Come all ye

6th annual Willesden Herald international short story competition

Competition entries are now coming in at a rate of about eight per day and rising. I look forward to finding stories with real attack, humour, a distinct and compelling voice, sense of adventure, landscape, time passing, engagement beyond solipsism, perhaps themes that rise a little above the problem of which fork to use for the starter and which for the main, which is not to say that nothing of any interest ever takes place in a tearoom. Didn't the boy eat oysters, shell and all in a Moscow café, and did we hear anything about their annoying neighbours or disgusting spouse? No. Give me something that matters, something that makes me pace like that boy's father. What is it that makes you angry, where is the love, the satire, travel, conflict? I'm sick of the tinkling of teacups and the swimming with waterwings. Do you read Hemingway, Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, Denis Johnson, David Means, Annie Proulx, George Saunders, Maile Meloy, Hanif Kureishi, James Lasdun, Angela Carter, Lorrie Moore, Bernard MacLaverty, Arthur Shnitzler, Arthur Miller or Arthur Askey and Arthur Guinness? Aim high to allow for the trajectory of the narrative curving towards the target. Or something like that.

Steve Moran

Protest outside Bertie Ahern's office today

On a day of mass protest in Dublin a lone picketer makes his verdict clear outside Bertie Ahern's constituency office.

Burn the bonds

Defend security of tenure, fight evictions. Don't let the ruling class pull up the ladder. They had free education and inherited wealth. Now their bank accounts are in jeopardy after decades of robbery, graft and corruption. Let those who benefited from the bonanza pay to clean up their own mess. Burn the bonds. Let the banks bury the banks.

If they should lose their fortunes who have destroyed our home industries by dumping their goods produced by cheap labour, prison slave labour, child labour, oppression of unions,  expropriation of workers and peasants, good. Let the money stay with us and let us say to them now it wasn't cheap labour after all.

Feargal

Facebook heresiarch carpeted

Church of England bishop suspended over royal wedding comments | World news | The Guardian

The suffragan bishop of Willesden has been heretical on Facebook and got himself set to Hidden by all his friends.

Willesden High Road

The fall of Capitalism

Every day brings news of more financial collapses. It started with Lehman Brothers in the US and at present there is no knowing where it will end. The ominous metaphor that comes to mind is the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers. At present we are in the phase after the initial plane impacts, equivalent to the multiple financial shocks (that money is heir to). The economic collapse that follows might be as far beyond anything we have imagined as the collapse of the towers on that day. It could mean starvation, destitution and disintegration of the civilisation we have known in recent centuries and the advent of a new dark age. We saw the fall of Communism with the Berlin Wall in 1989; are we now seeing the fall of Capitalism?

Feargal

Fogbound

1: Willesden Library Centre. 2: St Mary Magdalene's. 3: Harlesden Road.
Copyright © Craig Moran 2010

Craig

Fog - visibility about 50 metres

On a clear day you can see Gladstone Park but last night's fog is still here on a windless morning, 11:40 am, with visibility only as far as the next garden or two.

More better stories please

The short story competition closes on December 17th. So far I have one story for the short list. The problem is not quantity but quality. To you the very good writers out there this means an open goal. So send in your best story. You will be joining a very good list, look at how well writers from the previous short lists have done: Norman Mailer Award, BBC Book At Bedtime, Asham Award, books published by many different publishers. The aim of this competition is to encourage the creation of excellent new short stories. You don't have to be young, you don't have to be published, you don't have to be resident in any country, you don't have to write to any theme. There are no copyright problems and the entry fee is a nominal amount. If you have a fine story, this is your chance to find recognition, get it in a book, win a prize. Link

Steve Moran

50 Stories for Pakistan

Big Bad Media | 50 Stories for Pakistan

Includes stories by New Short Stories authors Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Jarred McGinnis and Vanessa Gebbie who also wrote the introduction. There is also a rare story by Willesden Green Writers' Group founder Anne Mullane. "Proceeds go to helping the victims of the Pakistan floods."

Stormy weather

Northolt, November. Photo by Anne Mullane copyright © 2010

Of course, autumn

King Edward VII park

Into the west

 
Donnington Road

Neo-classical mock Tudor terracotta British Arabic pub

South Wharf Road

Blue clouds

Harlesden Road

It's a very bad picture but just so you know we had powder blue clouds this evening in a peachy pink sky.

Brent Samaritans shop

Walm Lane

Full moon over Willesden High Road

The ghost of Concorde

Bag Lady

For J*


Without a bag lady the earth would career
Out of its orbit and into the sun
She balances boxes of air and beer -
Nobody does it and it has to be done.

Without a bag lady cars would careen,
Forever speeding where children run.
She crosses, recrosses, slow and serene -
Nobody does it and it has to be done.

