Yes, I’m back to moaning about driving. I’m well known for hating driving, but it has to be said that commuting to the Hove office has made me more comfortable in driving. However, Thursday morning was a real pain in the arse. I did leave the house expecting to need a Bond style car with underwater additions (think the Lotus Esprit from “The Spy Who Loved Me”) with the torrential rain that had hammered it down during the night. I didn’t need that, but it was water that was causing me issues.
Instead of five minutes, it took an hour to get from the house to being on the main A23 at Pease Pottage. The usual slow traffic due to roadworks at the Broadfield stadium roundabout being added to by the fact the entrance to the north bound M23 at Pease Pottage was closed. So, nothing from Crawley or coming over from Horsham could get on the M23, so were going around the roundabout and ending up coming back through Crawley to get on further north. Yet they hadn’t closed the road where it turns from the A23 to M23, so anything from further south was able to get on without any issues. (The M23 had been completely closed during the night due to flooding and crashes).
Therefore, I was an hour later getting to Hove, and the main junction over the Old Shoreham Road down to the level crossing was chaos. The level crossing was down, and traffic was backed up. This didn’t stop morons from the west turning in and ending up sat on the box junction, then those heading north couldn’t get past and blocked the junction some more. Those heading east added to the blockage, and those heading south and west finished the job. Not one of the imbeciles understands the concept of a box junction.
I was finally able to get around the corner and headed down to cut over the railway along Olive Road, only for an idiot taxi driver to have abandoned his vehicle on the turn off. So, it took nearly two hours to get to work instead of forty minutes.
The evening saw a writing session in Brighton. Having been stung £12 for less than two hours parking at a previous session, I caught the bus. It was good to relax and be able to look – properly look at the buildings. I’m always looking up when not driving, seeing the ages and styles of buildings much better away from the ship fronts. Regency, Victorian, Edwardian, Art Deco, and Brutalist all wedged in against each other.
Whenever I did look down, mainly to contrast the glass and metal shop fronts with the older upper floors, I am confronted by regular piles of rubbish, on the pavements or piled up in the road instead. I didn’t know until one of my colleagues mentioned it earlier in the week that the Brighton and Hove binmen are on strike.
It seems incongruous, the piles of mainly black bags (with the odd white, or blue, or yellow, or green) ones in there and with many split to be stacked up as an eyesore against the many grand buildings on the other side of the rubbish strewn pavements.
There are few ugly buildings on the journey. The Co-op being the one that springs to mind immediately, as does most of Waitrose. The corner of Waitrose you see first on approach from the west looks like another of the grand curved frontages of regency houses along the route, but the rest is a mess of mixed pebbledash and brick in no single style, which seems a shame.
The workshop was on something called mass observation – which is quite an interesting concept, but there were two different explanations of what mass observation is that sprang to my mind (neither match the correct version, which is worth looking up and reading about). First, I thought about little aliens coming to Earth and their first interaction with humans is watching a Catholic high mass. Secondly, since mass is weight, and therefore mass observation is weight watchers!
At least there was no reason to get up really early on Friday, but the radio was playing when “Dare” came on with the dulcet tones of Shaun Ryder, and it led to an interesting stream of consciousness conversation. We’ve been watching the greatest hits of the 90’s series, and he’s been on looking like a Gollum headed weirdo. Helen asked about Happy Monday albums (had they done any), and so I rattled some off. “Bummed” got a laugh, but “Squirrel and G Man Twenty-Four Hour Party People, Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)” reminded me of Manchester days and Surerandomality as it gave the aliases to two of us. Then of course there was the last album they did at the time, the one that bankrupted Factory Records “Yes Please!”
From there it jumped to the film Twenty-Four Hour Party People, where Steve Coogan played former Factory Records boss Tony Wilson. And the fact that Peter Hook commented on the casting with the quote, “It’s about the biggest cunt in Manchester played by the second biggest cunt in Manchester”, which always makes me laugh. With Coogan in camera, it moved onto the fact that his Partridge act is ruined forever by the fact that Richard Madeley is on GMB on a regular basis nowadays and out Partridge-ing anything Coogan could come up with.
This week he’d berated a young woman (who was on talking about having her drink spiked on a night out) about watching her drink at all times. The Twitter backlash did include at least one reply along the lines of “What, like Tesco have to watch you all the time around their alcohol supplies.” Helen said she’d seen him outside a Tesco metro in Chipping Norton once (presumably casing the joint), whereas I had used to shop at the Didsbury Tesco where he forgot to pay for his alcohol. In fact, it linked back nicely to Squirrel and G Man, as another of the main protagonists from Surerandomality days (Hopalong) regularly used to stop there on the way back from a night out to buy the female he’d picked up some flowers, and invariably the latest Harry Potter book.
Such an entertaining conversation we were later getting up than intended, but it was a good day, with a potter around Steyning, full of old Tudor buildings, a medieval church, and a very nice lunch at the White Horse. Still, plenty to see there I think, so another trip to be made soon.
With picture laden travelogues and Crawley Town match reports being a main focus there hasn’t been any random blogging recently. Not to worry, random blogging is back
I’ll start with sprinklers, or any random way of soaking people. I had been dreaming of this kind of thing before the sprinklers at Crawley Town came to life at some point in the second half of a recent game. It was originally about the noisy youths who sit drinking, shouting, and generally being noisy twats late at night / early in the morning in the park at the back of the house. I was thinking what a great deterrent a remote-controlled sprinkler system would be. If they suddenly got soaked every time they got a bit rowdy, then perhaps they’d fuck off somewhere else. Then there is the water feature in Queens’ Square in town. It doesn’t seem to be on very often, and I always see people walking across the area where the little jets are. Imagine being in one the building surrounding the square and having a little button you could press as people are walking across the square, and suddenly they are surrounded by water jets. There is a reason they don’t let have these things.
