought I’d share a few to show that finishing your job will not make you a loser, a leper, or some other sort of social Pariah, destined to roam enternally through the barren lands.

My mum said: “Well if it’s not for you it’s not for you – you can’t stay if it’s not right to.”

Dad said: “So…you’ve quit your job…at least you didn’t kill your boss!”

My sister said: “Fair enough. You can’t do it if you don’t enjoy it.”

Chris, my boyfriend, didn’t think leaving PR for something new was a problem. It was partly through his influence that I had the guts to say I needed to get my art going and that meant leaving full time PR.

My friends said: “That is amazing!”, “Now you can get on with the art you should have been doing”, “You’re brave to have the courage of your convictions.” Along with really nice text messages, emails and calls.

Everyone worries about what they will do without the money if they are between jobs. This was obviously something I looked into before I jumped ship. I worked out I could afford to live for several months, pay the rent and have enough left over for toothpaste, even if I struggled to find another job. And at least now I would have time to seek out something part time so I could work and get my art started.

Another worry about leaving my current my job (especially in a recession) centred around losing all hope of a good reference from my employer and having a black mark on my cv, which suggested to any new employers that I was a lazy good-for-nothing quitter.

However, my boss – who will freely admit being extremely blunt, possibly a bit fiery too – actually sent me a thank you card in the post and phoned me up and offered to arrange paid freelance writing which I could complete in my own time. He told me that I could do anything I wanted to do. He was unbelievably supportive. When I left he gave me a hug. I will never forget that.

I can’t promise to anyone else that their boss will be as calm as mine was. We left on good terms, partly, because I was deliberately very frank about my reasons for going. And partly it is just because my boss (who I can’t name because he’d be embarrassed) is a nice guy. But if you want to do something else in life and, like me, you haven’t got a massive mortgage hanging over your head then most people will be feel happy for you.

The only ‘negative’ response I had after leaving came from one of my friends who texted me saying: “Oh my God why? It’s a recession!” And even they came round when I explained my situation. So all in all it’s not been a bad week!

It is now the end of the first week of 2010. It’s icy outside and most people are just about breaking their NY resolutions. I’m excited. I have two painting commissions and one of my drawings has sold. I have already been called up for a job interview – one that will fit in with my desire to improve my art and write. It is still a proper job. I am still on good terms with my boss – in fact I realise now exactly how nice he is.

One of this week's portraits - my good friend Amy. Now I hope to improve my art instead of working full time.

I guess what I’m trying to say is if you’ve got an inkling of an ambition in mind and you feel like your job is overruling it then you need to navigate your way – in definite, deliberate movements – to something that will suit you better.

There’s no good reason to suffer. No one who is worth your time will think badly of you if you move on. I think in some ways I only just realised that this week.

Was ist die gleis fur Schoenefeld Flughafen? And other thoughts from Berlin.

The cynical part of me, influenced by my working experiences, the writings of Bakhtin and Habermas, and from hearing second hand accounts of politics gurus like Marcuse, would like to suggest holidays were created at exactly the same point that nine-to-five jobs came into existence.

Here’s how it seems to me. An individual works five days out of seven, catering for people’s inflated desire to buy things they don’t need. Eventually the poor repressed soul starts dreaming of work, even while they are sleeping, and they become frustrated and angry and fed up. They realise there is no space in society for them to be creative, that society doesn’t care about them in the way they thought it did when they were younger, and that the job they have is pointless and unfulfilling. They shout ‘Enough!’

…and book a week away – as if that will solve their problems.

While on this strange Western healing experience the pressure, which might otherwise have pushed them to tell their boss where to stick it, subsides and they feel okay with everything again. Unfortunately, this occurs just in time for them to arrive back in England with their savings spent, forced back into the work-sleep-work bind they opted into initially. The holiday even convinces them that they are doing the right thing by continuing in their job. They can’t snorkel and don’t like eating raw goat – so they conclude they don’t suit any alternative situation the world could possibly offer. As a consequence, time and time again you hear people come back with the phrase “Oh, it’s so good to be back home!”

This year I started my first ‘proper’ job as a PR manager in Preston. I was sceptical about the profession because ‘Public Relations’ is often just a fancy phrase substituted for its uglier brother ‘advertising’ – whereas what I really wanted to do was write. Still, I decided to try it out and work hard until Christmas, which I did.

I quickly began publishing stories on our Northwest businesses UK Good Deals, Ghostbikes and ProJump, their products and their staff. Our team did a pretty good job of keeping our customers informed, through email, in newsletters, through our blog, Facebook, Twitter, and in the Lancaster Guardian, Bolton News, Lancashire Post, British Dealer News, Bike Trader Magazine, the Guardian and on hundreds of independent websites across Europe.

