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Drew Payne

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  1. Drew Payne

    Wednesday 29th March 2023

    By Drew Payne,


    blog post
    On the grass, in front of our house, the crows and seagulls have fallen back into their usual cold war, after all staring at the lorry that came to emptying our rubbish bins. They stand around, glaring at each other, or attacking leftover fast-food wrappers, which the crows always seem better at. Every couple of days the cold war breaks down and they’ll start fighting over something or other, leaving behind the occasional feather on the grass.
    Before lockdown, the grass was dominated by pigeons, who wondered around in their lost way, with the occasional crow interrupting them. But something changed during lockdown and a flock of crows moved in, driving the pigeons away. Towards the end of lockdown, the crows were joined by the seagulls and the cold war began.
    The crows are now sitting up on the roofs, of our terrace of houses, glaring down at the street like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, as the seagulls just stand around on the grass. They are back into their cold war.
  2. Drew Payne

    Tuesday 28th March 2023

    By Drew Payne,


    blog post
    Last Friday we had a day out. We went to the London Transport Museum Depot, out at Acton (West London), for one of its open days. It was an amazing experience. It is housed in an old London Transport depot and is full of all kinds of old equipment, trains and memorabilia from the London Underground.
    I have always been fascinated by the London Underground, ever since I moved to London. Taking a train across a city, that travelled only underground, was so new and different. Since then, I have found that the history of the London Underground also ties in with so much of our social history.
    Then something uncomfortable happened.
    We were looking at a restored old tube train and a guide was telling us all about it. I realised that I used to travel in that type of tube train when I moved to London. Then I saw they had, preserved, the ticket machines from the same time, the ones I had used almost daily back then. Looking around the museum, I saw serval other exhibits I remembered from when they were in use.
    I remember things in everyday usage, from when I was an adult, that are now exhibits in a museum. I am old enough to remember museum exhibits when they were in everyday use.
    When I was a child, exhibits in museums were strange and very old things, things from a different world, an old world that was securely in the past. Now I can go to a museum and find something there that I can remember when it was in everyday usage.


    Life can be so complicated.

  3. Drew Payne

    Moving Pictures

    By Drew Payne,


    Writing
    On a July evening, in 1991, three people are each caught in a moment of indecision, not knowing what the next right thing to do is.
    Helen has cooked a special, surprise meal for her husband, but he still hasn’t returned home. Paul has parked his car at the side of the road, but he doesn’t know where to drive to next. Craig is working late, but his mind isn’t on work.
    Moving Pictures is my newly published short story. It tells its story from the point-of-view of three different people, all caught in one moment in time, all trying to make the right decision.
    It is available on Smashwords, as an eBook only, but is free to download, or you can pay whatever you want to.
    Happy reading
    Drew
  4. Drew Payne
    Charles is the apple of his mother’s eye, born in Cornwall just after the end of the First World War. He becomes the focus of his mother’s life after his father dies from TB. But Charles does not want to be a “mother’s boy” and when war breaks out, he leaves his claustrophobic life in Teignmouth, enlisting in the navy as a coder.
    The title of this novel has a double meaning and Patrick Gale uses both of them with skill and breadth. Charles is a boy raised as his mother’s sole outlet, the sole reason for her life, though Charles, as an adolescent, becomes aware that he is attracted to other boys, but he knows some of those boys could betray him and so much of his attraction is illegal.
    This novel is set in the time between the First and Second World Wars and Gale captures the repression and social order of that time. Charles, an intelligent boy, can only stay in education until his time at grammar school ends because his mother cannot afford for him to stay any longer. Charles is also aware that his attractions are illegal, he displays a distaste for a friend who embraces his attractions, though that distaste is more driven by fear.
    Joining the navy is an eye-opening experience, both professionally and emotionally. So many of his experiences affect him deeply, but he also meets other serving men who are far more comfortable with their desires and their openness pulls him along with them.
    Gale captures the repression of the inter-war years but he also shows how the Second World War, with its mixing of people from all different backgrounds, brushed away so much of that repression and so many people’s lives benefited from that. His descriptions of wartime life are some of the most memorable parts of this novel.
    This is Gale at the highest of his skills. He sympathetically and insightfully writes about his characters here, drawing characters that are all too recognisable, but he does not forget that he is writing about a very different time than today. It was so refreshing to read a novel set in the 1930s and 1940s where modern-day attitudes do not bleed into the narrative and characters. This reaches right through to the novel’s ending.
    Here is a novel well worth the time it took to read, not a moment wasted.
    Find it here on Amazon
  5. Drew Payne
    This play opens with a startling image. In a sitting room, at night, a man lies dead in his wheelchair while standing over him is his wife holding the gun that killed him. Onto this scene stumbles a man, a stranger to this household. But instead of calling for the police, or even calling for help, the man, the unexpected guest of the play's title, starts to coach the woman in how to get away with the murder of her husband.
    Agatha Christie had an equally successful career as a playwright as well as a novelist. She is Britain’s most successful woman playwright, her play The Mousetrap is the world's longest running play. But we often forget about this.
    The Unexpected Guest is a fine example of her murder mystery plays. This one opens with a corpse stage left, but she doesn't treat her plot like a typical detective story. Here the plot comes out of the characters' actions, their reactions to the murder. There is a police inspector and his sidekick sergeant, but these two are much more plot devices so we, the audience, can be told the physical facts of this murder and have the backstory of the dead man explained to us, and this corpse was asking for someone to shoot him. But the real crime solving comes from the interactions of the characters themselves.
    There are some of her stock characters here. The elderly woman who knows her son too well, the servant who wants to supplement their low wages with a bit of blackmail, and an abused wife who is far from a victim. She does handle these characters well, making the plot flow from them. She makes an interesting comment with the reactions of two of her characters. When a woman thinks a man committed murder for her, she becomes protective over him, standing by him and trying to defend him. When a man thinks a woman has killed for him, he wants to distance himself from her as quickly as possible, leaving her to her fate on her own. However, her treatment of the disabled characters is very of its time and creeks uncomfortably. The victim is a wheelchair-bound man who is so bitter and angry that he could drive anyone to kill him. There's a young man with learning difficulties who is overly excitable and easily manipulated.
    What is so enjoyable here is the twisting plot. At first we are given a thriller where the question is will this woman get away with murder; then the first twist turns it into a mystery were we don't know who the killer is. After that the plot delivers several twists ending with the last twist where one character is left alone on the stage as the final curtain falls.
    A play script, even the best play script ever written, is only the third of a great play, the other two-thirds being the acting, direction and staging. As good a read as this play script is, I would still much prefer to see a well-acted and staged production of this play. But plays are written to be acted and not just read.
    Find it here on Amazon
  6. Drew Payne
    It is wartime England and in a south coast village an old man watches a boy, with a brightly coloured parrot, walk along a train line. The boy is silent, a Jewish refugee from the horrors in Europe, while the parrot cannot keep quiet, happily speaking long sentences in German.
    The old man, who remains unnamed throughout the novel, is a famous “Consulting Detective” who has retired to the countryside to keep bees. This encounter with Linus Steinmen, the mute boy, draws the old man into his life and occupants of the home, the local vicarage, were the boy lives. And then another member of the vicarage’s household is murdered.
    Here Chabon has tried to write a “new” Sherlock Holmes story but as an old man no longer interested in crime. The Second World War setting is interesting but not enough on its own to carry this book, neither is the character and situation of the old man. The character just feels old, there isn’t any regret, loss or even introspection of an old man looking back on his life.
    The plot did not have enough mystery to hold my attention; the mystery here did not feel important enough to push the plot forward and there wasn’t enough plot, without it, to hold my attention. Unfortunately, the other characters are not strong enough either. So many of the occupants of the vicarage were interchangeable because they were so poorly drawn. The only character who stood out was the vicar’s wife, but that was mainly because she was the only female character there.
    The book felt like a clever writing exercise, to reimagine Sherlock Holmes in the twilight of his life, but its execution was far too clever, without the feeling for the characters. There was too much extraneous information, as if Chabon was showing off the research he did for this book, but there was so little feeling that these characters were actually living during a war. These people just did not come alive for me. I did not find here the characterisation I have enjoyed in other of Chabon’s books.
    Sometimes writing exercises should just stay that, sometimes they do not make good books.
    Find it here on Amazon
  7. Drew Payne

