Well, shit

So, we're pregnant, and I couldn't be happier. You are officially boiling away in there, getting yourself ready to meet a couple of completely unready chancers who suddenly have a lot of shit to buy, and no clear holiday plans for the next five years. Thanks for that :)

I feel like a huge ball of warm, calming light is fighting to burst out of my chest and fill the room. I want to tell everybody, because I have a three-word comment in my locker that has astonishing power to halt all other conversations. We aren't telling anyone yet because we only found out yesterday afternoon. Sparing you some of the details, your Mum thought you were in there, and I had a feeling she might be right. Call it fatherly intuition if you like. It's not, but you can do so if you wish.

So, we went and bought some tests from the supermarket, for use at the weekend, to confirm what we both secretly suspected, but were having trouble telling eachother. An enormous, soon-to-be-true fact hovered over us like the spaceships from Arrival, but less scary. Or more scary, depending on your viewpoint.

"What? Oh, that? That's just a life-changing fact. You'll get used to it after a few minutes. It just sort of lurks there."

 Yesterday was Tuesday. The plan was to do the tests on Friday. We agreed this, primarily because I had a pile of work to do and several people shouting at me to get things done. I thought finding out I was a father could - and I'm sorry to say this now, but it's true - wait until the weekend. In a precedent that you're no doubt familiar with by now, your mother had other ideas.

There I was, typing away in my little room, a resplendantly childless 38 year-old married man with stable finances, a sensible wardrobe, some guitars and no clear idea of who, where or what I would be in two years' time, never mind five.Your mother let out a unique, scary and excited sound from the confines of the bathroom. She is no stranger to the unbidden emission of bizarre noises, but that notwithstanding, it is a unique amalgamation of fear, excitement, holy-fuck-overwhelmedness and mental adjustment that will stay with me to my dying day. It is now known as The Sound You Make When You Find Out You're Going To Have A Fucking Baby, or TSYMWYFOYGTHAFB. The branding people are working on something snappier as I type this.

On hearing it, I immediately thought: 'Hmm, that sounds portentous.' Right again, gentlemanly foresight! 2-0 man-intuition!

Your mother comes out of the bathroom, laugh-crying and holding her pregnancy indicator thingy. You know - the one mentioned three paragraphs ago, which we were going to use on Friday night. Pregnant, 2-3 weeks, it announced, somewhat coldly I thought, from its little life-defining LCD screen.

We are going to see a doctor about you later in the week, just to check you're actually there and everything, but I know you are, because of my intuition. Already and without realising it, the little peppercorn-sized bundle in there is changing our lives. Immediate benefits include a renewed interest in completing various DIY tasks around the house, but deeper and more meaningful consequences are also emerging. I already know how new parents feel re: work. That is to say, work don't mean shit to nobody no more. Work is for you, and your Mum. It pays the money to buy the things, as the Beatles once said (I've probably bored you to death about them by now). You and your mum are the most important things in life. End of.

I mean, the dog's quite important, but largely in a comic relief/decorative sense. But then, you know that all too well.

I wanted you to know that we wanted you to be made. We agonise over most things in our lives, and we agonised over you for longer than anything else, and quite rightly. We worried that we wouldn't know how to be parents properly, or how to cope with the realness of being parental. We worried that we'd miss out on things, but couldn't really say what those things were, because we spent ten years doing most of the things that new parents miss. But then we both wanted you to be in our lives, so we decided to just see if we could make you for a bit. Turns out we're pretty fucking A+ at conception, too, eh?

I knew, once my mum died, that one day I would probably have a child of my own. Ours is a small, keen but ultimately unready army, and we need the reinforcements. I expended many thousands of mental calories fretting about dull things like money and mortgages and how work would work, and your mum worried about what being a mum would mean to her sense of self - which is really common among mums and mums-to-be. She is, I would imagine, worrying about that on her way to work in London on the train, with this tiny, massive secret inside her which is more life-changing than any faint backache deserves to be. You and I both know she will be fine, though, and your arrival will change us both for the better.

