Author: ivan

As a result of comments made on Laurence’s blog, it is incumbent on me to share a first draft of some description. This makes me really uncomfortable. But anyway. My prompt (from Fliss) was the word ‘shoes’.
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My name is Jed Nunson. I am a shoe salesman. I am a good shoe salesman. I have certificates and order books to prove it. I have sold shoes in half a dozen towns in this county, and I must have measured the feet of half the State.

I was taught the trade by my grandfather. He ran a small shoe shop, specialising in shoes for the working man. He charged more than Mellville’s, but he had a smooth manner and a loyal customer base. My mother and I moved in with him when father left to join the navy. It was only later I found out he had simply plain left – run away – not so much as taken a spare pair of laces.

Times were tough. Mother took to working in the shop, and I would help out with deliveries and general errand-running. My grandfather had a shoe-related tale for every lesson in life. I’d catch him drinking from a hipflask and he’d laugh at me and tell me he was polishing his tongue. You could always tell when he was closing a sale with the incomers working in the big new buildings in the town centre. He’d say ‘shoes maketh the man’, and smile and slap the other fellow on the back. He wasn’t always so polite afterwards, when they couldn’t make their payments on their hundred dollar shoes. I understand now.

He always made sure I had the best polished and fancily laced shoes at school. I guess he figured I was an advertisement or something for the shop. Other kids used to laugh at me, with my mirror-shine shoes and patchwork clothes. But I understood. Or I thought I did.
When I was old enough my grandfather gave me a book. It was about walking a mile in another man’s shoes. I took him at his word and traded my shoes with a boy from the other side of the tracks. My mother gave me a hell of a beating that day. But my grandfather understood. And he made me wear them shoes for a month until my feet bled.

I remember seeing my first pair of sneakers. Nate Edwards came in the store one dusty Saturday afternoon looking for some church shoes for his little Jimmy. Nate was wearing some Converse Hi-Tops. I’d only seen them on the TV before. My grandfather was horrified. He’d fitted Nate for black Oxfords ever since the man could walk – thirty years of one-pair-a-year custom going up in canvas and rubber.

That evening grandfather shouted and threw mother’s food all over the kitchen. He kept saying the world was coming to an end. ‘Grown men wearing children’s shoes’. And in a sense he was right. A bible salesman once tried to explain that you can’t spread the word of God in anything but Italian leather. I didn’t buy the bible, but he was right about the shoes.

I guess that’s when things started to go wrong. Less customers meant less shoes sold meant less shoes repaired meant less laces sold. Boxes of boot polish and little brush sets started piling up in the back room. And the place started to smell more of the whisky that grandfather kept under the counter. Mellville’s diversified, my grandfather didn’t.

I guess mother should have left then. Could have left then. She was still young enough to learn another trade. But she was still hoping one day my father would return and pick up the shoes he’d left at the end of the bed. And she liked mending things. When the work started drying up, she kinda disappeared into herself a little more.

I moved out on my 21st birthday. I took a job in another town up the highway in a Mellville’s franchise outlet. My first day was tough. My co-workers found my ways stuffy and threw shoe-horns at me when I told the customers they were wrong to but athletic footwear over american formal wear. But I learnt. And by the end of the month I was outselling the rest of the team combined.
That was 20 years ago now. I’ve sold a lot of shoes. Some good. Most of them bad. My grandfather passed on, and mother’s now in a home. I go to visit her and usually find her sewing. She’s not so unhappy. In grandfather’s will he left me his silver plated polishing set, which I keep in the car and use for impressing the important clients. They like the personal touch. Even if they’re only buying shoes.

I guess I’ll keep selling shoes till I die now. It’s in my blood. But people don’t respect you any more. They don’t care for craft or comfort. I wonder about this country. But most of all I wonder about their shoes.

While watching the death throes of the Murray vs Nadal tennis match yesterday I was left wondering about the former’s will to win. Both men are professional athletes, roughly the same age – they even trained together as chiddlers. Both are successful (or at least in pure cash terms both have won more than £1m in prize money), have impressive biceps and are blessed with a fair degree of natural talent. Yet there was only going to be one winner out there. The desire of one player seemed to crush the other almost before they stepped on the court. It’s not all that separates them, obviously, but it looked like it was a large part.

I can play a bit of tennis. But I’ve never practised for hours. Or worn a bandana. Or curtseyed to Princess Michael of Kent (not exactly a perk of the job). I simply don’t think I’ve ever wanted to _win_. Not in the way that Nadal does. I like to beat people, but these are usually specific people. I don’t play to win. I play to enjoy myself. Ultimately, this has meant that I have never trained in the way that he / Murray do or made the sacrifices that they have. Or benefit from the rewards.