During November, my second month of work, I convinced Chris to go on holiday with me. I wanted to go somewhere I’d never been before. Before long we landed in Berlin, North Germany. This was a great place and something I intend to blog about in the future. It was an especially valuable experience for me because I came to realise a few truths about PR and about my working goals while in the harsh light of that cold climate and possibly under the influence of Gluhwein.

Good PR workers view their profession as one which gives the right people the right information at the right time. For example, when you wonder what to eat for tea tonight and the Guardian website has a section entitled ‘5 ideas on what to make for tea tonight’ that’s Marks and Spencers, KFC or Dominos doing ‘great PR’. However, all too often PR departments are made up of unscrupulous salesmen who argue that with the right lighting you can make shit look good and that you must always “Sell, Sell, Sell!”  So, thin fabric is ‘ideal for summer months’, fattening foods are ‘decadent’ and cheap merchandise are ‘value items’ or ‘bargains’. And because PR exists to oil the wheels of the economy, and specific businesses, there is always an element of pressure to accentuate the positive.

Fortunately, I was never asked to be dishonest or to irritate customers with intrusive advertising campaigns, but I was under intrinsic pressure to make our ecommerce company appear attractive – and so that permanent marketing shadow was never too far away.

I think Late Capitalism is also the era of the everyday Public Relations individual – where people market their own lives to themselves. They tell themselves they should put up with a repetitive job they hate for 50 years because it ‘offers training benefits’, the slight possibility of a pension and some vague idea of financial security. After a week out in the strange landscape of Berlin I decided this marketing mindset was something I couldn’t afford to establish in my life. I wanted to write and I wanted to paint and I wanted to make my art a bigger part of what I do. So instead of booking my next holiday I decided enough was enough.

…and I left my job for the New Year.

“You can’t help me. I’m angry. So angry.” [final piece]

Harley still couldn’t remember where he lived, although we’d stood on the end of a street for a while as he stared at several houses. He said, “Ah, I’ll just keep walking, I’ll find my way home in the end. I really appreciate it.”

You can’t leave someone on their own, in the cold, with nowhere to go, although I realise I’ve left people sitting on street corners many times before. So me, Chris and Harley trudge unsteadily back to the train station to get him a taxi with Harley still insisting that we must be religious.

The station looks definitively closed – the last sleepy commuter probably stumbling out about an hour ago with a crumpled up copy of the London Standard and some other relic of travel – a multipack of fruit pastels bought to keep her from getting lonely waiting for a connecting train at Crewe. £3.49 but she had to have them.

Out of nowhere Harley starts a monologue.

“I’d like to be like you. I’m in a bad place. I haven’t got anyone.

“I’d like to do it but I can’t. I hate it – all of it. I can’t go back. I do believe it though.”

I look at him and I can see that he’s crying although he’s trying facing the pavement, still slightly hunched over under the weight of all the alcohol and God-knows-what-else that he’s taken tonight.

“It’s alright Harley. You’ll feel better about it in the morning. Look, I’ll give you my phone number.”

I hand him a screwed up little contact card – one of the ones left over from my course last year. Helen Perkins. Nottingham Freelance Journalist. My email. My mobile number. I wonder if he’ll hate me in the morning. Maybe he’ll think I’m some evil hack from the Daily Mail touring the North West to collect people’s sad stories for some dramatic two page spread on waifs and strays. He takes the card and stuffs it into his pocket.

“It makes me so angry. So angry. Do you understand? I’m so angry right now. I can’t tell you.”

Unable to console him and aware that he’s too drunk to be fully reasoned with, Chris goes and asks a nearby taxi driver if he can take our man to the street Harley has mentioned. The taxi driver looks less than impressed at me and an alcoholic with a bleeding head. He points about 200 yards away.

“It’s up there.”

Before we leave Harley on his street, determined to go through his front door alone, maybe still just sober enough to consider that we could be thieves or worse – Catholics – the three of us sit on the end of the wall of some memorial garden, on one end of the street which may or may not include Harley’s house, opposite a derelict pub and some sort of scout hut.

The stars are out; my hands have gone numb, it’s very quiet. Harley is still clinging to his bag of knock-off alcohol but he looks happy now and keeps telling me thank you – though I’m not really sure if what I’ve done this evening amounts to a good deed. I think of the hundreds of others wandering drunk and stigmatised in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham, London, York. All without anyone to look out for them and labelled as crazy.

Harley talks about his family and he tells me he would like to meet up again and go for a coffee in town but he’s not sure if he can. He looks happy. He gives me a hug and I’m not sure if he’s shorter than me because he’s short or if he’s still struggling to balance. We talk about his brothers, his family in Leeds, his life in Lancaster. His hair is short and black and curly. He has a kind face and he laughs a lot. He doesn’t seem to feel the cold.

