Swan 2014

Writing case studies for work, especially if you're sat next to your scanner, is quite dull.

This is a far more interesting use of ink.

Tracer

I fiddled about in Illustrator on the train, and this migraine-guarantee is the result.

Lost Pen

This is another random bit of scribbling I found cowering in the dusty recesses of my hard drive. It dates from London (November 2012 or so), and is alright.

I lose things. I am absent-minded. Things I own just plain disappear, without warning, rhyme, reason or explanation – whompf! – they’re gone. Clean fucked off. I cannot understand it or predict what will be next, and I can explain it only marginally more adroitly than I can, say, particle physics, or the success of Two Door Cinema Club.

This week’s near-vital missing item is a pen. Not just any pen, this – a fine, balanced and moreover entirely free fountain pen of the house of Waterman, procured through the labyrinthine means of the work stationary catalogue (more on this dastardly and infernal tome later).

The writing implement in question’s lines and the smooth flow of ink issuing from it have - I’ve assured thrilled onlookers - led to better, more considered note-taking on my part, and in short, an upswing in my performance at work. By association, I have gained confidence in a variety of areas of life, and now leap as sure-footedly as a mountain goat from one challenge to the next, guided by the certain knowledge that I will succeed. Yup, my posh new pen’s made the world a better place for everybody. It’s a joy to behold, literally. Until this morning’s arrival at the Citadel of Relentless Opportunity was overshadowed by ill tidings and a development that cast a great pall over our team’s early wisecracking; a black mood leavened only slightly by the news that the Bank Holiday was next week: The Pen, that shining example to us all, had gone missing.

Aghast, I rooted through my rucksack, palms slick with perspiration at the thought of The Pen’s horrendous demise on the floor of the 0804 from Loughborough Junction. Perhaps it had fallen and choked to death in the shifting, foot-thick silt of receipts and business cards that dominate the bottom of this, the world’s least tidy work bag? Worse still, what if a long-forgotten sandwich remnant, lurking Kraken-esque in the bag’s inky depths, had slathered it in a nib-rotting hummus-and-tobacco-flake bisque – a fate that had already befallen an iPod in similarly tragic circumstances last year? I almost had to call off the search as a horrific slideshow of images flashed through my mind’s eye, featuring The Pen coming to grief under the relentless tide of commuters trampling past Farringdon station.

I looked everywhere, short of actually pacing maniacally back to Farringdon, as after all a pen’s a pen, even if it is The Pen. After a few minutes, my years of training in second-guessing and then outwitting my past self kicked in: ‘Think how you’d think in this situation’, I told myself, confusingly: ‘then do something unexpected and totally without precedent, because that’s probably what you did with it in the first place.’ It didn’t work. I tried looking for The Pen in my bag, my jacket, the lining of my jacket – see, told you I’m a pro – under my chair, under my desk, under my pedestal drawers thing under my desk, under colleagues’ desks – but to no avail. The Pen remained resolutely unfound.

Disconsolate, and sensing the familiar escalation to full-on rage that frequently accompanies situations like this, I looked down at the alternatives to my new and favourite note-taking device. The various desk-tidies were billets to quite the scrawniest, half-chewed and decidedly motley selection of writing implements I’ve seen in a good while. A sorry company of fading highlighters, biros with blobs of ink drying embarrassingly in their fuselages, blunt pencils and something that looked like it had last seen action a Ladbrokes stockroom in 1987 were all I had to work with. To get through the day using this past-it collection would have been depressing in the extreme, and there would have been casualties for sure. Old Timer Biro, whose clicky button hasn’t worked this side of 9/11, and can’t do a lower-case j without weeping stodgy black crud until halfway through the next word would never make it to lunch, let alone my three-thirty with the chatty bloke and his lazy eye from Accounts. It would have been carnage – like sending Manfred Mann over the top at Ypres.