I can't wait to tell everyone you're real. This is an amazing feeling, and if I could bottle the warming light-in-the-chest and sell it, I'd be rich enough for you to go to university. Imagine that!

I love you already, you glorious little speck of trouble.

Things I Write About When I Write About Thinking About Running

OK, so the amount of mithering you'll find on this blog might make it seem as if that bloke from Sleaford Mods finished his A-levels, but really I'm not that fucking bad. I find it easier to be negative, that's all. I apologise to those bored enough to still be reading this.

Anyway, things are about to get a lot more interesting, but before I reason out exactly why that is, there's just enough time for A Minor Reminiscence:

Since time immemorial, I have hated running. A sliding scale, where x is speed and y is negative feeling, clearly exists in my brain - somewhat thus:

As a child, I was made to run, but I am uniformly bad at it. I was overtaken by my younger sister from the age of nine onwards. I have no pace, stamina or particular technique. Like Teddy Sheringham or a late-career Beckham, I prefer (or more accurately, hope) that my mind will be quick enough to put my slow-turning, non-accelerating body in the right places in life. So far, it has done just fine.

I'm sure we've all done cross-country runs in the past, right? Horrid, obviously, but a part of growing up, like acne or terrible haircuts, which simply must take place. I don't mind having had to do cross-country runs as a kid - I don't think they did me any good, but I don't mind them being there, smelling faintly of Deep Heat and BO, in the rusty locker in my head where I keep all those old secondary school memories.

During my mid- to late teens, I benefitted, as some young whippersnappers are wont to do, from having the apparent metabolic rate of an impala. I ate whatever I liked. I did no exercise, other than that demanded of me by polyester-rocking PE uberleiutenants or, for one diverting year, the bloke who ran the paper rounds down at the New Forest Post's fusty headquarters. Fred, his name was. Wonder what happened to him? Dead, probably, by now.

Anyway, I was an arrogant, bonk-eyed whippet of a thing, all piss and vinegar, and everything fitted and nothing hurt. Ever. 'Fuck you, exercise as a concept', I must have shouted as I sauntered through university, still whip-thin, powered by Lambert & Butler, Skol and burgers. 'Hahaha!', I will have bellowed to myself as other 'squares' started to go to gyms voluntarily, and in order to look and feel good, both internally and to others. Dickheads, obviously. Waste of time, all this. Just you wait and see.

The honeymoon from any kind of meaningful exercise lasted until I worked in videogames journalism. Already an underpaid, sexless, dietician's nightmare of a career, my colleagues and I added extraordinary levels of alcohol and nioctine intake to our already meagre diets. Seasons changed. Burgers were eaten. Beer was consumed. Hills were avoided. And slowly enough that you wouldn't really notice, in a manner later perfected by both global warming and the Republican Party, things started to change. My body, once a rusty trampoline of a thing, blithely repelling the four sausage sandwich breakfasts and twenty lattes I threw at it on a weekly basis, started to run out of bullets. Down in the engine room, Scotty had his oxygen mask on, and first-year ratings were being thrown off gantries to their undeserved deaths by exploding panels of lights and dials. The outer hull remained, to the untrained eye at least, unchanged, but within, trouble was afoot.

Slowly, I began to run to fat. I'm not fat, though. Just sort of 'unkempt', physically.

So I started running the other day. And I almost like it. It makes you feel physically in touch with the world, and tired. So damned tired. You sleep well, you feel present and capable and awake in a way that sitting at a desk for nigh-on two decades so far hasn't been able to replicate. Getting over what others think of the sight of you running is easier than I thought it would be, too - turns out, you just start fucking doing it and if you need to, see it as a fuck-you to everyone else who isn't looking after themselves. 'Haha', you shout silently to yourself, 'I have one over on you lot - I'm self-improving.' Or something.

