One man and his pencil - a special relationship.

I own a number of pens, ball point, felt-tip and fountain, and they all have their function in my life. Also, a lot of my time is spent at the computer and I'm perfectly happy typing away all day. There is, however, a special relationship in my working life and that is the bond between me and my pencil. There is something especially intimate and natural about writing poetry with a pencil and I have a number of little note books which I keep with me and where I do exactly that. Over the last few years I've written over seventy Fibonacci poems, many of them published in the specialist Fibonacci poetry journal, The Fib Review,  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/ and most of them begin life in this rain-spattered book. It's interesting sometimes to look back and see how these little syllable-count poems began.

I have a number of pencils but the one in the photograph has been companion for some time now and, silly though it might sound, I've grown attached to it. I feel that we know each other very well and I respect the way it puts up with my terrible hand-writing and the often intense pressure I put on it when I write.  It is also tolerant about being chewed during those thoughtful moments when, in olden times, I might well have simply lit a cigarette. So this little pencil and I are friends.

I have my rather superior pencil sharpener too - it's a souvenir from the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice and, over time, it has sharpened but also whittled down my pencil many times a day until now I'm brought to a sad moment of parting.

My old friend is now getting so small that I fear it's reaching the end of its working life. Just how much smaller can I make it before it ceases to function as a writing implement? What do you think? Is it time to chuck it? Should I retire it to the back of my stationery drawer or just throw it into the bin? I have plenty more pencils so I should stop being sentimental perhaps.

Recently I was given a posh Edwardian propelling pencil as a birthday present. It's made of silver and is elegantly ornamented so it's the type of pencil that should be used on special occasions like noting down a telephone number, scribbling an aide-memoire, making a light-handed and desultory doodle or, best of all, it's perfect when I'm in the mood to write a gentle and thoughtful poem conceived in tranquillity. If I'm in my usual writing gusto though, the leads just break on first contact with the paper.

No, my little pencil does that job best but I know that I am going to have to make a decision. Which of these lovely new pencils, another present, should I choose next? It's an important moment because whichever it is, it might be with me for a long time and through many writing adventures - both good and bad. Farewell little pencil.

Virtual Writers ask me to remember why I wrote Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love.

The lively online writers' community, Virtual Writers, has asked me to do a questions and answers session about my novel Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love (published by Ward Wood Publishing). It was enjoyable thinking back over the time when I wrote it just when I'm finishing my new novel, Blue Notes, Still Frames (soon to be published by Ward Wood Publishing), and working on the third one, Over The Hills Is A Long Way Off.  All three novels are based in Brighton, UK, but in different decades - 1967, 1994 and 2017. Sometimes, it's difficult to remember what year I'm living in.

I'm grateful to Virtual Writers for encouraging me to go back to my first published novel and to remember or try to remember the impulses that led me to write it. If you'd like to find out what I said, here's the link:

http://www.virtualwriters.org/stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love-by-colin-bell/

1967 and all that.

I've been having a bit of a sort in my computer files and found some of my old research photographs for my novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love, published on the 31 October - yay!
As you can probably tell the book is based in that vivid year 1967 and these photographs sum up some of the moods that I was trying to capture.

My computer clear-out has failed of course because I really can't delete these even though the text of the novel is now about to go off to the printers and I shall have to live with it as it is. As Pontius Pilate said, what I have written I have written.

I was a teenage schoolboy in 1967 but I knew that I was experiencing the dawning of something exciting and, probably, life-changing and I couldn't wait to get on with it. I was, I think, a little jealous of those, just ahead of me,  like the young man below, who could get out there,  on the road to what I assumed would be that difficult word 'freedom'. I don't know the people in these photographs but then again I do.

I could see them all around me and read about them too even in my edition of Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805)


OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood 

Upon our side, we who were strong in love! 

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 

But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times, 

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 

The attraction of a country in romance!

Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution but his words rang true for me when, not entirely wrongly, I felt that we too were on the edge of a glorious revolution.

Since then, of course, the so-called Summer Of Love has been much maligned or, worse, trivialised. Whatever its legacy, it was a thrilling moment in time - one which I attempted to write about with some trepidation.

I don't know where I was, quite literally, when this photograph was taken. Presumably, judging by the length of my hair, it was a couple of years later after I had moved on from those idealistic schooldays when I used to listen to the excitingly new Beatles' Sgt Pepper Pepper album and dream the dream.

Wherever that was, whatever I was on and whoever I was with, I think I must have got the message.