Closing date

It's the closing date for ABBA entries today, the post has been and gone, and I still haven't received the postcard I sent with my entry to acknowledge receipt. So now I'll be worrying that it went astray and won't even be looked at.

It's possible, of course, that they're holding all the entries until after the closing date before opening any of them. But this kind of defeats the whole point of allowing an acknowledgement slip to be included with the submission. If it never has a chance to get back to the submitter before the closing date, how are we supposed to know whether or not we should resubmit?

Oh well. It's too late to do anything about it now. I'll just have to trust in the postal gods and await my fate.

Book Review: Never Let Me Go

February's book was Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. When we held the club meeting, the first question anyone asked was "did we think this was a science-fiction novel?"

Umm... no. SF is defined by its exacting depiction of the science, along with the fiction. Ishiguro comprehensively (and irritatingly) fails to address any of the science surrounding his central premise. We never find out exactly what is being "donated" and when, or anything about the cloning process. Indeed he's on record as stating that the novel isn't about clones, it's about human relationships, and how people treat other people. His use of flashback, combined with the personal narrative style, allows Ishiguro to jump from half-revealed truth to half-completed story and back again constantly, which I found distracting in the extreme, and also quite false. This is a novel, after all, not a transcription of one person's random thoughts.

Throughout the novel issues and revelations are hinted at but never really explored. Neither society's apparent treatment of the "students," nor the students' own unrealistic behaviour in the face of the knowledge of what the future holds for them really rings true. What's left is the feeling that the author was interested only in writing a "literary novel" for its own sake, rather than exploring his, admittedly interesting and original, story concept in any way that would provide any satisfaction or resolution. In common with his other work (apparently), his words paint a cold, bleak landscape entirely populated by cold, emotionally repressed characters.

Enjoy the book for its expressive and descriptive language, but don't expect to care for any of the characters - they can't even bring themselves to care about each other - or to gain any insights into any of the many questions it asks.

Finally I must also give more iPublicity to this "satirical" review on the Guardian site which was pointed out to me by another club member. It's not only hilariously accurate if you've read the book but also gives an uncanny flavour of the whole thing if you haven't.

I've made $10!!

It's pretty quiet in my corner of the world. I have a few regular readers (that I'm very grateful for - thanks guys!) and a few others happen by from various parts of the world, but I'm not one of those blogs that is read avidly by millions. In fact I'm so not into that whole thing that I couldn't even quote you the name of one of "those" blogs. So it was very much with tongue in cheek that I installed Google AdSense almost two years ago, more out of curiosity than anything.

Imagine my surprise then when I received an automated email from them today saying that now my account had reached the dizzying heights of $10, I needed to verify a few details in case they ever need to actually pay me. I thought it was a phishing scam at first, especially when I logged into my AdSense account and saw the balance was, as always, $0. That was until I realised it was showing the earnings for the day. As soon as I clicked on "all time earnings" the balance shot wayyyyyyy up. To $10.27.

So yes, I've verified my phone number, and nominated a bank account, and I'm in the process of verifying my address. Nice to know, with all this verifying going on, that my ten bucks will be secure from fraudsters.

Unfortunately, since Google don't pay out until the balance reaches $100, I won't actually be seeing anything for a while. I signed up in April 2007. Call it two years ago. So on current form it'll be around 2027 when I collect my earnings. I can put it towards my retirement party! Still, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so thanks to all my visitors for all your clicking!

What a drip

Our friendly neighbourhood plumber came round first thing this morning. Good timing, as it turned out. The drip, which had started off really slowly, had worsened to the point where it was filling the bowl twice a day - right to the brim.

It took his more experienced eye less than a minute to discover the leak was not, in fact, at the joint in the pipe. This was merely the lowest point of dribble. The source was higher up. Much higher up. At the neck of the tap. If we'd looked more closely we would have seen it for ourselves quite easily. The water was clearly visible, running over the chrome.

Doh.

Silver lining? Ten seconds tightening with a professional-looking wrench and no charge. If only all drips were so easily sorted.

A fern decision

We inherited five large ferns when we moved here. One in the border between us and next door, one in the bed at the end of the deck, and three beside the ugly, useless, cement-asbestos garage that lives at the bottom of the garden.

Very healthy ferns they are too. They clearly love their respective locations and burst forth each spring with lush greenness. Unfortunately they also die back every winter with dirty brownness, and in the intervening months they constantly seek to trip up the unwary gardener, hinder the mowing of grass, and deposit spiky ferny balls onto the clothes of anyone who walks by.

