So, as of today, I'm one of those people who has 'therapy', apparently. After years of not feeling particularly amazing on a lot of fronts (driving, confidence, family history, bereavement, anger etc) I decided - with T's support - to, well, seek help.
I have only been for one session, with a cool woman who lives about two doors away - is there anything this village can't do? I was a little nervous, but also wierdly calm. Or, as calm as you can be when you're about to tell a complete stranger some unresolved stuff that dates all the way back to when you were a nipper.
Anyway, she's cool, and we had a good introductory chat. I already think it's beneficial. For too long I have felt a bit like a car with only two working gears. I can go forward, but progress is halting, and I tend to roll to a standstill at the first sign of a hill, if you like. I haven't driven here for three weeks, and frankly I'm not arsed if I never drive again. It is too much, and I fear hitting stuff and endangering other people. That's not something I was over-burdened with in Bristol, or London for that matter. Maybe a bit more self-confidence will enable me to take this shit on and actually excel at something? Early days yet, but I am hopeful.
I've felt strange and 'drifty' for the last couple of years. I don't really know what I'm doing, or where I'm going particularly. Maybe this will help to focus that? I don't know. I already feel it's the best thing to do - it's also really nice to have a space where you can just talk to someone neutral about yourself for a while. I've not had that, ever. Nobody gets that close, and those that used to aren't around (at least corporeally) these days, so it's got to be a good thing. I sensed a bit of envy from Tam when I came back. Maybe she could benefit from doing something similar?
All I know is, I love her too much to not be with her, so I'm going to become better in order to keep her.
Monday, 24 November 2014
Monday, 20 October 2014
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.
This is a far more interesting use of ink.
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.
Tuesday, 14 October 2014
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
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
Monday, 13 October 2014
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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Friday, 10 October 2014
Monday, 6 October 2014
Friday, 9 May 2014
Member of Legal Profession in Doing Something Shock
Right – lots of things have happened. To whit:
We had originally engaged a conveyancer to shuffle our bits of paper on the initial move which fell through. They were utter rubbish – not a single phone call or email, and they managed to ‘lose’ the signed and witnessed documentation we sent them via recorded delivery. Fuckwits.
Fearful that we’d end up on Watchdog or something, I decided to switch to a conveyancer that’s actually another department of the company brokering our mortgage. I spent an enjoyable 20 minutes yesterday morning really leaning into the first conveyancer, in a spectacular telephonic takedown of which my mother would have been proud. So, we now have a new one. It’s telling that in the last 24 hours, we’ve been able to progress further with the new conveyancer than we did with the old one in two months. My god, they were awful. I was promised a phone call from their head conveyancer yesterday, but as of yet I’ve not received it. I am not surprised by this.
Despite this, our mortgage application is on track, and we just need to send the lender original copies of every important document we have ever owned (passports, driving licenses, bank statements, payslips, locks of hair, cheek swabs, stool samples etc) and then pray they get returned. Otherwise though, all’s well, and we’re on target to exchange before the end of June, when our tenancy runs out.
On the inheritance front – STRIKE UP THE MARCHING BAND! SEND IN THE CLOWNS! ARRANGE THE RED ARROWS! FIREWORKS ON STANDBY! CHILL THE CHAMPAGNE! – John Smart has ACTUALLY DONE SOMETHING OF NOTE!
What a man John Smart is. I’ve never doubted him – he has the elegantly disinterested, old-money air of a man unfamiliar with the vaguaries of mortgages. When phoning him, I like to imagine that my unexpected phone call has caused him to fluff a two-footer on the 18th green at Barton Links. I have phoned him in relation to grandma’s estate on no fewer than 14 occasions in the last two months (I know this because I resorted to minuting them after his caddy Stephen Wheatley buggered off two months ago).
I have merely requested a bit of paper that states the extent of the estate and my legal claim to it on no fewer than six occasions, the last of which was an email on Tuesday of this week. I phoned him today and he said ‘I’ve got two of your cheques in front of me, just waiting on the third.’ A momentous breakthrough, but my 15th phone call notwithstanding, not one he was going to inform me of.
He is ‘surprised’ the last cheque’s not arrived yet. I am not. He is also confident that everything should be with me ‘this time next week.’ Encouraging as this sounds, I will still expect a windfall sometime in September 2015 if current form’s any guide, bless him.
So, we’re nearly there. I told John to email me with ‘something appropriately official-looking explaining where the money’s coming from’, as without this we can’t progress our mortgage, and he promised to do so ASAP. This is also a breakthrough, and evidence that my new ‘JFDI’ approach is paying early dividends, even if my inheritance money isn’t.
This process has been exhausting so far. We have at times been enmeshed in the kind of self-interested, institutionalised incompetence that only prevails when an entire industry is based on both hourly rate and bonuses. The only exception is our surveyor, who is as keen as a famished spaniel and would happily take a squiz your roofline and soffits you if you stood still for any more than eight seconds. That he’s an ex-Balfour Beatty employee who knew my old boss is beside the point.
We will get there, and we will love it when we do.
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Wednesday, 7 May 2014
OIEO?
Buying a house is an utter, utter fucker. Estate agents are basically scum. Everything is more expensive than it rightfully should be. Even though I’ve been waiting for this moment for 10 years, I can’t actually enjoy it, because of arseholes. Even though the house I want to buy is probably worth what I’m going to pay for it, I feel cheated.
Nobody does what they need to do when they need to do it unless you talk to them like a child and threaten non-payment of their scarcely-earned fees. They are all playing you off against other people, and needlessly obfuscating. Even as someone who hasn’t had to scrimp up a few thousand and has everything he’ll ever have riding on this, I’m by turns disappointed and actually upset by the attitude of sellers, agents, conveyancers, solicitors... it just goes on. Even the vendor, who was nice enough initially, has turned hard-nosed and pushy.
I’ve got no help in this either, as Mike can’t even be bothered to pick up the phone, and Tam’s parents are more interested in (a) minimising the amount that we spend because they have no perspective on the matter and (b) borrowing from me so they can effect their own move. Despite the fact that I haven’t got the money yet, for God’s sake.
It’s still better than renting. It’s still better than renting. It’s still better than renting.
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Friday, 2 May 2014
Jack Kerouac Had It Pretty Much Spot-On
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Generally Negative
In a funny mood for the last couple of days. Still no sign of the inheritance, and time marches on, effectively meaning that our collapsed house move and subsequent fuckery could potentially lead to rental in Exeter, and manifold disappointments therein. Hey, that is, as they say, how fucking life goes. I feel hard done by, I think it’s fair to say.
I am also entering a grand old funk about injustices in the workplace – either perceived or real. It dawns on me that in six years I’ve had two days of training, and would like some new skills in order to reignite interest levels that are basically on the floor. Meanwhile newcomers are being given hundreds of pounds’-worth of training and letters after their names that will mean increased employment opportunities. Meanwhile my manager sits on his arse doing nothing, but mainly because I can’t ask him for anything, as I have no goals to hit that I can’t already hit. I could volunteer to become an in-house videographer, spend six months and thousands of pounds on equipment, but there’s no drive for anything like this from the top, so why bother? Just rebrand fucking case studies and shut up, Jones. My career is effectively over, unless I radically change it.
