I’ve mentioned a few times that I jot things down which I might use to write about, and I’ve been jotting again. I looked at my little list, and the first is someone speaking to another person, no idea who either of them are, or anything about them or their relationship with each other. “Ah! There you are! I thought for a moment you’d run away from home!” This could be said as a simple jokey comment – obviously the person speaking knows the other hasn’t and isn’t likely to have absconded, and presumably they are at home. However, there is a certain underlying tone – not that they had actually run away, but maybe just picked up their coat and slipped away without a goodbye. As I typed that last sentence, I almost wrote “picked up their coat and hat” – suddenly a scenario is developing without me meaning it to because I started writing to comment on my notes and note-taking. Now my sentence, written as an example, has a woman in a forties style light summer suit, hurrying to sneak out of a house she’s visiting, gathering up her coat and hat which were laid on a chair in a paved hall with a glazed front door, the sun streaming through the coloured glass. Who is she? Why is she in a hurry, in fact, it’s almost a furtive scurry! She doesn’t look back as she closes the door silently, but we are still in the hall, maybe standing on the stair, and we don’t know where she goes. Does she hurry away on foot? Has she a bicycle, or maybe a car, or maybe a taxi, or maybe a car with a freind in the driving seat – it’s an open-top car, by the way! Now I realise that I’ve gone awry because there are two different scenes here – the first I mentioned, someone is not leaving but the other person thought they might have. In the second scene I have inadvertently changed the situation, because now someone is leaving, although I don’t think she’s running away from her home, but just speedily leaving somewhere. Hmm, this will need thinking about!
The next phrase on my jotted list, “the killer question book”. So is it a philosophical book about killer questions, is it a book which guides interview candidates on how to deal with killer questions (In the world of hiring and employment, killer questions are used to filter out job candidates. These questions make it easier for the hiring team to screen for the candidates who are the most qualified or the best fit for the role.‘ https://www.hireful.com/glossary/killer-question) is it a book about questions one might ask a killer? Who knows!!!
The next is another thought I must have had, or comment overheard: ‘cold and rain only leads to disaster’. This is simply a prompt for a story. However the next jotting is more serious as it’s the name of a real person who found himself in a shocking situation and responded by doing something which changed his and others’ lives for ever. Tony Martin was an elderly and rather eccentric farmer, who had been bothered by thieves and burglars. Feeling persecuted (and maybe he had some issues which added to this) he armed himself with a shotgun (and of course farmers sometimes have shotguns for various reasons) and when a couple of likely lads did break in to his lonely, isolated and desolate farmhouse, his gun discharged and a young man was killed. Tony Martin went to prison, but there were many complicating factors which you can read about on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_(farmer)
I had one final jotting , Eugenius Birch. Another fancy name I had made up? No, he was a 19th-century English seaside architect, civil engineer and noted builder of promenade-piers and two large aquaria.
Will any of these jottings lead to anything? Possibly – a mash up of my first paragraph above, together with a killer farmer and a seaside architect could become some sort of story, particularly as we have a clear-ish idea of the woman in a light summer suit. Would the story be set in the 1940’s… well maybe it will, and maybe my newspaper reporter Mike Scott will be involved. (note to self, I must finish my first Mike Scott story and find the secret of the bowler hat and the missing typist!
PS I’m pretty sure Eugenius Birch did not build our Grand Pier in Weston-super-Mare
Lois Elsden 