Category Archives: Ramblings

February 18, 2013

A Very Small Holiday

By The Rogue Verbumancer

I’m recharging my batteries at the moment. Now you’d think that would be what the weekend was for, and ordinarily you’d be right. But this weekend I took a small holiday and have subsequently taken today off. Primarily because any form of travel leaves me feeling drained, knackered, broken and decidedly inhuman. So today has become a compressed weekend in lieu of an actual weekend, a day where I do nothing except vigorously neck pint mugs filled with tea. As Elbert Hubbard said “No one needs a holiday more than the man who has just had one.”

The holiday in question was a flying visit to my old stomping grounds of Nottingham. It served a very important purpose. My body might be curled up in a small heap and groggily telling my brain to “fuck off” at the merest suggestion of movement, while recharging itself to a point where I can once again pass for human; but this holiday served to reboot my brain. Something I have been in sore need of doing.

EastMidlandsTrains2

Seriously, fuck trains.

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February 11, 2013

Treachery

By The Rogue Verbumancer

I have always generally been my own worst enemy. A great many of my endeavours have been ruined or hampered by my own laziness, chronic inaction, fear or doubt. But generally that has been something I’ve been willing to live with. Such things are after all generally just an accepted fact of being human. But this weekend I found new and exciting ways to bring grief upon myself. For thus weekend I discovered that I must roam this mortal realm forever trapped inside a traitor.block

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January 21, 2013

This Post is not About Snow

By The Rogue Verbumancer

Although there is a fair dusting of it about. Believe me, it’s take every fibre of my being to restrain my natural English desire to talk about the weather. I mean look at it! There’s just so much of it. So much weather. Everywhere. Let us just accept that snow has occurred and as always, it has been a divisive issue. I come to you today to talk to you about another matter entirely. For this weekend I did something which could possibly be considered terminally inadvisable. I went onto the Book of Faces and I made a page for the blog. Because that’s what people apparently do these days.

Facebook-F-logo

Facebook cares not for the capitalisation of proper nouns.

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January 14, 2013

Ass-backwards

By The Rogue Verbumancer

Last week I was bemoaning my writing woes. How I felt like I was basically smashing my head against a brick wall. It was less than fun. It’s not a nice feeling, sitting down to do something and then eight hours later discovering that you’ve managed to achieve the sum total of naff and all. So I came up with the cunning and ingenious scheme of breaking the 5,000+ word novella I’ve promised down into ten tasty, bite-sized chunks of 500 words a piece. I’m now sitting pretty at just a few hundred shy of 2,000. So I’d say it’s been a moderate success, even if only 2 of the 10 slated sections have been done. I’d like to attribute this moderate success to my ingenious plan, but in truth I think it’s because of something else entirely. I think it’s due to the fact that my life is profoundly ass-backwards. That is to say, ludicrously disordered and showing an arrangement grotesquely counter to the conventional.

donkeys

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January 7, 2013

Breaking it Down

By The Rogue Verbumancer

It hasn’t been a good couple of months for me creatively. Which is typical of life really, the one time of the year where I’m more or less getting snowed under with things to write and I more or less lose the ability to do so. I’ve spent literally days staring at my computer screen, trying to bring myself to do some proper writing. (Blogging isn’t really proper writing, it’s basically the writing equivalent of standing in the street shouting at passers-by.) And in that time I have achieved more or less nothing. This isn’t a case of writer’s block, writer’s block I can deal with, that’s just the problem of not knowing what to write. The situation I find myself in is not being able to bring myself to write. Just staring at the empty or half written pages fills me with a profound sense of ennui. That hopeless feeling of “honestly why do I even bother?” It’s hardly an ideal, and as much fun as cranking the stereo volume up to 11, curling up on the sofa with a cup of tea and hoping that the world spontaneously catches fire, it doesn’t really achieve anything.

