April 2010
1 post
The Slow Death of English
I originally intended to write this essay for The Nervous Breakdown, but not long after I started roughing it out, I realised it was appropriate to this blog, as it’s about the language I use. Even after trimming the list of subjects covered, it ended up much longer than I expected - almost 2,500 words. It’s not my usual fare - storytelling - so it rambles a bit, but see what you think. The...
March 2010
1 post
Ha Ha Wee Wee (Deleted Scene (For Now))
Near the end of the previous story, The Worst Night of My Life, I intended to make a brief aside - “Oh yeah, the only other time I had to use a bottle like that…” - but the little tale became longer, and longer, and really, dirty green imps and urine bottles will only hold a reader’s attention for so long. So this piece went straight into storage and might never come back. Although it may find its...
February 2010
1 post
January 2010
2 posts
The Worst Night of My Life
I couldn’t see the point of coming up with a title that was funny, eloquent or enigmatic; it was what it was. These events occurred on the night of October 15th 2003. I’d been in hospital for three months and was still largely paralysed; I couldn’t use my arms or hands, or speak. I communicated by using my left big toe to tap letters on an ABC board at the foot of my bed WHICH LOOKS LIKE THIS and...
SOGOTP
It’s almost Christmas 2009. I’m in Chester (England) and the snow which has brought most of the country to a pathetic standstill has finally arrived here. It’s falling with conviction; thick and straight down, big, heavy flakes. Since August I’ve been writing with conviction; in January I decided that I would either make a serious attempt to finish Get Well Soon or abandon it entirely. The...
November 2009
4 posts
Then and now
Going back a bit: I wrote a lot just after I left hospital in August 2004. In the preceding months I’d occasionally made notes on a small (though thick and weighty) laptop PC; little snatches of others’ conversations, general observations on the shortcomings of National Health Service food, the negative psychological effect of a steady diet of Heart FM, that sort of thing. Many of these incisive...
Kitchen
I’d like your help. I’m trying something out; as I’ve said before, I want to tell a story, not just recount some events, so I’m using a style here that I hope will serve a particular purpose - convey more than just “what happened”. I don’t want to be too explicit about what I’m trying to achieve, but I’d really like to hear your reactions, so please leave a comment. I’m not crowdsourcing, I’m just...
Feeling better?
A number of people have suggested comparing my current life, living with the accident’s consequences, with the time I spent in hospital. While that would certainly provide a framework, I’m sticking to the original plan; 19th July 2003 to 5th August 2004, with some nostalgic deviations. However, for the first time, I’ve written a bit about my present-day circumstances in a creative, storytelling...
Quiet
Hungry, hungry. Fridge. Thea’s popped to the shop for milk, so no tea just yet but I could do with a nibble. What’ve we got? Salami. Not the choicest cut, something from the corner shop in a clingy pack, but still better than pretty much anything on the NHS menu. You’re coming with me. This salami likes its orderly existence in the pack and is reluctant to leave. Pick-pick-pick, eventually I...
October 2009
9 posts
The Nervous Breakdown
I’ve started posting short pieces on literary non-fiction site The Nervous Breakdown. The first was the same Last Train story that’s on this blog, but I’ve just put up a new one, Enid from the Block. I’ll be posting to The Nervous Breakdown every two or three weeks, and those’ll be all-new pieces, not extracts from Get Well Soon.
Skool
This story isn’t entirely true.
Nineteen eighty-nine!
The number, another summer (get down!)
Sound of the funky drummer…
…and of willow on leather.
There’s a grey area, a surprisingly long ten-year fogbank. I was at the same school from eight to eighteen; junior, senior and Sixth Form. A decade in the same building; it all seems vague and flat. Surely something happened in that...
Mr. Rollercoaster
This man’s face! His expression…it’s the expression the passengers wear when the rollercoaster comes down from its final loop. Terror, bewilderment. Exhilaration, inexplicably. He sits with this befuddled smile as staff fuss about, transferring him into a bed on the ward’s plague side; eventually he’s snug, propped up by a mass of pillows. The urine bag attached to the bed rail is half full of...
Geezers
Some time before the fluorescent strips came on, grey underwater light was slowly brightening the room. The geezers at the far end were already chatting away, dawn chorusing as old boys do. “’Ow are you then?” asked one. “Terrible,” his mate replied, “I died in the night!” – and they laughed and laughed, and I sniggered and went back to sleep. The far bed was empty and tightly made up. Geezer...
We hope you like our new direction
A friend emailed to tell me what she thought of the blog so far. She’s a very good friend and gave a very detailed critique; one thing she mentioned was that I appear to have two distinct writing styles. I’m using two distinct formats, present tense for the main narrative and past for reminiscences, but that’s not what she meant. She singled out a couple of passages, one more (for want of a better...
