Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

Happy Halloween everybody!

Except, I’m actually not that happy that All Hallows’ Eve has come round again this year. Seemingly unimpressed by my silent protest 12 months ago, the day has reoccurred once more and a day and evening of frightful fretting has commenced. No matter how much people try to convince me that there’s nothing wrong with a good old bit of dressing up, I just can’t seem to like Halloween.

This afternoon, fearful of the impending onslaught of trick or treating, plans were made to cope with what lay ahead. We would, quite simply, pretend we were out. Lights would be turned off, curtains would be drawn and doors would stay firmly shut.

Then, in a glorious twist of fate, the weather forecast foretold of downfall after downfall of wonderful, wonderful rain. I was, of course, mainly thinking of the farmers, glad that their crops would continue to grow (assuming such things still continue in late October) but as a by-product I could sit back and relax, listening to the pitter-patter not of little sweet-hungry feet but of droplet after droplet raining on their parade. Bliss.

I’m not sure what troubles me more – the idea that I might have to converse with people in costume (always awkward in all areas of life) or the fact that I would be forced to relinquish the treats I had carefully stored up to help me cope with all the pressures of this life. What do children know of pressures? They don’t need mini bags of Tangfastics. I do.

And then there’s the pumpkin. Apart from its obvious flaw of being orange, the pumpkin is part of the dubious ‘festival family’ (also featuring the Brussell Sprout), marked out as something that is only worth eating once a year. In fact, its chief selling-point seems not to be its taste but rather its capacity for being carved into something barely resembling a face. Give me a broccoli any day.

On reflection, I suppose my Halloween hasn’t been too bad. I have eaten more chocolate than the local children, endured only mild heart palpitations when the sound of excitable voices skipped past our door, and written a blog to encourage those like me out there who can’t wait for All Hallows Day to swing its beautiful figure into view.

On the downside, the end of the day brings the start of November. Don’t even get me started on that.

Something might happen

I will, it seems, watch just about anything.

Not content with having recently wasted significant hours of my life staring at the wet grass broadcast on ITV when England were supposed to be losing to Poland last Tuesday, it seems I am now spending my time watching stationary doors and rotating swirly patterns accompanied by undeniably-riveting phrases such as ‘Preparing Windows’ and ‘Getting your devices ready’. Indeed. Wouldn’t want to miss that.

Who else joined me last Tuesday in enduring an hour or so of Chiles and co commentating on the wetness of the grass and the openness of the roof that surely should have been closed many hours earlier? Yes, Adrian, it most certainly should have been closed – I am with you there and I would suspect most of the country were too. We were with you for the first non-bounce of the ball that indicated we should all be changing channel as soon as our fingers have finished tapping away our frustrations on Twitter. We were even with you when you sought to speculate as to when this match might actually go ahead. But why, oh why, did we stick with you for a single second more, especially when there was a good old tussle going on between Belgium and Scotland on a channel sporting far drier grass than anything Warsaw was able to offer? Especially since there was enough good old English rain to look at through the window if we began to miss the Polish variety.

And then this morning, as I sat down for a leisurely post-9.30am breakfast, I found my eyes transfixed not by the oaty goodness contained within my bowl but by the close-up shot of a rather impressive looking door. A door that, we were informed, would soon see the arrival of George Entwistle, Director-General of the BBC. This was, I’m sure you will agree, quite a privileged door.

Debate was rife:

- would he stop to speak to the press?

- would he be alone?

- would he use his left or right hand to open the door?

- would he offer a conciliatory turn, smile and ambiguous right-hand gesture that we could draw all sorts of wild conclusions from?

- would he miss the door entirely and become the first man on TV to walk through a brick wall?

I was hooked.

Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any more exciting, I returned from a brief break to discover the ‘Breaking News’ on Sky that he was ‘looking forward’ to the meeting. This was indeed breaking news and I wondered just how many minutes of this defining moment in history I had missed when I naively chose to get changed at that exact time. If only I had heard him say those words in person rather than having to settle for second best of seeing them recorded on the yellow bar scrolling across my screen. Such experiences are sent to try us, no doubt.

