Matt

Paul McKenna and Me 11: Phobia Day, Part 1

By Matt on Wednesday, March 2, 2011

One of the events that had been trailed throughout the whole length of the course was the event known as Phobia Day.

I had seen footage of the day on the Paul McKenna showreel on the net. People handling snakes, and going up to do public speaking – neither of which I thought was a particular problem. I mean, we all know that snakes are lovely warm things, right? I’ve handled them, they’re dry, they’re slightly scaley and they are utterly beautiful. Public speaking… well, getting up in front of a whole crowd and speaking… that’s just the same as getting up in front of one person and speaking. If you can do it 100 times to one person, then pure mathematics says that you can do it once to 100 people. Right? So these were phobias that I considered utterly ridiculous.

But on the showreel there were also the spiders. I recall footage of a gigantic spider the size of a man’s hand being lifted from a glass case and placed in someone’s hand. And when I had watched it, I had felt myself shrink inside, as if the little shadow that was my soul was withdrawing inwards to the darkest recesses inside. My heart pounded, my knees quaked – and I just didn’t know what to do. The spider was utterly terrifying. As it walked, stretching its long brown/yellow legs with a slow, menacing movement, I recalled all the nightmares and imaginary horrors of my childhood. I remember the spiders in Mirkwood in Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”, and their monstrous mother in “The Lord Of The Rings”. And all the times that my own mother had been reduced to a quivering wreck by a sudden move on our worn red carpet by the fireplace when I was a kid. “The Valley Of The Spiders” – a short story by H G Wells… that one had really got me. Spiders were scary.

When I was a kid, my brother had picked spiders up without fear. He had brought them, cupped in his hand, for me to look at. But seeing my fear, he had then decided what a good game it was to wave them near my face. My sister was the same as me. It was, to be frank deeply annoying.

So it was that on that Saturday, as I walked into the Ibis Hotel in Earl’s Court, that I thought I had all this history on my shoulders, carrying it around like a pile of baggage. What was different, though, was that I didn’t have the deep sense of dread on me that I had expected to feel beforehand. To be frank, my head was so cleared out of rubbish already, that I didn’t quite know what to make of the day at all. However, I did have a sense of quite deep resignation to the day. And it was with that sense of resignation that I went back into that room where so many strange things, so many amazing transformations had happened already – not just to myself but also to everyone in the room – this time to face my fear.

I walked in with some anticipation.

Writing

Man In The Moon – Draft 3

By Matt on Wednesday, February 9, 2011

The latest version of my sonnet on the moon. In my previous version I identified rhythmic problems to do with the shift from iambic pentameter to trochaic pentameter in the second quatrain. It meant the loss of a syllable at the end of the iambic lines in order to keep the meter fluid – a compromise I was not willing to make. At the same time, it was conceptually clunky, failing to segue adequately between quatrains and sextet. This one is closer, still, to where I am heading with this:

Man In The Moon

“When witches long ago beheld the moon
they conjured up a man hunched with a pack.
Astronomers spied ‘seas’ that would maroon
A sailor in a tranquil well of black.
Later, truer lenses picked out craters
ringed by nightbound mountains. Violent meteor
storms had tattooed deep on Luna’s face a
shadow-man – an ink-blot human creature.”
A woman, thinking, as she travels, weaves
her moonbug’s track through lunar rocks and dust –
“Technology sustains life and relieves
our need for faith or guesswork – even trust…”
The Cosmos is a mirror to each mind:
Look long upon its glass: What will YOU find?

Writing

Man In The Moon – Draft 2

By Matt on Friday, February 4, 2011

Well, that didn’t take long before I rewrote it. Here we go again:

Man In The Moon

“When priests in ancient times beheld the moon
they conjured up a man hunched with a pack.
Astronomers spied seas that would maroon
A sailor in a tranquil well of black.
Later, truer lenses picked out craters
ringed by nightbound mountains. Meteor storms
had violently incised on Luna’s face a
shadow-man – an ink-blot human form.”
A woman, peering through her visor, shrugs
away these thoughts. With slow-mo tread through rocks
and lunar dust she mounts her waiting moonbug –
driving on toward her metal box…
…She leaves behind a footprint as a sign:
“The Universe is shaped within a mind.”

