January 2012
1 post
I Always Only Blog At The Start Of The Year
I am reading The Master and Margarita, which Abi bought me for Christmas. I still mainly like to watch Harry Potter films. Last night I drank two beers and one glass of Scotch. I am going to lose weight this year and stop snoring and be a better person all round. Sound familiar?
We have a baby now. Here she is. She pretty much occupies our life at the moment.
I really hope that 2012 is a bit...
April 2011
1 post
Motivation to read
So far this year, books have been off the agenda. Not enough time, not enough energy. The exception has been the Harry Potter series, which has been good for providing a bit of paper-based nourishment but perhaps not a worthwhile solution to the mini-crisis.
(Another notable exception is JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, which currently props the TV forward so you can see the screen...
March 2011
1 post
Week Nine
This year rumbles on. A few weeks ago I was REALLY FUCKING ILL. I came home from work one afternoon and went to bed, then didn’t really wake up properly for about three days, then started to feel better, then felt a lot worse, then went to the doctor to get some antibiotics and gradually started to feel better. It was mad.
Around the end of this illness we went down to Cornwall to see my...
February 2011
1 post
Week Six
Have spent most of today watching Equilibirum. I watched this film first about three or four years ago and loved it. Today, I also loved it. Obviously silly but strangely emotive. Its reason for existence seems to be to tell The Matrix to fuck off.
At this week’s midwife appointment Abs was, supposedly, 30 weeks pregnant. This differs by a couple of weeks according to the due date....
January 2011
5 posts
Week Four
January has skated past rather quickly.
My weight has dropped by 9 pounds, as of a few days ago. On and over target.
Reading has been patchy. Starts but very little in the way of finishes. Harry Potter is about my limit at the moment. Today I started to read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson, having watched the film during the week. It’s gripping, although I wish I...
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Week One
I don’t really have any resolutions for the new year. What I do have is a determination to lose weight. This week I have been eating much less than I would do normally and trying to insert some activity into my otherwise sedentary lifestyle. As a result I’ve lost close to three pounds. This is roundabout where I want to be. The purpose (rather than engaging in ‘fad’ diets)...
1 tag
Statistics
I think I’ve managed to get a bearing on the data that I’ll set out to collect this year. It’s themed around movement and consumption, which sort of ties in with some of my aims (i.e. lose some weight, be more active, eat more responsibly and economically). So, I am tracking what I am trying to do. This means that the success of one relies upon the success of the other.
As...
1 tag
Chicken Basque
Not sure if this is ‘official’. It’s how I make it.
You need: Enough chicken on the bone (i.e. not the breasts) for four, two red peppers, one large onion, three or four garlic cloves, a couple of chillis, a good length of chorizo, a handful of sundried tomatoes, a mug of basmati rice, chicken stock, white wine or cider.
Season the chicken pieces then brown them in a large,...
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2011 begins
It seems that I can post from my phone again, following a hiatus while I was unable to do this. I can’t sleep, so I’m alternating writing this blog with following a cricket match in Australia.
Christmas and New Year are fading memories. Today we put the house into order. I also spent some time nursing a quite dodgy stomach. Earlier we went for an hour’s walk along the seafront...
December 2010
12 posts
10 tags
Christmas
Christmas Day was a mess of various meats, pickles, pies, chocolate and an overly long and nearly-violent game of Pictionary. At the end we fell into an icy car and returned to Boughton and that was that. A fitful night’s sleep (populated by meat-based dreams) later and we arrive at Boxing Day. England are wiping the floor with the Australians at cricket, later there be football, we all have...
5 tags
A festive message
Have now finished work for the year. Feels good. I love my job but it can be a bit draining and it’s nice to have a break.
Currently listening to the Christmas Wittertainment on BBC 5Live. I can’t explain how much I love Wittertainment and, in fact, how much I love 5Live. I almost feel emotional thinking about that radio station.
This morning I bought The Innocent by David Szalay....
6 tags
Big Freeze
You might be interested to know that I now have a comprehensive(ish) list of thematic tags. I also have a list of books read/bought/mentioned. This may seem like a pointless waste of time to you, but it’s the sort of thing that makes me happy so give me a break.
Yesterday in the space of 90 minutes the roads around Boughton became blighted by snow. After picking Abi up from work we had to...
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This week's highlights
This week I bought a cool and slightly deadly birthday present for my friend Mike. He turns thirty on Christmas Eve. Another friend, Marcus, turns thirty in March next year. I don’t know if I have any other friends approaching thirty. There must be some, as they’re mostly around the same age. So, for all friends of mine either thirty-plus or approaching thirty, well done. Life begins...