So, what do I want to do? In the long-term, property management. In the short term, something creative and visual enough for people to be impressed by? Maybe. I envied Nick’s abilities on that video shoot, but most of his business is in London, and I don’t want to be based here, because (fanfare please) it’s a fucking shithole. Meanwhile Tam’s doing well, and is really respected and ensconced at the management level of the business, with all the attendant kudos that brings. Tony’s sitting at the end of these desks chortling to Chris about nothing whatsoever and I can’t fucking to listen to it anymore without wanting to walk out and never come back to any of this. It is, and always has been, utter bollocks.
I think a sabbatical might be in order.
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Wednesday, 26 February 2014
Gwendoline Doris Wheale, 1/10/18 - 26/2/14
My grandmother, Doris, passed away this morning. She was 96.
She had been ill for several years, had suffered angina, and two strokes related to the Alzheimer’s that ultimately ended her life. I had little contact with her in the last three years of her life, despite the fact that she was in a care home just a mile from my parents’ house in New Milton. I found it hard to visit as her condition deteriorated, but justified this with the notion that ‘she’ had effectively vacated her physical body a long time ago. Alzheimer’s strikes me as a cruel condition, creating in the sufferer a complete breakdown in the veracity of one’s own memory. Then, it replaces key memories – the house you grew up in, your wedding day - with fabrications. Next, Alzheimer’s starts to alter your perception of the present, ‘real’ world such that you can’t even believe or understand what you’re hearing. Voices, ‘strangers’ in your own house, and all the while, the true memories are being erased.
After losing your ability to perceive time, language and any sense of your location in the wider world, Alzheimer’s plays it’s cruellest trick: sufferers forget that they’ve forgotten anything, and appear to exist in a heavily medicated dream-state, where one second lasts years, years last minutes, hours are infinite and everything’s in the wrong order. The dissociative, disorientating combination of all these factors would be overwhelming to a young, agile mind, but it generally afflicts the elderly. How must it feel to realise that your mind is coming apart at the seams? Alzheimer’s steals experiences away from those who experienced them, and then those who have been robbed no longer realise that any theft has occurred.
Thankfully, I have some amazing memories of my Grandma, which I’ll be forming into a eulogy at a later date some time next week. She was a pretty amazing person before her condition started to take effect. She was an amazing cook, a crossword-solver extraordinaire, a proud and fervent supporter of her family, and had a toughness and flint in her gaze that spoke, I always thought, of her Welsh ancestry. She could be argumentative and forthright – a trait that all the women in my family share, but this was driven not by malice or the simple love of an ‘exchange of views’, but by love; by wanting what was best; by an innate sense of what was right. I hope that some of that has carried on percolating down through the generations, and will continue to do so.
Now that she’s gone, and relations with my father are still very much non grata, I consider myself orphaned, remarkably, at 35. ‘The last of the Joneses’ (which is nearly true, of course, but not quite). I am not literally alone. I have the nucleus of a family – my step-father will be as great a source of strength in the next few weeks as I no doubt was to him when my mother – the woman he had expected to die in the arms of, no doubt – passed away three years ago. Even as a youngster, I realised and accepted that I might see a day when my mother and grandparents would have passed on – that I would be living in a ‘post-Mum’ universe – but to have lost a sister, mother, grandfather and now grandmother at this point in my life does feel unfair. Christmas at Tam’s family home brought home to me just how many people I no longer have to call my own.
Of course, after the formalities are completed, the funeral over, and our lives resume, there are positives to be drawn from the midst of all this loss. My Grandmother is, I can virtually guarantee it, in a better place than she was this time yesterday. They call it ‘being at peace’, and the deaths I’ve had to witness or share with friends and colleagues certainly fit that description.
A friend of my sister’s lost her parents when she was in her early twenties, and I think her personality altered somewhat afterwards. I remember feeling the deepest sympathy for her, being scarcely able to comprehend how that much loneliness would feel. I feel it too, sometimes, and in my case it takes the form of a howling emptiness in the quiet times of the day, and a heightened significance at family occasions or on anniversaries. It’s literally like a dull ache in the heart, which if pursued and brought into the open of conscious consideration, leads to tears. Even more dispiritingly, it seems to get worse as the years go by. The idea that this howl might live inside me for the rest of my life is profoundly sad, and very real. This, of course, is why people have children.
I look forward to introducing mine to their grandmother, and telling them what a great person my grandmother was.
Monday, 24 February 2014
Brace for impact
In truth, I have felt utterly exhausted for some time. Frozen, both creatively and work-wise, for the best part of a year.
All of that, with a bit of luck, is about to change. All of the what-ifs will come at once, pull up a chair at our little table, and start spinning our preconceptions of what we do, where we live and in many ways, who we actually are. I am obviously excited by the idea of change on this kind of scale, but also terrified of letting everybody down. I have several more hurdles to cross before the most monumental event in the last three years is welcomed in with quaking arms. Let’s just say that if I’m brave, and right enough for an hour at the end of this otherwise unassuming little week in late February, we will be a quantum leap in the direction of the Long Term Goal, and all of this fight, scrap and scrape will be a memory – a source of pride, to be sure, but a memory all the same.
Our time is coming, again.
Do we want it? Is it right? Am I right? Only time will tell. On the face of it, the potential opportunity is a massive reshuffle of the work-life balance, a copper-bottomed opportunity to finish saving and start investing, and a self-determining poke in the eye for all those fuckers who continue to doubt me, all rolled into one. I will have my revenge, again. I will move forward with those I love, regardless of their views on my limitations. I will prove myself, again.
This is the moment that decides where we get married.
This is the moment that decrees where I finally learn to drive.
This is the moment that clarifies where our first house is purchased.
This is where our baby could take her first steps.
This is where I take back control of things.
This is where we make our own rules.
I’m terrified and confident of success. I could back off now, but don’t want to. In any case, I have set in motion a sequence of events that makes most of the above unavoidable.
Thursday, 23 January 2014
Jon Hopkins/Daniel Avery
I don't like dancing. It's pointless, fake, obviously contrived and bears no relation to the music that allegedly inspires it. I'll do a longer post on why dancing is shit (probably entitled Why Dancing's Shit, obviously) at a later date - and I can hear you all holding your breath for that one already, but don't. No, dancing is not for me. Dance music, however, definitely is. What's more, I blame Noel Gallagher's dalliance with the Chemical Brothers for this.
Now then. I like to think of myself as a person who won't necessarily dismiss music on grounds of genre, but I also count myself as a person who can dismiss a great deal of Nineties chart music precisely in this way, because I was there, and let's face it, it was bollocks. Culturally, musically, in terms of its legacy, it was utter rubbish. Unlike some fads (flares, kipper ties etc) which are seen as dreadfully a la mode at the time, only to be sniffily derided with the benefit of hindsight, mid-to-late-Nineties chart music, with its wall-to-wall manufacture of bobbins boy bands and cheap 'untz-untz' house fit only for the bovine super-club arenas that blighted the cultural landscape at the time, was shit then, and it's shit now.
