She was about fourteen and trying to make a fashion statement out of a Catholic school uniform by rolling up the skirt to somewhere around her breakfast. She had something sticking out of her ear. It was either a stereo system or a cappuccino machine. I would have needed a magnifying glass to be certain. Her friend had something sticking out of her ears too. She wasn’t listening to breakfast skirt. She was talking into a bump in a piece of string that hung from her neck. Observation point, one here is that they weren’t communicating with each other. The importance of this wouldn’t hit me until several months later when we got back to Thailand.

I was in the local newsagents at the time looking at the front page of the biggest selling paper in England. There were tits on the cover – big ones. They didn’t seem to have any relevance to the lead story. The editor had taken a huge risk of losing low-concentration readers by putting in a three-word headline with punctuation; UP YOURS, FRANZ. I got the feeling that most readers wouldn’t make it past UP YOURS. Britain’s top seller is ninety percent pictures. The longest article – once you took the naughty photos out – was two inches long and the print was BIG. I wondered whether anyone would notice if they left the text out.

I pondered both the email comment and the broadsheet revolution on my way home. It occurred to me that it’s the cool guy, the one who sits back and observes the trends who ends up with a private jet and en-suite plastic surgery. But you have to be first.

Ten years ago, a friend and I sat in a bar one night and came up with this idea for a hand-held electronic device that would allow you to read books on a screen. We drew up plans for it until the bar shut. Neither of us could sleep as we visualized all the money we’d make out of it. We were ten years too late. So you need to be that cool, observer type AND quick. And the internet is definitely the way to go. I have something at home which explains all the intricacies of the internet in clear, almost remedial terminology. It’s called a wife. Jess gave me a quick rundown of the rapid evolution of on-line communication. While I was still learning which button to press for my email not to vanish into thin air, the modern world was already leaping and bounding ahead of me.

Cool guy sits back and examines the trend. We go from hand written letters that take a week to arrive – to email which is instantaneous but still bulky. People seem to think they can write as much as they like because there’s no end to the page. But, to its credit, email did introduce cute abbreviations like NIGYYSOAB (Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch) all of which took longer to find and peck than writing the actual words – and emoticons which did away with the need to make words altogether. But, excuse me, it was still all so then, and it had the word ‘mail’ in it. SYICP (So yesterday I could puke). Blogs arrived and survived only in the cobwebbed cyberspace of the over forties because, look out, here comes chatting. Chatting had a brief (three week) popular spell, but then social networking was on us. And, whoa, now we’re really getting down to the nitty-gritty. It’s all about ME. Come one and all, normal and weird and enter my most intimate space. But after a while it started to get a little disconcerting to know that a drooling postal worker with a criminal record in Gdansk knew what brand of moisturizer you had beside your bed. Sharing was icky. But at least there was a new ‘not exactly sharing’ instant communication fast food on the block; Twitter. As much depth and meaning as you can squeeze into a hundred and forty letters. If only published fiction were that bite-sized everyone would be reading. And here we arrived at a trend I knew I’d be able to milk. Fewer and fewer words. Sentences and grammar optional. All about self. No need to reply. No need to reply to reply. Basically, although putting up a brave social front, people didn’t want to communicate at all. They just wanted to be left alone and not troubled by annoying distractions like nuances and opinions. They wanted to do all their chatting and social networking with the person they loved the most. Which is when I came up with TWIDDLe: the unsocial network for people who have lost the ability to process words.

It all started in 2009 with a single operator (me) in an old garage at the back of my dad’s place. Fast forward a year and Forbes has us down as one of the IT companies to watch for 2011. Here at TWIDDLe HQ we’ve put together a package which will make you the only person in your universe. And as we’re only just embarking along this lonely road together, I’m offering membership to readers of ICWRC (You don’t have to work that one out. It’s at the top of the page) at the reduced rate of $150 a week. Forget Paypal. Just put it in a brown paper bag and mail it to me here. In fact, know what I’ll do? The first fifty readers – assuming you can struggle to the end of this blob – get signed in to TWIDDLe absolutely free. Yup. You heard it here, folks. Here’s what you do. Once I send you your personal IDRMA (It doesn’t really mean anything) code number, highlight all your networks and chat sites and communications over the past year. Somewhere on the right (that’s the side your mouse is on) of your keyboard is a button called ‘delete’. If you’re lucky it’ll just say DEL. Press that and you’ll notice that everything’s gone apart from solitaire and the recycle bin. You’re alone now. Unplug the computer, draw the curtains, get yourself a drink, and play with yourself.

Welcome to TWIDDLe.

A brief recap on the Eel Swamp ducks. Over a month ago we moved our mosquito repellent and sleeping bags and five dogs to a hovel in Eel Swamp. One small brown duck occupied the pond. Rumour was the construction site workers left the brown duck behind. After finding a place for the two cartons of mosquito repellent, netting, tent poles, and sleeping bags, the wife, her mother and the maid—with time weighing heavily on their hands—focused on the brown duck, which was named Khemchart (translation: ‘Good Life’). They all agreed that he must be terribly lonely swimming endless circles in the pond.

