I will not be beaten, you know.

One of the most interesting things about the acoustician Rschevkin is that he was very fond of his pet Chihuahua.


Good enough, chaps?


:-p

Briefly breaking cover

Yes, I know I mothballed this blog two years ago.  However, I have News.

My first novel, Looking for Buttons - a comedy for the romantically hopeless, is out now as an e-book on Amazon.

I blog about it here.

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This blog is closed due to paucity of material. We apologise for any incovenience this may cause.

Polite enquiry

Is anyone still reading this blog? I've always assumed that the words I type slip away into the ether, gathering dust like so many pasta twirls dropped down the back of the kitchen cupboard of life. Lately, for one reason and another, I've had time to sit at the PC and nose about in other people's blogs. And, quite frankly, chaps, you leave me impressed at your skill, your bravery, your variety and your committment. Whereas I bash out self-conscious tosh at irregular intervals before clamming up and chastising myself for not using the time for something less creative but somehow more 'important' (such as clearing dusty pasta twirls (fusilli! That's the word I was looking for. I think) from the back of the kitchen cupboard). This cannot go on. Either I've got to stop wishing I could be some sort of writer and get on with some sort of writing, or I've got to shut up and go back to my cupboard. So how does one become a serious blogger? Any tips? Please?

The first cut is the daftest

I can't remember when it first happened. I was slumped in front of the telly, probably knitting (depending on the pattern, this can make TV like radio, only with inferior pictures). I glanced up. On screen was a Moderately Well Known Actor. I paused. I peered. I may have dropped a stitch. I turned to the Electric Landlady. "Here," I said, "has he had a nose job?"

The Electric Landlady made a cursory inspection. "Yes," she said eventually. "Think so."

"But!" I spluttered. "But! He had a perfectly good nose before."

The Electric Landlady shrugged and went back to her crossword. I gazed intently at the screen, willing them to show a close-up, and, if at all possible, a profile shot.

Since then, whenever the Moderately Well Known Actor appears, I scrutinise his nasal area. I try to judge the distance between his septum and upper lip. If the Electric Landlady is about I irritate her beyond human endurance by canvassing her opinion even though I know it hasn't changed. I am now 95% convinced he's had his profile tweaked. And this makes me wild. Not wild as in an OMG-you-sexy-moderately-well-known-actor. Wild as in what-the-hell-did-you-do-that-for-you-silly-man?

It's not just MWKA and his profile. It's not even just Very Famous Actor and his missing wrinkles. It isn't the aging actresses (all of twenty-four) being sliced and diced because no-one will employ them beyond thirty unless they're Judi Dench or Helen Mirren. It's not the identikit pop tarts writhing around MTV in their scanties. (It's not titillating because being told to strip off by a record company exec is empowering, OK?) It's you. It's me. It's all of us.

There's a secret the entertainment, cosmetic and fashion industries and all their myriad fellow travellers don't want us to know. However, fearless tweedy plain monobrowed spinster that I am, here and now I am going to blow it wide open. It is this:

You are all right as you are.

You don't need to be sexy 24/7. You don't need to be hot. You don't need to change yourself to fit in with a committee's expectations.

And if your nose is a little longer than you'd like, if your eyes disappear when you smile, don't be upset. We don't hate you for it. We may even like you more.

Just be you.

Fleeting appearance

Some of the things I've learnt in my sabbatical:

1. Be careful what you wish for.

Virginia Woolf said that for a woman to write she needed money and a room of her own. Having neither, I had a ready-made excuse not to write. Now I have a small desk in the spare room with the laptop upon it. Theoretically, this is an improvement on sitting on the floor with the laptop on my knees. In practice, there is so much junk in this room that the impact of my fingers on the keys makes the adjacent tottering miscellany wobble alarmingly and I cannot get my knees under the desk. The folding chair is too low for comfort so I am sitting on a cushion. A hundred and twenty-six words into this, I have twinges in my shoulder muscles that are advising me to give up.