Between 1992 and '95, something bloody horrible started happening on the radio - a music none of us in the provinces understood washed over us, like a deafening blanket of nothing in particular, its verses, modulation, form, interest all stripped away, leaving a beat and a bunch of synths that just went on and on and on, until someone reached, at last, for a song with words in it. It was horrible unless you were on strong drugs. We weren't on strong drugs.
It was a dark time to be a rocker, I can tell you. This obvious crock of shit - If There Ain't No Love (Then It Ain't No Use) by Sub Sub - later to bafflingly re-emerge as the bearded and bucolic Doves - was on the radio eighty times a day, it seemed.
Give me fucking strength.
Then along came Block Rockin' Beats, with its - gasp - melody and - crivens - bassline probably played on an actual bass! The indie nation looked up from its collective copy of Vox for a second, snorted derisively (which we did a lot at the time) and carried on waiting for Dog Man Star to come out. The Chemical Brothers, who had goosed the public in late '94 with Leave Home and Chemical Beats,were coming back. Their joker, of course, was only just around the corner. This, for those of you who don't have it permanently seared onto your eardrums, is the noisy bastard in all its screeching glory:
I know how that feather felt.
Lore has it that the vocal Noel laid down for Setting Sun, the single that propelled the Chemical Brothers to number one and started all of this in my house at least, was recorded while a cab waited outside with its meter running. This alone makes it unimpeachably great, and is another reason to love Noel and his erstwhile band. I like to file this one alongside 'Supersonic was written and recorded in six hours', and just down from 'Wonderwall's vocal is take one', and not at all far from the fact that Talk Tonight, Headshrinker and Acquiesce were all b-sides of the same single.
As it happens, Noel's contribution to Setting Sun is pretty perfunctory, as the above story might attest. What it did, though, was bring the Chemical Brothers' seismic 1997 career highlight Dig Your Own Hole into otherwise unsuspecting sixth-form common rooms nationwide, whereupon it preceded to gently propel otherwise died-in-the-wool guitar-fanciers towards beats, synths, amyl and acid. It did so with fucking deafening beats, screeching synth lines, clarinets, trumpets - you name it. It's a bonkers record, and Noel's specific involvement with it made a 'cleverer' more textural kind of instrumental house music, acceptable. As trojan horses go, it must be one of the loudest ever constructed.
That must have taken all of 20 minutes, then.
Kasabian's very existence aside, there are no real downsides to this turn of events. Personally speaking, it led me directly or otherwise to seek out Neu!, Can, drum'n'bass, Aphrodite, Renegade Snares, Orbital, the Orb and many other acts in that space that I would normally have avoided while ripping the piss out of, as they didn't know what a Les Paul was for. This interest in dance music comes and goes to this day: while I'm ostensibly 'into' more rock'n'roll than anything else, I'm endlessly drawn back to dance music (and jazz, actually) like it's some vast, scarcely mapped continent that needs further examination. Recently a couple of artists - one new, and one, well, new to me - have emerged that have further piqued my interest. It strikes me that living in London I've been exposed to, and taken a greater interest in, places like the Boiler Room, home to some of the most innovative dance music producers and DJs around - or so I'm told. I'm no expert on this, so forgive, yo.
Now then. I like to think of myself as a person who won't necessarily dismiss music on grounds of genre, but I also count myself as a person who can dismiss a great deal of Nineties chart music precisely in this way, because I was there, and let's face it, it was bollocks. Culturally, musically, in terms of its legacy, it was utter rubbish. Unlike some fads (flares, kipper ties etc) which are seen as dreadfully a la mode at the time, only to be sniffily derided with the benefit of hindsight, mid-to-late-Nineties chart music, with its wall-to-wall manufacture of bobbins boy bands and cheap 'untz-untz' house fit only for the bovine super-club arenas that blighted the cultural landscape at the time, was shit then, and it's shit now.
Between 1992 and '95, something bloody horrible started happening on the radio - a music none of us in the provinces understood washed over us, like a deafening blanket of nothing in particular, its verses, modulation, form, interest all stripped away, leaving a beat and a bunch of synths that just went on and on and on, until someone reached, at last, for a song with words in it. It was horrible unless you were on strong drugs. We weren't on strong drugs.
It was a dark time to be a rocker, I can tell you. This obvious crock of shit - If There Ain't No Love (Then It Ain't No Use) by Sub Sub - later to bafflingly re-emerge as the bearded and bucolic Doves - was on the radio eighty times a day, it seemed.
Give me fucking strength.
Then along came Block Rockin' Beats, with its - gasp - melody and - crivens - bassline probably played on an actual bass! The indie nation looked up from its collective copy of Vox for a second, snorted derisively (which we did a lot at the time) and carried on waiting for Dog Man Star to come out. The Chemical Brothers, who had goosed the public in late '94 with Leave Home and Chemical Beats,were coming back. Their joker, of course, was only just around the corner. This, for those of you who don't have it permanently seared onto your eardrums, is the noisy bastard in all its screeching glory:
I know how that feather felt.
Lore has it that the vocal Noel laid down for Setting Sun, the single that propelled the Chemical Brothers to number one and started all of this in my house at least, was recorded while a cab waited outside with its meter running. This alone makes it unimpeachably great, and is another reason to love Noel and his erstwhile band. I like to file this one alongside 'Supersonic was written and recorded in six hours', and just down from 'Wonderwall's vocal is take one', and not at all far from the fact that Talk Tonight, Headshrinker and Acquiesce were all b-sides of the same single.
As it happens, Noel's contribution to Setting Sun is pretty perfunctory, as the above story might attest. What it did, though, was bring the Chemical Brothers' seismic 1997 career highlight Dig Your Own Hole into otherwise unsuspecting sixth-form common rooms nationwide, whereupon it preceded to gently propel otherwise died-in-the-wool guitar-fanciers towards beats, synths, amyl and acid. It did so with fucking deafening beats, screeching synth lines, clarinets, trumpets - you name it. It's a bonkers record, and Noel's specific involvement with it made a 'cleverer' more textural kind of instrumental house music, acceptable. As trojan horses go, it must be one of the loudest ever constructed.
That must have taken all of 20 minutes, then.
Kasabian's very existence aside, there are no real downsides to this turn of events. Personally speaking, it led me directly or otherwise to seek out Neu!, Can, drum'n'bass, Aphrodite, Renegade Snares, Orbital, the Orb and many other acts in that space that I would normally have avoided while ripping the piss out of, as they didn't know what a Les Paul was for. This interest in dance music comes and goes to this day: while I'm ostensibly 'into' more rock'n'roll than anything else, I'm endlessly drawn back to dance music (and jazz, actually) like it's some vast, scarcely mapped continent that needs further examination. Recently a couple of artists - one new, and one, well, new to me - have emerged that have further piqued my interest. It strikes me that living in London I've been exposed to, and taken a greater interest in, places like the Boiler Room, home to some of the most innovative dance music producers and DJs around - or so I'm told. I'm no expert on this, so forgive, yo.
