Book Collections

Been hard at work on my new(ish) website for the run up to Christmas. It's a book price comparison site, and, while there's still a few bugs to be ironed out, it works pretty well. Recently I've been adding new feature pages to try to pick up some traffic over the (potentially) lucrative holiday season when it comes.

The most recent pages I've added have been:

• A Mr Men and Little Miss complete collection box set page. I loved the Mr Men when I was a nipper, so this was a really easy page to write.
• A page on the Skulduggery Pleasant series, a series of kids books featuring the undead wizard Skulduggery Pleasant, a living skeleton who fights the forces of evil using his formidable magical powers. Fun stuff.

I've still got tons of work to do on it - I've identified 13 different book box sets which it would be good to have a page each on - but it's good to see the site shaping up after all the work that's been done on it.

Here's hopin it might actually make me some money in the long run...

Skiving.

For those of you who don't know, "skiving" is the noble art of "not actually working when you're at work". In the Far East Zen masters refined and codified the practice into the highly-refined, semi-mystical form of "faff-fu". And you thought they were just meditating.

So, my boss is still on holiday (when will the madness end?), and, to make things even worse/better, my line manager-type guy has moved desks so he's no longer almost literally peering over my shoulder all the time.

Enter the sloth.

I've spent most of this week not doing any actual work at all, but wearing my (now well-practiced) "slightly consternated" face while looking up all sorts of irrelevant rubbish on Wikipedia. I also heard a crap joke that made me laugh -

Q - How do you know when the Devil's at the front of the queue in the Post Office?
A - He takes many forms.

Anyway, as I was saying - lately, the Wikipedia has been my playground during working hours, so if I'm not actually working, I am at least finding out new stuff. Been reading a lot about Outsider Art at the moment: I've always been impressed by the Watts Towers and other semi-obsessive projects like that, so I did a bit of digging and came up with some truly fascinating stories.

There's always been a bit of a correlation between art and madness, at least in the popular consciousness (if there is such a thing). Most of the people we consider as great artists were a bit unhinged, but I think that's kind of true of anyone who really throws themself into something: to be really good at something, to be singular at something, you almost by definition can't be what the bulk of society would consider "a well-balanced individual". You have to be single-minded, passionate: or, to use a less positive word that means effectively the same thing, obsessive.

What I liked about the artists I found when I did a bit of digging when no-one else was looking in my workplace was that they weren't creating for an audience. They created stuff because they had to. It almost felt a bit voyeuristic looking at the stuff they'd made, knowing that they'd never saught a public airing for it when they were alive.

I'd better give some examples. Edmund Monsiel was a Polish shopkeeper who, in 1942, hid himself away in his brother's attic fearing arrest from the Nazis. He remained there for years, scratching out innumerable iterative drawings by candlelight. All his drawings feature repeated faces drawn again and again - they do have strange kind of beauty to them, but that's probably not what Edmund intended. Even in darkness or in the folds of a piece of clothing he saw accusatory eyes and a dissaproving face. See what I mean about the voyeuristic aspect? I'm calling them beatiful, but they were probably painful to him. Not sure how I feel about looking at the signs of a mind falling apart.

I will write more about this later (it's really captured my imagination), but I must head to bed now. Do not pass Go, do not chop off your ear and send it to your loved one.

Back to the Toad "Work" Squatting on my Life

I've not had a good week. After my wee week away, I just haven't been able to back into the swing of things at all. I'll try not to make this post too moany, but I've not been the happiest of men over the past seven days.

Can't seem to knuckle down to it at work, which just makes the time drag all the more. Took on some new stuff today (which I shouldn't really be doing) just to see if learning something new would enthuse me any, but it's proved to be another cul de sac of procrastination and over-deliberation.

Don't get me wrong - I do like my job: it's just that lately I don't really want to do it. Between every strike of the snooze button on my alarm clock, the prospect of pulling a sickie lately always looms large. Maybe it's just the nice weather sapping my energy, maybe someone's sneaked some kryptonite under my desk - whatever the reason, I just can't seem to muster up the bluster to tackle the stuff I'm supposed to be doing.

Doesn't help that my boss is away on holiday at the moment. The whole atmosphere at the office is one of lax licentuousness, and I think everyone's kind of just kicking back and seeing what they can get away with. Which turns out to be quite a lot. It hasn't gone all "Lord of the Flies" quite yet, but I reckon it's only a matter of time before someone sticks a pig's head on a stick and we all start lighting fires with spectacles and eating each other.

Gahh. But on the plus side - we're all on holiday on Monday, which means a long weekend followed by a short week. And I've been invited to a barbeque tomorrow by a couple of friends who I haven't seen for ages, so that should be good. And I've secured Monday and Tuesday off the week after that, to help out a couple of mates who are moving house and need a free-coffee-fuelled general dogsbody kicking around to assist them. And possibly paint stuff.

