In a pickle

It occurred to me just yesterday, having written recently about the "progress" we've made with the house this year, that if you were to look at it from one perspective we've only really got one room that can be classed as "finished."

The perpective I'm talking about is having a room decorated, furnished, and laid out in a way you'd be happy to live with... well... forever.

So the room that's done is: the kitchen. It was completed as near to the date of that post as makes no difference, is kitted out pretty much with all the gadgets we need, is in daily use as a kitchen, and doesn't contain any extraneous furniture or shite that really belongs somewhere else.

The same cannot be said for ANY other room at the moment:

• Rear reception room. Erstwhile dining room, currently undergoing refurbishment as a living room, but finishing that project has been delayed by a postponed flooring installation, a leak in the new radiator requiring replacement, and we haven't chosen any new furnishings or entertainment equipment for it yet.
• Front reception room. Currently the living room, but when the new living room is complete will be flipped into a dining room, therefore requiring carpet removal and another new oak floor installation
• Hall. Currently a storage space for one of the sideboards. And the radiator cover needs attaching to the wall
• Garden. Reconstruction project starts TODAY!!
• Front small bedroom. Never decorated since two months after we moved in, requires plaster reskim and decoration, plus possible fitted wardrobes and bed replacement.
• Front large bedroom. Currently without any recognisable form of bedroom furniture since the old lot was sold on eBay in August and since then we've had all our clothes in cardboard "removals" wardrobes and the contents of bedside cabinets in plastic crates, pending the new handmade bedroom furniture which won't arrive until next month.
• Rear bedroom/study. Decorated and furnished, but currently home to a huge assortment of packing crates storing things to be sold on eBay, and cardboard boxes in which to parcel them up and send them off when they ARE sold.
• Bathroom. Second room to be refurbished back in 2007, we were never really happy with the result and have recently decided to do it all over again (at least in part) to get it right.
• Attic room. Still only half decorated, now two years since it was completed.

We have often said we're glad we didn't tackle the whole house at once, like our near neighbours who have basically been living in a building site for at least as long as we've lived here. But we're not that much better ourselves when you think about it!

Put it on eBay

That's a phrase that has echoed around our house - both houses actually - for almost ten years. Whenever we inherit or find something, or for one reason or another it becomes surplus to requirements, but it's "just too good" to throw out. Like it still works, or it was originally quite expensive. We have some sort of investment in it still - emotional, financial, psychological - that prevents us from driving it to the tip.

I'm not pretending we never chuck stuff out. We do. But there's always more. And increasingly (it seems) the stuff is still OK. Still serviceable, usable, whatever. Just not by us.

So "the eBay pile" has been growing for many years. That old hi-fi stack I never use. It was all wired up in our previous house. Played occasionally. But that was in the B.I. years. The time Before iPod. When listening to music entailed physically inserting a CD or a cassette tape (a WHAT? Google it) into a device and pressing a real, solid, play button. Not clicking an icon that just *looks* like a play button. Anyhow when we moved, this lovely old stereo stack in its smoked-glass-and-mahogany cabinet came with us and lived under the stairs - well, the loft ladder - for three years. Then the loft ladder was replaced with stairs and the cabinet had to move into the study. Then into the dining room. Still never connected. Never played. Listen, I spent over £2,000 on in it 1984! I can't just throw it out!

The Christmas tree stand that we don't need since we started using an artificial tree that has its own feet. An old telephoto lens for a camera long since crushed under the boot heel of digital technology. The camera that it fits. The aluminium flight case I carried them both around in. The socket set I used to use to service my car, in the days when I did my own car servicing (OK, this item has been kicking around for a lot longer than ten years. It sat in the garage of my old house in Yorkshire quietly rusting away for most of the 12 years I lived in that house, and I hadn't used it much in the ten years before THAT).

You get the picture.

Three months ago something snapped. "Put in on eBay" became something more than just one of those things we say that doesn't really mean what the words imply. I actually listed some things on eBay. What? Yes, you read that right. I started small. A couple of things on the Saturday, and a couple more on Sunday. Just to ease myself into it. And you know what? It was easy. I said I started small, but one of the first things I listed was that stereo. I figured hey, if I'm going to dump my emotional baggage let's start with the biggest bag. It had 11 watchers within 12 hours. It sold easily, and for more than twice the starting price. The guy drove up from Northampton for it.