Monday, 20 January 2014
Cassie was no joke
Cassie was no joke. Flipping channels, hopping bus to bus, train to tube, pushed and pulled, spat up at TCR, queued down into Maccy D’s, between seats and standing, hovered at the entrance, neon pulsing, skullcandy rattles Drake. Cassie was no joke. Mal bounced up, kiss kiss, how are you? Yeah not bad, got the tickets? Scoh, fucko.
Friday, 17 January 2014
Is Formula 1 Buggered?
Bernie Ecclestone, as reported in today’s Grauniad, might have done some naughty things in relation to the sale of F1 to somebody or other a few years ago. Obviously he isn’t confirmed as such, so there’ll be no allegations of wrongdoing in these august pages. But to the untrained observer, the man’s business dealings do look a little opaque at times, don’t they? Not that I’m really interested in the byzantine machinations at the top of the F1 management structure. No, I’m altogether more bothered about the proposed changes to F1’s core ‘product’ – its racing.
In recent years, a short-arsed German bloke who I’ll admit to having quite a bit of time for, principally because he loves Oasis, has eviscerated the competition in a car whose reliability and tarmac-curdling power has at times beggared belief. Time after time, Sebastian Vettel has wrung the absolute nuts off the snorting thoroughbred that is the RB9. The drive to victory in the USA. The absurd, lap-after-lap-after-bloody-lap consistency at Silverstone. The comeback in Brazil. The pass from miles back, around the outside of a bemused, struggling Hamilton, under Singapore’s lights. It just went on and on. Both car and driver won races in the most challenging conditions, and looked almost chipper at the end. More than once, Vettel reminded me of an eight-year-old lad emerging, wild of hair and broad of grin, after his first go in a dodgem. Going that fast, that often wasn’t just easy – it was fun.
And so the poles, the points, the wins and the accolades piled up, and up, and up. As the season progressed, Vettel’s lead began to take on embarrassing proportions, while somehow avoiding to do the incredible talent and technology struggling in his wake a disservice. He was better. His car was better. His car didn’t break. Ergo, he won, and won handsomely. But the people, they wanted more. They wanted competition: wheel-to-wheel, Mansell-vs-Senna-down-to-Ascari madness... and they weren't getting it.
Speaking of Mansell, Our Nige dominated the 1992 season, winning the first six in a 16-race season by margins. In doing so, he made Senna and Prost look like chancers, and McLaren and Benetton appeared positively backward. The backlash experienced by Vettel as his dominance increased last year bred envy, which might have something to do with his single-minded, arguably slightly cold public persona. There are several drivers in the paddock I could happily go for a pint with (viz: Webber, Alonso, and if I had a week off to recover afterwards, Raikonnen) but Vettel? Maybe not. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, and clearly knows his Supersonic from his Shakermaker, if you know what I mean, but he might just be a bit, well, German for some people.
I fully expect this situation to continue into 2014. Vettel’s dominance is in many ways more ominous than that of Schumacher – who crashed into those he couldn’t catch, and was really run ragged by Mika Hakkinen alone during his six years as the sport’s apex predator. Vettel is younger, and is consistently thrashing a stronger field than Schumacher did. Schumi reigned during a period when brute grunt – sheer horses in harness – won races; when the number of torques spat out on the grid often dictated the number of points awarded at the end. Nowadays, the crazy-haired geniuses in Oxfordshire wind-tunnels decide things – aero performance is key. KERS, DRS and all that are mere distractions, adding a faint sense of unreality and more than a whiff of videogame power-up logic to the racing. As a spectacle, it’s got brighter, but duller.
F1’s sharks believe that the technology bleeping away under all that carbon fibre must move forward, or no-one will watch their global superbrand’s travelling circus. With Little Seb winning at a canter every weekend, F1’s very own PT Barnum, Bernie Ecclestone, clearly had to convene the Powers That Be and decide to do about all of this tiresome predictability. After what one assumes would be considerable deliberation, the latest in a sequence of technological restrictions and rule changes was announced. Fanfare if you please – it’s time for Uncle Bernie’s Big Shake-Up.
As Patrick Head would probably put it, things done changed all over this biatch, basically. The engines in 2013’s cars were 2.4l, 760bhp beasts. 2014’s are 1.6s – that’s a mid-range Polo to you and me. Disturbingly, they’ll still kick out 600bhp, but as they’re still naturally aspirated, they’re set to whine like the world’s largest motorcycle display team composed entirely of wasps. They will probably reach peak revs at 20-22,000, with most ‘perfect’ changes happening at 18,000. 2013’s peaked at 19,000. Roughly translated, that means ‘Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooowwww!’ All the time.
There’s also a new Energy Return System to replace DRS, which produced an extra 60bhp for six seconds per lap in 2013, the new ERS will generate 180bhp for THIRTY THREE (possibly trouser-soiling) seconds per lap.
All the cars must have a faintly ridiculous eight forward gears instead of seven, for every race. The teams must also decide what their gear ratios are before the start of the season and then stick to them. This is designed to even up the differences in acceleration and top speed between the fastest and slowest cars on the grid, and kind of makes sense.
The big one: in 2013, fuel use was unlimited, with cars typically glugging down 160kg per car per race. In 2014, the cars will be limited to just 100kg per race, a reduction of 40%-ish. Obviously the fuel is one of the heaviest parts of the car, and combined with the 20% reduction in weight by dint of the smaller engine, these things are going to start races light, and only get lighter. This might be why the larger drivers have started complaining that they may soon be too heavy to drive the things.
Mark Webber (who is at my estimate 6’4, and built like a boxer) quit because of the fuel and weight restrictions. They will doubtless lead to teams telling drivers who could potentially challenge for a podium or the lead to back off, for fear of not finishing at all. As Webber said on Top Gear the other day: “What’s the point of driving a super-lightweight car with a massive turbo on it at 70% for the last 20 laps of the race? Not for me, mate.”
The FIA’s prediction is the cars will be 3 seconds a lap slower, but much closer together. Time will tell...
Sunday, 27 October 2013
Found in a Notebook #3
The sun rises. Then it sets. Rises and sets. Rises and sets. All oin all, not a lot changes. Sun rises. Sets. Comes back for more. Brave old sun, eh?
In our midst, there are those for whom the endless risng and setting are but commas in another story - one of persistence, growth, betterment and hope. There are those whose path never crosses ours - then again, there are those who path must corss those who live more, for one reason or another.
Quite how these 'people' are remains a mystery, and is in itself surrounded by heresay, but exist they do, move they must, and arrive they will, in our lives or just outside them.Lots of poeple thing they've seen them, be they suddenly 'brilliant' friends or strangers you've met on a train who have suddenly said something cutting or pertinent without knowing the full you - for some reason they've picked something hidden out of your personality that - on at least some sort of basic level - makes sense. Not to say that these pepel are necessarily magical or in posession of guidance from a higher power, but they are, in a wierdly elemental way, ebetter than us and seem to have us sussed. The sun rises, sets, rises and sets. On it goes.