    Book Review: Stonemouth by Iain Banks

    By Drew Payne,


    Book review
    Stonemouth is a Scottish seaside town and after five years away Stewart Gilmour returns to it for the funeral of patriarch Joe Murston. Stewart has history with the Murston family, the crime lords of this town, especially with his treatment of Ellie Murston. Added to this is the strange suicide of Callum Murston.
    Iain Banks’s prose almost effortlessly evokes the Scottish town that has passed its sell-by date and the people who remained there for their many different reasons. He also presents a narrator, Stewart Gilmour, returning to the town, who is swept along by the events surrounding him. Banks also presents a cast of almost larger-than-life characters, especially the members of the criminal Murston family.
    Unfortunately, we have been here before with Banks’s fiction. Funerals forcing wayward sons home is a plot device he has used before, also those criminal families who are large fishes in very small ponds and beautiful lost loves. He has often portrayed smalltown Scottish life as the backdrop to other works of his. This book has iPhones, CCTV, video games, and a refreshingly frank and joyful bisexual male character (a character in Scottish fiction finally stepping outside the traditional straight and narrow), but so much else of this novel feels like old Banks territory.
    Banks’s enjoyable and fresh prose certainly lifts this novel and makes it so very readable, with some horribly memorable set-pieces, but I wish he had chosen a different subject. This novel had the feeling of “we have been here before” and those earlier books felt better.
    Find it here on Amazon
  8. Drew Payne