There's no stopping me now. Well, not quite. I still wait for those "zero listing fee" weekends. eBay gets enough money out of me when I sell the stuff. I'm not giving them anything up front. But gradually, all that tat that's been hanging around for years is disappearing. And the bank balance is rising!

I picked a good time to get into this, when you remember that we just inherited the contents of an entire second house. And 95% of the stuff in it is both stuff we don't want, AND stuff that is "too good to throw out." Only one answer to that. Put it on eBay.

Manchester calling...

*tap* *tap*
This thing on?
*cough*
Hello!
Welcome back. To me, that is. You've probably been here all along, wondering where I was. Turns out *I* was here all along too. Just not saying much. Shit happens, they say. And shit is pretty much what has been happening. I might even write about it one day, but not right now.

So, when last we spoke, Nikki & I were in Toronto. April 26. Good grief! Was that really the last entry? That's almost three months ago!! *slaps wrist* Well that pretty much puts the mockers on my usual "chronological" approach to blogging. As regular readers (if I have any left!) will know, I like to keep things in order. Even if I'm writing the entry two or three weeks behind the event, it'll still have the real date on it. The date it actually happened. That's not so bad if I'm only three weeks behind, but three months? No. I'd never catch up, and besides one of the reasons for blowing the dust off this cobwebby part of the Intertubes is a pointed request for pictures of our CURRENT project. If I wrote up everything (significant) that has happened in the interim then the kitchen would be finished before it even got started, if you see what I mean.

No the only way to do this is to package up the last three months into a little box and leave it over there in the corner. Over the next few months I might open up the box and take one or two choice pieces out for display purposes, but for the time being we need to get started with what's going on right now.

Although perhaps, before we get to that, I should tidy up the news from our Toronto trip. I wouldn't want to leave us hanging there, so to speak, having apparently only just been lunching in the distillery district and then magically transplanted three months into the future back in Manchester. Here, then, are the rudimentary details of the few draft entries I'd queued up covering the remainder of that trip, with their prospective titles drummed into service as headings:

Man-daRIN
(Family joke). Shirley & Neil took us for dinner at the Mandarin all-you-can-eat restaurant. Now, we have AYCE outlets in Manchester - the ones we visit most often being the No. 1 Chinese buffet, and the Nawaab Indian - but even though they are both firm favourites and very good value for money the quality is nothing like Mandarin. Wow. Absolutely fabulous Chinese food, lots of it, masses of choice, and everything tastes as fresh as if it had been cooked to order. This place became a firm favourite almost on the first mouthful. We'll definitely be back.

My fortune cookie for the evening: Accept no other definition of your life, accept only your own.

How apt.

Kensington
Shortly before our return, Paul took us for a wander around Kensington market. We lunched at Big Fat Burrito (delicious) and picked up some cool Christmas presents from the various shops and stalls.

That evening we had dinner at the Tulip steak house, which surprisingly (the place looks a little run-down and basic) proved by popular acclaim to be the best steak we had all holiday. And also, after a little persuasion, the best rack of lamb!! (*ahem*)

JB @ JB
After a last minute trudge around Walmarts to pick up those few essential items that just aren't available in the UK, we returned to Jawny Bakers for dinner. Hard to beat for atmosphere and quality (in my opinion - but I admit to being completely biased since this place holds very fond memories for me), it ran the Tulip a close second for steak quality but it's somewhere I couldn't imagine visiting Toronto without going.

Pack it in
Packing for the return trip became interesting, and a little Dickensian:

Suitcase #1: 25kgs

Suitcase #2: 20kgs

Allowance: 40kgs.
Result: misery.

Ah, but... at this stage, Carry on #1 weighed 2kgs and carry on #2: 2kgs, with a carry-on allowance of 10kgs. So after some judicious redistribution of contents...

Suitcase #1: 20kgs
Suitcase #2: 20kgs
Carry-on #1: 4.5kgs
Carry-on #2: 4.5kgs
Result: happiness.