Khemchart looked happy enough to me. I thought that this drake indeed enjoyed the good life. But what do I know? Don’t answer that.

The women answered it for you and me: nothing. No surprise so far. Moore’s knowledge of ducks hovers just above zero when it comes to understanding the deep psychological state of an abandoned duck. The solution (the maid’s idea) was to buy Khemchart a female companion from a Klong Toey market vendor. This being Thailand, it seemed important that the duck should have white feathers. No matter that Khemchart is clearly a dark shade of brown. The maid found the white duck, the prospective wife at the market. Baht 195 for a wife is at the low end of price. With ducks you buy your bride by her weight. I suspect that is the price for a ‘kitchen’ duck rather than a domestic ‘pond’ duck. I have no doubt that in buying the duck at Klong Toey market as a companion as opposed to soup was something of a first. The vendors bought lottery tickets using the maid’s birthday for the winning numbers.

Like many new brides ripped out of her snug, secure Bangkok environment and plunged into the alien terrain of the countryside, the white duck—named Mali or Jasmine in English (my wife’s idea)—was released into the pond. Several days later, Mali flew over the fence to the pooyai baan’s estate and landed in the middle of a golf green. The estate has an even bigger pond. Her vaulting over the fence appeared to be the duck version of film Runaway Bride. Mali seemed unwilling to live contently on the pond with Khemchart and had hatched a sinister scheme to fly back to Bangkok. The local workers combined with the women of Eel Swamp ended Mali’s escape plans and she was returned to the pond and told to know her place. After another abortive attempt to fly over the fence—foiled by the pooyai barn’s watchful staff, Mali appears to have lost her travel lust.

Back in the pond, Mali’s been carefully watched by the women. Daily they waited for Mali to bolt again. The result is a little like the Eel Swamp version of a State of Emergency. Mali’s not exactly under house arrest, but her movements don’t go unnoticed on both sides of the fence.

In fairness, it should be noted, Mali has made no further escape attempts. The mother-in-law felt that Mali’s angst was caused by the absence of a house of her own. With the assistance of the maid’s husband, they built a pond side thatched roof A-frame, a tiny replica of the kind building that rich people use when they go to ski at Whistler Mountain, in British Columbia. The pond duck house featured a small entry way and some side windows. It looked like a primitive spirit house. The mother-in-law, wife, maid, and maid’s husband, along with the staff across the fence on the pooyai baan’s side, all waited and watched. Neither Khemchart nor Mali have ever ventured inside the A-frame house. They squatted beside it. Walked around it. Did that shiver of the feather thing coming out of the water in front of the A-frame, before flopping down, back turned to the door.

About the same time, doubts circulated as to Mali’s gender. She had a couple of strikes against her. Her pedigree to start with: she was an ordinary Klong Toey duck intended for the pot. Second, Bangkok women of all species are demanding, picky, flighty and liable to take flight at the first opportunity to explore a bigger pond (or putting green). Third, serious doubts about Mali’s gender circulated like wildfire after she suddenly mounted Khemchart doggy style in the middle of the pond. Mali refusal to live inside the house built for her cast doubt on whether she was a woman. All the women at Eel Swamp agreed that female DNA draws them to settle down in the best possible nest. Not Mali. She wasn’t having anything to do with house and Khemchart seemed more of a buddy than a wife. How could that be? Unless Mali wasn’t a female but a man, the women agreed that men pretty much slept anywhere, were fence jumpers, and had a thing about golf courses. I can’t say their logic was faulty.

My mother-in-law, using advanced sound wave listening techniques, concluded that Mali was a female. It was in the fine detail of the quack. Thai is a tonal language and that apparently gives them an edge in decoding duck quacking, which apparently has eight tones for females—Charlie Parker on the Sax and three tones for males—Kenny G. holding that one note long enough to pass out for lack of oxygen. The lack of tonal males is what makes female ducks quite fatalistic about being taken to Klong Toey market to await their date with a cooking pot. Of course, I may be reading too much between the lines. But that is what writers do. Read between the lines as they write lines for others to read between.

If the tonal test is inconclusive, my mother-in-law has another test up her sleeve. She says a male duck, a drake in formal duck talk, has a big crest on the top of its head, while the female has a small crest on her head. Big and small are relative terms, and getting close enough to the top of a duck’s head begs a question: if you are that close, why not check the bit of the duck that proves conclusively the point at issue.

A couple of weeks have passed since Mali came to live in the pond on Eel Swamp. All of that initial excitement and anticipation has faded. A little like one of the police or government crackdowns that crank up emotions for two weeks before moving onto the latest outrage or novelty to blast through the daily noise of life. Entire days pass without any of the women mentioning Mali or Khemchart. They stroll passed the pond without even glancing at them. The ducks have merged into the daily landscape of life. They swim across the pond day after day, and as I watch them it becomes increasingly clear how little difference it really makes as to whether Mali is a female, male or katoey. She’s our duck. She’s content to stay on the pond. She even seems to have grown fond of Khemchart. But I am betting that she’d rather be pate than sleep in that ramshackle A-Frame built for her and Khemchart at the end of the pond.