    Book Review: On Our Own by Anne Atkins

    By Drew Payne,


    Book review
    The plot of this novel is riddled with cliches. A novelist, Caz, who is staying in a country cottage to write her next book. She meets a young fan, nine-year-old Theo. Through Theo she meets his mother Ann and finds out that Theo's father Alan was murdered three years ago in strange circumstances and the killer was never caught. Then Theo confesses to Caz that he killed his father. Caz and her boyfriend Will set about finding out who really killed Alan. They do and everyone lives happily ever after, except the murderer of course.
    After finishing this novel all I felt was that I was waist deep in clichés. Atkins doesn't seem to have any understanding of the nature of human emotions. Her characters only acted within the narrow limits of her very thin plot. I found no insights, no character development or emotional depth in this novel. All I found was a very predictable plot and propaganda for family values. The novel ends with both female characters walking off into marriage and the murderer turns out to be an archetypical threat to family values: he is "mentally retarded" (Sic), a petty thief, envious of a family man, probably a paedophile and is dying from Aids.
    At best Atkins' characterisation is one-dimensional. A writer who thinks of herself as a free spirit yet happily walks off into marriage. A child genius who talks and acts a like a small adult, not a real child. Without any explanation, halfway through the novel one character is revealed as a wife-beater. The characters just move within Atkins’ plot without any real human emotions.
    The minor characters were so badly written as to be patronising. A feminist who is dismissed by a man's "winning smile". A caretaker who meekly actually tipped his hat to a "lady". An Anglican priest who’s unmarried, opposed to women’s ordination and can’t even boil water.
    If there hadn't been a mention of Caz's laptop, I would have believed this novel was set in some idyllic, middle-class 1950s fantasy. A   village straight off a chocolate box, the village shop is still open, friendly yokels everywhere and no problems with commuters moving in.
    Who allowed such a badly over-written novel into print? It is littered with flowery and overblown passages that serve no purpose. The dialogue is stilted and flat, the description clichéd and the characters only there to serve the plot, a very unoriginal one at that.
    I haven't read such a bad novel in a very long time, but I don't intend doing so again so whatever Atkins' next novel is I won't be reading it.
    My advice, avoid this novel at all cost. There are so many better writers out there to spend time with.
    POSTSCRIPT: I originally wrote this review back in 1997 and it was the first review of mine that was ever published
  9. Drew Payne
    Adam, an aspiring actor, makes the trip from New York to LA in search of fame and fortune. What he finds is a trip into the underside of fame in LA.
    Here is a modern-day Rake’s Progress; Adam (the narrator) arrives in LA with such high hopes, he has the looks and talent to be a star, but he finds an unfriendly city where he can’t get his foot on the bottom rung of the showbusiness ladder.
    This novel could have been a pro-faced, and even homophobic, grime tale, warning about the “evils” of Hollywood. Instead, Zeffer’s insightful but equally humorous prose lifts this novel into a far more enjoyable read. Adam’s self-deprecating humour is refreshing and helps make this such a readable book; even as his career spirals down, he still has his eyes set on being a star, imagining himself (when he finally becomes that star) confessing to his sordid past on yet another chat show. Adam’s spiral downwards, until he ends up working in gay porn because he is so broke, is handled well and is all too believable. What is also so believable is his big break, as the personal assistant/closeted boyfriend to a TV star, and the scandal he gets caught up in.
    This novel provides fascinating insights into the different levels of showbusiness in Hollywood. How the real stars treat those people below them, but those people’s work keeps them a star. How everyone in LA seems to be part of showbusiness, one way or another. How the only time he is treated with any dignity is when he works in gay porn.
    Zeffer gives this novel a downbeat but all too real ending, unlike the Hollywood ending of the film based on this novel, leaving the impression that this was a time of madness in the narrator’s life before he returned to the real world when he left LA.
    This novel is very much based on fact, on Zeffer’s own experiences as a would-be actor in Hollywood; he and the narrator share the same surname, but he does not present us with a novel-as-act-of-revenge, neither is this a cautionary tale. Instead, Zeffer presents this novel as a story that happened without any more judgment. This is a novel for all of us who never believed those rags-to-riches Hollywood stories.
    Find it here on Amazon
  10. Drew Payne
    Satire is a difficult form to get right. If it is too humorous then it might not be biting enough; if the satire hits home then it can be dry and even dull, and then it can be humourless and miss its target.
    These two short stories take a satirical aim at religious persecution and antisemitism in particular.
    Holocaust Tips for Kids is a young teenage American boy’s view of the Nazi Holocaust. It reads like that teenage boy’s scrapbook, facts and reportage sit all beside the boy’s own writing on how he would survive a modern holocaust. This takes broad swipes at Hollywood action-adventure films, using their logic to fight a holocaust.
    Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown is written in the form of the classic American Charlie Brown story, using almost all the many characters from that world. Here there is a war, in the Charlie Brown world, between the believers in Schulz, the creature of them all, and the Giant Pumpkin God. The characters quickly fall into the different factions, seeing the others as heathens and therefore justifying their own actions.
    Shalom Auslander has captured both these separate worlds extremely well. In the first story, he captures both the voice and logic of a teenage boy. In the second story, he unnervingly captures the tone and sound of the Charlie Brown stories.
    Unfortunately, Auslander’s satire is nothing new and fires at targets that other writers hit bull’s-eyes on long before him. The skill of his writing impressed me, tonally these two stories are so different and yet each of them perfectly captures the voice they are written in. But the satire here is nothing new, we have heard it all before by other writers. I wish Auslander had taken aim at different, new targets here or had found something new to say.
    Find it here on Amazon
  11. Drew Payne
    Gay marriage has been making the headlines recently and there are a lot of arguments for and against it. At the heart of a lot of these arguments is whether homosexuality is “natural” or “unnatural”.
    Simon LeVay is a neuroscientist and takes an evidence-based approach to his subject. He doesn’t just look at the theories behind human sexuality; he looks at the evidence for those theories, or lack of it. This is what lifts this book head and shoulders above previous books looking at the origins of human sexuality. LeVay doesn’t have one theory that he is pushing; instead he takes a critical look at all of them.
    He concludes that our sexualities are a product of our genes, sex hormones and brain systems (nature not nurture), but it is how he reaches this conclusion that is fascinating. He analyses the data with a refreshing evidence-based approach.
    This book is also written in clear and easy to read prose, not in an academic style, full of jargon and language that is difficult to understand. LeVay uses clear English; his explanations draw the reader in, not putting you off.
    The subject matter might not be of interest to everyone, but this book can benefit all nurses. We’re called to give unbiased care to all; this book helps us see sexuality as a natural part of life.
    (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine and published there in April 2013)
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  12. Drew Payne

    Showtime 2022

    By Drew Payne,


    Writing
    My big writing news this month is that my short story “Men Online in the Local Area” has been published in Showtime 2022. It is about Harry, a young man living in East London, who is finding building a new life in his new home difficult. Superficially, it is about the ups and downs of using dating apps, but its real subject is about how a big, busy city can be a very lonely and difficult place to form new friendships in.
    This anthology, Showtime 2022, is special to me because I am one of the editors of it.
    I am a member of Newham Writers Workshop and my writing has really benefitted from it. Having honest feedback has shown me what works, in my writing, and what needs improvement. It has also helped me learn so much about writing techniques and what makes good writing. My short story, “Men Online in the Local Area”, really benefitted from this feedback. Members showed me what worked, what could enhance it, and what distracted from it. They helped me rewrite the opening of it and to work towards the ending. I won’t post the original version here because I am much happier with the finished version in Showtime 2022, it is the far better story.
    Each year we, Newham Writers Workshop, produce an anthology of members’ work, called Showtime. For the past two editions (the pandemic prevented us publishing one in 2021) I’ve been one of the editors of it. My main role has been sorting out its formatting, not always easy, and getting it published on Amazon.
    Showtime 2022 is a grab-bag of different types of writing. There is poetry, short stories, essays, a book synopsis and even the results of a writing exercise. They also cover a wide variety of subjects, just as varied as the different people who make up the membership of Newham Writers Workshop.
    Whether read on the go or sitting back in a comfortable chair, this book is a treasure chest of different and inspiring writing, a chance to find a writer you have not heard of.
    Happy reading
    Drew
     