And ultimately, they're just... well... green. They don't do anything. Flower, or bud, or turn a nice colour. So we decided we wanted rid. It was a daunting prospect. When I said "large" I really meant "f*cking enormous" - some of them are almost big enough to fill the green garden recycling wheelie bin on their own. So it's been a slow process digging them up. I started a couple of weeks ago on the one nearest the house, and that was a pig to get out. The one under the tree wasn't so bad. Drier under there, see? Thereby hitting it with a fernish double-whammy of not being able to grow as large, and not having clumpy wet soil to hang onto. The friable, powdery soil released its burden much more readily.

Since those early successes we've been waiting for a combination of dry and frost-free weather, which finally arrived this weekend. My task - to remove the final three by the garage and thereby finish the job - took both days. At a relaxed pace, admittedly, but that's the only pace I've got these days. With the experience of the other two ferns under my belt, I had a radically improved technique. Nibbling bits off the edge with the garden fork until the buggers capitulated. The first one went into the bin; the other two were piled beside the woodshed awaiting the next garden recycling day.

So this is how the garden looks now. A bloody mess, I think you'll agree, but at least the grass will be free to grow up to the garage now (until we knock it down) and cover the brown/black scars left by the ferns. Think of it like removing a wart. And this season my grass-cutting will be trip- and spiky-ball-free. Yippee.

More bathroom woes

We've had a damp patch in the kitchen for quite a few weeks, directly above the boiler. Nikki noticed it first, where the plaster was bubbling above the kitchen window, but after a few days a larger damp patch appeared in the corner and slowly grew.

We entertained a few theories regarding its origin. On the outside wall in the same position is the hopper that takes waste feeds from the shower, basin and bath, so our first guess was that this had become blocked and was overflowing onto the wall. At the first opportunity (i.e. when the rain had stopped) I deployed my trusty ladder and went up to take a look.

It was as clean as a whistle, but while I was up there I noticed the pointing was in pretty bad shape. As we'd had some heavy rain, maybe it was a case of penetrating damp? That was my theory, although Nikki continued to believe the hopper was at fault. If it wasn't blocked, maybe it just couldn't cope with the volume of water? Tests were inconclusive, but we decided to call a builder in. We needed a quote for bricking up the kitchen door anyway.

Said builder duly attended and, while he agreed the pointing needed attention, he spotted a more likely candidate. An old vent hole that had not been sealed properly. What's more it matched the location and shape of the worst area of damp. Problem sorted, we thought.

That was until my traditional 2am loo break last night. With the house in silence an eerie tick... tick... tick... could be heard from the general direction of the bath. Now this isn't unusual in our bathroom, as the sash windows drip loudly onto the sills when it's raining. But this particular night, it wasn't raining. First thing this morning saw me with my belly pressed against the cold tiles, peering under the bath. One glance was enough. The puddle stretched for a couple of square feet and a slow but regular drip emanated from the cold tap supply pipe. I fetched a bowl.

The bath stands on feet on a tiled floor. It moves. I assume the occasional movement (when we nudge into it, or dry feet on it after a shower) has sprung a joint in the pipework. As if we haven't had enough trouble with this £$%&* bathroom!

Bye bye, baby

It's gone. I posted it yesterday. So now I enter that state of mental suspension I'm sure everyone's familiar with. Where you're in a situation that you have no control over but whose outcome is really (really) important to you, so you pretend to get on with life but really you've battened down the hatches and it's like you're holding your mental breath. You're in limbo until you know. One way or the other. And you hope it's one and not the other, but if it's the other you'll shrug and say "well, it was always a long shot," while inside, you bleed.

The unkindest cut

I don't know. I never got to it. After a week of reading, rereading, cutting and recutting, I've reduced my page count from 57 to 45 and the word count by almost four thousand. The elusive magic number of 44 pages is only a paragraph away, but I'm calling it a day.

The story is tighter, faster paced, there's no unnecessary dialogue and I'm barely a thousand words over the guideline. I don't think it's worth working it over any more. I'll be printing it tomorrow and sending it off the day after. For better or worse.

Which frees me up for my next project. What that's going to be, I have no idea. We intended to spend some time in the garden this weekend, but neither of us is enthused. I thought I might make a start painting the dining room door, but I can't get excited about that either. I think a lazy day is on the cards. After a spiffing pancake breakfast and another cup of tea, I reckon it'll be movie time :o)

Cut, cut and cut some more

After four passes through the play, the page count has reduced from 57 to 49 and the dialogue word count from well over 12,000 to a little over 9,000. The target according to the entry criteria is 7,000 but they *did* say at the workshop not to be too bothered about that.

I was aiming for the magic 44 pages (one page per minute) but it's getting tough now. Really tough. The fat is all gone. Extraneous scenes, flabby dialogue, all that went in the first pass. The second pass took care of anything I'd missed the first time round, and gave a hint at the hard decisions to come. Because the third pass really started cutting into the meat of the story and now it feels like I'm almost down to the bones. But still five pages and/or two thousand words too long. Or thereabouts.

