Good Afternoon Grapple Fans

I hope you enjoyed last week’s review of The Maltese Falcon. If you get round to reading it, I be interested to know what you thought of it.

This Friday’s story is part biographical, part fiction. The original idea was to write a true story about my grandparents, but I found I couldn’t do it justice without introducing some fictional elements. The basis of the story is the memory of my grandmother watching the wrestling. British all-in-wrestling was a very different affair to the modern day American counterpart and, for some reason, was very popular with little old ladies.  For a lot of people, particularly women,  born in the late Victorian era, life was quite a restrained affair. Watching wrestling was one way of letting inhibitions drop.

Part of the fun of writing this story was doing the research. The two wrestlers who appear in the story are real characters and I’ve tried to describe how they actually behaved in the ring. Another enjoyable part of writing the story was trying to use fictional techniques to describe real people. It’s something I want to develop over the next year or so as I delve into our family history.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to make some tweaks to how the blog works. Some are technical, like including gallery pages for photographs and upgrading how comments are managed. There will be some changes to the content too. I’m continuing with the photo-essays and book reviews, but I’ll include a wider-range of items too, including  posts about how the family history project is going.  This means in the short to medium term at least, there will be fewer fictional short stories. I promise I’ll write and publish ‘Camel’s Revenge’ later in the year, but at the moment at least I’m more interested in writing non-fiction. There’s so many amazing true stories to write about, that it seems odd to be making things up.

Liz and I are off to Robin Hood’s Bay on the North Yorkshire coast for a few days. If the weather’s half-decent I hope to take some photographs, which I’ll post up next week.

All the best!

Dave