2. The worst limitations are those we place on ourselves.

When I bought the Folly last year, friends and family were delighted. "It's freedom!" they said. "You'll be able to drive yourself to all sorts of places. You'll love it." The Folly sits outside, admonishing me fiercely about the lack of miles on the clock. It needs a clean. It needs exercise. It also needs a little paint work on the bumper after I bounced it gently off a protruding brick wall last week.

I quite enjoy driving. I loathe owning a car. It's a nice car. It goes vroom and it's a fair sight more comfortable to sit in than hunching over this desk on this chair. But it's a millstone. I might hurt someone with it. I might cause an accident. And if I hadn't bought it I'd have a little more money each month that I could put towards my escape fund.Having a car hasn't given me freedom because the biggest restrictions on my life are those I've made for myself. Given the choice between a day out pootling around country lanes with Black Box Recorder in the CD player or skulking indoors binning my undergrad notes, I'll take the latter every time. I must deal with the impedimenta of a life lived cautiously, finally reading then recycling the years-old magazines I bought then hung onto in the hope that I'd get round to reading them eventually, shredding the letters from friends I never hear from now. I've got into the habit of Being Good, which is less about disposing of sentimentally hoarded memorabilia than feeling terrible guilt at the lack of anything to show for the last twelve years of my life. The cheerful face in the student photos is not the one that looms pallidly in the mirror. I have become mentally incapable of having fun, which makes for dreary blog posts and drearier company.

3. Occasionally, I get things round the right way.

Boucing gently off a brick wall at under 5 mph was silly. Not colliding in any way with the loose horse in the road was not. Given the choice of first prang, I know I got it right. And there are worse ways to spend a sunny spring evening than teaming up with two coppers, two passers –by and a dog to persuade said horse back into its field instead of heading for the dual carriageway.

4. Some things do not improve with time.

Reading back this drivel, I see that the break has not sharpened my pen or loosened the block. I still have nothing of interest to say, just self-absorbed maunderings. And so I shall stop again. Ta ta.

Cameo appearance

In a flagrant breach of my not-writing-any-more policy, I've written a guest post for a friend's blog. Normal lack of service will now be resumed.

Laying down my pen

Well, I tried. For a while now I've been crafting witty, wise blog entries with liberal dashes of self-deprecating humour and a quirky slant on the world. The snag is that I haven't posted any of them. Some lurk as drafts, condemned to walk the battlements of cyberspace like the ghost of Hamlet's father. The rest squat inside my head while their topicality dribbles away with their potential. I can't believe in any of it enough to have the burning conviction that I must share it with other people. This one is different in that it will see the light of day. If you're reading this, I'm right, and I've managed to bring myself to publish it. I have tried. This is the second blog I've launched. I think this one has lasted a little longer, though I can't be sure. I do know that I tried to give up blogging once before and came back. This might be a boring rehash of all that has gone before, but right now I don't think I can do this any more. Thank you for bearing with me this far. Adieu. (Or possibly, just possibly, au revoir.)

WLTM knight in shining armour, must have GSOH

It's taken thirty-odd* years to reach this point, but after decades of pootling along nicely, fixing dodgy wardrobe doors, taking fax machines apart "because it's interesting, no, look, it is working now, well, all I did was read the manual" and colliding with male colleagues in attempts to out-polite each other through doorways, this evening I realised I want a knight in shining armour to gallop along and save me from dragons. Not that I've anything against dragons, in fact some of my best friends are dragons. I'm speaking metaphorically, since there are no legends about knights, armoured or otherwise, galloping up to relag a condenser pipe on a broken boiler. I don't know if there's a term for accumulated aggravation, but I seem to have spent the last decade using up my inner resources and now I would quite like someone to take the pressure off. So is this it? Is this what it's all about when the romantic balderdash is stripped away? When it all comes down to it, do people lash themselves to other people less out of a sense of communing souls and more from a fierce desire not to be the one outside trying to unfreeze the pipes with a hairdryer while the hood of your parka fills with snow? In the past, when women had no status outside marriage, it's hardly surprising that they'd hitch themselves to the best available protector. But now, when fully functioning spinsterdom is a very real option, are we willing to cling to our independence while knowing it's always going to be down to us when the boiler breaks down or the roof leaks? I'm not saying these are the province of men, simply that when life throws grey slush at us, sometimes it would be very nice to let someone else deal with it. I don't think I'm about to settle down and pop out a few sprogs. I prefer animals to children on almost every count and I've done my share of communal living. (Why do men have so many toiletries? Why do they leave the empty bottles in the bathroom cupboard? And X should be aware that I haven't forgotten the state she used to leave the kitchen in.) And I don't really think I'm even looking for someone on a white charger, or even on a donkey or a pushbike. Just right nownI would like a fairy godmother to give me a break for a while. But I'm curious if this sense of semi-permanent mid-thirties exhaustion is just my bad luck or if there's some weird genetic thing going on, trying to make me mix my chromosomes with the first available knight in the vain hope that this will make everything All Right. Because happy ever after is all very well but ever after is a long time to be stuck with someone. Now if you'll excuse me I've got to go and fiddle with the thermostat and prod the boiler. * Some would say very odd.

