About The Rogue Verbumancer
A chemistry graduate consumed by the demons of apathy and disinterest. Likes tea and cheese. Sleeps less than he should.
As I write this the sun is setting here in Slough and the oppressive heat of the day is leaching away into a slate blue sky. Outside the wind felt warm and stale, providing nothing in the way of respite from the baleful rays of the Day Star. Even safe within the confines of my home with the curtains closed, the heat left my brow slick with sweat. I tried to sweep my hair away from my forehead but only succeeded in making myself look like a cockatiel. This has been a lazy weekend. Even had the heat not been so strong as to sap the strength of any sane man it would still have been a lazy weekend. I need a lazy weekend. I need a lazy weekend bad. For last weekend was not lazy, it was not relaxing, it was a hectic roller-coaster of gross and improbable mischief. I was north of the border in the ancestral homeland of Scotland; in its fair capital of Edinburgh; visiting the Fringe. It was an experience to say the least.
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2 Comments | tags: Bears, Comedy, Edinburgh, Humour, Saunas, Tales From the Fringe, The Fringe, The Underbelly | posted in Ramblings
When this post goes live I’ll be somewhere in the vague and misty reaches of northern England, on a train returning from a weekend of gross and improbable mischief. This is of course assuming that I am, in fact, still alive. This is not something I can at the present moment guarantee since I am intending upon approaching this weekend with reckless abandon, fully intending on giving the coroner no choice but to return a verdict of death by misadventure. The source of this noble quest of self-destruction? A stag-do in Edinburgh. I have to date only been on one other stag-do and it was not what most people would categorise as a stag-do. For most people the prenuptial send off is all about wild, unrestrained and highly irresponsible debauching. The stag-do I went to involved us all traipsing round to by friends house, getting roaringly drunk and playing boardgames. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing of course. The lucky gentlemen who is to be the focus of the festivities in my good friend JP.
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2 Comments | tags: Bachelor Party, Edinburgh, Mischief, Ramblings, Shenanigans, Stag-do | posted in Ramblings
So we’ve finally found our way into the month of August. August is a funny month, but then again all months are funny in one way of t’other. In this instance it’s not that August can be used as an adjective, placing it into a very small category of English words who’s meaning changes when capitalised or not. For me the funniness of August derives, like so many things in my own twisted world view, from the weather. August in England sits awkwardly between summer and autumn and never seems to be quite content on remaining in one category or the other. It swings from vast, mind blisteringly hot Indian summers one year to icy gales and torrential, autumnal rain the next. It’s over the middle hump of the year and August is so often the month that shows us just how shallow or steep the slope down towards winter is. Now it’s probably best that I dispense with the painful highlighting of my Englishness through to endless discussion of the weather and get to the mater at hand. August’s Pictonaut Challenge.
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Leave a comment | tags: A Man Drinks Tea, August, NY Post, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
So here we are at the end of July and as the heat wave that’s been assailing Britain comes towards its end so does July’s Pictonaut Challenge. You’d think that 10 months in I’d have gotten the hang of this short story lark. You’d think I’d be cracking this out in the space of an afternoon the day after the month’s challenge starts. You’d think I’d then spend the rest of the month in casual relaxation while spending odd hours here and there honing the text to a razor-sharp point. You would however, be quite fantastically wrong. I’m writing this blog post on the evening of the 30th of July, it’s 8:43 pm and July’s wordascope remains incomplete. I didn’t even start writing it until Saturday evening. I am a terrible sham of a man, a fraud and a man of lies and deceit. But at the end of the day nothing focuses the mind more than blind panic.
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Leave a comment | tags: July, Pictonaut Challenge, Robert McCall, Sci-fi, Short stories, The Wheel in the Sky, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
I have not done a lot of writing over the last few weeks. Recently the looming spectre of computer games has sunk its claws into my being and has stubbornly refused to let go. I’ve whiled away hour after hour amidst stealthy cyber-punk infiltration and corporate espionage; I’ve lost whole afternoons to pixelated mining; I’ve lost days to simulated space violence. I don’t regret any of this, I don’t feel too guilty about it. It was jolly good fun. But a man has obligations, a man has his patterns. This post is being hastily knocked together in the scant few moments I have before bed, with a hastily prepared dinner cooking in the oven. So in lieu of anything else to say I have delved into a back catalogue of wordascopes which are yet to see the light of day.
