The Perils Of The Stay At Home Writer...

Or... Don't you just hate it when you wake up in a gritty northern drama?

Home.

It might be because I’m 86,258 words into my latest novel and the end is in sight.

It might be because novel is set fairly locally.

It might be because the story is, well, dark.

Whatever the reason, I can't help thinking that this morning I appear to have woken up in a gritty northern crime drama.

In my house.

Exhibit A: I woke up at 6.25am exactly.

As everyone knows, that’s officially the grittiest time of the day. Grittiness, especially the northern kind, is always most over-saturated with grit first thing in the morning. It’s a well known fact. Anything pre-6.30am has as much shingle as a post-coital examination after a spot of groping for trout in a peculiar river, as Shakespeare, sort of, once said.

Just so we can be clear on this, gritty nights, are not a thing.

Why not? Well, you see, the traditional menace of a gritty, northern twilight cannot be topped. If it were to keep evolving it would have no choice but to become a menacing northern night of horror. It’s Darwinian logic, plain and simple.

This step into the realm of the slasher genre is all very well if you’re a group of students who’ve taken a short-cut down Sliceyourheadoff Lane. But I’m a middle aged Mancunian in need of caffeine and self-reflection, so I’ve no time for such excessive viciousness. Especially when Sarah’s not here – I’d hate to think of how disappointed she’d be to miss out on a gratuitously violent bloodbath.

Alternatively, a gritty day up here can sometimes fade into spineless cowardice by night-time. It may develop a limp or might be heard grumbling about the cold and pile cream.

Not often, of course, but it has been known to happen.

Not night-fall, I hasten to add, night-time. You see, up here, it can get dark before the end of an even slightly late lunch. So, it’s not the light exposure of the day that determines ‘grit content’, but rather the hour.

6.25am = grit.

Exhibit B: The light.

The light today is anaemic. Should you pull down its eyelids they’d be flatulently pale. (I’m not sure that quite means anything, but there we are, it’s that sort of morning.)

The luminosity of the day has that stark quality to it. You know the one – like Mother Nature got bored scrolling all her jolly Instagram posts of growth and regrowth and baby animals rolling down hills and toddlers walking into closed glass doors, all that fun stuff; and instead she decided to try out a new filter, called something like Couldn’t Care Less filter.

That’s what the light’s like. Like a thing that couldn’t give a shit.

Or, if you’d rather, it’s like when one of the colours in your printer has run out and the machine’s trying make yellow with a combination of black, blue and red. You know what it's trying to do, but it's just, well, wrong.

The morning’s so grim and gritty I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find David Morrissey sitting at the end of my bed, looking remarkably confused and angry at the same time, in that way he often does.

If he had been sitting there, he’d no doubt launch into a theory that woke him in the middle of the night, explaining why the car-boot full of severed heads he found yesterday has a deeper meaning than: Run! There’s a psycho over there with an axe!

But that’s David Morrissey for you. Always more concerned with severed heads than whether I’ve had enough beauty sleep.

The reason he’s not sitting on my bed is because he’s standing on the landing! He's perusing the huge bookcase there. For reasons only explainable by the hue of the day, he’s rearranging my entire book collection. And how do you assume he’s doing that? Alphabetically? By height? By smell? No. By colour.

(I know people who do that, and I’m still happy to call them friends. You know who you are.)

David’s attitude seems to be that the book colour has to fall within the gritty spectrum of black to grey. Anything with bright and cheerful colours, he’s throwing straight into an oil drum, repurposed as a bonfire. A couple of figures I don’t recognise are warming their fingerless glove-clad hands round it. Typical, that’s all I need.

We don’t speak. One rarely does in this gritty Northern drama world. Instead I duck under Dave’s outstretched arm, which is angrily holding a fistful of Terry Pratchett novels awaiting incineration, and head for the bathroom.

Oh for heaven’s sake, you wouldn’t believe it - Pete bloody Postlethwaite is in the shower. Not washing or lathering, just standing with his hands against the wall, letting the water crash against his skull in a defeated and miserable way. Trying to rinse the grit from his scalp, I shouldn’t wonder.

I shout that maybe he could lock the door in the future, no one wants to see his hairy cheeks before their first coffee! But he’s humming something slow and ominous and pays me no heed.

Morrissey – the actor one, not the ‘punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate’ one, is now sitting exactly halfway down the stairs, head in his hands, like a grubby version of Kermit's nephew, Robin, wondering where it all went so wrong.

Half way down the stairs is the stair where I grit...

My footsteps echo around the walls in a way they never have before.

I'm sure I can hear water dripping onto concrete from rusty pipes in the distance.

A bird cry I can't identify squawks meaninglessly.

A distant bell rings, and somewhere an angel's wings fall off.

In the kitchen, Suranne Jones and Christopher Ecclestone are washing up. He’s placing freshly scrubbed crockery on the drainer and she’s taking it off, giving it a quick rub with a miserable tea towel and then hurling it across the room with a snarl. Each time she does it, Ecclestone exhales aggressively, grits his teeth, and washes the next thing in the bowl. Jones just dares him to say something. Just. Dares. Him. Terrifying to watch.