You don't have this trouble with a slate

I write this in a condition of low-level seethe. My laptop is about eight months old, and, as with all youngsters, there are teething troubles. Having bought a well-known photo editing package, I am continuing to pick up the pieces after it crashed my PC comprehensively. The latest error message is that the webcam isn't working. Tentative investigation suggests this is because the computer can't detect the webcam. Now normally I barely give the webcam a moment's thought. I don't do video conferencing or online chat or flash my mammaries at strange men in Minnesota. But I am peeved that the software is asking me to install a webcam when there is one built in to this machine.

I tried a system restore but that didn't fix it. I restored the system restore back to where I started and it almost decided not to let me open this document.

Now I'm not totally dim. I've got letters after my name and everything, and in a former life I was a scientist and an (inept) engineer. I understand the concept of built-in obsolescence and can see how it drives market forces. But I refuse to accept this as an excuse for shoddy workmanship. Why can't computers work reliably? Why must we view crashing PCs as something to put up with, like late trains or all this damned snow? And please don't sit there smugly and tell me I should have bought a Mac. Some of us are on a budget.

All I want is for PCs to be robust, so that if the user does something inadvertently unhelpful it can shrug it off and brush itself down before going smilingly on its way.

Is that so much to ask?

PS And while I'm having a technical gripe, why is Blogger reformatting my text and dropping all the carriage returns between paragraphs? No wonder I feel like giving up blogging altogether.

Future imperfect

2010 has proved a little disappointing so far. When I woke up on Friday I assumed, perhaps naively, that we'd all be wearing tinfoil jumpsuits and feasting on food pills. Yet here I am digesting a very traditional Sunday roast while wearing a top I think I might have had since the last millennium and jeans that won't stay up since the belt loops are too narrow for the snazzy tartan belt Father Christmas brought me. But this is the Future. Arthur C Clarke wrote a book about it and everything. Shouldn't everything be shiny and fabulous?

Human beings are very keen on progress. They don't like change very much, but progress must be a good thing. In the last decade progress has brought us a technological revolution in the way we communicate. It's now possible to cram hundreds if not thousands of songs into a piece of plastic and metal smaller than a matchbox. One need never go without music ever again. Imagine the joy of never having to be alone with your thoughts, never having to think about anything beyond a superficial level before being distracted by the next track.

It's now possible to spew out every passing notion to a waiting world, no matter how private, hurtful or inane. It's now possible to pretend to have a thriving social life by hunching over a screen and tapping out more inanities to people you never meet, people you have never met. It's now possible to pretend to yourself that you're still friends with people you knew years ago because they clicked yes to your request but have had no contact since. It's now possible to snipe about modern life without going to the trouble of leaving your room to find someone to snipe to.

This is no Star Trek utopia with all races, colours and creeds getting along in perfect harmony (and wearing jumpsuits). This is a fractured world with death, destruction, cruelty, pestilence and harm on every side. This is the future is the present is the past. Human nature does not change. We're still the same selfish apes we ever were.

I don't want to live this way. All right, the sniping in splendid isolation bit is what I'm best at, but not the rest of it. I don't want to cut myself off from birdsong. I don't want to tell the world what I had for breakfast or what goes on behind closed doors. I don't want pretend friendships. If this is progress I'm glad to be a luddite.

