Blood Eye - The Paperback!

The posters for the paperback are being spotted round and about and I even took a trip to the train station in Leicester this morning to have a look for myself. The chap on the gate very kindly allowed me onto the platform without a ticket so that I could take a photo of the RAVEN poster in all its gory...I mean glory (there were 7 of them!) For years I've been standing on that platform, waiting for the London train, and I can't describe how amazing it felt to see my dream up on the wall, so close I could reach out and touch it.

Shout me if you see one!

Festival of History

Another year, another Festival of History, another time Sally has talked me out of buying a longbow. Darn it. But they’re just so beautiful and shiny and well-crafted and…well…deadly. I know, it’s not the most practical thing I could spend my money on, but so what? Neither is a Ferarri, but it doesn’t stop those wallies sitting in London traffic, deafening pedestrians with the obscene roar of cars so ridiculous that they struggle over speedbumps. Still, I enjoyed every minute of this year’s dizzying historical odyssey. That’s not to say it’s not a little weird sometimes. After all, there you are munching on a hotdog in the rolling Northamptonshire countryside, looking up toward the grand 18th century Palladian style mansion of Kelmarsh hall, when six or seven WWII commandos march by, the whiff of khaki woollen cloth floating in their wake. Slurping the ketchup off your sausage, you just watch them go on their way, water canteens sloshing, boots stomping the brown summer grass. Strangely, they don’t see you, but I’ll get to that later. Then, thinking it’s probably best if you bought a waffle with chocolate sauce, you stop to let a column of Roman legionaries tramp past, complete with clinking cuirasses, shields, javelins and sandals that Jesus would have thought a little ‘last year.’ It’s all rather strange. So you make your way to another field, where two Viking armies are winding themselves up, frothing at the mouth, banging shields and hurling insults across the open ground. This year the Vikings really went for it. Some challenged their enemies to come and taste their huge Danish pastries…err…axes…Danish axes, which they swung and looped through the air. The fight was a good’un, too, the shieldwalls meeting with a clash to wake the gods! It was at this point I realized I had not put the memory card back in the small country of a camera I had taken along specially. B*****ks. The only way through this disappointment was via the beer tent, and into the arms of a couple of tall, damp, real ales. Even they tasted historic, prompting me to wonder what beer tasted like in, oh I don’t know, the time of King Charles I. Pondering such weighty issues, we followed the cannon’s roar to where the dashing Prince Rupert was leading his horse against the pikemen of Parliament. Even when you know they’re coming, those cannon blasts still make you jump, making you feel a right wuss. It really does go a little way toward making you realize how mind-bendingly terrifying it must have been to take part in such a battle. The cannon being a bit too loud for Sally (ahem) we moved on. There were archers and men-at-arms, mud spattered from the field of Agincourt, Roman gladiators sparring in their pants, (sorry, loincloths) jousting knights at full tilt, and Redcoats fresh from pounding Boney at Waterloo. So anyway, back to my mystical musings. I’ve never really believed in re-incarnation - not even when I was regressed and spouted (on tape) for 30 mins about my life in an Anglo Saxon village - but then I got thinking. What if all these re-enactors were folk who were somehow re-living parts of former lives? As for myself, sometimes when writing, the images are so clear and strong in my mind that they are almost like memories. I know how it feels to desperately want to go back in time, so desperately that it hurts. So, maybe the guy dressed as a Roman legionary was a Roman legionary…once…killed during the invasion of Briton. Perhaps that WW1 Tommy fought and died in the filth of the Western Front, in some former life. And could it be that that hairy Viking with the bird’s nest of a beard looked just the same when he walked these or other lands in AD 802? I know I know, you think I’ve been on the real ale again. Well maybe I have. But I’ll tell you this; whatever it’s all about, next year I’m buying that bow. Yew just watch me.

Long Live the Ring!

On Wednesday night we went to the Royal Albert Hall to watch Howard Shore's score to The Lord of the Rings performed live on stage by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, to a high definition cinematic screening of the film. It was a new experience for me to listen to a score performed live and it was stunning. Having said that, I’m such a fan of the movie that for some of the time I forgot the orchestra was even there. Liv Tyler's Elf princess, Arwen, stirs my soul with a very big spoon, and I don’t mind admitting I want to be Aragorn. But what the evening confirmed to me (other than I really do wish I lived in Midde Earth) was what I have always thought – that movies can be the ultimate artistic form. Paintings, sculptures, books and songs can all be creations of incredible power. They can inspire and excite you. They can provoke and disgust and influence you. They can rip out your guts and stamp on them. But some movies combine it all to take you on a journey you’ll never forget. The movie is a combination, a marriage of the story, the image and the music, and when all three hold up their end of the bargain, as in the Lord of the Rings, what you have is a masterpiece. And perhaps that’s why I still get that prickle of excitement when the lights go down in the cinema and the expectant hush falls across the auditorium.
Then again, I take it all back. You can’t beat a good book.