At The Blackrose Netcafe
Posted by WS on February 2nd, 2006I’ve been working all morning on the stage adaptation of my 1993 short story ‘Scale’, which appeared first in the literary magazine Granta and latterly in my collection ‘Grey Area’. Ostensibly the tale of a man with a severe DIY opiate addiction, living next to a model village, ‘Scale’ is perhaps my most Borgesian of stories, in that I tried to incorporate within it 5,ooo-odd years of human history (massive time scale), and every known literary genre – oral ballad, free verse, academic thesis, thriller, stream-of-consciousness &c. Naturally, there are also myriad plays on all the available senses of the word ’scale’: kettle, music, lizard, bathroom &c. When I was writing it I gloried – as we monoglots all must – in the rich synonymy of the English language.
