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Showing posts from 2008

Stranger Things

I finished my degree in 1997 and lost touch with the friends I made during my time at college not long after. This didn't happen all at once, but I am not good at keeping in touch and nostalgia does little for me, so I do just let things drift when it comes to friendships sometimes. However, the reunion does appear to be happening all at once. When FriendsReunited (or Friends Untied as we call it here) doubled their subscription charge I flat out refused to pay, even though one of my 'university' friends was on there and I did want to contact her. I suppose with the popularity of the other big networking sites FriendsReunited saw sense and went free, so I was finally able to send a message. That was over a month ago. Four days ago she replied and by strange quirk of fate #1 we are both doing the same job in different schools - something neither of us ever imagined ourselves doing in all the time we were studying together. We're busy catching up and arranging to meet in...

Absolute is Relative

I was shockingly bad at geography at school, not just for a top set student either. In tests and exams I was always positioned way below the rest of my class, which has allowed me the illustration that I am so awful at the subject that I came thirty-third in a class of thirty-two. That's probably an overly generous interpretation of my achievement, although in my defence the vast majority of what we studied was to do with reading maps and locating countries on an atlas or involved so many new terms that I just didn't get it. The latter of these difficulties is related to the way I learned to read - something I could do when I was three years old. I followed the print as it was narrated to me and memorised it, then matched sounds to shapes of words, not to letters. Thus I have always found pronunciation and meaning without context or example virtually impossible. I also remain pretty inept when it comes way-finding, be that reading maps, giving directions, plotting co-ordinates,...

Just one more thing ma'am...

Daytime telly. What are they thinking, other than "we get paid slightly more than the night-time telly schedulers to do this, so we best make a reasonable fist of it". Or something along those lines. Not that I'm complaining really - I remember being off school once or twice (as a pupil) in the days when there were only just four channels, some of the time, and the best that daytime TV had to offer was 'The Sullivans' and 'Crown Court'. However, I've had my fill of Time Team, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and romcoms and due to a clash in the sleep / TV schedule, I missed the only screening of Columbo I could find all week. Then there's the guilt complex. I just phoned my line manager to see if there was even the slightest possibility of some support in getting off lightly tomorrow at work. Of course it's not that I don't appreciate the three and a half months of sick pay they have already generously paid me; nor am I trying to shirk my re...

I want to be a thunder storm novelist

See, now this is what happens when that humid, overcast, really heavy late May / early June weather comes to play. I hate JK Rowling. Or I don't, I wish I did. As a reader rather than a watcher I was sold by the excellent marketing that placed the Harry Potter series smack bang in the centre of every summer holiday psyche. It means that days with that imminent thunder storm tingle instantly spark the desire to read (or write) an easily digestible, feel-good ending novel. So well done to the publisher or agent or whoever it was that picked up on how simply marvellous it was that Harry, Ron and Hermione were engaged in the annual ritual of preparing to return for another year in school and delivered it in timely fashion to their readership. It means we all have something to do once Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy are done spending their summer vacation rambling through mystical caves conveniently located beyond floral meadows and glossy woodlands. Of course I realise that these ...

Faces Spited 1: Authorship Aspirations 0

It occurred to me today that, consciously or otherwise, I may have suppressed the urge to write in order to arm myself with the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. Whilst not entirely convinced of the truth of this, there have been moments when I have wished to write and not done so, as once again it has been butted down the list of priorities by various other endeavours and commitments I must fulfil. Last week I was enraged to the point of devastation by an email message I received which detailed (with pictures) the disgraceful Italian artist who starved a stray dog to death by means of an exhibition. Research indicates this information was correct and granted the opportunity I will, no shadow of doubt, ensure the individual in question gets precisely what he deserves - if someone else doesn't first. The heartless lunatics who visited the exhibition are quite possibly so low in morality as to not be worthy of mention, let alone vengeful reaction. The consequence of my self...

Bubble perms and Bros

I'm sure Bros is supposed to be prefixed or suffixed with some kind of punctuation, you know, like Wham! were, although I'm also beginning to wonder if my memory failures when it comes to The Eighties aren't altogether to do with how terribly tasteless a decade it was. When we reminisce a particular era it is generally the one when we were in our teens, hence it comes with a focus on fashion, music and not much else. I can noteably boast that I was indeed born in the 'Summer of 69', was therefore ten and a half years old at the start of the 1980s and already owned a severe musical fixation on Queen. The girls at school arrived with scented erasers and other unnecessarily pastel-shaded accessories, stuffed into Duran Duran pencil cases, to be unpacked and repackaged into some other artists' 'merch' the following week. I was kind of envious, I suppose, but it wasn't enough to turn me away from rock music. I don't dislike Eighties synth. pop. Far fr...

No. She's deadly serious...

Interesting that I should find myself getting in on this debate. I always have a lot to say about everything although generally choose not to, or at most may engage in a private rant and then let it drop. However, I was asked for an opinion, thus I am giving it. 'Single Girl In The City' wrote an enpassioned response to Penelope Trunk's Boston Globe article: 'Want to have a baby? Now's the time' and I don't blame her, not just because her experience of men would lead most women to a nunnery. It reminds me of the articles I used to read in the Femail section of The Daily Mail, penned by the likes of Melanie Phillips and Linda Lee Potter, that would have me throwing my notepad and a fair few expletives around. I recall with special fondness a paper (published under the guise of academia) which suggested working women's fight for equal pay was stealing the family wage from their male counterparts, because working women are single and working men aren...

