Malcolm Hardcastle is a writer.

Malcolm Hardcastle is a writer who delivers clear, dynamic and efficient copy for a wide range of prestige clients.   Malcolm Hardcastle creates stunning copy that delivers inspiration, action and results. Malcolm Hardcastle is a member of the IAA (International Authors Association), frequently delivering keynote speeches on the subject of Business-to-Business communication.

Malcolm Hardcastle doesn’t fuck about. Malcolm Hardcastle rises each morning at seven am, clears his bowels, and sits down with a copy of the Daily Mail as he takes tea and toast. Malcolm Hardcastle lives in a prissy little cottage overlooking the prissy village green of a prissy little home counties village. Malcolm Hardcastle often wonders why that arsehole next door insists on parking his fucking tonka-toy builders car at such a stupid fucking angle.

Malcolm Hardcastle is renowned for the clarity and punch of his business reports, with many global clients remaining with him for many years.  “The key to a good bit of business writing”, says Malcolm Hardcastle, “is in keeping it authentic and simple”.  Malcolm Hardcastle has won numerous awards for his copy over the years.

Malcolm Hardcastle walks Jethro, his arthritic Labrador, across the prissy green and peers into the glum drizzling air.  Malcolm Hardcastle briefly remembers being twenty one, out in Sheffield one night, when a girl walked past whose very proximity drew every last molecule of his masculinity into a sharp and urgent focus. Malcolm Hardcastle will sit at nine this morning and write business copy for prestige clients and move ever so slightly nearer to his death.

Poem: Wax

why desire is so wrong;

shame forms all hearts' candles

from clumsy overblown fuel

and the wax rolls down in tears

as it cools.

I never knew my father.

When people say “I hardly knew my father” (a lot of people say this, I promise), is this cliché worth responding to? I’m often tempted to reply that perhaps he preferred it that way, seeing as how to him, you might have seemed a bit dull. Perhaps your father had different tastes, standards you couldn’t possibly meet or a short attention span. Maybe he was pre-occupied by something more meaningful to him, something to do with money or collecting something else equally dull.

That’s just me being horrible. Forgive me.

There are other more complex reasons as to why people hardly knew/know their fathers. Perhaps you just didn’t get on. That’s simple enough and needs no explaining, no apologising. You hardly knew your father because until you were twenty seven years old and having your first baby, he just didn’t seem that interesting or interested. Maybe this stranger who slept with your mother was a foul and selfish idiot, who had only ever given you a surname and your sticky-out ears. Perhaps your mother had developed a way of ensuring that you and your father had never shared the same physical space, as doppelganger legend demands that were you two to ever meet, you would instantly be obliged to fight each other to the death. This does happen.  

I though, am allowed to say “ I hardly knew my father “ without hesitation or self-analysis. I have my own watertight qualifier; because I only met him once. 

But this is not watertight really, I’m referring to meeting him once post-babyhood. I think that as a baby you can’t really claim any significant experience of emotional, social or psychological relationships, people were just those fleshy puppets that swung into view from time to time, dangled a toy or shoved a spoon of tepid pap into your mouth. There was an animalistic comfort in recognising the same puppet there every day. Vaguely amusing. Always useful. Some of them smelled nice which helped you sleep in their arms. Apart from that, nothing of any note to a baby.

So I met my father once post-babyhood. He gave me a huge plastic machine gun, which caused a massive ripple of respect for me in the school playground. The machine gun had “real” plastic bullets, which you placed into a spring-loaded cartridge, although they never actually launched from the gun, you would simply take them out to reload them again. It was a huge and multi-featured gun, probably the most up-to-date toy machine gun on the market at that time.

Was there a Freudian message there? My father appearing to me as a complete stranger, handing me a gun, and then disappearing again forever. Was this to arm me for the long fatherless future ahead of me? No. It was just a bit of plastic cack utilised as a kind of pay-off. Nice one Dad. The gun broke within a week, and so did my gun-based status in the playground. In Freudian terms, I was back to square one. Only the bullets survived, and I swopped those for a few sweets. Clearly, I had abandoned an oedipal penis envy for infantile oral gratification. That’s the story of my life.

Excerpt: Handsome Red Hobgoblins: The photographs on the internet.

There was a picture of a baby on the internet. Nothing unusual there, because the internet is awash with pictures of babies. But this picture was of a premature baby with its father.  The father was a jolly chap, very robust-looking and his smile suggested a person who rarely baulked at anything. In fact he looked like the kind of person who didn’t even know the meaning of the word baulked. He definitely looked like the kind of person who had never used the word baulked, in any context. He appeared to be a man living in a baulk-free universe.

This baulkless chap was looming over his premature baby in its incubator; the shiny red hobgoblin fast away in its usual morphine dream-world, with splayed limbs and a face full of ventilation tubes. The father was grinning as he held a credit card next to the baby’s head. To give it some scale. He held the credit card inside the incubator, as if it were the most normal thing to do in the world.

The photograph was probably taken to give the people in his local pub some kind of reference point in terms of size. What I found unnerving was that the photograph had the same triumphal quality of a fishing photograph. If this father had had a hook-slung set of scales on him, that baby would have been on them. It was a photograph of stunningly inappropriate pride and achievement in the face of prematurity’s huge trauma.

Part of me wanted to say “ Hurrah for you and your amazingly small baby!”. But that’s the side of me that makes people feel uneasy. But this guy wasn’t alone. In another photograph a similarly gurning father, who this time looked like he had baulked at something, namely ironing his shirt before going to the hospital, was holding up a fifty pence piece next to his premature baby’s head. Talk about a cheapskate. He couldn’t even muster up a credit card. Or a tenner. It was loose change for this proud father. He’ll need that silver for the car park machine. If he has a car, that is.