Which led to me thinking about my ‘malaise’ in general. As mentioned passim, an old English teacher has creative writing as down to three things – time and talent and tenacity? Do I really lack any of these? Or is it something simpler, more basic? Do I want to be creative? In the ‘winning things’ way – whether that’s a contract or a prize or whatever? Or do I simply want to play the odd knock-up game of serve-and-verb and not bother the scorers at the end of the day? And if not, why not?

I spend a lot of my working life using the phrase ‘the thing that really frustrates me is….’. And for all the window dressing in the world, it’s ultimately ‘me’. I have no reason to be doing what I’m doing. I have no reason to be saying ‘the thing that really frustrates me is….’. I have choices, thankfully. And the most obvious would be to use my linguistic dexterity for some nobler purpose than to amuse people on social networks with just how many units it can take to touch-type.

I’m a project-based professional. I’m a project-based person. I have the tenacity (not quite as good as He-Man, but I’m working on it). I’m perfectly capable of being a stubborn and contrary so-and-so until the project is finished (or more frequently until the finish line is in sight and then I lose interest). What I struggle to do, particularly in my creative work, is to build on these projects towards a bigger goal. (Whereas Nadal can evidently both focus on the milestones in a tournament (the individual matches) together with the overall ‘project’ of becoming #1 in the world. And Murray is perhaps better at the individual. )

I wonder how I can turn getting the novels out of my head into something like a series of manageable chunks, particularly when my ‘natural’ tendency is to introduce complexity, not reduce it. (Obviously my biggest natural tendency is to find ever-more-convoluted ways to whine about not writing, while in some form of tragic irony, writing).

Even my attempt to write a series of short stories has been sabotaged by my ‘natural’ desire to (a) cluster them around a theme; (b) share characters across stories and (c) put them into the Monk Quixote universe. But still, if you can’t stand around on the tube self-consciously attempting to not write like a dyslexic chimp in shiny purple ink in a very old moleskine.

Sigh. Anyhoo, long self-indulgent post (aren’t they all) pondering on how to get those word counts moving. No-one else will write this for me. And even if they did, it’s not the point.

Slowly, something stirs in the forest. Let us see whether it is an ant or a bear.

Ok. So six months into my ‘definitive’ year. And absolutely no progress on the novel. I am going through something of a re-adolescence though – bought a Wii, a camera, a guitar and a language course. It’s like being 15 again. But with less Thatcher. And no growing pains. Although the ends of the fingers are tender from many years of ignoring punk rock.

I am listening to Introductory French as I type, so apologies in advance if I suddenly get republican on your ass. Or derriere, should that be. Be that should. That. It. should be. Be. It should.

Maybe Yoda should have been French. Then he could have been Freoda. Or Yench. And on that bombshell. A bientot.

I have been drinking bubbles. Although I suspect that the bubbles themselves are not alcoholic. Or calorific. Or even bubblicious. Bastard advertisers of the 1980s unite. They are popsilicious! And alchinatonic. Stotius! Stialidowhoopsie!

Sigh. Tum ti tum. You wouldn’t credit how many times I have typed that in my life. I mean, it’s not your average sentence is it? Tum ti tum/ Altogether too many vowels. And possibly bubbles.

Anyhoo. Where was I? Bubbling. Oh yes. I managed to make my weight vary by 3.6kgs yesterday. I’m so proud. Almost as proud as John D’un’eath’roaming, the world’s first suicidal estate agent. I am the Wiiiiiiner. Or at least I wiiiiiill be, when I buy a Wiiii.

Speaking of which. It is time. Oh Oh. It is time. For stormy weather. Or other Pixies songs involving the loo. I am the loo, you are the loo, we are the loo, wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. Or similar.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow wiiiiiiiill be the day. The day God made. The day Ken Dodd’s dad’s dog died. And the day.

That marks the beginning. T.r.u.s.t. me.

Well. I think I have finally sorted out the Monk Quixote domain stuff. Which is SO. PROFOUNDLY. Not a pear drop moment that I’m almost ashamed to mention it. However, as I now have ‘proper’ RSS feeds set up for this blog, I have no excuse but to try and provide some content.

Life is finally coming together. And go read Neil’s ongoing memories of Douglas Adams. Both funny, incisive and hopeful – as ever – ‘No-one else has seemed capable of being so cheerfully profoundly miserable.’ Something to aspire to, as my friends will agree.

Smile.

