Creative Writing Assignment 3

This is my third assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignment was based on an object that we brought with us to class. I brought an empty Chateau Latour 1955 bottle. We were supposed to take a memory associated with that object, and use that as the basis for a piece of writing. I used the memory of taking my wine home. I don't know exactly where I will take this piece next.

    He brought home the paper bag, excited about it's contents, wanting to share his find with someone, just bursting with anticipation.

    "Honey, you will never guess what I've found!" he shouted as he came in the door of their small flat on the first floor of a steel-framed, 2-storey block.

    "What?"

    "A bottle of Chateau Latour," he said excitedly, "1955!"

    "So, is it good?" she asked, in a rather disinterested way.

    "Good? It should be amazing, 55 years old, one of the best wines ever, if it hasn't gone bad it will be amazing!"

    "Knowing your luck, it will have gone bad," she said dismissively, and actually quite unfairly to a person who had known amazing luck in the past. "I suppose you've gone and wasted a lot of money on it? Lord knows where you stash all the money you waste…" she said in a refrain that had been heard more than once.

    "No! That is the brilliant thing—It only cost me 1,000 yen!"

    "How come, if it is so good?" she asked with open scepticism. He also heard spite in her words, and it was too much for him.

    "Fuck you, and fuck your negatory ways, woman!" he shouted.

    "Is that how you speak to your wife?" she asked. This was also a common refrain.

    "We need to do something about that," he spat, "and soon. You are an unhappy, negative bitch and a half."

    "If you think that, why don't you just leave, you spineless dickhead," she said, not really asking a question.

    "Thanks for the invitation, I think I will do just that!"

    Ken, for that was the man's name, stormed out of the apartment, the whole block shuddering when he slammed the front door shut.

    His friend, Yoichi, lived just a few hundred yards away, with his mom. Still carrying the paper bag, Ken walked over to Yoichi's house.

    "Hey man, I have an amazing wine here, and you need to help me drink it," he said after Yoichi's mom had shown him in the genkan entryway and called Yoichi out.

    Yoichi, on a camping trip about a year ago, had pulled out a bottle of wine, one that he had saved since he was 10 years old. He had heard that wine got better, and more expensive, with age, and had put one of his father's bottles under his bed, to save, on his 10^th birthday. That had been exactly 20 years before the camping trip, which had been to celebrate his 30^th birthday. Though Ken knew little about wine, he did know that only certain wines actually aged well. Yoichi, bless him, apparently hadn't know that, or hadn't known that at 10, and had chosen to ignore it in the 20 intervening years, because he was absolutely shocked when his 20 year-old wine had been vinegar, and everyone had dumped their glasses. They had instead gotten paralytic on sake and shochu, playing cards until early the next morning.

    Though it couldn't be said that Ken had thought of that when he headed to Yoichi's house, the immediate reason being that his house was closest, when he remembered it, he thought it really appropriate to share his own amazing find with his friend.

    In Yoichi's room, they Googled the wine, and had found a similar one, from 1959, for over $3,000.

    "What is your mom's best dish?" Ken asked.

    "Mmm…I don't know…maybe tekka don…?" he said, referring to a bowl of rice with tuna sashimi on top.

    "Ok, cool, can you ask her to make one for each of us?"

    "Yeah, sure, it is almost time for dinner. Won't Aki be angry if you eat here, though?"

    "Screw Aki and how she feels," he said, looking down at his own stockinged feet.

    "Whatever…just a second, I will ask my mom to fix us tekka-don. I think she might have been planning it anyway."

    Ken continued to use Yoichi's computer to search for information about wine's online, and when Yoichi came back to say that his mom would be making her specialty, Ken asked "do you know how to decant a wine?"

    Yoichi didn't, so they googled that, too.

    They sat at Yoichi's living room table, a large decanter that his father had used, and that his mother had saved after his father's death, was in the centre, with the wine poured from it's resting place of 55 years, and into the large crystal vessel.

    The wine had a very mellow taste, and was in every way beautiful, no mustiness or bad flavour about it. And, strangely, the raw tuna, covered with soy sauce and wasabi, was the perfect food to eat with it, the bite of the wasabi, the soft flesh of the tuna, and the rice at the end all enhancing the flavour of the wine.