Photo by Chris van Ryn

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December 24, 2012

Merry Blogmas

By The Rogue Verbumancer

T’was the night before blogmas and I Y_Christmas_Tree_2was back home,

All the way up north where mammoths still roam,

Where it’s sure to be cold with the possibility of snow,

Let’s hope it doesn’t jam up the roads, but we’ll see how we go.

I’m visiting my family and there’s sure to be war,

Shouting and fighting and maybe a lot more,

I’d like to think otherwise, but I know that I’m right,

I’m just vainly hoping I’ll make it through the night.

“But how am I reading this? Is this post here by chance?”

No it is not my friend, it was scheduled in advance,

So while I knuckle under and try my best to stay alive,

To you a very, Merry Blogmas and all that associated seasonal jive. Continue reading

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December 17, 2012

An Unexpected Journey

By The Rogue Verbumancer

On Wednesday I got a yearning. A yearning to be somewhere other; a yearning to get the world under my feet and to keep walking until I ran out of road. To get out into the country and lose myself in a place where there was no one else. Even at the height of noon, the sun was a wan and sickly thing, barely punching through the swaddling of fog and ice, the temperature never rising above zero. It was the kind of weather which leeches the colour out of everything and leaves the world a perfect glass twin of itself; another, more perfect world; a world where hedges are draped with a filigree with frozen cobwebs; were fat wood pigeons and collared doves peck at frozen earth and shaggy coated horses nibble at the knife blades of frost coated grass.

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November 26, 2012

Reporting In

By The Rogue Verbumancer

So here we are. It’s Monday again and I’m shattering this radio silence. I’m shattering it like a milk bottle in a tumble dryer filled with bricks. A great many things have happened over the last couple of weeks, none of which I might add were entirely planned. But as Helmuth von Moltke the Elder’s adage goes “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Whether the enemy in question is myself remains a matter of debate. The lease on my old flat was due to expire at the end of February. Rather understandably I wanted to try and find a new place to live sooner rather than later. I had originally booked this coming week off from work to do house hunting, but a quick speculative jaunt to look at a flat 2 weeks ago, just to “get a feel” for the market again set wheels in motion. Terrifying, terrifying wheels. Now 2 weeks later I’m in a new flat, I’ve moved, I’ve unpacked, the internet is even up and running. So that’s a load off my mind, I can take a deep cleansing breath and no longer have to worry about my central nervous system tearing its way out of my body screaming “I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE! LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!”

So that’s nice.

I possess many things…

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November 19, 2012

Going Dark

By The Rogue Verbumancer

The radio is dead, the frequencies awash with a white noise hiss a sound perversely organic in its deadness. Then through this sea of audio nothing comes a voice, quiet and broken, on an unending loop:

… moved house…
…no…internet…
…going dark…
…radio silence…
…my god…the boxes…
…they’re everywhere…

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November 12, 2012

Out and About

By The Rogue Verbumancer

At the time of writing, I am not in the finest of fettles. I am in a word, exhausted. For me weekends are important not because they allow me to not be at work, but because they allow me to do nothing. They let me recharge the leaky, poor quality batteries that sustain my crude and imperfect meat-vessel of a body. This weekend has not seen much time for rest and relaxation. I have been “doing things” and this has left me worse for wear. Saturday saw me heading on a very important quest. I headed out to Reading. My noble and perilous goal? A combination of some early Christmas shopping and buying some sorely needed new jeans for work. A sojourn that I give the slightly inappropriate name of #EpicRockStarAdventure. The jeans were a matter of some urgency. My current work jeans are full of holes, the fly on one pair finally gave up the ghost and died and to cap it all off I am not as thin as I once was. Having to move up to a 32″ waist has given me a new understanding into the mindset of those who constantly bemoan their behemoth like girth when they are in fact slim and trim. It’s all a matter of perspective I suppose. If you’ve spent the vast majority of your life slipping into a 28″ waist you’re going to really notice it when you start to put on a bit of weight and cease to be quite so svelte and hideously skeletal. And then there’s the ever looming spectre of trying to find somewhere to live.

Shh… I’m hunting flats

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