Your basket (0 items) | view basket
 |
David Ayres David J Ayres was born in Birmingham UK and attended Aldridge Grammar School near Walsall in the West Midlands. It was at this early stage in his life that he began writing poetry and short stories, winning an award for English Literature at school at the age of just seventeen. He already knew this was what he really wanted to do. He obtained an honours degree in languages at Leeds University and a postgraduate qualification in teaching at the University of London. At that time, in the late Sixties, David was already having poetry published in various magazines. He taught languages for a good few years and ventured into the fast lane by training as a private pilot in 1979. By the time he gave up aviation in 2006 to live abroad for a few years, he had logged over a thousand hours. Nowadays he does a regular four hour shift in the air traffic tower of his local airfield. Since his university days David has played blues and rock guitar and has played lead guitar in several bands. He has since taught guitar both privately and at various college centres in the Midlands. He is still known to pick up a guitar and strike a chord! As a language teacher David held several Head of Languages posts at secondary schools in the West Midlands and later in his career turned his attention to Special Needs education, working with secondary pupils who had been excluded or were about to be excluded from their school. In 2007 David retired from teaching and went to live on the island of Fuerteventura in the Canaries. This proved a very creative period for him and led to the production of two anthologies of short stories, one of which became Top of the Sixties. He also became a regular contributor to a literary magazine in the UK and a regular columnist for an online newspaper in Fuerteventura, to which he still contributes from the UK. Fuerteventura is a desert island with impressive sand dunes and rugged mountain scenery. Although he came to love the island, his three years there gave him a new appreciation of the green lushness of England. David has had work published regularly in magazines and anthologies and writing is still his passion in life. He has a couple of novels in print – A Minor Relationship by Minerva Press and The Called and The Chosen by The Lichfield Press. He tells people he writes because he can’t help it. It’s like having a runny nose that you just have to blow regularly. His main reason for writing has always been in order to be read. He tends to relate his stories in a series of tableaux, more like cinema than a conventional book, and of major importance to him is the use of light and shadow, especially light from unusual angles. He uses light to establish atmosphere, rather like varying the lighting on a stage, all very visual. His characters are often drawn in a sort of Dickensian way, with nervous tics, odd speech patterns and other almost theatrical eccentricities. He feels strongly about the use of dialogue as a means of enhancing character and of pushing the plot forward. His literary influences range from Gustave Flaubert and Thomas Mann to Thomas Hardy, W. Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells. David is currently living in Lichfield in Staffordshire. David talks about writing & reading and creating Top of the Sixties in this interview with The Short Review. This a lovely picture of David Ayres with Tony Thompson, a former Mayor of Lichfield, during the promotion of Top of the Sixties at Lichfield Library. |
Blog07 May 2013The Age of Enlightenment It's easy to ridicule the caricature of early British explorers in Africa in the nineteenth century, how, at six in the evening, in the middle of the jungle, they would dress for dinner and dine at a trestle table covered with a white linen cloth and laden with cut glass and silverware. Grace would be said to begin the meal and a toast to Queen Victoria would bring it to a close. How ridiculous! We scorn that kind of formality nowadays. We know so much better today, don't we? The twenty-first century is so very enlightened, don't you find? Look at an English family today. There is no formal mealtime. Father has no supervisory role, because he's probably playing some childish computer game. On the lounge floor in front of the television is a large, round pizza in a cardboard container. Everyone mucks in with their dirty fingers and stuffs mouthfuls of pastry and filling into their mouth. The Victorians can't compete with that, can they?
Find out more 07 April 2013 Folly Death is notoriously difficult for people in the West to cope with. This is in contrast to the people of Malaysia, Indonesia and China, where death is seen more as a natural function like birth or growing old. In Western civilisation we celebrate birth and the anniversary of birth but death is something we shrink away from in fear. Find out more 26 February 2013 The Liar, the Voyeur A writer of fiction creates people, places and events that don't actually exist. The writer of fiction is a stylised liar. He writes 'the things that are not'. That's what the horse people in Gulliver's Travels call lying. People have always been spellbound by a good yarn, ever since they sat round the fire to listen to the sagas of old, as told by a skilled story-teller. There never was a great white whale called Moby Dick or a house called Manderley, therefore Melville and du Maurier were spinning a tale, they were lying to us. They did not lie in order to deceive but to entertain. Lies can be entertainment. The more skill a writer of fiction possesses, the more persuasive his lies. He uses every art available to him to make his lies more real.
Find out more 08 February 2013 Talk Straight Let me explain why the sloppy use of language can cause serious problems.
