Category Archives: Ramblings
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
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
I am nothing if not a 
creature of habit. In many ways this has its advantages. Things follow a fairly structured and preordained path, I generally know what I should be doing, when and how I should be doing it. Routine is comforting, it keeps me occupied and it gives structure to my otherwise feckless and directionless existence. It does however have its disadvantages. Some of these are obvious: that the routine may lull me into a rut from which I cannot escape, or that should someone decided that it’s high time to have me assassinated the strictly regimented framework of my life will make it a laughably easy thing to achieve. The greatest disadvantage I’ve found to it comes more from personal failing, the times where the routine has holes and gaps, places where it is incomplete. When the weekend finally rolls around and these holes are most abundant, it all tends to go to pieces. At no time is this more evident than it is on a Sunday afternoon.
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Leave a comment | tags: Exhaustion, Fatigue, Ramblings, Sunday Syndrome, Sundays, Tired | posted in Ramblings
There are a great many things i
n life which irritate me. A lot of these are fairly common irritations which are shared by most sane and right thinking people: disingenuous politicians, rising prices, crappy television, wasps, youths. But on top of these I have quite a collection of irrational irritations. Things which you know shouldn’t bother about or even pay any attention to you, but nonetheless they get under your skin, leave you grinding your teeth and seething with a barely contained rage. I have on occasion pottered around a friend’s house meticulously straightening picture frames and spent a good few hours organising a cards (of both the collectible and standard playing variety) simply because they were in what I considered to be “the wrong order.” But perhaps the greatest of these irrational irritations is that of text alignment.
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Leave a comment | tags: Irritations, Justified Text, OCD, Symmetry, Text Alignment | posted in Ramblings
So this weekend was Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond Jubilee. Now that you’ve read this blog post’s title I can already sense some of you clenching your backsides. You’re thinking: “Oh fuck it’s going to be a massive rant against privilege and inequity. He’s going to bore us senseless with tirades about democracy and all those other republican wonders. Oh fuck, I’m not political, why am I here? I don’t want to read this.” Well you needn’t worry. I slated this blog post for writing about a fortnight ago. The confluence of these two things is nothing more than a coincidence. I’m here to write about something else entirely.
I recently experienced a bit of a domestic tragedy. One of those little blips in life which makes you hiss through your teeth and mutter things along the lines of “fiddlesticks” or a plain and hearty “bollocks.” These domestic tragedies are not truly sad or terrible, but they get in the way of the smooth and straightforward operation of one’s meat-vessel within one’s functional life-scape. To cut a long story short, my mouse stopped working.
Squeak?
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Leave a comment | tags: Computers, Domestic Tragedy, gadgets, Mice, Mouse, Ramblings | posted in Ramblings
Life is never easy. It’s an ongoing battle, a 
struggle. It is cruel and it is cold. Life is hard. It is made ever harder by being filled with hard choices. Choices where the answer is not readily apparent, forever occluded by the uncertainty of the future. Alternatively, in rare cases, the answer is clear and obvious, but through its choosing opens you up to any number of hardships and unpleasant consequences. For me the hardest of choices comes every morning. It is the choice as to whether it’s worth getting out of bed. Should the day finally arrive when I decide that it isn’t, that is when I know that I have lost. It will be the day that I finally throw in the towel and surrender to a genetic predisposition toward sloth-like laziness. To be swallowed by my own crushing personal inertia, an unwillingness to move or do anything. The bottom of an energy well from which no amount of coercion can roust me. But until that day I keep getting up every morning, fuelled by an empire shatteringly unstoppable quantity of spite and a blind, unrelenting, stubbornness that would put most tectonic plates to shame. I do this because it is habit, for I am nothing if not a creature of it. But most importantly I do it because I know that nothing worth doing will ever be easy. If it is easy then it’s probably not worth doing. As it is with life, so it is with books.
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Leave a comment | tags: Books, Gormenghast, Hard Books, Hard Choices, Mervyn Peake, Ramblings | posted in Ramblings
Today is a good day for writing. 
The sun is streaming in through the back windows, across the open expanse of the kitchen and into the front-room. It makes my little cosy world feel spacious and clean. Fresh. A state that belies its true nature. The discarded plates can go unnoticed, the strewn flotsam of rubbish can wait till tomorrow, the strata of filth and grime is something which can be avoided. I’m drinking a big cup of organic white tea (middle-class represent!) out of a big, fat, pint mug. Times like these are one of only two times I can really write, the other being the grey place where afternoon and evening blur together. There is always however a problem with writing, the ever struggling battle for originality, the quest to produce something new and exciting. Naturally this isn’t as easy as it sounds.
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Leave a comment | tags: Georges Polti, Gilgamesh, Originality, Shakespeare, Stories, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
All things have a beginning 
and all things have an end. This is one of those inalienable facts of life, existence and creation. Ultimately everything in transitory, forever on a journey between these two markers. It’s a bit grim when you think about it. Depressing. I’ve been having a bit of a mope these last few days, one of those ennuis courting with malaise in a downward spiral of misery. I’m sure if it could be visualised it would look awfully pretty were it not for the fact that it makes me feel so downright awful. So forgive the somewhat maudlin tone on which I’ve began. Of all the bastards and traitors I have ever known my own brain is the greatest amongst them. But that is a matter for another time. This latest plumbing of the depths of my own self-absorbed mopery got me thinking about the aforementioned end of all things, specifically stories, tales, yarns and suchlike. Endings are fantastically important things, if they’re handled badly or poorly executed, then pretty much everything that has come before them is rendered ultimately pointless and irrevocably tainted.
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2 Comments | tags: Endings, Fin, Ramblings, The End, Writing | posted in Ramblings
This week sees me pass something of a 
milestone. Ali over at 12 Book has decided to go off gallivanting and galumphing across Europe; she’ll be gone for about a month. To fill her blog in her absence she asked for guest posts. I wrote one. It goes up on Wednesday 25th of April. In years to come when the world is a blasted ruin and we all live in caves or cardboard houses, when the sky bleeds acid and the very air is a noxious and cloying poison, Ali will look back on this day and say “That. That right there, is where it all began. Where it all started to go horribly wrong. That was the first, big, mistake.” Probably. I suspect that it won’t come to that though. Probably…
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Leave a comment | tags: 12 books in 12 months, Blogging, Guest Posts, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings
The Rogue Verbumancer 