Tag: Blancmange

Moderately OK on a More Consistent Basis

Aware that we will be moving soon, I have been overproducing posts like some kind of hyperactive fence manufacturer.  When we get to the new house it will take me some days to set up the office, sort out the internet and install the coffeemaker, so I will need posts in reserve.  I no longer rearrange the chronology of the blog, so I hope that the nearly good/really bad cycle of my weekly blogging has been replaced with ‘moderately ok’ on a more consistent basis.  I hope that you will not be able to spot the joins.  I have always rated consistency very highly, but more often than not in blancmange¹.  It is my ambition to produce a flummery of wholesome evenness and this I have decided to do by not twatting about with stuff anymore.  I have, however, discovered one or two flaws in my current approach.

Posts do tend to clump (or possibly congeal) a little: the simple bug-bear does not dissipate in a single day with a five hundred word rant, it tends to linger for a week or more and poke its nose into anything else I happen to be saying.  I will, as my wife will affirm, bang on about things of such insubstantial consequence that the scientists assigned to the Large Hadron Collider would struggle to invent them, until I have given them sufficient time to bore even me.  Occasionally I write two or three posts in a day (sometimes my mind shifts into Little Fiction mode and I may make things up for days on end) and I often have to poke myself into variety – usually of style, but occasionally of arranging the words in a different order.  It’s all very well to allow Monday to lead us into Wednesday, like a middle-aged, woollen-socked and back-packed pathfinder, as long as it doesn’t stamp straight back down the same path we tromped up only this morning.  The terrain around here is bland enough without repeatedly tramping down the same nettles.

My office is currently devoid of all my usual clutter and is filled instead with cardboard boxes: I am not surrounded by inspiration; I am surrounded by scuffed walls and a strange musty smell that I can’t quite track down.  If it is not cardboard related, I will have to open everything and search for what has died.  Unshackled from editorial whim, I am no longer tied to word count so I do tend to let things take as long as they need, and these days some pieces – usually those with the least to say – seem to need a whole lot more than others.

Monday this week chewed up quite a lot of words and so, I have the opportunity to redress with a much pithier offering today, but you know my record with opportunity.  It seldom knocks and when it does I’m always indisposed*.  I never quite manage to make it to the door before it shoves its Golden Ticket back into its pocket, kicks the hydrangea and wanders off to find someone far more deserving.  I feel like a mountaineer with acrophobia – everything starts to fall apart when I realise how far there is to fall from the top, and I head straight back to the sanctuary of Base Camp where I no longer worry about falling off, I don’t fret about pulling my friends down with me and I have, at least, an icy hole to crap in.  I am able to obsess about absolutely nothing in complete safety.  If I fail, then it is to nobody’s surprise and if I succeed… ah, what the hell, it will never happen.

¹Known, I see, as American Pudding in America.
*Middle English for ‘on the loo**’.
**Middle English for ‘having a poo***.’
***Middle English for ‘having a sh*t’

Wee Small Hours

It’s amazing how much more often you see the wee small hours as you get older.

When I was younger I saw 2am only when I was either a) heading towards the toilet, b) heading towards a crying baby or c) missing a deadline by a few thousand words.  I’ve never slept well, but I’m not much of a night-time prowler either.  Generally I go to bed at night (in preference to the next morning) and I stay there until I get up.  Well, I did…

These days you will far more often find me drinking herbal tea, watching shit on TV and trying to remember what I should have done earlier.  Usually, what I should have done is to have gone to sleep before the men on the television started getting their knobs out for appraisal by someone who, if you’re asking me to be honest, probably would have been much wiser to have kept her own trollies* on.  Somewhere, one of us has something fundamentally wrong with them and if it’s me, I’m not sure that I want it putting right.  But then I remember how old I am and realise that it just doesn’t matter anymore**…

This is the point at which the voices inside my head start to manifest themselves physically: I constantly worry about the state of my teeth and my inability to eat anything with a texture firmer than blancmange (and that only as long as it is not lumpy) without fearing the total collapse of my mouth.  In the small hours my teeth throb in tune with my concerns.  I am acutely aware of all my contemporaries, many of whom are dying around me: usually tee-total, exercise loving folk with healthy diets and an equable temper, and I wonder if sloth, drinking and eating crap might not be all that is keeping me alive – but when I close my eyes, I can hear my arteries hardening, my chest grating and my heart playing a Neil Peart drum solo.  In the middle of the night, staying alive feels like a major achievement.  In the daytime, I am driven along by the ‘practical’, but night time is dominated by ‘theory’ and I begin to conclude that, by rights, I might just be running out of road: the engine is knackered, the suspension shot and there is almost certainly a major leak in the sump somewhere.

These days, I calm myself down by drinking an infusion of some weed or another: camomile is the current favourite although I wouldn’t entirely rule out anything that I am relatively sure has not been piddled on by a dog, if I had any indication at all that it might chase me back to sleep.  “Hemlock?  Why yes, you’ll have the best night’s sleep you’ve ever had.”
“Will I wake up refreshed?”
“Er…”

The worst thing about being awake at this time is that it makes me aware of just how often I am now awake at this time and I have to try and find some way of taking my mind off it if I am ever to find sleep again.  So, where was I?  Oh yes, right then, which vagina would I pick for a date? – definitely not the one that reminds me of Donald Trump’s mugshot – so it will probably have to be the one in the middle that looks vaguely human…

*Underwear

**This little TV aberration is called ‘Naked Attraction,’ a dating program in which the sole criteria for choosing your ‘date’ appears to be the size and shape of your prospective lover’s genitalia which, for no apparent reason, appears to be my TV’s default position at 2am.  Now read on…