So this year I'm striving for change over progress, ears open, looking up. If this is the future, I'm going to meet it on my terms for once.

Doctor! No!

It's always hard watching the decline of a dear, beloved old friend. And yet that's how I've spent the last few years. As I write this, he's nearing his end, so they tell me. We first met when I was very young but I didn't form any real, lasting attachment until later. After fleeting glimpses, we became properly acquainted in the school library. I was twelve. He was several hundred years old. His name was the Doctor, and I cannot love him anymore.

Right now I'm supposedly catching up with the episode I missed on Christmas Day, mainly because I'm going back to work tomorrow and someone's bound to want to talk to me about it, plus I'm expecting an e-mail from a ten year old who may expect me to make intelligent remarks about the storyline. And all I can do is whimper, "But it's drivel!"

Way back in, oh, when was it? 2002? 2003? I waited with some trepidation to see how the revamped Doctor Who would fare. To my surprised relief, it was a success. Christopher Eccleston was dynamic, Billie Piper didn't sing and it could only have been bettered if Charles Dickens had stayed on as a companion.

Slide forward a few years. Picture this: a small, ethnically and sexually diverse, group in a contained setting, in peril from something huge and powerful. One of their number may have psychic tendencies, one will be there for comic relief. There will be a woman, probably comely, almost definitely young and bosomy. The Doctor will arrive. Things will go awry. There will be explosions. At least two of the small, ethnically and sexually diverse, group will die horribly. There will be more explosions and some sort of extended chase sequence, possibly featuring hi tech motorised vehicles. The comely woman will kiss the Doctor, unless she is Lindsay Duncan and therefore too old to kiss anyone. If John Barrowman is in it, he will probably kiss the Doctor as well. The Doctor will realise with horror that simply waving his sonic screwdriver around is not enough and they are all doomed, so the comely woman will sacrifice herself nobly and David Tennant will do that stricken spaniel look he's had so many opportunities to perfect.

Which episode am I describing? Waters of Mars? The one that was on at Easter with the girl who used to be in Eastenders? The one with Kylie? The one with Georgia Moffett as the Doctor's daughter?

Having sat through the first part of David Tennant's swansong, my mental checklist has been marked off comprehensively. Gratuitous Christmas references? Check. Cheery mockney autopilot from Tennant to ease viewers into story before the Serious Expression sets in for the duration? Check. Portentous staring into the distance by Messers Tennant and Cribbins? Check. Shameless pantomime from John Simm? Check. Pointlessly long chase sequence? Check. Ludicrous special powers bestowed on the villain for no reason? Check. Unfunny comedy sequence featuring stars of yesteryear? Check. Crude forcing of TARDIS and/or Doctor into Christian imagery? Check. [For the record, I'm not a practising anything, more of an amateur theist, but I found this offensive in its arrogance.] Bangs, explosions and special effects at the expense of an intelligent script? Check. Over the top threat to humanity that is merely risible? Check. We're just missing cameos from Billie and Freema Agyeman to give me a full house.

When the Master complained of the drums in his head, can I have been the only one blaming Murray Gold's deafening soundtrack?

I'm not anti-Tennant. I spent three hours of Boxing Day almost glued to Hamlet. [Three hours at teatime is not ideal scheduling. At least there's an interval in live theatre. Thankfully, I was handed a toasted bagel during Polonius's slaying.] He's a good actor but not with recycled, effects-first-storyline-second scripting.

Doctor Who used to be a children's programme. I watched it as a child. I soaked up morality and science, adventure and history. Twenty-odd years on, when I finally got to call myself doctor (the indefinite article, I must note), it was a bit late to realise that it was the sense of narrative that was strongest in me and not the science. Still, those letters look pretty on the CV.

But this series now, this sound and fury, what does it signify? Is it going to inspire anything in today's children other than a desire for the toys and the DVDs and all the rest of the merchandising hoopla? While the children I know (of various ages from small to pensionable) enjoy the bangs and the spectacle, the child in me is huddled miserably in the corner, longing for the Target novelisation of The Ark In Space.