Writing group is back, and this means a Maccy D’s breakfast is back as part of the routine. And that means a few minutes watching people. On the way in last weekend I saw a bloke wearing a uniform and hi-vis gilet over the top. On the back of it were the words “Civil Enforcement Officer”. Which of course brings me to ask the question, are there rude enforcement officers? Because I’m fairly sure that kind of job would be right up my street. “Excuse me sir, could you move your car please?” “Why?” “Because you’ve parked like a cunt.”
Next up was I saw a little boy bend down and pick up what looked to be a stick from something like a Chupa Chups lolly. I did think he was going to put it in the bin. But no, he decided his mouth was a much better place for it. His mum didn’t, she yanked it out of his mouth with the kind of hand speed that boxers would die for. And then the berating started. Which is fair enough, but the funny thing to me was the fact that the dad had a look around to see if anyone was watching before sidling off with the little girl of the family, so they were out of the beratement zone.
The stream of delivery drivers collecting orders is never ending. One of them did catch my eye as he left with an order. He had a Deliveroo jacket on but was carrying a Just Eat heat bag. I couldn’t see where he was parked, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to see him jump into his Uber car.
The drive to and from work continues to be a source of much “what the fuckness”? I could take any day and fill it with a litany of imbecilic driving, but I’ll pick yesterday as a general example. I hadn’t even gotten out onto a main road before it started. The picture / diagram below will help with what I’m trying to explain. I was stopped at the traffic lights at the bottom of Southgate Drive waiting to turn onto Southgate Avenue to head for the A23 (the red x). On Southgate Avenue waiting at traffic lights were cars who would be turning right onto Southgate Drive (the small yellow arrow). Then a BMW in the straight on lane who had green lights (the big green arrow), slows, puts their indicator on (a shock, I didn’t know they worked on BMWs) and stops to wait for anything heading north to pass. I thought they were just being impatient and were skipping the queue in the filter lane to turn into Southgate Drive. But no, why do that when they can instead do a U-turn.
On the way home I had a much more up close and personal insight into piss poor BMW driving. Just after Hickstead the A23 changes from two to three lanes, and there is a feeder lane onto the A23 which forms the third (and new inside) lane. So, as I’m coming to the merge point doing my usual sixty, a BMW comes up the feeder lane, and despite the lane in front of them being clear they automatically come across into my lane, totally ignoring the fact I’m already there. Beeping has no effect and I have to slam the brakes on to avoid being pushed across into the ten-ton truck in the outer lane, and the poor sod behind me nearly crashes into the back of me. Meanwhile the BMW is flashing their hazards as if they are saying thanks for letting them in. It’s probably a good job I don’t have some kind of James Bond-esque machine guns built into my headlights.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything more than a sad sack Facebook status update. Over fifty days in fact. It isn’t as if we haven’t been doing anything, there has been lots going on, off over and under during that time. But, when it comes to putting pen to paper, or typing into Word, I just haven’t been able to do it, and the notepad has been closed unblemished, and Word has the X in the top right-hand corner clicked on firmly.
The last time I wrote anything was after going out (but not out out) for Helen’s birthday. We dropped the cat off for teeth cleaning and spent a day wandering around looking at old buildings in East Grinstead, Forest Row and Hartfield. I started a write up but didn’t get as far as lunchtime and hadn’t added any of the photos before it was closed to sit in My Documents. Possibly never to be finished.
During this time, I have managed to put two issues of Flanagan’s Running Club out, but with those it’s just collation of things I’ve borrowed or items I’ve written before. I had a good backlog of stuff this time last year, with writing group every fortnight it was getting added to on a regular basis, but the flow has dried up. If there isn’t some sort of normality resumed by the end of the year next year’s issues may be few and far between.
I’ve had a rubbish idea for a short story about a bloke called Justin Thyme, but that may never see the light of day either. I’ve had thoughts on a poem paraphrasing The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, along the lines of meet the new car, same as the old car, but that deserves not to see the light of day.
Blog posts is pretty much all I’ve written in the last year, the various works in progress for the novels haven’t been touched, and then over the last couple of months even the blog posts have dried up.
Besides the Sussex wanderings on Helen’s birthday (a far cry from previous years where we’ve been to Brussels, Toulouse, Barcelona, Berlin, and New Hampshire), there has been a few Crawley walks, finding old buildings and more street signs in Bewbush. An afternoon in Shoreham, which happily involved ice cream and a couple of mooches about looking for cars.
With the office closing I got a lump sum for excess travel for six years, with which we used to buy a new car, as the old Venga was becoming a bit of a repair pit, so it’s been given to Nathan. We looked at quite a lot of cars, all that had external measurements that suggested they were larger than the Venga. But whereas the Venga is a bit of a Tardis inside, most of the others we saw were the opposite. The Peugeot 2008 was laughable, I couldn’t even get in the thing properly without losing hair and skin. The Citroen C3 was uncomfortable and had a teeny tiny little toy steering wheel. There were others, but none of these bigger cars had the space we had already, or the adjustability we need when one of us is five foot nothing and the other six feet two. So, we got another Venga, a couple of years old, but with a whole host of mod con updates to the one we had. Sat-nav, panoramic sunroof, heated seats and steering wheel, reverse camera. It may be boring to get the same car again, but it is right for us.
Anyway, back to road sign,
With three roads in Broadfield named after cricketers, I was eight short of a team, so set out to find them in other parts of Crawley from other themes to come up with a team for the ages. I did so and was then left with trying to find the best batting order for them, as there were seven in the team that were opening batsmen at some point. I eventually came up with this order.