The Hunter watches you
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Leave a comment | tags: Computer Games, Mass Effect 3, Poetry, The Hunted, Writing | posted in Writing
I will be the first to admit that I am not a particularly sporting man. There was a time, in the dim and distant past, when the concept of sport was not so utterly strange and alien to me. A time when I was roped into games of football and cricket. There was even a time when a much younger, thinner, more agile and seven stone version of myself used to play rugby twice a week. Needless to say this did not end well. Agility, speed and above average height could only take me so far in a game where I regularly faced off against people quite literally twice my weight. People whose sole purpose in the game seemed to be to inflict severe and most grievous harm upon my person. I played scrum-half, the pain magnet and the opposition forwards always had murder in their eyes. Three days laid up in a hospital bed with a severe concussion somewhat put-paid to any further sporting aspirations in this field. Once I moved away to university sport vanished almost completely from my life, being replaced with the delights of reading, computer games and so many other delightful distractions that had been so frowned upon back home, my time forever being scrutinised under the judging eyes of the sport-maddened loons I called family. It was therefore with some trepidation that I approached Wednesday afternoon. For you see, Wednesday afternoon was Sport’s Day
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3 Comments | tags: Exercise, Fitness, Mechanical Bull, Ramblings, Sport, Sports Day | posted in Ramblings
Towns and cities are funny things. They’re a bit like pearls: something a little bit wondrous, something that draws the eye, but something that at its core is made of nothing more than a mundane and unwanted speck of grit. I’m sure that this metaphor could be drawn out further. I could lament on how people are, by our very nature, intruders and despoilers. That the rise of cities around crossroads and river-mouths is nothing more than nature’s response to the irritation we cause it; shells to keep us penned in and away from doing too much harm to the rest of the land. I like to imagine towns and cities as people, transferring their quirks, character and ambiance into more tangible human traits. Glasgow is a dishevelled looking man who wears a string vest and has a beard you could hide a badger in. He spends his time drinking special brew and leering menacingly at people who he doesn’t like the look of. London is a well to-do office worker in “The City,” he weighs 30 stone, wears pinstriped suits and display an outward persona of easy affability while, deep-down, he’s a proper old-fashioned, copper-bottomed bastard who’d sells his own grandmother for a quick buck. Then there’s Slough. Slough is a tremendously boring man in middle-management, he has grey hair and grey eyes, he wears grey suits, he eats grey food and speaks in a dreary monotone voice. Slough is boring, fantastically boring, boring right up until the moment he stabs you in the gut with a blunt knife and steals all your stuff. Slough is not a man you’d share a drink with.
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Leave a comment | tags: A night on the tiles, Cities, Drinking, Slough, Towns, Windsor | posted in Ramblings
Today is July 1st 2012 and I am a bit of a mess. I had envisaged a day of wild productivity, of getting things done, of cleaning pans and hoovering floors, of writing reams upon reams of really good words. Such a grand plan was obviously doomed to fail, but today it failed before it even began. My alarm went off at just after 8am this morning, my response to this was to turn it off and roll over for what I initially planned to be for a short and brief five minutes but what rapidly spiralled upwards to a frankly decadent three hours. Those three hours were gloriously restful, but also fantastically surreal. I lived through a terrifyingly vivid science fiction odyssey first fleeing from an oppressive father by disguising myself as a leper. Then I found myself bounding across roads and fields with a faithful dog and massive spring-loaded jumping boots. I broke into a the VIP Hilton terminal of a futuristic interstellar train station, and paid a couple of million credits for a ticket out beyond the Oort cloud to deep, deep space to my destiny as a military trained space assassin. That whole bizarre experience was probably worth the three hours of my life it consumed, even if it is now fading into the realm of forgotten ideas, whole chunks of the experience rendered grey and fuzzy. Up until last night I still hadn’t decided what picture to pick from the mystical Pictonaut stockpile, but after this morning’s whirlwind adventure I decided. It had to be sci-fi.
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Leave a comment | tags: July, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Robert McCall, Sci-fi, Short stories, The Wheel in the Sky | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Yet another month draws to a close and with it June’s Pictonaut Challenge. June has been a turbulent month, swinging seemingly without warning from blistering heat to torrential rain. Leaving myself and many others to suffer the eternal “coat dilemma.” The agonising decision as to whether you should take a coat when you leave the house, sure it looks fine now but what if it rains later? Or if the sky looks gloomy, but isn’t actually raining do you take the coat just in case and risk having to lug its dead weight about if it starts to brighten up. To add a particularly rotten cherry to the top of this middle-class dilemma I remain in an uncertain limbo as to my housing situation for next year. My lease technically expires in a mere seventeen days, the leasing agent has been dragging their feet for months over signing the new contract. Sure my landlady may have stated that she’s fine with me staying but she herself is under the looming shadow of uncertainty with potential unemployment and the none to implausible risk of mortgage foreclosure. So it’s all fun a games for me at the moment. All rainbows and fucking unicorns, prancing about shitting gumdrop bastard mountains.
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Leave a comment | tags: A Place in the Country, June, Pictonaut Challenge, Pictonauts, Short stories | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Humanity has always had a 
propensity to look upwards, to gaze into the night sky and all of its unfathomable infinity. We try in vain the get our heads around just how mind bogglingly huge it is. Some of us spend nights lying awake simply from the knowledge that it’s there, in all of its terrifying enormity. But for all its long-eye stargazing, humanity oft misses things right beneath its collective noses. For on this island earth of ours we have created a colossal thing also of unfathomable size, perhaps not to quite the same magnitude as the entire vista of creation but still fairly big. And what makes it even more mind-blowing is the fact that we did it almost by accident: piecemeal, day by day we have added to it and let it grow and it has become a titan far beyond even the most outlandish and fevered dreams of its creators. This thing of which I speak is the internet and it just keeps on getting bigger.
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Leave a comment | tags: Bigs Things, Internet, Size of the Internet, The Future, The Universe, YouTube | posted in Ramblings
The Rogue Verbumancer 