I'll stick with it for another couple of passes through from start to finish, but I've got an increasingly loud little voice that's telling me not to go too far with this process. Going back to what they told us in the workshop, they expect a script to have to undergo quite a bit of "development" even after it wins, so maybe at this stage it's more important to worry about telling a good story - one that attracts the judges - rather than being overly concerned with whether it will fit in the time slot. That, after all, can be worked on later. First and foremost I have to convince the producer it's a tale worth telling.

The tidiest my desk ever gets...

...is when I've just tidied it. All those piles of filing? Filed. All those things waiting to be listed on eBay, or Amazon market place? Back upstairs (still waiting, but out of sight). Shredding? Shredded.

Don't run off with the impression that everything is done. I still have a long "to do" list. But it is a list. Not eleventy-hundred separate piles all covered in a thin layer of dust. The artefacts against which the items on that list will be actioned now have a special shelf all to themselves. Yes, it's a bulging shelf, but it's all in one place.

There's been a switch around in the study too. Shelves moved, desk turned 90° to give me a view of the garden. Wall looks a little bare with no pictures, but we'll remedy that over the next few months. A traditional tennis girl scratching her bum, perhaps? See, I'm a traditionalist at heart.

The Reading

We held "the reading" of my radio play last night round at the home of some friends. Some Act-or friends. And we took another Ac-tor friend with us. And three copies of the script. And me with my laptop open at the relevant page, doing the sound effects and stage directions as and when.

It cantered along pretty nicely. The reading had the desired effect of pointing up areas of dialogue that didn't really work, or were out of character. Much more of the latter than the former, to be honest. That's because when I'm writing I run the conversation in my head while my fingers play the part of scribe. So the content is usually OK in terms of realism, because it is a real conversation going on in my head. The only slight problem is, all the characters end up sounding like me. Because it is me, holding the conversation with myself.

So then I go over the dialogue again, many times, changing the words around until they sound more like the people they're supposed to be. Only when we read it out the bits I'd missed, or where I'd not done this well enough, stuck out like a forest of sore thumbs. 17-year-old street kids don't use words like "palatial" for instance. Some more work to do there, then.

But overall not as much as I'd thought, and the reaction of the audience was uniformly positive - Jamie even enthusing "it's GREAT!" - which gave me a bit of a buzz.

Unfortunately, there is one huge problem. It's way too long. Even allowing for the fact that it was a cold read, so the actors weren't as familiar with the text as they would be if they'd had several rehearsals, the sound effects were "serial" rather than "embedded" behind the dialogue, and there were many over-long pauses, even with all that it still doesn't alter the fact that this is a script aiming for a 44-minute slot, and the first reading went to an hour and twenty minutes. Almost twice as long as it should be. I'm going to have to cut it by around a third, I reckon, to make it anywhere near the right length when it's performed for real.

In some areas what I need to do is obvious. There are entire scenes that can be cut without losing the thread of the narrative (some, indeed, that I added in earlier when I thought it was running short!). There are also several instances of verbose exposition (my internal conversations do tend to be a bit wordy most of the time) when far fewer words would be better. So I'll do all that and see what I'm left with. It's 57 pages at the moment, and after last night's experience I think it should be no more than 40. Which, ironically, brings us almost back to the old rule of thumb that a page of script runs for about a minute.

Interestingly, one observation that came up last night was that since it ran for 80 minutes with almost no pauses, it probably wouldn't take much to turn it from a radio drama to a 90-minute TV drama. Even if I get nowhere through the ABBA route, there might still be life in the old dog. For now though, it's back to the rewriting. Three weeks to go!

Book Review: If This Is A Man

A little late with this, the book club choice for January: Primo Levi's "If This Is A Man." Strictly speaking, two books in one, as it includes "The Truce" in the second half, but I didn't read that. To be honest, I'd had enough after the first couple of chapters and couldn't face another entire book of the same, no matter how short.

From what others said, I may have peaked too soon. The second book is supposed to have a jollier aspect than the first, but as far as I'm concerned it's no great loss. Let's face it, the second could hardly be more dour and depressing than the first, which is a recounting of Levi's time in Auschwitz in painful detail. Literally painful - he enumerates his sores, and beatings, and hunger, and cold.

I think this is probably a book that everyone in the "civilised" world should read, but that doesn't mean I think they'd enjoy reading it. I didn't. I wanted it to be over. And I felt guilty wanting that. Countless reviews bang on about Levi's beautifully crafted prose, and yes, it's true, the book is astonishingly well written. But to me that didn't help. The subject matter is still what it is, and the more illuminating it is, the more depressing.