Anyway, long story short, I did a 5k, with several walk phases, up several hills, in 32.33. Some people I know who are 10 years younger than me can't do that on the flat. Keep going, I say. I want a flat, treadmill 5k time around 24 minutes, and the one involving steep hills outside my house in under 30. Then I will be happy. I'm happy now, though, because I know if I just put my shoes on and go, I'll have gone, and will therefore get where I want to be. QED, innit.

Sorry in advance

I can't see people passing their driving tests and humblebragging about it on Facebook anymore. It's poisonous to me. I hate their success. Hate it. And by extension, I hate them. I hate them because they have categorically succeeded where I could not, and never will. Their lives are apparently limitless. Mine is restricted to a lovely house in the middle of fucking nowhere. I cannot escape. I cannot change. I cannot move. I cannot grow. I cannot. I cannot. I cannot.

I am moving in two years' time to a place from which I can get about unaided. This is ridiculous. I feel disabled, and useless, and sub-them. Fuck them. Fuck them. Fuck them.

My life has all the makings of a big heap of nothing. He is literally some sort of fucking rocket scientist. I am a writer who has written nothing. I have sat in the back-bedroom of my house and failed to complete a simple form, and then failed to do a basic job. No one has cared, or called, all day. Fuck this.

Of course I didn't do that great idea I had. Because I'm a cunt. A useless fucking cunt, sitting on his own, shouting silently inside his own head, unable to change a single fucking thing.

As you were.

I've just had a brilliant idea...

I would like to write more, but don't know what to write about.

My life, as it happens minute-to-minute, doesn't seem like the kind of thing that other people would like to read about. But then again - I live in Devon, I have a dog, I work in London, or wherever, and I travel a hell of a lot, pretty much at will.

I could stretch this and form some sort of creative pursuit/blog/vlog out of it, no?

I'll start a little blog and push 1,000 words a day through it for seven days to see if it has legs.

More on this soon (maybe).

Nineteen and Forever

I was five and she was three
I was 12 and she was ten
Were we all that different then
Look how free we'd be
I was 13 so she's eleven
The storm came through in '87
All those summers run together
What it means to me ain't what it means to you
She's nineteen so I'm 21
I become the fortunate son
By the time the winter comes
Where we're two now only one
I'm 27 plays nineteen
Thirty, thirty three, three seven
The lights are on but she's not seen
the intervening years between
Nineteen and forever
Nineteen and forever
Borrowed time on the never never
Nineteen and forever

Just create. Create.

I have just been reading a bit of this while listening to Bowie giving an interview to Alan Yentob in 1978:  and I've realised that I have to create something. Work will fit around it. It has to be made. It must. I must start tonight, and not stop until something is written. Force it. Make it into a thing out of nothing. It's this or a penniless, angry ex-marketing writer with nothing in the locker. I can't have that.

Watched a lot of Tony Robbins stuff in the last couple of days too - proof if anything that there is nothing wrong with me, a lot of people with bigger/more problems do more with their time, and it is in me to do this. Write something, I mean. Just create. Just create. Create.

David Bowie, 1947-2016

EDIT - I've left this blog alone for a year, as is my wont. I've just found this draft post, and was going to extend and finish it, but I like it the way it is, sort of.

Bowie's passing makes me sad even now. I never met him obviously, but would name my first male child after him in a heartbeat. I think the fact that Finn is my favourite name for a boy puts my love of the Veils in perspective (I wonder what Finn would think if he knew?), but Finn Bowie Hutchings is a pretty rockin' handle.

Anyway. The Dame went, then about a fortnight past. Time took a cigarette, as they say.. and I wrote this:

"As you're sat there in the future, you'll be inimitably aware that David Bowie has died, and will probably have processed this fact. Back here on my sofa in Devon it's only just happened (well, it happened while we were asleep this morning). We woke up to a more-mournful-than-usual Shaun Keavney intoning glumly about someone's 'amazing legacy' over Sound & Vision and I instantly thought something fell had happened overnight. He had his Sad Newsreader Serious Voice on, the poor man.