I was also going to post something humorous about the pharma ads on Canadian/US TV. Honestly, if you haven't seen one check it out. Little beats them for unintentional black humour. I might still do a post on that at some stage. (Probably during our next trip, when I'll be exposed to them again :o))

And finally...

I just read this back and realised that I've waxed lyrical about all the wonderful meals we had OUT, but nary a mention of all the many wonderful meals we had IN. So many grateful thanks to Shirley for repeatedly proving that home cooking easily beats bought. Amongst numerous other successes, a roast turkey dinner to die for - or, at least, worth travelling 3,000 miles for!

Random last-minute jobs

Most of the time, procrastination is my middle name. Just occasionally though, those little niggly jobs that I usually put off forever have to be done RIGHT NOW. Today was a day for jobs like that.

1. The keyhole cover.
After decorating the hall, I replaced the brass keyhole cover on the front door. Trouble is, I didn't get it *quite* right. I reckon it was somewhere around 5° off the vertical. Not much, and not enough to make it impossible to lock/unlock the door (or I'd have had to fix it right then), but just enough to require a bit of key jiggling and make opening the door harder than it should be. Reason for procrastination? Initially, annoyance at myself for getting it wrong in the first place. Subsequently, not being arsed.

I took it off and spun it those 5°.

2. The shower light.
Our bathroom has 10 spots. Eight covering the main area of the room, on one switch. Two above the shower cubicle, operated off a separate switch. One of those two blew a few weeks ago. Reason for procrastination? In the 4 years since the bathroom was reconstructed, I've not had to replace one of these bulbs, so I don't know the type and I've been constantly forgetting to (a) bring the stepladder upstairs and (b) pull one of the bulbs on a shopping day so we can be sure of having spares.

I pulled a bulb from the eight and swapped it with the blown dude, checked our extensive collection of random spares, found a match and replaced it.

Umm... that's it. Fish will need a 50% water change on Wednesday which will last them until we get back, at which point I'll do another 50% change. But other than that we're all set.

The rest of the morning was taken up with lawn mowing and a spot of digging, leaving the afternoon free to watch Glorious 39 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Handkerchief. I'd not seen Glorious 39 before. Definitely one for the eBay pile - we won't be wanting to watch it a second time!

Let there be light

We continue to tick off the final few finishing flourishes in the (almost) never-ending saga of hall and staircase refurbishment. Today's instalment: a new light fitting in the hall.

I say new, but this particular fitting has been with us since our previous home, where it hung in the dining room. It was reasonably expensive, but more importantly I really liked it, so it came with us when we moved and in the four-and-a-half years since it has lived in various boxes, cupboards, and most recently spent almost a year under my desk in the study. All this procrastination had two main causes. We couldn't decide where we wanted it (and even if we tried, it was odds-on that particular room wasn't "done" yet, so it would have had to wait anyway); and since the ceilings in New Barns were considerably lower than these, it being a new build, the light fitting had been shortened. Made too short, in fact, for the Edwardian ceilings we now have.

In an unusual spurt of enthusiasm several years ago, I had ventured out to B&Q (Home Depot for my transatlantic readers) and secured a length of decorative chain and a roll of electric cable of the right hue with which to recable the thing, but at that point the procrastinatory shutters came down again. The chain and the cable have followed the light fitting around the house from box to cupboard to under-my-desk, unused, ever since.

Finally, with the hall newly skimmed and painted, we decided that was the best place for the light. I began taking it apart to find out how hard a job the recabling would be. The answer? Hard. It wasn't so much the disassembly/reassembly, or the convoluted path of the cable, but once I arrived at the business end of the fitting - a small space in the innermost cylinder in which the cables from all five lamps, and the incoming power cable, all came together with thermal sleeving and industrially-crimped clips - I realised I wasn't going to be able to get the darned thing apart electrically, let alone put it back together again.

A professional was called for.

And, in the way of professionals, he took a Gordian Knot approach to the problem. "Why don't I just splice on an extra length of cable, and hide the join inside the top cup?" Why indeed.

Book Review: Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

The book club choice for January. Usually a fairly relaxed read, because we don't have a book, or a meeting, in December. Unfortunately I ordered it, without paying much attention, from an Amazon marketplace dealer in New Jersey, so it took most of December to arrive.