In the gym - part 2
“We’re going to put you on a plinth,” Ella informs me, “and see what’s what.” A plinth? Carpenter John organises sweatshop shifts of students to bang out dozens of plinths at the end of each year, white-painted MDF cuboids that hold together long enough to display 100 or so graduate projects, then get smashed up and skipped because there’s nowhere to store them. They’re going to put me on one of...
September 2009
14 posts
In the gym
You can count the number of times I’ve been in a gym on the fingers of one finger. Carpenter John had been feeling a bit of middle-aged spread (“I can’t understand it,” he complained, “All that sitting on my arse and drinking Guinness, I should be in peak condition”) so he’d decided to consider investigating the possibility of maybe joining a gym. Outside the Fitness-Something-Fitness place across...
Ambulance
Most of the 40,000 or so words I’ve written so far have covered events about which I can now laugh. In truth, though, very few situations were funny at the time, and some still aren’t. I have to deal with the accident’s effect, all day, every day. I won’t go into detail, but my strength and range of motion are massively reduced, with a corresponding decrease in...
Fiesta!
When I first met her at university, and for about ten years after, Ali had this Ford Fiesta that she’d painted with a roller, dark blue. With its matt finish and angular construction it was probably invisible to radar, a one litre stealth hatchback. The filthy little engine sat in the middle of its spacious bay like a lump of coal and its wasp-in-a-biscuit-tin sound was easily recognisable as she...
Eh up
Since I’m no longer catheter compatible, I’ve been using a dreadful thing called a Convene (emphasis on the first syllable, Con-vene). Basically it’s a small condom with a tube on the end. Small? Yes. It’s supposed to fit snugly over my flaccid penis. Imagine that - trying to wriggle a floppy little length of sausagemeat into a casing, manually. And, of course, I can’t do it myself, so it’s up to...
Last Train
Hello folks.
I’ve had a great response to this blog, so I thought I’d post something extra to say thank you for all the positive feedback and encouragement. This is one of the first things I wrote after leaving hospital in 2004; it’s not part of the main narrative (which is written in the present tense), it’s a chunk of memory, hence the past tense.
My writing style was originally very dry,...
Train ride
At Victoria station, Network SouthEast’s wheelchair service falls a bit short. Thea phoned ahead yesterday - why should she have to do that? Anyway, she did - and a chap duly comes to meet us when she presses a big blue button on a thing. Chap takes the bag that’s been balanced precariously on my lap and leads us to the Eastbourne train, where he unfolds a big knobbly yellow plastic ramp and helps...
LAMF
Regardless of a gentleman’s position in society, it is an undeniable truth that he will on occasion find it desirable, perhaps even necessary, to totally rock out like a muthafuckin’ hurricane. - Oscar Wilde
Crash
Crash team, Greene Ward, 4 AM
It’s nothing like ER. A calm female voice directs the show, calling the players by name, requesting numbers, issuing instructions; words and figures whirl and bounce, always spoken, never shouted, until it’s just her voice enquiring “OK, everybody clear? Melanie, you clear? OK.”
And then…nothing. No thump, no flatline whine, the money shot passes in a moment of...
Scanner
That scene at the end of 2001 where Dave’s entered the monolith and he ages in stages, in an elegant white room - remember how the pod sits in the corner, fitting in with the colour palette but otherwise looking a bit out of place? Well here it is again, look. If Luigi Colani and Franco Sbarro designed a washing machine, it would look like this MRI scanner, a gigantic half-sucked polo mint...
In the cooler
Dan enters my room, grinning like a chimp. “What’s this about you assaulting some old dude?” he wants to know. “Badaaass!”
Christ, the rumour mill grinds away like some kind of simile, anyone would think it was boring in here. Still, he’s heard something from someone, and that must have come from somewhere; also, the fact that I’ve been put in solitary confinement might suggest there’s some truth...
What's it all about?
The story takes place between July 2003 and August 2004, in an East London hospital. I was in there recovering from a brain injury sustained in a road accident and damn it, I need to think of a better way to pitch this. It’s a good story, honest! I wouldn’t bother telling it otherwise. I aim, unashamedly, to amuse and excite you - to entertain. So.
What's this then?
I’m Steve Sparshott. I’m writing a novel called Get Well Soon; I’ve started this Tumblr to chart its progress, and to put short extracts out there for you to read. It won’t be serialised - the extracts won’t even be in chronological order, and will probably be extensively rewritten before the final draft. They might not even make it that far. There’ll be no...
Hello.