Monk Quixote

I’ve been swim­ming in a sea of num­bers for the last few days — which makes a pleas­ant change from star­ing at words and will­ing them to coa­lesce into some­thing inter­est­ing. The upside is I get to make graphs, and I’m exper­i­ment­ing with new forms of data visu­al­i­sa­tion (I blame the Grau­niad, myself) although for the most part I am sat in my uncom­fort­able ‘exec­tu­tive’ chair, scratch­ing my head Laurel-style and squeak­ing ‘yes, but what does it all mean?’.

I know I was enjoy­ing myself because I lost track of time (and *polite cough* I started talk­ing to myself, com­pared myself to a maths-nut-eating squir­rel, and took on the voice of Dr Sta­ti­con — the infa­mous ser­ial gra­phu­la­tor of Olde Num­bers Towne, Des Moines (Alabama). You haven’t heard of him? You should have — he left a square root sign on all his vic­tims and only ever ate Pi. Ok, that last bit was a lit­tle pre­dictable, but what do you expect? Matri­ces and cat­alytic con­vert­ers, I mean qua­dratic… hydramatic…systematic equations?

In other news, the sun’s been out. No, it hasn’t gone to my head. It’s been cov­ered in num­bers. It’s well known that num­bers are bet­ter than hats. Espe­cially the num­ber three. I also had a dream that I was in a meet­ing with Boris John­son, cur­rent Mayor of BoTown and quite pos­si­bly the only Tory I wouldn’t mind hav­ing a chat with, mainly because I’d imag­ine he’d stand a round. Although on that basis, I should prob­a­bly focus my drink-with-a-tory mus­ings to 15 pint Hague.

In non-sun, three or Dr Sta­ti­con news, I have still to hear from my #1 pref­er­ence agent. But I have booked a trip to the loca­tion of novel num­ber three (sorry, I didn’t realise the num­bers would repeat like that), which I’m quite look­ing for­ward to. But not as much as I’m look­ing for­ward to Fri­day, when I hope to finally get a new short story down (called ‘Geordie’ for now).

Any­hoo. Wib­bled on about noth­ing, and cleared my head of graphs, bub­bles, columns and all thoughts of con­sul­tancy, suntan-seas, squir­rels, nuts and square roots, square balls and square pegs. It’s like a car­riage return for my brain. And apolo­gies if any­one actu­ally reads any of this. But you can make the noise now, if you like — if you remem­ber man­ual type­writ­ers that is.

And so to bed.