Resolving Mali’s gender appeared to me as a muddle created by ambiguity, doubt and indecision. There is another explanation. Just maybe I’ve had a lesson in the Thai version of Schrödinger’s Cat, that old quantum physic problem in which the cat is neither dead nor alive until someone in a white lab coat opens the lid and looks inside the box. The pond is a kind of box with a lid on it. Mali, then is neither a male nor female, as no one has looked. I like the idea that Mali’s gender is somehow suspended in this state of all gender configurations.

Next time you are in a restaurant and seek duck on the menu, think of Khemchart and Mali idling away their days at Eel Swamp. And in some distant universe, the likes of Khemchart and Mali are looking at a menu with people like us on it. Maybe one of us made it out of the market and into a private pond and garden, tried to escape, and figured out there is no real escape, that it was better coming to terms with the pond you know rather than searching for the perfect pond over the horizon.

Bielefeld (population 330,000) is a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. Or is it?

Since the 1990s, there has been a widespread internet campaign to convince Germans that this town doesn’t exist. It began as a light-hearted battle over computer codings between some fellows in Bielefeld and others elsewhere (who took a different view of the coding and decided to fight back.) Even though most of them know it exists (or do they?), Germans often respond to mention of Bielefeld with the words, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

This is because the town is rarely visited, doesn’t have a regional accent of its own, isn’t mentioned in the news very often, and had for a long time a railway station that looked boarded up. There are also few monuments or great buildings there, because…well, you can thank the USAAF and the RAF for that. (Bielefeld isn’t far from the Ruhr and was heavily bombed in World War II.)

The city council once released a statement titled “Bielefeld does exist,” but they released it on April Fools Day. So it looked as though the city council even was saying Bielefeld didn’t exist.

But I went there. And it does exist. In fact, it’s quite nice.

I did a reading before a good crowd at the Beit Tikwa Synagogue. Which used to be a church until the congregation grew too small. (A year and a half ago, there was a protest against the conversion of a Christian place of worship to a Jewish one. The protest was lead by a fellow named Riefenstahl, nephew of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker Leni, and frankly someone who ought to, shall we say, avoid Jewish issues, just as a matter of good taste.) Beit Tikwa is beautiful, as is Katharina Lustgarten, who organized and introduced my reading.

If a synagogue seems like a good use for an old church, a restaurant is even better. A one-time church in Bielefeld is now Gluekundseligkeit, a swanky Asian restaurant with a long bar down the aisle. In armchairs on the altar, you can drink wine where the pastor used to bless the holy wine. I had a very fine stewed duck.

I dined there with Andreas Schnadwinkel, a pal who writes for the Westfalenblatt newspaper, and Thomas Wolff, an imposing actor at Theater Bielefeld, who read from my work at the synagogue and at another reading in nearby Bad Oeynhausen the previous night.

Thomas and I repaired to the old part of town and a bar, where we chatted about the kinds of things only writers and actors would find interesting or useful (how to tap into spirit energies to create a character and to experience an emotion…) That central area also was quite lovely.

Then I was on to Cologne. On a local radio station, I mentioned during my interview that I had been to Bielefeld the previous day. “You know,” said the hostess, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

Maybe I was tricked.

I always wanted to have loads of different animals when I was a child, but because I grew up in a city, that wasn’t possible. I did have eccentric friends and relatives – some of them quite off the scale even by Gerald Durrell’s standards – but not, of course, amid the bright sunlight of a Greek island. East London in the 1960s and 70s was more of a light drizzle sort of environment.

Later, as a teenager, I discovered the work of Gerald’s older brother, the novelist, Lawrence Durrell. Right from the off, I was hooked. I think it took me less than a fortnight to read ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ and I then went on to devour everything else in Lawrence’s catalogue. The intensity of the writing, the odd and often borderline abusive relationships that he described and the lush evocations of places both familiar and unfamiliar bewitched my soul. That a girl from a working class background should be so taken by tales of louche diplomatic and artistic types having affairs and exploring literary forms in places like Cairo, Avignon and Alexandria was, I guess, unusual. But then I think that probably the nature of the characters and their locations in space were probably irrelevant. What got me was the notion of people exploring.

Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Quartet’ novels are often described as ‘flawed masterpieces’. The four-part form is applauded but the result often, some feel, falls short of the original artistic intent. I am no literary critic but my feeling on the matter is that even to attempt such a thing was an act of both bravery and genius. But then that was what Durrell and his literary friends and acquaintances did.