    P.S. Find past editions of Showtime here
  13. Drew Payne
    It is 2008 and John, an Irish university student, is spending a year at an American liberal arts college. During that year he forms three very different relationships with three very different young men—the radically gay Jake, Eric the straight jock whose life is turned upside down when he is shot, and Brendon, his former best friend from Ireland. Also during that year he will be involved in a shooting, cause a scandal at a historical monument, meet an ex-president and be complimented by a rising Hollywood star.
    Unfortunately, this novel does not live up to its plot summary. Rather than an emotional roller-coaster ride of discovery and entry into the adult life, it felt plodding and lacking understanding of its characters. None of the characters felt like real people, they just seemed to be there to serve the plot. The plot also felt very pedestrian, moving from one event on to another; each event seemed to finished and rounded off before the next one began. No event bleeds into the next one.
    So many times in this novel we’re told what has happened, rather than shown what happened, without any insight into the characters and their actions. Far too many times the narrator turns into the author philosophising about different aspects of gay life and life in general. These sections, apart from adding nothing to the plot or narrative, did not read like the musings of a 19/20-year-old Irish young man; they read like the philosophising of a middle-aged, cultured man. But worst of all was the fact that the narrator’s voice was all wrong. He was supposed to be a 19/20-year-old Irish young man, in America for the first time, exploring what it means to be a gay man. There was no wonder, no culture shock, no comparing American culture to the one he’d grown up in, no questioning of the new culture he was living in; he didn’t even get confused with the new currency he had to use. He spoke and behaved like an American man.
    There were so many missed opportunities in this novel, in so many ways it could have been so such better, but so many times it fell back on cliché or lacklustre plot turns. After finishing reading this novel, I was left wondering what the point to it was; it was so flat and lacking in insights.
    Find it here on Amazon
     

  14. Drew Payne

    When Joan Met Tommy

    By Drew Payne,


    Esaay
    My father married the girl next door. My parents met because they lived next door to each other, in post-war Barrow-in-Furness. But saying it like that makes their story sound so simplistic.
    My parents did not a make big deal of how they met. It certainly wasn’t a family story, brought out at every chance and worn as a badge of pride. I only found out how they met when I was fifteen. My parents had taken me back to Barrow-in-Furness, a car drive up from Liverpool with our pet dog. That trip we had not visited either of my father’s brothers, who still lived there, he was not close to either of them. He had been close to his brother John but John had died several years before from cancer. With hindsight, losing his brother deeply affected my father, John was the first of his brothers to die and it made my father face his own mortality. My father was always stoic with his emotions, not talking about his feelings and just keeping things to himself. I wasn’t aware, at the time, of how much John’s death affected him, I was not a preceptive teenager, but I have had many years to look back on events.
    I don’t remember why we visited Barrow-in-Furness that bright spring day, but my father decided to drive around the city, showing me places from his childhood and youth there. As we drove around, our dog bounced about on the car’s backseat with me, she hadn’t had a long enough walk and was full of energy.
    We drove to the street where my parents had lived as neighbours.
    It was a narrow street of terraced houses, the briefest strip of pavement in front of the two rows of houses and the road itself still made from cobblestones, causing the car to rhythmically shudder as it was driven over them. My father stopped the car in front of two houses. They were a matching pair of terraced houses. He told me that they were the two houses where he and my mother had lived, with their parents, before they married. The house where my father had lived now had a cream-coloured rendering covering the front of it and a pale pastel-coloured front door. The housed my mother had lived in had a frontage of dark grey bricks and a chocolate-brown front door. The car drove on and my parents made no more reference to those houses.
    I was fascinated by it though. I might not have been a perceptive teenager, but my imagination had matured early and was very alive. Falling in love with the next-door neighbour was a cliché of much fiction, and even songs, and here were my parents who had done that. But it also gave me another insight into my parents’ lives, especially before I was born. My father loved to tell me stories about being a boy during the Second World War and my mother would talk about growing up and living with my grandmother, but neither of them talked at all about their adolescence and courtship. Their lack of information intrigued me; my imagination began to fill in the details.
    My father was born and grew up in Barrow-in-Furness, living in the same house, but my mother was born and grow up in Kendell, Cumbria. She moved to Barrow-in-Furness as a teenager, after the war, when her parents moved there; her father had got a new and better job there. He was the first person to own a car on their street.
    But how did they meet? Did their mothers become friends, chatting over the garden fence, and so they got to know each other? Did my father see the new girl next door and decide that he wanted to court her? Did my parents become friends first and then from friendship did romance bloom? I don’t know, they never told me, but my imagination has filled in that blank space over and over again. I am not a fan of romantic fiction, but I am fascinated by people’s stories. How someone met their partner can tell me so much about them, about their relationship, and it fascinates me because we are all different and we all have our stories. As a writer, how couples met can be the catalyst for so many stories and can help me shape characters.
    But I just don’t know how my parents met.
    Then, as an adult, I stumbled across a fascinating detail. My father wasn’t the first of the Payne brothers my mother dated. First, she dated my father’s older brother Arthur before she dated my father.
    How did my father feel when his brother was dating the woman he wanted to? Or did he first notice my mother when she was his brother’s girlfriend? Did my father dating his ex-girlfriend affect Arthur’s relationship with his brother? As for my mother, why did she stop dating Arthur and start dating my father? What did my father have that Arthur didn’t?
    I don’t know the answers to any of those questions and I won’t now, both my parents died nearly twenty years ago. I wish I had asked them those questions, asked them how they met, asked them about their courtship, about their life together before they married. They were middle-aged when I was born and they always seemed so old to me as a child, too old to have once had a romantic life or even a life before they became parents. Back then, I had such a narrow view of life. I have learnt differently since then.
    After my parents died, I inherited so many of my mother’s photographs. One of my favourite ones is of my parents before they married. It was taken on a summer’s day and my parents are standing in front of a farm gate. My mother is wearing a white 1940s dress with a wide belt around her waist and the skirt flowing out under it. My father is in shirt sleeves with his left hand down by his side, carefully holding a cigarette. They both are wearing photograph expressions, their best smiles directed into the camera’s lens. They look so happy.
    There is a postscript to this story. The last time I saw my Uncle Arthur was at my father’s funeral. It was during that awkward limbo time when we were waiting for his funeral to begin, waiting for the right time to leave the house for the church, waiting for all the other mourners to arrive. I was standing outside my parents’ house with my brother, just waiting.
    My cousin’s car pulled into the street and he got out of it. Out of the passenger side of the car slowly stepped my Uncle Arthur. But he was the double of my father. The same build, the same profile, the same head full of hair. He was my father’s doppelganger. The shock caught in my throat.
    “Oh, my God…” I hissed in shock.
    “Yes,” my brother agreed with me.
    Drew
     
