HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY: Pete Sortwell

Luca asked me to be in on ‘Off The Record’ a while ago now. Having read his story ‘Shooter’ and seen him around the Facebook writing community over the last few months, I was happy, no honoured, to be asked. The fact I had to write something inspired by a song at first was a bit of a ball ache, as I tried to crowbar in something relating to the novel I have just finished. That was called ‘Rehab’ after the Amy Winehouse song. It had an emphasis on the ‘No, No, No’ part of the lyric and it turned out shite. With the closing date looming I considered giving up for a while. Then I remembered one of my good friends was actually nominated for the Mercury music prize in 2007, in fact he was in up against Amy then too. Neither won in 2007. However, in the ‘Pete Sortwell chooses a title of one of your songs contest 2011’ James ‘Maps’ Chapman came up trumps. I have even drawn him a picture (that’s a lie actually but I thought about drawing him one). So I gave the album covers a look through and saw ‘So Low, So High’. As I was listening to it I also remembered an episode of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ where Del, Granddad and Rodney have gone poaching and end up holed up in a cottage, rain pouring down outside, and a lunatic on the run from the local mental hospital. Rodney sees a face outside and thinks it’s the madman, that’s when Granddad comes out with the line I nicked for the last line of the story. Have a read and find out what it is.

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Pete Sortwell