After the first couple of chapters I began to think this would be one of those books that I'd abandon. Firmin -- you can read extensively about him online but briefly the runt of a litter of 13 rats who develops a taste for eating books and discovers that this leads to enlightenment through some weird process of absorption through digestion -- takes, I think it is fair to say, a while to get going.

Many of the online reviews revel in the slow pace of the start. The detailed description of life as a young rat living in a bookstore, the trials and tribulations of being the 13th rat born to a mother who, as nature dictates, only has 12 teats. His discovery of books and his long-distance, always doomed, relationship (or attempt at one) with the bookseller. I just found it hard going. By the time I'd read a third of the novel I was convinced I was going to give up, but I've abandoned so many book club books. I decided to press on and see what happened. So for me the story didn't really take off until the second half when Firmin meets, and eventually starts to lodge with, the writer Jerry. And unlike many of my book club contemporaries I found Firmin's sojourns to the cinema, and his surreal encounter with Ginger Rogers, added to the story. It ended up being, if not exactly a fulfilling read, then at least quirky, original, and reasonably entertaining.

While researching other readers' views on Firmin prior to writing this (more to see whether the idea another book club reader had -- that Firmin is, in fact, the alter ego of Jerry the writer -- was really as inventive and original as it sounded during the meeting), I came across an interview with the author, Sam Savage, from 2008. Savage wrote Firmin when he was 67, and this extract from the interview I found unexpectedly moving:

'He pauses, then says: "Of course, everyone asks me now why I waited so long to write. And I give different answers. I had always wanted to be a writer: I'd written a lot of poetry, which I didn't like then and don't like now. I used to publish it every now and then, but I found it very unsatisfactory.

"Anyway, when we moved up here, we had to clear everything out, all our books and papers and everything. And I found fragments of novels, whole chapters that I've written over the past 35 or 40 years, and I'd read them, and I'd think: this is not bad. I thought I'd abandoned these because they were terrible. But not only did I not remember writing them, I couldn't recognise the person who did write them.

"So I suppose that in one sense the person who wrote Firmin didn't come into existence till later, and I couldn't have written it at any other time. But also, Firmin's essential experience is of failure - failure to write, failure to complete - and I'd had that experience. You can't have that at 30, because you think it's going to happen: you have to reach a certain age before you realise that it isn't.

"I thought I'd give classes on writer's block," he continues, "because I know the solution: it is to give up. Not pretend to give up, but really give up. I'd stopped writing for several years, I had a sailboat and I was going to sail around the world, and I thought that that was what I'd do before I died. I'm not going to be a writer, I thought, I'm not going to write.

"Now there's something in Buddhism - called, I think, the great death - where people go to the master, and they struggle, and they memorise the texts and the sutras and so forth, and they meditate and they meditate, and they don't achieve it, and then they give up. Right? Ain't gonna come. And then you have all those Zen parables, where the old man goes off, and he's sweeping, and he knocks the pebble into the bamboo, and - there it is. Enlightenment.

"And you can't give up like that when you're young," he sums up.

"You can only give up like that when you realise your life is approaching its end. I did, and it just came. Like a miracle."'

(You can read the full review and interview here.)

For someone (clue: it's me) who's been struggling to find the impetus, the energy, the motivation to write another novel after having spent 7 years writing the first and not having any success with publishers in the three years since, Savage's words felt something like a blessing. The cynical side of me laughed a hollow laugh and thought "Christ! I can't even give up properly!" but the small boy who always wanted to be a writer? Well, his ears perked up (well, OK, I was reading rather than listening, but I don't like the image of eyes perking up. Even if they can) and he thought Yeah. This guy didn't make it until he was 67. I'm only 54. There's time.

The -painted- Alcove

Hard to believe it's two months to the day since I last posted about The Alcove. In that time there has been priming, there has been undercoating and there has been glossing. There has also been, as predicted back in November, a deal of colouring in with a tin of Redcurrant Glory, as well as the sourcing of some hard-wearing clear matt varnish ("Diamond Hard" as it's called on the tin) to protect the colour on the shelves from scuffs and scratches. There has also been the intervention of Christmas, which partially explains the extreme delay in what is essentially a simple job. Still, it's done, and I can finally reveal the result:

As predicted there's enough Redcurrant Glory left for the fireplace on my side, so we'll (sort of) match, eventually. Happily (I didn't check this before I fitted the lining) the top shelf is still large enough to accommodate our memory jar, while the larger bottom shelf will hold a stunning ornament of some sort, as soon as we can find one.