I met one of these people once. It was a hot day, the kind of weather that gets on the news. My train journey was taking longer than usual, but the denouement of The Catcher in the Rye' was taking my mind off the worst of it. After a while, I realised that the guy opposite me - who must have been eighty, giben his shjock of white hair, receding gently at the temples, the quality of the briefcase he was carrying and the depth of the lines on his face - was checking out hte well-thumbed copy I was reading. I thought nothing of this for a good twenty minutes or so, as after all, it's a very popular book. Holden's brush with the hoker with just playing out when a soft, discernably Australian lilt broke my concentration:
"That's a fabulous book - but you'll know that by now."
The moment the first syllable left his lips, I was utterly stunned. Such warmth, directness and, behind it all, insight in the tone and the calm confidence of the way he spoke. It was almost as if he was speaking directly to my subconscious. A deeply odd feeling, and not one I'd felt before.
"It's fabulous", I stammered, trying to make sense of the piercing blue eyes that now fixed on mind from the other side of the pile of dead coffee cups and magazines on the small table that separated us. "I have to say, it's not my favourite, but I can understand its value, I suppose."
The next senence nearly knocked me off my chair:
"If you understood anything about what real travel was, my man, you'd appreciate little fairy tales like that one all the more."
"What do you mean?" Still unnerved by those blue eyes, beautiful in their own way, but empty, too.
"That book's changed many a life, son. You'd do well to understand it - brilliant prose often reveals certain things to all of us."
I was more than a little stunned by this. I've loved the Catcher since my teens, for one reason and another, but never really given it much thought. Interested by the old duffer's take on it, I persisted:
"What do you mean?" Quite blunt. Waiting.
"It's yours," he continued, warming to his theme. "That and every book you've ever read will give you the story you've been looking for."
A strange kind of silence broke over the carriage.
"I don't really understand", I said.
"It's yours to find, young man. Understanding is not something I care about or can help you with. Belief, on the other hand, is a different matter. Anyway, this next one's my stop, so I'd better be off. I trust you'll have a good day, and a good life, full of good moments and interesting interludes such as this one. And if you're ever in Australia, I recommend you visit the Gold Coast. There's some great places to see there, if ever you find yourself back there."
"Thanks, I'll bear that in mind", I said, wondering what the old man was on at this point, but oddly transfixed nonetheless.
As he left the train, and my journey continued, I found it increasingly difficult to forget the face, the voice and the strange manner of the man who had introduced himself. As the train finally pulled into my stop and I collected my things, I realised he'd left an old, leather-bound volume behind. Roughly the size of a bible and clearly very old, it was locked shut at the spine in the style of a diary or notebook, and bore the monogram 'PL' on the front cover in small, exquisite script. I looked at the book for a couple of seconds, and put it in my case without clearly understanding why. Perhaps I could trace the man and return it to him?
In our midst, there are those for whom the endless risng and setting are but commas in another story - one of persistence, growth, betterment and hope. There are those whose path never crosses ours - then again, there are those who path must corss those who live more, for one reason or another.
Quite how these 'people' are remains a mystery, and is in itself surrounded by heresay, but exist they do, move they must, and arrive they will, in our lives or just outside them.Lots of poeple thing they've seen them, be they suddenly 'brilliant' friends or strangers you've met on a train who have suddenly said something cutting or pertinent without knowing the full you - for some reason they've picked something hidden out of your personality that - on at least some sort of basic level - makes sense. Not to say that these pepel are necessarily magical or in posession of guidance from a higher power, but they are, in a wierdly elemental way, ebetter than us and seem to have us sussed. The sun rises, sets, rises and sets. On it goes.
I met one of these people once. It was a hot day, the kind of weather that gets on the news. My train journey was taking longer than usual, but the denouement of The Catcher in the Rye' was taking my mind off the worst of it. After a while, I realised that the guy opposite me - who must have been eighty, giben his shjock of white hair, receding gently at the temples, the quality of the briefcase he was carrying and the depth of the lines on his face - was checking out hte well-thumbed copy I was reading. I thought nothing of this for a good twenty minutes or so, as after all, it's a very popular book. Holden's brush with the hoker with just playing out when a soft, discernably Australian lilt broke my concentration:
"That's a fabulous book - but you'll know that by now."
The moment the first syllable left his lips, I was utterly stunned. Such warmth, directness and, behind it all, insight in the tone and the calm confidence of the way he spoke. It was almost as if he was speaking directly to my subconscious. A deeply odd feeling, and not one I'd felt before.
"It's fabulous", I stammered, trying to make sense of the piercing blue eyes that now fixed on mind from the other side of the pile of dead coffee cups and magazines on the small table that separated us. "I have to say, it's not my favourite, but I can understand its value, I suppose."
The next senence nearly knocked me off my chair:
"If you understood anything about what real travel was, my man, you'd appreciate little fairy tales like that one all the more."
"What do you mean?" Still unnerved by those blue eyes, beautiful in their own way, but empty, too.
"That book's changed many a life, son. You'd do well to understand it - brilliant prose often reveals certain things to all of us."
I was more than a little stunned by this. I've loved the Catcher since my teens, for one reason and another, but never really given it much thought. Interested by the old duffer's take on it, I persisted:
"What do you mean?" Quite blunt. Waiting.
"It's yours," he continued, warming to his theme. "That and every book you've ever read will give you the story you've been looking for."
A strange kind of silence broke over the carriage.
"I don't really understand", I said.
"It's yours to find, young man. Understanding is not something I care about or can help you with. Belief, on the other hand, is a different matter. Anyway, this next one's my stop, so I'd better be off. I trust you'll have a good day, and a good life, full of good moments and interesting interludes such as this one. And if you're ever in Australia, I recommend you visit the Gold Coast. There's some great places to see there, if ever you find yourself back there."
"Thanks, I'll bear that in mind", I said, wondering what the old man was on at this point, but oddly transfixed nonetheless.
As he left the train, and my journey continued, I found it increasingly difficult to forget the face, the voice and the strange manner of the man who had introduced himself. As the train finally pulled into my stop and I collected my things, I realised he'd left an old, leather-bound volume behind. Roughly the size of a bible and clearly very old, it was locked shut at the spine in the style of a diary or notebook, and bore the monogram 'PL' on the front cover in small, exquisite script. I looked at the book for a couple of seconds, and put it in my case without clearly understanding why. Perhaps I could trace the man and return it to him?
Thursday, 24 October 2013
Friday, 18 October 2013
London Pubs: A Diatribe
I just posted this to a thread about pubs on the Guardian, because I’ve had a long day and fancy shouting at something. I feel better, and some of this is quite funny, I think:
London has some fabulous ones, but most of them are either dull or complete rubbish. It's not the price of beer - that's going up steadily in most parts of the UK since I've been drinking it. The thing that ruins pubs for me is the profound lack of space in them.
The lack of space in London pubs can render even the quaintest, most interesting or most historic venue a nightmare. I have had a long day. I want a pint, and a whinge, then another and a laugh, then another and some tunes, then I'll go home. It's not much to ask. Central London's pubs are, however, literally awash with half-dayers by about 3pm, so by the time I arrive at 6-ish, I have to settle for a handheld pint of warm lager stood by the gents, because the place is already rammed. Cheers!