I find the imprecise use of language really irritating, don't you? It interferes with communication and leads to changes which become permanent. People may say, 'Well, it's a good thing that language is constantly evolving'. Perhaps they mean as a fever evolves into death or as a population explosion evolves into Armageddon. Find out more 06 January 2013 Peter Pan must die! How about this for a novel idea? Taking full responsibility for ourselves - how does that sound? It's a bit of a shock, I realise, but just consider it for a moment. Imagine a world in which you are not told to do this or do that, to eat this and not eat that. Who's responsibility should it be to decide what goes down your gullet? I think it's your responsibility. You must look after yourself, because you are an adult. If you have children, then you must look after them too. You must make choices about healthy diet, exercise, smoking and drinking. You must guide your children in these matters, not sit on the sofa waiting for some initiative to appear on the television, some campaign to tell you how to do your job as a parent. Find out more 27 November 2012 Why can't everyone be like Vicky? Vicky is one of two ladies who clean the small apartment building where I live. She's the sort of person you could easily walk straight past, as she vacuums the carpet and dusts the window sills of the public areas. How could you possibly know that, like so many ordinary people, she is in fact quite extraordinary? As I walked by today and passed her on the landing on my way outside, we began a conversation which became quite surprising, so surprising that she switched off her vacuum cleaner to talk to me at length. Did she talk about the weather? Did she talk about her family? No, she talked about Nostradamus! Yes, she talked about his prediction that England would eventually sink under water. She went on to tell me that his real name was Michel de Nostredame born 1503 in Provence. Then she said apologetically, "I'm afraid I'm not really a bookish woman." I was gobsmacked. It's also worth noting that she recently suffered a heart attack. Find out more 13 November 2012 We could have been anything that we wanted to be. (Bugsy Malone) The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling, her first adult offering, eschews the boy wizard and deals with such grown-up issues as rape, prostitution and drug abuse. Critics have said the book has 'divided opinion', is 'no masterpiece', 'doesn't deserve the media frenzy surrounding it', is 'just dull'. Rowling is undoubtedly a genius in her original genre and has been laughably emulated by many uninspired wannabees but now she is straying outside her comfort zone. Similarly, I always struggled to think of William Shatner as anybody other than Captain James T. Kirk or Patrick Macnee as anybody other than John Steed. Some things are just meant to be. Find out more 22 October 2012 How full is your Glass? These days we can travel to where we want to go faster than ever. An airliner covers a mile in about six seconds. We can taste food from every continent without travelling very far and we can download enough books and tunes to fill a reference library the size of the planet Jupiter. When it's warm we have air conditioning and when it's cold we have central heating. We have machines to wash our clothes and our crockery and we can talk to friends anywhere on the globe and see their faces. So why aren't we happy? Why is most of the world at war? Why is there so much depression and mental illness? Why does the next generation show little or no interest in inheriting this paradise that we have created? Find out more 29 September 2012 All Things must pass Our modern saints and holy people are known as celebrities or celebs. Young people, in the absence of any alternative suitable role model, worship and emulate them - their bad behaviour, laughable hair styles and poor, halting speech. Celebs represent the triumph of impact over style, fad over good taste.
I think culture's a wonderful thing, don't you? I include religion too as a part of culture, all admirable. Look at our society today for example, lashings of culture everywhere you look. Our religion is called Premier League football and our media are deeply religious. They are obsessed with goal scoring and league tables, and we suffer hours of futile interviews with semi-articulate louts and mumbling ex-muggers, all jibbering about tactics and transfer fees. Find out more 24 August 2012 Vandals Nobody likes vandalism and yet those who vandalise the English language go unpunished. Their crimes are many and, at the risk of shocking you, I will outline a few heinous crimes. They fall into various categories such as punctuation, number and confusion of verb and subject. Let me outline those offenders which should suffer the death penalty. Find out more 16 July 2012 Pray to the Tart There was once a lazy, loud-mouthed man who had never done a day's work in his life and, like his father before him, lived on state benefit. His equally revolting wife also drew state benefit, in order to support their seven children, four of which were sired by different men. The three eldest boys received their secondary education in special units because of their behaviour. All the children had criminal records. One fine day, to their great delight, they discovered they had won forty million pounds on the lottery. Find out more 16 June 2012 Selective Blindness It seems that common sense is lagging only about thirty years behind modern life. How frightening if it ever caught up! I struggled to stifle a groan recently when I heard a very upbeat announcement on the radio, "It is now believed that more emphasis should be put upon grammar, spelling and punctuation in schools." Yippee! The proverbial penny is dropping at long last. As teachers, I and many others used to whisper the heresy of grammar, spelling and punctuation behind closed doors. The more 'progressive' teachers would bleat, "Oh no no no, you obviously don't understand, we don't believe in all that old-fashioned stuff any more. You are a dinosaur, tut tut tut." Find out more 05 May 2012 A Novel Approach What is a novel? We know it isn't simply a string of events, so what is it? Let's look at some linguistics. The etymology of the word novel lies in that which is new or different. The French word roman is associated with the Romance. In the very old days men strove to achieve higher goals, to be worthy, to be valiant. Think of Beowulf or Odysseus or even later, Robin Hood in the oral tradition. But in the more modern novel all this was to change. Find out more 19 April 2012 A Novel Concept Just as every Tom, Dick and Harry believes he could fly an aeroplane, so almost everyone believes he has a novel inside him. How often have I been assured, "It's just that I haven't got the time."? If only these people had fewer commitments, they could produce a masterpiece of literature during their training to captain a Jumbo Jet. They might write about their personal life, which they are convinced would make riveting reading for people burdened with a more humdrum existence. Find out more 28 March 2012 The ailing Child of the Times Literature is just as surely a child of the society from which it springs as are movies, car design, fashion, architecture and even language itself. In the nineteenth century the fascination with science and the belief that man had no limitations in his pursuit of knowledge, led to the science fiction of H.G.Wells and Jules Verne. It gave us Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In the twentieth century two World Wars, numerous other conflicts and the notion of glory in the field of battle gave us the Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky and the Cruel Sea.
