I bloody love the Barbican Estate.

I’ve been living up the road from this controversial London landmark for about five years, and take any opportunity to visit and have a stroll around. I first visited the Barbican more than ten years ago, when I moved to London, and I remember feeling like I had slipped into the future. Not our future, but some other future that never came to pass.

The Barbican typifies the sort of over-reaching, Corbusian, architecture-as-social-engineering housing estate that sprung up between the end of the war and my birth, many of which informed–or were used in–the production design of the dystopian SF films of the sixties and seventies. It’s no surprise, then, that it feels to me like some alternate-history version of the 21st century.

There’s so much space. In any city, a building project featuring such a spread of water and greenery, so close to the centre, would feel ambitious. Here – a couple of minutes walk away from the financial district of the UK’s capital – it feels decadent. Stand in the heart of the Barbican Estate, and you experience quiet like nowhere else in the centre of London, so far are you from the surrounding roads and traffic. There’s no vehicle access. Residential buildings are connected by elevated walkways, and there’s a lake and a central court. The estate houses an arts centre, a music and drama school, a museum, and a prestigious private school for girls.

I expect it’s because of its proximity to the City, and its cultural features, that the Barbican hasn’t fallen into ruin, like many similar developments. Some of its residents are incredibly wealthy (residences go for up to £1.75m), and have therefore found themselves on the more fortunate side of the UK’s ever-growing rich-poor divide. The same can’t be said for Robin Hood Gardens or the Alton Estate.

The Barbican Centre itself is a fantastic place, right in the centre of the estate. It has two theatres, a concert hall, a massive library, cafes, restaurants, an art gallery and a cinema. It’s a sort of cultural pleasure dome. When I go there, whatever the time of day, it always feels like it’s about twenty past seven in the evening and the show is about to start. It has that sort of atmosphere: orangey light and anticipation. I love the open plan layout and the exposed concrete and the 70s-ishness of the whole thing.

The Barbican is also home to one of my favourite museums, the Museum of London. London’s greatest asset is its history and the Museum of London takes you right from the bronze age, through the Romans and the Saxons, the plagues and the fire, Dickens, the war, the swinging sixties. It has everything, and it’s just had a fantastic hi-tech makeover. It has saved me on countless rainy Sundays when the kids were going mad with boredom. I love the little Victorian street with its little shop windows and the pub you can sit in. I love the new augmented reality exhibits. I love the fact that the centrepiece of the Roman exhibit is just a huge window overlooking the actual Roman wall which runs through the Barbican Estate. (‘Barbican’ actually comes from the Latin for ‘fort’ and there was probably a fort nearby during the Roman occupation.)

The Estate was built to fill a massive area cleared by bombing during the Second World War. The ambition of the project was only made possible by the scale of the devastation it was established to repair. It’s therefore a classically London estate. This, after all, is a city which has been rebirthing, reforming, and rebuilding itself constantly for two thousand years.

I haven’t. But I am getting close to having a system which, given the tremendous constraints my job and my kids place on my time, just about allows me to function as a creative individual, and which has ridded me of the problems of half-baked ideas and unfinished stories which had dogged me for years. I’m quite proud of my wee system, so I thought I might share it here.

My system depends on a handful of principles I learned when I was an actor, trying to write plays and going to improvisation classes. The principles concern ideas, and how to handle them.

Dave’s principles for idea-wrangling

1. An idea can come at any time – You can’t think an idea into existence. You can’t force it to come when it suits you. In fact, the opposite tends to be true, as it’s all the other stuff you do in life that fuels your creativity. So be ready. Carry a notebook. Keep one by your bed. Fill them up and never throw them away. If you don’t like paper and pen, you could stick Evernote on your mobile, although if I’m caught short I tend just to send myself a text.
2. Ideas don’t always look like ideas – They don’t announce themselves to you. It’s often said that the difference between writers and everybody else is that writers can recognise an idea when they see one. Learn to recognise an idea for what it is.
3. Ideas are fragile things – You’ve got to freeze them with liquid nitrogen before they wither and die. Write them down the second they come to you.
4. There are no bad ideas – Not at first anyway. Just get them down. Worry about whether they’re good or bad later. In my experience, an idea that looks bad is often either looking for the right vehicle (something that works for a comic short story might not work for a feature-length TV drama) or incomplete in some way (see #5 below).
5. Ideas love company – It’s the friction between seemingly unrelated ideas that often creates sparks. Rub them against each other and see what happens.

