Invasion

I am not asking anybody to believe that I have an exhausting life, because I do not believe that myself.

Nevertheless I was so tired this evening that I got halfway through my dinner and had to give up and go to bed.

We were having a night off, this is not the sort of behaviour that might be possible on the taxi rank, where my bed is a long way away and not accessible for a quick snooze between customers.

I was looking forward to our night off very much indeed. I had spent the day doing book things. I wrote some, although not a complete chapter, and edited a lot, and then had to address myself to my current knotty creative problem, which is this.

I have been considering the premise for my story quite a bit but think I may have not given proper consideration to the general theme behind it. I have not been able to think of a single reason why anybody at all might want to invade Yorkshire. Or, indeed, once I started considering it, anywhere at all.

Now that I am planning and trying to finance one, an invasion suddenly seems to me like an incomprehensible waste of money. Let us suppose you invade York, as I have considered in my story. You invade it, kill everybody who argues and then sit in it, eating all of the nicest things and sleeping in the best Yorkshire beds. Firstly you have got to do a great deal of clearing up, because of the corpses you have left lying about all over the place.

Then, once you have eaten everything nice, you have got to persuade all the people around York to bring you more nice things to eat. They might be reluctant to do that so you have either got to pay them, persuade them, or kill a few of them as encouragement for the rest. Everybody will be sulking very grumpily, and not be at all keen to give you anything nice, so you have probably got to carry on being horrid to them for quite some time, or share the nice things out quite liberally, which might change their minds, but would mean that there wouldn’t be nearly so many left for you. This would water down the benefits of owning York quite a bit.

Quite possibly most of the ordinary people in York wouldn’t care very much who owned it anyway, as long as nobody was coming round to their house stealing their daughters or hitting anybody with sticks. They would just get on with doing things like selling fish or making sausages or shoes or candles or wardrobes.

After a while the person who thought that he ought to be the rightful owner of York, i.e., probably the King, would turn up. He would hang about outside and would fire guns and throw stones and stop you pinching nice things from people on the outside of York. If you were not jolly careful pretty soon you would run out of nice things. Then you would be stuck in York with no nice things and another collection of corpses to get rid of.

The whole thing is suddenly completely and utterly a waste of effort, especially if you were somebody who already owned some nice enough places, like Edinburgh. Why on earth would anybody bother?

Surely it would make more sense to spend the money with which you might have paid your army by investing in really useful things, like some decent ships for selling the stuff that you had already got lots of, like wool. Or in having nice holidays to York every year if it was really that important to be in York. At least then you could enjoy it at times without corpses or plumbing disasters or anything awful, because you could just buzz off home when those things happened, feeling relieved that it wasn’t your problem.

This difficulty is causing me some thinking, which actually is probably why I am so tired, it is not something that I need to do very often in a taxi.

In my book a sensible and intelligent monarch invades York. This happened quite a bit, which is why York is so heavily fortified. Robert the Bruce did it, among others.

The problem that I have is that I can’t equate the two halves of the sentence, ‘sensible and intelligent” and ‘invades York’.

The two seem to be mutually exclusive.

Answers on a postcard, please.

The picture is Mark making solar panels. He is doing this whilst I am invading York.