The best part, naturally, is that we can finally bin that awful Japanese parasol. Oh, and since I stuck to my plan to complete other priming/undercoating/glossing tasks at the same time, the linen cupboard is now painted out and in use too. You could be forgiven for thinking that things are coming together. Still a long way to go though.

The Alcove

The impending massive decorating job that is now hanging over me, following the completion of a significant construction project, is causing some serious displacement activity. Case in point: this weekend, which saw me finally lining out the display alcove in Nikki's half of the study. This is one of those "finishing off" jobs that tends to get left (in my world) ad infinitum. Well, not quite infinitum, but approaching three years, which is long enough to feel infinitumish.

That alcove - in what was a fireplace - has been hiding behind a bird bedecked parasol and falling firmly in the "out of sight; out of mind" category since the study was replastered. Such is the quantity of painting now facing me (easily several hectares) that it seemed sensible to put myself in the position of being able to finish all the outstanding painting at the same time. I mean, if there's priming and undercoating to be done, why leave out the priming and undercoating that'll be required on any of the other parts of the house? It feels slightly uncomfortable, exposing quite so much of the way my mind works, but there it is.

Armed with a few sheets of 9mm MDF, some ogee architrave and a couple of lengths of 1x1 battening, I set to yesterday morning and by lunchtime today the alcove looked like this.

Ready to receive a coat of primer as soon as I've punched and filled all the nail heads and gaps in The Room Above, and can do all the priming in one go.

The woodwork will eventually be traditional satin white, but the shelves and lining - at Nikki's suggestion - will be tricked out in the accent colour that matches the walls. This used to be called Raspberry Something, but in the intervening three years the Dulux marketing department has renamed it and it's now Redcurrant Glory. I'll be painting round the wood-burning stove on my side to match too. Glorious.

What happened at the car doctors

I took the car to the garage this morning. You may remember reading exactly the same opening sentence to yesterday's blog. There's a reason for that. I had exactly the same opening sentence to my day. This is because unfortunately, despite my mechanic being both very good and very reasonably priced, he has a limited grasp of scheduling.

The way it works in his garage is that he says "yes" to any work that appears on the horizon and then proceeds to handle them sequentially. If it transpires that he's taken on more work than can be done in a day, the ones left over simply get shunted to the next day. Which is fine (I suppose) if you can leave your motor with him overnight. I can't. So when I call up towards the end of the day I get "sorry, I've not even looked at it yet."

Which has now happened on four out of the five occasions I've taken the car to him. In any other circumstance this would be grounds for me to take my business elsewhere (with a level of huffiness dictated by my grumpiness at the time), but he IS cheap. And the garage IS within walking distance.

Anyway it turns out all this enginemanagementpoorperformancelumpyrunning business is my own fault. I haven't been checking my oil regularly enough. He actually said that. "I get the impression you don't check your oil very often." Yeah, that would be right. Well, to be entirely honest, "at all" would be closer to the mark. I usually leave it until the oil warning light flickers when I'm taking a hard corner, and then think "ah. Must get some oil next time I fill up."

This, apparently, is not the best approach to take. Especially on modern engines with hydraulic tappets. Because, well, being hydraulic, they need - you know - oil. If the oil level drops all their little reservoirs go dry in a kind of homage to the state of the country's water supply a few weeks ago, the valves don't open properly, and the engine management unit registers a misfire and turns on its little light to tell me all about it. Occasionally the whole situation gets so bad the misfires become audible, and affect more than one valve, which explains last Friday's (and Sunday's) journeys.

He cleaned it all up, reset the EMU codes, and topped up the oil. For my part, I'll be doing weekly oil checks from now on. Me ol' Dad would be proud of me. Exasperated, but proud.

The smell of green

I took the car to the garage this morning. Its 'Engine Management' light had been glowering at me for some days. In recent months this hasn't been cause for concern as, before I could (be arsed to) organise a visit to the garage, it would go out again. And then come on again, a few weeks later.