Not all of their ideas and explorations were influential or even quite sane. Whilst staying with Durrell and his family in Corfu the author Henry Miller decided that he wanted to rebel against the tyranny of clothes by walking around in the hot Greek summer stark naked. I can’t necessarily see why anyone would want to risk such comprehensive and catastrophic sunburn, but I do applaud his effort. Why not give that a go? Why not write a massive great tome detailing a significant parcel of time from four different points of view? This, to me, is what the progression of art is all about. Exploration! When I was a very small child I wanted to be an Egyptologist and dig around in the sands of the Valley of the Kings and discover… What? Actually it didn’t matter very much. I just wanted to discover something wonderful and amazing, something that would allow me to learn a fact that, to me, was new and shiny and told me a whole previously unknown thing about the world.

As writers, whether we plough a literary or a genre fiction furrow, it is I believe incumbent upon us never to stop exploring. There is no subject that cannot be looked at, no form that can be dismissed as irrelevant, pointless or stupid. I am just about to start on my latest Çetin İkmen book that will take my character into pastures that he has never explored before. Not only will he be working in ways he has never even dreamed about, he will be meeting people and going to places he cannot even have imagined. Both his ‘life’ and mine will, I hope, be enriched by this. I hope also, very much, that the book will be a huge success. This will be for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which will be because I will have moved Çetin, and myself, on. I may not have ever found a new and fabulous tomb underneath the sands of Egypt, I may never have eschewed the tyranny of clothes, but I’m still in there trying to do new and exciting things with my fiction. So big thanks for that, as well as hours and hours of wonderful prose, to the two late Durrell brothers, Gerald and Lawrence.

But that leaves me short of a blob for this week. So I have no choice but to tell you of another disturbing event. If anybody’s actually reading these blobs, he and/or she may recall that two weeks yonder I was forced to become a feature for a rather hunky internationally-known newspaper. Despite the fact that the journalist had a perfectly functional camera embedded in his cell-phone, he insisted on flying a photographer down to take a few snaps. (You need a pretty good parachute to get to our place by plane.) Now, I happen to know that due to great strides in technology over the past few years, a squid could take a photograph that, ten years ago would have won the Pulitzer for feature photography. With my little Kodak, I personally have taken several excellently artistic pictures for my ‘Yucky Things I Find on the Beach’ gallery which caused quite a stir in Flotsam and Jetsam monthly. So why send a real photographer? I tell you. The UNION. The professional photographer’s union is second only to the Teamsters in the bodies in concrete boots league. They look after their own and I got the feeling the journalist might have had a little accident if he’d gone ahead and snapped me with his cell-phone. KnowwhadImean?

Because of his obvious mob connections I was determined not to like Justin. Yeah, ‘Justin’. Name like that, gotta be gay, right? Nothing worse than a gay mobster. I still have nightmares about that scene in Fame where Irene Cara’s lured into the bedroom by a sleazy photographer/videographer.

“Colin, sweetie. Just slip off that shoulder strap, will you? Super. Teensy bit lower. Lovely.”

There’d be erotic pictures of me posted all over the web. I’d be humiliated over and over again like Paris. So, it came as a surprise to learn that Justin was 7ft 2 and hairy. He drank beer and the dogs liked him. (They discussed Faust deep into the night). But all that made his mob connections even more ominous. How could I refuse his ‘suggestions’? Tell me how many of the following I would have considered if my photographer didn’t have a baseball bat in his camera bag:

Up to my waist in jellyfish infested water? Covered in red ants as I dangled from a tree? Beating my way through jungle using my teeth as a machete? ‘Just one quickie’ up against a factory wall surrounded by armed Burmese? Right, National Geographic photo spread, you say. Justin took 805 photographs of me. That’s eight more than they took at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. And, do you know how many they’ll use? One. And you just know that’ll be the one of me at my desk writing with my Nobel prize slightly out of focus in the background. Eight hours of extreme posing and nothing but insect bites and second-degree sunburn to show for it.

We considered locking him in the cellar with the others but we decided Justin was just following orders. In fact he was a nice guy…for a 7ft 2 gay mobster.

Of course, you’re going to point out that dogs form packs with a pecking order. Yes, that is true. But the top dog doesn’t promise change you can believe in, or health care or daycare for puppies. Might is right keeps the pecking order a well-oiled machine. Life is basically sniffing each others asses and urine trails, eating, begging for food in between meal time, sleeping. And Oscar, the Lab, sometimes picks up his ball, brings it to me, I throw it, he looks at the ball and at me with those large, sad eyes, as if to say, “Why did you do that? Now I’ve got to wander over in my old sweet time, lift a leg to keep the urine trail fresh, have a nice drink of water, and yeah, ‘Why was I going over here?’ He often forgets the ball destination. For dogs it is all journey. They have no real destination to speak of. They happily travel with nothing remotely equivalent to our world of frequent flier points as an incentive.

Dogs, as far as we know, despite the dialogue above, have no interior monologue going on. Dogs aren’t Hamlet. They don’t argue with themselves. They don’t suffer doubt, make holiday plans, worry about growing old or whether global warming will cause their urine trails to dry into nothingness. In other words, dogs have no conception of the future. That alone relieves them of huge anxiety. Marlowe, who is 14 years old, is going deaf, his eyes are clouded, he’s slower in getting to his feet, and he’s still nursing a hernia resulting from a fight over a bitch. But Marlowe behaves pretty much the same way as he did when he was one year old. He has no perception that he’s an old man, and that fighting other, younger members of the pack, over a woman at 91 years old (in human years) is bound to be a losing battle. Dogs don’t know their limitations.