     
     

  15. Drew Payne
    It is the future and all humans live underground, each person having their own room, which they never leave. All their needs – food, drink, hygiene, medication and even sleep – are provided for them automatically from machinery within the room’s walls and ceiling. They communicate with other people without leaving their rooms, via a metal disk on which the other people’s faces are projected. They have a book that contains all required knowledge, which is being constantly updated. This world is all run, for these humans, by the mysterious Machine.
    This disturbing dystopian novella was published in 1909 and was written by EM Forster, more famous for the novels A Room with a View and Howard’s End than his science fiction writing.
    This is a strange but still fascinating read. It is written very much in the style of the Edwardian novel, as all of Forster’s fiction were, with a distanced narrative. The central character is a middle-aged woman, not a dashing male hero or strong-willed young heroine so common in later science fiction, and she doesn’t rebel against her world but embraces it, she almost worships the Machine. Neither does Forster explain how this world came into being; he just describes how it is. An early dystopian story that bucked the trends that would later be present in so much of later literature.
    This was a fascinating read and so surprising coming from the pen of EM Forster. The only downside was that the title gives away far too much of the plot.
    This was the only piece of science fiction that Forster wrote, but it is so startling and original that I wonder what else he would have written if he’d tried his hand at it again.
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  16. Drew Payne

    "His Story"

    By Drew Payne,


    Writing
    Does the pain stop when the abuse does?
    My new novella, His Story, asks this question by following six, different events from one man’s life, a man who survived ex-gay/conversion therapy.
    Though this may sound a depressing read, there is a hopeful ending, and it discussed a subject not often found in literature, how do you survive abuse and start living again.
    It is available here, on Smashwords, as an eBook only, but is free to download, or you can pay whatever you want to.
    Happy reading
     

  17. Drew Payne

    Book Review: Faggots by Larry Kramer

    By Drew Payne,


    Book review
    “2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area.” So begins Larry Kramer’s infamous novel. It is a strange opening for a novel but, in some way, is indicative of this one.
    It is the late 1970s and this novel is an odyssey through gay New York life. The main protagonist is Fred Lemish, almost a gay everyman, who is just short of forty. He is searching for love, especially the love of the gay hunk Dinky Adams, but all he can find is promiscuous sex, recreational drug use and almost constant disappointment.
    This novel has so many things in it that just don’t work. Firstly, the large cast of characters makes it difficult to follow, some of them not having enough time to develop and other characters who do not add much, if anything, to the plot and left me wondering why they were there. Then there are the sex scenes, the many, many sex scenes. Some of them do add to character development but many of them felt repetitive, by the end of the book I was feeling, “Not another sex scene.” I wanted to read the novel; I didn’t want the distraction of all this sex. But what wore me down, as a reader, was its unrelenting negativity. Nothing here works out well; no characters get close to a happy ending, all of them end up unhappy in their own different ways. In one scene, a romantic relationship is sabotaged before it can even begin, which felt almost nasty on the part of the author.
    The characterisation here was so poor that I was left feeling frustrated. Characters are portrayed in a negative light for their actions, promiscuous sex and drug use, but there is little to no examination of why they are behaving like this. What is reinforcing such negative behaviour? This novel is set in 1978 New York and yet there is little discussion of the homophobia of that time, both external and internal. Homophobia then was more than systemic, it would have had a huge impact on these characters, it would have driven so much of their lack of self-worth, yet it is barely mentioned.
    This novel felt less a satire on gay life and much more an expression of Larry Kramer’s distaste for a world that didn’t accept him and that is such a shame. With his plays The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me, Kramer showed he is a writer who understands characterisation. Those plays got under the skin of their characters and examined their situations. The Normal Heart examined the homophobia that was preventing fighting AIDS; The Destiny of Me examined the events that shaped the central character, a gay man facing his own morality and the fact that there was so little treatment, then, for HIV. None of that ability is on display in Faggots, if it had been maybe this novel would have been so much better.
    Here Kramer tries to hold up a mirror to the world around him, unfortunately it is a distorting mirror that sneers back. Such a missed opportunity from a man who could be a great writer.
     
