Writing for fun and fears
I am a Geordie, a Lagosian, a granddad, a pensioner, a retired cardiologist and much more. Or less. As I have had a few bits taken out, others zapped. I’ve had pills to shrink threats and try to prevent pot belly breasts. But still I write.
I write this on the day after the hottest of the year and am thus a tad blacker than I was a few rainy months ago. Quite Black.
Black enough even in winter to fear that fascism will be served up with a Home Counties smile or two, garnished with pretty turns of latinate or of blokeish phrase or praise for the left behind left behind by the architects of the economic calamity they now seek to exploit.
Of this fear I scribbled in my first book, Deadly Conception. That was more than ten years ago. Is it terrifying to see parts of it come true? You bet it is. Those who think they are safe should ask what happened to the arm that scoffed as the leg sunk into quicksand. Alas, it suffered the same fate. Culture is the template on which history repeats. Rachel’s now topical rant in “Deadly Conception” publ 2011
The idea for My latest book, A Quest for Solace came in reaction to the fate of NHS whistleblowers. But as anyone who works in any large organisation knows, it is not uncommon for dissent to prove fatal. He died? That bolshie woman died? Old news. Move on they say. Good riddance. A legitimate sentiment.
I was missing a spark.
One Saturday afternoon I was listening to a doleful track on Dave’s Psychodrama in my car on Streatham High Street. I thought poor things, it is as if these young men are living in a dystopia. And with that a shower of electrons in my head must have leapt their confines. “You stupid man,” I thought. Why not make a successful Black female surgeon believe she lives in a real life dystopia? I had my character, Osese, which in Yoruba means it is possible and signifies the opposite of kosese the refrain in one of my favourite Fela Kuti songs “It’s no Possible.” Sweet.
Covid lockdowns, roundabouts and about turns did the rest. https://amzn.eu/d/a5NvS5q
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