Find out more 14 March 2012 BBN Sir, I'm arresting you for being sober in the street on a Saturday evening and for failing to cause a disturbance. But, I - I - no, you're right, I haven't had a drink. I thought that was the correct way to behave. Let's leave out the witty banter, sir, if you please. You're clearly sober and I did notice, if you'll pardon my saying so, sir, that you have not urinated in a public place nor have you displayed your bare backside to public view. Find out more 08 March 2012 Break the Cycle When a society loses its moral values, it has to search around for something else to drive it along. The substitute for morals tends to be fads. The irritating thing about fads is that we don't just embrace them as if each one is the best invention since sliced bread, no, we go completely overboard and lose all sense of proportion over them. Find out more 01 March 2012 Do you dream about Traffic Wardens? I know it's not original thinking to point out how an earlier prediction is being fulfilled, but Google is about to build up a profile of me through my choice of browsing on the internet. This will lead to pin-point advertising - not a scatter gun as hitherto but a hyperdermic with offers aimed only at me, knowing all my weaknesses and proclivities, some quite unsavoury. Find out more 15 February 2012 Baby and Bathwater It doesn't seem so long ago that teachers were saying to their pupils, "Write me a story, don't worry about spelling or grammar. It's the content that counts." Thus spelling and grammar came to be regarded not as the fundamental building blocks of language but rather as a sort of irritating extra consideration, which could be dismissed if necessary - for example by a young illiterate. Find out more 06 February 2012 Created not Creator People assume that when God dies, civilisation goes down the pan at the same time. They will say, "Look how western civilisation is collapsing. God is dying." Dying he may be - in the west but he's having quite a comeback in the Muslim world. It's all about self-belief which they have and we no longer have.
Find out more 02 January 2012 An open Letter to all deceased English Writers Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, Find out more 09 December 2011 Marmite and the Movies To bring their ideas to life, writers use their powers of description. People who make movies use special effects, sometimes distastefully written as special FX. Just as a child who has received a water pistol for Christmas squirts water over everyone, so this new digital effects toy is being overdone to an almost laughable extent. Find out more 02 December 2011 A Brave New World One of the striking differences between Australian and English people is the Australians' very vocal pride in their country. Not only are they very patriotic but eager that you should share their enthusiasm for 'the Thirsty Giant'. Find out more 17 November 2011 Paradox One of the things a writer can do is to present a character defect as a positive advantage in his craft. Find out more 07 November 2011 Brisbane and Sydney Brisbane is the State capital of the great sprawling mass of Queensland. At night Brisbane buzzes to a cocktail of foreign languages, the traffic roars and the neon lights are bright. Find out more 04 November 2011 The Rainforest The Daintree Rainforest in North Queensland lies just 16 degrees south of the equator. About 50 miles north of Cairns, it feels like part of the South Seas. Find out more 30 October 2011 The Tropical North Darwin wallows in its own sweat on the shores of the Arafura Sea. It's almost like an island, stuck in the far north of Australia thousands of miles from the big cities further south. Find out more 27 October 2011 The Red Centre Ayers Rock rises abruptly out of the flat bush in Northern Territory, a great reddish hump, baking in the heat. Find out more 22 October 2011 Outback The coach journey north from Perth to the beach resort of Monkey Mia is a little short of six hundred miles and takes you close to the Tropic of Capricorn. It is unbelievably tiring, since the road is straight and recedes into infinity with little or no traffic and endless bush on either side. The earth is a sandy red and the occasional emu struts in front of the vehicle without a care in the world. Find out more 19 October 2011 Perth Singapore to Perth is two and a half hours and a whole culture away. The flight crosses the equator and what we used to call the East Indies. The warm sunshine and cool breeze of Perth are bliss after the appalling humidity of Singapore. Find out more 17 October 2011 A note from Singapore The Writers' Bar at Raffles Hotel in Singapore is still haunted by the gifted spirit of one of my literary heros, W.Somerset Maugham. The whole place reeks of Empire and understated gentility. Find out more 05 October 2011 Short stories and why I write them Some people write, others paint or sculpt or compose music. That still leaves 98% of the population who do none of these. The purpose of the lives of creative people, those 2%, is to shine a light into the darkness in order to present the world as it has never been seen before. Only they can do this. Find out more |
|