Writing

Man In The Moon – Draft 1

By Matt on Friday, February 4, 2011

The Man in the Moon with his Dog, as European Legend has it!

It is always a mistake to publish an idea when you are drunk. While I am not exactly drunk, I have had a few glasses of wine, and my judgement may be off.

However, I have got a good feeling about this, the latest of my “Cosmological Sonnets”. It is the first draft, and I will rework it shortly, but I thought: well, why not share it? I’m in that kind of mood. Keep watching. It will be reworked shortly!

As for when the moonshine wears off, and I see this in the cold light of a new day, well, that I will have to live with tomorrow. But I hope you enjoy it, and that you can see what it is that I am groping towards.

Thank you for your patience!

Man in the Moon

“When priests in ancient times beheld this disc
they saw a man and faithful hound rove free
across its face. Later, astronomists
Baptised its sea of dust “Tranquillity”.

Through their lenses men spied nightbound craters
ringed by darkened mountains. A meteor storm
had etched that world and made from pools of shade, a
shadow-man: an ink-blot human form.”

The woman, peering through her visor, shrugs
off her thoughts, and slowmo treads the rocks
and lunar dust. She mounts her faithful moonbug
then drives off toward her pressured box…

…She leaves behind a footprint as a sign:
“Beware: The universe is humankind.”

Events and Products

The Great NLP Extravaganza!

By Matt on Wednesday, February 2, 2011

The Great NLP Extravaganza on February 26 at the Ibis Hotel, London, is the perfect launch pad for those interested in finding out more about the fascinating applied study of human interaction, NLP.

NLP is strongly focused on how we use language – for example, how the asking of particular questions lead to very specific types of answer. Meaning that you can set the agenda to an interview or a discussion without expressly saying so.
NLP enables you to change the interactions that you are having with others, so that you can be aware of and guide other people’s emotions.
It enables you to get control of your own emotional state so that you are able to give the very best that you can in the most trying of circumstances.
It also trains you in the art of “reading” people more closely, so that you are able to draw more information from discussions and interviews than their words alone tell you
It teaches you how to build strong and positive relationships, and how to get yourself and your staff more positive, and with increased morale.
It teaches an attitude to life which enhances business and personal relationships and is the breeding ground of success.

NLP is used by such diverse figures as Oprah Winfrey, Paul McKenna and mentalist Derren Brown to enable them to be more clear and focussed at work and at home, and to allow them to achieve more.

The NLP Extravaganza will be a well-priced day that allow you to find out more about the skills on offer, and to take away practical tools that you can apply for yourself. It will show you how to apply NLP to business, medicine, negotiation, public speaking, presentation skills and sport.

To find out more about the Great NLP Extravaganza, just click through on this link https://theukcompany.infusionsoft.com/go/nlaew/m068w/

Banana Republic Inspirations

A Simple Act Of Kindness Can Change The World

By Matt on Thursday, January 13, 2011

I’ve just got back from a walk in my home town of Portsmouth – and I’ve learned how one person really can change the whole world.

I was walking past a little brick-built church on Old Portsmouth’s High Street, called the John Pounds Church, when I suddenly remembered reading that there was something special about it – a little museum dedicated to Mr John Pounds himself. So, on that sunny winter afternoon with some time to spare, I decided to take a look at exactly what that museum comprised.

At the back, in a neat courtyard, a small wooden hut is built on to the side of the church. It is a modest little museum. If you look in through the barn door you will see a mannikin of a cobbler looking over the shoulder of a boy reading from a bible, while around him are other figures of little children in Victorian clothing, ragged and poor, sitting and reading from a book or scribbling on slates.

It is the image of a makeshift Victorian schoolhouse, which John Pounds’s house and cobbler’s shop became. Pounds had only two rooms in his house: one downstairs and one above. And in the room downstairs, he taught the poor to read.

Pounds himself was self taught. In 1778 at the age of 12 years old, he was indentured into the dockyard in Portsea. And at the age of 15, just a few days after his father died, the teenaged Pounds fell into a dry dock and was crippled for life.

He was carried out of the dockyard, and that, as far as his employers were concerned, was the end of their responsibility for him. He stayed with relatives in Portsmouth, and over the coming months he slowly recuperated. Illiterate but with an enquiring mind, in that period of recovery he taught himself to read. Then, as his vitality returned, he trained as a cobbler and set up his little shop on the main thoroughfare between the fortified town of Portsea and the High Street in Old Portsmouth.

