writers-circles.com

I suppose every club, group, society has its oddball. A person seen, by virtue of their physical characteristics or behaviour, to be different from the rest. The Little Snoring Scribblers had Henry Russell, affectionately known as 'Henry the Hyperlink'.

Henry was not exactly a misfit, more an unusual attribute. In the context of creative writing, his indulgence was the 'creative' rather than the 'writing'. Henry took early retirement from his job as a landscape gardener several years ago, and found himself at a loose end. Paradoxically, he didn't have a garden of his own, being more inclined to indoor activities. A bachelor, he lived with his two Westies, Marmaduke and Morrison, in a beautifully restored observation coach. This coach was once part of the rolling stock of the London and South West Railway Company. Now it was parked in The Siding, what remains of the railway line that used to run alongside the village.

How and why he became a member of the Scribblers, no one was exactly sure. Perhaps he wanted the companionship, because although he said he was interested in writing, he never seemed to do any. But, as Lavinia Fanshawe remarked one evening in the village pub, 'The Idle Farmhand', after having had one too many gin and its, "So what? Considering the parlous state of the group's finances, I'll take anyone's money!"

But what we didn't know in those early years was that Henry had a hidden agenda. That 'loose end' had been tied to computers. He'd enrolled on every course in computer programming he could track down. Virtual Basic, JavaScript, Pascal, C double plus, he took them all in his stride. Henry lived on a small pension, so there was one criterion: the courses had to be free (although he thought nothing of forking out £80 for a 48-hour round trip to Inverness for a half-day seminar).

Gradually and diffidently, Henry began to apply his computing knowledge to the writing discipline. At one of our 'open evenings', he brought along his laptop and demonstrated a program he'd devised called 'Gramcheck' - one step further than Spellcheck - which could highlight and correct syntax anomalies. On another occasion, he produced a graphics program which showed that when a Shakespearean sonnet was passed through the eye of a virtual needle it rearranged itself into a villanelle. 'Here was a genius at work', we all thought.

However, Henry's resourcefulness eventually met its match : Hypertext Literature. For those who are not familiar with this relatively new writing genre, allow me to explain its principles:

1. It is a form of interactivity between the computer operator, a specially-written program, and what is notionally a piece of prose or a poem laid out in conventional linear form.

2. Various keywords in the text are designated as 'hyperlinks'. That is to say they can be clicked on in order to diverge from the linear text along an alternative route, much like the layout of an algorithm.

3. In this way, the operator (or reader) becomes his own author. He decides the way he navigates through the original text.

One evening, Henry demonstrated the above using a story of his own making. The result was a revelation. The Scribblers were fascinated by the possibilities and begged for more. Eventually, so convinced was Henry in his programming ability, he announced he was going to produce a piece of work in which ALL the words were links. In effect, it would be the Rubic Cube of hypertext literature. Through his network of computer buffs he obtained an obsolete IBM mainframe computer, which he installed in the tool shed adjacent to his dwelling. Then he set to work on his magnum opus.

The climax of his endeavours came on a late summer's evening, under the light of a glorious full moon. Members of the Scribblers were just emerging from the library after a meeting when there was a tremendous bang from the direction of The Siding. The volunteer fire brigade was alerted, as was the village doctor who, with some members of the Scribblers, hurried to the incident. What they found was a surreal scene. Henry's mainframe computer, unable to cope with his demands, had exploded. The subsequent blast had torn away the wooden roof and sides of his dwelling, revealing an unscathed Henry, still seated at his computer monitor, with a bemused look on his face. The doctor quickly examined him and pronounced him to be in deep shock. This diagnosis was reinforced by Henry being heard to mutter to himself repeatedly: "open bracket, HTML, close bracket, next line, open bracket, BODY, close bracket, next line ..."

Poor Henry, we never saw him again at our meetings. Which was a pity, because we were all of the opinion that he'd brewed the best pots of tea we'd ever tasted.

Copyright © Paul Grainger, Jan 02