These principles are the foundations of everything else.

A couple of years ago, I wasn’t finishing anything. Every time a new idea came along, I fell in love with it. I wanted to nurture it, nurse it into life. So I ditched whatever the current project was and started a new one. This went on until I had maybe ten or fifteen stories that I’d managed to outline or written a thousand words of, then abandoned.

The hourglass

I discovered that finishing projects is a craft in itself. It’s one I haven’t entirely mastered, but like all crafts, I’ve found it helps to develop an approach that suits your sensibilities.

I’m a crap multitasker, so my approach involves compartmentalising my efforts such that I’m only ever doing one thing at a time. If I’m writing a draft, I don’t stop for anything until that draft is finished. That means when an idea comes along, I need to get it down quickly then forget about it and get back to what I’m doing. And it takes me ages to write anything because I have so little spare time. This creates a queue. Ideas pile up.

In fact my system is less like a queue, more like an hourglass. I have far fewer fully-formed ideas than bits of ideas, still fewer story propositions and outlines, generally only one story on the go, then a number of stories at various stages of editing and (eventually, hopefully) still more stories that are finished, submitted, published or available on spec.

The key thing is: I’m only ever working on one section of the hourglass at a time.

Development week

Every couple of months, I’ll free myself up for a few days, finish whatever draft or edit I’ve been working on, and dedicate myself to nursing those little ideas I’ve been gathering. Well, I say nursing. What I actually do is smash them into each other, LHC-style, and see what comes out. How would this story look if I put it in that world? What would these two characters have to say to each other? How might this idea address this theme? And so on.

I might, at this stage, introduce new elements. I’ll listen to music for a sense of mood and tone. Maybe throw in a couple of lines of dialogue. Anything to guide me towards understanding what sort of a story it is I’m looking at. Then, when I think I have something, I scribble down a hundred word summary, and move on.

This way, I end up with a pool of reasonably well-formed ideas from which, when it’s time to write a new story, I can pick the one that – to borrow Joss Whedon’s phrase – is crying out for food the most.

The next stage, as I explained to Colum, is usually realising that I’m not enough of a writer to do the idea justice. But I’ll always have a handful of decent ideas worked up, so I’ll pick the one I think I can make the best go of, and start writing.

And I won’t write anything else until I have a draft.

When to let go

Crucial to this whole method is knowing when it’s okay to shelf one idea or project and move onto the next. This was the bit I was getting wrong all those years. You don’t let go of a draft until it’s written. Similarly, when you glimpse an idea, you don’t let go of it until you’ve taken it down.

It takes discipline. I’m only allowed to do development in “development week”. If I get excited and start flitting between ideas at any other time, it all falls apart.

Of course, I’ve settled on this method after a lot of fumbling around, and it works well for me because I have a particular temperament that fits with this way of working. But I struggled for years and this advice wasn’t anywhere. If someone had offered this advice to me a few years ago, I’d be way ahead of where I am now. So hopefully someone suffering similar difficulties might stumble across this post, and find it helpful.

Season Two, not so much. Too much darkness. Too much overarching plot. Too much mindfuckery. And then it got cancelled.

I saw this article in The Guardian at the weekend and it got me thinking.

What’s wrong with TV?

It has been a while since a new genre-based show came along and blew everyone away. And when there seems to be a genuine candidate, it inevitably screws up and gets itself axed. Even long-running favourites, like Who, seem to have lost their mojo. What’s going on?

Well, I have a few theories.

The God-Forsaken Arc

Showrunners want us all to think they have a plan. Every new show is launched with accompanying soundbites from the writers: we have a five year arc - or –  we know where it’s all going, we’ve written the last episode already.

I don’t know much about how the industry works. Maybe this is a way of keeping the networks off your back. I suspect it’s more to do with retaining viewers when things go a bit ropey in the middle of the second season. It could be a reaction to the negativity that surrounded later seasons of Lost, but let’s not forget the writers of that show made the same claims.

