maybe three

Off to The Proms - unexpected, but very cool.

"To the Royal Albert Hall, Jeeves."

"A small libation before departure, sir?"

"Tip-top idea, Jeeves - perhaps two!"

"Very good, sir."

Bloody clever gent, that Jeeves.

80 years young

A computer test last week claimed my brain was 80 years old, but with training could return to a nimble and youthful 50.

I only just turned 30.

I figured the test must be flawed. I checked. The test was not flawed, but the way I took it was. I couldn't even do it right.

I tried to look on the bright side, thinking that an 80 year-old has a wealth of wisdom earned by years of playing the game called life.

But this didn't test wisdom. It tested response times to simple brain teasers and arithmetic.

So I started doing the training - it's kind of addictive. It's the stuff you secretly liked in primary school - fast sums and that sort of thing. There's memory stuff as well. There are drawbacks - a 3d floating head of the Japanese scientist that invented the game mocks you if your scores slip and laughs at its own dreadful jokes. That's creepy.

But I've dropped 53 years in just over a week. Which makes my brain 3 years younger than the rest of me. I think learning how to take the test helped.

Oh, and just because your idea's rubbish doesn't mean it won't make you millions. I like the LaserMonks. They sound kind of like Jedis, but for printers.

In other news, London's an oven. In fact, scratch that, Britain's an oven at the moment. Except for North West Scotland, which is more like a weak heat lamp. With every news service chiming in on the thermal meltdown of Wales and everywhere else, I thought I'd throw my two cents in as well.

• People, it is summer. Summer is, by its very nature, a hot time of year - much like winter is a cold time of the year.
  
• When you say it's the hottest summer in history, you are guilty of sensationalist, dreadful, irresponsible journalism and should be ashamed of yourselves.
• Global warming is probably responsible. This is like standing in the rain and muttering that it's the drops making you wet. Climate is not a constant. Nothing on the planet is a constant. It is dynamic, in constant flux and whether the cause is human or natural, the effect is the same. The last 25 million years or so is the only period in the earth's 4 billion years that it's been temperate enough for ice to cover both poles. So for 160th of the planet's history, there's been weather systems that we would consider 'normal'. Just suppose we did manage to curb global warming, and the planet decides to fuck us with her own climate change, one that we can't blame on emissions? Do we adapt, or try to fix it?
  

That was my weather rant. Sorry, it's hot up here.

advice

Don't walk four miles in flip-flops.

Make sure the pub you're going to isn't shut for refurbishment.

Especially if you're walking there in flip-flops.

tomes & tunes

I've broken a cardinal rule - I'm reading three books at once. Well, not actually at the same time - that would be like Mad Libs on crack - but they're all next to my bed, bookmarks embedded, marking where I was when I grabbed the next book.

Don Quixote
Love in the Time of Cholera
Almost Like a Whale - an updated Origin of the Species

Blues and classical music fill the Belfry at the moment. Again, not at the same time.

Stevie Ray Vaughn and Albert King's In Session (Live)
BB King's King of the Blues
Orff, Carmena Burana
Vivaldi & Bach, Gloria in D - Magnificat in D
KT Tunstall's Acoustic Extravaganza and back to the beginning again.

On an unrelated note, today I shut the blinds on the skylights in the Belfry. Seven years of higher education and it occurs to me only after weeks of slow-roasting that shutting the blinds just might help cool things down.

orson and welles

The pair of fat wood pigeons that plague our garden now have names. One's called Orson, and the other's called Welles. If I only see one of them, I tend to assume it's Orson because it's more fun to say the name. It breaks all laws of aerodynamics that birds that fat achieve lift.

It was a good weekend. Friday night I broke my writer's block and passed a big round number. The release was a deluge and I almost resented my schedule over the following two days as it kept me from continuing apace. My fears were allayed today as another round number was passed in a flurry of scribbling that will pick up again when this post is finished.

Saturday was my birthday party. The sun shone bright and friends chatted, tossed the frisbee around, ate, drank and were merry. It didn't really have to be my birthday party. It could just have been a nice bbq. But I'm glad it was, because someone gave me chocolate truffles and someone else gave me a bottle of Lagavulin.

Yesterday I spoke with a family friend for nearly four hours about jobs, my CV and the future. It went well.

Today - well, today was hot. The Belfry is a sauna. Hence writing at night.

proof of green dogs

I now have photographic proof. I'm not hallucinating. The people of Barnes live with a pack of large green dogs staring at them across the river.

See if you can spot those dogs I'm seeing.

No? How about if I circle the dogs in red? See - easy. They're totally there.

Still no luck? Well, I was afraid of that, so using sophisticated Photoshop skills, I've enhanced the images to highlight the canine aspects of the trees in question.

So there you have it - I'm not seeing things. They're there. And one of them's Hong Kong Phooey.

let them eat scooby snacks

Happy Bastille Day!

To celebrate the anniversary of the start of the French Revolution, I'm going to take a walk and try to take some pictures of the giant green dogs up the river. Not to prove it to everyone else, but for my own piece of mind. It may be that I'm imagining the similarities. That the willows are just willows, and not giant green dogs. That without sweat streaming into my eyes as I run, this will be apparent.

