Fairy Tales of the Mind

Every story has a beginning, but what happens if you don’t remember that beginning? What if you realise that the few memories you have, are only of violence and neglect?

Anxiety rises, fear of abandonment is constant on your mind, fear of being unloved is eating you up, and the world you envisioned to be a fairy tale is destroyed. So, you comfort yourself by letting your mind wander, and you wait for someone to save you even after the abuse, despite knowing full well that it’s unhealthy. Knowing that those daydreams you have of dying are unhealthy.

You survived the physical abuse and the neglect by escaping reality and continually dreaming of fairy tales, but you became too engrossed in those dreams. Those dreams resulted in you creating an alternative world in your mind in which you craved to stay in – like an addict, forgetting entirely that there existed a world outside of those dreams.

This is a collection of poetry about mental illness and the impact of child abuse in adulthood.

Fake Love

Moving through the complexities of dating, Stella and her friends quickly realised that the online world was simply a revolving door of people coming and going.

It had become a collection of hopeful souls and artificial feelings, all competing for attention. Conversing with many, yet rarely sealing the deal; because in the blink of an eye it was all yesterday’s news, and there were fresh, new people to talk to instead.

Craving love, and being burnt by the fire, losing hope, losing themselves, and getting lost within the deep, dark caverns of this online world of desire.

The fickle nature of being just a number and waiting your turn; of broken promises and stretching the truth. The short-lived swipe-right, swipe-left world around them was no easy game to play. The virtual world was certainly not a place to become emotionally invested in.

As Stella takes a reminiscent walk down memory lane, the stories of her and her friends are discovered, each with their own complicated tales of love, hope, heartbreak, and regret.

Was there really such a thing as finding the one? Or was that all just a fantasy?

Fall in Love with Your Mind

Fall in Love with Your Mind is a collection of poetry about the wayward notion of creativity as a force to combat darkness on the journey towards self-discovery. It is divided into sections dictating the continuous and frustrating feeling of time slipping away all too quickly on the path from mindless self-destruction, to heartbreak and hopelessness, to learning and growing.
Read each section whenever you feel you can relate to it the most, or when you feel you need it the most. That’s the thing about words on a page – they’re always there. Even if you burn them, the most important ones always remain safe and sound in your mind. Falling in love with your mind is the key to brighter days.
Make a coffee, light a cigarette, do whatever warms your soul; read and be present. You are right here, and that is always enough.

Fallen Through The Cracks

Press your chin hard against your throat. Now turn your head to the left and lift your left shoulder until it touches your ear. Keep your chin against your throat, your left ear against your left shoulder, contract your neck and shoulder muscles as tightly as you can and hold it like that for the rest of your life. That’s right. Eat like that, brush your teeth like that, drive like that and keep your head like that when you go to sleep at night.

This is what psychiatrists in South Africa did to me and they expect me to live like that for the rest of my life.

Falling Behind

Do you really know the person you have committed the rest of your life to? Are they the same person you married, once knew, or have you ignored those subtle changes and made compromises just for the sake of happily ever after? Perhaps it is you who has changed, and now everything you once cherished, once hoped for, does not bind you in the way that it once did.

Against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, Beth, and her husband Jake, travel to Samoa to reset and mend a broken marriage. But the suspicion of an affair, an addiction, a crime, or the thought that he just does not want to be around her anymore, travel with her to this island paradise.

How does it feel to lose a child? Your children are not supposed to leave you before you leave them. How do you live in a vacuum, unable to breathe, when sleep and inevitable death are the only reprieve? And then, what happens when you are responsible for their death? An old man and women, isolated from the rest of the world, abandoned by their families and neighbours, grapple with grief.

Falling Behind is a collection of six short stories that explores the character of grief and its manifestation in people and how these very same people attempt to ride it out and hope, at the same time, for it to end. As with Leaving Behind, each story bears an unexpected twist.

Falling Leaves

The driving force of this book is the author’s lifelong fascination with human nature. Forty years in the law brought him into contact with a broader cross-section of society than most people would normally experience, or even wish to, and it is their strengths and weaknesses, values and doubts that shaped these poems.

The majority of these poems were written well into the author's retirement. As we know, the ageing process involves a shift in values, priorities and challenges. He faces these head on: dementia, faith, physical decline, even falling in love. Nothing is spared.