Honesty time out. I was tempted many times to find some way of showing people just how utterly miniscule our boys were. How their shiny red fingers were the thickness of a liquorice bootlace, or how indescribably shocking it was to see their legs emerging from the postage stamp nappies, legs that seemed more suited to a frog than a human baby. I did manage to refrain from filling their incubators with everyday objects like oranges, bunches of keys or kitchen roll. Apart from the lack of taste, there’s also the matter of hygiene too.

Excerpt: The Ghosts of the Red Lightship

As the Coventry laid at anchor, awaiting the arrival of her sister ship the Daventry, Edwin busied himself at his watch, without distraction or dereliction, attending to all the commands and duties assigned to him in the engine room.  This was a place where Edwin understood everything.  The tall chamber that sited the huge engines, with the sequence of gear housing, main pistons and combustion panels, this was his domain.  The drive that impels forty thousand tons through stormy seas, here in the hands of Edwin Cotton. The pipes and pistons, gauges and boilers, all immaculate in the hands of Edwin Cotton.  His work was silent, focused, efficient, and reliable. There were no shortcuts, or dawdling, on his watch.  Tiny erroneous details were harried and chased back into perfection within Edwin’s mute performance.

The noise in the engine room was on a scale that defied measuring, or controlling. It was a million screaming metal transactions that ranged from the highest falsetto to the deepest sub-sonic kidney-bursting thrum. The sound seemed to quicken the air through which Edwin moved, everything vibrating with power meeting demand. Edwin waited by the gauges for the crossing-over of engine power, watching the synchronised swapping of pressures and temperatures, for the moment when he could shut an engine down for it’s daily routine maintenance.  Once shut down, the silent engine would surrender its innards to the dipsticks and wrenches as Edwin revived the engine’s performance and certainty.

The first torpedo left the U-boat with a recoil kick that sounded throughout the metal tube, submariners call this kick, “the knock on the door “.  And this torpedo was calling on the Coventry.

The klaxon horns sounded on the upper walkways of the engine room, so harsh that they even cut through the horrendous noise of the auxiliary engine. Edwin paused to look up as men scurried through the hatches that led to the upper decks, abandoning their duties. The klaxons spoke of incoming attack. Here in the Norwegian Sea, that could only mean U-boats with their torpedoes and a very high chance of being sunk. In the Atlantic these klaxons sometimes signified the lone strafing of a keen young German pilot, or the distant sighting of an unidentified war vessel. But here the klaxons would cause immediate bowel-emptying flight. The engineers were leaving in droves, pulling on lifejackets as they ran, taking the steep stairs upwards four at a time. A lone figure strode righteously between the engines, pausing to flick at a gauge here and there, taking no notice that the rest of the engineering crew had fled for their lives. It was a matter of honour for Edwin, as he had not been formally released from his duty. 

Edwin placed a waste bucket under the tappets sump panel, and pushed the sump plug release key into the slot. Being oily, it slipped from his hand and fell to the walkway. It made a sound. Like no other sound. He could taste this sound on his tongue. There was no more sound.

Excerpt: Ghosts of the Red Lightship

The oppressive self-regulations of the upper middle-class that had so far informed, educated and dressed Pearl Linster, were the very things that she was trying to shake off the night she first met him in the dance hall.  An impossible industrial-scaled haze of cigarette and cigar smoke hung down from the ceiling to just above the large round tables. On a miniscule stage, decorated with the latest ragtime designs of strung-out black men making fiery love to trumpets, an anaemic-looking band squiggled its way through a furiously good-time jazz stomp.  Pinioned by her drunken elbows to one of these tables, Pearl was being aggravatingly loud and opinionated during a risque discussion on pre-marital morality, when Geoffrey Risley-Shaw leant over her shoulder and asked her for a light.

That Geoffrey was holding a bow tie instead of a cigarette between his lips wasn’t what Pearl had first noticed. As she turned, proferring a taper that she had lit from the table’s candle, Pearl looked into his eyes, eyes that held a fascinating hue and depth.  They weren’t brilliant eyes by the usual standards of male beauty, but they were so looking right into her that she dropped the taper.  Picking it up again and relighting it gave her the chance to compose herself, and then she saw the bow-tie held between his lips.  She laughed functionally and immediately regretted every drink that she had downed that evening, recognising that these invasive eyes were well worth a considered and sober appreciation.  Recovered, and with her sanctuary of sarcasm back around her, Pearl waved him off with a disdainful staged derision.  Geoffrey left and became just another black suited shape amongst the sloshed crowd.

A Town Called Ramsgate (After Town called Malice by The Jam)

tuesday night at churchills
the old men have a jam
they can't manage quite so much these days
so they play just what they can

the crowd are there to sink a few
and forget their daily grind
they soon forget and pretty soon
they'll completely lose their mind

in a town called ramsgate
ye-a-sh
town called ramsgate
ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh

when shopping in that waitrose
you always see a face
you stand and talk about whose life
is becoming a disgrace

you tut a bit and snigger at
how publicly they've failed
thank goodness that the both of us
have life so firmly nailed

in a town called ramsgate
yeah eah eah.

i look around and wonder
just what brought us all down here
there's no rhyme or reason
for these lives to so adhere

could it be the sun and sea
that english channel smell
i don't know i'm just really glad
i'm not a dfl

in a town called ramsgate
yeah yeah yeah.