He makes a move to go and as my final motherly gesture I tell him in a stern voice that I won’t leave until I’ve seen him walk to the next lamppost without falling over in the road. The potential Lancaster Guardian headline still frightens me.

He laughs out. “I’m scared of you!” And then he goes, slowly into the dark still unsteady but sober enough to get home – if that’s where he’s heading to.

“You can’t help me. I’m so angry. So angry.” [continued]

The drunk man tells me his name is Harley, and also that he is really drunk. He smells of cheap alcohol and keeps falling into me or towards the cars. If I let him go he can’t walk more than two paces before falling into the road again and I worry he’ll end up frozen to death under a hedge or taken out by another taxi. I imagine reading his death in the Lancaster Guardian.  I decide me and Chris have to walk him home and Chris looks at me and I know he’s got the same idea.

Harley’s pretty friendly. He keeps saying thank you. He’s surprisingly articulate but he can’t manage to walk three feet by himself. So Chris holds one of his arms and I grab the other and we make slow but steady progress towards his house.

“What religion are you then?” Harley asks. He stares at me with big bloodshot brown eyes. He has a kind face.

“Um, I’m not really.”

“Then why do you do this? I’m so sorry, I’m really drunk.”

“To be honest Harley my main reason is that I don’t want to see you fall in front of a car.”

He laughs. “That’s really good that is. That’s really good. You two are really good. You’re really good. I like how people do that, because you know not everyone… are you a Catholic then?”

Our conversation circles around the issue of whether I’m a Christian of Catholic or Anglican – although he’s drunk so he pronounces Anglican ‘angling’ and it takes me five minutes to realise he’s not just raving about fishing. He’s had religious parents, he tells me and Chris, staring at each of us in turn. A big family. A strict upbringing. He’s one of several brothers and they’re still religious; he’s the black sheep.

The pubs are closing and several people eye us cautiously as we stagger past; our linked three make up an unusually mixed demographic – one manager, one PhD and one drunk. But it turns out me and Harley have quite a bit in common and he’s a good talker, despite the beer.

“I was brought up to be religious – a Catholic,” he says.

“Me too. I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness,” I say.

He stops and looks at me. “Is that why you do this?”

He keeps accusing me of being religious and I’m not. I guess I’m still an agnostic, or maybe now I’m just tired of the question. I remember saying to my mother, in a horrible moment, that I would look back into religion – but later and in my own space. It seems like a strange time for the issue to come up this evening, hundreds of miles from Derby in a backstreet with an alcoholic. Do you think this is how God does it – through the drunks, the homeless and the dispossessed? Maybe he uses them as a goad towards religious fervour and righteousness because they seem to give a fairly independent review of religion.

“I’m not religious. I just didn’t want to leave you by the road. Are we nearly at your place now?”

It’s freezing cold and Harley stops walking and stares across the street.

“I don’t know,” he starts to laugh, “I can’t remember.”

Award winning writer Iain Sinclair gives a guest lecture at Lancaster University

With white hair, a tailored jacket and not a tremor of nerves, the award-winning British author Iain Sinclair met  Dr Brian Baker to discuss Sinclair’s work. Here are just a few fragments from the event at Lancaster University, October 2009.

Iain Sinclair: speaking on psychogeography and narrative in the noughties

Sinclair began by talking about the way his life developed after gaining critical acclaim with his novels and poetry, such as Lud Heat and the 1992 Encore award winner Downriver.

He said: “I once thought of my travels to universities as research for the books I was writing, now I see my research going towards the travelling. I’ve had only two days at home to write in over a year.

“One tries to get a sense of this time spent travelling up and down the country in a way that’s not altogether unlike travel writing - engaging on a series of trips, detouring and writing a story and making up elements. Each of the places in my book becomes a kind of novella. Each place is precious.

“I think we have gone beyond the idea of pure fiction and pure documentation. My writing is not quite a novel and not quite a kind of documentary. What it’s about is creating a personal system. It suggests if you don’t create your own system you’re living by the system of somebody else.

“I want to work in a different way to traditional authors. I will keep my notes. Sometimes I will write a one piece poem when I’m walking, including particular details and specifics of place. Sometimes it will be something longer.”

He then gave an explanation of one of Sinclair’s recent travels: “One of the suggested stops I visited was Milton Keynes. They have got lots of money for a new arts centre. There’s a massive place built for the arts but no content to go with it. The person with me was showing a film he had made by driving to Rugby. Rugby has become this huge retail park and distribution centre. He just fixed a camera on the side of the lorry and drove there. There were three people at his screening - one of them was the organiser, one was someone asking if I would come and give a lecture and the third was a runner who would run up the motorway until he was arrested. He had just taken a detour to find out what all the fuss was about.

“My book … is a kind of debate between critique and personal memory set inside a detective story. There was even a detective element to writing it. I know that there will always be books that have written what I want to write better than me. So I began my book by taking another that I admired and blacking out parts of the text to leave key phrases. This, although it worked a little like a conspiracy, revealed to me the framework and themes that I was trying to create in my own stories.

