Darkness

When the light is switched off and the candle is snuffed, blackness pours itself around you like melancholic bile. You feel depressed, as if the dark is a blank canvas on which all your worry and inadequacy makes itself known. The dark is awful and unclean, even if you are not a nychtophobe.

While you sit in solitary silence, totally devoid of light, the dark sets its malevolent hands upon you. Black velvet gloves that reach reach out to your throat. Velvet gloved fingers disturb your hair and snatch at your clothes. What makes it worse is the knowledge that these gloves do not exist. They are simply illusions vomited by your frightened imagination. Therefore, they cannot be faught against.

When the gloved hands of darkness compress your throat further, you know you cannot stand the ordeal any longer. You snatch up your lighter and, with trembling hands, flick the switch to light the candle. A tiny, indistinct blue orb glows firstly, emitting very little light. The flame soon, however, expands into a yellow steeple of light streaked with red and blue, supported by the scaffold of the wick.

You take the tiny light and sit with it before a mirror. The yellow steeple gives off heat that makes your chin and upper lip perspire. Its limited light is insufficient for you to make out the colour of your own hair and eyes. However, it easily picks out every line and blemish in your face, a blackened tooth, the silvery hairs sprouting between your eyebrows, the tiny craters of open pores and the glittering white flakes of dead skin on your chapped lips.

You again lift the tiny bell of the snuffer and extinguish the flame. A tendril of grey smoke billows from the wick carrying the special scent of molten wax to your nose. Sitting there, the black velvet gloves now stroking your face tenderly, smoothing out your wrinkles and hiding your blemishes away from judgemental eyes, you reason that no light at all is better than partial light. It's all or nothing.

Why I'm called Welford Soar.

I very much like the pseudonym that I have chosen for myself. My own name, although I have no objections to it, I fear is too 'personal.' Also, I doubt very much if NMH would be taken seriously as a historical novelist. Another reason is that my pieces seem better written by someone totally anonymous. A person with a name and an ability for writing, that is all.

The Bronte sisters chose pseudonyms that were neither male nor female names, as we all know. I love the idea of a non-gender specific name. Especially as I have a very masculine writing style. NMH could be accused of all sorts of crimes, but Welford Soar is simply a name.

I live in New Wharf Hall on the banks of the River Soar. George Orwell chose his surname from the name of a river, in which case, so shall I. What about a first name? In the great city of Leicester, there is a great road. An artery pumping the citizens and their motors in and out of the city's generous heart. The name of this raod is Welford Road. 'Welford' goes well with 'Soar.' Welford Soar it is then! Welford Soar, I like.

Welford Soar is not a man, Welford Soar is not a woman. Welford Soar is not a feminist, Welford Soar is not a misogynist. Welford Soar is not a Communist, Welford Soar is not a Facist. Welford Soar is not black, Welford Soar is not white. Welford Soar is not gay, straight or bisexual. Welford Soar has no political opinions. Welford Soar has no spouse. Welford Soar has no children. Welford Soar is a contradiction in terms, just a name, a veil, a screen. Welford Soar is simply Welford Soar.

Solitude

Leave me. I want to be alone.
When I need somewhere to be alone, but I am not quite ready to face the four gloomy walls of my room, I meander through the streets. I know from experience that there is no peace to be had in Leicester. The only place I can go is the Cathedral courtyard. Even there, passers-by come and go every few minutes.
I stand by the buttresses, or sit on a piece of masonry - a mourning statue of an angel clad in black - and try to wear an expression of deep melancholy. The same expression on the face of John Keats when he composed his Ode to the bird of infinite melancholy.
Inside the quaint, hipped spire (as Hardy would have put it) the great bells of Leicester chime the hour, the quarter hour, the half hour, three quarters and the next hour. I sit below them, but perceive them as clearly as if they were inside my temples.
I feel a true Leicesterian under the great Cathedral spire. I serpentine between the benches and headstones, gazing up at architecture chiseled by very curious hands. Hands that had to be strong enough to drive a chisel into the depths of the stone block, yet delicate enough to fashion the intricacies of Simon De Montfort's nose and Gabriel Newton's curls. Two pairs of hands metamorphosed into one. A physical paradox.
Many a reverie is ardently pursued under the proud bosom of the spire. Even if my own Pagan religion rejects such organisation, such architecture, such materialism. When I am alone, however, it hardly matters if I am in awe of an architectural tribute to Christianity. The statues were, after all, fashioned by the hands of man, not by the hands of God.

The Writing Question

I am always being asked to consider the question: "Why do we write?"
It is a conjecture I do not find easy to solve although I know I love to write. It is almost impossible to explain my love for writing. Ideas simply enter my head, one after the other and jostle in my mind like people in a crowd. The side effects of this are nausea, insomnia and a mind that will not let go of painful memories.
I find the insomnia part of it terribly irritating. It is far from uncommon for me to be writing at four am while my flatmates have just arrived back from a night out. Many writers I admire have suffered insomnia: Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov were all raging insomniacs to name but a few. Dickens often walked late at night, which he described in his essay "Night Walks," and Kipling often wrote late into the night, in the same fashion as I sometimes do.
However, despite the trouble it gives me, despite the insomnia, the painful memories and the infuriating sensation I experience when I am inspired and do not have a notebook to hand, I love writing. I am a true Paramour of Prose. I love the physical sensation of the blood throbbing through my writing hand. I love the sheer freedom of writing. When I write, I do not feel I have to follow the conventions of speech. If I had to say the words I write, I would choke on them, but it's so easy to put those very same words down on a page. I also love the fact that writing acts as an outlet for all the ideas that enter my head and scream in my ears until I want to cry "Enough!"
I cannot give up my writing. Without my poems, short stories and my novelettes, I am nothing. They are me and I am them. Without them I do not exist.