Needless to say, I watched the entire duration of his questioning, nodding and shaking my head where appropriate and only pausing briefly to fuel up on coffee to get me through the remaining minutes.

In fact, that is not actually the complete picture because I succeeded in multi-tasking in my devotion to whatever is put on a screen in front of me by spending a considerable number of minutes watching my laptop inform me that Windows was ‘finalizing my settings’. Mainly, I was furious that ‘finalising’ had been spelt with a ‘z’ and found it hard to look away from such a blatant Americanism but I have to confess that it was hard to tear myself away from the screen just in case something new happened. Sure, that new thing would probably only be ‘preparing’ or ‘initializing’ (again with a rogue ‘z’) but at least it would be different and if there’s one thing that excites a man who’s spent the past 5 and a half weeks at home recovering from an operation then it’s the prospect of change.

Change did come after a surprisingly-large number of minutes and all seems to be well with the new (trial) Windows 8 software at the moment. I have torn myself away from loading screens and doors and am free to resume my refreshing of email, Twitter and Facebook. Or perhaps I’ll even go as far as to write a blog post and continue with my play this afternoon so that I can hold my head high when my wife returns from work this evening?

Well, I suppose part one of the plan is now complete. On with the play…

I’ll be waiting

Think of something you do in your life and you can be pretty sure that there’ll be a statistic for it somewhere.

Sleeping? Well, you spend about 14 years doing that.

Eating? Let’s go for about 7 years.

Feeding the cat? That’s got to be at least 2 years.

Even seemingly rare occurrences such as clipping your nails, putting the bins out or saying something encouraging to someone else must rack up the months over the course of a lifetime. In fact, only two weeks after its release date, the new Muse album has probably taken up about twelve hours of my life so far. Twelve glorious hours.

But what about waiting? How long does not actually doing anything take up?

My life seems to involve a lot of waiting at the moment:

- Waiting for my friend’s baby to be born

- Waiting for the Muse album to come out (we finally got there with that one)

- Waiting to be able to use my left arm again (hurrah, the time has come!)

- Waiting for a couple of emails I’d really like to receive

- Waiting for my dinner when my wife’s late home from work (I’m still playing the ‘I can’t really cook with only one arm’ card…)

- Waiting for inspiration so that I don’t end up writing blog posts about waiting

The Bible claims that those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength but it’s less clear on what will happen to those of us waiting upon our dinner or the latest bit of bold-type to appear at the top of our inbox. My guess – and it’s a guess built upon quite a bit of experience recently – is that this sort of waiting is actually likely to sap rather than renew our strength and I’m not convinced that living in 2012 is helping me/us with any of this.

Even if I move away from the computer – and I do, occasionally, do this – then I am likely to be only inches away from my phone which now has the capacity to do pretty much everything the computer can do. Certainly, it is more than capable of catalysing my crushing obsession with just having one more quick check…

What must it have been like to have lived in a time when news came to you via a hand-delivered note (preferably on a silver tray carried by a butler) and you could happily while away the hours/days in between each correspondence without the slightest anxiety as to why you hadn’t heard back within a few minutes of your message being written? I suppose it must have been possible to relax, to sit back and accept that you wouldn’t hear anything for days on end. Maybe this is how books got written and read for so many years?

Now? Well, to be honest I think I’ve probably checked email/Facebook/Twitter three or four times while writing this blog. Surprisingly enough, not an enormous amount has happened but I might just pop off quickly to see if that’s changed since the last check…

OK, I’m back (apparently, front-row tickets for the Rolling Stone concert will cost £1000) and I’m off to post this now and then wait for the statistics to roll in.

Reading Sam’s blog? Be careful, you could probably spend a couple of months of your life doing that.

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(N.B. All statistics included in this blog are pure guesswork – I considered looking them up but decided that it would be a waste of my precious waiting time)