This time it came on and stayed on.

Worse than that, on long journeys (such as last Friday, and again on Sunday) the car would give a worrying lurch, the light would start flashing, and the performance of the car dip alarmingly, as if it's only firing on two cylinders. Which, given it's the Engine Management light, is entirely possible. So I booked it in yesterday, and dropped it off this morning.

The garage I've used since the demise of the garage I used to use before I started using the one I use now, is only a short walk away, which is the main reason I chose it. That, and the fact that it comes highly recommended on the local community forum. It's wedged between two semi-detached houses on a bend in a normal suburban street, so "dropping the car off" entails hunting down a parking space before walking back to the garage to leave the keys.

I started to explain where I'd left it. "I'll find it," he breezed. How are you going to do that when you haven't even asked me for the registration, I wondered? I offered him the registration. "You wouldn't believe how many people don't know their own registration," he mused. Well actually mate, given my penchant for examining the human condition, I would.

Walking back from the garage through the leafy streets of Whalley Range on what was a sunny morning following a rainy night, the smells of fresh grass, early hints of autumn, and rain-dampened pavements evoked many memories. Something smells are known for, but for some reason this morning the memories were more powerful than usual. Maybe it's because I don't walk anywhere very much any more, whereas as a boy I walked the 2-3 miles home from school every day. I should do it more often really. But not, I hope, on account of having more car trouble!

Farewell to the Bottler

True "statesmanlike" behaviour is seen when the right thing is done without pause, and because it's the right thing to do, not when it's delayed until it is the only option left and comes after a period of unseemly scrabbling to hang on to the reins of power at any cost.

Whenever Gordon Brown said he would do something for the good of the country, you knew that he really meant "for the good of Gordon Brown." Well, now he's gone and good riddance. His party had fired the starting pistol on their race to elect a new leader days before he'd even resigned. A more apt metaphor may be the opening of sluice gates to let flow the pent-up vitriol, repressed indignation and hidden ambition that has been building up ever since his unopposed  "coronation" as leader. Unopposed, yes. But also unelected. And that's how he will now remain.

Let there be light...

I mentioned recently that we've been living in the shadows for a while. On the landing, at least.

A couple of years ago I installed a security light switch. A clever little beast with a built-in timer and a photocell which provided a wealth of options on when it would turn on, and off, and how many times, and on what days. Versatile enough to make even the most observant tea-leaf believe there really was someone in the house on those all-too-rare occasions when we go away.

Shame then that those clever electronics weren't also resilient electronics. Call me picky, but I'd have thought a light switch should be able to withstand something as simple as a blown light bulb. I'm not talking massive electrical storm, direct lightning strike, or rat-inspired short-circuit. Sooner or later, your light bulb is going to turn up its toes. A light switch whose electronics are fritzed by such a common occurrence shouldn't, to my mind, be allowed on the market. But there you have it. First dead light bulb... one dead light switch.

In my normal procrastinatory fashion it's taken me several months to shift my ass into gear but today I finally coughed up the £1.48 for a replacement switch - and fitted it! Not another electronic one, mind. No, that would have set me back at least ten times as much, and probably gone pop again the next time the bulb blew, so it's back to the relative simplicity of a standard two-way for us. Let's hope there are no burglars watching.

Copenhagen

I've had a draft post with this title sitting in my bloglist since the Copenhagen climate summit opened. I intended to write about forlorn hopes, high ambition, good intentions and inevitable failure but to be honest, in the end, the whole thing was just too depressing and predictable.

More than a week on, and what I assumed at the start would be the inevitable end looks as though it is indeed coming to pass.

Twenty years of talking, of governments agreeing, or not agreeing, to emission limitations and then missing their targets by miles, while all the time the palm-oil industry destroys the rainforests at ever-increasing rates and every single government ignores their activities. It's hard to avoid the clichés when writing about this stuff. Vested interests driven by fat cats more interested in protecting their billion-dollar stashes and their "right" to drive across the street in a four-ton, gas-guzzling "sports" vehicle than in any notion of protecting the planet. Desperate presidents and leaders of island nations only a few inches above sea-level and hence in urgent need of, well, greater elevation at least, sharing their desperation with the world in the hope of some compassion and receiving? Not a lot.

