Happy New Year

To all my fellow bloggers and the wordsmiths and photographers who provide such interesting reading and wonderful pictures: Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the glimpses into your lives. Here's wishing you and yours health and prosperity in 2013.

Eve of the Eve

The day before New Year's Eve here in Pennsylvania. This Sportsman and some like minded souls took to the field for a Tower Shoot on a cold and windy Sunday morning. I am on the right in the foreground heading for my shooting peg. About 25 of us get together for these shoots during the season and the wingshooting is challenging. After the shoot, we head up the hill to the landowner's home where a steaming pot of soup awaits and some porter and lager is poured. It is a great way to spend some time afield and on this particualr Sunday, despite the cold...the bright sun and the snow covered ground made for a stunning setting. My thanks to the photographer Ed Wheeler ( who is a professional behind the lense) for capturing this moment for me.
Happy New Year to all.

Christmas Post

Happy Christmas everyone! Thank you for your support in 2012. Thanks to the help of many kind people, I have accomplished more than ever this year. We go onwards and upwards from here. In prison, Christmas is the time when suicides peak. Here's what I wrote about my last Christmas in prison (2006), plus a conversation on Boxing Day with Two Tonys, a Mafia mass murderer, now deceased, who protected me.

“Standby for chow, Yard 1. You’re getting breakfast first.”
On a cold crisp Christmas morning, below a pink and blue sky, I join the prisoners drifting towards the chow hall. Most look miserable, as if suffering a winter virus. A few swap greetings and gang handshakes.
“Merry Christmas, homey!”
“Happy Hanukkah, you sarcastic motherfucker.”
“Happy Kwanzaa, dawg!”
“Felice Navidad, ese.”

Inside, each of us takes a tray as it emerges from a slot in the wall. Breakfast is pancakes, scrambled eggs, cinnamon rolls, cereal, and an apple. A guard with a clipboard checks off names, and jokes about how hung over he is. The rising sun floods the room with light, illuminating the dust motes dancing over our food. After fifteen minutes, the guards order everyone out. The prisoners rise from tables strewn with spilt milk, corn flakes, and apples stabbed to prevent hooch brewing.

We retire to our cells. While I reflect on being absent from my loved ones, a sad silence spreads across the yard. No basketball. No pull-ups or dips at the workout stations. No squabbling. No “motherfucker” this and “dawg” that. No announcements.
At least it’s my last Christmas here. I read to take my mind off the mistakes I made to lose almost six years of my life.

At Building B, a guard starts a security walk. “Put away your hypodermic needles! Don’t let me catch anyone drinking hooch!” 
By the time the swing shift arrives, the sun is shining through a sky mottled with clouds like the hide of a cow.
In a slow sarcastic voice an announcement comes: “We would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very merry Christmas and to thank you for providing us with such a wonderful 2006!”
The yard animates with obscenities and threats:
“Merry fucking Christmas to you, too!”
“Shank you very much, motherfucker!”
“Come and say that to our faces, bastards!”
The guard continues: “And you’ll all be pleased to know that we fully intend to keep up the time-honoured Christmas tradition of shaking your houses down.”
Two guards – a female and a Mexican we call the “Fruit Nazi” who overzealously seizes apples and oranges from inmates leaving the chow hall – raid cells, scattering property, confiscating food, thwarting hooch operations, and doling out disciplinary tickets.

Late afternoon, we emerge for a surprise. The Gatekeepers – a young and high-spirited choir – sing carols from the other side of the perimeter fence. Briefly, I’m not a prisoner anymore. I’m someone’s son, brother. I’m human again.

At dinnertime, skimpy portions of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and broccoli provoke outbursts that unsettle the guards. 
After eating, I join a queue for phones that barely work. Written on the faces of the prisoners are the usual concerns. Will our loved ones be home? Will they accept the expensive call charges? Unable to get through, some prisoners hang up, cursing life.
Nearby, a demolition team of pigeons is savagely pecking the cling film off chow trays abandoned by the guards. From a burst of blowing dust that deposits sand in my mouth, a flock of Chihuahuan ravens descends – a vortex of big black birds with a purple and blue iridescence – scattering the pigeons and ravaging the spoils.

A final announcement at 7:55pm: “Yard 1, rec is over. Take it in and lock down.”