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  18. Drew Payne
    Miss Marple is probably the most famous female detective in English literature, she was certainly an original character when she first appeared in print, using psychology and character observation rather than searching for physical clues to solve crimes.
    This collection of stories was published posthumously after Christie’s death and brings together the remaining Miss Marple short stories that hadn’t been published in book form before, plus two supernatural stories that didn’t feature Miss Marple.
    This is certainly a mixed bag of stories. Sanctuary and Greenshaw's Folly are fully formed stories, with plots and characters that work and carry the reader to the end at a readable pace. Strange Jest is much more a puzzle story than a mystery and suffers from not being a Christie mystery. The other Marple stories here feel rushed and not fully formed, like first-draft stories that were squeezed into a tight word limit. These stories far too often tell the reader what is happening rather than letting the characters and events show the reader what is happening. So often they felt rushed. They weren’t to the standard of other Christie stories, especially the original stories in the very first Marple collection, The Thirteen Problems. In Miss Marple Tells a Story Christie shows her ear for dialogue, the story is written completely in Miss Marple’s voice, solely her voice speaking. It shows how well Christie knew her character; unfortunately the story itself is too short and slight to build any plot.
    The two non Miss Marple stories here are examples of Christie’s supernatural stories that she wrote periodically throughout her career. The Dressmaker’s Doll is overly long, dragging out the situation and distracting from the ending. In a Glass Darkly is a much darker story in tone, but the neat ending, where order is restored, is a let-down.
    Christie’s short stories were best when she gave herself time and space to develop plots and characters, thus making her longer short stories often the better ones. This is very much the case here.
    This is a collection for committed Miss Marple fans who want to read all the stories she appears in. If you’re new to Miss Marple fiction there are much better places to start.
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  19. Drew Payne
    “A murder is announced and will take place on Friday October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6.30 p.m.”
    So reads the announcement in the Chipping Cleghorn Gazette that morning. That evening, the local neighbours all dutifully turn up at Little Paddocks, all with their different excuses for being there. At 6.30 p.m., without warning, all the lights go out and…
    This is the beginning of one of Agatha Christie’s most intriguing novels that is firmly rooted in post-war Britain. She chose to set it in the classic, golden age of crime setting of an English country village. But this is a place very changed by the Second World War. No longer is it a place where everyone knows everyone else. This is a place of strangers. The war caused such upheaval; many people left the village, many never to return, and newcomers have moved in, people whom everyone else has to accept are who they claim to be without “knowing their people”. Christie uses this as a strong thread to her plot, are these people even who they say they are?
    Her intriguing plot is served well by the tone Christie creates in this novel. At first it is light-hearted and almost comic, the surprise and speculation in the characters’ reactions to the announcement of a murder, none of them believing it is anything sinister. Even after the first murder, she maintains this light tone; the victim is a stranger and certainly not a “good type” of person. But slowly the novel darkens; the second murder is too close to home and casts a dark shadow over the story. Christie handles this well; the grief of some of the characters is uncomfortable to read.
    This novel uses several plots trails that will be familiar to Christie readers, but here she certainly plays around with them. The village setting but with a cast of characters very different from her pre-war novels, her use of sexism to aid her plot and having the detective gather all the suspects together in one place to announce who the murderer is. Christie created this convention with her first novel, though she used it sparingly in her subsequent works nowhere near as much as the film adaptions of her works would lead us to believe. Here, though, it is the police inspector who gathers together the suspects, not Miss Marple, and it is not to unmask the killer but to lay a trap for them.
    This novel also benefits from having Miss Marple as its detective, rather than Poirot. Poirot was always the star of the novels featuring him, while Miss Marple was so often one of the supporting characters, watching the events from the sidelines. Here Christie uses her to her best, aiding the plot but also giving the other characters chance to breathe by not being in every scene.
    In the centre of all this is a portrait of a lesbian couple, whom all the other characters except without question. Only at the end, after tragedy has struck, do we see the depth of their love.
    Agatha Christie might not have been the greatest of literary writers, but what she did do she did so well. She knew how to plot her novels; she created twists that never left the reader feeling cheated. She laid just enough clues so that once the twist occurs you can feel, “Oh that makes sense now.” She also knew the characters she wrote about, the upper middle-class English, though her novels also chronicle the changes in English society. She might not have been the finest descriptive writer but she knew how to create characters with dialog and used that effectively.
    This certainly is a classic Christie, plot, characters and setting all come together to make a fascinating read. I challenge you to work out who the murderer is, until they are revealed and then it all makes horrible sense.
    Happy reading
     
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  20. Drew Payne
    Jeff Jones has certainly lived enough to fill six ordinary lives. Since growing up in Wapping, East London, he’s been in trouble with the police, been sent to prison, been homeless and been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. But he has also been to university, been a manager in mental health and youth work, met Prince Charles and even passed The Knowledge, the exam for London black cab drivers.
    This book charts his life in a clear and very readable style, sometimes also at break-neck speed, but always it is engaging. Jones does not shy away from the racism that marked so much of his life, growing up as a black man in twentieth-century London, but neither does he preach at the reader or hit the reader over the head. He simply presents racism for what it is and in this clear manner makes it far more chilling and uncomfortable.
    This is a book about contemporary life in Britain but from a voice that is not often heard, a black working-class man, which can be enjoyed by all. At his heart, Jones is a storyteller and he uses that to great advantage in this book.
    Find it here on Amazon
     
     

  21. Drew Payne
    There have been many different theories about the spread of AIDS, some of them bizarre, but here James Chin returns to a very old one; AIDS is not a threat to the heterosexual population. Chin is an epidemiologist and bases all his arguments on a narrow reading of the HIV/AIDS statistics. He seems to want to turn back the clock to when we talked only of “risk groups”.  There are no political, cultural, social or psychological elements in Chin’s arguments, which leaves this book very one-sided.
    Between 1987 and 1992 Chin worked for the World Health Organisation (WHO) on HIV/AIDS surveillance until he abruptly resigned over what appears to have been a personality clash. This book seems to be an attempt at settling his old scores with WHO. Throughout it there is a relentless attack on WHO’s HIV/AIDS programs, the main argument being that WHO is wrong in saying that AIDS will affect the general population because, Chin claims, they have overestimated the figures.
    This book is written in the first person; while appropriate for a biography it does not enhance an academic work. It only shows the one-sided nature of Chin’s arguments and highlights the lack of depth to them. There is little analysing here, only Chin’s singular views.
    This book does show the dangers of using only one discipline to tackle a complex problem and the narrow findings this can give. All this book offers the reader is number crunching and the rehashing of a very old argument, HIV/AIDS prevention needs to be far more than just that.
     
