New Year Read

Let us begin the new year's new reads with a lie...

Uncle Vernon's Lie (by Patrick Samphire) is published in Serendipity, a new online journal of magical realist fiction. If you love magical realism then you'll love this story, in which a young boy is sent to holiday with his uncle, who will only ever tell him one lie. Uncle has no TV or computer but lives in an enchanted house and there's a girl in the garden who may not be real. Uncle Vernon is full of fantastical ideas, all of which sound like lies. Separating the one lie, may not be easy...

Extract...
"What did that man want?" Benji asked.

Uncle Vernon grimaced. "He's a doctor."

"Then why didn't you let him in?"

"In?" Uncle Vernon's face whitened. "No, my boy. That would never do. Doctors make people ill."

"What do you mean?" Benji said. "They make people better."

"They don't, whatever they might tell you," Uncle Vernon said. "They make diseases. They make cancer and bad backs and in-grown toenails and colds and the Black Death and the dreaded lurgy. Doctors go poking around looking for new illnesses. They find someone who's a little under-the-weather and say, 'Ah-ha, you've got lung cancer'. Then, ever-after, people have to suffer from lung cancer, and the doctor gets a medal or certificate." He shook his head. "I let a doctor into my house once, and he made me a new disease. That's why I never let doctors in anymore." He glanced out the window. "Doesn't stop them trying. Meddlers."

Benji considered that. "The dreaded lurgy isn't a real disease," he said.

"Ah!" Uncle Vernon leaned down. "Not yet, it isn't. Stay away from doctors, and it might never be. See?"

Read Uncle Vernon's Lie.
*

What a disappointment

Love or loathe the Harry Potter series of books (and movies), one can hardly ignore the phenomenon that dreamed it all up, JK Rowling. A documentary on ITV the other night, A Year in the Life of JK Rowling - allowed an insight into the author's life. She was asked everything from her love of forests, to childhood and relationship with her parents (and how these fed into her creation of the boy wizard), to whether her fabulous wealth comes between her and friends, and whether people write her asking for money (naturally, they do) to whether she likes the book run. Interestingly, JK Rowling knows the unwritten future of her characters, who married whom, the names of their children, who was OK, who wasn't. The author goes back at some point to the lowly Edinburgh flat where as a struggling single parent she wrote the first book. "This is where I turned my life around," she says, and proceeds to weep.

~

Perhaps the most touching scene, for me, is at the beginning of the documentary, where JK and her sister Di look over old family photographs. Their parents had wanted a boy, to be named 'Simon John' when a girl, Joanne (JK), came instead.

"She was a massive disappointment," says Di, sweetly.

What a disappointment...