Hands open

‘Look, Mum! No hands!’

It seems that these words of childish exuberance are rearing their head on our streets, albeit in their slightly more dangerous adult form:

‘Look, England! No brain!’

Harsh words? Well, yes. But surely ‘no brain’ is exactly what some people are not only demonstrating but are also anticipating as a future accident waits around the corner to rid them of their grey matter once and for all. As a child, lifting your hands off the handlebars for an ambitious half a second (which, let’s be honest, felt like at least a full minute when you did it) was the signal that you were truly brave, a fully initiated member of society who could hold their head high in the park, perhaps even strut while striding past those pathetic six year olds (you are seven in this story, by the way) who could only dream of lifting a finger, let alone a hand, off their handlebars. They probably still used stabilisers too. You – that’s right, you – were destined for glory because your very own mum had seen you dice with death. And all while being decked out in a fluorescent orange helmet and knee pads…

And then we become adults. Well, some of us do. Some of us walk, drive cars and ride bikes with both hands on the bars, well aware that we are surrounded by machines that are more than capable of crushing us if we make just the slightest slip. (Anyone been put off cycling yet?)

Some of us, on the other hand, think the game is still on. Mum is around every corner, cheering us on as we go for our new personal best, perhaps even occupying our fingers with something else entirely – phones being the most popular option currently – just to prove that, not only can we do without those handlebars, but we can turn our attention to something far more interesting (like the handlebar app on our phone). And you can forget the orange helmet – that’s gone completely, and I don’t just mean the colour…

My favourite ‘stupid cycling incident’ (or SCI, as they’ll forever be called) took the whole ‘I can do whatever I like with my hands’ claim to a whole new level, tore through all previous levels, mocked them for being so unimaginative and made any future efforts at handlebar-free cycling pale into insignificance. This was more than a phone. (No, it wasn’t two phones.) This was a bowl. A bowl containing noodles. A bowl held in the left hand. And the right hand? Well, let’s just say that his fingers were expertly grasping chop-sticks that were extracting the noodles and effortlessly raising them to the mouth above. While cycling. Quickly. In a straight line.

‘Look, Mum! Noodles!’

Is it wrong to have wanted to have kicked the bike?

Or perhaps we should embrace this as the perfect demonstration of multi-tasking. Maybe we should all be trying out such things? Perhaps someone who reads this might like to go for a ride on their skateboard (you probably don’t own a skateboard if you’re a follower of my blog but I saw one earlier and so my head went there…) while making a cucumber sandwich. Sound easy? You’ll need a knife, a cucumber, a bread board, two slices of bread and a tub of margarine.
Consider it a blog challenge. And, if that doesn’t take your fancy, you could always try making a cup of camomile tea while skipping gaily down the street.

‘Look, Mum! Burned hands!’

Same Band

Spying works. Spying brings unexpected discoveries. Spying enhances your music collection.

Readers of my first batch of blogs many months ago will know that I occasionally (OK, often) dropped in the name ‘Mark Watson’, normally alongside a self-deprecating comment about how much better he was than me, accompanied by an open invitation to a game of table-tennis if anyone is able to hook us up. Having recently trawled through his website and spied on the tweets he is sending to other people (yes, this is perfectly normal behaviour – why are you looking at the screen like that?), I stumbled across further evidence that, not only is he more successful than me at doing stand-up comedy gigs before crowds of hundreds (to be fair to me, my career in that particular area has yet to take off), but it appears that he is also far more adept at finding out about bands reforming and even has the gumption – what a cracking word – to contact such a band to check whether they really are the same band that produced the song ‘Same Band’ back in the heady year of 1999. It turns out, you see, that he had indeed correctly identified the band and, one quick Google & Facebook search later, I too found myself reacquainted with one of the most bizarre but incredible bands of the late 90s: Ultrasound.

I don’t expect you to like them. Not many people did really – hence the solitary mammoth debut album from ‘99 that has perhaps the greatest album sleeve ever created (look it up if you ever get the chance – it’s not just the artwork on the front cover, the whole thing opens up to show this most incredible piece of art).  But they’re back and with a storming new single (see video below), which I am very much enjoying and am using as the primary evidence for my new campaign to encourage people to spy on tweets. I’m wondering what else I’ve missed – have Mansun finally got back together? Have they made a 4th Matrix film that went straight to DVD and didn’t get much of a press? Is Mark Watson heading on a tour of Southampton, looking for people to challenge him to a good old-fashioned game of ping-pong? Who knows, but maybe twitter will and so let’s all read as much as we can so that we don’t miss out on any more of this marvellous world.

In other news, I’ve just spent the last week home alone, which was definitely less eventful than Macauley Culkin’s many adventures, and so I have learned a few things about myself that I would like to share:

1) I am perfectly happy to play an long-running game of buckaroo/jenga with pots, pans and baking dishes.