*Recollections of John Pounds by the Rev Henry Hawkes is available from Life Is Amazing, publisher*

The poverty in that part of Portsmouth at the turn of the 19th Century was smothering. A report from several decades later describes, for example, a tiny close called Messum’s Court that butted up against the garrison town’s fortifications and was approached via a two foot wide tunnel called Squeeze Gut Alley. Here 116 people lived below sea level in a damp, dismal courtyard supplied with water from a single standpipe that ran for just 10 minutes a day, and with one privy between them. An open dunghill stood in the middle of the courtyard, through which also ran an open drain. The denizens of this court, some of whom lived in cellars, dug their own wells outside their front doors, down which their small children were in constant danger of falling, while the water drawn up was often contaminated by seepage from the open sewers and cess pools nearby. Children growing up in this poverty with no hope of an education were condemned by default to a future of yet more grinding poverty, and of crime.

Children were criminalised easily back then. Again, a few decades later, by the mid-1800s, it is recorded that the offences of hopscotch, flying kites or playing marbles were, among many other offences, punishable by hard labour and a mandatory whipping. But since those children were turned out on to the streets by their parents who didn’t want them at home, what else were they to do except loiter and get into trouble with the law or be recruited into criminal gangs?

It was in this milieu that Pounds took to teaching children to read and write in his cobbler’s shop. To draw the kids in, he kept injured birds that he was nursing back to health in little cages hung from the ceiling, and little pets. With his stooped walk that was a result of his dockyard fall, he would go out on winter days with hot jacket potatoes in his coat pockets (it is said that he had sewn in extra pockets to hold more of them) and hand them out to the children who were shivering among the timber stacked near Spice Island, or huddling in little crannies by the sea, out of the wind. “There are plenty more where that one came from,” he would tell them, and the children would follow him to his shop.

Inside, it was cramped, but it was warm, and the kids learned to read under Pounds’s tutelage. Often, 40 children at a time would be squeezed into the tiny little shed where he worked. It is thought that in his lifetime he taught hundreds of children to read and write in that little room.

The fact was, there was no money in this for him at all. If he got an inkling that your parents were able to pay for schooling, then you would be replaced with someone more needy. As John Pounds put it: “I wants they as nobody cares for. They’s they for me.”

When Pounds died at the age of 72, after dedicating a lifetime to teaching children to read, his cobbler’s shop had only a few items inside. There were the tools of his trade, and a handful of personal effects. He had lived and died in poverty, but had given hundreds the opportunity to work as shopworkers, join the Navy or get some form of employment other than manual labour – and had shown them possibilities other than crime.

Soon after his death in 1839, as people realised what an amazing thing he had done, the Reverend Thomas Guthrie was inspired by his story to set up the “Ragged Schools” movement, which provided free education for the poor across the country. Portsmouth’s first “Ragged School” was opened just 10 years after Pounds’s death.

By 1852, the movement was so powerful that Parliament set up an inquiry into the condition of “criminal and destitute juveniles in this country and what changes are desirable in their present treatment, in order to supply industrial training and to combine reformation with the due correction of juvenile crime.”

This was a milestone in the development of something that would change the English speaking world forever. That something was Universal Free Education in the form of a State Education.

If you are reading this and you are from Britain or one of its old colonies, it is likely that you received your education precisely because of the acts of kindness of a cobbler in Portsmouth, who 200 years ago walked out into the cold with hot jacket potatoes in his pockets, and set in train a course of events that would lead to the liberation from poverty of literally hundreds of millions of people across the globe. He lived half a mile from where I live, and I could not have written this blog without him.

And you, wherever you are on this planet, would not be reading it.

Opinion

English? Yes… But Not Patient Enough…

By Matt on Thursday, January 6, 2011

I’ve just watched one of the least enjoyable movies I have ever had the displeasure of enduring, and it’s not what you might consider a “usual suspect” for such a distinguished honour…

It was as much a surprise to me that The English Patient, starring Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas was the culprit as it would have been if I had spotted a crashed biplane on the surface of the moon.

