Blog

… it’s Salmon pink, marshmallow roasted, Essex blonde, new potato, Elvis in a dress, marsupials breeding with mammals effluent. Available from your local Marks and Spanks for just a nappy or two.

I’ve realised a bit late in the day that one of my own heroes (or herrors, as I just tipped) has already written J-Pod. So, once again, I am back to the drawing board, although frankly, by the very mention of the buggers, you would think that half of the middle classes would be Leonardos by now. Similarly, there must be a lot of escapologists working in agencies if they have to think outside the box so often. Which is a very tired joke. Unless there was a Box religion. In which case it would become immediately edgy (ON TOP of it being boxy, badda bing badda box) and you know, street.

Although a street box would invariably be some kind of food container, and therefore not very big. I have always assumed that this ‘box’ that I am meant to think outside of is quite large. Positively big. Although not as big as Elvis. Or indeed, Eavis. Oh Glasto, let me count the ways that I hate thee. Although it is not, as yet, sold in a box.

Of course, street boxes don’t figure as high on the american express scale as DHL cartons or Ikea packing cardboard. Which makes it fair game for experimentation. Many’s the gruesome image we are force fed via our telling visions of boxes covered in grafitti or dipped in canola oil. Boxes covered in oil AND/OR onions are a regular feature of my local paper and OH MY GOD the irony, my local paper will inevitably end up as something covered in fat. Or poop.

Which brings us back to FA-ti-doh. Etc. At ease gentlemen, your pupils are no longer required.

Like my good friend Mr Hassenscouser, I am partial to the odd advert starring ‘Tyrannoserious Alan’, a dinosaur with no sense of humour whatsoever. This is a particular problem for said reptile, as he spends most of his time talking to an imaginary volcano (possessed by the spirit of Brian Blessed, or Prince Charles, or possibly a Peking Duck – one can never be sure about these things). Anyhoo, this particular foam rubber apprentice is fond of flowcharts, which is just spiffing, because I had always thought that what the Pleiscene era was missing was a good old brainstorm. I mean sure, they had their ice age and their mass extinctions and their fancy Poole pottery, but what did the Beefeaters ever do for us, eh?

Beefeaters? What am I thinking of? Mr Darwin hadn’t invented lego yet, let alone the humble Cowius Parsleyius. No burgers for Stanley. I mean Alan. And let that be a lesson to you….

Two of them. Staking out their territory in the carriage like they would do at Glasters or Glynders or Class WarDers (just a little pun there, mes amis). Overnight bags stuffed full of cosmetics that have Never Knowingly Been Sold to Poor People. You can tell this by the pattern on the front of their bag. Both have bouffant Winehouse hair. Except it is blonde in both cases, and the effect is somewhat lost by them both being sober and indeed, not singing sewer-jazz.

They chit-chat, flick through style mags at a speed that suggests reading may make them incontinent and demolish a small landfill of Marks and Spanks best oral fixations. Or what is commonly known in the trade as Not Very Good Sushi. I am pretending to be a top person and Destined For Great Things. I do this by eating jelly while reading The Economist. In your face, Tory puds!

One of them has fat ankles. Well, in fact I have no idea what a fat ankle looks like. But they sound like a bad thing. And she deserves them. Unless she helps out at a puppy farm. An abandoned puppy farm. That is, the puppies are abandoned, not the farm. Although the farm could have been abandoned at some point in time. Yes, that would be allowed. Also, the puppies must not be experimented upon. Especially not for Fat Ankle Syndrome. Because they were abandoned. It would be all right if they were bred for it and were puppies in name only – in fact being bundles of fur that shit every 23 minutes, yelp and try and fetch a test tube. That would be all right. I think. Well, I don’t know really.

But I digress. Various small groups of men get on the train during the journey. All are magnetically, or perhaps pheronominally (or just plain nominally), drawn to sit in the next set of seats to the girls. Because, ya know, it’s too fetch to actually sit with them, or engage with them in any way but slobber.