Doctor Who has regenerated into something I no longer recognise. All I can do is mourn.

Goodwill to all mankind (that includes shopworkers)

So, in the immortal words of Noddy Holder, here it is. Three and a half weeks to go until the big day. In shops and stores across the world, consumers are suffering varying levels of festive stress. In need of an outlet for this building pressure, they seize on the best virtual punchbag known to retail: the poor soul behind the counter.

This underpaid minion has not been wearing tinsel and reindeer antlers since the middle of October of their own volition. It is a Management Directive. They are not smiling at you because they are delighted at your custom. It is a rictus forced upon them on pain of unemployment. If at times this becomes a little tiring and they look a little surly, do not blame them, for their feet ache, the remorseless lighting and the relentlessly looped Christmas music have given them a splitting headache, and the general public at large, endured en masse, day in, day out, rot the soul.

You're at work. You're doing your job as best you can. Somebody comes up to you expecting to be treated with respect, nay, honour. They are The Customer. You smile, offer a polite greeting. The customer blanks you completely to bawl into their mobile phone. You scan their items and wait for payment. The customer continues to ignore you. A queue builds. Eventually the customer shoves a card at you, still talking, not making eye contact. Some time later, they deign to enter their PIN code into the machine. You finish the transaction and present their card, goods and receipt with a smile now a little frayed around the edges. They snatch the lot and leave without a backward glance, still yakking. If you're lucky, the next customer will give you a word or a look of sympathy. If you're unlucky, they'll be on the phone.

If you've never worked on the wrong side of a service point, you cannot imagine the rudeness, the venom that is spat at someone in no position to defend themselves. Ninety-five per cent of the time, it's not their fault but still they have to apologise for the perceived mistakes of others.

Today (not in my workplace) I heard a customer spend at least twenty minutes haranguing a man behind a counter for something that was a) not his fault, b) inconvenient but not insurmountable and c) temporary. All this in tones of real nastiness. It's a tone I hear a lot, sometimes directed at me, sometimes at other people.

When you're out and about, in shops, in public service offices, hanging on the phone to call centres, listen to yourself. Not just to what you say, but how you say it.

So you're having a bad day. So nothing's going right. We're sorry for your troubles. We're doing all we can.

Swear inside your head, not at us. Better still, take a deep breath and try to appreciate that we want to help if you'll let us, but if you carry on treating us like dirt we'll decide you're not worth the bother.

This may amaze you, but people in customer service have feelings too.

And she's hooked to the silver screen

It's taken me a while, but I've finally realised what the problem is. This is a Technicolor (TM) world. My soul is monochrome. Inside this scruffy exterior, buried beneath layers of ill-fitting denim, beats the heart of a wannabe silver screen siren. No wonder modern life leaves me so dissatisfied. In the first place, no-one wears hats properly any more. I certainly don't as I any hat tends to make me look like Noddy Holder crossed with Wally from the Where's Wally books (or Waldo if you're in the USA). Yet fifty, sixty years ago everyone wore hats by instinct alone and looked fabulous. The same goes for tailoring. The women were hoisted into place with discreet scaffolding of one kind or another. The men wore made-to-measure as a matter of course. Now I know I'm generalising wildly and yes, I know not everyone could afford to look like that. But that era had class. No-one flashed their drawers at the paparazzi. They'd be ashamed at the mere idea. Yet these days tartiness is de rigeur and I can't remember the time I saw a well-dressed man in the street. By now you're rolling your eyes and wondering what's set the mad tweedy women off on her soap box again. It's quite simple. Blame whoever did yesterday's daytime telly schedule and decided to put on a 1947 thriller, Odd Man Out, directed by Carol Reed and starring (deep breath to ward off swooning) James Mason. He was playing a wounded killer on the run rather than leaning suavely against a mantelpiece but it still set me thinking. My train of thought, a short one, admittedly, ran something like this: I'd forgotten how lovely James Mason's voice was. Oh, I haven't seen The Prisoner of Zenda for ages. Oh! Stewart Granger! Stewart Granger and James Mason in the same film! At this point I had to go and lie down, fanning myself with the Radio Times. You just don't get men like that these days. You don't get stars like that, all velvet-voiced and masterful. I mean, compare the brooding presence of Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights with Tom Thingy in the recent TV serial. It's a bad example for me because I didn't watch the latter on the wholly-justifiable grounds that I can't bear the book and just want to bash Cathy and Heathcliffe's heads together for being so irritating, but you can't fault Olivier. I'm on safer ground with Hitchcock's Rebecca; I've seen that several times and he was an excellent Maxim be Winter. Going back to James Mason, I've seen several old films in which he's never less than compellingly watchable even if the rest of the film's complete tosh. I know these men were actors, and gifted ones, and I know that sixty years ago there were probably women carping that screen heroes just weren't the same since the talkies came in, but I do think that modern men just don't compare. So while my inner self cries out to wear a fabulous frock with a nipped-in waist and my hair longs to do that twisted under thing beloved of the Foyle's War stylist, perhaps with a little pillbox hat perched aloft at a sassy angle, I have to say no and put my plimsolled foot down firmly. There is no point going to all that effort when men wear South Park t-shirts and talk like refugees from soap operas. As a species, we have no longer have any class. How frightfully, frightfully grim.