    (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine)
     
    Find it on Amazon here
     
     

  22. Drew Payne

    With Pride, July 2008

    By Drew Payne,


    With Pride
    Marching with Pride
    (July 2008)
     
    On Saturday (5th July 2008) it was London LGBT Pride and, with bright sunny weather, my partner and I had a wonderful day there. The highlight, as always, was the Pride March. People were laughing and smiling, enjoying walking through central London together and openly.
    The march was headed by groups representing many of our uniformed and emergency services. First came lesbian, gay and bisexual members of the navy, army and RAF, all in their uniforms. Next followed the police and British transport police, again in uniform. Members of the fire service, complete with a bright red fire engine, followed them. Finally came members of the ambulance service and St John’s Ambulance service. It was a very impressive sight and the crowds cheered and clapped as they passed. But I was left with one thought, where are the nurses?
    True, there was an NHS float, much later in the march, but it was a general float. It didn’t have the impact of a group of nurses or healthcare professionals marching with the others at the head of the march.
    But why do nurses need to march at Pride?
    Still so many lesbians and gay men have little trust in healthcare. A recently published survey, from Stonewall, on lesbians’ experiences of healthcare, found that half of the women taking part had had negative experiences of healthcare in the last year (1). An earlier study found that 50% of gay men were too uncomfortable to come out to their GPs (2).
    We have a long way to go, but nurses marching at Pride will help along that path. Previously the police had a very poor relationship with the lesbian and gay community, there was no love lost on either side. Now, while still far from perfect, there has been a great improvement in police attitudes and an increased trust in the police in recent years. This has been achieved through a lot of different activities but not least of these has been the presence of police officers marching at Pride (not just “policing” it). The presence of those police officers has given confidence in the police. Nurses marching at pride could give so many lesbians and gay men far more confidence in healthcare and nursing as a profession.
    Nurses may not be able to march in uniform, with the duty of care that a nurse’s uniform carries, but the presence of nurses marching at Pride, even not in uniform, will go towards building up lesbians’ and gay men’s confidence in healthcare. Who will march though? Well, people like me.
    (This was originally published as a comment piece in Nursing Standard magazine)
    Drew Payne
     
    Find out more about this short blog series here
     

  23. Drew Payne

    With Pride, July 2019

    By Drew Payne,


    With Pride
    Something New Every Year
    (July 2019)
     
    The other Saturday, I did something I’d never done before. At my age, it isn’t often I get to do something as new as this, but the other Saturday I marched in the London Pride March openly as a nurse.
    I’ve marched in the Pride March many times before, with friends, with LGBT organisations, but never before openly as a nurse. This year, a group of staff in my Trust’s LGBT Network organised to take part in the London Pride March and we had the blessing of our Trust.
    On Pride Saturday, all of us in bright yellow tee-shirts (with our Trust’s name and logo emblazoned across them) and all wearing our security bracelets, we took our place in the march. We were LGBT staff and our straight allies gathered around our placard that announced who we were, Whittington Health Staff Inclusion Network.
    Marching in Pride openly as NHS staff was one thing, but the reaction we received from the crowds along the route was amazing. People smiled and waved at us, they clapped and cheered us, people were so happy to see us. All we were doing was marching.
    The NHS is still not an inclusion or safe place for many LGBT patients. A recent Stonewall report found one in four LGBT people have witnessed homophobia from NHS staff and one in seven of them have avoided treatment because of fear of discrimination from NHS staff (1). Yet how much has the NHS done to reverse this situation? Very little. This isn’t the first report by Stonewall, there have been many over the years, all reading the same, and yet the NHS does so little to change this.
    In the four years between 2014 and 2018, LGBT hate crime rose by 144% (2) and yet the NHS is still not a safe place for LGBT patients.
    What my colleagues and I did at Pride was not a great step forward and for most of us did not require a large amount of effort, yet the reaction of the crowd was almost breath-taking. Those people cheered us on because they were happy and grateful for us being there, and our presence told them that our Trust was working towards providing care in a safe place.
    Taking part in London Pride fired all of us up, our WhatsApp group has gone crazy, and we are already making plans for next year’s Pride and getting off the ground an LGBT Staff Network. We need to work hard at making our Trust an inclusive organisation, a safe place for all, but we are starting.
    We talk a lot about person-centred care but are we just paying lip service to it when so many LGBT people do not feel able to be open with us about themselves for fear of discrimination?
    Every long journey starts with a single step, but who would have thought that step would be marching at Pride? So why aren’t more NHS Trusts taking part in the different Pride celebrations around the country? Our presence would say so much to the LGBT people there.
    (This was originally published as a comment piece in Nursing Standard magazine)
    Drew Payne
     
    Find out more about this short blog series here
     
     