And what would a "successful" outcome to Copenhagen look like? It's all talk anyway, so at best they'll all walk out, patting each other on their expensively-suited backs and congratulating themselves on agreeing to some vague target years in the future which no-one actually believes they'll hit and even if they did wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to anything.

Those who never wanted to restrict their emissions in the first place have dived on the emergence of what looks like evidence that some of the numbers have been... manipulated... with such shameless alacrity that you wonder they're not entering the 2012 Olympics as a new form of gymnast.

I don't claim to know whether the planet is actually in danger from CO2 or not. Quite honestly I don't trust any of them. These are all human beings with their own axes to grind and it's every bit as likely that the scientists' main interest is in protecting their research budgets so they can carry on producing their nice little graphs, or promoting expensive new technologies to "fix" the problem. On the other side of the scales sit the oil billionaires along with the other main players in the old carbon economies and we all know where their interests lie. There's an exact parallel between them and the cigarette companies, who for years denied any link between smoking and lung cancer, while all the time piling high and selling cheap death wrapped in small tubes with a filter on the end.

The world is even more addicted to oil than it is to tobacco and anyone who thinks that is likely to change any time soon is as deluded as the poor guy from the island nation who thinks any of his presidential peers is really interested in giving him a leg-up away from the encroaching ocean.

So no, I never believed Copenhagen had a hope in hell of fixing the planet. While individually human beings can exhibit intelligence and compassion in sufficient measure to solve the problem, collectively we are like lemmings heading for the cliff. See you on the other side.

Ideas 'R' Us

I had an idea for another novel last night. It came to me in one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had and for once, I remembered it for almost an hour after waking - long enough to write it down in sufficient detail for me to build the story on it.

Trouble is... I really don't need any more ideas. From a position a few years ago of saying to myself "I know I could write a really good novel, if only I had an original story concept" to now, when I've been writing down every good idea I've had since that first thought, I've got more ideas that I know what to do with. Certainly more than I could ever write in however much life is left to me. People in the know - specifically this guy - told me (well, not ME personally, you know - he wrote it on his blog. His very-well-read blog) this would happen and guess what? He was right.

Damn' good idea though. Really dark and menacing. And as always, FAR more attractive than the story I'm trying to write at the moment. Which makes it just one more distraction I don't need!

An absence of being moist

Ever been irritated and satisfied at the same time? I finished those small (re)decorating tasks today, finally. So the irritating part is that small jobs like this (I reckon all three areas we're talking about here add up to no more than 25 square feet) need just as many individual visits - stain stop; replastering; two coats of paint; and, in the case of the study ceiling/walls, additional days because the ceiling and walls can't be done on the same day owing to one or other edge being wet - as a much larger project. Which means just as many brush- and roller-cleaning events too.

The satisfying part should be obvious. We now have a kitchen ceiling that doesn't stare balefully down at you with its one plaster eye (albeit the painted part is slightly whiter than the non-painted part, but that's only temporary), the landing doesn't look so much like a building site, and the study doesn't have that mouldy, mottled, bubbling aspect of something out of Skellig's shed. Result! It's only taken a week.

Or two years, if you count the elapsed time.

Novel news

Calm down, it's not that kind of news. Trust me, if I'd found an agent or publisher the title would have been positively hyperventilatory. I can use words like that. I'm an author.

I remembered that yesterday; hence the title.

No, I hadn't really forgotten it, but the lack of any positive response to my early submissions had, if I'm honest, taken the wind out of my sails. I knew the beginning of The Novel needed reworking, and I had no enthusiasm for the task. So there it sat. Gathering dust on my hard drive. Going nowhere.

As is so often the way of things I had no conscious grasp of how much time had gone by since those first submissions. September LAST YEAR! God. And my last reply? November 12. That's not bad actually. Only about eight weeks after the query. All told I had 15 responses from 20 submissions. All negative, naturally. The five no-shows were all from agencies whose guidelines say "we'll only contact you if we're interested." I hate that. How do you know if they're still looking at it, or they haven't even started looking at it, or they've binned it, or they're passing it round inside their firm to find the right agent? Even a form rejection is better than listening to static.