Jack Hobbs (all-time leader for runs and centuries)
Alastair Cook (Most runs and caps for England)
John Edrich (Just edged his cousin Bill out)
Ken Barrington (Best England batting average for a player scoring over 5,000 test runs)
W.G. Grace (Top five all time for runs, wickets, and catches)
Wally Hammond (Over 50k runs and 2nd most triple centuries)
Wilfred Rhodes (Most ever 1st class appearances and most wickets ever)
Fred Titmus (One of three in this team to score more than 20k runs and take 2,500 wickets)
Jack Russell (5th leading wicket keeping dismissals)
Derek Shackleton (Most post war wickets taken)
Jimmy Anderson (England’s leading wicket taker)
Looking in the A-Z I did find address for (Peter) May House and (Jim) Laker Court, but there were no road signs, just plaques on the wall of the building, so they missed out, as did (Ben) Stokes Close. I also found an appropriate team manager – (Keith) Fletcher Close.
I’ll mention work briefly. It’s fucking chaos. No other words for it. It’s difficult to explain just how busy it is. I need to be back in the office, anything to break up doing twelve-hour days and still not getting everything done. If it’s not all getting done there’s no point in doing so much over normal hours. Even with three days weekends there doesn’t feel like there’s a break.
Plus working at home recently has been somewhat entertaining. We’ve had a new boiler. The company that were doing the fitting sent Laurel and Hardy the first day. After much scratching of heads and arses they said it would have to go in the loft and a couple of hundred miles of copper piping would need installing. And then on the way out they took some sun cream. They didn’t come back. When their boss did a few days later, the boiler was put in the kitchen, and there was very little new piping on display. And the electricians came and wired it in to the mains and it was job’s a good un.
Well until it was time to do the kitchen. We’d been and planned a new kitchen back in October. Yet it was after easter by the time it got fitted. The deliveries came in three parts, but the final bulk part came at half seven in the morning, and I wasn’t even dressed, and then they rushed all the stuff in, entombing the kitchen table in some kind of Ikea cardboard fort. This was over a week before it was due to be fitted. The table had to be moved out and squeezed into the living room. Not ideal for a nosy bastard when I’m looking out the front window at everything passing by.
The new boiler had caused another leak because all the water now comes from the mains, and the pressure was too much for the kitchen tap, which had to be capped off, so upstairs water for three weeks. Then the hot tap on the bath started leaking. A plumber came, said the taps needed replacing and left it in a worse state than it was before. We were resorting to turning the water off at the main tap in the hall. Only that hadn’t been used in decades, and so after steady use for a few days it sprung a leak of its own.
Normality was finally resumed on the water front as the kitchen was being fitted.
Of course, before you can fit a kitchen, you need to get rid of the old one. The actual ripping it out didn’t take that long. We had some help, and all the units were stripped out and dismantled in a couple of hours. However, the removal of tiles and wallpaper brought problems. Along with about half the plaster down. Part of which I missed to get my first AZ jab – something that would catch up with me later. We also found the electrician from the boiler install had done a quick and dirty (if not downright dangerous) fitting, putting wires between piping and drilling through the tile in part and sticking the junction box to another tile.
Now, it’s well known my DIY skills only fall under the category of destroy it yourself, so fortunately Simon was on hand to help with (well, do) the plastering. And it must be said, he could turn pro, he did an amazing job. Though it wasn’t dry enough to think about starting the wallpapering.
Which as it turned out was a blessing in disguise. The electrician for the kitchen fit came and drilled out troughs for wiring that would have been right through where the wallpaper would have been. The kitchen fitters were less than impressed by the new piping the boiler fitter had put in as it was all mid wall and meant they would have to cut holes around it all to install the units. Then when the units were fitted it also meant there was a lot less to wallpaper. The kitchen still isn’t fully fitted, there was a wrong door delivered, and we’ve had to resort to going to Ikea to get it ourselves as promises of delivery have been and gone for two weeks. Additionally, the shelf for the unit was missing. Only it wasn’t, I’d put it down the side of the fridge as a safe place to store it, only to find it after the fitters had finished for the week.
Then came wallpapering, which I wasn’t anywhere near as bad at as I had been in the past or expected to be this time. We nearly got it all done on one day, but invites to the bar next door brought an end to proceedings at about eight pm. It got finished on the Sunday, and over a week later it’s still all in place.
Anyway, next door’s bar. They’ve been working on it since the back end of last year, and it officially opened the weekend lockdown eased. We’d been elsewhere for a barbeque the day it did ease – anything to get out, but the bar opening will be remembered for how monumentally pissed I got. Stick any drink in front of me and I’ll drink it, which won’t help. What finishes it off is the kilo or so of vodka jelly that I was popping into my mouth in bite sized (well, not sure any biting was involved) chunks at five second intervals. The drinks after wallpapering were a lot less frantic.
When the pub gardens opened, we took the kitchen helpers to the Downsman for curry and drinks and then back to burn random pieces of wood in our garden. The winter covers had been taken off all the garden furniture and cushions retrieved from the loft, but the paddling pool masquerading as Baker Lake is still there and full of water, and no matter how much it is used to water plants and the garden in general, the level doesn’t seem to go down. It might just about be emptied in time for it to be used in anger.
It’s not getting used to its full potential though as we have another leak. This time the kitchen waste pipe has snapped outside the kitchen window and so fills a bucket on a regular basis as well as keeping half the patio damp.
Then there was the Tottenham debacle. I’ve been moaning since Mourinho was hired that they should sack him, but then they trump that and join the ESL. This prompted me to have a sweary rant denouncing the team as I’m sick of them, and football in general.
That’s it, I’m done.
I’ve been a Tottenham fan for over 40 years, but no more.
Being realistic, I know a lot of our fan base have delusions of adequacy. We have not been a big club for a long while. A top four place is the best to hope for. So being one of 6 English clubs said to be setting up a European super league (of only 12 clubs) is more than just a piss take. It’s a fucking disgrace.
But it’s typical of the cynical money first nature of Levy, who rides roughshod over decent fans (which, granted, there aren’t too many of). The man who hired two managers that publicly stated they hated the club, George Graham and the current incumbent fuckwit. I’ve been saying #MourinhoOut since day one, but with this latest development, keep the twat, you deserve each other.