The problem extends outside of modern boozers, too - now that we're all metrosexual, sophisticated arrivistes with complex tastes, teased hair and a burgeoning interest in 'craft' ale and 'artisan' this, that and the other, we can't get enough of al fresco drinking. Even before you get into the place, the outside of a pub is covered in gangly aesthetes braying about themselves from early afternoon onwards. Farringdon, I'm looking at you here.
In a damning indictment of this, I saw a bunch of blokes outside a crowded pub the other day. They appeared to be in their mid-Twenties, and were sharing a portion of chips, drinking beer and smoking. Nothing amiss, really, except for the fact that the pub of choice was so oversubscribed, they were balancing their pints, chips, fags etc on the top of an overflowing bin. Because there was nowhere else to put anything. Because of everywhere being crowded. Everywhere. All of the time.
How can balancing your shit on a bin while drinking in the gutter for £4.50 a pint be deemed acceptable? What can we do to stop this?
Full ego-mirror here.
Tuesday, 15 October 2013
Oops, sorry
Didn’t have time to write for the last few days. You’ve not missed a massive amount. The Royal Mail shares I was seconds from buying at £750 are now worth £1100, but I’m not going to cry into my keyboard over it – might play along the next time a decent opportunity comes along, but I actually find the whole IPO thing a bit risky and distasteful. Free money, however, I’ve never had a problem with.
You may have noticed that the second epic essay in the 50/5000 series is a little on the tardy side – again, this is down not necessarily to a lack of time, but more likely a lack of planning and scheduling prowess on my part. I’ve set aside Thursday night to knock this off – T has to go to Bristol for work on Friday so is quite rightly staying at her mum’s over the weekend. Let’s see just how much creative-type stuff I can get through while I’ve got no distractions, eh?
Important music-geekery news! I’ve FINALLY managed to isolate the problem with Logic around monitoring of output /and/ recorded tracks, and can now record multiple tracks of guitar/vox/whatever over previous ones, studio style. This paves the way for ridiculously precise, complex and layered guitar pieces, similar to the ones I’ve had wandering around my head for the last few months. Quite how they’ll fare on the vocals front is another matter entirely, but with enough scotch and an empty house, I may even give it a whirl.
Work is fine – I have a few case study visits to do end of this week/beginning of next, which will see me wandering distractedly around post offices and a big hole in the ground they call Crossrail. Could theoretically prove interesting I suppose. Things on the escape front are looking more promising, with a contractor of ours talking quite seriously about offering me a job in Bristol/London/home-based (and fully commutable from Plymouth). It would be a hike in salary from here, but I’m ready for that. Inertia doesn’t suit me, frankly.
On that subject, I have a bunch of shit to organise, so had better skidaddle. England-based flutters are placed for tonight (four easy ones, a total of £4, nice and easy). I also have another small flutter linked to the success of the first one but including Bayern Munich’s walk-in-the-park in the Champions’ League the following week for another £10
Friday, 11 October 2013
Cat Cafe: Lunacy Beckons
This is now a thing: http://now-here-this.timeout.com/2013/09/10/were-so-cat-sited-the-location-of-the-cat-cafe-is-revealed/
I would love to go, and inevitably, probably will end up going. I was about to protest the idiocy of such an escapade, but resistance is futile. Instead of saying ‘I told you so’, I’m just going to articulate my concerns in the silent void of the internet.
Assumptions: Lots of girls read TimeOut, and want cats, but can’t have them because London is shit and their jobs take too long. Girls also like coffee, and the strange mix of companionship, soft fur and lack of responsibility that comes from playing with a friend’s pet, perhaps over a coffee at their house, then going home.
Some clever ladies have come up with a Cat Cafe, having seen a Cat Cafe in Japan. Geniuses, those two. What inventive people they are.
Timeout has mentioned this to its largely female and pet-affection-starved readership, and some people very close to me would like to visit said establishment. I am felt compelled to issue the following:
TIMEOUT OVER-EXPOSURE CAVEAT: Now that everybody knows where it is, and the weather’s foul, it will be:
FULL of people getting in the way and not finding anywhere to sit, and
FULL of people standing near people who are sat near cats
It may even be so over-exposed that the beleaguered owners have to give those intending to sit cat-adjacent a time-sensitive ticket, reducing the crush between the Cat-Approach Area and the cramped Non-Cat Area of the Cat Cafe. This may even lead to the existence of a Cat Queue.
Such a crush will be encouraged by the owners, as it will allow them to maximise revenue generation and ‘buzz’ around the Cat Cafe, so I expect the Non-Cat Area to be extra-narrow, hot, loud and uncomfortable, and by design, forcing us into the apparent comfort offered by the Cat Approach Area.
Despite all this, we should go. Could be a laugh, and who doesn’t like cats?
Found in a Notebook #2
There’s another snippet of something here, too – this one lurks between notes for meetings in my work book, and looks like it was hammered out on a train, given the state of my handwriting. Brevity abounds, if that’s possible.
The ground beneath Sally’s feet was warm – baking powder-fine dust rubbed between her toes, her sandals keeping the worst of the stones on the verge from bothering her. Another car passed at speed, whipping her Sunday dress as it went. She scarcely noticed, starin instead at the small, dull metal disc in her hand. Not long now, she thought.
The knapsack’s dumb weight was just beginning to bother her when the needle started twitching, then speeding.
It spiked, unequivocal. Into the field on her left, it said. On she went. Sally instinctively checked the road for cars, just as Miss Foster had taught her and the rest of the class back at St Beatrice’s since she could remember. She turned. The needle nodded in approval. Sally started at it, willing it to talk or otherwise enlighten her. The needle bobbed sarcastically, wavering again, then reiterating its latest instruction. Sally complied, weary.
On entering the field, with cicadas keeping time for the high noon sun as always, Sally passed an old elm tree that had seen many days better than this one. She reached into the only pocket on her dress for the last piece of paper she owned, and read it to herself yet again – just as she had every day at this time, since finding it in the street four days hence. The calm, old-time handwriting was already familiar. The foolscap old and classy, just starting to yellow. It said:
And then it ends, fucksake! This is so much better. Definitely something in that. Don’t remember writing it, but so many questions. Who is Sally? Where are we? What’s with the needle? Will Philip Pullman mind if I’ve ripped off the Golden Compass?
There is something in this, somewhere. Needle in a fucking haystack it may be, but at least there are traces of haystack.
Found In A Notebook
Found this in a workbook at the bottom of my bag. One can only imagine what the hen party got up to next.
The day ended much as it had begun, with a rush of bags, coats, passes, beeps and doors, people and half-shouts, “excuse mes” and platform alterations. Finally, Morton Glennister and his assorted baggage – a rucksack containing dirty washing and a small laptop bag he picked at of the corners of when he was waiting on platforms, and contain at least a pound of assorted stationary, tobacco and other detritus sure to clog the sockets of his iphone and ruin anytyhng that had the misfortune to find itself trapped in its murky depths.