1. I’ve finally become someone who uses ‘so’ instead of ‘anyhoo’ to link (admittedly fragmented) thoughts. That means there is some hope for a narrative to be drawn from A to Yes please, I’ll take those royalty terms sir.

2. I expended energy today defending the ‘worth’ of blogging in various socio-political terms to someone who was (a) blogging, (b) respects my opinion as much as a chocolate frog. Although to be fair I have never seen them in the vicinity of a chocolate frog. Or now that I think about it, chocolate. Or perhaps the letter ‘c’. Ok. That was pushing it.

3. Someone has visited the site looking for ‘keeping your readers with you’. Which is so funny I could spit chocolate frogs.

4. House.

5. Iron is not a very funny metal. Although ferric oxide has its moments.

6. Delicious cannot give your shirts nice creases. Although it could crease your brow.

6 (again). Seriously. Who uses the word ‘brow’ in polite conversation. Or conversation with choclit frawgz.

7. Forrest Gimp. The masochistic hero of our times. Who probably eats shrimp. Gumbo choclit shrimp.

Yum yum.

An interesting day of many different culture clashes yesterday:

Walking up Fetter Lane (where they are endlessly building breeding pods for lawyers and accountants) there is a glass fronted building that faces the old Rolls Building. If you stop a minute, and the light’s right, you can see the Rolls reflected across its entire surface – a gigantic plasma screen. It’s not a perfect mirror – there are the lines of the window frames and the odd internal light manages to catch a shadow and shines through incongruously. It reminds me of how I want to write – layers of old and new, meanings and symbols inter-twined. It also makes me wonder if a building could have a jacket would it go for the glass or the carved stone. Perhaps there’s something to be read from the fact that glass buildings don’t last – either metaphorically or literally.

And then on to work, where the daily battle to ‘imagine’ takes place. There are days, especially sunny days like yesterday, where the notion that I do not create anything tangible is almost too much to bear. All day, most days, I talk and I think and I type. I manipulate bits of plastic held together by wires to change the sequence of photons on a screen and affect someone’s life in some way at varying degrees of emotional and physical distance. I rarely see the people I am (attempting to) impact on. They do not transact, by and large, with me (I can’t make simple ‘market’ judgements as to whether what I do is worthwhile or not – beyond remaining in employment). I do not hear them laugh, or clap or swear. I cannot step back from my work and take it home, or see it on a shelf or live in it or sit on it or eat off it or indeed, eat it. And I don’t mean this in an emo-sense – it’s just adjusting to living and working with ideas – I guess I had always expected to have a more direct link between my work and artefacts. Although, I guess, this Mac I’m typing on is some form of substitute or derivative of the ideas that I ‘sell’ to my employer, rather than to a publisher.

Ho hum. Humdrum. I hate having ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’ conversations. Always so pointless. Particularly when I’m talking with myself. And I’m not good at listening.

Which is why the second half of the day was so interesting. I snuck in at the back for the launch of ‘We-think‘ by Charlie Leadbeater, with a critique / well-mannered bun-fight with Andrew Keen, of ‘Cult of the Amateur’ fame. The latter was splendidly rude about lots of things. And spoke eloquently about among other things, the fetishisation of risk, the decline of state, Rousseau, silicon valley nonsense and the different forms of handcart we’re going to hell in. I don’t think he writes about Arsenal FC in his book, which Charlie does – but more on that later.

I’d already seen Andrew’s arguments by following his online trail over the last couple of days. And it was fun to be in a room full of people who would be twittering and blogging about this event (I counted at least five people whose blogs I’ve read in a work capacity there last night, and at least two were doing some form of live update).

Charlie says (sorry, always wanted to type that) that the web (and web 2.0 in particular) is an opportunity for creating a whole new way of looking at things, for innovation, for thinking of ourselves – ‘we think therefore we are’. On the night there were dissenters claiming that it fell short of ‘grand narrative’ or ‘philosophy’ because it did not address economics (and never have I felt closer to the 18th century than in typing those words) – but as much as I disagree with some of what Charlie says (through self-interest mainly) I think these people missed the point.

If the ‘old’ culture was about material things centred around the individual, then the ‘new’ culture is about ‘shared’ things in the collective. But there are still important ‘economic’ drivers, they are just not monetary ones – these are ‘kudos’, ‘ratings’ and ‘trust’. This is what the digital natives derive value from. Obviously at some point we have to convert that currency into one that buys beer tokens, but that can’t b too far off.