It’s funny, because it really did take years for me to get to this movie. Every time I saw it lurking in the DVD drawer, or scheduled on the box, something in me recoiled. But I eventually decided I would have to succumb to its call. Anthony Minghella was, after all, from the Isle of Wight. I have eaten his family’s overpriced ice cream and sworn at the ice cream sellers who rip you off on Southsea beach, just across the water from “his” island. We have things in common. So watching it would be showing solidarity with a local boy, right?

Oh! That I had left it out of the player!

So, what exactly is wrong with The English Patient? (- Apart from being hideously burned and looking like a mummy, obviously.) That was the question I began to ask myself when I got about an hour in and found my attention wandering despite efforts to shepherd it back. I had the feeling I used to get when reading worthy books that were supposed to be masterpieces, yet plodded on towards the most predictable of endings. This movie was the filmic equivalent of something by Chekhov or Hardy: ploddingly dull.

Now, there’s no doubt The English Patient is beautifully filmed, although, somehow, not beautifully enough – despite all of the soft shadows on fleshy sands, implying the curves of a woman’s body. It has pretty people in it, although they might have been either more real or more pretty. And the costumes look authentic, down to the German uniforms, and the leather flying jackets, the white cotton dress. The scenes set in Khan Al Khalili look real and sumptuous; the desert looks exotic – mostly. Everything is visually engaging in a 1970s Turkish Delight tv advert sort of a way. So that’s not where the problem lies.

Nope, the thing that did it for me was that I actually didn’t care one tiny little bit for any of the weird characters, who wandered about the desert having their affairs. Not one of them aroused in me the slightest feeling of sympathy, whatsoever. From the autistically deadpan Ralph Fiennes with that strange face he has that looks like it has the texture, flexibility and expressiveness of a crusty bloomer baked in the desert sun, via Colin Firth who comes across as neither hearty nor dull, through to the cold and emotionless Kristin Scott Thomas, nearly nothing engaged my sympathy. Experiencing a series of emotionless faces on a sandy background simply left me wondering if this is what the English really were like before the War. If it were the case, I decided to thank the next German I met for starting something that at least collapsed a culture that was so horrendously repressed that it didn’t once know how to throw its posture off the symmetrical, or put a glimmer in its eye. I might as well have been on Tattooine, so alien were these Sandpeople.

Which of course, left the love affair that was to determine the fates of thousands to be a completely incomprehensible nonsense. Why did Kristin Scott Thomas’ Katherine not recognise the weirdly distant Count Laszlo as a stalker? Why did she cheat on her perfectly serviceable husband who had it all: money, looks, kindness and an aeroplane? There’s no explanation. I charge the film makers with deception. And Exhibit A, your honour, is Breadface’s pulling technique. Ready for this?

He stares at her a bit.

Yes, that’s it. That’s what brings the erudite, brilliant, funny but cold Katherine to the conjunctive bath tub. One would think that with so much going on in her head, it might take more than staring at her a bit to cause her to open her legs to him.

But apparently staring at her a bit really is enough. As is talking in a dull monotone. And not letting anyone know what you’re thinking. Useful tips, which I am sure I have tried to less than erotic effect. That Katherine woman is a singular individual, that’s for sure! If only all socially inadequate stuffed shirts could meet someone like her! I’m sure I’ve read of people in the modern age who’ve tried that staring thing, and they either got arrested, beaten up, or had a restraining order put on them.

And here is the problem with the movie: everything that follows from him staring at her a bit seems as nonsensical as his staring at her a bit does. For another hour, a parade of faces looking disengaged and dull goes by, and I find myself looking once again for how much more of this I will have to endure. At the end of two hours, I start talking to the living room saying: “Please, oh movie, just surprise me.” By now Katherine has been abandoned by Laszlo in a cave as he looks for a doctor. But we all know they’re going to die. And the fact that he sacrifices most of Northern Egypt to the Germans for the sake of recovering her corpse does not seem such a romantic gesture. It just seems as inexplicable as the rest of Breadface’s behaviour throughout.

True, on the other side, Juliet Binoche does save the scenes set in a monastery where she has holed up with Laszlo, and she does have a fleeting romance with a Sikh Bomb Disposal Officer, which adds a medium amount of spice to the proceedings. They talk a bit about Imperial attitudes, and then he talks to Laszlo about how much he dislikes Kipling. But hey, big deal. Binoche’s caring, kind face that actually displays emotions is not enough to engage the attention, because a narrative would also be useful at this point. This very point clearly perplexed Ondaatje and Minghella, who introduced to the plot the thumbless “Moose” Caravaggio. But all he does is go around being a bit sinister in a half-hearted kind of a way and muttering about past lives and revenge, and that is meant to produce the narrative tension the film is lacking.

