I’m on the wrong side of a four and a half 
hour string of train journeys. I feel like a cheap, badly constructed replica of myself, like I’m made out of cardboard and regret. A pale and shadowy simulacrum, a husk of a man. Everything aches, I can barely summon the energy to stay awake. My mouth tastes of stale spit, a taste that reminds you that you’ve been on the move for too long, that you’re badly dehydrated and in dire need of a decent meal and a cup of tea. I crave sleep like a mad junkie craves the sweet ministrations of his favourite intravenous cocktail. I am not a well man. I am a tired man. I’m still trying to shrug off the cloying embrace of a hangover and the experience of sleeping in a friend’s spare room and a bed that is not my own, a thing which has never sat well with me. I like the comforting familiarity of my home, my seat of power. Being away from it for any length of time leaves me drained. Needless to say this is not a state conducive the rationalised and coherent thought or blogging in general. So in lieu of any thoughts from my own fevered imagination I thought I’d share with you some of the blogs that have really tickled my fancy recently.
Author Archives: The Rogue Verbumancer
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October’s Pictonaut Challenge
So here we are in October. 2012 is shrugging out of those ridiculous baggy cargo shorts and the voluminous tie-dye t-shirt she’s be wearing all summer. She’s putting on proper clothes now because it’s starting to get a bit nippy and inclement out there. It’s started to rain a lot, the sun is getting tired and sluggish; it’s getting up later and going to bed earlier. From here on out it’s all boots, sensible trousers and one of those coats with more pockets than are strictly necessary or in fact sane. There is however the distinct possibility of a decidedly silly and not entirely practical hat. Last year October’s Pictonaut Challenge was all about Halloween-esque spookiness and Lovecraftian terrors. Not wanting to repeat the same theme this year I decided to go with something a little outlandish and a bit mad. Just like that hat I mentioned. Behold, October’s Pictonaut Challenge “Hail Traveller!”
“I’m not going to lie, last night got really weird…”
The Journey
September now draws to a close. I nights are beginning to get fat and heavy; longer; darker. We’re well and truly rolling into the twilight of the year. At the start of this month I gave you a picture which I entitled The Journey. An image which is quite clearly of a seriously massive [technical term] desert. There’s something perverse about this. Not in of itself, but simply because large chunks of my home country and the surrounding regions were very recently, mostly underwater. I’m sure a better, more philosophical man than I could make some point about dissonance and duality, but my general reaction was largely composed of a simple and succinct “woah.” A ten foot rise in water levels generally has that effect when you’re not being directly effected by it. At the end of the day sand basically just like water right? Except less wet, more solid and chemically different. That si to say, not like water at all. But it does however share a propensity for eating things just at a considerably slower rate. Flood water thrashes and bashes and necks its food like a mad gannet with a gizzard full of PCP. Sand takes it slow, it nibbles and savours. It’s a connoisseur of the devouring of human endeavour.
The R-Patz Factz
In the waning hours of the fifth of September I received an email from a contact in deepest, darkest Scotland. I do not usually get emails from this contact. Our communication is usually limited to bizarre and esoteric insults on twitter, which despite our best efforts are likely to come across to outsiders as either vaguely homoerotic or evidence that we will very shortly be festooned in the innards of our latest victim. The contact in question is the venerably bearded Andrew of Blair, known to twitternauts as aagb1884. A screen name which begins with a collection of letters more reminiscent of a dying wail (or confused jizz-noise) and ending with the year Colchester was hit by a magnitude 4.8 earthquake.
Mister Andrew has recently completed work on an eBook with an associate by the name of Danile Lilley. He was curious as to whether I would be interested in reviewing or plugging his most recent fictional endeavour. Since agreement would result in me getting a book for free I could hardly refuse. I told him I would whore, pimp, sell, flog, wax-lyrical, preach and praise it and that I might even, if push came to shove, think about reading it. So this blog post constitutes me being all professional, reviewing the fictional works of others. After being called an asshole by a comedian who didn’t like my negative bloggings about his show I’m becoming dangerously professional. Well, at least as professional as you can get while wearing jim-jams stained with bits of last night’s dinner and perching on the corpse of what used to be a chair.
Sports Day Redux
Way back in the bright and skin-meltingly hot days of mid-July I wrote about my battle against the unforgiving and merciless nature of a mechanical representation of uncontrolled bovine violence. How I took on a mechanical bull and ultimately lost and the price I paid for delaying my defeat. What I neglected to mention was that the entire thing was called off half way through due to a massive downpour finally arriving. It had been threatening to do so the entire day but finally decided to wash us out right in the middle of our “fun.” The ground quickly turned into a thick, soupy quagmire of dirt. My team were slated for a game of football, I was genuinely looking forward to the game, what with the conditions having finally made it to what I would call “proper” football weather. But Messrs Health and Safety weren’t too keen on this plan so everything was called to a stop. Naturally ten minutes later the rain had stopped, but we’d all packed up by that point. The decision was made by the powers-that-be to reschedule the entire thing and finish it off properly. So that’s I did this Wednesday afternoon, as once again me and my workmates set out for the company sports day.
