Work for the Working Man

Unbelievably, I am being expected to go to work tomorrow.

You might as well go right ahead and wipe that ‘A Day in the Life’ post from your memory banks (assuming you haven’t done so already) because it ain’t happening again for a long time…

Well, not until Friday at least.

Friday? National Crunchie Day? The ‘Thank God It’s…’ day? That one?

That’s it, you’ve got it in one. The day after Thursday will indeed herald a return to the halcyon days of waving my wife off to work while I think of more words beginning with ‘w’ to continue this impressively-alliterative sentence. Unfortunately, I may need to try and be slightly more productive than I have been over the course of this summer but one thing remains consistent: the day will be mine.

After much bargaining, arm-wrestling, pleading and hunger-strike-threatening, I have secured every Friday off for the foreseeable future to further my foray into the world of unnecessary alliteration, hopefully achieving the added bonus of accomplishing more than was possible these past three years. Excited? You should be.

In the meantime, I need to navigate myself through the next three days of what I like to call ‘actual work’. Contrary to all expectation, I am employed as an English teacher (apologies if this is news to you and you’d now like to trawl all previous posts to hunt down the inevitable errors that render this claim absurd) and so I am all set to jump on the ‘we was robbed’ bandwagon regarding the recent results as we dissect, reflect and something else ending in –ect before settling down to realise that yes it would indeed have been nice if more people had achieved a C grade but what are you going to do?

I’m not sure what we’ll do, to be honest, but at some stage groups of students will appear before me and I’ll be expected to string a few sentences together. Perhaps some of them will even smile at a few of them or offer me a nod of appreciation, doffing their metaphorical cap in my direction as they stride out of the classroom thanking me for all I have taught them?

Or perhaps I will dream of Crunchies and will hum along to Friday, I’m in Love (stay tuned for that inevitable blog title) while all around me is chaos?

Whatever happens, there’ll be no Twitter checking or time spent gazing out of the window wondering why on earth my package hasn’t been delivered yet. No, professional man that I am I give you this promise: I will be at work and I will give it my all for four days every week.

But not the fifth day. Oh no. That’ll be mine. Always mine.

(It’s Good) To Be Free

The best things in life are free.
For five days, so is the script for Who’s the Baby?. Unlikely to make many people’s ‘Top 10 Best Things in Life’ list I know, but free it is nonetheless, reckless promotion-hunting freak that I am.
Basically, this is for everyone out there who said ‘you know what, I like the blog and I like the sound of a play with the word baby in it but you have got to be kidding if you think I’m shelling out 77p for something like that.’
Perhaps you’ve never read a play script on your Kindle before? Perhaps you don’t even own a Kindle but are desperate for the first play script to read on your Kindle software on your PC, Laptop or Phone? Or perhaps you’re simply hear expecting another tale of gourmet fish and attempted murder and are by now, quite frankly, extremely disappointed?
Whatever your thoughts at this exact point, at least I’m not asking you to pay anything. You’ve got to give me that.
It would be nice if more things were free, wouldn’t it? Paying for things really puts a dampener on life. I’ve tried to accommodate this thinking by only charging 99p for It was the tree’s fault and £1.99 for Accidental Crime but I appreciate that even that falls someway short of the heady world we’d all like to live in where we simply take things and enjoy them. Kind of like the riots last summer, only less illegal and with fewer fires.
Here’s my slightly more realistic dream: hundreds of people download Who’s the Baby? for free, think to themselves ‘it would be fun to put this play on at Christmas’ and this December churches across the country (if not the world! – no, too big) put on productions to reach thousands of people with the message.
I wouldn’t get a single penny for any of this but, I’ll tell you what, I’d rather see that happen than sell 1,000 copies of Accidental Crime this week…
(P.S. I’d be perfectly happy to sell 1,000 copies as well, just in case you were wondering.)

This Is My House

Sometimes it can be hard to know what to write about. It doesn’t matter how many staircases you climb – literal or metaphorical, take your pick – you simply cannot focus in on that tale that must be told. You can take a walk to clear your head, surf the net to fill your head or position yourself in the way of a swinging bag to hurt your head, but sometimes the ideas just aren’t there.

Then, one day, one lonely day when you least expect it, someone knocks on your door (quite literally) and practically writes the blog for you…

‘Hello!’ he called out, my 28 year-old face staring back at him. ‘Are your parents home?’