    At the end of the meal, there was still about a third of a bottle left, and Yoichi and Ken retired to the living room, wine glasses in hand, and had one last glass of the wine each.

    "This wine is magical," said Ken.

    "Yes, indeed. Thanks again, mate, for sharing it with me," said Yoichi, who was genuinely touched that his friend had shared such an expensive and special wine.

    "No, I mean this wine is really magical. Once I drink this glass," he said, holding the glass aloft, and looking through the glass at the setting sun outside the window, "I will be transformed somehow. I don't know how, but I just know this," said Ken with a certainty that had only come to him at that moment. He drank the wine, and that moment is the one where things did change.

Creative Writing Assignment 2, Variation: Third Person

This is a variation on the last piece I wrote for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. I re-wrote that piece in third person, in an attempt to shorten it, and to see whether it worked better without the first person of the original. Have a look at both, and let me know what you think: Does this one or the other work better for you?
 
    "I do like tennis, but I swim," said the man with a German accent.

    His companion's eyes widened, but in typical English fashion, merely raised his left eyebrow, and inquired "but you like to swim?"

Diether, the German man, replied "that isn't the point—I do it for myself. My body likes it."

"But don't you get bored?"

"You don't understand," said Diether. He was right, the Englishman didn't understand, but it is unlikely that anyone, including Diether himself, did in fact fully understand.

The Englishman, James, was fascinated by Diether, and looked forward to their meetings. They were, in many ways, opposites, and Diether—tall, blond, formal, stiff—was seemingly the polar opposite of James—slight, dark, casual, and floppy. Diether's powerful, fluid strokes through the pool contrasted with James' frantic, almost manic, crawl stroke, 200 metres of which would have completely exhausted any normal human, but which he kept up for 1000 metres.

The regard they had for one another was, however, genuine enough, and their friendship deepened. James' voluble nature caused him to talk rather a lot, and Diether was by nature a listener, so this suited. But this disguised the fact that Diether had opened up far more to James than anyone since he had been married.

He told James about his failed marriage, his daughter, Hannah, and his childhood in Cologne. It must be said that it took him more than a year to divulge the most basic information, such as why he had come to the UK, what his ex-wife's name was (Jane), and what he thought of tennis, which is where we started.

They often found themselves in the club bar at the Porchester Pool & Racket Club, though generally for a coffee or cup of tea rather than a pint. The bar was a sort of cheap and cheery one, with comfortable cloth-covered sofas, likely from Ikea, brightly coloured lacquered tables, also likely from Ikea, and inexpensive red and yellow carpet tiles. The staff may have thought them a gay couple, which was mostly down to James' use of his hands, expressive in the way of an Italian, but floppy in the wrists, like some sort of marionette.

Neither Diether nor James had felt such a strong bond of friendship that they could remember since childhood, though of course neither would say so in such words. For Diether this was a surprise. With James, though he took the piss when he thought Diether wasn't paying attention, and had his annoying English manners and irony, there was a level of trust and regard, and something about the ever-chatty James that was very attractive, and drove him to make the effort to deepen their friendship.

For James, the fascination was with someone so set in his ways, so unyielding, so unlikely to change. Perhaps he had been betrayed by someone, and wanted a rock, or was simply fascinated by someone so extremely different than himself.

    Friendship, in their case, meant swimming together maybe once a week, it meant dinners every week or two, and drinks on Friday evenings. Because of Diethers requirement for routine and order, the times and activities were quite well defined. Diether worked as a print master in a printing plant of a daily paper, and worked from 9 pm to 5 am, Sunday to Friday. He had never, in his 34 year career, missed a day of work.

    One evening, James was at Diether's flat in Bayswater, on Inverness Terrace. Diether had a nice, large apartment there on the first floor of a Georgian townhouse. He liked, he said, to have somewhere for his daughter to stay, though by that time she was off at Oxford. His apartment was large by London standards, with a large kitchen/lounge/dining area with lovely high frescoed ceilings, wooden floors, two bedrooms, and French windows looking out on to Inverness Terrace.

    Diether was preparing a Spanish meal with fish, a very good gazpacho, prepared, actually that morning to let it gain spiciness over the day, and some tapas. He spent two weeks every summer (and for Diether that meant no lapses) in Mallorca, and that had been one of the things that had caused him to want to cook in the first place, to recreate some of the foods that he had there properly. He had never, in James' experience, cooked anything other than Spanish. When James had invited Diether to his own house, and had cooked Chinese, Diether had been unhappy with the food, which he found to be too exotic, and which was why the evening meals now always ended up at his house.