I watch their eyes. Three distinct groups, from different ethnic and social backgrounds. And ther eyes betray all of them. Their pupils slide and slither from underneath sunglasses or stoned-lids. The sheer force of will by which they are trying to alter the path of lightwaves so that they Might See a Bt of Muff is incredible. It’s like Lynx for Physics. I begin to wonder if I am being drawn into a blonde continuum where men will lose their dignity for a hint of gusset.

I feel rather sad, and a little angry. I want the boys not to look. To show restraint. Despite the tuts and knowing looks to each other as each group departs, they clearly thrive on attention. And like a fly to a moth, I find myself storing little details away for future use. And slowly, surely, I fall into their whore-hoorah trap.

Fifty unrelenting minutes of the mindless tedium that is rural middle-age. It reminded me of a scenario from school, where on the first day of a new year, the sixth form would attempt to persuade innocent first years to write essays on the sex life of a ping pong ball, or the geography teacher would ask a particular numpty to fetch the black chalk from the store cupboard. What larks! There’s a lot to be said for an English education. Actually, on reflection, there isn’t. There’s a market out there for tweenie fiction and endless tales of boarding school hell, but nothing comparable to the entire genre or high school fic that there is in the UsofProm. That’s what having Grange Hill on the television does for you.

But I digress. Unlike this particular woman on her way to a training seminar or similar. If only. A little digression. Some gossip. Any kind of insight for me to squirrel away in a notebook and vainly claim to have made up thirty years later. But no. Satan could use her to set crosswords. Twenty whole minutes on the inner workings, settings and efficacy of her new boiler system. Stabbing with bent spoons was too good for her. Several hours later, I can still recite the temperature of her bungalow for any given point during the day. Her travelling companion, on offering advice (God help me but he had the SAME BOILER and thermostat. Wireless apparently. Naturally – that’s to save their respective spouses from strangling them with the wires) was rebuffed with the simple yet deadly, ‘oh yes the man who installed it said that too’.

Hells’ teeth! What connivance was this? Not only is this woman killing me softly with her dial settings , but she’s also not taking the advice of a qualified engineer. All male particles in a three metre radius were beginning to oscillate. ‘I suppose I should have read the instructions….’ Now. I’ve read enough Dilbert and seen enough Scots mechanics in black and white WWII films to know that this is Never A Good Idea. Although I did just assume that the installer was qualifed. And we should never assume things. Assuming makes appointments with disappointments. Or is that cheese?

As usual, I find myself looking for sequences that may not exist. Having missed out on e-everything and being far too late for i-everything I am busy trying to predict whether it would be a vowel or a consonant next. Would it be o-everything – o-Pod, o-Life, o-Man, or perhaps something more prosaic like B. B-Bop for your B-Pod in your B-Life. Although, on second thoughts, that sounded a bit negative.

Perhaps in our 2.0 world, it should be a number instead. A prime, obviously. And nothing as mundane as a single digit. 23-Pod, I’m having a 23-life. Or maybe just Pod-everything. I’m listed to my Pod-Pod while eating my PodDonald
Until it comes out of beta, naturally.

Funny how it’s rarely better when it comes out of beta, eh? Little bit of nerd humour for you there. Biting satire. Nibbling at the very ankles of mediocrity.

Which reminds me…. superstition. What’s super about it? And can any jokes be truly free of Seinfeld in our inter-media age? Ok. So we’ll gloss the super. So – we’re left with the stitious. Do you stit? The only word I can think of with a similar ending is fictitious. Which leaves a stump of ‘titious’ and a prefix of ‘s’ or ‘fic’. Which is a neat piece of synchronicity (bright and warm and blue and free).and haven’t a very pleasant Pod-Life. In fact, let’s go the whole hog shall we? Let’s fuck-everything. It’s the modern way. I want to listen to Fuck-Lo on my Fuck-Pod from Fuck Tunes while eating a FuckBurger from FuckDonalds.

I have not so much been avoiding writing as running (in as far as it is possible to run while firmly glued to a chair) away from any semblance of fiction. It has even got to the stage where I was considering starting a spreadsheet to chart the time and type of displacement activity I was taking part in, until it dawned on me that this was in itself a displacement activity. My life would probably be much richer where it not for alcohol and spreadsheets.