My parents? Um. Hmm. Let’s see. Would those be the parents whose house I left over 10 years ago and who probably are at home in their house 4 hours away from here?

‘This is my house,’ I responded, confidently (because, you see, it is my house – I’m a big fan of the truth).

‘Oh,’ he replied, slightly taken aback. ‘I’m just doing a bit of cold calling and I was wondering whether you’d be interested in some gourmet fish?’

Well, at least he wasn’t trying to get me to change energy supplier. Perhaps he’d seen the glint of a Cambridge graduate in my eye or something?

After a brief exchange in which I blamed my wife’s occasional vomiting problem on fish, it was clear that the cold calling wasn’t getting any warmer and so he began retreating, speaking as he did so:

‘Oh, and sorry I questioned your ability to own a house.’

So, it seemed we had gone from me being confused for a child to now being someone incapable of owning a house. Perhaps he actually did think I was 28 – or in my twenties at least – but one quick look as the door swung open communicated quite clearly, in his mind, that this man was certainly not capable of home ownership?

What exactly is the look of a man capable of owning a house? What am I lacking that I need to start doing?

Should I be rubbing the door post with my ‘owner’s hand’, as if stating quite clearly: this is mine, or should I reach out my hand ready to shake the salesman by his while shouting ‘Welcome to my house!’, ready to follow up with ‘I bought it with my own money…and the bank’s’ as soon as that first look of doubt appeared?

I suppose the obvious answer is to get a plaque. Something that makes it absolutely clear that the house belongs to ‘people who look unlikely to own it’ (I’m unfairly including my wife in this, I know, but I banking on her being happy to stand with me in solidarity). Maybe I could even stick a photo of us on the door to lessen the shock?

And, if all else fails, I suppose I should simply nod and say ‘yes, my parents are indeed home, so if you get on the next train to Norwich you should catch them by mid-afternoon’.

Or – and this is definitely the final or – I could always grow a beard. Beards scream out home owner, don’t they?

A Day in the Life

It was so obvious I almost overlooked it completely.

You see, as I was climbing the stairs a few moments ago wondering what on earth I could blog about it suddenly occurred to me that you are no doubt wondering what I actually get up to on a daily basis when I’m allegedly on summer holiday. No? Well, single-minded man that I am I’m going to press on regardless and let you in to the secrets of how I spend my time…

Picture the scene: my wife scurrying around to get ready for work while I curl up on the bed keeping my eyes as tightly shut as possible. It’s a nice scene and I maintain it until the moment the front door clicks into place. Then, against all the odds, my eyes spring open (yes, eyes do spring – look it up) and I switch my phone on to check that nothing of global importance has occurred over the past eight hours that might affect what I choose to do next.

On arrival downstairs, my cat inquires as to whether it might be possible perhaps, if she were ever so good, for her to have a second breakfast. Disappointed at my inevitable refusal, she slumps off to the living room to lay down for the day while I do my best to make some sort of stab at eating something.

We’re back up the stairs now (a lot of my day seems to involve stairs) and the laptop is being switched on in anticipation of today being the day that I finally write that magic sentence, that life-changing paragraph, that viral tweet that will have the world’s media queuing up outside my front door to catch a snap of me in my PJs.

After 45 minutes or so of what I like to call ‘general surfing’, it occurs to me that I should probably start writing something. I look at the clock – if it is not on the hour or 15, 30 or 45 past the hour, I simply cannot begin. I don’t make the rules up; it’s just the way it is.

I head on over to Twitter and tweet something very much like the sentences above, wondering if there’ll be someone out there who might come ever so close to a chuckle at my worldly wisdom. Once I have assured myself that there are probably dozens skipping over the post without a moment’s notice, I reopen the document of my latest novel (which also begins with the letter ‘A’ – that’s exclusive news, so keep it to yourself…) and re-read what I wrote the day before. Then it occurs to me – I could enjoy reading this even more if I did it on my Kindle – and so as the document travels through cyber-space I check out the response to my tweet, draft and redraft a few follow-up tweets and then delete in a flurry of self-doubt.

Time then passes. Hopefully, at some stage during this time, writing is done. Reading normally happens before writing and then tends to occur during it and after it too. Sometimes the writing is rapid and I clock up 1,000 words without realising it. Other times…well, I’ll let you finish that sentence yourself.