It’s not just the future that dogs are oblivious to thinking about, it is also the past that eludes them. Elephants may have a memory for slights and rough treatment but dogs have no such memory. Yell at them, and an hour later, they wag their tails, and lick your hand. Forget to feed them, and, hey, no hard feelings. None of that boiling up rage over what someone did a day, a week, or years ago. My dogs don’t wait in the dark to knife someone who caused them to lose face. I love dogs because they seem free of the kind of delusionary thinking that passes for day-to-day human mental activity. In their lives, they don’t need wire taps, guided missile, loyalty oath, preachers, assault helicopters, GPS, Internet, Twitter or Facebook.

A dog looks in the mirror and doesn’t know it is looking at itself. There’s something to be said for lack of awareness of self. Because it is our sense of self and sense of time that, from a dog’s point of view, could be more usefully spent tending a urine trail and looking for food. Dogs don’t write anything down. Because they basically don’t need to remember a lot of stuff, and they don’t have to search where they last left their reading glasses or car keys. Dogs are both freer than we are even though from our point of view they are locked in a mental prison with no possibility of escape. Life is filled with these trade offs. Knowledge is the devil that spins us like a top. It equips us through books, movies, folklore and myth to face a more complicated mental world where we are convinced the stakes are much higher. We suffer from knowing too much, from our inability to easily forget or forgive, and from entangled emotions and intellect that fight like two overtired mud wrestlers, with the battle ever shifting and never ending.

Things like face, revenge, the past and the future, are so much part of the human species, that we marvel having animals around us that are happy, content, and playful, day after day, in the absence of such mental processes. Years ago, Thais frequently would tell a foreigner, “Thinking too much is no good. It gives you a headache.” I haven’t heard any Thais saying that lately. A lot of them seem to have a headache.

Sanuk or fun and sabai or feeling comfortable are also standard Thai ways of being. Or so it was in the past. You don’t hear many Thais talking about sanuk or feeling sabai. It’s because they’re too busy thinking too much. We laugh at dogs because they lick their balls (at least my four male dogs do) and fail to laugh at ourselves for constantly licking our emotional wounds, real or imagined, not to heal them but to remind us of our enemies, to reinforce our rage, and to plot our payback.

When I am away from Eel Swamp and the animals, I soon leave their world and float back into the human world of Bangkok. The thing about my dogs, is they never leave their world, not for a moment, because that is only the place they live, in the moment, and I envy them for being content to be in that big Now.

As for the two ducks, that is for another blog. Here’s a preview: The Klong Toey market duck (the white one) bought as a wife for the existing duck at the pond in Eel Swamp may turn out to be a male. No one at Eel Swamp has made a physical examination to determine the duck’s gender. Ducks are hard to catch. But that may not be necessary. My mother-in-law dismisses the need for such an examination. “Leave the duck alone,” she says. She says a duck’s gender is determined by the tone and timbre of its quack. Gender floats to the surface by examining the voice register. In her mind a female duck’s musicality is as distinct as Mozart is from the Rolling Stones.

There is no gynecologist near Eel Swamp to confirm or deny the white duck’s gender. The household is betting she is a ‘she’ though the odds vary day to day, depending on latest reports on her tone scales. This isn’t Julie Andrews singing the Sound of Music theme song. There’s a lot of variation on a theme in the white duck’s quacks. The gardener has made a side bet that the white duck is a katoey.

Next week: The Strange Case of Duck Gender at Eel Swamp.

Naturally I’ve been doing a lot of reading in historical fiction. It’s part of what made me want to write about Mozart and Caravaggio, rather than Caravaggio, my Palestinian sleuth. Mostly I find those historical works inspiring. From the class of Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution novel “A Place of Greater Safety” to the brilliant grittiness of “Libra,” Don Delillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald story.

But there are times when I see flaws in the way history is used by some writers in the genre. Instead of digging deep for the drama of a historical period, they go for the most obvious kind of drama.

Take Jews, for instance.

A few months ago, I was reading a rather flabby novel about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. The arch-Catholic Knights of the Order of Saint John are engaged in a death struggle against the hordes of the Ottoman Sultan. Then suddenly into the midst of the book sails a subplot about crypto-Jews hiding in a cave on the island. They befriend a Maltese girl who, in turn, tries to persuade the Grand Master of the Knights to save the Jews. In reality, the Knights would’ve imprisoned the Jews and ransomed them to the Jewish community of Venice, but that isn’t what got on my nerves.