In the 90s we regularly put out the worst back 4 in top flight history (Austin, Nethercott, Doherty, Edinburgh – find worse, I’ll wait), and now, with a new stadium, we’ve got things like arm sponsorship by Cinch, and Dulux as an official paint partner, and despite all this lunacy they still want more.
They want to destroy football, its history, its fans, and its soul for a few (granted millions) dollars more. I will not be a part of it. So, fuck you Levy, fuck you Tottenham, and fuck the other 5 mercenary English clubs.
Even if a super league doesn’t come to fruition, the fact Tottenham were willing to jump in means they deserve to be hoisted by their own petard, and deserve every criticism and punishment that comes their way.
Within an hour of me posting that, they sacked Mourinho. Then they withdrew from the ESL a couple of days later, but I’m not going back, and all my Tottenham gear went in the charity clothes bag that was collected Wednesday morning. At least I know it’s not been me jinxing them all this time. Even after disowning them, they still managed to lose a final.
The main source of entertainment is however the cat. He’s only just about gotten used to eating on the floor in the kitchen after years of being up on the counter to avoid the dog snaffling all his food. Yet over the last few months the landscape of the house and garden has been changing on an almost daily basis, and so each time he comes in there is a sense of bewilderment as he tries to orientate himself to furniture moves, deliveries, cardboard boxes everywhere, drips of water, workmen, noise dust, missing furniture, and his bowl in a different place every five minutes. He’s adapted by turning his volume up and being on for longer.
He’s been up on the table at the front window, watching people go by and doing a low purr / rumble / growl at them, he really is beginning to think he is the dog of the house. You look up and suddenly there he is licking your plate. Most of the time it is empty, but he also seems to like trying to lick the garlic and herb dip that turns up with pizza Friday.
And finally, he now thinks he’s part of mealtime.
You know the meme, the one with the screaming/crying woman being held back by her friend and the cat sat at the table in front of food making a sarcastic response. Well Sniffles can now be making his own. I’m fairly sure I’m the one shouting “get out of my seat you cheeky fucker”, and Sniffles responding, “It’s not yours anymore bitch.”
And we refurnished much of the dining room today, the table and chairs we’d got from the charity shop turned up, and against the odds and looks of disbelief we got a six-foot-long sideboard in the car (I had mentioned earlier it has a lot of space). The old sideboard and Welsh Dresser are out in the garden covered by tarpaulin, and the random shelves are emptied and in the garden for future firewood. The new (well for us, another charity shop buy) sturdy TV stand turned up as well, so there is a lot of furniture to sell / offload. So, if anyone needs a sturdy kitchen table with six chairs, a wobbly coffee table, a Welsh dresser, or an art deco-esque sideboard, let me know.
It’s been a while since I committed to writing a blog post, I’ve not felt like it since the middle of November, at which point writing was going well, only for it to fall off the edge of a cliff the next day. I signed up for a four week zoom course set up by Writing Our Legacy, and have done the four weeks, but it is in a notebook and hasn’t been typed up yet. It will be entertaining trying to transcribe it when I do get around to it, my handwriting is notoriously difficult to read a day after I’ve written it and it’s still fresh in my head, let along a month down the line.
I’ve not got the Christmas spirit either, as it has stood for the last six weeks or so I’d make Scrooge look like Buddy from Elf. I suppose I’ve not written much as it will have only been expletive laden rants as everything seems to annoy me. I have been doing some things around the house, and have sold a couple of thousand records, and cleared out over three hundred books, pretty much all my DVD’s and half of my CD’s, which in doing so has freed up space and two units have been cleared and are gone, and a bookcase has been swapped out for one half the height. It wasn’t quite as cathartic as I was hoping it would be, but it has helped a bit, and Helen is happy with the added space and light the changes have given.
The sale of the records brings me to my first mini rant of this piece. I sold them mainly in job lots, with a few single items. I was extremely specific about not splitting the job lots, them being pick up only, and not accepting offers on them or ending auctions early. But it wasn’t clear enough for the cornucopia of utter fuckwits on eBay who bombarded me with stupid questions. Then of course eBay takes its 10%, including on postage, and PayPal takes another 2%. The thing that really annoyed me was out of twenty-three sales only six of the pillocks bothered to leave feedback. Less than thirty percent, and none of the ones who came and picked items up, all of whom got free boxes, one got a storage unit, and help hefting the multiple boxes to their swish cars, all of which seemed to have cream leather seats. I know they all received the items because they were all tracked. They are just a bunch of selfish ignorant twats.
It is sad to say the Charlie isn’t himself, he couldn’t be bothered to come and mither anyone picking stuff up, or even bark at them at the door. He isn’t eating properly and seems uninterested in whatever dog food is put in his bowl. He will eat cat biscuits, and will beg shamelessly for human food, but sniffs his own food and walks away. So much so the silly sod is sicking up bile because he’s empty. And he’s not as keen at going out either. Ongoing vets’ visits are in play.
Meanwhile Sniffles has been caught eating from the dog’s bowl a few times, but with it being permanently wet outside he spends a lot of time either curled up on a bed, or since the Christmas decorations have been out, on top of the kitchen table and usually on the lid of a wreath box. But in doing so he has become the target for cat buckaroo and dressing up. Which just elicits a stony glare.
Although to be fair, with all this rain I wouldn’t want to go out either. I can’t remember the last day it didn’t rain at some point. There really can’t be any more water up there. It’s all soaked into the ground of what now are marshes out there, and the drains are giving up the ghost. If anyone knows someone called Noah, you might well be advised to keep an eye on them to see if they start and large wood related projects.