    "Your doorman has let some riffraff in the building, old boy," said James with a posh voice and a grin from the living room, after two loud voices in a language he didn't recognise continued outside Diether's door for nearly ten minutes.

    "Unfortunately, James, I do not have a doorman. Would you be so kind as to ask them to leave their position outside my door?" he requested from the kitchen, with no irony. Diether had an irony deficiency, one more thing James found very funny.

    Peeping out from the door, James saw an oriental woman in a red wool coat speaking loudly to someone, who didn't seem to be saying , and whose back was to the door. He coughed loudly, to try to indicate his annoyance, but foreigners never seemed to get such subtleties, forcing him to open the door and address the sources of his annoyance.

    "Can I help you?" he began to ask, but the woman with her back to the door turned and tried to force her way in. James, slight though he was, blocked her way.

    "What's going on out there?" Diether called from the kitchen.

    "Stop!" he yelled, but it was no use, she kept trying to get through him.

    "Stop right now, or I call the police," he tried again, still to no avail.

    "Stop or I slam the door and break all your fingers," he tried again. Her friend then shouted something at her in a foreign language.

    Right at about that point, Diether came out of the kitchen to see what the commotion was.

    The woman trying to get into the flat stopped dead, and spoke for the first time.

    "Diether!"

    "Nat!" said Diether, "Mein Gott! Was machen sie hier?" he asked in astonishment.

    James and the other woman just stood staring, as they embraced, she with her face buried in his chest, and silently racked with tears. After a bit of that, Diether led her into the living room, to the sofa, and the other woman followed the others in to the apartment.

    It turned out that Diether had been an exchange student in Thailand when he was young, and Nat had been his host sister. The woman in the red coat was her older sister, Pat. Diether and Nat had been in love, but her father had found out, and had Diether sent home.

On this evening, Pat, who lived in England, and who Nat was visiting, had been trying to convince her younger sister to drop things, as it was mad trying to get back with someone thirty years later. Her arguments were the ones James had heard outside the door prior to opening it, but had been to no avail.

    Probably because they were young, both ended up getting over things, getting on with their lives, getting married, and having families. But for both of them it was first love, and even 30 years later, they both held memories of one another dearly.

    Nat spoke English, and that had been one of the reasons that Diether had initially become so close to her: She was the only one in her family who spoke English. Diether hadn't spoken any Thai, and hadn't tried to learn at all. He had decided that he would improve his English, which was a lot more useful than Thai. This refusal to learn the language had meant that he came to depend on Nat's English ability. His world was somewhat limited by his rather stubborn and arrogant view of the place he lived in. For Nat that had been OK: He had been all hers.

    James was taken aback by the entire situation, from a mad woman forcing her way in to Diether's apartment, to a long lost love come from Thailand, information he gleaned from Pat, who stood with him in the entry to the living room as Nat and Diether sat on the sofa, murmuring to one another, Diether stroking her shoulder and her cheek.

    After some minutes, Diether, ever the gracious host, got up and asked James to set the table for an additional two.

It fell to James, the Englishman, to make polite conversation during the meal.

Chatter about the weather, football and jokes about politics followed, but the air was constrained, everyone thinking the same thing: 'What next?'

    That question was answered by Diether: He had to go to work. It was nearly eight o'clock, and that meant an end to the evening. The two women slept in the guest room, and James took his leave.

    Though James called Diether the next day to check up that everything was ok, Diether wouldn't say anything besides "I am dealing with things. I will let you know if I need any help."

Diether called James the next week, and requested that they meet up at the club. They usually met in the lobby before their swim, so that is where James was waiting when Diether came in. He had bought a new gym bag, and it was only when they got to the locker room that James saw that it contained tennis whites, shoes, and a tennis racket.

"Teach me to play tennis, James," said Diether, smiling.

"But Diether! Of course! But why?" said James in genuine surprise.

"I am tired of regretting what I have not done when I had the chance, and I have always regretted not playing tennis when I had a lovely girl who so wanted to play with me. But I also don't want to look foolish, so I thought a bit of practise first might be good," said Diether, his innate sense of organisation requiring certain steps prior to his first game with Nat.