3 tags
A daughter
Yesterday we went along to our second scan, slightly ominously titled ‘The Anomaly Scan’. Thankfully, there were no anomalies. We got a good look at a fine, healthy baby who, as it turns out, is female. She has (amongst other things) a good, strong spine, a head, legs and arms, kidneys, a brain. Thankfully, she also has a heart which is beating steadily. The scan was unable to tell us...
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Wasting time pt.2
Having despaired at wasting an hour creating a new blog before disposing of it, I have now wasted another hour updating this blog. Should you be interested in wasting some time of your own, you can now find all of my old blogs linked in one place and all of the fiction of mine that I can find on the internet. Knock yourself out.
Whilst I was at university, I was intent on being published in...
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Wasting time
I don’t quite know why but I just spent an hour creating a new blog in Wordpress, only to discover that all of the themes are shit and you can’t tweak them unless you pay and are good with CSS, which I’m not. So I’m back here, without ever really going anywhere. Below is what I wrote for my first Wordpress post:
“Check this out. Instead of doing something useful, I...
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November 2010
6 posts
3 tags
Survivors' Voices
This week I went along to Survivors’ Voices, an exhibition of artwork produced by survivors of domestic abuse. It was organised by Oasis and held at the Marine Studios in Margate. To say it was humbling would be an understatement. Perhaps most extraordinary was the art produced by children living at the Oasis refuge. Scanned images of their favourite possessions, such as a plastic Dalek and...
2 tags
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Yesterday
After dropping my wife off at work I drove to Canterbury, a few miles down the A2 towards Dover. I parked the car in Pound Lane car park and declined the offer from a man in a yellow jacket to have my vehicle cleaned. I paid for my parking using Ringo, a new system implemented by Canterbury City Council whereby you phone a number and pay by credit card, which is useful when you don’t have...
3 tags
Let Me In
On Wednesday we ended our cinema drought by going to see Let Me In, an English-language remake of the excellent Let the Right One In, of Swedish descent. There are a number of things wrong with it.
The first wrong thing is that there really wasn’t any need to remake the original film at all. It isn’t particularly old, it’s well-made, well-acted, well-lit etc. etc. It is a good...
In further news, I am afraid to report that 18.13 has died a slow and painful death. Never mind, it was fun while it lasted.
5 tags
Not-reading, not-writing and not-watching-films
I haven’t been reading much recently, or watching many films. Hence the lack of blog-posts. I have also been doing a drastically small amount of writing, which is a bit depressing. Nevertheless, I’m hopeful that things will pick up.
Of what I have read, JG Ballard’s The Drought was by far the highest quality. The only writer I can think of who seems to have created his own...
October 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Minor update pt.8
This weekend seemed to pass quickly. I did some DIY yesterday. I think this is known as ‘nesting’.
Today I watched Deja Vu, a Denzel Washington film. In it, Denzel plays a cop who goes back in time to solve a murder. It was a lot better than I’ve made it sound. It got me thinking about Doppelgangers. Double walkers. This led to thinking about Doppler shift, which is where the...
3 tags
Minor update pt.7
Been a bit of a chaotic week all round.
This afternoon we’re driving up to Birmingham for Abi’s nan’s 80th at a swanky country hotel. I have to wear a suit.
This morning I bought Everyman by Philip Roth. I haven’t started reading it yet. Last week I bought a Richard Feynman book, which has been baffling me.
I am making absolutely no money by selling some books on...
September 2010
12 posts
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Minor update pt.6
I watched some good TV today. There was Stephen Hawking’s new programme (I forget the name) which this week was about time travel. It turns out that travel into the past is impossible, due to radioactive feedback destroying any wormhole that might be big enough for a person to walk through. Travel into the future, though, is a theoretical possibility, if we can travel fast enough. There was...
2 tags
The Soloist
In which Robert Downey Junior plays Steve Lopez, a columnist for the LA Times who discovers a muscial genius playing a two-stringed violin on the streets. The musical genius in question is Nathaniel Ayers, played by Jaime Foxx, who has been sleeping rough since he left the Juliard school of music when he began to hear voices. Lopez takes interest initially to fill a void in subject matter for his...
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I hope you like prison food. And penis.
The Other Guys was quite silly. Still, I liked it. Probably Will Ferrell’s best film since Anchorman. He played a similar character, which is what he does best.
Will Ferrell’s default position seems to be to play the Dummling. This is a character from fairy-tales, who is simple-minded but with good intentions. They are usually rewarded at the end. In The Other Guys he plays an ex-pimp...
1 tag
Tone
At the weekend I stumbled across the exact tone that I want for Don. As a result, I’m completely redrafting the second draft (you might call it a third draft, except I didn’t complete the original second so I’m preferring to call it Second Draft Mk.II).