A Matter of Etiquette
For the past three days I have been playing computer games. Although the term playing seems to me like something of a misnomer. Something more along the lines of devouring, consuming or main-lining seem to be more appropriate. It was not without some considerable effort that I managed to pry myself away from the clutches of the virtual world to write this. I staggered from my desk, blinking in the searing light of the foul and malignant Day-Star; my head s whirling maelstrom of agony and confusion, feeling as if my brain was made out of a bad, rough, kind of cotton-wool that grew up in a broken home and whose only way of interacting the world is shiving people in the kidneys in darkened alleyways; my eyes burnt and felt as if they were pointing in different directions while attempting to crawl their way out of my orbital socket to freedom. I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to reorientate myself to reality. Asking the really big questions like Who am I? Where am I? What time is it? And Why is there a magnetised pen on my fridge door? What is this foul witchery?! I shall not suffer its like in this house!
The salient point is that this massive gaming bender reintroduced me to one of the things which really winds me up and generally cause my soul to burn with the furious light of a thousand particularly angry supernovas. It’s not the fact that people on the internet are dicks, that’s a given, it’s more the fact that their dickery seems to breech some fairly basic rules of social etiquette.
September’s Pictonaut Challenge
The start of September heralds the end of summer in the traditional sense and the advent of autumn, in the words of House Stark “Winter is Coming.” I fucking love winter. Winter means that I can wear my coats. I love my coats, they are my armour against the world as much as it is against the cold. But in the interim I’m in Banbury. I’m once again off to see my parents while they’re a bit nearer to my neck of the woods. This of course means getting a train and we all know my feelings about trains. And now comes the segue, dropping like a thunderbolt out of a crystal blue sky, a meteorological phat bassline WUB. Since while you’re reading this I’ll be on a journey of sorts I’ve decided that September’s Pictonaut Challenge will be called The Journey.
A Man Drinks Tea
The Pictonaut Challenge has now been going for three hundred and sixty-seven days. It all began back on August 3oth 2011 with This Blog Needs You my plaintive cry to the faceless multitudes of the internet to join me in writing some fiction, once a month, every month; till the earth’s seas do boil away and the realm of man turn unto dust; until every star in the night sky winks out and the void finally grows cold and still; until the mere memory of words is all that remains; until I get bored and finally give up. But as of yet I haven’t given up, nor have I been alone in my endeavours. Every month at least one poor sap has joined me in my writing, sometimes more than that, but I have never soldiered on alone. I’d like to take the time to thank all of those who joined in and cranking out a wordascope wretched or otherwise, but most importantly of all I would like the thank my own stubbornness for forcing me to keep going. I’m a year down the line and I now have some twelve thousand odd words. Twelve thousand odd words which I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t started this whole mad idea. Sure it’s no 12 books in 12 months, but it’s a damn side better than having written nothing at all. Add to this NaNoWriMo and all of the blog posts I’ve pumped out and I’d estimate that in the year since I started this project I’ve written 111,000 words. Now that’s almost respectable.
The Last Hurrah – Tales From The Fringe
Today’s the last UK public holiday before Christmas. The last time we get a state-mandated three-day weekend, and it’s all we have to sustain us through that gulf of nearly four months. I’ve always found the front loading of the year with public holidays a little ridiculous. Obviously I don’t feel like that during the first six months of the year when I’m getting all that extra time off. I only feel like this when the end of the year rolls around and the prospect of a free long weekend dries up. I shouldn’t really complain though, I’ve still got sixteen days left of my yearly holiday allowance and through the tactical deployment of days-off, haven’t worked a full week for nearly two months. What I can complain about is the fact that I’m manfully attempting not to drown in my own mucus. Unsure as to whether it’s hayfever or a rotten summer cold I’ve been double fisting handfuls of cetirizine hydrochloride and ibuprofen in a frankly vain attempting to stem the tide. As I write my nostrils are plugged and capped with rolled-up strips of kitchen roll to stop the flow of watery snot long enough for me to write this post. But enough with my unnecessarily graphic descriptions of my personal maladies.
Today is the last day of 2012’s Edinburgh Festival, subsequently I think it fitting that today I draw my Tales From the Fringe to a close by recounting my last day at the Fringe; Sunday, August 5th, the arse end of JP’s stag-do and our weekend of debauchery and self-inflicted liver damage.
Edinburgh; well known for its dapper, cycloptic, cat-beasts
A Town Called Spank! – Tales From the Fringe
I’m back from a Kentish wedding, a wedding which I would swear took place on the surface of the sun. Being from the grim and icy wastes of northern England I am still not yet inured to the blistering heat of the late southern summer. To put it bluntly, I was sweating buckets. My heart really went out to the groom, the best man and the usher, all of whom were kitted out in full formal dress, waistcoats, cravats and all; while I sat comparatively smugly in a shirt, without a tie and with my sleeves rolled up. So JP is finally married. I thought I’d take the time this week to continue regaling you with some more Tales from the Fringe and the aforementioned JP’s stag-do.
We did not wake up easily. It came in fits and starts. All of us swaddled in that early morning darkness that gives you no real idea of time. Devoid of a clock you all lie there half awake, playing a deranged game of sleep chicken, not wanting to be the first to wake up, not to be the one impolite enough to wake everyone else up, yet all the time vying against the boredom of just lying there and the gnawing hunger in the pit of your gut. A bloke and friend of JP named Matt was the first to really cave, but under the pretext that he was off to see some triathletes who would be passing through central Edinburgh that morning. Myself and the two Richards dragged our carcasses out of bed shortly after. We had all had perhaps only 6 hours of booze fogged sleep. After spending nearly an hour trying to wrangle all of our rag-tag group together we sloped off in search of a breakfast composed primarily of fat. As any Venerable Sage will tell you, a proper old-fashioned fry-up has magical powers.
Rich: “I’ve seen things man. I’ve seen things…”
The Rogue Verbumancer 