For whom the Belle tolls

So blogging lady of the night Belle de Jour has outed herself... as a former PhD student. Like many others, I read the media coverage in appalled amazement. How the hell did she find the time? Did she submit her thesis by the deadline? What about the rewrites? Was the quality of her work affected by her other job? And what about the effect of that work on her research project? This is where I have to hold up my hand and declare an interest. I spent four years of my life - and this is not something I'm proud of - as, yes, a PhD student. Even now, the memories fill me with shame. The long hours hunched over a computer, tapping away. The even longer hours trying to look busy while waiting for a simulation to finish running. The clammy, sweaty realisation that I had used the wrong variables and was going to have to start all over again. And the gut-churning day when the computer displayed a black screen with the dispassionate message: "Cannot detect hard drive. Please insert hard drive and press any key to continue" and I hadn't backed up any of the last two years' work. And perhaps worst of all, the self-loathing and bitterness that came from the realisation, about eighteen months in, that I did not want to do this for the rest of my life. The spurious glamour had faded and the fun had gone. But there was no way out. Dependent on the research grant for my survival, I was forced to spend the next two and a half years chained to a battered desk in an overlit, underventilated communal office, putting my soul through all sorts of twisted contortions as I tried to make the person I'd become measure up to the person I could have been had I been able to find the strength to walk away. Today I am rehabillitated, a hard-working, upstanding pillar of the community. But there is always the fear that, one day, my past will catch up with me. Despite the censure heaped upon PhD students, we fulfil a need in society. Someone has to drudge through the dead ends of human endeavour, drawing erroneous conclusions from incomplete data. Without us, there would be no Nobel prizewinners, no medical breakthroughs, no market for black t-shirts emblazoned with the logos of obscure Scandinavian hard rock bands. We live through the agony of peer review of papers cobbled together because our supervisor thinks it's time we published something, anything, through the pity of friends with five figure salaries, and with the almost overpowering temptations of eBay and Facebook. Every day we are forced to face up to our own intellectual inadequacies. We fell into this way of life, seduced by images in the media. We remain there, trapped by the desperate need for cold, hard cash to pay the heating bill. Please don't judge us.

I've got a little list...