Over by the microwave there’s a pile of broken mugs and plates, the like of which you wouldn’t see outside of a stereotypical Greek wedding. I haven’t the energy to get involved with their furious cold-shouldering of each other.

I make coffee, quickly, while there's still something to drink it from.

As it brews I notice Sarah Lancashire outside in the backyard. She has her hand squarely in Brenda Blethyn’s chest, in a very ‘thou shalt not pass’ manner. I can’t make out the whole conversation but Lancashire says something about Blethyn’s portrayal of Vera not making her Northern. She’s still from Kent. At least I think she said Kent.

The light’s even stranger now. It’s like dusk. The sun’s metamorphosised into a 1970s 40-watt lightbulb. No wonder it can’t burn away the low-hanging clouds. And let me tell you, what meagre light is dribbling into the outside world, is somehow not making it through the windows. I mean I can see some light outside but it’s not coming in. It’s like a vampire waiting to be invited across the threshold.

Exactly like this!

What’s that about?

It’s not like the sun isn’t still a colossal fireball capable of creating flames 92 million miles away by simply smiling at a broken bottle amidst dry leaves, is it? People used to worship the sun for heaven’s sake! They wouldn’t today. Today it can’t even force itself through a bit of damp cottonwool in the sky. Imagine a flame-thrower unable to burn through a recently sneezed into Kleenex. Pathetic.

I go out.

Unsurprisingly, Alun Armstrong’s sitting on the front wall. He’s looking worriedly across at the allotments. I bet he’s not thinking about veg. He’ll be thinking through the recent disappearances of everyone he’s ever met. He’ll be waiting for the call from ‘bad’ people demanding a meet in a multi-storey carpark, or on a building site where construction seems to have stopped entirely. You see if they don’t.

His eyes never focus, he doesn’t see me.

There’s no one else around. No sound. It’s very disconcerting. I feel like, as well as walking down the middle of my road, I’m also watching myself from behind upstairs curtains in neighbours’ houses. Very peculiar.

Eventually I pass Sir Ian McKellen with two small dogs. (He might not sound it, but believe you me, he’s as Northern as they come.) He has a small black bag dangling from his hand. He looks startled, as if I’ve caught him stealing another dog’s 'business' off the pavement. His attitude says ‘don’t watch me.’ But it’s hard not to. After all, it’s Ian McKellen.

He's aware of me watching and awkwardly raises his black poo-bag gloved hand in greeting. I mumble a Manchester ‘all right?' and hurry on my way.

I record a quick phone message for a friend.

Because I’m a man, I’m capable of walking and talking.

Sadly, also because I’m a man, I'm not capable of walking, talking, and paying attention to where I’m going.

I check my map app. Shit. The whole world of the map has changed. It says, I’m going in the wrong direction.

Before I can recentre myself, cartographically speaking, I sense movement. McKellen, awash with dogs and their small bags of unpleasantness. We both have enormous awkwardness. He knows I’ve seen him poo-handed, while I know he knows I don’t have the faintest idea where I’m going.

He asks if I’m looking for a ‘passageway’ off this road.

I say I am. Even though I’m not.

I’m English, you see, and it seems easier to agree with him than to get into a conversation about why I’m standing vaguely on a street corner staring at my phone.

He directs me back about 60 yards. Sure enough, there it is – an alleyway. I stride into it.

It’s strangely dark and very narrow. Does this feel wrong? Have I been duped?

What if I hear the sound of two scampering mutts behind me, neither one of them more than eight inches off the ground, but both, I’ll warrant, capable of devouring a man’s ankles in seconds!?

I double my pace. I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. This alley goes on and on and on. And it’s shrinking. Claustrophobia erupts in me.

With every step, the tops of the fences on either side have increased crime prevention tactics.

First there’s barbed wire.

Then there’s razor wire.

Then there’s a sniper tower manned by Dominic West from the TV series The Wire.

I like Dominic West, I wave at him. He ignores me.

Funny, people in my imagination often do that. Rude.

And on and on and on I go. I’m seconds away from clicking my heels together when I stumble out into a quiet road - that I recognise!

I’ve ended up in Hyde, where I live. The very same place I’ve walked through many times before. It's where I started from. And the place I still am.

Strange too, that though it feels like hours, I’ve only walked about three minutes since I saw Sir. PooBags and his attack dogs.

Oh dear, I’m exhausted. It’s the grittiness. It’s been quite the morning. I have a decision to make. Do I go home? Or do I pop to Asda?

Decision made, I’m off to get a couple of low grade pastries to have with second coffee. Then, I really must get back to my novel.

But, you know what, if David Morrissey’s still there, I’ll eat a silent pain au chocolat with him, maybe flick the red string on his murder wall and then I’ll get back to my keyboard…

Sarah thinks I might be spending too much time on my own.

I don’t think she’s right.

I’ll have a chat with the gang and see what they think…

The Gang.

What a merry band of revellers we are!