    Nat loved tennis. She and Diether had gone to the country club in the posh Bangkok suburb where they lived nearly every day in the five months before he got sent back, but Diether had never played tennis with her and, despite her attempts to get him on the court, he had only swum.

"Crikey! Next thing you'll want to cook something besides Spanish. Thai or Chinese, maybe?"

"Don't be silly, James, I have friends who can cook those sorts of things for me" he said with an uncharacteristically happy smile, and just the faintest hint of irony.

Creative Writing Assignment 2

This was the second assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignement was for one person to interview another, and for one more person to listen, and take notes of the quotes of what they said. I had to choose one of my quotes, which is the first sentence of this piece, and then use it as the basis for a piece of writing. I read this in class, and got the impression that it was too long. Let me know what you think. After the class, I went home and re-wrote it in third person, which shortened it quite a lot, even though I added a bit more in terms of narrative. That is the one that I posted as Assignment 2, variation. I would really be interested in which you think works better.
 
    "I do like tennis, but I swim."

Diether, a man with whom I had recently become friends, said this. We were speaking over a coffee in the Porchester Sports Club, where we are both members.

    I had watched him swim, his monotonous breathing done up and down the pool as his strokes glanced in and out of the water, barely causing a ripple, a fluid movement, beautiful to watch. He did this every day for 2000 metres, or about 40 minutes.

    The first time we met, I had just finished swimming 1000 metres, which was a lot for me at the time, and swum with considerably less grace than Diether. I was in the dressing room, he came in from the pool, still in his Speedo and swim cap, we began changing together near the same lockers, and began talking, as you do, about the recent freezing weather and not wanting to go out in it.

    "Why don't we have a cup of coffee at the bar?" I suggested after we had both changed, and that is exactly what we did.

    "You're such a beautiful swimmer," I said. It is a bit odd for men, in conversation with one another, to refer to traits of other men as 'beautiful,' but I am one of those people who like rather expressive language. I also like women, if that was your next question.

    "Thank you. Swimming is an important thing to me. It keeps me fit and sane," he answered.

    It was maybe a few months later, when, again over coffee in the bar, we somehow began talking of tennis. Perhaps it was coming on spring time, and I was beginning to yearn for the courts. That is when he made the comment about liking tennis, but swimming.

    The comment tickled something in me, and began my fascination with him. It could be that it was because he was German, or that he was rather set in his ways, but I found it at once hilarious and worthy of derision. I have learned my lesson at my age, though, and kept my mirth to myself.

    "But do you like to swim?" I asked.

    "That is not the point—I do it for myself. My body likes it."

    "What about your soul, though? Don't you become bored?"

    "You don't understand," he said, and was absolutely right.

    I was to see him many more times, and despite the fact that I teased him about how stiff he was, albeit obliquely, and unlikely to pierce his Teutonic armour, we became friends.

    Friendship, in this case, meant swimming together maybe once a week, though I was really no match for his form, I could at least almost keep up. It meant dinners every week or two, and drinks on Friday evenings. And it meant a sincere regard for one another, though it must be said that the regard I had for him was tinged with a certain fascination at what I saw as his eccentricity. In hindsight, it was less that he was eccentric than the fact that we were quite different in outlook. Normally one has a hard time warming to someone as different, but in this case, for whatever reasons, I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to our meetings.

    Diether was not a man one got to know very well, very quickly, and it took me a long time to piece together who was, what he did, and from where he had come. He was German. I already mentioned that. He had been married to an English woman, but they had divorced a number of years before. They had a daughter, Hannah, who had lived with her mother, but who Diether saw often. She was a nice girl, and Diether was justly pleased with how she had turned out, despite some misgivings about her mother's child-rearing skills and the fact that she had grown up in a country that Diether did not particularly like.

    Diether had moved to England initially to join his wife on a two year assignment. She had been working for a large German bank in Germany when they had met, before the City had become so dominant in finance, and that is where they had met. Cologne, it had been, when that city was rather influential, being just up the road from Bonn, prior to the fall of the wall. Having lived in Cologne myself for a short time, I was sympathetic to why Diether's ex-wife had taken the assignment in London. Though a very nice city, Cologne is very closed in terms of allowing outsiders in. I mentioned this opinion once to Diether, himself Koelsh (being from Cologne), and his response was that "it was better than London, where everyone is welcome, even the English." He had that 'bah-humbug' air of him. In some of my classmates in university I had heard such statements, uttered in an attempt to goad someone into protesting or calling the utterer a racist bastard, or said with sly irony to suggest the opposite.