But I'm hoping they're still there.

And no, it really doesn't have anything to do with Bastille Day.

the gardenia tale

My father's devotion to my mother is a wonder to behold. Four times a year, he and I engage in overly-complex, clandestine gift-obtaining operations, desperate not to repeat ourselves. Valentine's, Mother's Day, Birthday & Christmas - the ritual is almost as important as the gift itself, whatever it may be. Sometimes he asks. Sometimes I ask. This is part of the subterfuge. Mom will tell us something simple, practical, or both. That will be my present, because it's usually the cheapest as well. Then we'll come up with something nicer or more extravagant and that will be from him, because he pays for it. Half the time it's my idea, half the time it's his. It works well. We're a good double act and all the secrecy lets us fulfill that yearning every guy has to be a secret agent.

This past Mother's Day, mom told dad she wanted a gardenia. Aside from the fact it was a plant, dad and I were pretty clueless. But we found a nice garden supply shop, ordered a couple and they went down a storm. Mom really liked them. She really liked the surreptitious surprise present as well, I'm sure. But the gardenias were lovely. Even I liked them. They smelled amazing. For 5 years I tasted & judged wines, mentioning 'heady floral notes' on the nose and now admit that until I'd smelled these gardenias, I knew naught of 'heady floral notes'. It was like Turkish Delight but without the sickly confection. Like smelling a real, ripe strawberry having only ever had McDonald's strawberry milkshakes beforehand.

I took special interest in these gardenias. They need quite a bit of attention and they don't like the cold. My only experiences with plants involved putting up Christmas trees and a couple of bonsai trees I was given when I was 11 or 12. Bonsais were the coolest plants ever in the late eighties. The shallowness of the decade allowed a tradition thousands of years old to be grasped as a fad by the ignorant. I was one of the ignorant. Too young to make a fashion statement with my dwarf trees, instead I used them as dramatic scenery when playing with my Star Wars and GI Joe toys. My mother refused to get one with a water feature, probably for the best. I didn't take good care of them and they died. They deserved better. So did the gardenias.

The hectic travel schedule at the beginning of the summer, combined with the drought and hosepipe ban, spelled their doom. One looked mummified, the vibrant green of the leaves replaced with terminal brown and grey, a single touch enough to bring the whole lot into an autumnal pile at the base of its pot. The other fared little better; some green remained but, like the lawn, it was mostly scorched, the healthy patches looking the aberration rather than the norm. They looked pathetic. Mom said one was beyond help and we considered chucking them both out.

I said no, I wanted to nurse them both back to health. So we pruned all the dead stuff off to salvage the healthy and let it grow. Pruning is a harsh art. Anything dead must go, even if the living still clings to it. What remains looks more dead than what you began with. The pathetic twigs breaking through the soil look like someone planted kindling. You've only got faith that whetever's left behind can grow back. It's optimism at its best, but most brutal.

Yesterday I found a half dozen tiny green bulbs emerging on those pathetic twigs.

Pruning my CV has been more difficult. Untended for over 3 years, dead leaves and dry twigs abound. High School education is no longer important when you're 30. Dead leaves & dry twigs, it must go, though fond, vibrant memories cling to it. University, the most defining years of my life, gets put to the bottom of the pot - it provided the growth but is no longer part of the foliage. It's fertiliser. First jobs, bartending and building, essential to nostalgia, their menial aspects badges of pride and proof of proper labour, are no longer relevant, memories of a decade ago - pruning shears at the ready. The agonies and tortures of terrible jobs must be snipped, leaving only the upsides and lessons learned to thrive unhindered. Things I felt defined me, as I was, lie at the bottom of the pot.

The twigs are all that's left.

But they're about to sprout.

feh

Didn't write anything today. I did tinker with my CV, to the extent that I stole a new layout for it and tried to work out why someone would hire me. I didn't get very far. Not because I couldn't think of a reason for someone to hire me. There are loads of great reasons to hire me. I just couldn't succinctly put them to paper. Which is, I suppose, a good reason not to hire me. And evidence that writer's block affects everything bar blog posts.

There's a big post coming. Not this one though. There will be flowers mentioned, but not pictured.

I didn't realise that lingering sniffles was my 300th post.

Listen to Robot Man by The Aliens.

I gave almost 50 pages to someone today. They had words on them and everything.

Sometimes you can't shout, scream, sob and rant in indignation, outrage, anger and sorrow. You want to. But you can't, because you can't understand what you'd be shouting about; it's not about you. And shouting, screaming, sobbing and ranting won't change that, and it won't make anything better. And all you want is for it to be better, or never have happened at all.

Anyway.

Flowers. Tomorrow. Big post. I'm going all horticultural.

And real writing. That you won't read til it's out in hardback at the beginning of next year. It'll be worth the wait though.

wall jellyfish

An upside-down DVD and a skylight, and all of the sudden I have a jellyfish on my wall.