About this Blog
About Richard Beard
I figured out the software by translating a very short book by Andre Maurois, now available under the Translation tag above. This means I can move on to whatever else is on my mind. If I run out of ideas, the next pre-computer age blog I plan to translate is another very short book, this one by Henry Miller, also in French, entitled I’m No More of an Idiot Than Anybody Else.
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 waste of space Dru tells me, with all due respect, that I haven’t yet developed my blogger’s voice. She means that I write like I always write. I haven’t managed that intimate but off-beat tone that she does so well herself. But then Dru has unfair advantages as a blogger. She does loads of stuff. She’s been having an adventure-a-day, against doctor’s orders, since before blogs were first used as solid fuel. Take a look. This is how it should be done.
Instead of adventures, I make a habit of sitting at my desk doing nothing much, though I do have an idea for an art installation that will be a speeded-up film of my day at work. The lucky audience will get to see exactly how often I drop my head into my hands. It will be fascinating.
Meanwhile, and in the absence of shipwrecks and poetry readings, there’s Dru on a walk through Leigh Woods stumbling across ‘a stone. It’s Welsh slate, carved with the words AND STONES MOVED SILENTLY ACROSS THE WORLD. It was put there by Alyson Hallet.’
This stone serves the perfect function of public art, in that it’s not very noticeable or thoughtful. Public art needs to be inconspicuous. It gets installed in public places. If the passing-by audience become animated in any meaningful way then the council fears a traffic hazard or an incitement to vandalism. Public art is therefore chosen for being whatever art isn’t -passers-by must pass it by.
Fountains are the second-lowest point for public art - they often get turned off, as if they were never there. The highest contempt, however, should be reserved for public sculptures of human figures on town-centre benches. They’re rubbish art. But they’re also taking up a space on a public bench. What good to the public is that?
 'there are no winners' As a sportsman, I am a member of the ‘ -y’ family. I’m related to Straussy and Backy. In our small sub-species, Homo Olympiens, there are three primary families. We are joined by the ‘-o’ family (Wilko, Johnno) and the ‘-ers’ family (Aggers, Athers).
We get along famously, because these sporting nicknames are names stripped down. They are names in the dressing room in their jockstraps. They’re no respecters of names. On the team-sheet nobody escapes – the system is automatic and egalitarian, and amid the mud and studs everyone is quickly allocated to one of the families.
The same does not happen in individual sports. One of the horrors of golf coverage on the TV is the smarmy use of first names – ‘Tiger’, ‘Lee’ – as if everyone was on first name terms. You’re not fooling anybody.
I’m thinking about this because I was surprised to be referred to on the net as Beardy. Over on his excellent blog designed for auto-didact, spliffy, anti-establishment ranting polymaths (who like trains), Ian Marchant reminded me (and all those in his wide constituency) that I’d offered to take the Physical Education Classes at the Free University of Radnorshire.
(This will be free like the National Gallery and not like Westminster Abbey, which is free except if you don’t pay you can’t go in. At the National Gallery there’s no bullying, and you’d have to have a heart of socialist stone not to bung a few coins in the tin or pay a couple of quid for some overpriced postcards).
But Ian is right. I have put myself forward as the Professor of PE at FUR. He was therefore correct to give me my active sporting name, and you know what, Marchers? That’s going to be the first class we take, before preparing for the more philosophical Race With No Finish Line (practical).
What are team nicknames all about? They announce an intimacy. They also infantilise, which makes them true. Those of us who like games and rolling about on grass are in touch with our inner child. A baby name is the best we deserve, and there is no room for airs and graces.
I was reminded of this once in the letter pages of the Times. A show-off Dad proudly wrote in to say that his eight-month old son was a keen fan of BBC’s Test Match Special. Not only did he like to listen to every ball of a Test match, at the age of eight months, but only the day before he’d uttered his first words: ‘Aggers.’
The next day another reader replied that his son, too, was eight months old and listened to every ball of the Test match. His first words were ‘Christoper Martin-Jenkins.’
 'no, after you' Last night I introduced the fantastic Robert Goddard, who was giving the NAW lecture at the Birmingham Book Festival. He’s a speaker who can make a 500 seat auditorium seem like a living room, partly because he knows what he’s talking about.
A crime writer, he says, has to get things right. And to get things right, it helps to be the kind of person who protects detail like others feel for kittens. If temperamenally you enjoy searching out errors in ancient train timetables (Bradshaw’s (d.1961) for maximum satisfaction) , you could do worse than try your hand at a crime novel.
Also, it’s always reassuring when at a public event a professional storyteller turns out to be brilliant at telling stories. The one I enjoyed most involved the correct etiquette for a gentleman who wishes to show a lady through a revolving door. His dilemma is that he needs to help with the door, but without pushing in front.
The correct solution, apparently, is for the gentleman to enter the revolving door alone, complete four fifths of a cycle (alone), and then to allow the lady to enter the empty section in front of him. He may then complete the cycle, following the lady graciously into the lobby.
