Brian Bollen's Blog

When did people become so disrespectful?

When did people in Britain start becoming so disrespectful? We have just had yet another xxxx parking across the private parking bays in front of our house and next door, ignoring the bollards and the clear private parking signs.

He got a double whammy of well justified abuse from next door and me (in full Rab C Nesbit mode) and won't do it again, I suspect. But someone else will...

Delusional David Moyes

That's what I do, I win, says David Moyes, reacting to his re-appointment as manager of West Ham United.

The accompanying statistics show that out of 93 league points up for grabs during his first tenure, the team accrued 37.

I have never worked in football, other than to write about it, but does that really constitute winning?

Had a nightmare last night

I had an extended nightmare last night, based around producing my first solo league table edition of the FT Mergers + Acquisitions International magazine. It brought back the horrors of single-handedly compiling six separate league tables for deals in different categories while also writing and editing the associated content.

Showing that it's never too late to learn, it suddenly hit me that rather than hitting the world with the six tables at the same time in the same issue, we should have spread them over three issues, meaning that every issue of the year would have had FT league tables in it. That would have created a marvellous ad sales opportunity.

Why didn't I realise that at the time? Because I was so bogged down in everyday detail I couldn't think strategically. And because from day one as editor I was under the pressure of constant management review which eventually resulted in the sale of the title and my redundancy.

As I said, it was a nightmare.

The death of the incomprehensible Alasdair Gray

I note with some interest the passing of Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray. I knew Alasdair for a while, signing up for his extra-mural sessions in creative writing when he was appointed writer-in-residence at the University of Glasgow, in 1977.

I never understood a word of his writing, and arguably even less of his advice on writing, which resulted in my writing virtually nothing new at the time. One spectacularly misguided piece of advice he gave me, having decided that I was too wordy, was to read Ernest Hemingway as a lesson in writing economically.

I dutifully tried Old Man and the Sea, found it to be overwritten and impossibly dull, and have read nothing of that author's output ever since.

Our paths crossed again a couple of decades later, when I thought I might try and enlist his help in finding a publisher for one or more of the 'comic' novels I had written. He said he remembered me, and seemed willing to lend a hand, but nothing came of it, other than that his publisher of that time, Canongate IIRC, deemed my writing to be uncommercial.

Several full-length novels, and umpteen rejections, later, I just gave up creative writing to concentrate on the hack work that doesn't lift the heart but does pay the bills.

RIP Alasdair. I think it is safe to say you were one of a kind.