The Morning Commute

Unlike my last job, my new job is a Monday to Friday, nine-to-five kind of affair. I live a couple of miles away from my work, and, as I'm too damned mean to shell out for bus fares, I have a little trip there and back on Shank's pony every day.

Hoofing it up the pavements day in and day out, I'm always surprised when I see the same faces every day in roughly the same place. Not being a great one for enthusiastically relinquishing the comforts of my bed (personally I believe that all "morning people" should be either shot or sent back whatever planet they came from in the first place), I'm often slightly tardy in getting out of my front door of a morning - scarily, I've found I can judge almost exactly how late for work I'm going to be by the exact point at which I encounter a familiar face.

It's strange - I've got friends who I see less of than these daily moving milestones, but it seems to be an unwritten rule that even exchanging a nod with these characters who play regular bit parts in my life is not the done thing. So (because the walk to work would otherwise be fairly dull), I resorted to making up back stories for them just to make my life seem a little more interesting.

There's a Victorian hypnotist - seven feet tall if he's an inch, and with a waxed black moustache that's so impressive it cuts through the crowds like bullbars on an SUV - if I pass him before I pass the college building, then I'm only going to be five minutes late. I try not to catch his eye.

A little further on, I encounter the Eskimo dissident. He always looks slightly furtive, and smells of fish. He fled his icy home and has been leaking secrets ever since. Lately, his twin brother has been sent over here to track him down and drag him back to Igloo HQ - there's a lot of bad blood in that family, and a personal vendetta that has nothing to do with Eskimo state security, but the twin brother had a score to settle and if he can do it with the backing of the Eskimo secret service, so much the better. Admittedly, it could have just been the same guy wearing a different jacket one day, but the look in his eyes told a different story.

Then there's the Major. He's always on his way to the Central Library, striding past me in a puff of tweed and an intruiging cumulo-nimbus of bygone facial hair. I like the Major. You can tell he was tall, once. Regular as clockwork, he marches down to the library, battered briefcase in hand. I always make way for him - once I think he even aimed a half-nod in my direction. In his briefcase he has the almost-disintegrating military files of a couple of his old comrades who didn't survive the war he came through unscathed - worse, their reputations have been tarnished, and that's something he can't stand for. But the Major is an honorable man - they were his men, and he still feels a duty to them.

And, perhaps most strangely of all, at lunchtimes there's a Lollipop man I walk past who's the spitting image of Pete Postlethwaite and has a child's mitten attached to the non-business end of his sign. Like some kind of trophy. I don't like to ponder on that too deeply.

Let the Linkfest Begin!

God I'm stupid. Turns out all you need to do to link to something is just to use HTML. It was staring me in the face all the time.

So - lately I've been playing about with this, which is a good idea that doesn't quite work as well as it thinks it should, this, from which I've been downloading stuff to my MP3 player to listen to at work but is a tad limited at the moment (there's a scary computer-generated section as well, which I haven't quite mustered the courage to venture into yet -
not quite sure I'm ready for Shakespeare's sonnets as performed by Sir Stephen Hawking), this, which my wee brother sent me a couple of days ago and looks like something I'd really like to do but probably am a bit too lazy too actually get round to. Oh, and this, which is just silly.

Phew. That was physically tiring to write. A lesser man might have just copied and pasted all the pointy-bracketed Karate Kid style stuff, but I typed it all with my own dainty fingers. Just to remind myself how stupid I can be.

By the way - if anyone knows where I can get the complete works of H. Ryder Haggard (and I have to say - how cool a name is that? He wrote King Solomon's Mines and a bunch of other Victorian adventure stories, but even his name sounds like a description of a particularly interesting character who appears midway through a story on a horse and saves the day...) and John Buchan (he of The 39 Steps fame) online in MP3 format, I'd be eternally grateful.

In Praise of K_Sra

I feel like I'm famous. And like I should really take the time to the work out this linking thing...

The legend that is k_sra dedicated an entire post to yours truly. To say I was touched would be an understatement. Yet again, she made my day.

Bad photo, though. Still, could have been worse, I could have been sniffing someone's a

In Praise of Whims

My mate Steve - who I mentioned earlier on in this blog, before the recent ice age thawed - has been going through a bit of a hard time of things lately. He's just moved house, with all the attendant hassles that that provides, his new job (which seemed tailor-made for him) is being ruined by a boss who seems to have no clue how to actually deal with people, and he was due for an operation on Monday (and although he's a sizeable bloke who can readily deal with most stuff that life throws him, the very mention of needles or blood has him donning a dress, clasping a wrist to his brow and swooning like an old-time silent movie heroine. "Big girl's blouse" is the medical name for his condition, I think). So he's not been a happy man lately.