Once again it’s not enough. There is no narrative tension. Everyone lives these internalised, introspective lives, and then they die. Of course, it was always going to end unhappily, as we knew it would from the opening scene. Besides, we all know how the love triangle must end in this sort of a movie. It all seems very French, what with all that predictable misery that comes from Breadface and the Ice Queen getting it together. I wondered whether Binoche had been included because it might fire off a few cultural buttons about the Gallic obsession with doomed love affairs. A kind of shortcut to class.

And that’s the end of the movie. The Breadman becomes Toastman, the Ice Queen melts away in the cave of the swimmers, the Moose ends up getting married unexpectedly, and the Frenchwoman is left to seek her Sikh in a Christian church in an Italian town.

All very picturesque, but missing the passion, missing the feeling – and missing a cast of human beings that actually walk, talk and emote like human beings…

Perhaps a biplane really did crashland on the moon. I just wish that someone had told me before I watched it that all the characters were meant to be aliens.

Inspirations

A Mashed Potato Race

By Matt on Sunday, January 2, 2011

The minute we sat at the dining table, six-year-old Charlie and I started having fun. The truth is, I love sitting with kids at dinner tables. They are so much more enjoyable than the adults.

Within a few minutes, we had discussed the lobsters that live on the ceiling, and sometimes lose their grips and fall on the heads of the diners, and we talked about how the dwarf fireman comes in with a high power hose to wash the lobsters away, and the little-known fact that the hotel we were eating in every night put out trampolines for the lobsters to exercise on, and cleared them away in the morning before the diners came to eat. And we talked about the bizarre nature of monsters.

I carry a notebook around with me most of the time, and Charlie and I started drawing monsters. He started first with a velociraptor, which was an okay kind of a monster, with big teeth and big eyes, and a pointy tale. But I wanted to show him one of the ways his imagination might work, and how he could get to make up the rules – so we drew monsters with all sorts of extra bits: one with wheels on the ends of his 6 legs so that if he got too scary, when he fell asleep we could push him off a cliff. Another with a fierce looking hook for one hand, and a rather civilised salad server for the other, a snake for a leg, and a hedgehog for the other leg that made him go “owww!” when he walked. Another that rushed at you shouting “I will eat me!” and then did exactly that when it attacked you, so that there was nothing left, except yourself, blinking at how a monster could turn into nothing in such short time. Soon Charlie was howling with laughter and started adding bizarrenesses of his own to his monsters. A roller-skate monster with the weirdest face and a leg growing out of its back was the starting point. He was alight, and I was loving it.

When it came to ordering our food, I decided that we were going to get along famously, so when he ordered sausage and mashed potato, I did the same. This made us little conspirators at the end of the table, while the grown-ups talked about all the things that grown-ups talk about at their end of the table. Our mood was so much better then theirs, I thought, and we laughed even more, and had to quieten down a little because we were getting a bit raucous.

Then the food came, and the thing happened that I remembered had happened to me when I was a boy. When Charlie started eating the sausage, a change came over him. His eyes puffed up, he pulled a face and looked longingly down the table at the burger and chips someone else had ordered. “I should have ordered the burger,” he said, sadly, and his throat tightened as a lump formed in it, that was made of all the grizzles and struggles he’d had with food he didn’t like at other dinner tables on other days.

Oh, I remembered all that from when I was a kid. Not liking the taste of a partcicular food, and being told to eat it, I had turned the food into an instrument of torture with which I had made dinner times a living hell – not only for me but for my parents, too. I saw Charlie pick up the sausage and start trying to pull out the bits of herb that he took exception to, and realised that if I didn’t act quickly, we might have a bit of local difficulty. I smiled at him and gave him a wink.

“What do you think of it?” he asked me.