Among all the horrors that Levi describes, what stood out for me is that no matter how much privilege, rank, and power are stripped away from men, even when they are stood naked in the mud and rain with nothing to their name but a few dirty rags of clothing and a spoon with which to eat their daily ration of foul soup, when even that very name is removed and they are referred to only as a number, even then men will find a way of imposing hierarchy to differentiate themselves from their fellows. To subjugate some, thereby improving one's chances of survival. To defer to others, for the same reason. Even when survival means nothing more than the chance to stand naked and freezing in the snow for another day, men - humans, I should perhaps say rather - will still do whatever it takes. Because the alternative is, for them, too frightening to contemplate.

That's what stood out, from his writing. But there was another aspect to reading this book. The way it makes you think about yourself. How would I react, I wondered? Would I be one of the ones prepared to do anything, say anything, eat anything, to survive? Or would I give up, and play the part of one of those Levi so eloquently describes, who wander around for weeks, sometimes months, with dead eyes, waiting for their body to catch up with what has already happened to their spirit?

No snow!

And there it was: gone! After listening to the 10 o'clock forecast warning that another two or three inches were expected (that'll be a disappointment for someone) and that some areas could have up to a foot (way too much of a good thing - someone else would be choking on it), what did we have?

A huge melt. There's nothing left.

Which, if repeated across the whole of the UK in these credit-crunchy times would be A Good Thing. At least, if yesterday's news is anything to go by. 6 million people failing to get to work, £1.2 billion lost to the crumbling economy, roads closed or impassable, trains, planes and buses cancelled, people full of the great British spirit battling their way to their local train station only to find that's as far as they're going to get. We wouldn't have won the war if we'd had this namby-pamby attitude back then, I tell you! Cough! Splutter!

Sorry. Got a bit carried away there. Still, it is faintly ridiculous isn't it? It's not like snow in February is exactly unexpected. It was even forecast. I heard Ken Livingstone on the news (mind you, he'll say anything to beat the drum won't he? Still smarting from having to hand over to Boris I expect) blaming the worst of the travel problems on councils who didn't want to send the gritters out on Sunday and pay overtime. What a load of bollocks. I was out and about on Sunday night and followed several gritters all over the North-west.

I tried to work out, in my usual geeky way, what proportion of the UK workforce 6 million came to. There's about 65 million of us altogether. If you assume a linear distribution of ages from 0 to 80 (I know that's not right, but for the sake of argument...) that makes 34 million of working age (over 18 and under 60), of which there's about 2 million unemployed (32) and an unknown number who don't work, or try to, at all. But even if you leave the figure at 32 million that's one-fifth of the entire workforce couldn't get to work! Crikey.

Rather madly I'd decided to stick to my usual routine and go in to the office yesterday. I could have worked at home, but as it turned out (and not surprisingly) a much larger than normal number of my colleagues had elected to do that, and overloaded the corporate VPN shortly before 9am, so I wouldn't have been able to get much done anyway. I really needed some light relief while negotiating the roads into the office, and it was duly provided by Radio 4, where they read out an email from a listener pointing out that we were now suffering the 21st-century equivalent of traffic chaos as well as the more traditional sort.

Yes, not only were the roads blocked and the public transport cancelled all over the place, but the traffic and travel WEBSITES were all crashing too, under the load of people trying to find out whether they should set out or not. What irony! What symmetry! The British do farce SO well.

Snow!

Like, I suspect, much of the country we woke this morning to a snowy scene. This is the 6am version. It has become quite unusual for Manchester in recent years and probably won't stick around for long. It'll be chaos on the roads while it lasts though. The slightest hint of snow on roads and pavements means all the nervous and semi-competent drivers will slow right down making things extremely frustrating and delay-prone for the rest of us. Never mind that the gritters were out in force last night and most major roads will be frost-free; it'll be 10mph all the way this morning. Bet on it.

The snow also gave rise to another feeling for us this morning: satisfaction. Because we did, in the end, pull out our collective fingers and spend a little time in the garden, taking advantage of the two crisp, clear, sunny days that we've just had. The fern count reduced by two. No point in rushing things, these are big buggers we're talking about, and any extended period of digging wakes my back up to the fact that it doesn't do spade work and what am I doing forcing it to take part in such activities and if I don't stop soon it'll go TWANG and that'll show me. So I took it steady. One fern on Saturday, and one on Sunday. Plus a bit of a haircut for the remaining three, so that I can see what I'm doing when I take my fork and my spade to the next one.

Only at the moment, I can't see what I'm doing because they're under two inches of snow. Which my back is very pleased about.