Home again, home again...
May. 21st, 2007 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceY'know, it's been so long since I posted here - days'n'days - I can barely remember how to do it. What does one talk about? Who would care?
Anyway, here I am, back from tour. I have done four gigs in five days, which may be a record; I do perhaps have a smidgeon more sympathy for bestsellers when they grumble about their book tours (but only a smidgeon: there are demonstrable compensations for the relentless drear of travel, interview, event...); I have done some work tho' probably not enough, and I have spent time with friends, and and and.
We did three Write Fantastic gigs in libraries, each to small but distinct audiences; it's odd how very different they can be, from one event to the next. All three gigs worked very well, I thought - and shall I ever get tired of telling How I Met Tolkien? Prob'ly not. But my fellow TWFers may get very tired of hearing it...
Rounded the week off by reading one of my ghost stories - 'The Deadly Space Between', still available in 'Phantoms at the Phil 2', with CD recording and five other stories - in the Mummy Room at Manchester Museum. Again to not many people: which gives me the opportunity to say in a very literal sense that the audience was more dead than alive. One of the dead was laid out in full view, right behind me.
I stayed mostly with Juliet McKenna and her family, tho' I did slip away for one night with m'friends Helen and Mark in Henley; and bracketed that with two days spent working in Oxford. The bus into town on the first of those days broke down outside the Radcliffe Infirmary, which leaves you walking down St Giles. What's the first significant feature you meet, walking down St Giles from the Radcliffe? The Eagle & Child. Aka The Bird & Baby, the pub where Tolkien and C S Lewis et al used to drink. So I went in there to work, in hopes of something's rubbing off. And then drifted across town via other old landmarks - the Pitt Rivers museum, Mesopotamia, the house I was born in, like that - and other pubs, before I met up with Helen in the evening. Love that kind of day: productive and nostalgic, both at once.
And now I'm home, and the house is a tip but the boys are pleased to see me; and I don't know whether I should do some work or sort some books or build some more shelving, so I expect I'll run off shopping instead. That's what I usually do.
Anyway, here I am, back from tour. I have done four gigs in five days, which may be a record; I do perhaps have a smidgeon more sympathy for bestsellers when they grumble about their book tours (but only a smidgeon: there are demonstrable compensations for the relentless drear of travel, interview, event...); I have done some work tho' probably not enough, and I have spent time with friends, and and and.
We did three Write Fantastic gigs in libraries, each to small but distinct audiences; it's odd how very different they can be, from one event to the next. All three gigs worked very well, I thought - and shall I ever get tired of telling How I Met Tolkien? Prob'ly not. But my fellow TWFers may get very tired of hearing it...
Rounded the week off by reading one of my ghost stories - 'The Deadly Space Between', still available in 'Phantoms at the Phil 2', with CD recording and five other stories - in the Mummy Room at Manchester Museum. Again to not many people: which gives me the opportunity to say in a very literal sense that the audience was more dead than alive. One of the dead was laid out in full view, right behind me.
I stayed mostly with Juliet McKenna and her family, tho' I did slip away for one night with m'friends Helen and Mark in Henley; and bracketed that with two days spent working in Oxford. The bus into town on the first of those days broke down outside the Radcliffe Infirmary, which leaves you walking down St Giles. What's the first significant feature you meet, walking down St Giles from the Radcliffe? The Eagle & Child. Aka The Bird & Baby, the pub where Tolkien and C S Lewis et al used to drink. So I went in there to work, in hopes of something's rubbing off. And then drifted across town via other old landmarks - the Pitt Rivers museum, Mesopotamia, the house I was born in, like that - and other pubs, before I met up with Helen in the evening. Love that kind of day: productive and nostalgic, both at once.
And now I'm home, and the house is a tip but the boys are pleased to see me; and I don't know whether I should do some work or sort some books or build some more shelving, so I expect I'll run off shopping instead. That's what I usually do.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 08:33 am (UTC)I'd love to hear how you met Tolkien, but I guess I shouldn't ask?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 01:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 01:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 03:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 01:26 pm (UTC)The full story is recorded here (http://www.chazbrenchley.co.uk/seoul.html), in a lecture I gave at a conference in Seoul. It's about halfway through the text, if you want to skip...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 01:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 03:54 pm (UTC)I encountered Tolkien about 10 years after you, also off my brother's bookshelf. My brother and I proceeded to steal one another's Tolkien paraphernalia for years afterward, and I too owe my writing bent to my older brother. So I warmed to your account instantly; it read so much like my own life.
Unfortunately I lacked the self-discipline to not-write-fantasy-until-ready 8-Q Oh well.