As it turned out, my meetings were cancelled, so I was able to confine the Clive Dunn of the rollerball world and his similarly antiquated cohorts to barracks for the rest of the day, but still mystery shrouded the exact location of The Pen – in so many ways, the Enterprise-D to their Model-T Ford.

The good news for me, though, is that technology – or rather, some young and well-funded creative thinkers with great hair, doubtless based in California – have provided an answer of sorts. Tile, a product small enough to fit on a keyring, has been launched through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, and has already secured a quite absurd amount of funding. Why? Well, in short, Tiles find things for you.

I am not the most technologically-minded person in the world, but by my reckoning, Tiles are little RFID tags that you stick onto your treasured possessions and then track them, using some sort of tidily-appointed mobile app or other. As you can tell, my research into this is at this stage pretty minimal, but I am fairly certain that’s how it works. In other words, things that are Tiled cannot be misplaced, unless my suspicions are correct and small, important things in my possession can actually create wormholes in the very fabric of space and time and disappear at will. There’s no news yet on whether the Tile app will enable object-tracking through temporal distortions – no doubt they’ll issue an update that covers this in due course.

Then again, do the creators of Tile really know what they’re up against? I am a black-belt at misplacing important items. I have lost a set of house keys /the day before going on holiday/. Without them, I couldn’t lock the back door of our house, which was already well-known to the criminal underworld of South East London thanks to the break-in we’d been treated to just weeks earlier. In a state of panic, the Other Half rush-ordered a temporary door lock, which arrived at considerable expense the next morning and all was well. We went away, still perilously oblivious as to the exact location of our back-door keys, only for them to turn up in the lining of the door seal of our washing machine after it had completed a full cycle of dirty holiday clothes. Would a plucky little Tile have put up with that, doggedly bleeping away from within the salty bowels of the washer-dryer as we fretted on the French coast? I doubt it.

All this is very well and futuristic of course, but what of The Pen? Our return home, delayed slightly thanks to a wander through Old Street and the altogether nicer Bankside, led to more fraught searching of bags and personages, and the grey, relentless creep of resignation that, once again, Tile or no Tile, something else had disappeared. After a moment’s pondering, though, Other Half came to the rescue. “Found it,” she cried, “in the lining of the inside pocket of that bloody bag. For God’s sake, get yourself a pencil case like a grown man,” she said, paradoxically. “A man can’t just carry a pen around without losing it, can he?”

Maybe if it was WiFi-enabled, tethered or lived in the cloud he could.

London: One Night

Inspired by On The Road, I decided to walk from Blackfriars to the Worlds End and back in the rain. It was lovely. Enlivened by a few whiskies, I came back and wrote this. I like it:



So it is what it was and is - a walk through the greased and shining city streets in bruised darkness, to the known via the unknown. A sideward glance eight fifty two, beat red man from Bankside cross, all sliding lights, water and cobbles, up to monument, memories and events that didn't happen, but for the sake of a story, perhaps did.



Hard up by stations only seen from the inside, roads never walked before, umbrellas and sellers writhing for a way down current-pushed pavement. Puddles mirror streams of walkers, water, water everywhere, and where to get a drink? Nobody to shock-stop, no Bem to chime an end, one foot in front of t'other, forward gleefully as past and present blend.



Through intersections nudges plastic mind with all the answers. In pocketback keeps us safe, a blue line in the familiar, confirming confidence, doubling resolve in the rain. On you go, he chides, on, on, on.



Starting to bleed familiar now, old tracks amid streetlights and convenience stores that could be anywhere, but are definitely here and now and right; blue line and fragile little instincts, flickering, light the same page at last.



Forward through the drizzle, light of foot, fleet of mind and quick of heart, too warm for the rain to counter, too hot to be cold, the only answer forward. One foot in neon, one in guttertaxi, chickenbone ranks, first Bloomsbury, then old giant Euston. A great, dark-shouldered bulk over the way, stone guard of the City's North, hunched on the Roman road; an ogre sleeping on a chain. Still after all these times and souls, he sits and waits.



