by Michael Bloor
(first published in Literally Stories, August 21st, 2025)
It’s an April Sunday afternoon, the long, wet, cold winter has not yet relented. Alan sits staring at the blank email on his laptop. He’s meant to be sending a newsy update message to his brother in New Zealand. The rain splatters against the window. His brother was wanting him to come to New Zealand on holiday. Apparently, there’s a beach on the Coromandel peninsula where a hot water spring bubbles up through the sand: you could dig yourself your own hot tub, and sit there watching the tide roll in…
No fuckin’ chance of the Coromandel peninsula this year, bro.
Normally, on a Sunday, he’d be down the allotment. But the weather, the frosting of his new potatoes and his baby lettuce, has driven him away and indoors. And he really ought to email his brother, who’d be wanting fresh news of their mother, in the hospital after having her foot amputated – a consequence of her diabetes.
It wouldn’t be right to alarm Derek in Auckland, who’d been back visiting the family only last year. But there really isn’t much he can tell his older brother that isn’t bad news. It doesn’t seem fair to tell someone in New Zealand how upset his own mother is on the other side of the world. Some stuff could be delayed til next month’s email, like the departure of his (Alan’s) long-term partner, Louise, who’d frankly deserved better and eventually found it. But the forthcoming closure of Atkinson’s Engineering (two years after being taken over by Capita-Task – registered office in the British Virgin Islands) would be something Derek would almost certainly be reading about, as an overseas subscriber to The Ilkeston Advertiser.
Alan would get some redundancy money, but not much – he’d only been with Atkinson’s seven years. It would certainly be an awful lot less than The Honourable Piers Atkinson had got for selling his shares in Atkinson Engineering two years ago…
Instead of the tricky email to Derek, Alan suddenly finds himself typing a coldly furious email to The Honourable Piers Atkinson. Last night, in his Louise-less bed, he’d been re-reading Herzog, the 1960s masterpiece by Saul Bellow (1915- 2005).The eponymous main character, a middle-aged writer, lecturer and would-be public intellectual, is teetering on the edge of a breakdown and financial ruin, unable to concentrate on his writing. Herzog is being divorced by his wife who has run off with his best friend. The wounded husband takes a kind of comfort in dashing off angry undelivered letters to his psychiatrist, to the priest who converted his wife to Catholicism, to old childhood friends from Chicago’s Jewish district , to dead public figures like the post-war politician, Adlai Stevenson, and so on.
Alan reckons Herzog might’ve been onto something. He finds distraction, if not relief, in tapping out the Atkinson email:
Dear Honourable Sir,
We met previously five years ago, just before Christmas. Old Mulligan, the then Chief Executive, was taking you on a factory tour and you both walked past the door of my Despatch Office. Mulligan introduced me. You shook my hand, wished me ‘A Merry Christmas’ and moved on. May I therefore follow-up the opportunity of our previous acquaintanceship, to tell you that I’d very much like to take your hand again?
I’d like to twist it behind your back to the point where I’d be hoping to dislocate your shoulder. And I’d demand to know whether flogging off the family firm to an asset-stripper and throwing 97 people on the scrap heap ever causes you a wee midnight qualm? And did no-one ever point out to you that squandering your family legacy on a share in an F1 racing team was a clear case of arrested development…?
Alan has to break off at that point and use the toilet, which he noticed in passing could do with a good clean. Resuming his seat in front of the laptop, he finds his murderous rage has flushed away. Instead, he feels an urge to mail to his old hero, William Morris (1834-96).
Dear William Morris,
It’s not your fault that my uni MA dissertation on your prose romances didn’t lead me anywhere. Nor that I ended up in Atkinson Engineering’s Despatch Office.
I confess that, back then at uni, I never took seriously your revolutionary politics, putting it down to artistic romanticism. But now I realise that your plan for turning The Houses of Parliament into a manure store was well-conceived, and is ripe for revival….
Calmer now, but no further forward, Alan decides to put off the email to New Zealand til tomorrow, but he doesn’t shut down the laptop. He fetches the bottle of Highland Park that Louise had bought him last Christmas, pours the last of the whisky into a glass and raised a silent toast to William Morris. He has one last unsent email to type:
Dear Saul Bellow,
All your life, you were committed to realism; friends and enemies alike would find themselves reproduced in your novels. Your lifelong commitment to realism stemmed from your strong commitment to leftist politics in the 1930s. You even travelled to Mexico City to visit Trotsky, tragi-comically arriving the day after he was assassinated. In Herzog, your suffering writer-hero faces financial ruin in the divorce from his philandering wife.
But you were a notorious philanderer yourself. You were married five times, for Christ’s sake! Did you think there was a special rule for writers, you randy old writer-hypocrite?
He shuts the laptop, drains his glass and looks out the window. It’s late afternoon and the sun is now shining; the first butterfly of Spring is fluttering at the window.