Mono Multiple

Reflections on Life
At that stage of looking back at, for the want of a better way of putting it, life. I am fully aware that the male line of my family have always had a strange relationship with fact and fiction, for whatever reasons. Recent studies have made me think more deeply about my own understanding fact and fiction. Doing a degree (my second) in English Literature with Creative Writing was probably the wrong choice from this perspective. Now I would be the wrong one to try and analyse my own relationship with fact and fiction simply because I am inside it. I was always considered a bright kid, so why was I borderline at the eleven plus? Looking back from decades distant I am thinking that, at that time, I was scared of learning. Consequently I wound up in a Secondary Modern school – yes, it was a very long time ago. Here I didn’t need to be scared of learning, I was never going to learn anything, well nothing of interest to me, there anyway. Within a very short time of starting I realised that I was surrounded by, what I thought of as, losers, and that included most of the teachers. They did not want to be there teaching cannon fodder for farmers and builders etc. etc.. With increasing age I am beginning to come to the conclusion that thinking is not such a good thing after all – it raises too many questions. Questions like where is the dividing line between fact and fiction? This then raises the question of is there a dividing line between fact and fiction?

Confession time. I guess that I was always something of a strange kid – or as my grandfather always put it fey. I can’t remember ever not seeing and hearing things that others hadn’t seen or heard – and still do occasionally. I very quickly learnt not to tell others that I had seen or heard something, it usually led me into trouble with older people – that is except my grandfather. Most people would consider such things quite scary, but I can’t say that I ever did. I guess that I was always intrigued that I saw and heard things that others didn’t. I never could, and still can’t, understand this, for want of a better word, phenomenon. The weird thing is that I never did, and still don’t, believe in the idea of ghosts. However, I do believe that there is far more to our existence than we will ever understand. Over recent years I have thought a lot about this ‘phenomenon’, and wondered what it is, and why me? Ghosts? No! That would be far too simplistic, along with being too wrapped up in religious twaddle for my thinking. The best idea that I can come up with is that people like myself, and there are others, are seeing and hearing another plane of existence. Not being any sort of scientist that is the only way I can put it. This in itself raises a whole load more questions for which I don’t have an answer.

Fact or fiction? I have no idea, the blurring/ ambiguity leaves very little room for manoeuvre. there are times when I read, or hear, a piece of news that I think if I wrote that no one would believe it. Such occasions always lead me to question the definitions of fact and fiction, and whether, or not, there is any difference at all – I know there is, but it is always good to question, isn’t it?