    In Diether, though, there was no irony. None. That was likely another aspect of England that he disliked: To someone unable to use or understand irony, living in England, it must be almost as though you don't understand the language. I don't know, but can guess, that after he and his wife began to live in England, and speak English, that could have been one of the things that made their relationship difficult. I imagine his wife must have found his irony deficiency tiring.

    Diether was a master printer. The Germans, he told me, make the best presses in the world, and I will have to trust him on that point, knowing nothing of the subject myself. Being a master printer involved an apprenticeship which began when he was 14 years old, and continued until after he was 20. There were tests along the way. But after he had finished his apprenticeship he was merely a journeyman printer, meaning that the formal training of the apprenticeship gave way to more responsibility, and more focus on the job itself. After nearly 10 years of that, he had become a master printer, meaning that he could run a wide variety of printing presses, and could manage others to do it, too. He had had his own apprentices, though not for long, since about two years after becoming a master printer in Cologne, he had followed his wife to the UK.

    In London, aided by his former company, and contacts they had in the UK, he landed a job as the foreman of the print shop of one of London's major daily newspapers. This meant odd work hours, which could have been one more reason his wife had wanted out. He worked from 9 pm to 6 am, so I am not sure how much of a sex life they must have had. In fact, he still works those hours. They suit him, he said, and there is no reason to change that which suits. That was Diether all over. He still complained about the fact that his company moved their printing facility outside of London, down near Gatwick, and he refused to move out of his central London flat to be closer to work. I guess with the hours he worked, traffic wasn't really a problem.

    One day I was at Diether's flat in Bayswater, on Inverness Terrace. He had a nice, large apartment there on the first floor of a Georgian townhouse, in fact taking the whole floor. He liked, he said, to have somewhere for his daughter to stay, though by that time she was off at Oxford and I don't believe that she often stayed. In any case, his apartment was large by London standards. He had a large kitchen/lounge/dining area with lovely high frescoed ceilings, wooden floors, two bedrooms, and French windows looking out on to Inverness Terrace.

    Diether loved to cook. Like everything that he set his mind to, he was very methodical and precise, following the recipes very carefully, and reading books to develop his cooking skills. On this evening, he was preparing a Spanish meal of some sort, with fish, a very good gazpacho, and something else I can't remember, for reasons which I will explain in a minute. Diether spent two weeks every summer (and if he said every, you could count on there being no lapses) in Majorca, and that had been one of the things that had caused him to want to cook in the first place, to recreate some of the foods that he had there. So a Spanish meal with Diether was in no way unusual.

    What was unusual happened as he was preparing dinner. We heard some voices outside the door to his flat, coming from the landing. That wasn't so strange, I guess, as there was another family living on the second floor, and they of course had to get there somehow. These voices, though, were speaking a language that I didn't understand, rather loudly, and it wasn't the French of Diether's upstairs neighbours. And they continued to speak loudly for maybe ten minutes.

    "Your doorman has let some riffraff in the building, old boy," I said with a posh voice and a grin.

    "Unfortunately, James, I do not have a doorman. Would you be so kind as to ask them to leave their position outside my door?" he asked me from the kitchen.

    I peeped out through the peep hole, and could see a woman in a red wool coat. She was speaking to someone who seemed to be rather short and leaning against the door, as when I looked through the keyhole, something blocked it. I couldn't understand the language they spoke, but the woman in the red coat seemed Oriental. All I could see of who she spoke to was a foot sticking out, as if the person leaning against the door was sat on the floor with her feet out.

    I coughed as loudly as I could, really a clearing of my throat rather than a cough, but the red-coated woman and her friend didn't seem to take the hint. So, I eased the door open, in case the person leaning against it had her weight on it. The door opened inward. As soon as I had opened the door, the woman leaning against it stood up, and grabbed the door frame.

    "Can I help you?" I had begun to ask, but this woman, maybe 40 years old, I thought, and like her friend, with Oriental features, began to try to force herself into the flat, holding on to the door frame and trying to pull herself in. What was preventing her was me blocking the door and her friend pulling on her other arm.