Ankle Deep and Rising

I am ashamed to admit that when Boston Legal character Alan Shore first exhibited a disorder called 'Word Salad' I'd never heard of it. And me a scholar of Psychology too. However, in such a capacity I discover that the correct term for the disorder is 'schizophasia', something that can be brought on by stress, as depicted in the show, but is more likely to be associated with the disorganised thinking common in people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. As far as my own disabilities in vocabular vocalising are concerned, I'd make a pretty meagre salad - more like a salad drawer just before a trip to the supermarket in fact. So far I've established that my issue with losing half my words is quite possibly related to caffeine consumption. It first started at university, generally when I was engaged in wading through a significant workload and it seemed the more I had to do the worse the word drought became. Ironically (if caffeine is indeed to blame) the first ...

Driven and Committed, Need Not Apply

Driven: determined; ambitious; motivated; impelled; compulsive; goaded; involuntary. Committed: pledged; sworn; bespoken; affianced; attached; loving; wrapped up; bound. There is a point at which derived meanings become less synonymous with the original terms, where the ambitiously driven are no longer afforded prestige. What we value as most virtuous becomes obsession, to be admonished instead of rewarded. Sometimes I consider the people I am acquainted with who are overtly ambitious, those who will stamp on heads to ascend mere inches. Yet it has occurred to me that this level of drive toward personal success could be condemned as some kind of involuntary compulsion. That said, I don't expect it to be included in DSM-V. A very small part of me retains envious admiration for such individuals, for on occasion I have attempted to set myself on a blinkered route towards some end goal, planning out how I will thwart those who step in my way, packed ropes and hooks and carabinas for su...

And it only cost me a pound!

Like most topics that crop up in this blog, I vowed I wouldn't write about my weight and now here I am doing it, even though I could be anything from the width of a stick to the side of a house and it wouldn't matter as far as my internet presence is concerned. However, as this has been a significant preoccupation for all of my adult life (and most of my adolescence), it's remarkable that I've failed to mention it at all. By medical and social definition I am obese, not quite 'morbidly obese', but with a sufficiently disproportionate height to weight ratio for that incredibly ugly word to apply. Honestly, I'd rather be called fat, chubby, tubby, lardy, pudgy, chunky, cuddly or anything than 'obese'. I've experienced many phases of 'obesity': first there was the puppy fat stage, which coincided with puberty and in retrospect is somewhat more than coincidence, in that every epochal change in my weight has occurred at the same time as a sign...

Untitled

Anyone who has ever posted to Blogger will know that above the textarea for the main body is a place to add the title. I have always started from a title, as my posts are never entirely pre-planned: I have something I want to say but there's no concrete destination in mind when I begin. My title provides a succinct frame of reference, keeping me focused in some direction or other. Today a title eludes me, although I don't quite know why. At 7.30am I was set on getting straight down to some novel editing, just as soon as I reached a suitable place to leave the book I am reading ( 'Barking' by Tom Holt ). Then my concentration drifted and I lost interest, not because the book is bad. It offers Tom Holt's usual blend of off-the-cuff fantasy with chuckles and I've read enough of his books to feel qualified to say that, in my opinion, it may not be one of the best novels he's penned, but it's certainly not one of the worst. So I dragged myself into the world,...

The costs of living in a bubble

Yesterday I endured the same old question-answer routine that I have for the past seven years. "So, you're a teacher?" "Yes." "What do you teach?" "Psychology." "Whoa." Inquisitor makes some backward movement to ward off evil mind-reading powers. Actually, it can go one of two ways at that point: either the person with whom I am conversing develops a sudden terrible fear of the seer status they themselves ascribed to me, or they mumble some regret about psychology not being on the curriculum when they were at school. And really, as I've written a lot more than I've taught over the past four months, my defining occupation is that of writer, by choice and reality. Alas it occupies but still doesn't pay, and it's not going to get me corporate rate membership at the local sports and fitness centre. By now it is custom in this type of scenario for me to demystify the magic of my discipline, such as it i...

Mills & Boo

Who the hell were they anyway? This is what I imagine so far: Miss Elizabeth Mills (Betsy to her friends) was a fifty odd year old spinster (actually make that an odd fifty year old spinster), who met another lovely middle-aged spinster, Edith Boon, one day in the publisher's office. Both had achieved limited success as writers of tame, fairytale style, romantic fiction - love stories for discerning ladies of leisure. You know the sort I mean: wives with empty nests who have nothing to fill the void but paperback consumption. "We are very good at this." said Miss Mills. "Indeed we are." replied Miss Boon. "Let's set up on our own." suggested Miss Mills. "What a simply splendid idea." responded Miss Boon. And so they did, buying the novellas of other like-minded souls and casting them out into the ever yearning world. To be perfectly honest, I don't care how Mills & Boon started or became the leviathon in bulk publishing that it i...

Elementary, My Dear Reader

It was windy last night, so windy in fact that our milkman was delayed in his deliveries, or at least I assume that's why the milk was late arriving. I imagine battery powered, open-backed vehicles with a maximum speed of about 15MPH don't fair well in weather like that. Still, he got here in the end. Unfortunately the empties had taken flight at 4am, but they've regrouped, ready for tomorrow. And it's a 'Green Day': the local council's day for collecting all recyclable household waste. Again, due to the severe winds during the night, it would seem that the vast majority of the crescent's plastic bottles, cans and whatnot ended up in our front garden. Why, when our own rubbish stays firmly where it's put does everyone else's erupt into a bouncing merry-go-round echoing through the night and keeping me awake? Because the buggers don't 'rinse and crush' as directed and empty vessels, noise etc. So that's air for you. Water - well - ...

Picking up the Breeze

If I could sit here a moment longer, The wind drifting over my head, Dust clouding my view, I'd have a vision. If I could wait a second more, The gust lifting my collar, Howling in my ears, I would find a voice. If I could walk a mile further, The gale pushing me onward, My hair in my face, I might find a way. If I could take a day over, The breeze capturing my thoughts, Lifting my dreams, I will find them outside.