On Boxing Day, I meet Two Tonys at the fence. “How the fuck was your Christmas?”
“Not too bad because the day before I got an unexpected visit from Royo Girl, which gave me a boost,” I say, grinning. “It’s been so long since I saw her, I almost wrote her off. We got a little kissing action in, and she said she’s coming back soon. How was your Christmas?”
“Good ’cause I ain’t got no beefs,” Two Tonys says. “Let me ask you something, Shaun. You ever heard of Chad or Somalia or Sudan?”
“Yes.”
“Well how nice a fucking Christmas do you think those poor motherfuckers had?” he says, raising his chin.
“I see what you’re saying,” I say, nodding.
“Do you know how many pieces of apple pie I got?”
“No.”
“Three, and two issues of roast beef. It might have looked like shoe leather and tasted like shoe leather, but that’s OK ’cause guess what?”
“What?”
“Ivan Denisovich would have snorted those motherfuckers up with his left nostril, and been as happy as if he were having supper with Mikhail fucking Gorbachev.”
We laugh.
“That’s my barometer now: how rough Ivan had it,” Two Tonys says. “Imagine being happy to lick some carrot gruel off a spoon. Or having to ride the cook’s leg to come up on some extra gills and tails in your fish-eyeball soup. Or Slingblade grabbing your bowl of oat mush, and you’ve got to go toe to toe with the fucking Neanderthal or starve to fucking death. My point is this: how the fuck can I complain when there’s always someone worse off? Of course I’d like to be chowing down on a Caesar salad, some escargot, a little bowl of scungilli, and some ravioli stuffed with spinach, but I ain’t gonna let those thoughts get me down.”
“What did you do on Christmas Day?” I ask.
“Played a little casino card game with Frankie. Watched a little TV. Sang some fucking Christmas carols to myself: ‘Silent Night,’ ‘Jingle Bells,’ and all that shit. How the fuck can I get depressed in here? This is my retirement home. Not just any motherfucker qualifies to be in here you know. You don’t just hop on a bus and say, ‘Driver, take me to the big house.’ This is an exclusive club. You’ve got to put some serious work in to get here. And what’s good about it is they can’t ever kick me out, ’cause I’m doing life. If things get shitty in here, I just tell myself, Get a grip, man. What would Ivan Denisovich be thinking? Would he be raising hell about his waffles being cold in the morning? Would he fuck! Like I’ve said before, that’s PMA, bro. That’s my positive mental attitude.”

Shaun Attwood

Manchester Book Signing

Pics from today's signing at the Trafford Centre.

Hair of the day. I think this young woman belongs on the cover of Party Time.

Great to meet my long term reader Hazel Andrew in Manchester today.

This woman lives in Tucson, Arizona.

 Shaun Attwood

Merry Christmas

I wish a Merry Christmas to you all. Once again, thank you for your pictures and your prose. Throughout the year it is truly a pleasure to read your posts and see your photos. This week I will be chasing waterfowl and enjoying Yuletide time with the family so no posts for a few days.

"Fenwick's in the manger," Sportsman's Alternative Christmas Movie Suggestion

 Long before my wife and I were married, I took her to the Sam Eric on Chestnut street one evening. This palatial old school movie house was showing a one-time sneak preview of "Diner." The 1982 release of this classic film was scheduled, but the studio did some limited East Coast previews... they were gauging audience response. I was absorbed by the dialogue and the period tone, the soundtrack and the cars. The script captures the guy-banter better than any film prior to that time.It is funny, touching and real.

The film take place over the Christmas holiday and culminates with the wedding of Eddie and Elise on New Year's Eve. As such, "Diner" technically qualifies as a Christmas movie. In fact, the scene of Kevin Bacon's "Fenwick" lamenting the theft of the baby Jesus and removing his clothes to do a stand-in at a local church Nativity display is as off beat a Christmas scene as one can find on film. I have watched this movie countless times and know the dialogue by heart.

Recently,Vanity Fair" ran a great piece on "Diner" and the significance of the film:

"Made for $5 million and first released in March 1982, Diner earned less than $15 million and lost out on the only Academy Award—best original screenplay—for which it was nominated. Critics did love it; indeed, a gang of New York writers, led by Pauline Kael, saved the movie from oblivion. But Diner has suffered the fate of the small-bore sleeper, its relevance these days hinging more on eyebrow-raising news like Barry Levinson’s plan to stage a musical version—with songwriter Sheryl Crow—on Broadway next fall, or reports romantically linking star Ellen Barkin with Levinson’s son Sam, also a director. The film itself, though, is rarely accorded its actual due.