It’s fine. We like a bit of mystery, little hints of a wider continuity to keep us coming back. But it isn’t necessary to pour gallons of narrative into every episode. Look at Doctor Who. The best episodes in recent years – Dalek, Blink, The Doctor’s Wife - they’re all stand-alone episodes. Lost was at its best when maybe one episode in five moved the wider story along. That first season of Dollhouse too.

The Sodding Darkness

For reasons I can’t fathom, it has become terribly common for TV writers (and filmmakers, for that matter) to boast about how dark they’re going to make things, as if that of itself is a good thing. This probably comes from The Empire Strikes Back, which was certainly darker than its predecessor. Thing is, Empire was also deeper, more fun, revealed more about the characters we had grown to love, and was better crafted. The fact that it happened to be darker is almost inconsequential. You know what – Pirates of the Carribean 2 was darker too. And it was shit.

You can test your characters by throwing them into new depths of peril, but if it doesn’t tell us anything new about them, or give them a reason to grow and evolve, what’ve you got? You’ve got Amy Pond in a pod, having a baby sucked out of her womb and then going back to happily married life like nothing ever happened.

The Flaming Mindfuck

This is my personal pet hate of the day, and for this I lay the blame squarely on Messrs Whedon, Abrams, Lindelof etc. Writers’ favourite boast at the moment seems to be:

“You won’t believe what happens next!!!”

And usually, crushingly, that’s because said writer has gone for a cheap plot-shock, rather than a well-crafted development for which the appropriate groundwork has been laid. I’ll admit, there’s a sort of masochistic pleasure for a viewer in having the rug pulled out. But you inevitably end up paying for it later as the writers struggle to work it into the continuity. That moment in Lost when, out of nowhere, Ben Linus murdered John Locke, the show’s best-loved character, in cold blood – it was a shock, yeah – it got the heart rate up – but a huge chunk of my love for the show was invested in that character, and it died with him. And for what? It’s not like the actor wanted to leave or anything. He stuck around, but he had to spend the next year and a half playing some paper-thin villain apparently made of smoke (or some shit like that, I never figured it out and I don’t care).

The Next Lost

Going back to that Guardian article. I sincerely hope the Next Lost, when it does come along, employs none of these tropes. It’ll be a show you can drop in and out of, with some great characters that develop gradually in subtle ways. It’ll be fun. With no surprises. Like Quantum Leap.

It was fun. I was only there for the day but I found it inspiring, thought-provoking, infuriating at times. I didn’t get to speak to everyone I wanted to, didn’t see everything I had planned to, surprised myself by how much I got out of the things I did see.

There was some disparity in the quality both of panel moderation and of the contributions from panel members. You’re always going to get a few pompous windbags trying to dominate – it’s the same anywhere. The Guests of Honour – what I saw of them – were all excellent. Tricia Sullivan in particular, whose work I don’t know at all, was insightful, generous and witty in both of the panels I saw her do.

There was a great discussion of the portrayal of science in the media which, despite the general message being science is good for you and don’t believe what you read in the Daily Mail, still managed to freak me out a little when it turned to the potential dangers of beaming out messages to any extraterrestrial civilisations who might be listening. Something about children shouting in the woods at night. Still gives me the willies.

A panel on Youth and Youthfulness in Science Fiction turned into a broader discussion on cultural diversity in fiction, and contributions from Aliette de Bodard and Tricia Sullivan really brought home to me how much responsibility sits on a writer’s shoulders not just (as we speculative fiction writers often do) to portray the world as we would like it to be, but sometimes just to portray it properly and thoughtfully as it actually is.

And then there was the BSFA awards. I had been shortlisted for the James White Award, which would be presented during the ceremony. I think I calibrated my expectations appropriately so I wasn’t too nervous when the moment came. (A couple of pints of Old Rosie – 7.3% abv – might have had something to do with that too.) It was all over very quickly (the award, not the ceremony itself which seemed to go on for about fifteen years). Congratulations to CJ Paget, whose story, Invocation Of The Lurker won the award and to Tori Truslow, who won a special commendation for her story, Train in Vain. I was fortunate to have the chance to meet both of the winners and they were terribly nice and gracious and I can’t wait to read the stories.

All in all I had a good time. I wish I could have got over my nerves sooner and spent a bit more time talking to the other attendees. One of my acting teachers used to stress the importance of training yourself to see more successful actors as peers instead of idols on some unattainable mountaintop. I can see now that’s where much of the value in these things is.