Rather it was that Jews make for an easy hit of emotion and drama for writers of historical fiction. Just as contemporary writers go for 9/11-related themes when they want to invest their bland narratives with broad, inspirational impact. It’s reaching for a topic that isn’t yours, that doesn’t touch you, just because it’ll make your work seem important and weighty. Instead of delving deeper into their spiritual reservoir, these historical novelists toss in a Jew, spin a few quotes from the Talmud, and face the Jews off against some averagely seething anti-Semite. Bingo, a plot with vim.

What’s more, the Jews of these novels are entirely flat. That’s because they aren’t there due to any burning connection felt by the author. They’re just plot twisters tossed in for cheap drama. In combination with today’s political correctness, that’s why the Jews in these historical novels come across as such absolute good guys. After hundreds of years of the reverse treatment, maybe it’s time Jews got an angelic rap. But they can’t all have been nice guys who only wanted to study the holy books and keep kosher, can they? Yet most contemporary historical fiction shows them that way. (I’ve lived in Jerusalem 14 years, and I’ve met a few who weren’t quite such prizes.)

I’ve written a historical novel set in Vienna in 1791 which will be out next year. It’s about Mozart. There are no Jews in it. I’m completing the manuscript of another Jewless historical novel even as I write these lines. It’s about Caravaggio. Believe me, I could’ve taken the easy way out and dropped in a suffering Jew—after so many years in Jerusalem I know a few things about Judaism and the sufferings of the Jews who live here today. But it shouldn’t be hard work to find drama in wild historical times, often with more depth, once you look beyond the obvious torment of the Jews.

I like to make it hard for myself. That’s also what makes it real.

The owners of the Stop were a family originally from eastern Turkey who were some of the kindest, most caring and most ambitious people I have ever met. The building itself, which was probably built sometime in the 1920s or 30s was riddled with damp and probably every type of wood rot known to man. It was dingy, the plumbing was beyond eccentric and every time you turned on a light you took your life in your hands.

Cuts in mains water supply used to happen a lot in İstanbul, a phenomenon not always easily understood by tourists from Western Europe, the USA, Canada and Australasia. Whenever the water went off at the Stop there was always a roar of fury from those halfway through washes or trying to flush the toilet. I once got caught covered in soap, not a drop of water in sight, in what was laughingly called the shower room. This was a vast hymn to cracked tiles dominated by a massive cylindrical boiler that looked not unlike a 1950s B movie version of a spacecraft. This thing could, with help, be persuaded to emit a thin, lukewarm trickle of water from the object you were encouraged to call its ‘shower attachment’. But only with the window wide open. If you didn’t do that you’d die of carbon monoxide poisoning – not that anyone ever did. What I did do was nearly die of laughing as I lay under that bone dry space rocket that hot waterless afternoon when I was covered from head to foot in soap and shampoo. I was there, waiting and laughing, for over an hour before the water came back on.

Then there were the cats. Seemingly thousands of them. All grey and brown tabbies, all out of the same mother, an heroic old girl called ‘Little Cat’. Little Cat was one of the most loving feline mothers I have ever known. She was also very proud. Wherever you went in the Stop, Little Cat would follow you with her vast tribe of kittens hot on her heels. You had kittens in reception, kittens in the toilet, the washroom, in your bedroom and, very often, actually in your bed too. Some of the Stop’s more nervous guests would be disgusted and describe the kittens (admittedly full of fleas) as ‘disease vectors.’ But me and mine are cat people and so we just took the cats and their fleas, in our stride. They were all part of a charm that also always included a welcome that was so warm that turning up at the Stop felt like coming home. But then the owners were extraordinary people. Hoteliers and, almost to a man and woman, students too. As they worked in the crazy bedrooms and scary toilets, they studied university texts on biochemistry, physics, English and history.

In the years that I patronised the Stop I met many strange and remarkable people. These included American converts to Islam setting out on the haj to Mecca, whacked out backpackers on the road to they didn’t have a clue where, drug casualties from the 1960s, refugees from Afghanistan, appalled Western Puritans and some very charming men who were probably gangsters. However the thing that lingers most for me about the long-gone Stop, is the view I got from its shabby, probably very dangerous roof one very early morning in the summer of 1989. The sun, though hazy, was up and from the roof I could see the whole of the old city of İstanbul coming to life around me. No whizzy wazzy modern trams in those days, just the sound of the odd ancient car or bus sputtering into life and the cries of the street sellers of simit (bread rolls) and yoghurt. I remember looking out towards the great Mosque of Sultanahmet and then beyond to the Sea of Marmara and watching the seagulls veer away from the smoke that puffed out of the smokestacks of the early morning ferries. OK, I was young then, but at that moment I felt as if I could do anything and be anyone I wanted to be in my crazy, friendly, maddening and fabulous city. It is a feeling I have sadly, never been able to experience anywhere, since.

The life in and around the Stop and its denizens was just so intense that maybe that just isn’t possible. Those days have gone.

‘I represent a major newspaper with a readership of 11.2 billion and I’d like to drive down to Pak Nam Lang Suan to do a feature on you.’