Slumping into the nearest empty table seat, Mort – 28, nondescript brown hair, browner eyes – exhaled and gazed out of the window for a few seconds, and with a little affirmative nod, reached into the smaller of the two bags, fishing out a typically unkempt copy of JD Salinger’s overrated student stable The Catcher in the Rye. Mort had several hours of rain-based monotony to blot out before his train eventually limped into the small provincial station that was close enough to his parent’s modest cottage for you to smell dinner from the platform if the evening breeze was so minded.
Engrossed in Holdens brush with the law after the business with the hooker, Mort ignoed the landscape’s judder past his window, featuring increasingly decrepit stations. The cast of faces and pasts around him shifted, too. He did look up and sigh outwardly when the hen party from Tredegar at the end of his carriage, emboldened by pints of Asti...
And then it tails off. You can almost smell the Berkeley menthols they’ve been cadging in the train’s disabled loo-cupboard, can’t you?
This is actually a draft of a draft of the real-life story of when a strange man on a train appeared to either (a) be a version of me from the future or (b) be a relative of mine from a different universe. Really perceptive old guy, seemed to know me really well, had a very strange, oddly timeless look in his old blue eyes. I like to think of him as a time-traveller. In fact, The Book is based on there being a load of people like him among us, if you must know. Quite how it will differ from all of the other time-travel books in the world is beyond me at present. Then again, the main reason it’ll differ from the other time-travel books is that I’ll have written it. I’m reading some Gael Garcia Marquez to get my head around this Magical Realism thing and hopefully some of his beautiful imagery and wordplay will rub off.
There are more snippets of stories I found in notebooks, too. Maybe I should put them all here, and then interlink them in some way.
Thursday, 10 October 2013
Ramping up/music writing
The Work has got far more extensive and fast-paced since taking the New Job, it seems. I have to say I initially enjoyed the old-school buzz of /having to/ produce words on an almost hourly basis. In truth, it’s not a job I’ve had to do full time before. In the past, I always thought of myself as a frustrated writer, cruelly run off the road of full-time scribbling and labouring on the hard shoulder reserved only for put-upon subs. Tortured metaphors aside, it’s all getting a little bit frantico. Still, better that than the underemployed mess I have been in past lives eh?
Trouble is, now that I’m the Internatonal Go-To-Man for data about this company, I’m finding it hard to find the time to write the case studies and other shit everyone else is so keen to nick and stick in their bids. I’m also really easy to pick on if the bundle of stuff we have already is in any way not up to snuff. But hey, I’m workin’ on it, dammit.
Quite excited about seeing The Death of Pop – Thom and Angus’ new noisy adventure, upstairs at the Garage tomorrow. I might even interview them, stick the result here and then sell it to Music Radar, Line of Best Fit, the Quietus or something. We’ll see...
Having something on the Quietus would be awesome, but they’re weapons-grade pretentious arseholes, so I doubt it’ll get that far. There might be a nice piece about the differing fortunes of Joe (who will be there in support/van-driving capacities) and Thom. Family Fortunes: A Story About Committment, I could call it...
Tuesday, 8 October 2013
Brighton/weddings/winnings
So we went to Brighton on Saturday, the events of which basically nixed my lofty ‘write-every-day’ ambitions. Thankfully some new ideas around worlds-within-worlds have started to bob to the surface in the absence of the thousand or so words I should have produced, like long-forgotten corpses on a moonlit lake. Purple simile use aside, Brighton was as predicted – inherently smug, full of crap vintage shops, but not short of a beer, so all was well. Chloe turned up, we bought her dinner in a US diner, we sent her home, the roof of her hotel room collapsed. The usual.
Yes, the roof of her hotel room had collapsed while she was out for dinner! Typically for someone who has only ever taken the cheapest available route to anything, our Chlo had needlessly placed herself in danger by paying under £30 for a night’s accommodation in a room barely wider than the bed at its end, with ‘bathroom on the second floor, showers on the third’, apparently. Jesus. Who does this in 2013, I hear you cry? Even as a witless borderline alcoholic idiot, I would probably have factored the cost of a decent room into the photography-course bottom-line before booking it. She lives in Newport, so three hours’ drive across the country (away from the outright ugliness of Wales, which isn’t worth photographing, obviously) resulted in a near-death experience. Fuck that.
Anyway, all was well – she hesitantly got a refund, and will be billing the OAP Chinese (!) people in charge of the hotel for ‘the cost of cleaning her camera’, in a vibrant seizure of her inalienable rights as a consumer, and not in a limp and half-arsed way, of course. Personally, I’d have been down the road in the Premier Inn for another £50 anyway, or at least gone there, explained the situation and then wrestled compensation from the fuckers on my return. To take being moved to another room in the same dilapidated shithole is to infer that it’s inconvenient, not outright dangerous. I hope she grows a pair as a result of this, I really do. It would be about time.
I may not have mentioned the nuptials of Andy and Sasha on here before now – a brilliant afternoon/evening in Bath, catching up with all of the Future gang (or those that are left, anyway). I’ll do a full post on the state of the old Alma Mater in due course. Suffice to say I seem to have put a bizarre, 7-fold spread on Barcelona, Real, Bayern, Chelsea and all kinds of other stuff, which all came in, meaning I’m into three figures off an initial stake of £5, in two months! £108.11! Who says gambling’s for fools (besides Lemmy)? This means that the round of international matches due tomorrow – which contains some seriously lopsided affairs such as Spain vs. Belarus – could be another bonanza.
Monday, 7 October 2013
A Future Beckons
This, from the Guardian’s eloquent, passionate and positive review of GTA V Online, is a two-paragraph précis of what I want from an online, open-world game:
“What the game definitely realises though, is the chaotic thrill of life in an urban sprawl entirely populated by gun-toting ne'er-do-wells. You can be cruising the streets looking for a convenience store to turn over (sorry mum) when in a flash, two other players in roaring muscle cars scorch past pursued by half the LSPD. At other times, there are weird moments of unspoken camaraderie – like Journey re-imagined by a 14-year-old action movie fanatic with attention deficit issues.
On Sunday night my female character was waiting at an ATM to cash in about seven grand's worth of stolen car funds; when I turned round there was a male player character waiting for me beside a motorbike – he sounded the horn and waited some more. So I got on. We spent the next half-hour riding around the city and ridiculous speedlike Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, zipping in and out of the traffic as the giant sun sunk behind the skyscrapers. Then some other player took a shot at us as we passed. We followed him to a tattoo parlour, where he got out of his car and walked in for some new ink. My new friend calmly stopped, got off his bike, pulled out a can of gasoline and poured it all over the car. He then poured a line all the way up to the door of the tattoo parlour. When the guy came out, my pal ignited the line and rode off; I looked back to see our victim attempting to get into his vehicle as it exploded. We just kept riding. ”
Unfortunately, this in turn will be fed by real-world cash in the form of seamless integration with our real-world bank accounts, and social interaction between NPCs and the real world will be arbitrated through Facebook or whatever follows it.
