Too Much To Declare

At boarding school, aged 11, I rode a bicycle into my classroom just after the beginning of a lesson.

Before I rode in, I thought it was going to be very funny.

I don't drink, right?  It's not that I'm an alcoholic or religiously opposed to the stuff, but booze simply doesn't agree with me.

Sad, maybe. You may well be thinking what a boring twat I must be.   But this affliction certainly saves me a lot of money

I have found a handyman to do some of the small but necessary jobs the builder seems reluctant to come back to do.  The handyman's hourly rate is so low I wondered if he was propositioning me.

But still I am a wee bit paranoid.  Every man I meet is gay until proven otherwise.  (They must be - otherwise why am I have such success with women?)  And when the handyman comes to work here on Tuesday, I bet I'll find a way of mentioning a girlfriend.

I would no doubt burn in Hell.

Should I try to be saved, as an Insurance Policy?

[Note to Realityjumper:  This approach usually doesn't work]

I leave home just before nine am, get pack after 12.30.  For almost the last three hous I have been travelling from near Guildford to Brighton (if the crow flew straight, it would be about 50 miles).  Delayed trains, bad connections.  And after about 8pm on Saturdays it is apparently compulsory for all trains to be full - mostly with people impatient to get drunk and for the trains to stop all stations, especially those where no one gets on on or off.

Every week, when travelling or at my mother's, I run potential posts through my head.  But when I get back I'm far too tired or hungry to post them.  Or sometimes too pissed off to care.

I am going to miss the train

You know the old sayings - beware of what you wish for, because it may come true.  And - revenge is a dish best served cold.

Well, remembering the second one but forgetting the first, I have been planning the perfect murder.  At last, every detail is in place - my alibi, disposal of the murder weapon, leaving clues as to other suspects' possible motives.  To be honest, it has been great fun.

The old ones are the best ones, sometimes.
Time to blog this post again, last published here exactly two years ago.  A few of you may even remember it.

I'll call her Jane. She was English, tall, thin, a museum curator I think. We met in the eighties, when I was working in Glasgow.

She sent me a valentine's card - with a phone number scribbled underneath - of a cemetry, a sewage farm or a drugs helpline I can't remember.  Can’t remember either how I learnt she was the one who sent it.  Probably I recognised her aggressive sense of humour

One evening we ended up at her flat in a middle class enclave south of the Gorbals. A besit, really, with an enormous iron bed. There were cats everywhere. Jane avoided telling me how many there were. Avoidence seemed to be her way of flirting.

Jane wanted me to stay the night in bed with her. She encouraged me to fondle her body - but only to a degree. Moaning, then clicking her teeth. Touch above or below her breasts - but move towards them and she would turn away, or lift one of the cats so it fell on the blanket between us. I could touch her stomach, her lower but not her upper thighs. She would make encouraging noises, do some provocative caressing of her own then brush my hand away. And the cats appeared to be trained to back up her pervisity. Sometimes she'd picked one up and caress it.

I endured seven hours of this. No sleep, no sex - or genuine affection, but as soon as I turned my back to her she cuddled up and gave me hope, so the whole process started again. It was almost balletic - Jane, me and the cats. A ballet danced to Stockhausen.

A couple of weeks later, Jane invited me to a party at her flat. I arrived late. There were only men there, and Jane, and the cats. Awkward silences. My 7 fellow male guests seemed strange in a way I couldn't at first quite define. Self important (for secret reasons) but at the same time... We all related to Jane and barely to each other.

Then it dawned on me. All eight of us had spent atleast one night in bed with Jane. An excruciatingly frustrating wrestle-dance with cats. And I'm pretty sure that each the other seven believed they were the only one. They were all manoevring to be the last one to leave. This time, each one was convinced he knew what he had done wrong before. This time, all 7 of them knew everything would be different.

I phoned for and caught a taxi before the final play-off. Perhaps I'm wrong, and of all them, on their own, followed me shortly afterwards, and by midnight Jane only had her pussies for company.

I visit to the nearest Sainsbury's supermarket as little as possible.  I am beginning to think that most of the staff are robots(v1.01), but that's a post for another time.

We will see.

Following my reference to the Garden of Eden last night, Almighty God must have got in touch with two of H(/h)is more eccentric representetives.

"We come from monkeys," I tell him, slamming the door.  If anyone can think of a better a response I'll run after them and shout it.

I'm awake again - at my laptop at barely 5 am.

This has taken ages to write.  I am going to attempt sleep again.