Lunch occurs when it dawns on me that it is past 2pm and I’m still sat in front of the laptop without a sandwich in my hand. Lunch is a dangerous thing – not so much the eating but the post-lunch malaise and procrastination it induces. Sure, the eating is enjoyable (perhaps even essential) but when a glance at the clock tells you that we’re now pushing 3.30 and I still haven’t returned to the writing then it’s time to admit that lunch is causing you a problem.

So, after losing a few games on FIFA – and, yes, losing is exactly what I’ve been doing recently (not that I’m remotely bothered about it, oh no, not one bit) – I decide to head on back up stairs (there’s the stairs again) and re-open the document. After 30 minutes or so of checking Twitter and occasionally taking the plunge and adding a comment of my own, I give the typing another go.

This is where it all goes a bit blurry. Some days, the fingers skip across the keys with reckless abandon, producing something that actually makes me smile, if not giggle to the empty room around me. Other days…well, I think we’ve been to this sentence before…

Then, just as I’m in the middle of my best paragraph of the day, the door will open and my wife will return, calling up the stairs (are you keeping count?) at the exact moment that I am trying to work out what the next ‘killer phrase’ should be. Loyal, loving husband that I am, I bound down the stairs (5?), throw my arms around her, ask her how her day was, make her a coffee, talk through the options for the dinner I will cook any moment now and will nod, smile and say ‘yeah, my day’s been OK, I got some writing done’ before asking if she minds if I skip back up the stairs (keep counting) to finish off my sentence.

And now I enter my most productive period of the day, reeling off word after word just when I should be cooking and conversing. In some cruel twist of fate, I am now more focussed and ‘in the zone’ (whatever that means) exactly when I need to put that world behind me for now and curl up on the sofa. Despair sets in. Hunger swiftly follows. Dinner is made, served, eaten and reflected upon. The evening begins.

I could tell tales of films watched, books read and outings undertaken but that is all for another day. The writing day is over and now all that awaits me is a sleepless start to the night as I think through all the things I’d like to put down on paper (well, keyboard and screen) the moment I awake.

Now, aren’t you glad you asked the question?

It’s the end of the world as we know it

Well, that all went surprisingly well, didn’t it?

Hang your cynical head in shame, because I’ll tell you something: London 2012 was a spectacular success.

Forget for a moment that Russell Brand sang ‘I am the Walrus’ and Liam Gallagher was, well, there. Forget the fact that you were anxiously looking at your watch from 10.30 onwards last night wondering if this thing would ever end. And forget, most of all, that the way it all ended wasn’t quite as good as the way it all began.

The fact is, few of us have witnessed a better couple of weeks in this country and we have well and truly waved our cheap plastic flags in the face of anyone who dared to question that we’d have the gumption to put on such an event.

OK, so it would have been nice if we could have achieved 30 golds, if only to leave us with a nice round number, but we can’t really complain with the 29, whilst at least some credit has to go to those who muscled in on the act with a silver or bronze. And all with the backdrop of a Mayor who dances to The Spice Girls, a Python who dabbles in a bit of Bollywood and a Bean who demonstrates remarkable dexterity with an umbrella. Now that’s what I call British.

The problem is, what do we do now? I suppose the flags will go back in the drawer, the bunting will be taken down and we’ll have to start shaking our fists at one another once again rather than holding hands in communal celebration. We’ll look at the Leisure Centre flyers dropping through our door, will picture ourselves pedalling away with all the ferocity of Chris Hoy and will briefly, just briefly, think about signing up. Then, as the theme music to Coronation Street kicks in, the only pedalling we’ll do will be stepping on the pedal-bin lever, opening the lid to deposit the flyer, while we whisper ‘honey, I’m home’ to the sofa and settle down with a bag of cookies to work on our curves.

Or, perhaps not. Perhaps this really will change things and we’ll all be jogging down the street, shooting pigeons and show-jumping on the backs of unsuspecting Labradors. Perhaps – and it’s a big perhaps – someone somewhere will get out a calculator and will realise that spending lots of money on this sort of thing will actually save us money when people stop needing to be wheeled into the local A&E for thousands of pounds of treatment that a few brisk walks to the shops would have prevented.

And when you’re reading that Daily Mail and are tempted to join in with the moaning about immigration, just remember two names: Mo Farah.

Maybe, just maybe, it won’t be the end of the world as we know it but the start of a whole new one (cue the song from Aladdin…). Now, wouldn’t that have made the last two weeks worth it all?