When I'm not writing clunky blog entries or procrastinating, I read. Since procrastination takes up most of my time, I read far less than I would like too and less than I should. The usual result of this is spectacular multibooking. This week I have been blending Edmund Crispin with Terry Pratchett, which is good for the vocabulary if nothing else. I haven't dared add any battlefield archaeology to the mix. One of the less mindboggling side effects of this habit is that I always have a mental list of Books I Really Must Read When I Have Time. Everyone has a list like this. It's driven entirely by guilt and peer pressure. Wolf Hall? Oh yes, but there were about three hundred people on the waiting list at the library last time I checked. All three volumes of Simon Schama's History of Britain? Gathering dust on the bookcase for the past six years or so. A Clockwork Orange? Read an extract in the paper this morning, thought "oh, that looks good, I'll have to reserve that". The complete works of Christopher Marlowe? Got to read them for work but I fear I'll struggle. (I don't buy the Marlowe-was-Shakespeare theory on the entirely unscientific grounds that Dr Faustus bored me and the Shakespeare I've read so far never has.) The Lost Symbol? No, no and thrice no. Even for a giggle. The worst aspect of this condition is that the list gets longer all the time. I'll be wading through a social history of the personal column thinking "I haven't read Jane Eyre in ages". (A sub-condition is the buying of books I've borrowed and enjoyed, the theory being that I liked them so much I'll re-read them later. They gather dust with all the others.) Why do I do it? Life is finite. There is only a fixed number of books I can read. Why must I try to cram in more than I can possibly get through in the allotted time? Denial complicates matters still further. I know I won't read six books during my week off work but I still bring them back from the library anyway. I've read one, which has brought a small glow of achievement. I'd planned to read part of another today but somehow ended up ironing instead and then realised I hadn't finished the paper. The simplest thing would be to admit that I don't have time and send the contents of my overstuffed bookcase to charity shops, relying instead purely on the charms of the local library service, but that would be a betrayal of the avid reader I used to be. There's nothing for it. I am going to have to work through all the books on my list. One at a time...

Reasons to be cheerful

A bloggette today: five reasons to feel good about myself. 1. In spite of everything, I keep writing. While some might say this is not something to be proud of, I like to think it shows perseverence and a determination to improve. 2. Slowly but surely I am getting rid of decades' accumulated junk. Apparently this will feel liberating when it's finished, although at the moment I am just wondering where it all came from, since there seems to be no corresponding space in the cupboards I took it from. 3. By not conforming to modern standards of singlism, I am forging my own identity. No matter that this will end up as tweedy woman in bobble hat knitted from moulted cat fur. At least I am not walking about in a skirt shorter than my coat and no tights, so I am not going to contract pneumonia and be a drain on the National Health Service. 4. Although not stated explicitly on my job description, I seem to be the only person who can fix the fax maxhine at work. Apart from last time, when the most I could do was a post mortem. But I did it nicely. 5. I know all the words to Bowie's Young Americans, even the bit in the middle where he gabbles. It's not much, but it's a start. Oh, and I can write concisely when I want to.

Mirror, mirror

So I came back. Bit of a makeover for the blog, tart the place up a bit, try to encourage myself to come out of my barnacle-encrusted shell (do you get landlocked barnacles?) and just get on and write something. But what? Well, I said to myself I was going to be a writer, then I said to myself I'd better face up to the fact that it ain't gonna happen. And so it's time to face the other unpalatable truths of my life: 1. I am never going to be a beauty. Now I know I've blogged extensively about my bloodyminded embrace of plainness and all its attendant freedoms from unfeasible cosmetics bills and having to look in every mirror I encounter, but I have to admit here and now it didn't come easily. Because if I'm honest I'm like everyone else: I want the world to see how fabulous I am. Now, well-meaning friends and greetings card writers aside, no-one really cares about what's inside. Exterior is all. No-one ever said, "All right, she's got a face like the back of the bus but, my god, you should see her spleen." And that goes for more nebulous distinguishing characteristics. You could be the kindest, most noble creature on God's earth but if you look like a mangled trout no-one will give you a second glance, apart from, perhaps, the odd lairy twelve year old who will take great delight in informing you of your repellant aspect. (Really. It's happened to me at least twice in the street.) And all this leads on to: 2. I am never going to have a relationship of any meaning with anybody. Again, I've blogged bravely about the advantages of the defiantly single life, but when it comes down to it, when I've read too much Jane Austen or watched part four of the BBC's adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, it's a bit disheartening to know that I am never going to experience anything even faintly reminiscent of the grand passions evoked in great works of literature, or by the Mills & Boon oeuvre, come to that. In life, it takes a lot to get past first impressions (see point one) and no man is going to waste time on a borderline depressive teetotal wallflower. Well, one or two men might give it a go, but I know them by sight (and, in one case, by particularly pungent smell) and I take evasive action accordingly. When all's said and done, the fault's entirely mine. I'm misanthropic and would rather stay in sighing over fictional heroes than go out and find my own. Nevertheless, resigned singlism does have its problems, namely: 3. Leonard Cohen is never going to write a song about me. For various reasons, among them my inability to socialise like a sane human being, points one and two above, and, most importantly, the fact that we are never going to meet or have any other form of contact, I am never going to be the muse for a song of startling beauty and lyrical truth, sung by a man whose voice sends shivers down my spine. While realism insists I recognise this, I can't help feeling a twinge of disappointment as I listen to CDs on headphones in the wee small hours of the morning. 4. I am never going to be the wise-cracking all-action sidekick of a 1960s super-cool secret agent. It's 2009. Any remaining 1960s super-cool secret agents will be a) dead, b) too arthritic to swing or c) popping Viagra and trying to pull sceptical nineteen year old popsies with a line about their flying car that can go underwater. And it's that pesky point one again. 5. I never keep a promise, even to myself. I said I wouldn't write any more, but here I am. Next time, I shall blog on five things that make me feel good about myself. That will be a much shorter post. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to listen to Leonard Cohen. Well, a girl can dream.

