Further thoughts on Alternative Calendars
It was September 27th, 2005. In Clerkenwell, David Widera was tearing his hair out over Ronald Cattle's “fucking quill pen,” which had finally dried-up. Ronald was refusing to finish his novel claiming that, when the ink reserves were exhausted, the book was finished. When pressed, he pointed out the supporting paragraphs in a photocopy of the contract that had been hastily drawn up on a bar napkin, and duly signed, when the three of us were all the worse for wear. The original had been misfiled, or perhaps even mistaken for litter and thrown out, by the firm of solicitors that the Walmsley publishing house had engaged, ever since their inception in 1967.
Clearly the book wasn't finished. In fact it had ended mid-word. Ironically that word was 'continuous'. Ronald had got as far as writing 'cont'. The remainder of the text was a barren inscription, void of pigmentation.
“I'll tell you who else is a cont,” remarked David.
It was thought, by our mutual employer, that it would be better if I alone was sent to mediate in person, though I scarcely managed to be any less impatient. There was money on the line and I had already pre-emptively spent my share.
“It's an affectation,” I told him. “You're worse than those people who rent out Jean Rhys' typewriter to write their novels. The only thing missing is a vase of lilacs and a picture window overlooking the Cotswolds.”
Ronald's response to my tirade was to amble silently into his tiny kitchen, where he stood at the slither of counter-top with slumped, rounded shoulders, chopping foraged field mushrooms for the pasta sauce, that was to form the basis of our evening meal.
I, of course, followed him, unwilling to let the matter rest.
“Why can't you write on a computer like a normal person?” I enquired.
“Because unlike you, my writing isn't an abstraction, but an imperfect reflection,” he mumbled, in that peculiar fusion of accents that he acquired from a variety of rural backwaters around England, Wales and Northern France. “It doesn't seek to separate itself from my surroundings.”
Ronald regards his writing as a vocation. This makes him, in the considered professional opinion of my former colleague, David Widera, “an absolute stroke-inducing nightmare” to any publisher who has failed to fully grasp the myriad idiosyncratic rules and personal codes, that both guide and actively subdue the creative processes of such individuals.
He writes according to a natural cycle. In April, the calendar geese depart from the marshes around his home in great flocks, on a migration path that will take them to their sub-arctic breeding grounds. Around the same time, Ronald's wife – the travel journalist Barbara McAllister – will embark upon her own Summer migration.
“Ronald never wants to go anywhere,” she once told me. “He holidays in his own mind.”
During the northern exodus of the calendar geese, the shafts of their flight feathers will fill with a black fluid that functions both as a natural insulator and as an antifreeze that prevents the formation of ice crystals on their wings. This evolutionary trait allows the birds to fly at exceptionally high altitudes. Plane flightpaths are diverted from known migration routes around this time of year.
The organic architecture responsible for the fluid is a membrane of fatty tissue lining the interior of the feather shaft. This builds up over the Winter months and is usually exhausted by the time the geese complete their return journey around September. Any feathers that are separated from the birds continue to follow their biological imperative and produce fluid throughout the Summer.
Prior to the northern migration, Ronald will venture out onto the marsh and carefully select a disembodied feather that he considers up to the job of functioning as his pen for the next six months. He will sharpen the end of the shaft into a nib. Thereafter the replenishing ink that issues forth for the tip will be set to purpose in the creation of a novel. When these reserves dry up in early Autumn, he will place whatever he is writing on permanent hiatus.
Around this time, Barbara will return home from her travels. Ronald will put his writing on hold until the following April, while the pair attend to the minutiae of their married life.
As a parting gesture, he saddle stitches the unfinished manuscript with dental floss and places it on a home-made shelf that lists precariously above the fireplace of his sitting room. I noted, on my visit, that a number of these unpublished works showed signs of singeing around the edges, indicating they had perhaps toppled from their perch and into the hearth. I wonder if he would care if one or all of them were to be consumed by the fire. He appears to regard the act of writing as an end in and of itself, and the half-finished books that he produces as a by-product of this seasonal process.
“When the nib fractures I remove the end with my toenail clippers and sharpen a new one,” he said, as he proffered the spent remnant of his most recent quill. Evidently there had been a number of fractures, as all that remained of what I imagine was once a fairly substantial feather were two inches of shaft with a few stray barbs bristling from it. He explained that, when a feather was new and at full length, you could expect to get around 2000 words per day out of it before you needed to rest your pen and allow it time to replenish its ink supply. The number of words went down over the Summer as a result of wear and tear.
“You know, you could pick up more than one feather,” I suggested.
Before I departed I told him: “If I possessed even a fraction of your talent, then I would be knocking out novels left right and centre. I certainly wouldn't be letting some arbitrary rule, based on the limited availability of goose ink, constrain me.”
“Barbara makes enough for the pair of us,” he replied. “If money gets tight, I can always get a winter job at one of the warehouses.”
I drove almost 300 miles back to my home. That evening my fingers struck at the face of my soiled computer keyboard with extra vigour; its disembodied back legs jammed into wodges of Blu tack, the individual letters wiggling in their broken sockets; the circuit board foundation steeped in the electronic imprint of my own abandoned writing projects.
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