And it set me thinking, about what I want from life. It used to be a row of perfectly bound books with my name on them. And would e-books, or self-published books (I did my first POD project a few weeks ago on blurb.com) be the same? No. Unless, maybe, just maybe, I received a similar kind of satisfaction or substitute – and I don’t just mean sales. Maybe it is simply about having ‘fans’. Maybe it is as simple and basic as people saying ‘I like you’ (enough to comment / buy / send you a Facebook custard pie’).

Which is a bit chastening, in a sense, because I’ve always considered myself very much an island. And yet all I am doing is endlessly re-creating my own episode of Lost. :O)

And anyway, tying it back to earlier, it struck me that this clash of old and new has been re-enacted countless times throughout history, and is perhaps the closest I will get to the occluded front of innovation – if you’ll pardon the meteorogical pun. Because ultimately it’s not about me and my generation any more. It’s about the Wii-generation. Those that would rather play tennis in their living room on a screen, than with a ball in the rain outside. And this makes me wonder about sport, and religion and culture – but more on that another day.

Not so funny when I’m being serious, eh? Or perhaps that should read ‘when I’m taking myself too seriously’. La la la la la. I can’t hear you. Deaf in both headphones. Eat qwerty and hit F4. Smile.

If I were to were to write an adventure for Tintin, I would definitely update Captain Haddock’s vocabulary. A little list, based on experiences over the last few weeks:

1. Exploding donuts. When making your own churros, make sure to have a clear understanding of what you’re doing, or you will discover for yourself that donuts, once taken out of hot fat, have a tendency to explode if the dough wasn’t properly mixed. Or the oil was too hot / too cold / not Spanish enough. Anyhoo. These badgers go bang. And while it’s kind of neat, it’s also spraying burning hot donut insides all around your kitchen. And yes. As a boy I felt the need to test this phenomenon. Several times. Until I burnt myself. And it wasn’t funny any more. Nor was cleaning donut gloop off the hob hood.
2. Headphones of productivity. I don’t believe these figured in any of the role-playing games I pretended to have enough friends to play with in my youth, but they should have done. There’s something about headphones that makes me get on with things. This is a bit disturbing. Perhaps it’s simply immersion in the task at hand. Perhaps my brain is the donut. Ole, as opposed to oil-y.
3. Dental plans. You can take the catholic out of the church, but that doesn’t stop you getting cavities. Home win.
4. Mental plans. You can take the teethies out of the mouthies, but you cannae make them talk, captain. They’re giving me everything they’ve got.
5. Lambada, wherefore art thou? Rum baba, addis adaba, the dowager. Never in the news. Old news. History, even. Draw.

And so on and so on, son. Lots of stuff going on. But not a lot to say publicly.

An odd day, an odd week.

Nearly 5,000 words written, translating between what people feel, what an organisation can and wants to say, a little personal opinion and a lot, a lot, of words.

On the tube – giving up my space for others, bloody-mindedly, ignoring etiquette.

In the supermarket – romanian man trying to explain the concept of ‘air freshener’ to the bangladeshi crew in the supermarket.

At home – our polish cleaner has decided the note she left us last week was not clear enough, so a row of empty bottles are on the table top.

In the supermarket again, ringing up a bagel for £692. Swearing. Laughter.

At work. Negotiations. Coded language. Smileys. Threats of conversations. Heaven forbid.

Hopefully I can translate….ha ha… some of this into something meaningful in the next few days. It’s time to make a move, gentlemen. :o)

When one is imitating heroes, it is probably better to use the pen that Rankin writes with rather than drink the whisky that Rebus does.

1700 words in two gruelling days. None of it for the novel. None of it accredited. But still, satisfying in its own way. I have added another piece of kit to the wishlist – some noise cancelling headphones. It’s quite comforting to hear nothing but your own breathing. Except when you have to hear yourself ask some comedy questions in an interview. I have a particular nasal drone on mic that I particularly hate. Anyhoo, highlight today was the re-re-wind of me asking one of my top boffin colleagues…. ‘so [pause] um. Is [that] a good thing or a bad thing?’

Sigh. Marvin, me.

I also entertained my chums over at Fetcheveryone with a superb demonstration as to why coffee should also be rationed on the NHS. A sample below:

SPARTA!!!
To be sung in either a Skol Skol Skol style or (preferably) running around a meeting room like a demented bee. If you don't look like Buster Bloodvessel you're not doing it right.

Sparta. Give. Me. Strength.

See? And that was before the Highland Park. La. And indeed. La.

Oh yes. I also realised today that most of my. New. Concatenated style. Has a name. It’s blank verse. Poorly punctuated. Blank verse. Thirty five (nearly thirty six) fucking years old and I’m a fucking poet. Bollocks to that.

Good night.