Yet no movie from the 1980s has proved more influential. Diner has had far more impact on pop culture than the stylistic masterpiece Bladerunner, the indie darling Sex, Lies, and Videotape, or the academic favorites Raging Bull and Blue Velvet. Leave aside the fact that Diner served as the launching pad for the astonishingly durable careers of Barkin, Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, and Timothy Daly, plus Rourke and Bacon—not to mention Levinson, whose résumé includes Rain Man, Bugsy, and Al Pacino’s recent career reviver, You Don’t Know Jack. Diner’s groundbreaking evocation of male friendship changed the way men interact, not just in comedies and buddy movies, but in fictional Mob settings, in fictional police and fire stations, in commercials, on the radio. In 2009, The New Yorker’s TV critic Nancy Franklin, speaking about the TNT series Men of a Certain Age, observed that “Levinson should get royalties any time two or more men sit together in a coffee shop.” She got it only half right. They have to talk too.

Yasmin

My little niece with cancer, Yasmin, made the tabloids today. She was at the party at Great Ormond Street Hospital, where thieves stole the kids' Xmas gifts. Check this pic out of her in The Sun: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4703522/Thief-nicks-sick-kids-Christmas-gifts.html

Shaun Attwood

Blind Banter

Unlike Turkey or deer hunting, where being still and quiet is paramount, duck and goose hunting affords the hunters a chance to talk. Once you are set up in the blind, once the decoy spread is just so, once the guns are loaded and ready, once the dogs are settled, you wait. You wait for the honk of geese or the dark shape zipping by that is a group of mallards circling for a look. At those moments the only words you want to hear are "Take 'em."

But in the interludes, you can talk. You have a couple of hours in the blind with your son or your buddies. Talk ranges from politics to ribald jokes to child rearing and hunting stories. You talk about books and movies and game recipes; you talk about dog training and marital issues(perhaps the similarities of same) and you talk about sports and upcoming hunts and maybe even work. In this era of smart phones and Blackberries and text and tweets and other electric connective artificial urgency and static, it is a treat to be in the blind in the outdoors where the sounds eminate  fom nature and from the hushed offering of your blind mates. The quiet talk in the blind is comfortable and genuine. It is the talk of sportsmen and fathers and sons and friends. These exchanges are part of the memory and the enjoyment of hunting as much as the sweet crossing shot at thirty yards on a wood duck or the two geese you drop with two shots when a group of 5 has their gear down and is dropping into the spread.

Birkenhead Book Signing

Just got home from Birkenhead. The young woman in pic 1 had the best hairstyle of the day. In Pic 5, I'm with Acronym Man, who approached me, and said, "I like acronyms. Here's Waterstones: Whales And Tarantulas Eat Raw Strawberries Tremedously On November Evenings Sometimes." I laughed, and said, "How about WH Smith?" Without hesitating, he replied, "Weevils Hate Small Monkeys In Their Hotel."

Acronym Man introduced himself to my mum as, "Julius Ceasar. I'm over 2000 years old." "You look well for your age," Mum said. "I had much more fun invading England than I have in England these days," he said. For 20 minutes, he laid acronyms upon me, until a staff member took him aside and escorted him out. Every now and then, you meet a colourful character in Waterstones.   

 

With Acronym Man

Shaun Attwood

Frankie's Heart is Broken

This is a recording from my call to Frankie last night.
Shaun Attwood

Manchester Book Signing

Pics from today's signing at the Trafford Centre. I'm signing there again on Christmas Eve.

Shaun Attwood

Table-Scape

 When I bring home game, I enjoy making an event out of dining on the fruits of the labor a-field. My wife takes great pleasure in creating the "table-scape" to compliment the meal. She watches the cooking channels and with some inspiration found there has become very creative and skilled at creating a canvas upon which we can paint a delicious game dinner.

 I posted earlier about the wild boar one of my friends shot. As I was the recipient of about 50 pounds of wild pig meat, we have had several fine meals from this bounty. A few weeks ago I labored for several hours to cook another huge  batch of wild boar ragu. My wife set this beautiful table for 8 and we invited some like minded souls who would enjoy the boar.

We began with cocktails and some appetizers. I made some wild duck mini empanadas to accompany the drinks and my wife made figs stuffed with Gruyere and wrapped in bacon. A flash under the broiler yielded a second delicious pre-dinner offering. At table, we began with a plated Ceasar wrapped in proscuitto with shaved sharp provolone. The ragu was served on paperdelle wide pasta. Some full bodied red wines were offered by the guests and Sarcones seeded peasant loaves rounded out the meal. Judged by the slurping and grunting and lack of conversation during the entree, everyone loved the boar and seconds were demnaded by most. Eat what you kill....and now and then do it in an elegant fashion. Cheers!

Manchester Book Signing

Met some great people at the Waterstones Manchester Trafford Centre signing today, assisted by my friend Wild John. I'm back at the Trafford Centre all day tomorrow.



With Wild John

Shaun Attwood