So long, farewell, and so forth

One of the recommended pastimes for a wannabe hack writer is to read widely. I've read newspapers, I've read magazines. I've read blogs by people I know and blogs by complete strangers. I've read cereal packets and adverts on bus shelters. I'm trying to read two books simultaneously, one at home and one at work. They're both archaeology so at some point I am going to get seriously confused and put Culloden down as one of the major battles of World War One. And what has all this reading taught me? That I have nothing to say. I can't comment intellligently on topical issues (http://www.bitmorecomplicated.com) or on books (http://norfolkbookworm.blogspot.com). I can't write commercially; a sheaf of rejection slips attest to that. As a embryonic hack, the realisation that I'm just not able to cut it is a hard one, but at least, agents aside, I've not wasted anyone's time but my own. So for now I'm laying this blog aside until I've got something to say and the means to say it well. Thanks for sticking with it so far, and adieu.

Not busy, just disorganised

As Cliff Richard almost sang: Procrastination breeds consternation. I've got so much to do but don't know where to start. (It does fit. Don't deny you've got a copy of Congratulations somewhere. Dig it out and sing along.) I used to read Keith Waterhouse's columns avidly as a teenager. I think that may be what's made me so militant about the correct use of apostrophes (although I shall doubtless bung one in the wrong place in the course of this post.) I was saddened to hear of his death, but cheered immensely by the extract they used on the news last night. Paraphrasing wildly, the gist was that he appeared busy by doing six things at once, but was actually working on one while avoiding the other five. While he was working on his column, he was avoiding working on his novel. While working on his novel he was avoiding working on a script. The loud twang you may have heard around twenty past six last night was my soul resonating in sympathy. Right now, as I write this I should be doing at least one of the following: looking for a job that doesn't lead to ossification of the soul, polishing my CV as a means to getting said job (hollow laughter), practising my driving in readiness for the commute this mythical job might entail, ironing the kinks out of the manuscript of my first novel prior to submitting it to another agent, going through the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook (apostrophes seem OK there) to find another agent to send it to, replying to all the wonderful Authonomists who spared the time to give me sound constructive criticism on said book, reading the work of said Authonomists and giving them almost sound constructive criticism, working on the plot of my second novel which has stalled slightly, getting a framework down on paper for the other two books I've got in mind, reading my library books before they go overdue, reading the magazine backlog so I can recycle them, watching the DVD backlog so I can put them away instead of piling them on the floor, tidying my room so I have somewhere to put the DVDs, listening to the two plays and a serial I taped from the radio last month or longer ago, taking the stuff I have cleared out to a charity shop and washing my hair. In no particular order. Now it could just be that I have appalling time management skills, but there is a lot to be said for simplifying life and cutting out much of the pointless activity that leads to headless chicken syndrome. I think the best plan would be to write everything down and assess the usefulness of each task, rank them accordingly, and work systematically. I'll add that to my list of things to do.