I prodded a piece of sausage on to the end of a fork and put it in my mouth, chewing theatrically. “Scrummy, yummy, scrummy,” I said. It was the first moment at which our rapport had been dented, and I saw him internalising a struggle. I imagined it as follows: Everything I had said up to that point had been reliable and fun, now he was a little sad that he was on his own. I jumped in quickly as he put his head on his hand and looked at the bowl of sausage and mash as if he were gazing down a mineshaft at an afterlife of eternal damnation and proddings with tridents. And I said, really quickly:

“Remember when you had really good times and laughed?”

He looked up at me. “When? I can’t think of any…”

“What about when monsters have salad servers for hands and lobsters live on the ceiling?”

He brightened up and smiled at me.

“That’s amazing, isn’t it? The fun of it. And then there were all the times you’ve played and had a really good time. And when you put that piece of sausage in your mouth, you’ll remember them. I don’t know if you know it, but if you taste a food you thought you didn’t like 11 times, your body starts liking the taste. It’s like magic. And when that sausage goes in your mouth, you’ll remember sunshine, and play and laughter, and all the fun you’ve ever had will explode across your mouth, and it will be amazing!”

He had gone quite quiet as he thought about what I had just told him. He tried the sausage again, with a little bit of uncertainty. He didn’t like it so much, but he was fascinated by the future pace of 11 tastes and the possibility that things might change. It just needed one more element to shift it all the way. And it was further down the table: a little pot of ketchup. I grabbed it. “Dip it in there, first!”

He dipped with some pleasure, and when he put the sausage in his mouth I pulled a funny face and said crazy things, and he laughed as loud as he could. Then he ate some more, and every time he did, I told him what a great guy he was, and gave him a big “well done” in a light and friendly way.

Later on, his mum asked him to eat the mashed potato, and I could see that it wasn’t that he didn’t like it, but just that he was full of sausage. I had paced him, and had left my mashed potato, too. And so, we just needed to do one more thing to make sure that he had eaten enough food to get him through to the evening meal:

“On your marks, get set… go!”

Yes, we had a mashed potato race, as the invisible trampolining lobsters and the roller-skate monsters and the self-devouring beasts looked on, shouting for one of us, or the other, to win.

And Charlie was obviously very good at mashed potato snaffling, because, when I looked at his empty bowl, it was clear he had beaten me. Hands down. And all around us, staring from the little nooks and crannies of the ceiling, and beneath tables, and from behind chairs, the monsters and lobsters were cheering!

Writing

Vanity and Bad Breath – What Your “Self Publisher” Won’t Tell You

By Matt on Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Bad breath at parties is a bad thing. And I know, because many years ago I used to have bad breath. I don’t any more, for good reason – but there was a time when people backed away from me or turned their heads unexpectedly and buried their noses in their wine glasses. It was not a good place to be.

But more of this later, because right now I want you to imagine we are somewhere else completely. We are at a party, watching a female figure approach across the room.

See her now, coming near, this woman in her fifties with the tinted blonde wavy hair, proffering a bottle of wine as if it is some kind of magic talisman, or a piece of bait to get you hooked. Notice the lean frame and the sharp eyes that seem, at their centre to have a vacuum, and notice that friendly enough smile. She seems interested in a conversation… so why not?

The next few minutes are spent in prattle and intros – so how do you know x, and isn’t y lovely (notice how good she is at digging around, and notice again yet more vacancy behind those eyes) alongside calculations about property and people, and where do you live, and so on.

Then there’s the inevitable question: And what do you do? Suppose now that she tells you that she is a publisher. Then after a while, imagine that she tells you she is actually a “self-publisher”, which, you establish, doesn’t mean that she only publishes her own work. You might get a feeling that she would never be quite that careless with her own money. Nope. She publishes books for other “selves”.

Imagine that you ask her what she publishes, and she tells you: Oh, anything. Anything and everything. And if you’ve got half a brain in your head, despite the wine she has lavished on you, you might start getting a little warning bell sound. Especially when she describes how an author approaches her with a manuscript and she makes it so easy for them. How she organizes the printing of the book, she organizes the layout, she organizes the publicity and she organizes distribution. Which doesn’t make her a publisher. It makes her a high quality printing service.

So, you might ask yourself, what about the content of the book? It’s possible that you have friends who have self-published books that were so close to being really good, but which, somewhere along the way, let themselves down. Books that are fantastic ideas, but just needed working up. Books, in fact that needed a judicious eye to make them sing, but which croak at times instead – or raise themselves up to sonorous heights, only to stutter and stammer at the crucial point. Or others again that are playing a symphony of marvellous ideas, but which suddenly have a foghorn blaring right in the middle of the performance.