And the rain seems to make drivers worse. Last Monday must have been officially “Drive like a c#@&” day. They were everywhere, and not driving to the wet conditions at all. No lights on, driving down the wrong side of the road, at twice the speed limit; others just parking / abandoning in the middle of road, on double yellows or in bus stops. Ignoring the bus lane and using it to undertake, and the complete lack of indicators, especially the muppets who change lane without looking and cut you up. It’s days like this that make me hate driving.
Work has been annoying me. The winding down at the office has been taking place, people have been coming in to clear their stuff out before the office closure, and some people have been in working, and because they are more sociable than me (which wouldn’t be difficult), they are chatting to people. I was on a call and someone else on the call asked who they could hear in the background. And when I told them, they proceeded to skype message them to tell them to be quiet. The cheek of it, especially from a person who has spent the last month trying to do “forced fun”, by hassling us to do festive selfies, take part in taskmaster events and the like. It is hypocritical in the extreme to moan about people who are being social in a natural environment when trying to force feed us artificial social situations.
Then there are the printers, who are on a non-stop mission to take the piss. We have printing set up so we send the print and then we scan our ID card on the printer to get the print off. I don’t get mine straight away normally, as I pass a printer when I get up to go to the toilet or get a drink. Without fail in the last month when I do get to the printer it tells me there are no jobs on my ID waiting for me. So, I swear at the technological pile of shite and go back to my desk to reprint it. Only to get back to the printer, swipe on again, and for it to tell me there are now two copies there waiting for me. How I haven’t taken a baseball bat to the printers yet is a modern miracle. It’s not even as if I’m doing a lot of printing for myself, most of it is from people who aren’t in the office and send me their printing that needs to be posted out.
I have two days left in my office before I’m on leave over Christmas and the New Year before I have to do a crappy driving commute to my new office. We’ve been in the current office just over ten years, and if I were in a better mood then I would do a write up, but I’m not. All I can think of is how much it has changed in those ten years, especially the atmosphere, and none of it is for the better.
I had a sudden surge of energy last week and thought it would be a good idea to use Helen’s Amazon Prime to watch the Liverpool vs Tottenham game, but as the day wore on my enthusiasm wore off, and come the time when she got the show going on her laptop, I was losing the will to live. The fact that it came on with them interviewing #MourinhoOut didn’t help, and when they announced Ally McCoist was doing the commentary I shut down and turned the laptop off before the game started. I have no enthusiasm for watching Spurs now and won’t have until he leaves. And on Sunday during the game against Leicester, I had another mini rant about it on Facebook.
#MourinhoOut And before any of you fuckwits start, this isn’t a kneejerk reaction post. It’s a reiteration of what I have consistently stated since they appointed the footballing antichrist as manager over a year ago. The team hasn’t improved under him, they’ve got worse. The league position may have improved, but that’s because everyone else has gone downhill, the twat has dragged most teams down to below our level. If ever there has been an undeserved leader of the Premier League, it’s been the shower of shite Mourinho’s been sending out to play for Spurs week in week out. So, congratulations to Liverpool and Leicester for not being dragged down and for beating the abysmal attempt at football that has been put in front of you.
The American Football hasn’t been going any better, the 49ers have slipped back into a losing streak, including a loss to the cretins from Dallas. After winning the NFC title and narrowly losing the Superbowl last season, the end of this season sees us bumped out of the prime-time game slots, and dealt with as an afterthought on RedZone. It’s not good from a sports perspective at the moment.
And then we have the Prime Idiot messing with everyone’s head (and not just their Christmas), and coming out with hyperbole that now sees a whole host of countries banning flights from the UK to them, and Eurotunnel closing for 48 hours. In turn Sainsbury’s lost their mind and issued a list of foods that they said they would run out of before Christmas. Which was either really stupid and a self-fulfilling prophecy as it would create panic buying of those same items, not just in their own stores, or; it was a genius way of making sure they sold all the crap they thought they weren’t going to sell.
And at that point I will stop my incessant moaning.
Since the world went mad in March my writing has suffered. I do the VSS every day, fifty or so words, but it is pretty much all the fiction I’ve written in six months. And this month it seems worse than ever as the inclination to even do blog posts has dried up. Since I seriously took up writing four years ago I haven’t had a month where I’ve written as little as I have this month. For the first time I’m not even going to reach 10K words for the month, only just managing to scrape over half of that. I haven’t jotted anything down in any of my notepads either.
And this week’s edition of my random sh1te isn’t going to be that long either. I’m sure the weekend just consisted of eating. There was pizza Friday, then large dinner and pudding at the Frogshole on Saturday, home-made curry Saturday and Sunday nights, and another dinner out at the Air Balloon, where the food was all unhealthy and you could see the sundae from space. By the time it got to going to bed Sunday night I felt like a barrage balloon.
At some stage these things turned up, I came down to the kitchen Monday morning and these were on the side, somewhere there is a pensioner missing their mantelpiece ornaments. I don’t care where they came from, but they sure as hell need to go back.
The car went in for an MOT, failed, had some work done and then passed a couple of days later. I had a massive row with a cyclist on the pavement near work after I shouted at them for being on the pavement and not using the new cycle lane. There may have been some colourful adjectives used. I spent some time on jigsaw world, got a few more Sporcle badges and read some books. And that’s about it for this week.
If it wasn’t for Covid, Saturday would be the usual last Saturday of the month and writing group. But it isn’t, so instead of having a couple of short stories or pieces of a book, there will be some vacant stares and mindless online activity. Enough of this sh1te now.
I had written about some of the lunacy going on in the world in last week’s blog, but I took some pieces from that and did an extended blog on those elements.
And, no sooner had I finished writing that and click on publish, then I found another news story. A scientific exploratory team had uncovered an underground cavern, which supposedly haven’t been opened in something like five million years. And in the cavern were some creatures that hadn’t been found on Earth before. Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but for me, this really isn’t the year to be looking for new creatures that have survived in an enclosed space for five million years. Re-seal the effing cavern and walk away. Or even run; just don’t bring anything out of there.