The immersiveness, the dreamlike omnipotence, the endless opportunity for - albeit virtual – self-expression will be utterly compelling for a while. Film, as a medium, is fucked once this goes properly mainstream, and massive, immersive adventures are mainstream enough to be downloaded in three seconds and enjoyed by your parents. Film is something you watch. This – whatever this is – is something you do, with friends, strangers, whatever. This therefore wins, long-term.
It is becoming an industry and a lifestyle all its own. This game (and others like it, let’s be honest) is a stepping stone on that road. How thrilling it could be. I don’t want to be living my life vicariously through a screen full of made-up people at any point in my future, but this stage, where it’s literally somewhere else to go, and virtual tourism is a real thing, is fascinating.
Friday, 4 October 2013
Fake nostalgia/pebbles
What’s it called when you’re nostalgic for a period of time or a sequence of events that never were? When you hanker to revisit a set of emotions and situations that you know, in reality, that you never had? I find myself periodically – particularly on Friday afternoons when all I’ve got to do is knock out case studies – experiencing this in regard to my first job.
Working at Paragon, for the 20 months it lasted, was a bit mental. My sister died, I fell in love, I fell out of love, I got very sad, I started a life-long distrust of senior managers, I began to understand the difference between hard work and dossing about, and defiantly backed the latter as a career principle.
It was so volatile, seat-of-the-pants and emotional that I effectively left in a huff (as discussed elsewhere on this blog). And yet, and yet, I find myself wondering how Nicky, Nerys, Lisa, Chandra, Martin, Andy H, Karen and Russell are – where they’re at and what they’re doing, like we’re in some way still friends. In some cases, i wasn’t even great friends with some of the names in that list, but that just serves to mystify even more. Why should I still care? It was very formative I suppose. In truth, true friendship survives when both parties involved want it to in equal measure. None of those people have spoken to me in anger since Ieft in 2002/3 – jeez – but here I am, absent-mindedly googling them. I ran across this: http://magazinesfromthepast.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Search?search=kimber&fulltext=Search&ns0=1&ns14=1#
...which is about my first boss, from some sort of half-arsed archive of old magazines I worked on back when I was funner. How things have changed. I miss those guys, dammit. I think. Some of them. Maybe.
Off to the home of raw-sewage enthusiasts, overbearing vegans and renowned homosexuals tomorrow – sunny Brighton beckons. I’ve always found Brightonians to be terribly interested in telling you how amazing Brighton is, despite it being a slightly naffer version of Bournemouth with a shingle bank where the beach should be, galloping heroin addiction rates and about 2000% more fucked Cockneys than my erstwhile stomping-ground. It does, however, have a lot of well-appointed places to get riotiously hammered in before weaving one’s way back to the comparative familiarity of Oyster cards and silent, faintly sinister nightbuses, which is why we’re going.
I may blog from there in accordance with my stated aim of doing this every day for a month, but you never know, I might get my 4s pinched by a corn-fed seagull the size of a Dachshund. You never know.
Thursday, 3 October 2013
Weddings, trips, football, gambling
The Wedding was at the top of our to-chat-about list last night. It’s been bubbling away at the back of our heads for the last two years, obviously, but living in London has kind of stymied/slowed decision-making. Knowing that we’re certainly leaving next year has galvanised our thinking somewhat and we’re close to a theme for the day. The prospective costs are a bit of an issue, but there are ways around these. I think once the end of the year comes around we’ll be in a good place to book venues, decide on decor etc etc. I don’t want anything too fancy, as we’re not really fancy people, and our friends and family have to love it, so it’s not going to be all about DJs and fireworks. Something cool in the West Country – where we met and fell in love, after all – seems the most sensible option.
On the whole, Autumn next year seems to be the best time, giving us enough of a window to put something together that ticks all of the above boxes and gets everybody who needs to be involved on the same page. I can’t wait to put some concrete in the foundations of this idea, which has been mere sketches for so long.
A quiet evening last night, after accidental after-work beers the night before. Did some writing (‘Apple’ is proving a lot more straightforward to knock out than ‘Age’ ever was, and hopefully won’t contain quite as much self-reverential nonsense). I think it’s a good discipline to aim for getting one of these things done a week, and the longer I spend writing something – anything – on a daily basis here, the more likely that is.
I emerged from steering an imaginary Arsenal side to European glory on PES last night to find Tam’s character in GTA in the grip of a post-Alien-induction acid trip, complete with phasing visuals, sitar’n’bongo backing music and all kinds of analogue-delayed vocals, as he fell serenely to earth. I’ll post some images of it here in due course, but suffice it to say it is easily the most out-there visual I’ve seen in any media – TV, film, whatever – in a very long time.
Rockstar could be accused of shark-jumping at this point, as it feels that they’ve run out of better ideas and have opted for the fantastical, but it raises an interesting potential direction for future games on this model. Open-world games such as GTA seem to succeed because they represent a skewed or dreamlike version of the real world, while unapologetically ‘fantastical’ sandbox games revel in their unreality. Truly combining the two has probably been done – apologies, I’m no student of videogame history – but the idea that there’s another world ‘behind’ ours, in the style of Stephen King and Peter Straub’s book The Talisman – is compelling. It’s one of the ideas I’m toying with for my magnum opus. I wonder what a combination of Oblivion and GTA would be like, for example?
Before witnessing Rockstar’s latest fever-dream first hand, I’d been listening to a nightmare of sorts, as Manchester City were taken apart by a Bayern Munich side who are steadily usurping Barcelona as European football’s pre-eminent force. I only listened to the increasingly fatalistic 5 Live coverage, but from what Alan Green and co were saying, combined with the Guardian’s reaction this morning (http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/oct/02/manchester-city-bayern-munich-champions-league) it was brutal out there. Their strikerless, endlessly shifting dominance of midfield and exploitation of space will probably even have Neymar and co shitting it a little bit. Even so, I had a good day at the office, with Real Madrid and PSG both winning at a canter. My latest foray into the world of high-stakes gambling reads thus, predicted winners in bold:
Wednesday 3 Oct
PSG v Benfica - won
Real Madrid v FC Copenhagen – won
Saturday 5 Oct
Liverpool v Crystal Palace
Levante v Real Madrid
Barcelona v Valladolid
Sunday 6 Oct
Tottenham v West Ham
Norwich v Chelsea
As you can see, there are relatively few risks here. I can’t say I trust Liverpool 100% to get a result, but Palace were so pisspoor against Southampton that I had to have a go. Real away at Levante might also come unstuck, but I doubt it given the form they’re in. Tottenham should be pretty safe against West Ham at home, and I assume that Chelsea will be able to overcome Norwich, even though the Canaries are tough to beat at Carrow Road. Sensible bets all, though, and if they all come in, that’s £50 on a fiver, right there. Two down, six to go. I’ll let you know.
On the strength of last night’s schooling of Man City, I may have to add Bayern to my ‘stable’ of regular bets, to (qv. Barcelona, Real Madrid, Chelsea) and remove Man United, who are getting a little better each week, but have clearly lost a lot of their potency and ‘fear-factor’ since Lord Ferg retired to the golf course.
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