The Art Of Swearing

A few months ago, while I was searching the net for some help with a web page style sheet problem I came across one of those glorious little factoids; those snippets of golden know how that can turn a mundane accessory into a niftily indispensable aid. I have been using the all purpose text editor, Notepad, ever since I got my first Windows PC. It is a rare day when I do not have a stack of notepad files open. I have a large folder of jottings named Notepad Bits. I suspect that as much as 90% of the files are utterly useless and redundant. Lately I have been using MS Outlook not only to manage my completely stupid number of email addresses, but also to manage my diary and to keep track of my private journal. However I continue to hold simple old Notepad in esteem for those eureka! thoughts and in particular there is a single file, tecnicolor dream (yes my typos are that appalling!), stored directly on my desktop. Its first line is:

.LOG

This first line in a text file, I learned, instructs the program to append a date and time to the end of every entry. So I not only have a record of those thoughts I considered significant, I also know the date and time I committed them to electronic memory. I took a look through it today after adding a new reminder and was pleasantly surprised to rediscover an old idea that has been patiently waiting for resurrection. It was only two words: swearing tolly. I have a son who is now all grown up and making a career but when he was tiny he was cute in both main senses. One day when he was still between first word and first recognizable sentence he overheard a conversation and added a new word to his rapidly growing vocabulary. It was a word that was to delight him and me for several years to come and he quickly made it his own by making subtle changes, both to the vowels sounds and to the consonants. The word was polyester but within weeks it had transmogrified into tollylister. It was a supremely ubiquitous word. It was used in high spirits uttered with a joy and the sort of unselfconscious chuckling giggle that toddlers too quickly forget how to do. It was also used petulantly and on at least one occasion I am certain that it stood at least one tour of duty as a profanity ... there can be no mistaking the tone even if the words used are risible or non-sensical. For me, though, Tolly Lister was always a real person. As the years rolled by I got to know him, even as his inventor outgrew the childish gibberish that spawned his name. Tolly was an exotic person. A true wild man of rock and roll. Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Axl Rose ... these were mere pretenders to the title. Tolly was also a musical prodigy; a Mozart for the twenty first century. He could make grown men cry by plucking an original melody from any handy guitar or keyboard; he could soothe restless babies to sleep with soft contralto improvisations of nursery rhyme standards; he could draw and capture for ever the hearts and minds of a one hundred thousand strong audience with the wildest and most original music since Buddy Holly reinvented rock and roll. Stephen King says that a writer doesn't just need ideas. Writers also need to be able to deliver. He sums it up as "Can you?" Ten years ago I asked myself that question. Tolly Lister had a presence in my mind and he just begged for a story to go around him. I had some ideas but most of all I needed a scenario to put a past into Tolly's life. To make the man rather than to leave him as just a shadow, a thin transparency set only in one moment, a cartoon gel. On a cool spring Saturday afternoon during 1993 I retired to the bathtub with a bottle of indifferent French merlot. I had the house to myself and I meant to find out if I could work up a yarn that made Tolly come to life. What emerged was both scary and heartbreakingly moving. I found that was looking into the not-too-distant future and although I felt inclined to shrink away from science fiction I felt drawn to the story that was growing in my head. I had it off pat within an hour; it was then that my second mate, Mark, chose to return from work and came to see if I wanted anything such as tea or a help soaping my back. I told him I'd like to borrow his ears, so he perched on the toilet and I told him the story of Tolly Lister. It took about 45 minutes and I didn't lose his attention for a moment. It was quite an ego boost. I began work on a full length novel a few days later. Time was always a problem and the project continued in fits and starts over the rest of the decade. Mark and I split up and it got shelved indefinitely. One day I refound it and I read a substantial portion of it to my mother; she wondered why I wasn't trying to finish it and I wasn't easily able to explain, not then. The truth was simple. I was stuck. It wasn't writers block. I was writing pretty good stuff but the plot was going around in circles ... by the time I stopped for breath and took a serious and honest look at what I had I saw that the plot had eaten its own tail. I was still trying to figure out how I could rescue the thing from slow death by inspiration starvation when 4 planes crashed on a September day in 2001 and huge chunks of my plot came too horribly true and at the same time other major plot devices were exposed as false and silly shams as events overtook them. I lost heart then in many more senses than one. My own loss was insignificant in the great scheme of things but loss is relative and mine hurt me as much as anyone else's hurt them. Time is of course a great healer and my muse is now slowly coming back to life. So I say tollylisters to everything and maybe one day I really will sit down and tell the story of how a nice middle class girl ran away with a fairground gypsy and gave birth to a baby boy whom she named Nutroast .... I tell, ya, it brought a tear to Mark's eye and he thought he was a tough guy; he also thought that Tolly Lister was modeled upon him and maybe that was a true, a little, but Tolly lived first in my own heart and he is, was, and always will be, my very own alter ego. My own little pitchfork equipped devil hovering o'er my left shoulder, belittling my successes and heralding my failures. But I am goona get that little expletive deleted Get thee behind me, imp. But, er ... not before I have you pinned down to this table flayed open and fully dissected and analysed.