Charles Davis's Blog
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Jan.27.2011
Watching the telly, me and my niece. She’s eating a chocolate bar. News comes on, up flashes an image of starving babies. Moment’s paralysis before my niece turns to me: “Do you want a bit of Mars?”
I could appreciate her dilemma. She was only twelve at the time, but she was confronting a problem...
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Jan.11.2011
I really ought to be keeping my head down. I’ve done it again. Everytime I voice an opinion, I lose potential readers by the thousand. What is the publishing equivalent of negative equity? Whatever it is, I’ve probably got it. I am ‘left wing’ and try to write ‘literary fiction’. As far as I can...
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Jan.10.2011
Writers are a curious breed. Most of us spend the greater part of our time discreetly observing the people around us, refraining from intruding on the conversation, but prompting others to speak, while we sit there, watching, watching, watching, always bloody watching, quietly taking mental notes...
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Jan.01.2011
Despite spending my childhood reading war comics from which I garnered the greater part of my German vocabulary (In case you’re wondering, Donner und blitzen! is absolutely useless when you want to buy a beer and a ham sandwich on your holidays), then indulging in a brief flirtation with the books...
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Aug.30.2010
Charles is up a mountain . . . somewhere. He won't be back until the New Year. Big disappointment, eh? If consolation is required for this deplorable dereliction of duty, you can e-mail Rania at The Permanent Press to place an advance order for my next novel, Standing At The Crossroads, which is...
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Aug.12.2010
Friend came round for dinner. Two topics cropped up, totally unrelated, but subsequently wedded in my head to populate the night’s dreamscape.
First, he described meeting an old acquaintance who, having acquired a pacemaker, could talk of nothing else, so much so that our friend found himself...
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Jul.30.2010
We Brits are very attached to BP. Or our pension funds are, at least. And since our pension funds are rapidly falling apart, any Brit intent on mitigating the looming indigence of old age needs to come to the defense of this great British institution. So, as an expatriated Englishman whose pension...
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Jul.03.2010
In the last blog, I confessed to a besetting case of xenophilia, a prejudice that, disturbingly, seems to be reversed when I browse my bookshelves. I don’t do too badly at writers from the subcontinent (Rushdie, Mistry, Roy, the Desais and so forth); there are stacks of South Americans (Llosa,...
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Jun.21.2010
I’m a racist. I like skins that are darker than mine and expect the people inside them are going to be better, more appealing people than they would have been were they lumbered with a paler skin. There’s no reason for believing this. I don’t even think it’s true. In fact, it is almost as...
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May.30.2010
I’m fond of Santa Margarita y los Monjes, the parallel world I created in Walking The Dog. So is my sister and one or two readers. Joan Baum, a wonderful woman who, purely coincidentally, happens to like my books, wrote a nice review in The Independent. She had her reservations, but was generous on...
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May.12.2010
Goodness matters. I don't want to give the impression that I'm some moralizing old fart pontificating about what is right and wrong. An unbiased assessment of the evidence might suggest that, in actual fact, this is probably the case, but it's not the impression I want to give. Goodness does matter...
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Apr.28.2010
Stern mother reproving mendacious child: "Have you been telling stories?"
Child: "Yup! Good, isn’t it?"
I’ve never actually heard the stern-mother line cited above, but it’s enough of a cliché to be familiar. And, of course, the admonished child never replies like that, but...
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Apr.14.2010
I like words. Sometimes words like me, too, though they’re fickle little bastards and anyone relying upon their fidelity is in for a nasty shock. For my part though, it’s their very inconstancy that I like. Back in the seventeenth century, there was a concerted effort among European philosophers (...
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Apr.02.2010
I don’t wish to be too vulgar. I don’t mind being a bit vulgar. I find it quite amusing, even if nobody else does. But I know I lack judgement in these things and it’s all too easy for tastelessness, however minutely studied, to become tiresome. Nonetheless, I must admit that (this is it, by the...
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Mar.17.2010
Last few weeks I’ve been talking about the involuntary revelations writers make in their books and speculating on some of the curiosities that have cropped up in the course of my own fiction writing. Been fairly light-hearted for the most part. But there’s one recurring theme that is not in the...
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About Charles
Charles Davis was born and educated, and has travelled and worked. He now lives and writes. That has always seemed to me to be enough biography for any writer, but being an avid reader, too, I appreciate that curiosity demands a bit more, so . . . .
Basically...
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Causes Charles Davis Supports
Oxfam, Amnesty International, Greenpeace