Then break in the gloaming, and things come familiar as trust in the route returns. Tired and hungry in the spray and bluelight violins, through twinkling, past revelries, new loves and drunks. In shadow, away from scenes, a homeless man locks gates on the tireless cold with one blue blanket, a scrawled face cowed under a hoarfrost mourning. One forgotten, facing more than we know, with less than we carry. Our crouched hero shivers, resolute.



Further again, lights trigger memory as a goal looms. Noise - warm, deep and infinite, broils at the world's end. Warm whiskey rewards stoke fired to carry the wayward home as the underworld shakes below.



Pool hall Maggie teases Mr Blue Sky, who cuts clouds from minds eyes in the queue, all triplets and love. So long, so long, son. Hot stones and warm spice start me up as the sky seethes and the wind cries Mary, beckoning back the way we came. Rain everpresent now quickens, beating woebegone streets, oiling unseen wheels that push tired limbs home on that little blue line, to a bed not owned.









Sent from my iPhone

Purpose

Me again.

 

You’ll notice there’s been a slight hiatus. Sorry about that. Moving house, planning the wedding, working etc.

 

We made it though, and it’s fabulously new and big and wierd and awesome and other. I love it. The house is tremendous. I wish, in a distracted way, that you could see it.

 

You’ll also notice that I’ve decided to do some more ‘drawing’. As always I have grandiose plans for this that won’t come to anything. Bugt regardless of whether they are any good, wouldn’t it be great if I managed to ‘produce’ a drawing every day for a year. I suppose that this blog is a kind of living record, a memento – a memoir, even.

 

And if I’m going to fill it with interesting things as well as swearing and moaning about the small stuff, I need to produce said content. I’ve always liked drawing, even though I’ve never had any real flair for it, or instruction. It just calms my mind. It’s more meditative than writing, that’s for sure, which – despite everyone else in my life’s conviction that I’m some kind of literary genius – I find difficult to the point of impossibility. When I’ve tried, consciously, to ‘write something’, I find it incredibly hard to start, difficult to love, impossible to stop fiddling with and easy to disown. I only see the bits I’m not pleased with. The flaws, clichés and generalities. The rushing. The /wanting/ something good to be in there, somewhere. But there isn’t anything in there; it’s only echoes.

 

Anyway, it strikes me that this little online bolthole might actually be growing a purpose of its own. I’ll use it as a record of my life. I’ll be honest, life since Mum passed away has lacked a little purpose. I’m also struck by the idea that I’m the last one around who can reliably recall /anything/ that happened in my family before Mike’s arrival on the scene in 1990. I was born in ’79 and your aunt in ’81, so there’s a lot of years in the middle that are just a dotted line. I’m the only one who can fill those pages in. Maybe that’s my purpose. Maybe I should make that my purpose. There it is again: maybe.

 

I have just realised that for the first time ever, I’m writing this to the child I don’t yet have and have not yet planned to have, but will probably have one day. That might be the definition of shouting into the void. How strange. Hello, you. How’s tricks? I hope we’ve met, and we get on. You’re probably as much fabulous, complicated trouble as your mother, so we should be fine, you rascal.

 

Maybe I’ll write this to you so that you know the story of life before you were born, as soon there won’t be anyone else who can tell you the real tales of when your Dad was your age, younger and older. Mike’s a great, great man, and his family are wonderful, but they are not necessarily my family. I’m related to them by marriage, and since my Mum passed away, that relationship’s changed. I’d like to say we’re really close, and we are, but we’re not quite as close as we were. We’re being men about things more than we did while Mum was alive – closed off and uneven with eachother. We still love eachother, but in a male way, because we’ve both simultaneously lost the single biggest female influence on both our lives, and are spinning a little bit. Mike’s anchored himself to Bashley and his allotment and his neighbours, and I’ve concentrated on our house (possibly even the one you’re going to be born in  - who knows?). We’ll be alright, but we need to tell you about the times before. I’ll do so in due course, I hope.

 

I love you, whoever you turn out to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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