Out of my Tree...

Out of my Tree...

  London, Stoke Newington, 31st August 2010

On Tuesday I finally got around to getting  my bicycle fixed, which I took to a BMX shop in Stoke Newington, while it was being repaired, I killed some time exploring the length of Northwold Rd and then Clissold park. I was enjoying the sunshine for a change rather than being cooped up in my room struggling with my stupid Sci-Fi novel, which I imagine any well read critic will compare to HG Wells and Wyndham.

     The more I write it the more Wyndham Wells it becomes and I’m almost at the brink of wondering whether to abandon it altogether. I’m only writing it in the hope I might win £20,000 in the Terry Pratchit writers competition in December. If I win I will clear all these debts I have accumulated in one final fowl swoop and perhaps have a bit left to travel the world or something like that. However, I have to keep reminding myself not to try and write a great book or the greatest piece of literature ever written but just write a fucking book. Its subject matter is messy to say the least, it has robots taking over in a near dystopian future (sigh) and everyone’s tagged and the machines use the tags against man. The moral to it all is that tagging is a really shitty idea. But I’ve written so much waffle now, I wonder if my substitutes for Triffid’s (the Swans) will ever swing it with the readers. However, I imagine every writer has wanted to write a book based on his or her favourite novels and so that is kind of what I am doing with this. I also read in the annals of ‘Subterranean’ back issues regarding sci-fi that it didn’t really matter, that it was ok to be cliché, so long as that idea was freshened up somehow, given a new spin perhaps and delivered in a intelligent manor.

    So with that, I went and sat in a tree in Clissold park, it was the only tree worth me climbing, for its long branches hung heavy and low and beckoned me to climb upon them. I had not climbed a tree in years and always wanted to get back into the habit without falling on my ass in front of a bunch of bemused onlookers, however this tree was special, it had low branches that almost touched the ground and it was relatively simple for me to jump up and scuttle my way along.

Nothing seemed to compare with climbing this thing, I had played in front of hundreds of people, done Texas and passed a degree in film but it all meant nothing really. It was like I was never there doing those things but this tree was real and after being cooped up in my room for weeks on end, writing a stupid sci-fi book,  this was like heaven. I climbed up about half way, perhaps 20 feet off the ground, maybe less finding a spot where I could sit and make a few notes in my pad about the book. Walking earlier through Northwold Rd, looking at all those shops that sold various mobile phones, camcorders, mini Tv screens and so on, I realized that there was no past present or future for this was the future and anything beyond was self explanatory. I felt like Colin Wilson’s outsider searching for a truth or realising that this was the truth- that all this mechanical marvallry, only accounted to so much plastic, so much obsolescence as some newer, smaller, quicker, gadget came out on the market.

That all this ultimately meant nothing to me and all that really mattered was what was going on in the here and now. So in this I hung out in the tree watching life go by, perhaps the closest I would be to escaping the city around me, with all its confusion, beeping traffic, howling sirens and miserable looking citizens permanently glued to some gadget as if they had become dependently fused to the machine...