Ray Schaufeld's blog

My optician advised me that because I have a 'complex prescription' if I see flashes or floaters in front of my eyes I should get to A & E straightaway as it could be a detached retina. Eight nights ago I was reading in bed. I thought I had a speck of dirt on my left lens but no. I have a little spidery thing that swivels round when my eye moves. Sunday morning at RD & E was quiet. I was seen in under 3 hours by the eye nurse. I would...

Two friends, one now dead the one living writes about the friendship. I don't think I like Lucy, her friend. Ann gives us a selection of Lucy's letters to Ann who she often addresses as 'dear pet' They seem twee, shallow, lacking in reciprocity. 'you will have make do with being my favourite bagel, my favourite blue awning above some great little cafe where the coffee is strong but milky and has real texture to it.' Why all the poetic...

No it's not my boyriend's bean stew I'm talking about weather, gusty breeze, longer days, shivering in the sun. A feeling that the year is cracking open like a hard shelled egg.The usual 'stay or go' dilemma coupled with awareness that choice can be a soft bed to sink into. I'm doing new bits of paid and voluntary work, helping with mental health training sessions for student doctors and nurses through Experts by Experience, also waiting till my...

When I read Alans' sequenced tales from boyhood up to leaving Glasgow for London and returning for Hogmanay .a line from the opening'Tinsel' hit hard. Wee Aleck is reading his Wonders Book of the World and 'nothing in the book was like anything he had seen'. I was 19 then and from Wembley Park. Ok no-one in my family was called Janet or John and I had a lot of aunts mostly living abroad who were all called Eva or Trude but the houses, the...

Radio 4 is our only well-known channel which is about words not music. Where do they get their material from? The formats often feel 'tired' and threadbare. How do 'us lot' get in there? I suspect unless we are very lucky or a known name our work sinks to the bottom of a barely glanced at submissions pile. Could one of our editors approach them and get a regular half hour, call it 'easy as Abc?' or something. It would be win-win because Radio 4...

Some of my past work is in the Womens' Library, currently housed on the top two floors of the London School of Economics. Back in the days of second stage feminism I wrote opinion pieces, book reviews, poetry and a short story for the Edinburgh Women's Liberation Newsletter and my pieces are in files on shelves in the open collection. I decided to photocopy them while they were still there. The Women's Library, previously the Fawcett Library has...

Why is Exmouth's only well-known female writer (1919-1999) almost invisible? The Guardian and the Independent both describe her poetry as 'wry.' Wry rhymes with 'shy', the vowels of wry chime with 'irony'. No mention of passion, fire, humour, bite. The lace curtain of 'wry' sells her short, ignores her often present precision and anger. Her swipe at her father, who lived his working life 'from puberty to impotence' as a railway clerk at Exeter...

A long book which does away mostly with character, dialogue and plot. A central character who is a lot of people the main one, Bernardo being a 'mutilated' Fernando, the same environment but more restricted. The lethargy of a still great capital city in a country which ruled the world for centuries. A ledger clerk who is underpaid and accepts it as he has become almost fond of the office where he works as a near robot and who thinks Vasques, his...

A collection of letters written by people who have been through depression. We address a person 'out there' who we imagine as currently struggling with it. Each letter starts 'dear you'. About 50 letters each of us saying in our own way 'you are not alone' to a person feels they are and 'it won't last forever, that's the depression talking' to the person who feels the illness may never lift. 'From Elsie' is on pages 153-54. A simple format and...

Go on, I dare you. You will not feel out of place if you go on your own. I saw it yesterday and most of the audience were my age or older. Only a few had rounded up a child or grandchild. Good inventive slap-bear-stick. A varied set of real and imaginary views of London, Paddington Station, the Shard and showground with a mystery object that leads our innocent marmalade-head to aargh! prison. Don't want to give away any more but it's...