    "Close the door!" her friend shouted. I would have happily complied, except that her mad friend, who hadn't uttered one word, just a very intense and frightening look, still had hold of the door frame, and I would have broken all the fingers on her right hand if I had shut it.

    "What's going on out there?" Diether called from the kitchen.

    This seemed to spur this woman to get in even more, and I couldn't answer him, having to concentrate on keeping myself upright as she tried to bowl through me and into the apartment.

    "Stop!" I yelled, but it was no use, she kept trying to get through me.

    "Stop right now, or I call the police," I tried again, still to no avail.

    "Stop or I slam the door and break all your fingers," I tried again. Her friend then shouted something at her in a language that I didn't understand.

    Right at about that point, Diether came out of the kitchen to see what the commotion was.

    The woman trying to get into the flat stopped dead, and spoke for the first since I opened the door.

    "Diether!"

    "Nat!" said Diether, "Mein Gott! Was machen sie hier?" That I did understand, though I am not sure she did, as she just repeated his name again.

    Diether shoved past me, and embraced the woman, who began to sob. I and the other woman just stood staring, as they embraced, she with her face buried in his chest, and silently racked with tears. After a bit of that, Diether moved her into the living room, to the sofa, and the other woman followed us in to the apartment.

    It transpired that Diether had lived, as part of some kind of German international development program, in Thailand for what was supposed to be one year. He had lived with a host family, and Nat had been his host sister. Pat, the other woman, was her older sister, and had already left home and married an Englishman by that time. On this evening, she had been trying to convince her younger sister to drop things, as it was mad trying to get back with someone thirty years later. Her arguments were the ones I had heard outside the door prior to opening it, but had been to no avail.

    I didn't find out the details until later, but Diether and Nat had fallen in love. Her father, who was someone rather important in the Thai government, found out about this, and promptly had Diether sent home to Germany, with a strict order to keep away from his daughter. Neither of them said it, but it seems that they were completely in love, and both suffered broken hearts.

    Probably because they were young, both ended up getting over things, getting on with their lives, getting married, and having families. Except that she, apparently, hadn't gotten over Diether, and when her husband, who was somewhat older than her, suddenly died, she had gone to England to see her sister. Considering her state that day at the door, I am guessing that her mental state had been fragile.

    Nat did speak English, and later we had many long conversations. She told me that her English had been one of the reasons that Diether had initially become so close to her: She was the only one in her family who spoke English. Diether hadn't spoken any Thai, and hadn't tried to learn at all. He had decided that he would improve his English, which was a lot more useful than Thai. This refusal to learn the language had meant that he came to depend on Nat's English ability. His world was somewhat limited by his rather stubborn and arrogant view of the place he lived in, Nat told me, but that had been ok with her: He had been all hers.

    Her passion was tennis. She and Diether had gone to the country club nearly every day, and I asked her whether Diether had played tennis.

    "No," she laughed, "along with not speaking Thai, Diether did NOT play tennis. Believe me, I asked. He preferred swimming, he said. I couldn't get him to even try tennis."

    Nat was an attractive woman, even at 47 years old. She had kept fit, and had kept a youthful air about her, almost childlike in manners. She was, after the initial impression of mental instability had worn off, a very nice, lively woman.

    But I am getting ahead a bit. We were still in Diether's apartment, the four of us, Nat still recovering, Pat and I stood looking on like uncomfortable spectators. Diether, ever the gracious host, got up and asked me to set the table for an additional two. We had dinner, and as usual Diether's Spanish dishes were lovely, but to be honest, on this occasion I am not sure any of us derived the full enjoyment out of the food.

    It fell to me, the Englishman, to make polite conversation during the meal. I was still very much unsure about what had occurred, and therefore stuck to those subjects that every Englishman learns to speak of ad nauseum.

    "So, it was quite a nice day today, wasn't it? Hoping for a bit of sun tomorrow as well, knock on wood."

    "Yes, that would be lovely," said Pat.

    Silence.

    "So, assuming the weather holds, what will you be up to tomorrow, then?" I ask.

    Not a good question, as it depended on a resolution to the question of what her younger sister would be doing next. Chatter about football and jokes about politics followed, but the air was constrained, I think everyone thinking the same thing: 'What next?'