Having dedicated last year to teaching myself some basic skills and discipline around writing, this year was going to be about reconciling myself to the fact that I am a writer.

And I am a writer. I now write obsessively, compulsively and habitually. But I still haven’t shown my writing to anyone but a group of strangers on the Internet. It’s an uncomfortable fact that Grace, the mother of my children, with whom I share everything, still hasn’t been allowed to read one of my stories.

Well, this has given me the push I needed. I’ve been outed here. It still feels odd, telling people what I do. I can’t say the words, “I write science fiction stories,” without hearing myself in the voice of George McFly. But it took a while to get used to being called Daddy too and I got there in the end.

And I’m ready for the next step.

I’m going to Eastercon.

Only for the Sunday, mind. They’re announcing the award at the BSFA awards and I thought it’d be nice to be there. But I can’t tell you how nervous it makes me. Yes, it’s only a day. I didn’t have the guts (or the money) to make a weekend of it. But I don’t know anyone. I keep thinking it’ll be like those lunchtimes at school when I sat in the toilet because I didn’t have anyone to talk to. But this is the logical next step in my gradual reconciliation and I’m bloody well doing it.

I will report back next week.

Pepe

Julio makes birds in his workshop, powered by the mountain wind. The first bird he made was a parrot, because he was tired of talking to himself. Then he found a way to make all birds talk, so he made doves, because they looked beautiful when he let them go, fluttering down into the clouds like torn paper. They seldom came back, so he made a condor, because condors love the mountaintop. The condor ate the other birds, but it spoke eminently and when it soared, it was as beautiful as any dove.

Now, Julio makes chickens. Every morning he kills one and throws it onto the roof of his workshop. While the condor feeds, Julio sits on the cliff edge and watches the cloud billow and eddy beneath him. There are smaller mountains out there, just breaking the mist like rocks in a foaming sea. Sometimes, he feels that if he cast himself off, he would drift on the wind and land with his feet on one of those mountains.

“Why won’t you eat with me?” says the condor one day. Although his face is turned away, Julio blushes. He finds the condor ugly when it feeds.

“I want you to go down through the cloud, to the Lands Below, and see if there is anyone like me.”

#

Pepe is the condor. Every day, Julio gives him breakfast and then sits alone. He wonders why Julio is sad when the whole of the mountain belongs to him. One day, Julio asks Pepe to fly to the Lands Below, so Pepe stretches his wings on the current that climbs the cliff-face and rides it down as it cools. The cloud sticks to his flight-feathers. He discovers he is afraid of the Lands Below.

When he emerges he lets out a cry because he is amazed by what he sees: endless acres of green; glassy lakes, churning with life; crooked towers that sway in the wind; fires that burn white with heat. He follows a brown river in vast and gentle curves across the landscape until he comes to a great city.

Pepe wheels through the spires of the city. He sees thousands of people. Some see him. They call to their friends and stare up at him as if they have never before seen anything in the sky but cloud. Some laugh and glance over their shoulders as if they suspect they are being tricked. To Pepe they look like food, like the little fat birds Julio makes for his breakfast.

When he has seen enough, Pepe finds a pillar of warm air and climbs back through the cloud. It feels colder and wetter than before. He has come a long way so he rests on a mountaintop, where he realises he is not tired but sad. He completes his journey, and when he sees Julio waiting for him, his sadness becomes easier to bear.

“What did you see in the Lands Below?” calls Julio.

Pepe swoops and settles on the roof of the little workshop. “I saw many things, but I did not see anyone like you.”

When I quit my job, I had to move. I had been living in a shared house – a nice big house – with other people like myself: middle-class twentysomethings with a future. I couldn’t nearly afford it. But I found a place around the corner – a little 2-bedroom Georgian terraced house that some unscrupulous buy-to-let profiteer had carved into 6 bedrooms. A bedsit.

I went to check the place out. I had assumed the guy I had spoken to on the phone – loud, something like a subcontinental accent, broken english – was the landlord, and it was he who greeted me when I arrived. Turned out he was a tenant. He was shaven-headed, of indeterminate race, impossible to age. He looked a bit like Yul Brynner, I thought. His name was Javed.