Anyway, that was then and this is now. Over the past week or so I've been building up a head of steam to get that rework done and honestly? There wasn't that much to do. The first few pages were grossly over-written. A result of me knowing that they are the Really Important Pages and had to be Just Right, so of all the 100,000 words in the book those few hundred had been written and rewritten so many times there was no energy left in them whatever. They needed a fresh start.

I cut out the waffle. Always a good idea. Tell the story, the whole story and nothing but the story. Don't try to impress with flowery language and long words (like hyperventilatory, for example). Cut to the chase.

That was the second problem. The first three chapters waffled on endlessly about the personal life of the main character, but never got around to introducing the conflict. After reworking, the conflict parachutes into the story in the second scene. So with a few hundred words of self-indulgent waffle stripped out, and four key scenes of conflict distributed liberally around the first three chapters (agents often request chapters 1-3 in their submission guidelines) I was much happier with the start and felt ready to restart submitting.

So I did.

I've been converted

Or perhaps, I should say, I'm being converted.

Several years ago when my PC was young, I decided to rip my music collection to it. After all, I reasoned, I spent many of my waking hours in front of the PC, we have no means of playing music in the living room, and the "media centre" idea was beginning to be established as the way to go. Intoxicated by the vastness of the space available to me (I had an almost-empty 250GB disk - luxury!) I chose to rip my collection to the superior, but slightly more space hungry, Windows Media Audio (wma) format, rather than the, perhaps more traditional, MP3.

The more tech-savvy of you will have predicted what comes next, and long-standing readers of this blog will already know.

I bought an iPod.

iPods don't play WMA format music files.

The frustrations of grappling with iTunes, expressed in that blog post linked above, have stayed with me for so long that I've only ever synced it once. That first time. You might even say I'd been traumatised. It did change my behaviour though. As soon as I discovered the WMA restriction I changed my rip options, and have been ripping in MP3 ever since. But still, more than half of my original music collection remained inaccessible, and none of my newer albums, despite having been ripped in the right format, have been synced.

This has long been a source of disappointment to regular travellers, as they discover nothing new on the iPod, but recently came to a head with my purchase of the Best of Nightwish, which both Natalie and Blythe wanted to listen to almost continuously. We even had to resort to the CD player!

Finally reaching the end of Procrastination Road, I sought out a file converter and pointed it at my music collection early this morning. It initially found almost 6,000 files, but after running it for an hour or so I realised it was wasting time analysing the MP3 files to detect that they didn't need converting, so I stopped it and removed everything from the list except WMAs, thereby reducing the number to 2,670 files. A few minutes progress monitoring suggested the conversion process would take almost 48 hours to complete, and when I checked a few minutes ago, this was still true.

You'd have thought with all my experience I'd know better than to use proprietary formats for *anything*. Maybe this will be the final lesson on that subject.

Second Novel Syndrome

Today's Writers' Guild blog has an interesting piece about writing your second novel. It quotes Luke Leitch, writing in The Times:

First novels, goes the orthodoxy, are the fruits of years of thought shaped into words at the writer's leisure.

Stephen Fry explained this when presenting the Encore Award - a £10,000 biannual literary prize for second novels.

He said: "The problem with a second novel is that it takes almost no time to write compared with a first novel. If I write my first novel in a month at the age of 23, and my second novel takes me two years, which have I written more quickly? The second of course. The first took 23 years, and contains all the experience, pain, stored-up artistry, anger, love, hope, comic invention and despair of that lifetime. The second is an act of professional writing. That is why it is so much more difficult."

Tell me about it. :-\

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)

I *really* need Series Link

Switched into "archive" mode on the PVR last night to delete the thing that had just recorded (that we'd watched live) and by some quirk I spotted that the episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that had just started recording was *finishing* rather than starting.

Huh?

Checking the schedules revealed that Virgin1 had moved it back an hour to the 9-10pm slot.

Oh-oh. How long has this been going on?

I checked earlier weeks' recordings and gave up after the second one back. If I've missed three weeks I might as well delete the lot. Bummer.

There's an add-on for my PVR that provides an equivalent of Sky+'s "series link" and which I'd "been meaning to install" for some months. There's that old procrastination, biting me on the bum again.