Nanowrimo Winner

[Total word count: 20,915]

A long afternoon in the fourth floor meeting room at Cincinnatus House. It holds eight in theory: there were twelve of us. We’d reviewed the Period 3 reports, we’d heard a long and halting exposition of proposed new statistical software. Now we were hearing a lengthy but fluent exposition of tolerance levels for GM material in food products within the EU. Probably it had something to do with the viability of the new product launch, but my attention was far away by now.

But something was stopping me from drifting fully into dreamland. A word kept coming up that vaguely irritated me. Diminimus. There it was in glowing red Arial on the PowerPoint slide.

“Ah, Bill,” I said, tentatively, “It’s not, er ‘Diminimus’”

Bill, five years older than me but looked at least ten, with his male-pattern baldness and greasy old suit, looked up in surprise and then smiled.

“Oh yes,” he said, “Sorry. That’s a sort of technical term. I should have explained it. Diminimus amounts fall below the prescribed limit, which means that on certain conditions the authorities disregard them. It means the amounts are so small they’re basically OK from a pragmatic point of view. Too small to bother with, in other words. OK, John?”

“Yeah, I understand the idea, Bill,” I said, “Just wanted to point out that the term is not ‘diminimus’. There’s no such word.”

“I think there is now, John. I’m afraid we all have to cope with these new jargon words, however much we dislike them.”

“No, you see, it’s actually two words. The term is ‘de minimis’. D-E, one word, M-I-N-I-M-I-S. It’s not ‘diminimus’. Sorry to interrupt your flow, don’t mean to be pedantic.”

He smiled a little smile.

“I think you’ll find you’re wrong, John,” he said, “I’ve got this from a Ministry leaflet.”

“Then the Ministry is wrong as well.”

“I don’t think that’s likely. With all due respect, John, I think you’ll find the term is ‘diminimus’. Why don’t you look it up afterwards?”

“Look it up? I don’t need to look it up, Bill. The tag is ‘de minimis’, and it’s a shortened version of ‘De minimis non curat lex’, which is Latin, meaning ‘the law is not concerned with trifles’. A Latin tag, but not a classical one – it doesn’t come from any Roman author, at least not in that form. The earliest recorded use of it is by Francis Bacon, in fact, and it seems he was basically varying an older tag which does come from Roman sources, namely ‘de minimis non curat praetor’. Now an interesting thing about this particular phrase, you’ll notice, is how its meaning changes. The Romans meant, top people don’t deal with details: they didn’t necessarily mean some lesser magistrate wouldn’t deal with the minimal issues. When Bacon used it, he meant that the trifling matters can be ignored altogether: although the law may prescribe a certain payment, if the amounts are trivial, it isn’t meant to be imposed rigidly. Nowadays, it’s used by civil servants to mean a provision which lays down explicit minima, beneath which things can be ignored. Note that this is quite different from the actual meaning of the phrase; if the law contains actual provisions about trifling amounts, then it actually does curat them; instead of an implicit principle, we’re dealing with explicit rules. But never mind all that: all I’m saying is, you ought to spell it right. OK?”

“I think you’ll find that it may have been spelled that way once, John,” said Bill, “But this is how we’re spelling it now.”

As we filed out, Kevin Johnson leaned towards me.

“Could we have a quick word, John? In my room?”

His room was a kind of cupboard with a specially reduced desk in it, but it was still a token of greatly enhanced status. Kevin was a gangling, sandy-haired man, but he always wore really good suits. They could actually be Savile Row, perhaps, but they were definitely not off the peg. I’d often thought that I’d like to ask him where he got them, but it just seemed slightly cheeky, and I never got up the nerve.

“What was all that ‘de minimis’ stuff about?” he asked.

“Sorry, it just annoys me. There’s a practical point, too though: if he keeps spelling it wrong he’s going to look stupid. Reputational risk. And it is ‘de minimis’.”