    In a funny way, that question was answered by Diether: He had to go to work. That is one of the aspects of dinner with him, that he has to finish by 9 and then go off to work, except on Friday, which he had off. It was a Sunday. He had never, he told me, missed work, in the 33 years he had been working. On this occasion, it meant that Diether was able to offer Nat and Pat accommodation for the night, and leave the awkward situation until the next day to sort out.

    I took my leave, but called him the next day to check up that everything was ok. He wouldn't say anything besides "I am dealing with things. I will let you know if I need any help."

I called back about a week later, when I hadn't heard from him, and he was equally cryptic, but suggested we meet up at the club. I went early, and expected to see Diether in the pool, as that was what we usually did: Plan to meet at three for a coffee, but actually see each other in the pool beforehand. This time, though he wasn't in the pool, and I did not see him, in fact, until I came out of the shower after my swim. He came in to the locker room from the club side, dressed not, as was usual, in Speedo and swim cap, but in tennis whites.

Creative Writing Assignment 1

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This was my first assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignment was to take the dream image of one of our classmates, and write what happened before a certain moment in that image, and what happened after. I chose the moment on the cliff, with the leopard.

The spotlights came up, highlighting the mountains behind the plateau on which the assembled string musicians sat, bows, fingers, and hands poised to play the opening notes of a most unusual concert, set in a most unusual setting. The plateau sat atop a ledge above the mediaeval town of Aran, cut into the spectacular mountain which rose behind it. The moon was full, and visible above the peak of the snow-peaked mountain Prima, the tallest mountain, which jutted into the sky, seeking, it seemed, to impale the moon on it's narrow spear of a peak.

Closest to the mountain and protected by an overhang, were the string players. There were an enormous number of them, more than 500 players of all sorts of stringed instruments, from violins to shamisens, from guitars to sitars, from lutes to banjos, and many more whose names are known only in the tongues of the farflung places from which they come. Even with so many, though, they occupied only a small part of the massive plateau. In the centre of the plateau, were assembled over 400 tables, each seating nine people. To the side, were four massive tents, in which the food was being cooked to feed the assembled guests. The deer and cattle served that night, over 50 head, had been marched up the mountain and then slaughtered, special precautions taken to muffle any noise, the plateau possessing almost magical acoustical properties which meant that any sounds generated there carried to Aran as though they were being produced mere feet away.

At the front of the plateau sat the prince of Aran and 500 of his closest friends. At the side of the prince, sat a leopard, a sleek female with an improbably small head atop a lithe, sleekly muscled, and beautiful body. The prince stroked the beautiful animal, but not in the way one would stroke a cat, or a dog, but in the way one would stroke the hair of a lover.

The conductor of the assembly of strings, the very well-known Mr. Sowaza, awaited the signal to start, which was to be relayed to him from the prince.

The assembled guests sat at their tables, chatting, and drinking the sweet sparkling wines that had been served, and sensed what was coming. The noise abated as they either discontinued their conversations or began to speak in hushed tones. String playing and listening is such a fact of everyday life in Aran, part of the fabric of the town, that it was respected but not revered. Everyone, to a person, expected a fantastic concert, and had respect for the musicians who they expected to provide it.

The sweet evening mountain air, the floodlit mountain behind them, the twinkles from the hundreds of candles on the tables, the moon in the sky, and their beloved Aran below, all created a magical atmosphere that no one would forget. If anyone had any doubt that this was the best party ever, they disappeared as the prince gave the signal.

Mr. Sowaza brought his baton down, and the entire assembly of musicians played the same note, an E flat. The song had been specially composed to resonate at those frequencies that carried best to Aran. After the initial note, the violas, the shamisens, and the Lao lutes took the melody, and the other instruments took the harmony. Two old Lao men, Mr. Kangprathet and Mr. Ngam played their small instruments, constructed of coconut shells covered in calf skin, long teak frets, and strings made from the guts of water buffaloes, and played with bows that had been given to them by one of the famous violin makers of Aran, being so far superior to their own bows that when they returned to their country, the technique of making them would be designated a national treasure.

The melody was high, with the slightly spicy smell of the Orient, yet came back again and again to one which owed it's debt to the lovely melodies first conjured many hundreds of years ago in the valleys around Aran. One by one, instruments came in and left, the banjos, the guitars, the 30-strong bass section's deep sounds shaking the glasses that the guests had now set down on their tables, enraptured o f the music, and completely forgetting all else, the wine, the conversation, and even the beautiful setting they sat in.