Can you imagine Excel, the drink? It would probably be composed of different coloured cells that you popped open into a Function mixer and almost invariably ended up with brown, tasteless sludge.

I have never had greater access to entertainment and yet never felt the sensation of time passing as much either. In five years I expect to be so metaphorically burdened by my own guilt that I will have to walk around with a wheelbarrow. Or maybe by then things will have advance to the stage that we can literally divorce our opinions. I certainly have spent much too long with an abusive-partner-thought. Although it’s not very Catholic. There’s probably a law somewhere against not feeling guilt. That’s why it’s branded – Catholic Guilt. And you get to upgrade to Catholic Guilt Complex after two dysfunctional relationships and fifteen impure thoughts. Or something.

Hmm. I need to draw a chart of the times I used the following – ‘anyhoo’, ‘or something’ and ‘but I digress’. And at work I need to…. sigh, let’s not go there. Right. Back to procrastinating properly.

So. Mac power cords. They make big play of being magnetic, for those pesky moments when the cat gets inquisitive and brings your *book crashing to the floor, spilling all your iCreativity onto the beautiful iKea iLaminate iFloor. While the cat gets a new, and unexpected, hat – although to be fair hats are generally unexpected, particularly on cats. Sadly, no room in this particular imagination for mats.

Anyhoo. What Mr Mac didn’t barter for is that I regularly visit a volcanic island. And on my last visit I managed to get a sizeable amount of volcanic sand trapped in my beloved STM rucksack. As it happens, some of this sand found its way near the power socket, where lo and behold, the mineral rich grains became magnetised and could only be prised out of the iOrifice with a tickling brush.

Which would have been fine, had I made the tickling brush out of cat’s hair. But it was in fact made out of the nostril hair of a walrus. Which entailed a very different type of trip to Iceland. Go on, smartarse, tell me there aren’t any walrii in iCeland. Well. There are. He’s called Horace. And he’s missing some hairs. I swapped them for a bucket. Little bit of iNternet humour, sorry, humor, for you there.

If all the world were run by geese. And toast were but a whimsy, as bonkers an idea as heavier than air flight and the concept of a fair trial. Then, my friends, would we eat till out internal organs burst? You see, sadly, I suspect you would, as there is almost certainly a commercial value in doing so (because, after all, there is a commercial value in wondering whether a goose’s liver will adorn a piece of toast that much better after consuming one more pellet or no….

But I digress. I eat liver. Under duress. And I quite enjoy pate. In the sense that the taste does not make me physically retch and I might seek it out in advance of some fish roe. Or a piece of 1976 Bakolite, as procured by St ElvimaDarren’s primary year 5.

No, I haven’t written anything significant. No, I haven’t been running. No, I haven’t remembered my password and I MOST certainly have not freaking passed GO. Ok people?

I have often thought that Bread Knows Best. If in doubt, one has only to play Spin the Loaf (or indeed, simply Use your Loaf) to determine the best course of action for any given circumstance. Of course it helps if that circumstance can be answered through the medium of spreads. Or at worst, pickle.

Ya got me?

So. Loose ends and scrap heaps. Snatched sleep and half-finished sentences. And all that jazz. Sorry, I thought that was jazz, except with added nose-trumpet and sta-sta-stacatto riddim.

I haven’t had a Saturday morning of doing nothing in a while. It’s not altogether pleasant – like all the myriad possibilities of how I might fill my time more productively than I am doing pressing down on me, creating brain fudge. Anyhoo, least said soonest mended.

Finished The Intruders last night. As usual with Michael Marshall’s stuff I was in a frantic rush to get to the end, so I will need to re-read at a more leisurely pace later. As usual, the pace was excellent, the tone laced with menace and the odd moment of surreal humour (I felt there were nods back to at least four of his previous books). I wish he didn’t do the exposition bit at the end, but I guess there’s no point having the big idea if you don’t get to explain it to people. And as with the previous trilogy, there’s a nice open door for his characters to walk back through, should he want to re-visit (although there’s less of a need to, I guess). Scarily close to some of my big themes for novel 2, but not enough to make it a non-starter. Which I’m sure, dear reader, is a relief to everyone.