  24. Drew Payne

    With Pride, January 2017

    By Drew Payne,


    With Pride
    And Some Things Change and Some Things Remain the Same
    (January 2017)
    I started to come out when I was nineteen, more than thirty years ago, and nearly overnight I lost almost all of my friends; I was ostracised just for being gay. It was a shocking experience that has left a lasting impact on me.
    Today, I am married to my husband Martin and work as a community nurse in North London. Everyone at work knows my husband and no one has a problem with him, I have almost forgotten the last time I experienced homophobia at work, it was so long ago.
    So much has changed since I was a teenager, changes I would never have believed back then. We have marriage equality now, we have protections against discrimination at work and when we use businesses or services under the Equality Act. Lesbian and gay characters can be found on so many different television programs. We have won so many protections and rights under the law this century that it makes our world almost unrecognisable from the one when I first came out.
    So we can just relax and sit back, all the work has been done? Unfortunately, no. Homophobia is still alive, it is just not as blatant as it used to be, and the NHS is still not an open and welcoming place to everyone.
    In 2016, a British Medical Association (BMA) study found that over 70 percent of LGBT NHS doctors experienced homophobia at work and three quarters of them had not reported it because they feared it would not be taken seriously or they feared reprisals (1). “I don’t think the NHS is an LGBT-friendly environment,” said Dominic, one of the doctors contributing to the study. This type of homophobia isn’t restricted to doctors only.
    Last year also saw the unsightly scene of NHS England going to court to allow it not to fund PrEP, the HIV prevention medication (2). If used correctly PrEP is 86% effective (3), far higher than most vaccines. If PrEP prevented heart disease or diabetes we would be welcoming it and there would be no question the NHS would provide it. But PrEP prevents HIV and NHS England felt it could justify not funding it, tapping into the homophobia around HIV.  A Nursing Standard Twitter poll at the time found that 54% thought PrEP should be self-funded and not provided by the NHS (4).
    There was a shocking spike in hate crimes following the Brexit referendum result this summer (6). Less publicised was the 147% rise in homophobic crimes in this period (7). Homophobia hasn’t gone away and the Brexit climate seems to be giving it oxygen again.
    Brexit also raises another challenge for LGBT people. When Britain leaves the EU, all the EU laws that are also part of our laws will be reviewed and we might lose many of them. EU Article 10 offers protection from discrimination, including on grounds of sexuality (8). The Employment Framework Directive 2000/78 (9) protects people against discrimination at work on grounds of sexuality.
    Many in the Conservative party have openly called for the repeal of the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act; Theresa May (the prime minister) has previously spoken of her dislike of the Human Rights Act (10). What laws, what protections will we lose as Britain separates from the EU? The government has given us no reassurances; they barely seem to know what they want from Brexit itself.
    In America, Donald Trump’s government has taken a shocking turn. Almost all of his cabinet have previously gone on the record with their anti-LGBT views (11). Already many fear that all LGBT protections will be lost if Trump’s administration passes laws allowing discrimination against LGBT people in the name of “religious freedom” (12).
    It is no longer true that what American does today we do tomorrow, but many people in Britain still look to America. People who have been campaigning for the repeal of marriage equality and LGBT protections will be looking very keenly at Trump’s administration, especially if they roll back LGBT equality.
    Peter Tatchell once said that LGBT people are the litmus test of how a society respects human rights (13). If a society doesn’t value diversity how will it value anyone? But why should nurses worry about human rights? Because if we don’t, how can we nurse anyone with dignity?
    (This was originally published as a comment piece in Nursing Standard magazine)
    Drew Payne
     
    Find out more about this short blog series here
     
     

  25. Drew Payne

    With Pride, August 2015

    By Drew Payne,


    With Pride
    Do Unhealthy Attitudes Ever Change?
    (August 2015)
    During my first year of nurse training (twenty-five years ago) I ran into a wall of homophobia. I was told by some of my vocal colleagues that I only wanted to be a nurse to see naked men, that all gay men deserved AIDS, that I was a danger to children, and that God could heal me and make me “normal”.  I endured it because it was 1990 and homophobia was what I expected as a gay man.
    It's now 2015 and our society has changed so much since my student nurse days. We are so much more open, we have so many legal protections now against homophobia; last year my partner and I got married. I thought we had come so far and then I was brought down to earth with a crash.
    This month, Stonewall (the LGTB campaigning organisation) published Unhealthy Attitudes (1), their report on the treatment of LGBT health and social care staff, and it was a shocking read. It felt as if I was right back there twenty-five years ago, like nothing had changed.
    The report, written following a YouGov survey of health and social care staff, found that one in four people had heard a colleague make negative or homophobic statements about LGBT people and one in five had heard negative statements about trans people. A quarter of them had been the victims of homophobic bullying from patients and service users. 10% had heard colleagues make claims that LGBT people can be “cured”.
    These statistics may sound cold and not greatly impressive but the report also carries the realities behind them, it is full of personal quotes. The nurse who was told by another nurse that he should be hung for being gay. The nurse whose manager told her that homophobic comments were “only banter”. The nurse who was ostracised by his whole staff team, at work and socially, when it came out he's gay. And many comments where trans people were called “it” or “she-male”.  Then there were the comments that were themselves homophobic. A healthcare assistant (HCA) who said people are not born LGBT but “choose” this “lifestyle”. A doctor referring to anyone he doesn't consider “normal” as “deviants” whose needs shouldn't be “forced” on the majority.
    Yet this report has created little outrage or even comment from our nursing leaders or the wider community. If this report was highlighting racism or sexism surely there would have been an outcry about it, articles in our newspapers or items on the television news. Yet this report barely caused a ripple.
    Homophobia still seems to be the prejudice that we most easily accept, it's just “banter”, it's just someone's personal belief or personal views, and any challenge to it is seen as “political correctness gone too far”. But it's none of these; it’s prejudice and it can damage or even destroy people's lives. Why, as nurses, are we tolerating this?
    There have been several reports previously from Stonewall highlighting the poor treatment experienced by LGBT people from the NHS and how reluctant they are to be out to healthcare workers. The results of Unhealthy Attitudes only reinforce these earlier findings. How can we offer patients open and non-judgmental care when we can't offer non-judgmental support to our own colleagues?
    We have spoken a lot about “person-centred care”, but it seems that if the person is LBGT then a large part of their personality and needs are ignored, at best. LGBT people have their own healthcare needs, more than just using the gender-natural term “partner”, but the evidence is that they are still being ignored.
    How have we got to this point? Unhealthy Attitudes has a clear recommendation, staff training in LGBT issues. It found that three in four people haven’t received any training in the needs of LGBT people and only one in four have been provided with any equality and diversity training. Yet the NHS has a legal responsibility to eliminate discrimination.
    In the last three years my own equality and diversity training has consisted of one fifteen-minute, online presentation that covered the needs of disabled people, black and ethnic minorities people and LGBT people, but in no depth at all for any of them.
    How can we say we focus on person-centred care when LGBT staff’s safety is so bluntly ignored by the NHS?
    (This was originally published as a comment piece in Nursing Standard magazine)
    Drew Payne
     
    Find out more about this short blog series here
     

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