I try to get up to his neck of the woods and visit him, his wife and his wee gem of a daughter as much as I can, but he lives quite far away so I don't get to see them as much as I'd like. We phone each other a lot, but it's not the same as drinking a few beers and talking shite in person.

Anyway, his wife was having a few of her friends around on Saturday night, and Steve didn't really fancy cowering in the corner while drunken women cackled about him all night, so he phoned me up and arranged to make a trip down to mine for the night. "We'll catch a movie or just stagger around a few pubs," said he. "Sounds good to me," I said. And hung up.

And then the fortuitous whim struck. Watching a film or crawling around various pubs is something that I can do anytime - Steve very rarely ventures back to our home town (long story), but every time I go up and visit him he asks about mutual friends who I still see all the time, and every time I visit Steve our mutual friends (that makes them sounds like communist sympathisers) ask about him.

So I thought I'd cut out the middleman. Almost a surprise party. Cooked a three course meal - Cullen Skink, roast chicken, and Apple Crumble (the dishing out of which was accompanied by a roar of "Llllllllllllets get ready for Crrrrrrrrumble" which I thought was funny at the time) - and invited a bunch of friends who Steve hadn't seen for (literally) years.

And a damn fine time was had by all. I haven't laughed so much in ages. It's the power of the whim - anything that had been overly organised just wouldn't have been as good. It was a wee group of people who hadn't been together in the same room for quite a long period of time, but as soon as we were, it was like we'd never been apart. Whimtastic.

So far, so rosey-tintedly good - the only fly in the ointment is (and how rubbish is this) I have no idea what Steve's operation is actually for.

He's definately told me - as I said, I go up and visit them as often as I can, and I remember him mentioning it, and I remember us talking about it (at great length), but there's always a lot of beer and other forms of extravagant alchohol involved (he's the perfect host), so the details seem to permanently escape me.

He went for his operation on Monday, but apparently it had calmed down a bit so they didn't want to operate. Which doesn't help me at all. If he'd been limping or wearing an obvious bandage, I would at least have had a bit of a clue.

It's not like I haven't been angling for clues either - "So, what's the actual procedure?" "Well, they just knock me out and remove it." Not helpful.

Any suggestions for leading questions would be much appreciated.

lostdog unlosted

'Scuse me while I blow the dust off this blog. Now please pardon my coughing fit.

Been a long time, hasn't it? Reading back over the other stuff wot I wrote here, seems like a lifetime ago. Much has happened in the meantime - new job being the biggest thing - but I won't bore you with the details. Or rather, I won't bore myself with the details, because I already know the details, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who's ever going to read this.

To cut a long story short - ditched shit job in favour of great job. Kind of bullshitted my way through interview, which resulted in me getting great job but not actually knowing what it entailled. Enter steep learning curve, stage right. Our hero (that's me, by the way) valiantly battles ignorance in his every waking moment, with his Mighty Sword of Google coming in most handy at crucial moments.

Anyways - the upshot of this wee tiny epic tale is that I was really busy for a while trying to find out what I've actually been employed to do, but now I think I have a bit more of a handle on it so I have a little more time to waste writing drivel on this blog. Lucky me/you.

What I do now is write stuff for websites to get them better rankings in Google and other search engines. And I love it. If I can wax poetical for a moment: I've always considered myself a writer, even when I wasn't actually writing anything. Like all other aspiring writers, I had ideas for stuff to write, but never actually put them down on paper. Never even made a stab at writing them.

I think that's what stops most "aspiring writers" from being writers - once it's down there in black and white, it's no longer the perfect, flawless idea that inspired you to write it in the first place. I've got a friend who's wanted to write the actual true story of Macbeth for as long as I've known him - he knows more about that badly maligned bloke than anyone, but he's still scrabbling about for a start point.

What my new job has taught me thus far is this - just write. It's never going to be perfect, and there's always going to be more people who hate it than love it, but if you can capture just one person's imagination for a moment, then it's worth doing. I literally wince at some of the stuff I write - but once the words are down there like physical objects then I can shuffle them about (fire a few of the lazy ones) and juggle with the rest.

Having to write to a tight deadline about stuff I know nothing about for a living has been a real revelation to me. It's teaching me the craftsmanship of writing - at the moment I'm selling all sorts of guff to people I'll never meet - I'm coming to realise that a lot of modern writers are very self-indulgent and are writing for themselves rather than for their readers.

All writing is lying. Words are always a poor compromise for the thoughts that spawned them. Words obscure more than they make clear, and a good writer always hovers in the ambiguous space left by what they didn't actually write.

Still want to saddle up a hippo, though. With giraffes doing a slow sarcastic handclap in the background.