2) I am so keen to train my cat to use the cat-flap properly that I will let her in the house via the door before taking her back outside and trying to push her through the cat-flap (in a tasteful, not-needing-to-be-reported-to-the-RSPCA-type-of-way, I should point out).

3) I will invent all sorts of interesting combinations of food for dinner – my favourite being: left over curry, couscous, broccoli, peas and a slice of crusty bread with tuna and sweetcorn spread.

4) I will still make as much coffee as I would if there were two of us and will solve this issue by drinking twice as much as usual. Genius.

5) I will still make lists of things that I put on blogs in an attempt to amuse readers and to give the impression that I have something worthwhile to say this week.

In other, other news – news on the novel and monologue collection is quiet because I am currently waiting for a cover to be made for both and for people who were reading the novel to come back to me with their comments so that I can turn it from being simply fantastic to being simply earth-shatteringly monumental. You will, of course, be informed (whether you like it or not) when  - sorry, I need to pause mid-sentence to tell you that I’ve just seen 3 dogs wearing coats outside and the one wearing the yellow one looked pretty fed up – one or both of the projects are ready to go.

In the meantime, here’s ‘Welfare State’ by Ultrasound. Don’t expect to like it but be happy for me that I do…

P.S. My week of being home alone was not indicative of any marital difficulties – my wife was visiting her sister to see her new baby. Just in case you were worried…

Summer Holiday

My summer holiday comes to an end today. After a mere 5 weeks and two days, I am once again being expected to get up in the mornings, dress in smart trousers and shirt and do the job I’m paid to do. I know, I’m outraged too. 5 weeks and two days? Who can possibly be expected to return to top form after such a short break? Back in my good old public school days, I lazed around for a full 9 weeks and so, frankly, it beggars belief that I am supposed to be at my best after only just a little over a month’s rest. It’s almost like they want the children to fail…

To celebrate the end of the summer holiday, here are 5 things that are great and 5 things that are frustrating about summer holidays:

Great

1) We get to see the Mastercard advert with teachers leaping into the pool while Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ rings out.

2) When you make sandwiches for lunch, you get to put them on an actual plate and eat them within a few minutes of making them rather than squishing them out of shape so that they fit in an ice-cream tub that won’t get opened again for at least 4, perhaps 5, hours.

3) Lying in bed while your wife gets up early to go to work.

4) Being able to beat your record for ‘number of times I have refreshed the Facebook page today’.

5) Having the time to make two websites, complete a monologue collection and write regular blog entries (by the way, the websites are still alive and well and looking forward to being visited if you haven’t had the chance to do so yet…).

Frustrating

1) People expressing their horror that teachers get 6 weeks off (5 weeks, 2 days actually…), as if this is a new thing that has just started and that no-one knew anything about. We all went to school. We all lazed around for 6 weeks (well, 9 if you went to a school that had its assemblies in a 900-year-old Cathedral…). We all considered becoming teachers for a brief moment when we remembered that they too got the holidays we got – but, and it’s a big but, you decided to go and do something else…

2) Rain – we’ve spoken about it quite a few times but, really, what is going on with the clouds at the moment? I’m sure August used to be nice. What did we do to it to make it like this?

3) Children are on holiday too.

4) In a non-World Cup or European Championships year, there is simply not enough football to watch. Why stop the football season when we’re finally around to watch it all?

5) False hope – we begin the holiday feeling as though we’ve come to the end of work, as though we’ll never need to enter that office again, and yet within a few weeks you’re beginning to realise just how few days you have left before it begins all over again…

Well, I’m sitting here looking at the rain soaking the BBQ I forgot to put away last night, waiting for my co-screenwriter to turn up for a brainstorming session to come up with an Oscar-winning storyline for our future film. By the way, has anyone actually dumped the word ‘brainstorming’ like we were supposed to and begun using the term ‘thought shower’? Personally, I don’t really think that people in England need another reference to rain and isn’t there something a little contradictory about having a shower while doing some ‘blue sky thinking’?

