Personal ArchiveKenneth WebbMay 27, 2026HNGOIYK, He Never Got over it You Know..., Manuscript pp 1-12 handwritten IBM 2010Comment

He Never Got Over It, You Know...

Personal ArchiveKenneth WebbMay 27, 2026HNGOIYK, He Never Got over it You Know..., Manuscript pp 1-12 handwritten IBM 2010Comment

Personal Archive

He Never Got Over It, You Know...

The Manuscript ~ The Pier 2000-2009

May 2026

Ian Bradley Marshall

Addendum

26 May 2026 Wythenshawe, Cheshire

Writers create manuscripts and within those scripts they create people, personalities, places, plots and schemes. A manuscript is a creative act. First manuscripts are usually preparations for writing with professionalism and the gift of communication. A first manuscript usually remains in the bottom drawer.

At York University weekend writers’ conference I was advised by a published author that we should never despise what we have created. We have created not a literal child, but a child via the freedom of literature.

I regret having ignored this advice.

This piece was written in Blackpool in 2010. The original two hundred page manuscript has gone. The author is the person that is the subject of the conversation between two people. Michael and a named second character. But these are characters within the manuscript. They are not living people. They do not exist.

Yet reading afresh these handwritten draft pages brings two people I'd completely forgotten about to full life again. The characters and personalities are as fresh today in the minds eye, and as intimate, as in 2010 and when they were first born in 2000, the year the manuscript commenced.

Ian Bradley Marshall

Page 12 Addendum written sixteen years on, and poignantly, still in North West England, and in the story, the characters and the author spent much time together in Liverpool, Manchester and Blockpool, the two great historical counties of Lancashire and Cheshire. IBM 2026

“Ah Yes. A E Housman.

 ’The Lamps in England lighted, 
And Evening wrecked on Wales.’”

— Alfred Edward Housman, 1896 two lines from his world-famous Poetry Collection A Shropshire Lad

*Das Meer, das Meer*
*Das offene Meer,*
*Wo mein Herz zu Dir ruft.*

© 2010 IBM

*The Sea, the Sea*
*The Open Sea,*
*Where my heart cries out to Thee.*

I’ve always been enthralled by this painting by an unknown artist which I first saw on an old Pinterest account in 2010. How fortunate I was to spend so much time, as in this painting, wandering quietly through the surf on the North West Coast of England in that tumultuous year. IBM