Without a bag lady inspecting the bins
Streetwalkers would walk the night alone.
She makes her own way, forgiving all sins -
Nobody does it and it has to be done.

--
Stephen Moran

* J. is a quiet soul who wanders the streets of Willesden carrying several bags full of other bags and empty packets and pulls a shopping trolley with more of the same. She is neither a small lady nor very tall and she wears a bandana.

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Outtakes from Spoon River Anthology

.

Tinnitus Young

Martha Postlethwaite hunted me for 20 years
Till at last I lay panting under her flashing teeth.
She stole her prize but in the taking
My heart burst and she lived forty years a widow.
Na na na na na.

.

Trod Strongly

As a child I liked nothing better
Than to roll and tumble in the hay in Art Poorly's barn
But on my first day as a hand on the harvest
I daydreamed and got rolled and tumbled
By Art's new combine harvester
And so I met my baleful end.

.

Mildred Fulbright

The local party chose me to present our town's gift
When Taft’s whistlestop train arrived.
I waved as the President left and he waved back.
Joe Fulbright was the proudest stationmaster in our state.
But when Washington shut the railroad down
Pa took to drink and overturned our wagon
Into the Spoon River one icy night.
He tried to save me but my hair caught in waterweed.
Now he's a Democrat.

.

Ulick Angstrom

They said it was a shame how I never ventured into town
Though I had travelled to the onion domes of the Kremlin
And to the minarets of Aya Sofia
And from the cafés of Paris
To the street barbeques of Manila.
But with all my knowledge
I brought home an embarrassing disease
Right when Doc Slein's daughter took over the practice
And that's what got me in the end.

.

Valerie de Valera

To this much at least they all could agree:
Discretion was not the best part of Valerie.

.

Pleat Muggins

Dory and Cory Muggins named their son Pleat
After an ancestor who sailed with Vasco Da Gama.
He was surly and never learned, though able,
And massacred his family at the age of 16.
When hanging judge Crudmore asked
If he had anything to say in mitigation,
All he said was, "My name is Pleat".

.

Mickey Pride

Here lies Mickey Pride.
He laughed till he cried.
He cried till he died.

.

Benjy Doone**

I shat myself, I pissed the bed,
I thought this & that, I lost my head,
I loved three or two or one.
That's the autobiography done.

.

-- Stephen Moran

* After "Spoon River Anthology" by Edgar Lee Masters
** Newly discovered (3 Nov. 2018)

Google freeloading on your wireless network

Google spied on British emails and computer passwords (Telegraph)

The Telegraph has missed the point. It's not the embarrassing but uninteresting emails of stupid people with no passwords on their networks, it's the annoying arrogance of Google in planning to use your wireless network identity as an indicator of location. For example be a person is walking down your street with a mobile phone using the Google Maps application. Google Maps is busy detecting where exactly he or she is, and in doing so it could scan for local wireless networks and recognise yours from its Streetview survey data, then use that to triangulate the person's location. The annoying thing is you are providing a service for which you are not being paid, though you are paying for its upkeep. They are using you, freeloading, without a by-your-leave. It's a matter of principle.

Simon

Paul Celan in Mapesbury Road

BBC iPlayer: "What brought one of the most compelling modern European poets to a perfectly ordinary street in North London? Who did he visit there? And what made him write a poem about the experience? The writer, Toby Litt, investigates this most improbable of brief encounters between Paul Celan, the master elegist of 20th century Jewish experience and Britain at the end of the Sixties."

Available until 12:02pm Tue, 26 Oct 2010
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 11:30am Tue, 19 Oct 2010
Duration 30 minutes


View Larger Map

Mapesbury Road runs from Shoot Up Hill, which is between Kilburn and Cricklewood to Willesden Lane at Brondesbury Park to be precise. It's not as somebody says in the commentary "...North Kilburn ... South Cricklewood ... a no man's land", it's got a serviceable name of its own: Mapesbury, and is an official conservation area. There are a lot of magnolias all around here to this date. (More: Mapesbury - Wikipedia) (Ed.)

Where are your bards oh youth of 2010?

Your forefathers could describe a forest in one twig, could perform their deadly thunder feats without appearing to move a muscle, could split a metaphor head to crotch with the blow of a single phrase. Do ye lie abed pleasuring yourselves while armies of creeping mumblers invade our ancient fields? Rise and send forth your magic incantations before the whole world sinks under the dreary wave. www.willesdenherald.com

Ossian

Songs from the Road

BBC iPlayer - Leonard Cohen: Songs from the Road: "A selection of live performances from Leonard Cohen's triumphant 2008-2009 world tour, featuring classic songs like Bird on the Wire, Famous Blue Raincoat and Hallelujah."

Broadcast on BBC Four, 11:00pm Fri, 15 Oct 2010
Available until 11:59pm Fri, 22 Oct 2010
Duration 60 minute