Right, time to make the most of every minute of my last day of holiday. I can feel a Facebook and Twitter check coming up, followed by regular refreshing of the ‘stats’ page of my blog to see how many people have read this within the last 5 minutes…

Kiss your past good-bye

So, it was A-Level results day today. All those months of work come down to a few letters on a piece of paper that might well determine not only where you live for the next three years but where you end up getting up a job and settling down for the foreseeable future. It’s always a strange thought that – Southampton very much feels like home for me now and yet I’m only here because my wife went to university here. Just think, I could have been eulogising over Exeter instead. Hmm, come to think of it, they probably don’t have the issues with the bins that we’ve had…

Talking of the future – well, we weren’t really but I needed a link – I’ve now finished my monologue collection and am looking forward to thrusting that upon the nation shortly. I’m not sure if ‘thrusting’ is the correct verb but it does, at least, express my acknowledgement that people may not exactly be queuing up, Harry Potter-style, to pick up their copy. Nevertheless, the thing will exist, and that’s more than can be said for things that don’t exist…

Also, I’ve just had my first meeting about co-writing a screenplay for a proper movie. As in, those things that last 90 minutes and appear on screens rather than just those ones that only you and your sub-conscious have ever seen or been credited for. I’m sure you know the sort – you’ve seen films. Well, think of one of those and now think about me writing one. Can’t see it? No, neither can I really. Thankfully, I won’t be alone (as you may have deduced from the ‘co’ bit earlier) and so the potential existence and success of the project doesn’t entirely rest on my shoulders. Whatever happens, work begins on Tuesday and the plan is to come up with a story. What could be easier?

That news was potentially so massive that this news simply pales into insignificance in comparison – I bought my first aubergine today. At least, I think it was my first. You’d have thought I’d have remembered my first aubergine, wouldn’t you, so I am assuming that today is my debut aubergine today. I enjoy the word aubergine (pronounced oh! – ber – jean) and am rather partial to the word moussaka too (which I misspelt twice before finally getting it right), so hopefully the two will come together in glorious harmony later this evening. This blog is beginning to resemble Julia and Julia more every day (which isn’t a bad thing if it secures me that movie deal we spoke about many months ago).

Verdict on the moussaka and further references to Aerosmith coming up soon…

Jewel Box

Maybe I’m just becoming a very paranoid and suspicious young man but there is certainly something slightly disconcerting about a man turning up at your door clutching a messy pile of yellow fliers saying that he is going around the neighbourhood asking whether anyone’s got any jewellery (‘such as gold or silver’, he says, clearly unconvinced I know what jewellery is) that he could valuate. More concerning would be if anyone then followed his request by presenting him with a box full of diamond necklaces and gold rings, eagerly determined to find out whether they might be able to get a couple of quid after all. I mean, how’s anyone supposed to sell anything these days unless someone turns up at their door anyway?

Needless to say, I insisted in an overly-assertive tone (which probably sounded a little suspicious, come to think of it) that we in fact have very little jewellery in the house. So little jewellery that I’m actually waiting for the guy who buys paper clips and elastic bands to come round later that morning so that I can afford to buy a couple of necklaces for my poor, deprived wife.

In other news, I came across an interesting article by Sam Leith earlier (which Nick Page pointed people to on Twitter) and so I wanted to show you a paragraph from it here as it touches upon some of the things I’ve mentioned from time to time and sums up my general approach to my days recently…

A large number of literate westerners spend most of their waking hours at computers, and those computers are connected to the web. The characteristic activity on such a computer has been given the pleasing name "wilfing", adapted from the acronym WWILF, or "What was I looking for?" You work a bit. You check if it's your move in Facebook Scrabble. You get an email. You answer it. You get a text. You answer it. Since your phone's in your hand, you play Angry Birds for five minutes. You work a bit. You go online to check something, get distracted by a link, forget what you were looking for, stumble on a picture of a duck that looks like Hitler, share it on Twitter, rinse and repeat.

The debate he then gets into is whether this proliferation of activities reflects the fact that we are cleverer than we used to be, since we can balance so many things at once, or whether we’re less capable then we used to be because we can’t maintain our focus on any one thing for that long at all. Since I’m a pretty big wilfer, I’m going to support the ‘we are cleverer’ argument…

In writing news, I’m now just one monologue away from having the collection ready to go and so my main focus is now on trying to find someone who can draw me a front cover. So, blog readers, is there anyone out there who would be up for drawing a few cartoon people, a cartoon snake and a cartoon tree? This is a genuine offer of stardom – well, the opportunity to appear on Amazon at least. Any takers?

I hope you’ve enjoyed having a browse of my websites. Lots keeps getting added and so do check back if you haven’t seen them for a few days – particularly the Contemporary Christian Drama one. Recently, I’ve been recording audio versions of the monologues, which has been good fun – if only for making me feel like I’m having a brief stint as a recording artist, seeing my name come up on Windows Media Player, fulfilling in a very roundabout and not really accurate way my long-held ambition to be a rock-star. OK, so there may be no guitars, drums or singing, but it’s a start at least.

Right, time to get the washing in before it rains and I have an awkward conversation with my wife on her return from work. It does mean I’ll be away from the front door for a few minutes – hope I don’t miss anyone coming round to buy any spare dust from our hoover (unluckily for them, if so, I managed to spill most of it on the kitchen floor yesterday)…