The first thing he did was offer me food. Not biscuits, or crackers. A meal: beef stew, with rice. I’d just met the guy, and there was something odd about him. He spoke too loudly, and had a peculiar turn of phrase. The beef was stewed on the bone, which struck me as weird. I felt that if I ate more than a couple of forkfuls, I’d wake up gagged and bound in the cellar. I’d read about these things. But it was delicious, as good as anything I’d ever tasted, and I ate the lot.

While I ate, Javed – very nicely – interrogated me. Where was I from? What did I do? Did I have a girlfriend because if I did she couldn’t stay here.

When I finished he said, “I forgot to tell you, this is a strictly non-gay house!”

What?!

“That’s fine,” I said. You homophobic psycho.

I moved in, and though I tried my best to avoid him, I discovered before long that Javed was not only homophobic, but anti-Semitic, anti-American, pretty racist in almost every way, sexist and rude. He ran the house with what he called regimental rules, which meant you couldn’t drip on the bathroom floor, or leave cutlery draining by the sink. I always suspected the purpose of regimental rules was to allow Javed to pretend to himself most of the time that he lived on his own. Well, not entirely on his own. Javed’s best friend was a Pomeranian called Billy (a pedigree – Billy’s full name was Bill Clinton). Javed shaved Billy from the neck down, so he looked like a tiny lion. Billy hated everyone but Javed.

Other housemates came and went. There was a French guy, a couple of Italians. There was a Polish guy who only lasted two days because Javed wouldn’t let him cook all of his meals on the patio using a foldaway barbecue he kept in his room. Javed scared most of the other tenants away. If someone left, it was because of Javed.

Me, I worked all day, went to drama school in the evening, rolled in late. I hardly saw Javed so I lasted longer than most. Sometimes he would treat everyone to dinner, buy lots of wine. We’d all get pissed and pretend like Javed was a normal guy.

“Eat, drink, laugh, fucking hell,” he’d say.

One time Javed invited round a former housemate – someone who had lived in that little house for years, someone Javed referred to as a friend. I imagined a boor – someone as rude and racist and wrong as Javed. But the guy who came round was young, professional, polite. He was just like me. And he spoke to Javed like an old pal.

That was the first time I remember thinking there might be something to Javed I had missed.

The following summer was a period of relative stability in the house. We had a cohort of housemates who for one reason or another could tolerate Javed. It was hot. We ate outside a lot. Javed cooked for everyone. And he could cook. God, he could cook. Sometimes, the other guys would bring their girlfriends round, and Javed would be charming, polite and courteous. People liked him.

One night, Javed and I got very drunk, and he pulled out a big pile of photographs. “The women in my life,” he said. They were just pictures of Javed with women. I’d guess they went back ten years or so. Many looked to have been taken in far flung places. He looked exactly the same age in every one.  They all seemed quite happy to have had their picture taken with him. Not as happy as him, mind. I can’t remember if it was before or after that I found out he had been married and lived in Germany for many years. It seemed to me that these were just pictures of women Javed had met in passing, but he remembered many of them by name.

One day, after a few drinks, Javed said: “I am a prince, you know.”

He went on to tell me about his family in Pakistan. He was from an upper class Karachi family. He had cousins in England, New Zealand, Canada. He told me how as kids, he and his siblings would take ripe mangos from under the tree, squash them, and then suck the juice out of the unbroken skin through a hole they made in the end. He still ate mangos that way, and for a while I did too.

I asked him why he chose to live in a bedsit in Finsburk Park. He said he couldn’t go back while Billy was alive. Another time, he said he wouldn’t go back until the country was politically stable.

One night, the other housemates were out and Javed had some friends round. All, old, wealthy Pakistani men like him. One of his friends brought his wife’s nihari, a spicy beef stew. Javed invited me to eat with them. They put the pot in the middle of the table and we each had an empty bowl to fill and a plate of bread.

For reasons I don’t understand, nihari is quite hard to get in the UK. It is probably the most flavour-packed dish I’ve ever tasted. Cheap cuts (typically shin) are stewed on the bone with various spices. Traditionally, the dish is slow cooked overnight and eaten for breakfast with lots of bread. Done right, it’s so tender that you can lift the bone out of the bowl and the meat will stay in the gravy.