Perhaps she blinks now, this self publisher. Perhaps she talks of how it isn’t her place to comment on the content. And perhaps, as you watch her more closely, you might begin to realise that that emptiness in her eyes is the void that comes from inhabiting a world devoid of values. The pages of whichever book she is thinking of right now, might as well be blank, you suspect. And without values – writing values – she can add nothing to raise any of the books she publishes to the next saleable level, either.

What business is it of mine to dictate what you find in the pages of a book? she might well ask, with a rhetorical flourish. These authors are experts on their subjects. I am not.

Perhaps at this point you might consider that yes, they are experts, but not necessarily on writing. An image might swim before you as you talk to this woman, as you consider the plights of those desperate to be published at any cost. It’s possible that you begin to think that if ever there was a duty of care towards a client, it really should exist in this world of self publishing.

What I have written above is just a daydream – a little picture to consider, as you read this little blog. And it can fade now, as we get back to the real point: bad breath.

One of the best things my brother did for me was, while driving me home from a party, to open the window on his side of the car. It was a winter night many years back, icy and cold, and I asked him to close it again. It was then that he told me: “Matt, you need to see a dentist or a doctor. Someone who can help you. Because there is something wrong with your breath.”

I was gutted. I cast my mind back through the preceding year and identified a definite pattern, which up to then I had been oblivious to. It was a recent problem, I realised, that had coincided with the pain I was getting from my wisdom teeth. Pictures came up of close conversations in which people had stepped backwards, and walked away and I had felt an unidentifiable sense of rejection. How awful! And all it would have taken was the right word for me to have dealt with the matter months before.

Once I was told about it, I decided to sort it out. I went to see the experts. The dentist edited my mouth, taking out a few unnecessary bits. He removed my wisdom teeth and life got better. People not only liked me, they were also willing to stand near me. My brother had done me a big favour.

Now consider this: if I had not received that great piece of advice, I might well have ended up in friendships only with people with no sense of smell. Or, worse, if I had a bit of money to throw around, I might have been surrounded by people who did have a sense of smell, but were willing to put up with the reek to get their hands on the wonga, and secretly sniggered down their sleeves when I left. Either of these scenarios might have made me feel good in the short-term, but the problem of being unpopular with lots of different people at parties would still have been there.

Now let’s go back to the vanity publisher we imagined. I haven’t made a decision about her breath in my imaginary scenario. I didn’t stand close enough to her in my imagination to find out. But if you are going to go to someone like her, heed this one piece of advice:

Don’t think she is interested in your precious manuscript or that she thinks it has value. That’s not her job. For her, the only book you have on your person of any value is your chequebook. She ain’t going to give you advice, she ain’t going to help you make your book better. She’s not going to sidle up to you and let you know, in the nicest, most caring way, that as it stands, right now, your book stinks and needs a proper professional eye on it – and that only that way will it make new friends. Because although she calls herself a publisher, making a profit from sales of your book ain’t her job. So she isn’t going to care one jot of ink.

Remember: at a dentist’s, at some point you’re going to have your mouth open wide. When you walk into a vanity publisher’s, make sure your eyes are open wide, too.

Opinion Pleasures

Arts and Their Impact on Human Relations – by Maha Moussa

By Matt on Saturday, December 18, 2010

I have a guest writer on the blog today. I first met Maha Moussa 10 years ago while I was working for the British Council in Cairo. Maha was interested in learning English, and was a wonderful hostess to me, taking me around the markets and secret places of Cairo, walking along the Corniche, teaching me about Egyptian food and taking me to cultural events, including Sufi dancing. It was a wonderful time.

When I moved back to the UK, we lost touch, until one day she popped up on facebook and said “hello”. Maha has lately been studying English again, and she sent me an essay that she wrote for her teacher. I was impressed by it, not just because of the competency of the English, but because Maha engages with her subject with a great deal of honesty, joy and optimism. It is the second essay she has written on the course. Before now, Maha was all self-taught – writing to friends in the West, and meeting Westerners in the markets. I think it is impressive for that feat alone – but above and beyond that, she raises some really wholesome points and some great, uplifting descriptions. It is very different from the way that I write – and I hope you enjoy the change!