This has put the stoppers on completing anything by the end of September but I don’t mind, because right now it’s...
6 tags
Minor update pt.5
I just uploaded a shedload of 18.13 photos. I wondered if the evenings were getting darker, but as this old one and this new one shows, it doesn’t appear to be yet.
Currently reading The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Before that, I read The Scheme for Full Employment by Magnus Mills. I also received two excellent magazines from Stack. They were literary ones this month. There was The...
8 tags
Minor update pt.4
For a few reasons I need to try and finish Don’s second draft by the end of September, which is a challenge. I am trying very hard to ‘take writing seriously’. The aim is to write a thousand words a day, and four thousand a day at the weekend. If I manage this then I will just about cross the line if I really get my head down over the final few days. (I probably won’t...
2 tags
About writing a book
Have been wondering today whether or not it would be possible to write a novel the way Mike Leigh makes a film.
I’m guessing you’d need to do a lot of background work first. Read a lot, get a strong idea of the themes and setting, sketch out a few scenes. Then get some characters and think about what motivates them, how they think/talk/act. Then put the characters in those scenes and...
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Minor update pt.3
Currently writing a fictional interview with myself. This was partly inspired by an episode of Roger And Val Have Just Got In that I watched last night, in which Roger uses a similar technique to deal with grief. Although I’m not grieving, I thought it was an interesting idea.
(Incidentally, the above mentioned programme is excellent. It’s billed as a comedy but treads a fine line...
August 2010
3 posts
2 tags
The Present Future Tense
Minority Report: information on a computer can be manipulated by a user wearing an adapted glove. Seems like a logical step forward from touch-screen technology (who wants a dirty screen?). The use of retinal scans also appears to be sound. Advertising billboards identify specific products for each passer-by. (Probably already possible.)
But the transport system? Cars run automatically along...
10 tags
Minor update pt.2
Uploaded a bunch of 18.13 photos stretching back to 5th August. As usual they are not artful or interesting. They just exist. There’s a 7 day gap while we were in Barcelona. I tried to keep up with it, and Abi kept reminding me, but in the end I was having too much fun not giving a shit about the time.
I have started chewing matchsticks. Found a load of them at the bottom of a drawer. I...
1 tag
Red Eye
Trying to work out the problems with Red Eye. In a way, it ticked all the right boxes. In another way, maybe the ticks were made with an ultra-light pencil. In fact, perhaps the boxes were really just waved at.
Plenty of other thrillers have taken place in airports or on planes. One of the Die Hards (forget which) is a good example. Another, obviously, is Snakes on a Plane. These settings...
July 2010
12 posts
4 tags
Objectives
In Terminator 2, the T-100’s super-objective isn’t hard to spot. It has been programmed to protect the young John Connor. Its desire is to obey its programming. This isn’t to say that it’s a flat character. It has also been programmed to adapt to human life. This is how we get the expressions ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ and ‘no problemo.’ (And an...
4 tags
Minor update
The small birds seem to have disappeared. There’s no sign of a struggle, so I assume they have learned to fly and gone off to their destiny. Or there is a very tidy cat in the area.
I seem to be reading very little. I am still reading Cat’s Cradle, which I started last week. I don’t know why this is.
I have also broken my not-writing-yet rule. I got tired of note-making...
3 tags
Small birds
There are two small birds in the garden. We think that maybe they’re babies who fell out of the nest. We also think that they may be blackbirds, as blackbirds seem to be the sort of creatures who would let their babies fend for themselves in this sort of situation. Anyway, they kind of potter around trying to fly. They look a bit scared about how big the world is. It seems that...
1 tag
Data
Got fucked over by car insurers. Far too angry to go into details. Waiting for the rage to simmer so that a nice letter can be written. Was so exhausted after the hour-long stonewall telephone conversation that had to lay down.
On the upside, I discovered today that there is a Guardian data blog. I’ve not had time to extensively explore but I discovered it after reading a G2 piece about a...
4 tags
Monday
Attempting to blog from phone. Seems to be working okay. Unsure what all the iPhone fuss is about. They’re fun for about a minute, and then you try to type something. Ridiculous.
Went to an extremely boring seminar about in-work welfare benefits this morning. Was an eye-opener though. 6.6 million a year of unclaimed money. Did you know that as a single working person you could be entitled to tax...
4 tags
Shit has changed
Discovered yesterday that time travel is possible. Videos here and here describe how Ronald Mallett is building a machine which uses light to twist spacetime. This one goes into even further detail. ‘Lasers exist which can create conditions as hot as the centre of the sun,’ the narrator says. (Slightly surprised these aren’t used in wars or something. Perhaps they are). Even more...