'Shit, I think Tony Visconti's died', I said to a half-asleep Tam. What I really meant was: 'Shit! I hope in my heart that David Bowie's not died, but in fact someone seminally important to his life and work has instead.' This is not to wish ill on Tony Visconti - he's pretty awesome by the looks of it - but you know. To actually articulate that David Bowie, the great unknowable avant-pop overlord, has finished with this plane of existence, is out of the question when you've only been awake for 32 seconds.

Typically, a quick scan of Facebook brought up my beloved mate Rob's characteristically unfluffy prose style: 'BBC are reporting that David Bowie has died.' he said, if not flatly, then matter-of-factly. Rob is not one for great emotional outpourings, as I'm sure you'd agree.

It is now quite late, by my standards - five to eleven as I type this. I'm still not entirely sure what this means. This is very difficult to articulate, but David Bowie meant a great deal, both to me, and to my generation, and to our parents. He was, I think it's fair to say, an icon of the 20th Century. That he's gone at 69 (jeez, liver cancer, thanks so much for that) feels unjust and early and yet, as details emerge of his life in that self-imposed 10-year 'exile' from the public's gaze, my respect for him just grows and grows.

So it seems that after suffering a heart attack (or at least a major scare, I'm not certain) in 2004 he decided not to tour again, and this master of the showbiz disappearing act took to his new role as a stay-at-home dad to he and Iman's youngest child. Laudable, but he probably also felt it necessary. After all, during the childhoods of his other children, Bowie was very busy being Bowie on an international basis, and wouldn't have been all that present in their lives. Speculation aside, that seems to have been his routine, but we also know that he was a prolific consumer of literature, arts, films and music throughout this 'exile' period and it seems he began writing new music, both for a stage musical and for his own ends during this time. As well as, you know, just enjoying being a quiet, massively successful cultural icon who's married to an impossibly beautiful former supermodel and activist. Sounds alright.

Then on his birthday in 2013, The Next Day dropped. Cue pandemonium, reverent cross-examination and general freaking-out. I have to say for the sake of full disclosure that I've not heard a great deal of this surprise from beyond the horizon, but the bits I have heard - Where Are We Now and a few other cuts - I really liked. As ever, Bowie was on terrifically oblique form, but looking back at it from here, with The News still dominating the media, there was a finality to it all. There's always been a sense of melancholy, either explicit or implicit, in Bowie's work, but here it was closer to the surface than recent releases would suggest. In the video for Where Are We Now, we delighted in seeing a man clearly still in possession of considerable powers reminiscing about his time in Seventies Berlin 'sitting in the Djungel' and 'getting the train from Potsdamer Platz - you didn't think I could do that'. It was heartfelt, and wry and touching. I loved it, and thought that, even if Bowie wasn't going to tour, he was at least out in the world, being Bowie. Being quietly better than everyone else at being a super-intelligent taste-making cultural polymath. That made the fact that Katy Perry was the biggest-grossing pop star in the world more palatable. Because Bowie was still out there, being cool enough for all of us.

A few singles arrived subsequent to The Next Day, as if signposting this very fact: 'I'm still here, please carry on', they seemed to say. Videos featured Bowie, and then not, but that was OK too, because you don't need to be in a pop video to be in a pop video. It's all artifice and suggestion, and who's better at that than Bowie anyway?

Blackstar subsequently emerged, and weeks before his death, this great chameleon at the centre of our culture appeared to be preparing us for his departure, lamenting his own mortality, celebrating his achievements /and/ leaving us witty little riddles to play with in his absence.

RE-EDIT: Almost a year on, and nothing has changed. Blackstar is still a landmark in a career of landmarks. To have done everything he did so well and to still be full of passion for his work despite knowing what he was facing is a mark of the man. I still miss him, and the world really is a little dimmer without knowing that he's around.

Maybe there will be more material subsequently - a new album of material from the early Eighties is mooted, for example. But still, a truly unique figure of immeasurable influence leaves us. Thanks, Mr. B. :)

And suddenly...