I tucked in. After a minute Javed said quietly, “remind me to tell you about Pakistani manners.” I had been pulling huge chunks of meat out of the pot and leaving the gravy. The meat is the expensive bit, and I’d been hogging it.

He was an old fashioned sort of guy. One of the housemates, a really good lad whom Javed was particularly fond of, convinced Javed to let him have a party. It was clear Javed had misunderstood what this had meant when the boy’s mates showed up with their decks and soundsystem. But he went along with it. About an hour into the party, Javed took the microphone from the MC and announced that there was lentil soup and bread for whoever wanted it. Everyone laughed. Javed looked confused.

He worked nights, driving a minicab, not because he needed the money but because he liked the conversation. One night, he pulled his cab to the side of the road and told the young women in the back that they would have to make the rest of the journey themselves. When they protested, he  asked them if they wouldn’t mind calling him an ambulance. He’d had a stroke.

I lived in that little bedsit for several years, only leaving when it was time to move in with Grace. (“Princess Grace,” Javed called her.) And it surprised me to discover that I missed the old bastard. A couple of years later, when Grace was heavily pregnant, we swung by Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park to see if we could see him. He’d go down on a weekend for no other reason than to wind up the zealots. (It turned out that none of Javed’s objectionable views were very strongly held.) And we found him, Billy under his arm, yelling at a fundamentalist Christian that “Jesus was a Jamaican”

Here’s some footage I found on YouTube, from last year. Javed’s the one in the cap, causing trouble.

My new union, the FDA, likes to negotiate. Our members include some of the most senior officials in Whitehall. Not only do we like to negotiate, we’re usually pretty good at it. The FDA has balloted its members on a strike only twice in its 92-year history. We don’t like to do it, and we don’t usually need to. We like to negotiate.

This Government does not like to negotiate. It thinks negotiations are a bit of a joke, not to be taken seriously. When my union officials reported with dismay the inept approach to pension negotiation they witnessed coming from this Government, I believed and trusted them, because this is a union whose track record shows that they take this stuff very seriously indeed. They’re not militant. They’re not prone to rhetoric. They wanted desperately to reach an agreement.

It’s important to us in the public sector that we have unions who will negotiate on our behalf. In the private sector you can negotiate for yourself, name your own terms, make a case for better pay. You can do all that face to face, with your employer. In the public sector we can’t, because our employer is the taxpayer. So we have grades and pay scales and all this crap that seems bureaucratic but is actually designed for fairness and to keep control of how public money is spent. We’re given a grade, and we take the pay and the conditions that come with that grade, and we trust our unions to protect that pay and those conditions, by negotiating on our behalf.

My union believes the taxpayer can afford our pensions. Why? Well, the cost to the public purse of public sector pensions has peaked. It’s already falling. Left alone, according to the best estimates, the cost of public sector pensions as a proportion of GDP will fall, year on year, every year, for at least the next fifty years. The Government knows this. It’s in the Hutton report, which they commissioned. But we’re living longer. We’re enjoying longer retirements. Depending on certain social factors, some degree of reform may be needed to make these pensions sustainable. This is Hutton’s argument. It’s a fair one. And there, you have a basis for negotiation.

But the Government isn’t interested in negotiation. Until this very month, they had made not one serious concession. Despite repeated requests made by my union since negotiations began in the spring, they would not release the costings data for the pension schemes until the middle of last month. And despite the fact that meaningful negotiations could not possibly even start until that data had been received and properly analysed (and this isreally complex stuff), they then set an arbitrary eight-week deadline to conclude negotiations.  There’s a term for the approach the Government have taken. It’s calledplaying silly buggers. And it betrays the fact that, for them, this was never about making pensions more sustainable. It was about something this Government takes far more seriously than the future welfare of public servants. For them, it was always about their commitment to deficit reduction, which they’re desperate to do as quickly as possible to placate the financial markets.

It’s just my view but, done fairly, I support deficit reduction. However, it’s a short-term goal. Pension reform is forever. And making permanent changes that will have negative consequences on people’s quality of life many years from now to solve a short term problem today isn’t fair, isn’t clever. And saying it’s about fairness and sustainability isn’t honest. It’s a downright lie.