I think I really liked my job when I was learning new stuff every day (it was a bit of a career u-turn for me - or, more accurately, a u-turn into an actual career from a dead-end job), but, while I'm still learning new stuff all the time, the things I'm asked to do get more and more samey, so I get less and less chances to use the things that I've just learned. I find myself doing more and more stuff on my own initiative, just to keep myself interested more than anything else, and it's starting to annoy me that that isn't getting recognised by my superiors.

I really need to lug more stones about. Build more (non-metaphorical) walls. Stop thinking about work for three days and just enjoy myself. Maybe push Piggy off a cliff while I'm at it.

And Relax...

Holiday over, and back to work today. Boo hiss.

Still, I did have a fine time while I was away. Luckily, the weather held for the most part, so I was able to bask in bright, un-Scottish sunshine for almost the entire week. I've even managed to get one of those absurd t-shirt tans, where I'm the colour of fine mahogany on my face and forearms, but still a sickly, pasty white on my torso from the neck down. My arms and face look like I'm quite healthy and outdoors-y, but the rest of me looks a bit like I've been living underground for the past five years.

'Twas a bit of a hectic week, but I loved every minute of it. During the day, I was working like a navvy, lugging buckets of stone chippings, sand and other heavy stuff around for hours on end. And breaking big stones into smaller stones with a tiny hammer, which was surprisingly satisfying.

Me and my Dad are still (perhaps foolishly) entertaining the notion of running the West Highland Way, so there was a lot of running going on as well. My first day there, I flippantly made the comment that I didn't want to run for less than two hours a day - unfortunately, my Dad held me to that, and woke me up at six every morning for a two hour/two and a half hour run every single day afterwards.

God, but Pitlochry is hilly. Lots of beautiful scenery, but it's very up and down (and mostly up). High hills to tackle early in the morning. But it was lovely to run through wooded paths and plant my feet on bare earth rather than the usual concrete pavements I run on here in Dundee. Here in this city I count as home, I run the same course day in, day out - seven days in Pitlochry, we took a different route every time.

Also ran the furthest I've ever ran ever on Saturday. Three hours: up Ben Vrackie, then downhill towards Killicrankie, and back to Pitlochry. Ate a sandwich the size of my head, then ran another three hours (and four minutes) doing the same course the othe way round. Six hours of running in one day. I'm hopelessly proud of that, but at the same time I'm aware that it's impressive only to me.

At one point a butterfly fluttered before me and my Dad - kept pace with us for at least a mile or two. Quite touching, until I realised that, like all the woodland creatures, it had realised how slow we were going, and was probably just taking the piss. Not long after that, I swear I saw a fox giving us the finger.

Holiday...

As of today (or Monday, if you're a pedant) I'm on holiday. Hoo-bloody-rah. Not a moment too soon - I don't want to bore you with work stuff (I bore myself enough with it already, but then I do get paid for it), but, due to circumstances beyond my control, my current project has just descended into a cut-and-paste fest that seems to be interminable. A brand new circle of hell. With none of it any of my my doing! Aargh! Jam fingers in ears, slam face into keyboard whilst humming the latest maddeningly catchy (but still hopelessly bland) tune that Radio 2 have decided to put on "high rotation" on their playlist. Repeat as desired.

And relax. Full stop, draw a line under it - that's the last little bit of thought I'm going to give to work until I'm back there and have to face the sprawling monstrosity of my current project once again. It breathes fire and everything.

I'm on holiday now. Holiday! My timing being as poor as ever, I think I've managed to miss to the bulk of the heatwave we've been having here in the UK by a very thin margin - I'll be just in time to get the rainy, humid and possibly thunderstorming aftermath of Scotland actually having some nice weather for a change. Looking out my bedroom window as I write this, it's all misty and mysterious out there - very romantic looking (in a pea-soup, Jack the Ripper kind of way), but not the kind of cloudless, sun-kissed skies I was hoping for.

Anyway - I'm off to Pitlochry tomorrow to begin my holiday proper. I'll be staying with my Mum and Dad for a week, laying slabs and generally helping them out with their garden. Do I know how to party or what? Slab-tastic.

All sarcasm aside, I am actually really looking forward to it. Hard physical labour will actually be a relief compared to the cutting and pasting stuff I'm currently doing as I sit on my arse in an increasingly comfortable chair.

Me and my Dad have been speaking about running the West Highland Way recently - it's something he really wants to do, and I think it'd be an adventure and a real achivement to accomplish. Only thing is - the West Highland Way is very, very long, 95 miles, to be exact. And my Dad also wants to run up Ben Nevis - the UK's highest mountain - at the end of it as well.