No offence intended
I mean I don't mean to blaspheme
(and the nearest I've got to hash tonight is reading about travelling on the Marrakesh express)
But Almighty God
Is a lazy sod
For not devising a way
That we could all stay
In the Garden of Eden.
Why forbid a fruit
If it's so nice 'n' juicy?

Of course it's quite possible
That AG isn't lazy at all.
He could have created a parallel world
Where we all hang out in the G of E
In fact, quite possibly,
That's the world we land up in
When we're done with this one

I've gone wireless, so I'm no longer stuck in this gloomy study in the crypto-basement.  Also I'm new on Skype.  All I need now are people to talk to on it.

Safriz, fancy a video conference call?

Meanwhile again, I am moving round central Brighton, spending an hour in a cafe here, two hours there, reading my novel through now it's printed out on paper.

So far so good.  To my surprise I am enjoying the reading process. (the main problem is avoiding too much coffee)  My editorial pen hovers, but there is little to change.  Call me conceited if you must, but the final version of Low Life Games threatens to be pretty damn good.

I've been here almost six months - and there's still so much to be done to make this place look 'finished', reasonably tidy, my home.  After a week or two of frustration, and being occupied with othe things (eh finishing my novel revising) I lose impetus and retreat into catatonic self-blaming (I exaggerate)...

"I am a nerd" + insomniac

1.  There are more choirs in England than fish-and-chip shops.

2.  There are 30,000 more Google entries for "nothing is possible" than for "everything is possible".

This is the post, My Hermetic Sister that somehow got marked depreciated and so not published, a few hours ago.  So - I did write it.  I wasn't halluicinating after all.

... What I mean by "hermetic" is that she's sealed off from all persausion.  I can never reach her inner world in which her life depends on fulfilling her duty to our mother - duty beyond reason, but not continual complaining.

She drives hundreds of miles every week, commuting between the locations needed for her journalism, her house and horse  - and our mother's house.  Maria, my mother's nurse and helper, has to have off one, two days a week - and my mum needs a break from her to.  Two days and two nights.  Part of the job involves getting my mum up in the morning, and as a man I am not thought suitable (thank goodness).

"Why can't we have someone else ocasionally, from an agency?" I ask.

"She wouldn't pay for it.  You know what she's like with money."

"I'll try to persuade her"

My sister sighs the martyr sigh.  "It's all right.  I'll manage"

She'll also manage to drive one day to Gloucester and then all the way back to Surrey again the next so she can drive our mum the three miles to the dentist, or the hairdresser, or the jewellers.  Maria doesn't drive and my mother thinks taxis are too expensive.

She does everything for our mum except stay still.  "She never sits down," my mother complains.  "Unless we play Scrabble."

"I can't stand her bedroom" my sister confides. 

"You're going to crack up" I tell her.  "You can't go on like this much longer.  And then where what we do, if you crack up?"

... but it seems to have disappeared.  I blogged it about 2 hours ago, although there seems to be no record of it even in my browser's history (which includes a couple of BCUK pages I didn't visit).

Hey - maybe I didn't write it.  Maybe I'm hallucinating.  Today's the 12th Never, right?

BCUK tells me I had over 100 visitors yesterday.

I thought that sort of thing had stopped happening.

My copy of Word had no UK English dictionary (but 2 copies of the US English) my (forgotten, long abandonned) Text Editor (with a brillianty fast spell checker) provided the wrong formating, so back to Word then my printer jammed, later Word quit in the middle of printing and the supposedly final print file completely evapourated so I had to reconstiute it, the printer jambed again, then sarted printing everything twice...and... but...then... eventually, despite all this I got a printed copy of my novel and I went out to a more expensive meal than I should afford and to hell with not drinking I had a glass of champage.

An easy job today, I thought - spellchecking my novel.

No panic - find preferences, find dictionaries, no languages, change to U.K. English.  OK, resume Spell check...  "Colour"? it queries.  "Color" is the correct spelling.  And it still says US English at the top.

I feel physically awful.  No reason - except that my Inner Sabateur has failed to stop me finishing my novel (see yesterday's posts) and it is not used to creative or personal things going well in my life.  And so it's beating me up a bit.

Whack!  Here comes a migraine, merely thinking about it.

Permission to speak sir.

Longstanding and longsuffering readers of this blog will have heard it all several times before.

And very soon I'll begin to think about my next project, and the one after.

Every book needs a gushing quote on the front cover.  Plus a few on the back cover as well.

My mother's wedding ring got stuck on a joint of her finger, and it began to hurt her.

1. Your father is dead.  There is no longer a danger of castrating him.
2. Genetics have nothing to do with it.
3. Forget essence.  Remember confusion.