I’ve started doing Couch to 5K. Before you all die of shock, this has nothing to do with running, those earth tremors you’ve been feeling this week have nothing to do with me. It’s a free writing course, and the 5K relates to words, not mileage. One of the exercises was around the use of language, bad language in my case, as my submission was the following.
I swear a lot.
People say it’s uncouth, but allegedly, the more intelligent a person is, the more they swear. In which case I must be an effing genius. And I’m sarcastic as well. They say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, which must be why I like the London Underground so much. They also say it’s the highest form of intelligence, so it is back to that genius tab.
I remember the first time I swore at home. An effing b@st@rd were the words I said. I must have been about eight or nine. And it led to being dragged into the kitchen by my ear and made to drink a glass of water with washing up liquid in it. My mum didn’t eff around when it came to washing your mouth out with soap and water. I still swore a lot after that, just not in front of the psycho woman with a washing up liquid bottle to get through.
It would be a lot better nowadays; they have all these lemon, or strawberry washing up liquids that smell nice (I haven’t tasted them – being of sound mind and all), but they hardly seem the deterrent the old green stinky stuff used to be. And of course if parents tried to do this nowadays, the kids would be straight onto the NSPCC.
I’m doing the course in the hope it will help push me back into working on the proper writing I’ve got sat gathering dust on my hard drive, rather than writing random b0ll0cks in blog posts.
Charlie is barking the house down at three in the morning again in a rush to go out to the toilet. The little sod isn’t in any rush to come back in though, slowly making his way back from the bottom of the garden stopping to sniff every plant and weed along the fence as he does so. No rush at all, not caring that some of us want to go back to bed.
And what fresh lunacy is this? I go to feed the woofy tw@t only to find his bowl isn’t there. So, I check to see if it’s in the pile for washing up. Nope. Then I go around the house to see if he’s taken it for a wander as he has taken to doing recently, but it was nowhere to be found. Out into the garden it is then, and there it is, under a chair under the patio table, close to a collection of balls, like he’s building up a little display of trophies. He’s been shredding tissues found on tables and in bins as well. Anyone would think we didn’t feed him.
I took a wander Saturday morning before it got too hot. Taking more pictures of street signs, drinking establishments and churches. I picked up a couple that I had missed on the previous wander, and did a new set of signs. I could say I walked up hill and down dale, but there wasn’t much of a hill, just eleven dale signs (none of them were Chris though).
You know the expression about people who eat their food quickly, that they inhale it. Now there are certain things that I’ve been known to eat so quickly I give myself hiccups. Burgers is one of those, but I managed to surpass myself and really did inhale it. Not that I knew at the time, it was only twenty minutes later when I blew my nose and a piece of bun come out. I didn’t realise it was part of the bun at first, as I’ve been streaming and coughing with hayfever my initial though was it was a part of a lung. And breathe (somewhat raspily). Now if I need a reminder to slow down when eating that is surely it.
The ice cream van turned up Sunday afternoon, full blast “O Sole Mio” playing, and I was out. I’m partial to ice cream. I don’t care if it’s the middle of winter with three foot of snow on the ground, if there is an ice cream for sale I’ll buy it. “Ma, throw down some money, the ice cream man is coming”. If you haven’t seen the ice cream sketch from Eddie Murphy’s “Delirious” then you won’t know what I’m on about, it is worth going and watching.
Anyway, I wandered out and there was the guy from the Italian family three doors down about to order, but new late instructions were being screamed at him from the house so I got to be first in the queue. And then it was like a stampede; by the time the Italian guy turned around he was fourteenth in the queue which was all the way back up the close to the junction with Southgate Avenue. It was difficult to tell whether people were in the queue for the ice cream van or the butchers. Back inside Charlie was rapt. When Helen got to the cone she offered it to him. He took a sniff, and then threw his head forward to inhale the whole thing, running off with it as if we’d take it back off him.
So, eighteen years after it first began to air, we’ve started to watch “The Wire”. A fair few people I know always say it’s the best TV show ever made, but until last week I hadn’t seen a single minute from a single episode. But it was showing as being available on Sky On Demand, and we started to watch it. We’re now in the middle of series two. I’m not sure it’s the best show ever, but it is good.
After it appeared I missed 2019 where music was concerned a couple of CDs have turned up this week as I attempt to catch up a bit. Mabel’s “High Expectations” and Lizzo’s “Cuz I Love You”, with more on the way. I’m going to make an effort to try and ensure that 2020 doesn’t pass my by. (Musically that is, in all other ways 2020 can effing do one.)
The sesame seeds are back, now accompanied by the Sesame Street Theme in my head. More rewritten lyrics may be incoming.
Wednesday snuck up this week again, time is going faster and faster, but the slow down light at the end of the tunnel for me may be coming. There is hope that by the time this blog goes out next week I might be back in the office. Fingers, toes, legs, arms and eyes are all crossed. If it does happen then I can do Kris Kross and Jump Jump (for joy – back to the tremors), just not sure about wearing my clothes back to front though.
It does seem as if this could be the moment I jump the shark
and start to disappear up my own backside (yes, some may think I’m already
there, and yes, there is plenty of room in my backside for people to disappear),
but I’m going to write about going to write. The next step will be when I start
referring to myself in the third person. (And yes, I do probably have enough
backside for three people.)
I went to a day’s writer’s retreat in Brighton last Saturday.
A day where you set some goals and then write and write and write some more.
Time to get back on track with working on my novels instead of writing this kind
of inane blog post or doing Flanagan’s Running Club (which you can sign up to
receive by heading over from this blog to my home page.)
On an overcast February day, I was in Brighton early (bright
and early if you will). Now it’s not a secret that I’m not a big fan of being
in Brighton. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but I feel uncomfortable and
threatened usually. That violence is about to be delivered upon me. Which is
strange considering I’d lived in some really dodgy areas of Leicester and Manchester
and not felt the same way.