It isn’t necessary, for the sustainability of pensions, to switch indexation from RPI to CPI, cutting at a stroke the value of pensions by 15%. It isn’t necessary to impose a levy on employee contributions amounting to 6% of salaries from next year, in the middle of a public sector pay freeze, when inflation is running at 5%. These are brutal, short-termist,deficit reduction measures, which will lower the living standards of many public servants by 20% over the next few years.

Here’s the kicker. That increase in employee contributions? The money raised is going straight to the Treasury. It isn’t even going to be used to make pensions more sustainable. It’s a levy. It’s a tax. Again, this is about deficit reduction, not sustainability.

Some will say public sector pensions are considerably more generous than private pensions. That’s because private sector employers have shafted their own employees by squeezing their pension funds in search of bigger and bigger profits. What has happened to private pensions is a scandal. I don’t want to live in a society where employers and the State race each other to see who can treat their employees the worst. That way, everybody loses.

Some will say it’s time for the public sector to take its share of the pain. The planned increase in employee contributions equates to a levy of £2.8bn. The levy on the banks equates to £2.5bn. So who’s taking the bigger share of the pain?

I live in an average household. We have a slightly lower than average household income and we live in London so our outgoings are pretty high. Since George Osborne’s emergency budget last year, we have suffered the total loss of our Working Tax Credit, as well as the effects of my pay freeze against a background of high inflation. These changes amount to the loss of a very large proportion of our household’s disposable income. Next year’s increase in pension contributions will be another sizeable chunk. For a family like us, living in London, with childcare to pay, these measures hurt like hell. They hurt me, and they hurt my kids. And my reward? According to the Government’s calculator, when I retire I can look forward to drawing £10,000 less per year.

So when the unions are trying earnestly to protect me and my family and millions like us, and the Government start dicking around with the negotiation process, trying to play hardball, play chicken, I feel insulted. When they offer last minute concessions and don’t give anyone the time to analyse them properly and work out what they mean, and then blithely threaten to take them off the table again, I feel insulted. When the Prime Minister gets up in Parliament and describes as irresponsible this action that we have tried so hard to avoid, I feel insulted. We have been treated with contempt. We have tried, repeatedly and with increasing desperation, to avoid this action. But here we are.

I don’t like going on strike. But I think industrial relations matter in the public sector. And for me, that’s what this is about. More than pensions. It’s about protecting the process by which we have always made sure our public servants are treated fairly as servants of the public, who don’t ask to be paid the same as they would in the private sector because they see the value in what they do, not in how much money it pulls in, but in how it improves lives. More than our pensions, it’s that process that I feel is under threat here. People say unions are anachronistic, or that they’re trying to drag the country backwards. But I’ve seen first hand how hard unions work to promote gender equality, diversity and work/life balance. I say we’re pushing things forward. But we can’t do it unless we’re treated respectfully. That’s what previous governments have done. This one needs to start doing the same.

I have a confession.

I sometimes want to eat fast food. Ugly, greasy fast food. The kind that appears on a plastic tray, mere seconds after you’ve ordered it, accompanied by some syrupy soft drink in a paper cup with a straw that squeaks when you put it to your mouth. The kind that comes with lukewarm fries. Not chips, mind. Fries.

I don’t enjoy it. But sometimes I want to eat it. I’m sick.

I was there the other day, in the food court. What a hell. There was a mother, facebooking on her iPad. Her 4-year-old son sat opposite, looking around the room for something – anything – to draw his interest. There was a West Indian woman, shouting at the entire queue in front of KFC for not going when they shouted next.

It smelt of bleach. And a bit of sick.

I perched with my tray at a sort of bar. I read my newspaper while I ate. Head down, in case I should look up and make eye contact with someone I knew.

A man sat opposite. He must have worked in the shopping centre somewhere because he was wearing a fluorescent tabard. He ate his chicken and stared into the middle distance.

Another man sat down. They both stared.

“Best part of the day,” the first man said to the second.

“What?”

“It’s the best part of the day.”

“Yeah, man.” He picked at his fries. “Except for home time.”

“Yeah, second best part of the day, innit?”

On the other side of it, I’ve been critiquing other workshop members’ stories and that’s been really valuable too. You get a strong sense of the common traps and, when you see a technique that works well, you can nick it… I mean, you can see if you can learn from it.

The new story is taking shape. It’s not like anything I’ve written before, but it has a lot of me in it. I’m just about ready to start scribbling down a first draft.