‘Man, these Nigerians,’ I thought. ‘They stop at nothing. Not satisfied with robbing desperate widows of their life savings, now they claim to be journalists. ‘Mbagwe,’ I wrote back, ‘I’m not falling for that one, son. Go take a running jump off a tall giraffe.’ But, after several security checks which included me speaking to the journalist’s mother in New York, it turned out Mgamwe was legit.

‘So, do I come down or not?’ he asked.

‘You paying for the petrol?’

‘Jesus! I could always do John Burdett, you know?’

‘Okay. Don’t get shirty. Yeah, you can come.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

We haven’t got a spare room so I booked him and his personal assistant into the Salt Water View Short Term Beachfront motel just down the coast. I’d never actually seen anyone stay there overnight but you never know if a tour bus is going to break down out front on the very night you’ve got VIP guests. It occurred to me that if all this wasn’t a scam, it was a pretty cool thing so I started to phone around.

‘This big newspaper’s doing a feature on me, with photos. Using my actual name.’

I called all my friends and living relatives, then a couple of dead ones. One call was to Bobby Bristol. Now, Bobby’s a nice chap but it’s rumoured they based Mel Gibson’s role in Conspiracy Theory on Bobby’s actual life.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why what?’

‘Why you?’

‘I guess they want to know about my books and understand the man behind the stories.’

‘Oh, come on, CC. Be real. No offense intended here but do you honestly think a serious newspaper’s gonna be interested in your dumb books?’

He’d said, “No offense intended,” but that did little to alleviate the offensiveness.

‘Yes?’

‘CC, CC, sometimes I can’t believe how naïve you can be. They’re not interested in you as a writer. They’ve got other agendas. They’ve got something deeper in mind.’

‘I haven’t got anything deeper.’

‘I know that and you know that, but that’s not gonna stop them. Oh no. These investigative journalists, they’ll find it even if it isn’t there. They’ll dig up dirt on you and plaster it all over the front page. Bye bye reputation. Nobody’ll ever buy one of your books again. Dead.’

I had a week to let all this ferment. There were omens. It rained every day. Two of the dogs got diarrhea. My favourite hibiscus died. Then they arrived in a big black car like the politburo. They were friendly and funny like serial killers. They asked a lot of questions like the IRS. They didn’t complain about the Salt Water short term like people who knew they wouldn’t have to fill in the guest register. Like people who could be in and out with nobody knowing who they really were. He matched me drink for drink and those sinister questions just kept popping out of him. By the seventh beer I knew Bobby Bristol was right. I couldn’t possibly let these people go home.

And so we come to him asking me why I was standing at the foot of his bed holding a sledgehammer. Luckily, it was then that I snapped out of my paranoia. He’s just doing his job. It’s been a slow news week. Let him live.

‘Cockroach,’ I said and proceeded to smash the floor tiles to buggery.

‘Big one?’ he asked. (Another damned question)

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘But they’re tough little sods.’

‘Well, gee. Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

I bade him sweet dreams and returned to my room and thought, ‘Whew. That was a near thing’. Before everybody in the world started saying it, my Auntie Rene used to tell me that if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was. Except Auntie Rene had a trick ending. Her version went, If something seems too good to be true, it probably is…unless it isn’t.

That’s the reality of life. Your two cars are going over the cliff and into the void. Sex is the one that usually stalls out and sputters to a stop first. Old age sputters, too, and sometimes needs a little push before gravity takes over. And if you look in the rearview mirror, you’ll see a long line of cars right on your bumper about to follow you into the void.

Why the gloom, Moore? What Celtic genes are switching through your synapses that sends a chemical bath through your neuron system and comes out the other end as the ritual of a shotgun marriage between sex and death and a James Dean finality to all of it?

Sir Frank Kermode

It started with Sir Frank Kermode died on Wednesday in Cambridge at the age of 90. He’d written over 50 books. He’d been knighted. He was a Shakespeare scholar, too. Sir Frank wasn’t a relative, a mentor, a friend or even someone I’d recognize passing him on the street. His drive over the cliff of life has been noted in the literary blogs, that faint cluster of stars in the far reaches of the visible Net universe.

Sir Frank with 90 innings at the plate and 50 home runs is inducted into the Pantheon of those few who are nominated by the living as having accomplished a good life, left behind a body of work with his name attached, and contributed to our knowledge and understanding about literature. I think of Sir Frank as someone who represented the high road, what we call ‘high culture.’ He is scheduled to go from life to myth and legend. That apparently is the best we can hope for when the nose of our car points due south and into the void.

So far I suspect a number of readers have been skimming this article impatiently wanting to know when do we get to Sex. That’s the leveler, the Pantheon of beings that gets our engines going. Either you do it, read or watch others doing it, talk about doing it, buy medicine that promises doing-it performance, shop for doing-it accessories, think or day dream about doing it, or have dreams in which you definitely out distancing Robocop in the doing-it department.