“As far as I’m concerned it’s spelt A-R-S-E-H-O-L-E-S. I mean, fair point about looking stupid, and I’m sure you’re right, but you should have let it go. We all know you’re clever, and we value all that, but then again, there was John H in that meeting: he did Greats at Oxford or something. He’s probably forgotten more about this stuff than both of us have ever known, but he didn’t feel the need to make a fuss about it.”

“Alright,” I said, resignedly.

“The thing is, John,” said Johnson, leaning forward, “You’re doing pretty well here. If you put a bit of effort in, you could be going somewhere. We were thinking of putting you in for your Manager interview. Normally you’d have to wait a couple of years, but we think you’re capable of moving on if you put your mind to it. Don’t quote me about this. But it would be a shame if you did anything to put people off you just now, OK?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. Thanks.”

“OK then. Maybe I can help a bit, if you’ll let me.”

I stood up and edged around the chair.

“Anyway,” he said, “I think you’ll find it wasn’t Bacon who used that minimis phrase, it was a fellow called Verulam.”

“No, no, you see Bacon was… Oh. Yeah. Got you.”

He grinned at me with the twin pleasure of catching me out and demonstrating that he, too, was conversant with the great minds of bygone days. A-R-S-E-H-O-L-E. Still, I had a definite spring in my step on my way back to my humble cubicle. To be put in for the Manager interview at this stage of my career would be a really encouraging sign, not to mention the probable increase in my salary of around 15%. And quite a kick in the teeth for my contemporaries in the marketing function of Behemoth. Especially people like Bill, who’d been around the place for donkey’s years. It is not enough to succeed, gentle reader: others must fail.

But that evening, as I sat down once more to Wenham, there was no triumph in my mood. In fact, and in short gentle reader, I was blocked. The blockage appeared to have a number of causes.

Cause 1. It was just absolutely bloody stupid that Charlie should do a kind of Fosbury Flop out of a car falling into the canal and live to tell the tale. I mean, not just implausible, totally, utterly, bloody stupid.

Cause 2. I was just tired. I believe, gentle reader, that my organ of originality is fecund and productive, but you know, there are limits. I just didn’t want to force myself to start thinking yet again of what was supposed to happen next or what somebody was supposed to say now. It’s not that I don’t want to do it at all: I just need, you know, a rest. But a rest is exactly what bastard Nanowrimo will not allow my sore, over-used creative faculty.

Cause 3. Wenham is shit.

Cause 4. I started this whole thing in order to persuade Julie that we should move in together in the fullest sense. Remember? And yet, if anything, it is driving a wedge between us. I never go out with her in the evening, I keep spending time alone with my laptop (please, no sniggering), she doesn’t understand or appreciate why I’m doing this.

Cause 5. Statistically, everyone gives up. The Mouse, Tom, Richard: everyone I know who is attempting or has attempted Nanowrimo, has failed. The odds are heavily stacked against me. Do I even want to succeed against that background? To all intents and purposes, anyone who succeeds is a freak.

Cause 6. Wenham is shit.

Cause 7. If Kevin Johnson is be trusted, and up to a point I think he is, I really need to put in a bit of extra time burnishing my reputation at work just now, but there are only so many hours in the day.

Cause 8. I don’t like detective stories. I may have given the impression earlier, with my knowledgeable references to Trent’s Last Case and Dame Ngaio Marsh, that I was a bit of a buff. I’m not. I have only ever read three detective stories all the way through, and two of those were Sherlock Holmes, which don’t really count. So if I don’t even like detective stories enough to read them, why in the name of God am I trying to write one? Moreover,

Cause 9. I’m making myself acutely vulnerable here. Normally I spend my life with a protective shield of irony. I just make witty, disparaging remarks about stuff. People can’t really tell how serious I am. But when you publicly write a novel, you’re basically saying, hey, I think these words of mine are good. OK, you can still do all sorts of post-modern distancing stuff, but in the end you’re still saying you think this stuff is good. It might be obvious to everyone else that it’s shit. And in fact,

Cause 10: Wenham is shit.