A word of caution. Many of the poems are simple and straightforward. And why not? Poetry is for everyone. Some appear simple and straightforward but have a twist or secondary current below the surface. Look out for them. In others the author sets out his views and throws down a gauntlet. In doing so he commits the cardinal sin of the modern age: he asks us to think.

Family Business

Family Matters

Kimberley Weatherby leads a privileged if rather boring existence with her well-to-do family on the Isle of Man. Her long-time boyfriend has left her. Then two men enter her life: a gorgeous newcomer to the island and a mysterious foreign stranger. Unfortunately, it was the one she doesn’t want that proposes marriage. Meantime she has to navigate some challenging personal relationships.

There are her best friends: Lisa, caring but overemotional and Julie, an ambitious single mother with an eye on the financial aspects of life. Then her immediate family presents multiple challenges. Her widowed stepmother, Irene, is demanding and bitter. Older brother Richard is exasperatingly dull, if diligent. And younger brother Bob is full of youthful exuberance and always getting into harmless scrapes – or are they?

Her romantic dilemma is quickly overshadowed by a dramatic and tragic event which exposes the secrets of everyone. Reeling from shock she must find the strength to resolve a dangerous situation and deal with repercussions that affect everyone around her.

Far From Worries

A couple of years ago, the author moved next door to the King of Thailand working as an editor of an online magazine published in Hua Hin, a seaside town. At the time, the king lived there permanently in his summer palace known in Thai as the Klang Kangnon palace, which delightfully translates as ‘Far from Worries’. The book is a chronicle of the author’s year there, but in a larger sense, it is a portrait of contemporary Thailand; part memoir, part history and part travel book.

Farewell Chapelon

When the cargo ship Chapelon is ordered to sail from her home port of Dunkirk just two days before Christmas, her crew is less than pleased. Not only were their hopes of celebrating with their loved ones wrecked, they also knew they were about to sail into rough and turbulent seas.

In a storm of unprecedented fury that is encountered off the north-east coast of England, the ship experiences an engine room explosion that leaves her disabled and at the mercy of the furious wind blowing her towards the shore. Efforts to find a tug to assist Chapelon prove to be fruitless and a life boat and helicopter that are dispatched to aid the distressed ship and rescue her crew themselves become overwhelmed in the atrocious conditions being experienced.

When Chapelon’s grounding becomes an obvious and imminent certainty, her crew’s very survival becomes reliant upon a local coastguard coming up with a last-ditch plan.

Fast Fashion and Flaneurs

Bill Wonder, the tyrannical billionaire fashion tycoon is found splattered on the pavement outside his fashion school in the West End of London.

Was he pushed from the balcony, did he jump, or it could have happened because of his high heel shoes?

The mystery of his death is stitched together by Sadie Silver, a hapless fashion history teacher, who needs to understand the incident to uncover her family’s sartorial secrets.

But wait, could she have killed Bill? 

After all, she was the last person to see Bill alive, and he really seemed to hate her new look.

Fastovski's Tales of Hampstead

Imagine that Isaac Babel’s Cossacks wassail together with Runyonesque Liverpool Jews outside the plate-glass window of a Hampstead café where a Klezmer band is playing to a packed and tea-drinking congregation of jazzmen, Hasidic scholars, surrealists, old soldiers, and retired strippers; and you have the tone and temperature of this unique and unclassifiable memoir – no, not memoir, more a stream-of-consciousness novella – no, not a novella but a piece of autobiographical fiction – no, not autobiography but a picaresque drama conquered from the unreliable and fertile brain of the eponymous Fastovski.

And who is Fastovski? Is he real or invented? Is he perhaps the alter-ego of real-life jazz pianist, Klezmer swinger, big band leader and flaneur, Wallace Fields, who stares at us from the book’s frontispiece in shades, Diaghilev coat and moustache, over a cup of strong black coffee? Fastovski’s not telling and anyway, who cares.

This is a book to be devoured, disseminated, denounced, and delighted in. It belongs to all who think art and life are one and that the Arch-Savant of Canterbury, Issy Bonn, Rashid the Manic Berber Chef of NW3, and Mrs Karl Popper, have an equal claim on history. I haven’t had such a good time since I shared Sir Ralph Richardson’s motorbike with a parrot and a striking grandmother clock.

Piers Plowright
August 2008