Now, my Dad's ran more marathons than I've had hot dinners. I thought I was catching up when I had a particularly steaming stew at a friend's house, but that's just a stupid joke. I've never ran a marathon. Done a couple of half-marathons, and at the moment I'm running 12 miles a night, but I've never actually ran for more than three hours at a time. Doing the West Highland Way the way we want to do it will mean running a marathon a day for four days in a row. Then running up a big fuck-off mountain. I'm more than a little concerned, as I hope you'll understand...

So, intermixed with slab-laying, I'll also be running like a bastard. I'll try to take some pictures as I go. I'm sure I'll love it, but it seems a bit daunting at the moment. Me and my Dad have already agreed that we should do a six-hour run (up a couple of mountains) just to prepare for immanent death/long distance achievement.

Degree Show '06

So I woke up today with an immense hangover after a night of enjoyable misadventures the day before. Unfortunately, I'd promised a friend that I'd go to the degree show at the art college (happens every year - it's only on for a week, but I always make sure I have a wee look round) - I was really hoping he'd have forgotten about it, as I felt fit for nothing but sleep and perhaps a little soft groaning, but he turned up as we'd drunkenly agreed, and we dutifully plodded round the college trying to keep our bleary eyes wide open to see what we could see.

I try to catch the show every year, because (a) it's free, and (b) it makes me feel like I'm all cultured and that. Wandering about the place with a head like lead, I came to a couple of conclusions - (1) most art students are not going to be great artists, and (2) you can't openly laugh at crap hung on walls when the artist is sitting in a chair in the same room as you. Pretending to read a book and feign disinterest at your reaction to their work.

There was some great stuff there. The fact that it managed to penetrate my hangover was testament to how much I liked it - more of which anon. But there was an awful lot of awful stuff. This sums it up - we walked into one "space" which had nothing but a series of series of pictures hung on the walls. Each picture was a photo of the back of a plate. I kid you not. After four years of studying art, this person's best effort when it came to displaying everything they'd learned was a series of pictures of the other side of plates. It moved my soul not a jot.

There was also a lot of "issue art". Art trying to make a statement. I should really have capitalised the "s" in that last sentence. Sledgehammer art, telling you something you already know - apparently, big corporations are bad, and have far too much power in the world: war is also bad, and people shouldn't be doing it - poverty is also not recommended, and someone should really do something about it. Maybe paint a big meaningful picture or something.

I think when you're in you're late teens and early twenties you have nothing to say. Angst? Join the club. Railing against the inequalities of the world - yeah, I did that too, but I didn't have access to paint and papier mache like you did.

Anyway - there was some good stuff to be seen. The highlight of the whole show for me was walking into a room with huge, semi-abstract bird sculptures in it. They were almost just blobs with legs, but their form totally captured the tremulousness of a tiny bird that just flits about, steals a nut from a birdtable and is gone. Walking into a room with those wee tiny birds made into a huge physical presence was great - it kind of took (rook?) me down to their level, and - weirdly - made me realise how far apart we are by bringing me closer to their scale.

Not sure if it's frowned upon or not, but I'm going to make it my mission to photograph those fake birds.

Beetlemania

So it seems I've got myself a new pet. I think I'm going to call him Eduardo. He's a little beetle who's taken up residence in my bathroom.

He's been there for the past week or so, no bigger than my fingernail, and he seems happy enough just beetling about. Truth be told, the first time I made his acquaintance I did consider scooping him up and flushing him, but it somehow seemed a little unfair. After all, I'm a lot bigger than he is, and he seemed to be having fun.

I'm not a big fan of insects usually, but I'm finding myself quite liking having little Eduardo around. Spiders are quite sinister, and flying insects are just annoying, but beetles - particularly little ones - are kind of like the cadillac of the insect world. All black and shiny as if they've spent all day polishing themselves. Cockroaches are too segmented and chitinous for my liking, but beetles have a simple solidity to them that I almost admire. Most insects seem somehow dirty, but I imagine a beetle - and Eduardo in particular - could wear a top hat and a cane with a certain aplomb. He could even pull off a waxed moustache and a French accent with a measure of style.

I'm a little bit worried about him, though. I have no idea what beetles eat - he hasn't touched the thimble of smoked salmon and caviar I left out for him the other day. I love the fact that my shiny shiny tiled bathroom appeals to him as a place of residence - it must be like a huge linoleum adventure playground for him - but lately he's started freezing as soon as I go in and turn the light on, as if I'm spoiling his fun.

Now that I think about it, it's very possible he could be dead.

Pink My Ride

And just how many muppets had to die to upholster the interior of this monstrosity?