Yet, the early morning walk down from the station felt
different. There were very few people around, no need for me to play dodge the
pedestrian. And it meant I could look around me. I’ve done the walk down from
the station towards the sea front plenty of times, but I’ve never really noticed
the little parks and open spaces behind railing just off the main road. Nor the
various churches, or some of the interesting architecture above the shop fronts.
I always bang on about how people should look up when going anywhere, but I’d
never done it myself in Brighton.
I always seem to spend my time looking over my shoulder for
possible attacks. Therefore, I’ve never really noticed anything except the
inside of pubs. Yet, here I was noticing lots of things that I should have done
years ago.
The writer’s retreat was at Werks on Middle Street. I know I’ve
wandered down Middle Street before, but I had managed to miss the fact there
was a little school there and had totally blanked out the Hippodrome. I had probably
clocked the abandoned graffiti strewn frontage at street level and walked on
by. On Saturday I took a step back and looked up at the impressive building and
the carved stone letters spelling out Hippodrome above the ruined façade. It seems
such a shame that a glorious building like that isn’t in use. Not only that but
I’d never noticed the church just a few doors down nearer to the front.
Anyway, in the retreat there were twelve other writers, and
apart from writing lots of words we all had different goals. I set myself the
goal of writing twenty-five pages worth of words in my notebook – five to six
thousand words – and that the words would be for my novels that are works in
progress. I had thought to write chapters for two of them – The Magicusians and
The Repsuli Deception – but it ended with everything I wrote being for The
Magicusians.
Apart from a couple of snippets I’d written for #vss365
offerings I hadn’t written anything for that book in months. Yet free from
distractions I got on a roll (sadly not a sausage or arctic one) and ended up
writing just over twenty-seven pages, beating the goal I had set myself, and
completing six chapters. Granted they weren’t all consecutive chapters and I might
have jumped around a little, but some of them filled in gaps I had already
left.
It was so intense a writing day that one of my pens ran out
of ink, which I took to be a good sign. The six hours flew by and I was happy
with what I’d gotten to write. The only downside being that I now need to catch
up on my typing up from the notepad (something not being helped by writing
posts like this instead). I think that I will sort out and go to another day
retreat in the not too distant future as it gives me a kick in the right
direction.
It was still overcast when I came out, but by now Brighton
had filled up with people. I passed some time with a mooch around Waterstones,
never having realised just how big the one in Brighton was as I’d only ever
been dragged past it on the way somewhere else. I then nipped into the Quadrant
for some brown fizzy stuff whilst I watched the football results come through,
before meeting Helen to go for food.
From the clocktower we headed to Chilli Relish, playing
avoid the pedestrians on the way. A game lots of other pedestrians were struggling
with. There was plenty of bumping and frayed tempers all around us. It just
about calmed down by the time we got to the restaurant.
Neither of us had been to Chilli Relish before, and the food
was great. I spent most of the time trying to work out what the venue had been
before it became Chilli Relish, as I’m sure I have been in there before,
looking out over the square, and the layout inside rang bells from the dim and distant
past, but it still won’t come to me.
Although we hadn’t thought we’d ordered a lot of food, it
was deceptive. I felt as if I could have done with a wheelbarrow for my stomach
(and probably another couple for my backside) on the way back to the car for
the journey home. It was crowded out on the streets again and I fell back into
the habit of not looking up when in Brighton.
I need to make another trip bright and early (or Brighton
early) another time and take the camera and capture the city before the hoards
arrive and spoil it.
I’ve been reading a lot recently, even more than I normally do. I’ve been reading a lot of books in genres I don’t read a lot of. Expand my horizon a bit from the factual/crime/sci-fi/thriller/horror/fantasy staples I usually read.
I’ve been tracking them on Goodreads, I spent a while a couple of years ago adding everything I could remember reading on there. The last couple of years I’ve signed up to the yearly reading challenge. I set myself a target of 150 books for the year, and I’m already past half way through that.
I have my Goodreads account sync’d to my Twitter account, so when I do updates on Goodreads, or finish a book and give it a rating it automatically goes out on my Twitter feed.
I finished reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness yesterday, and I gave it a two out of five rating. Only for someone to get irate on Twitter about my rating. “Excuse me? The greatest book ever written.” was part of their response. Someone, who isn’t one of my 1200+ followers, took time out to complain about my personal view of a book.
Then I thought that is one of the great things about books, and it’s the same for music, films or TV, that everyone has different tastes. Someone’s five star rating could only get a one star from someone else. It’s totally subjective. I’ve mellowed with age, I don’t get so preachy about what I think is great, I’ve come to realise that it’s down to individual choice.
But for the books I went back and had a look at the ratings on Goodreads. They put a description next to each of the stars.
1 – Did not like it.
2 – It was OK.
3 – Liked it
4 – Really liked it
5 – It was amazing
I’ve rated getting on for 3000 books, of which less than one percent get the top “It was amazing” rating, my overall average is at 2.82 and I think that is perfectly normal based on the wording of the ratings.
Then I look at other people’s rating. And it makes me wonder if I’m doing something wrong. The majority of the people on my friends list, or come up on my feed have average ratings of over 4. Only one other person had an average of less than 3.5. At least fifty percent of those I looked at had ratings over 4.5. Which means that they rated more than half the books they have read as being “It was amazing.”
Now, I know that people go for the kind of books they feel they are going to like, but it’s not natural for the majority of what someone reads (and some of them have got well in to the hundreds on the numbers of books read) to be that highly rated. As some of them are going to be absolute clunkers. It happens. I recently gave a book 1 star, and that was only because you can’t leave zero. The thing was I was really looking forward to reading it before I started, but it was so bad it was one of only three books ever that I’ve considered just giving up on.
If I ever get published myself, then I would be fine getting a two star Goodreads rating for any book I’d written. Three would be great, four is dreamland, and five would be special to me. But for others it would be happenstance.