...I'm depressed again. Always looking for the next thing. What am I doing? Who should I be? When will I know what's right is here? How do you move foward? Inertia creeps, moving up slowly. Everything is fine, everything is fine.

14 years

Last week, I met Finn, Sophia and the rest of the Veils. 'Never meet your heroes', they all say, but hey, I did, at a signing and mini-gig at Rough Trade East - coincidentally the place I heard them for the first time in 2003. Fantastic people they are too. Signed record clutched to my breast I wandered off to the nearest bar, and having taken a few cold drinks, started scribbling, like some sort of lunatic seer.

This, then, is what I saw. It starts out like fanboy nonsense, goes a bit boycrush for a second there, and then sorts itself out into some sort of Stephen King mystical bollocks/nutter-on-a-park-bench verse, just for the hell of it:

"It's not every day you meet an idol. Not the swaggering, already-there kind. A humble purveyor of his own truths. A man with his own candles burning. Perhaps they burn in the same places as yours. But they aren't yours. Theyare his, and he's able to share their glow with others, of which you are undoubtedly one. Tonight I met just one such guy. Slight but strong, and possessing the kind of voice bestowed on only a few. Teh music beats on eternal in this guy. He can't help but bring it out, heaving, raging and thrashing. Barely controlled, but contained enough. The perfect middle between bombast and heart. Singing and lamenting, because and why.

Normal for the whale, armageddon for plankton. Snacking for the leopard, but brutal murder for the antelope. Dancing throuh grass as antelopes stroll, calm in high grass means death.

At midnight they go dancing, reeling and rotting, searching and feeling, the spirits accompany feeling.

I can't here you right now, but I know you're there , and everything I am worried about is nothing to worry about. It is all one strange, fleeting dream. I can control it but in the end it will control me, whatever it is.

Whatever you write, it's better to bite the hand that creeps through pockets of time and will. Beginnings, looking for magical endings, unbound by the past we roll forward, betting the future, stacking the past. What will be will be until it won't, then it don't.

My baby is missing. Caught up in something else. Parade's over, did you lose yourself? Tantrums and reachings, glasses and waiting - look out for the past through the window-soaked glass. She's coming to get you and you know she'll last.

Beautiful shapes and brilliant sounds.
A jaguar roars despite its confines.
Bass through chests and floors besides.

Outside the rain of hearts still pours
Besides the clatter, under the dust, a will, you must.
Become and grow against the unjust
Ghosts and serpents, soil and rust
Who walk and talk alongside us, just because, just because

But what if you don't crest the wave?
What if you never reach the high?
If, but, maybe - what have you wasted?
Spend too much time to belie
What really gets you through the night

Pretend if you like, but you'll know why
The shake of a pen, the bottom lip tries
To hide a moment in consequence.
You had to shake that hand, and tell him why

Always meet your heroes.
They are heroes, after all.

All the moments are justified
You can do nothing but fly
You'll feel mighty and unified,
Uniquely of purpose and ratified
I feel perfect and impossible and deified.
I have shaken my idol. I have told him where he stands.
I am grateful and unbowed.
I'll learn new songs with the same old hands.
Today, I stand.

I must scribble first, to learn to write
I must write, to become myself tonight
To embrace flight and falter
I must try to alter my other, to bring out what is inside.
To go, tip forward towards the light
I will not grow tired, nor will I fight
My demons and spectres are all here tonight
I divide. I multiply. I am in my right."

Must've been good, then. The new album is fucking cracking, too :)

Talking About Things

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.

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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Line Stone #2

Line Stone #1

Wooden Sea

Sea of Books

Baloon Galaxy

Kanagawa

Applewood

Desert

Smoke and Dancing

Smoke and dancing.

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 18^th 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 15^th 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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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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Jack Kerouac Had It Pretty Much Spot-On

“Some's bastards, some's ain't.
That's the score.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac,

“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream”
― Jack Kerouac

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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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

Makes you think, dunnit

Some of these are just extraordinary.

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:

I live in London, (not by choice - long story) and I love pubs. Love them.
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.

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

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?