Shigeo Tokuda

This brings me back to Sir Frank. We don’t think about old people having sex. Dying, yes. That’s what they’re supposed to do, get out of the way, make way for the young horny ones in our midst. Let’s take a short drive down the low road. Our driver is Shigeo Tokuda, who started his porno film career at 60-years old, and fifteen years later, hitting the 75-year mark, has 200 films under his belt (so to speak). Mr. Tokuda (no knighthood on the horizontal bamboo mat in his future) claims no need to swallow a Viagra before the cameras roll. His position (he assumes many in his films) is that getting and maintaining an impressive erection is purely psychological. Most of Mr. Tokuda’s co-stars are females who are around 30-years old. There is a whole genre of porno films labeled ‘elderporn’ where the age difference between the elderly male and his counterpart is best measured in light years. There is also a sub-genre of elderly women having sex with young men but apparently the market for such films is thin.

When Shigeo Tokuda follows Sir Frank over that cliff for his final take, he may not be remembered for his insights into Shakespeare but for his starring roles in such classics as Tit-Lover Old Man Kameichi and His Horny Pranks.

High road or low road, like blue pill or red pill. You have a choice in the road you take. Authors make that choice every time they start a book. Writing blends death and sex into myth, folktale, legend and serving up a strong brew turns us into addicts. We drink down to the last dregs such stories and ask for a refill. The reality is Sir Frank’s opus makes believe that lives devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom are the pinnacle of human existence and shows our true potential for opening our minds. But our dirty little secret is that we’d trade places playing Shigeo Tokuda’s understudy in our old age rather than parsing the meaning of Hamlet into a book-sized essay. In our heart of hearts, something tells us that while we can never aspire to the likes of Sir Frank, we have a fighting chance to follow Shigeo Tokuda’s example to the final moment when the lights are cut and the stage goes dark.

I could leave Sir Frank and Shigeo at this point. But that would do both of them a disservice. There is something not quite right in the mash up of two very different lives that should stop us from snickering into our hand. This is where SLIM comes into the picture.

The SLIM, which is short-hand for Small, Limited and Impermanent, describes the outer ring dimensions of a single human life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re aiming to be Sir Frank or Mr. Shigeo, SLIM is what all of us are stuck with, including you. We have a sense in a celebrity driven world that some lives appear to be inflated, expanded beyond the normal, and indeed in a real sense these lives give the impression of a SLIM violation.

But there can be no such violation. The human condition is the same for everyone. No one is an exception—no one is immune to SLIM as it is the fundamental rule of defines our existence.

There is another point about the high and low roads. The guardrails and yellow line down the center are come from morality, laws and ethics. We are taught from an early age to follow these rules of the road. But we love our outlaws and our porno stories nonetheless.

The best writers sculpture stories populated with characters who promise to have found a trap door and chance of escape from SLIM. In reality fiction, such a conceit usually is the characters undoing. In fantasy and science fiction, the elements are bent, twisted, and the way out is something that looks vaguely like the human condition but is post-SLIM, like the promise of post-human singularity life. The digital world promises a kind of abstract immortality that is impossible in our analog biology. In the digital universe you are converted into a kind of ‘fingerprint’ in a book where we keep track of whose existences are worthy of remembrance.

Books and films and music—the arts—offer readers a chance to transcend their human condition, sweep aside the SLIM, and substitute a human condition that is much larger, borderless and permanent. The journey to find such alternatives is our tragedy. Noir is the world where the characters never will stand a chance at such transcendence, a world where all the guardrails and center lines are an illusion, the headlights are switched off, and the character drive blind. In the noir world, at each step, the reader understands the utter futility of fighting SLIM. Shigeo Tokuda will one day need to pop a Viagra, and later on the day will come when even Viagra won’t do the trick. Laughter will rain down from the rest of us when that happens, as we secretly believe that unlike Shigeo we will be spared this humiliation as our young co-star lights a cigarette, wraps the sheet around her and winks into the camera.

50 books, 90-years old is an accomplishment; make no mistake about that. Sir Frank gave us our best shot at blowing a hole through SLIM. Bigger caliber rounds have bounced off the shell of SLIM before, and bigger rounds will be loaded and fired in the future. Why do we continue to believe the impossible can be achieved in a single life?

Because so much of life is in working out the daily stuff of existence, Sir Frank working over a draft of a book, Shigeo driving to the studio, brushing teeth, eating, checking email, taking a phone call, reading a newspaper, gossiping with a friend, helping out someone in the family or a neighbor. It doesn’t add up to much. It lacks weight and importance. It is so incredibly impermanent. We crave a life that tips the scales as having been heavy and strong and long.

As writers we undertake the tasks of finding the location of such weight and meaning among the rubble of day-to-day existence and attached these dispatches which makes life grander, more exciting, and purposeful. Unless you write noir which puts your nose into SLIM and asks you as the reader to keep on breathing.

Like bends in the road, a story—noir or otherwise—demarks a path, and characters need a good reason to go down that path, equipped with the skills to negotiate the twists and turns, and dealing with the troubles along the way. The destination is, as they say, not the reason to travel; it is the journey and what happens along the way that defines us.