But if I saw a stranger’s bad / poor review of a book I loved, I don’t think I’d take to Twitter to tell them they are wrong. I might momentarily think it is a shame that they don’t like it, but then let it go as they aren’t me, and they are allowed to think whatever they like.
Hard
as it may be to believe, there is actually a St. Kevin. If you can manage to
get your head around that fact then it probably won’t surprise you to learn
that St Kevin was from Irish stock. Records about his life are a bit sketchy,
and they would have us believe he lived a very long life that spanned across
three centuries. Granted it’s not as long as some of the ridiculousness of the
ages quoted in the old testament (i.e. Methuselah at 969 years old etc.), but
for someone to live to the supposed age of 120 in the fifth, sixth or seventh
centuries is stretching the bounds of credulity.
He
was born on an unspecified date in the year 498 and died on June 3rd
618. His name was Coemgen in Old Irish, which means “Fair begotten” or “Of
noble birth” and is anglicised to Kevin. It took nearly thirteen hundred years
from his death for him to be made a saint, but he eventually was in 1903 by
Pope Pius X.
He
spent most of his life in south east Ireland, mainly in Wicklow, and founded
the Glendalough abbey c540. Glendalough meaning the “glen of the two lakes”.
Having founded the abbey he spent most of his life being a hermit, trying to
avoid those who would become his followers. He took refuge in a bronze-age tomb
in the Wicklow Mountains, which is now known as St. Kevin’s Bed.
I
was born in the right month for it as well, though still a fair few days off of
his saint’s day on the 3rd June. A day that seems to delight in
being the saint’s day for other numerous obscure saints – Charles Lwanga,
Clotilde, Ovidius and Vladimirskaya to name a few. But falling as it does it
gets somewhat overshadowed in the ecclesiastical calendar by the heavyweight
St. Peter and St Paul’s day on the first of the month.
There
are a few churches named for St Kevin, two in Dublin, one Roman Catholic and
one Church of Ireland, two in Glendalough and then others in Kilkenny and
Kildare. He doesn’t seem to have made it to the UK or USA, but there are
colleges named after him in both Australia and New Zealand.
It’s
so much easier nowadays to find this kind of information out. When I was a kid
growing up in Leicester with the name Kevin, the only saint Kevin that would
have been mentioned would have been the saint Kevin of Keegan as celebrated by
Liverpool fans. Well right up until the moment he buggered off to Germany to
play for SV Hamburg, and they inherited King Kenny instead.
Now
you can track all the information down in the internet. There is no being stuck
in a Catholic school where everyone had obvious saint’s names like Andrew,
Peter, Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Adverts ridiculed the name as well.
There was the advertising slogan (for a now forgotten company), “So simple even
Kevin could use it”, then the “Kev, Bev, Bev, Kev” adverts that came at the
start of recent Oscar winner’s Olivia Coleman’s career, plus Aldi’s ridiculous
Kevin the Carrot. And don’t get me started on Roland Rat’s sidekick Kevin the
Gerbil.
Despite
all this I do like the name and I now use it as a badge of honour, especially
in its shortened version (as can be seen from the website etc.)
I
was named after a saint, despite what many people seem to think. I’m not sure
personally about the whole blackbird thing, but I can say there are churches
(and colleges) bearing my name.
So
where did I get the name for my latest e-zine, Flanagan’s Running Club from?
Well, from my favourite book.
I
am on my fifth or sixth version of this book, plus having it on my Kindle. I’ve
lost a couple of copies in house moves, and others through lending them to
friends as I’ve recommended it as my favourite book ever. But I get antsy if I
don’t have a copy I could just pick up and read at a whim whenever I wanted to.
Since
the first time I read it as a teenager, it has been a book I return to time
after time. Thirty odd years down the line I’ve just done my annual reading of
it.
It
is a book that never ceases to move me every time I’ve read it, such is the
affinity you feel with the characters. There are often tears, both of joy and
sadness.
It
is set in the United States in 1931, a time where the country was still
suffering from the great depression. It follows the grand idea of Charles
Flanagan to have a running race from Los Angeles to New York set over three
months, and the trials and tribulations of the race, those running it, and
those competing in it. Weaving in their back stories as we progress across
America.
The
characters are a great mixed bag, coming from a range of backgrounds and
countries. Different ages and sexes. They entice you into the story with them
and then carry you along on a rollercoaster ride.
And
what a ride it is. There are powers at work trying to stop the race. The FBI
are investigating it, others are worried that the race will ruin the Olympic
Games that Los Angeles is going to be hosting the following year. Flanagan has
to keep trying to overcome the obstacles set in his way.
Towns
and cities that have promised to pay for stage finishes refuse to pay, or
refuse to let them enter the town, or make it so they can only enter after
dark. The caterers are leant upon to pull out, and the main sponsor goes into
liquidation. Yet through chance, and the fortitude of the runners they manage
to keep going.
They
get involved in various sideshows along the way as a way to raise money,
Highland Games, men vs horses racing, boxing matches and more besides, and when
they do make it to the end, they get an offer from a new company to pay the
original prize money. But there is a catch.
Real
life figures come into play along the way, there is a team of Nazi youth
competitors entered into the race, they cross swords with Al Capone and Frank
Nitti in Chicago, J. Edgar Hoover takes a personal interest, and the big film
stars of the day get involved in starting the race and spectating at the end.
You are rooting for the characters to make it, and pleasingly a lot of them do. They overcome what has been thrown at them, they have beaten the circumstances, the cheats and their demons. Some find love along the way, and some their personal redemption.
It is a glorious read, and even after over thirty readings, I will be returning to it again next year, and the year after, and every year that I’m still alive. There are stacks of books that I have to make my way through all the time, but I will always make time to read this and experience the magnificent journey of those running machines across 1930’s America.