“I believe that often what matters is what writers don’t say and what’s created there – that’s how books inspire us. Pull down a story and out come the perfect images – you get the impression of secret message beneath. But by taking another story as a base point for writing my own came risks and I had to be careful the stories did not double the worst elements of each other.

“My overriding theory is this – a culture xerox: Take anything successful and you can trace it back eight steps and find its routes spread in the architecture of the cultural and physical landscape. We have had this idea re-popularised for us recently in Dan Brown’s books – this idea that there is not sort of deep cultural memory which nobody remembers and it’s there – in the walls.”

Sinclair then spoke on the idea of walking as an art and the politics of walking. “Actively knowing a place before I begin a walk allows me to walk as a form of supping up a narrative. It allows time for a story and a shape to occur without the distraction of navigation. Often by walking the same journey you recognise and remember people - and a pattern and story evolves through this repetition.

“The idea of the politics of walking is an interesting one because it challenges a culture that’s often quite static. There are several jokes about the concept - for example, me and a friend said we should walk through Paris using a map of Venice.

“The is a difference between urban and rural walking for narrative purposes. Urban is always a kind of exorcism because we have to block stuff out because there are so many things happening in a city. It’s like warrior walking to get from one side to the other without being carried away on the tide.

“John Clare’s landscape was completely bereft of human inhabitants – nothing like the places I choose. You have to build your way out if you want abstraction from more industrial climates.”

“You can’t help me. I’m so angry. So angry.”

It is last Friday evening and I convince my boyfriend Chris to take me for a walk in the dark and cold of Lancaster city.

Lancaster train station - the scene of the minor incident

The weather is awful and it’s nine in the evening so most people who are out are starting to get lairy and demand McDonalds or they are aiming for one of the five or six student clubs in the town. The rain hits the cobblestones and the leaves are sticking to the pavements, making the paths treacherous for the people in short skirts and high heels. But it feels good to be out.

We walk and we walk and I eventually start to forget the irks of the working week. My job pays me. I’m learning how to write web pages and I’m writing pages for newspapers each week. I’m not starving. My frustration starts to collapse under its own weight. Not that it won’t be back again tomorrow.

At the far end of the road, on the way back to our house, I hear a shout and see a large shape silhouetted by the headlights of a taxi. In the middle of the road a man is lying on his back, barely moving.

The traffic comes to a halt and I pace into the middle of the street. This man, probably about 35, is rolling slightly, trying to get up and failing.

There’s another girl next to me. A student with a neat parka and a woollen beret on –she looks horrified and must disappear because by the time me and Chris have supported the drunk man to the side of the road, in a pretty dangerous, weaving manner, she’s gone and we are left with an intoxicated Caribbean man who can’t walk but is managing to cling onto a carrier bag with six cans of seven per cent paint stripper. He has a cut oozing blood above his right eye. If I let go of his arm, even for a second, he starts to topple back into the road.

This was two nights ago but I need time to write the rest so I’ll finish it tomorrow.

Book of the week: The Rum Diary by Hunter S Thompson

Sometimes, I confess, I buy the paper and I forget to actually read it. It will probably be the Guardian and I’ll buy it – promising myself that I will consume it lovingly cover to cover and that it will somehow make me a better person, raising my mind from thoughts of X Factor and lasagne. Such good intentions…

The next day I will see my paper on the sideboard. I will consider reading it but by now it looks deflated - its stories less enticing. I turn on the radio – the next episode of life and death is already happening somewhere out there. What is the point of paper pulp that only screams the breaking news of yesterday? So my paper ends up discarded and my money-waster guilt lives on. 

The characters in Thompson’s novel also face the question of the precise literary value and meaning of journalism. Well, I say face. They are journalists so they encounter the problem of writing reality but never fully discuss this issue in so many words and then, in most scenes, they get really drunk and sleep with other people or each other.

But Thompson’s narrator Paul Kemp carries around The Times like ‘a precious bundle of wisdom, a weighty assurance that [you're] not yet cut off from that part of the world that was real.’ Maybe, his character suggests, literature could learn some new tricks from the field of the hack. Get a bit more real. The alcoholic 60s cohort of ‘New Journalists’, including Thompson and his characters, try out a range of narrative and journalistic modes of writing in order to test out this theory.

Thompson, most famous for writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, paints a pretty debauched picture of Puerto Rico, its coin slots, fiestas, hotel parties and printing houses. Paul Kemp is portrayed as painfully aware he has only one drunken mind in a thousand with which to write reality. The Rum Diary stands as a record of a journalist-persona who writes reality ‘badly’ and offers us the job of doing better.

4/5 stars

Next I’m reading…Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park