ALBERT and BABS
Continuing my secretly harmonious mini-series on twentieth century icons, how about this comic strip? It’s in Viz (Issue 345, June/Jul 25) so of course it’s not funny, but what a combo – existentialism and smut. Oi Camus, find an excess in moderation or SLING YER ‘OOK.

I wrote similarly on Insta/FB, without the full strip reproduced here and full disclosure that no writer has had more impact on the way I live my life than Camus did. While my fevered teenage passion for Barbara Windsor was briefer and less practical, it was strong at the time and she never subsequently fell from grace.

I knew the famous (if unread by me) Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein was a Cambridge man, and who does not know of the US sex goddess? I did not expect to find them honoured specifically in Norway: a stiff hike in lakeside woodland near Skjolden to visit the place where Ludwig claimed to do his deepest thinking, and easy access at the Haugesund docks to the siren. Both satisfying in their own way.

There is a ‘pagan’ version, amounting (I was told) to a pub crawl in the centre of Caracas, but that will have to wait for another visit. The ‘circuit of the seven temples’ is a Holy Week Catholic tradition, which in Caracas includes the church where the city’s first mass was held and another where Bolivar was dubbed the Liberator. You’ll have to take it on trust that I did them all (though two were blocked off from entry on the day), since my phone allows a maximum of six photos in a montage. A gold star to anyone who can tell me which one is missing from it.

This weekend I was at the Writing East Midlands (WEM) annual writers’ conference at Lincoln University. My son Joe came with me to a city I hardly know, the city of my birth and first three months. Pictured are Brayford Pool and us at the castle. We took in the cathedral and some of the art galleries and pubs. The Peacock, a familiar name as our Rugby local for many years, happened to be opposite the building where I was born. Somewhat withdrawn from the road within ten minutes walk of the cathedral, what I understand was once The Quarry maternity home is pictured from the front and with me at the rear.

First business trip of the year to Ecuador, where there is always something worth seeing in the two main cities as well as the countryside.

Before diving from the springboard of dry January into who knows what wetness this year may bring, I look back to December 2019 when members of both sides of my family met for lunch at Worzals, Wisbech. Since then we have lost a majority of those pictured, whose memory I honour. No longer young, I may never see so much, nor live so long, but I am still in the mood to try.

A rare double church visit on 17 December. Around noon with my cousin Sue and her husband Steve to light some candles in memory of the dear departed at St Matthew’s in Sutton Bridge (exterior shown), where Sue and I were christened. In the dusk alone to St Clement’s in Outwell (interior), where Beaupre schoolkids’ snow globes were on display and 75 years ago my parents were married. Happy holidays to you and yours and nothing but good days in 2025.

Not sure who took the photo, but I think it was 1969 when Michael Jackson dropped in on an unsuspecting family at Henson House in Tydd St Mary. The picture features in this month’s newsletter, along with a competition to win copies of ‘The Sunny Side of the House’ (in which everyone in the snap features heavily) or any of my other books, and my entry in last year’s Rugby Cafe Writers’ Christmas competition. It placed third, which I shall strive to better in 2024. Onwards and upwards, all the best David.

Where are you from/where are you based?

I grew up in East Anglia, Outwell mainly but over the last twelve months have also revisited in life and memory Sutton Bridge, where I was christened and started school. I now live in the Midlands.

Do you write full time or do you have a ‘day job’?

Like Kerouac, I probably do more typing than writing, with millions of words from the past available to feed my website feature Dave Daze. My new material, by day and night, includes reports on international insurance markets as well as maintaining my personal publication schedule of a book every year.

How has your other work influenced your writing?

More so perhaps in this first venture into non-fiction than my earlier novels. The discipline of checking rigorously sources of information for my insurance reports helped me to dig into the past for corroboration or correction of boyhood memories in ‘The Sunny Side of the House’, though I hope this still has the narrative drive of fiction.

What is your favourite book?

As well as taking instruction from various published and unpublished memoirs of early years, including the gold standard of Tolstoy’s ‘Childhood, Boyhood, Youth’, I returned to my adolescent reading of fiction from them Amis boys, Donleavy, Vonnegut and Kesey. I could not fully recapture my teenage enthusiasm, but perhaps appreciated more this time around the ambition of Kesey’s flawed ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’. Old Henry’s injunction to his son is made for the writer struggling to keep alive his own ambition: NEVER GIVE A INCH.

Did this book inspire any aspects of your book? If so, how?

The first inspiration behind ‘Sunny’ was a desire for completion, a brain dump of my earlier memories to complement the contemporary record I have from the age of sixteen. In the writing I realised a memoir cannot be a diary; every day is a good day, not necessarily an interesting one – selection is everything, but must not be in your own favour. I did not want to take the fifth, unless it was the fifth commandment: honour thy father and thy mother.

Where is your writing space?

I usually write my diary in bed, recently on a ReMarkable gadget with handwriting recognition software embedded. Anything else nowadays goes straight into typescript, on a crowded desk in a cluttered room, with the Typhoo Tea mid-sixties United line-up on the wall behind my screen.

Are you currently working on anything new?

Unless the world clamours for a second volume of memories from a Fenland boy (I have three more in completed first drafts without yet taking me to age thirty), I am working for 2025 on a novel set among older people around the COVID-19 years, ‘The Tuesday-Thursday Tontine’. Then I hope to begin my second five-year plan, again a mixture of young adult – ‘Joe Kingmaker’ provisionally in 2026 – contemporary novels (‘Ray’s Last Ride’, ‘Trifocal Nostalgia’, possibly a start to ‘The Caribandia Trilogy’) and – whether the world cares or not – more about myself as myself.

How does it feel to be a published author?

Unprompted by social media mood makers, I feel blessed to be a published writer. Kingsley Amis was daunted by the eight feet of shelf-space Robert Graves had for his own work (are translations cheating?) at his home in Mallorca. Martin Amis’ ambition was to leave a shelf of books. Ken Kesey, from whom I would have liked to read so much more, produced only a handful. Maybe the merry prankster was right to focus on other dreams and visions, but the writing is the only thing I feel I can fully claim as my own. So somewhere between a handful and a shelf is the goal. As Anthony Burgess, another favourite of my youth, put it in his own memoir: ‘Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.’

Last week on what would have been Brian’s 80th birthday (17 September 2024) I met my cousin Sue, her husband Steve, my aunt Jean – Sue’s mum and Brian’s only surviving sibling – his best friends Ben, Dixie (John Dicks) and Margaret for a lunch in his memory at the Anchor pub, Sutton Bridge. A lovely occasion and a JD toast to Uncle Buck.