A Matter of Style

I’ve got the uncomfortable feeling I should be writing something. Can’t think what. So I’ve been drinking tea and blogging about writing. Which is like writing to avoid writing. It’s like I’m trying to drink myself sober.

So, let’s talk about style. Remember this from The King James Bible:

..and the Devil spake unto them, and said “ye shall attach tiny bells to the front parts of thy vestments, and thou shalt cause handkerchiefs to wave at the end of thine arms, and thou shalt worship me. And shouldst thou be accosted and accused thereof of being a follower unto me, though wilt babble something about Morris Dancing being traditional, and thus shall you embark upon a subterfuge that hast thee seen as a hopeless bumbling ninny and identified not as the truest spawn of my Satanic Majesty”…

No? Maybe you don’t have the same edition I have. How about this from Shakespeare:

“would my lady find it meet to peruse me in the street, and near the rivers yawning mouth, we could  journey but one day south, awkward questions to avoid, on whom had justly drown’d those Morris Dancers?”

Or even the rare out-take from Dirty Harry, where Clint Eastwood has a cup of Lapsang Souchong and is then accosted by “traditional” street performers:

“You have to ask yourself, do I feel like mincing about like a drunken bell-wearing clown when bullets from a .44 magnum are capable of stopping such behaviour ? Well, do you, punk?”

The point, which I am belabouring here, is that many styles are recognisable and copyable in writing.

And just so in tea.

Someone whom I won’t mention by name- because if his bullet-riddled corpse is ever found floating face down in the mangroves north of my home town, the constabulary will be asking me some searching questions – once told me that he thought Twinnings China Black was a great flavoured blend made with poor tea. So he created a new blend to provide the same profile with better tea.

Does that shock you? (not the bit about the bullet-riddled corpse, but the idea that someone might’ve pinched someone else’s “tea style”)

It shocked me a bit.

The first thing I did was to do exactly the same thing as a scientific experiment. I bought a well-known tea, and spent a month perfecting a counterfeit version, but better.

Of course, I then confined it to my own use.

In tea, it’s often worse and more blatant. Twinnings have a “Lady Grey tea” which is, I believe, a trademarked proprietary name. That doesn’t stop about a  billion tea merchants banging some rose petals and/or a bit of lemon peel in some Earl Grey and calling it “Lady Grey”. Twinnings must be pretty upset.

Is there anything wrong with trying a blend and then attempting to recreate it, perhaps improve it?

For the final thought, I want to relate a half remembered interview I read about Eric Clapton. He basically said that he was playing someone else’s song, and then he changed a few chords, and then he changed a few more, and then he had new song.

That whole notion made me uncomfortable.

But then again there’s only so many styles of tea and/or writing.

The problem with the internet is you can now find out that someone half a world away had had exactly the same brilliant idea as you, and expressed it virtually the same way. I mean, I could sue Stephanie Meyers because my first book had a load of well-behaved vampires in it, but what’s the point?

I think we can all be proud of our own style in everything we do. If it happens to be similar to someone else’s, than that’s OK.

If we’ve just nicked it, then we should burn in hell. With the Morris Dancers.