Alas, this kind of attention to detail is rarely easy to follow in practice. Other people are ignorant and push in front. And ladies are not as patient as they used to be.
I had a similar dilemma come up in Becoming Drusilla. I can never remember whether the man (if he’s a gentleman) is supposed to walk on the right or the left of his companion. In my mind I have memories of two conflicting possibilities:
‘The man walks on the outside [next to the road] to protect the lady from wheel splash. Or the man walks on the left [which will sometimes be shopside], keeping his scabbard clear, ready at any moment to safely draw his sword and defend the lady’s honour. Or is that the right, freeing the sword arm?’
Looking back on this, I don’t think a gentleman would stand on the right. Even though the sword-arm would be free, the sword in pulling clear might rent and slash the lady’s clothes (crinoline, hopefully) in the act of being honourably drawn.
The answer to this dilemma has since revealed itself. A gentleman should stand on the left of the lady, but should always walk on the right-hand side of the road. Then everyone’s happy.
I should be writing crime novels. I’m that kind of guy.
 Some People Know Everything I’ve done a bad bad thing. Reading the Bible seems like a culturally rewarding thing to do, like going to Shakespeare plays and listening to Bach. It doesn’t happen that often and it’s not always for fun, but I know I’m not going to come out the other side any more ignorant than I am already.
The twitch state starts with Bible Commentaries. Worse - New Testament bible commentaries. There should be a warning against reading books about the books of the bible, because New Testament Studies is not a field in which anyone can dabble. You’re either in or you’re a non swimmer, and not even everybody who’s in can swim.
The gospels are constructed using devices familiar from postmodernism. A ’frame’ in Mark describes his habit of starting one story, interrupting with another, and then returning to the climax of the first. This is partly why the gospels are open to so many interpretations – there’s a kind of unpredictable spark or molecular reaction in the unwritten gaps between two stories that taken separately are as simple as you like:
Be good to other people.
Matthew and Luke then take chunks of Mark , called pericopes, and move them about and make new versions of the same story. I think they’re trying to demystify the message:
Be good to other people.
If they weren’t so premodern they’d have known that demystification isn’t what’s coming next.
Seen like this, the gospel written second is already trying to save Jesus from the first gospel, and so on. Until eventually even Richard Dawkins wants to save Jesus from the Christians – he claims to own a T-shirt saying Atheists for Jesus.
A good slogan never dies and there’s now an A for J website.
There’s also a book on Amazon called The Postmodern Bible, but I haven’t had time to look at it yet. I’m buried under Bible Commentaries, and I’m sinking.
 Shout LGTB Festival - November
The news! I always neglect the news.
Thursday 7th October – Birmingham Books Festival
19.00 Birmingham Conservatoire
Tickets (5 pounds) and more information available here:
Richard Beard in conversation with John Boyne and Janette Jenkins
I haven’t seen John and Janette together for fifteen years, since we were at UEA together. When Malcom Bradbury died I wrote 24 Hours with Malcolm Bradbury for the Paris Review, but otherwise haven’t been a great revisitor of that time. However, I’m looking forward to playing David Dimbleby to Janette’s Bolton Joanna Lumley and John’s John Boyne. The last time I saw John he generously stood in at a Dublin reading when I came down with chicken pox hours before the event.
Wednesday 25th November – SHOUT Festival
19.30 Birmingham Library Theatre, Paradise Place
Tickets (5 pounds) and more information available here:
Becoming Drusilla at Shout
Shout is Birmingham’s Festival of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Culture. Dru and I do a reading which is more a kind of double-act – we read from the book but we do our own dialogue. Dru reads out the bits she wrote and I read out some other bits. We then have lots of questions at the end which are nearly always exclusively for Dru. As if I mind.
Dru recently discovered some unseen photos of the Becoming Drusilla walk.
Saturday 21st November – The Writer’s Toolkit Conference
10.00-16.00 South Birmingham College, Digbeth
Tickets (29 pounds) and more information available here:
The Writers Toolkit
What it says on the tin:
‘Subjects covered include Understanding Publishing, Pitching Ideas, Social Networking for Writers, Working with the BBC, Writing with Communities, Promoting Poetry, Working with Agents and Writing in the Digital Age. Other individuals and organisations involved include Arts Council England, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, Arvon Foundation, National Association of Writers in Education, BBC Radio Four, The National Academy of Writing and Bloodaxe Books.’
NAW Readings, October
At these events I shall be introducing the highly talented writers from The National Academy of Writing, who will be reading from their work.
Entry is free but tickets should be booked:
Thursday 8th October
18.00 Birmingham Conservatoire
Postgraduate Poetry Platform – Poets in Performance
Wednesday 28th October
18.00 Birmingham Conservatoire
Emerging Talent – National Academy of Writing Showcase
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and recently took up the post as Director of the National Academy of Writing. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed aboved. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below right. I'll get back to you.
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