Those not fortunate enough to have seats on the plateau sat in the market square of Aran, or in their homes, windows open to hear more clearly, and because of the way that sound travelled could hardly be called deprived of the marvellous performance going on above them. They, too, stopped all that they were doing, and listened to the performance, the magical performance, some closing their eyes to better experience the sensation of the sound, concentrating all their focus on that single sense.

The Symphony of Aran, as the piece later became known, was never heard in such perfection as on that night, the night of it's first performance. The composer, Mr. Jalakey, was seen with tears running down his face for nearly the entire performance. The pride of hearing his masterpiece, and it will definitely be remembered as such for many centuries to come, for the first time, in such an atmosphere, in Aran, on such a night, was so great that the memory was his most treasured.

The symphony conjured the images of the mountains, of the flowers growing in the high meadows, of the sound of the water of the creeks in the valleys, it was the sound of birds which migrated in from the east which brought the slight hint of the Orient, and there were the sound of winds of the southern Mediterranean desert, but all came back to Aran. And Aran, in this piece, ebbed, and it flowed, from the sounds of great thunderous crashes of avalanches, to the sound of a single songbird.

The finale was dominated by the violins of Aran, nearly 200 of them, and incredibly each one weaving a different part of the melody, though all playing in the same key, a nearly improvisational performance, but one that had been practised and refined, and followed a grand design rather than individual expression.

And then, some 90 minutes later, Mr. Sowaza raised his baton, and it was over.

The silence was profound. It was as if day had suddenly turned to night, the light, powerful rays of sound suddenly stopped shining on the guests. After a three second silence, a man near the front stood and began to tap his wine flute like a madman with his fork.

"Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo!" he shouted, and was joined by others who also stood and struck their glasses. The glasses, in various states of fill, echoed a variety of notes across the plateau, and down to Aran. And suddenly, the sound 4,000 wine glasses being struck created it's own wall of sound, a sound of pure joy, of wild joy, uncontrolled and therefore not recognisable as music, yet containing in it's random notes, randomly struck at irregular intervals, a music of the soul, a pure form of expression. It was, somehow, the magical sound of laughter. And when the assembled guests began to hear it as such, they put down their glasses, and began to laugh. It was a laughter of joy, of having experienced something that was so perfect that tears were shed even as laughter bellowed forth.

Mr. Sowaza acknowledged their praise, recognising it for what it was, and bowed. On his signal, all of the musicians not already standing, stood, and on a further signal, all 500 plus musicians bowed. The applause was loud and enthusiastic, and held for over two minutes, laughter and tears mixing with the applause.

Even the elegantly attired ladies and gentlemen of the prince's party stood and clapped, their concern at outward appearances falling away in the face of such a magnificent display of musical virtuosity.

The female leopard had curled up around the feet of the prince, wrapping her long tail around his left leg, and purring contentedly.

The night continued to echo the wonderful sounds of the musicians, who took turns in four groups playing dancing music late into the night.

The guests sat down to dinner, a wonderful meal prepared to perfection, and served with impeccable care, of such basic ingredients as beef, venison, potatoes, cabbage, and things that made regular appearances on the tables of Aran, and yet seemed to have been transformed by some magic into a meal of extraordinary depth and richness.

When they were done with their exquisite meal, they took to the dance floor, which sat between the diners and the musician, a fabulous tile floor across which they glided to the sounds of fiddles and banjos, kotos and cellos.

No one wanted the party to end, and the guests, the musicians, and the nobility danced and talked and ate until the wee hours of the morning.

As the sun rose behind Prima, the rays of light flashing from the top of the mountain as though emanating from it, they stopped their dancing, their drinking, and their talking, and sat facing the rising sun, as though it was a god to whom they were praying.

And, if truth be told, they were praying, praying to never forget what was, hands down, the very best party. Ever.

One man who attended the party composed a song that described his feeling, and the following verse from that song probably echoes the feelings of many of the guests:

Song of Aran

Won'drous Aran, your valleys and yer heights

Won'drous Aran, your music and yer sky

Won'drous Aran, I had not lived til I'd seen your sights

Won'drous Aran, may I have mem'ries of this night until I die