Arts and Their Impact on Human Relations – by Maha Moussa

Music, Singing, Dancing, Drawing, Poetry, Movies, and Plays, each of them is an important aspect of the culture of different countries and their civilizations. As such, they help us to form our ideas of life with many different perspectives.

There is no need to learn to be an artist, or even to study The Arts in order to feel the beauty which we see in the painting of the great works of Leonardo Da Vinci, or in the painting of an unknown person who lives in a slum area in India, for example. Napoleon Bonaparte said: “A picture is worth a thousand words”, and yes, this is true . There is also no need to speak several languages to be able to enjoy the wonderful music and songs that we listen to in different languages. All we need is to learn how to feel, to see, and to listen to these inspiring arts, by using our senses, our hearts, our minds and our consciousnesses. We can follow our desires to become acquainted with other people’s cultures and deal with them on a human level through their arts. That is all that we need to appreciate art.

One of the most famous quotes by Victor Hugo is: “Change your opinion, keep to your principles, change your leaves, keep intact your roots”. Thus, to be proud of our roots, our civilization, and our culture’s artistic heritage is something truly good and healthy. This sense of pride should help us to have a deep sense of understanding and respect for the cultures and arts of other countries, too. It gives us a wonderful chance to know more about the arts that contribute in some way to shaping the hearts and minds of other people, and affects our ways of dealing with each other in life. The fact is that, the global exchange of arts between countries, such as music, singing, dancing, drawing etc., provides opportunities for humanity to open the door of knowledge, to help people to add richness to their values, their dreams, and their ambitions to create a smooth path to communicate with other wonderful people around the world, and accept their differences. In this way, we learn to accommodate others in a way that is less severe or intolerant, regardless of their beliefs, their customs, their religions, their nationalities, or even their lifestyle. This shared gateway frees us to meet each other naturally and respectfully with more flexibility, respect, and tolerance.

Someone once said about music: “Music expresses feeling and thoughts without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.” So, if anyone has the opportunity to watch or to listen to any of the various music performances that come to Egypt from different countries such as: Korea, America, Zambia, France, Ireland, Pakistan, or India, etc., I think that the most useful way to be able to enjoy and feel this music is to let your soul go free and clear your mind, as if you are traveling to those wonderful countries and attending these performances by yourself. This is my advice from personal experience.

A few months ago, in the last Month of Ramadan, I was attending one of the greatest and most talented performances that I have ever seen in my life, along with one of my foreign friends, who was working in Cairo at the time. This wonderful show was one of religious music. It was the international annual festival of “Samaa for sufi music and chanting“. It was a new cultural event that started 2 years ago. It is held annually during Ramadan, in one of Cairo’s oldest and most iconic Islamic buildings, El Ghoury Dome, or Qobat Al-Ghoury. The event I attended this year at the festival had bands from many countries, such as: India, Morocco, Spain, Turkey, while the core band had members from Egypt, Indonesia, and Akabila. This wonderful performance was a mixture of Islamic religious chanting, Coptic hymns, and Opera songs, at the same time. All of these bands were glorifying God, and His messengers Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, but with many languages and in various musical styles. They provided to the world through their music ”a message of peace“, to explain that God created us equal. Regardless of the religions or the beliefs we follow, we all are humans. When my friend and I were listening to them, we felt as if the amazing music and sounds came to us from heaven. All we could do was just enjoy the Islamic Sufi chanting and the Coptic Hymns and we felt that there was no difference between them. When the whole group said the same words together, such as; Allah, God, Mohammed, and Jesus, we became surprised at how they felt the pleasure and the power of their words, and how they transferred that feeling to us, even with our inability to understand most of the languages in which they were performed. We had no choice but to respond to their music and their songs. Really we felt as if we had already traveled to each country.

In my opinion, there is no specific way to enjoy the different kinds of arts; every person has the absolute freedom to see, to listen, and to taste the art in the manner that suits him or her. Art and freedom are two sides of one coin. Thus, our freedom creates a sense of love, care, tolerance, and respect between peoples. So let us know and learn more about each other from our arts and our cultures. They translate many great and deep meanings in life into one common language we can all understand. Art provides us with convincing answers to many questions that we have in our minds about others, and the answer always is this: that we are all human, just human.