At the moment, gentle reader, Geoff and his girly bottle of fizz is all that’s keeping me going,. Good old Geoff. I knew you wouldn’t let me down, mate.

I sit here staring at the small comma-shaped dot of magnolia paint on my old white radiator and try to summon the energy to go on regardless, but disgust and fatigue prevent my troubling the array of white pixels before me. I even begin to toy with the idea of an alternative novel. A Western. It would be called The Zoroastrian. ‘Tell the truth and shoot straight, ma’am: that’s my creed right there.’ Too late for that; too late for anything now but the expansion and completion of Wenham, or surrender.

OK, look. There are reasons why I’m writing a detective story. The form has rules and conventions, which support me when raw inspiration dries up. I can also claim to be parodying the constraints and limitations of the genre if I have to, in order to ward off any mockery which might come my way and provide a secure retreat into ironic detachment.

What gives me a real problem is this idea of the fourth sibling. I thought it was my salvation, but the more I think about it, the less I like it. Three is a good number. It’s always three sons in the old fairy tales. Four just looks like milking it. I don’t like the character either, with her pushy ways, her designs on Charlie, and her spaniel eyes. What I really need to do is write her out again and carry on from there, but I just have not got the will or the time to do that.

What I’m going to do is write a long digression. The mad old vicar corners Lady Sarah in the chancel one day and tells her a bit of old folklore: the Legend of Wenham. This will prefigure the recent events in the village and provide a crucial clue.

So, the legend says that when a party of Guthrum’s marauding Danes came to Wenham, they cut the local lord into pieces and fed him to his own dogs. Godraed his son, taking the coward’s way out, fled in the direction of Wales, land of shame for him.

The local Danish leader, Othlac, giver of rings and wielder of the axe, settled in Wenham and ordered that there be given a huge feast for his victorious men. Every cow for miles around was slaughtered and half the Endle Forest, place of elder magic and darkness, was felled to make huge fires for roasting. Oceanic quantities of ale were brought in casks, and the Danes sat down in the open air (to ward off enemy charms) at long tables. They kept their weapons to hand, just in case.

When they’d all eaten and drunk, not their fill, but half the food in the county, a man from Othlac’s entourage named Vandrad brought out a board for hnefatafl (which, gentle reader, is a very vaguely chess-like game of that rude and simple era), bidding the heroes make war now with walrus teeth as they had lately done with teeth of iron.

So the fuddled Danes took to the board; but suddenly dispute arose between Ragnar Snout-nose and Brank Ilgursson. Brank insisted that Ragnar had removed one of his men from the board while he was taking a draught of ale. Ragnar not only denied the charge but swore he would nail Brank’s head to the prow of his ship if he did not apologise. Unfortunately, there was long-standing bad blood between the men, the result of a clash over the Perismunde, fair daughter of Thorkell Crookback. Vandrad unlocked the subtle word-hoard, reproaching the chiefs for their unworthy anger, and sought to smooth the matter over by suggesting the men should pledge each other, but unluckily, as they stood to do so the missing piece fell incriminatingly from Ragnar’s lap.

Within seconds, the kinsmen of both players had seized their arms and joined in a terrible fratricidal battle, the drunkenness of the warriors doing little to abate the lethal qualities of their weapon-play. Othlac stood up and bellowed for order: but at that very moment his head sprang from his shoulders, struck off by a long sword in the hand of Vandrad, cunning traitor he.

For Vandrad, who had insinuated himself into Othlac’s party only a few days before, now stood revealed as none other than Godraed, crafty son of the slaughtered English lord: far from Wales, he let out a mighty blast on his horn, summoned from their places in hiding battle-hardened veterans of his father’s thegns and the less terrible but more enthusiastic levies of the Fyrd, who together swarmed over the remains of the Danish force, still hard at work consuming itself like the worm Ouroboros, and obliterated it. The arrival of Alfred to contest Guthrum’s advance a few days later protected Wenham from any further incursion and the village lived in peace for the next century.

Hm. Think I’ll take that out again, actually.