Overland to China Episode I: Europe

We had about an hour between trains here - long enough to sample the food and watch the antics of the many stag parties!

I've been putting this off, but now we've managed to trawl through the 3000-odd photos we talk on our big adventure, and narrow them down to a few hundred... and I thought I'd post the first little batch. We crossed Europe in two days and two nights, via Eurostar, Burssels, Cologne and Copenhagen, then on to Stockholm and Helsinki. Helsinki was the first place we actually stopped, hence the majority of phots are from there.

Next stop St Petersburg...

Nawrimo 09 - c'est tout c'est fini

Once again, with scant seconds to go (well, all right - a day) the word count reaches 50,000 words... and so I get my 'winner' badge from the NanoWriMo website. Oh, the relief.



Sadly, unlike last time (can I link to it again? Please?) this one slightly ran out of control... so although I reached the 50k word limit and thus am considered a 'winner' of the NaNoWriMo thing, this victory is marred slightly by the fact that I am only about two-thirds of the way through the plot... so there will be more writing. So, no, you can't read it now. Which I know you're all just gutted about. Yes, you are.

So work must continue. Urgh. Really don't have much enthusiasm for the prospect right now... but who knows, hopefully sometime in the new year I will be able to post the complete manuscript for my latest oeuvre - 'Rain over Xanadu', a trashy bit of science fiction from the people who brought you (here's the link, here it is here it is! Yay!) 'Government Joe Must Die'. This one is rather darker, though, and for sci-fi buffs, it owes more to Alastair Reynolds and Kim Stanley Robinson than... whoever I said GJmD owed a lot to, I forget. Someone slightly more frivolous, probably.

So, that's it for another year... except it isn't. Because I will finish the damn thing. Argh. I leave you with these words from our sponsors:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Nanowrimo - hacking through the verbiage jungle

Urgh. Okay, so - so far I am managed 2,000 words a day - if I keep this up then I should just about make it to 50k. I seriously doubt that the story will be complete, though, and then what? Don't fancy spending December writing more. That sounds too much like masochism.

Two hours later and they were all rigged up in their best clothes – or at least, their cleanest clothes – collecting up the plates of those around them and taking turns in the kitchen. It had been, they had all agreed, a fine meal, considering. And now, as they sat around and contemplated how much better the human digestion system worked under gravity, their guest of honour rose to make the traditional remarks. The Tigerwinds were, according to the commissar, an ancient and illustrious dynasty on Mars, and their involvement in the politics and administration of Humankind’s oldest colony stretched back beyond living memory. However, the crew had been quick to notice that he was slightly vague on how he came to be sent with a colony ship to Mars.

“If that’s not a punishment posting, I don’t know what is.” Freda had cackled, as they discussed it in the dormitory, with all the excitement of girl scouts on their first night away from home.

But now, the old commissar rose and shone his steely smile at them. The lights in the canteen had been turned down, and each table had a night light placed on it;  under their spell, the man’s blue eyes glinted with all the jolly bonhomie of a shark.

“Ladies and gentlemen – crew and captain of the good ship Wednesday’s Child…” he spread his hands in welcome, “…my friends. I am most grateful for the wonderful welcome to have given me to your humble vessel, and proud to have shared this wonderful meal with you.”

“I have called you friends, and I am delighted that I can do so, so freely. To be as welcoming and civilized as you have been, at the end of an epic journey such as you have taken-“
Chris leaned over to Panab next to him, and murmured, “Steady on, pal, it was only three months-”
“-is a credit to you and to your society. Truly, Ganymede has much to be proud of in this ship and its crew.

“You left your homes behind and embarked on this perilous voyage in the hope of planting the flag of humankind on another world. I can only wonder at your emotions when you discovered, as I’m told you did, halfway between planets, that this goal had already been achieved by my own small team. I am sure, had our positions been reversed, there would have been some amazement, some anger, and a great deal of bewilderment on my own ship if we had discovered you already here. Bewildered, yes, we would have been bewildered – when one’s purpose is suddenly rendered unnecessary, how does one feel, how does one react? I do not envy you your position. But as a friend, I hope I can offer some advice.

“My view of your situation is, I’m afraid to say, an unhappy one. You travelled here hoping to claim a new land for Ganymede, to throw off the yoke placed upon you by the intransigence of your bullying neighbours Europa and Callisto. Yet when you arrive here, others have already claimed the land; and your mission has been thrown open to those whom you hoped to outmanoeuvre, your enemies! So you are caught between a rock, if you’ll pardon the pun, and a hard place. Your mission is compromised, its function redundant, its intention infiltrated by your rivals. Europans and Callistans will arrive here just in time to take the benefits of your hard labour.

“My friends… we can help. Our colony is young, and needs your help, just as you need us. Mars can be your ally against the rivals who have compromise your mission. We have an established land base, with an established administration which can easily take you under its wing. With your help, our colony can be firmly established beyond all doubt, and Mars and Ganymede united as friends.”

He sat down, to polite applause – but even as he did so, there was a low murmur round the table.
“That cheeky bastard…” Chris murmured, half-admiring.

Phil rose to make some polite answering remarks. Frankly, Panab didn’t really pay much attention – but he did hear Phil turn to his guest and say, “Of course, our rivalry with Europa and Callisto is common knowledge; but sibling rivalry is part of human nature, and a healthy part.” And woe betide the stranger who tries to intervene , the commander didn’t have to add.

Nanowrimo - quota central

Okay, so it's a day late and maybe a dollar short, but I'm getting my quota in now. I figure, all I have to do is write 2,000 words every weekday, and 10,000 words each weekend, and I'll sail past 50,000 with a couple to spare.

So today, I Reached my target of 25,000 words. In fact, I went past that and reached... 25,007. Woohoo.

I went back and re-read 'Government Joe must Die' last night. I wa surprised - I remember it being pretty clunky, but it was actually pretty readable. Okay, the plot is a tad flimsy, but I was pleasantly surprised by how readable it was. This one, though, is taking a long time to get going. The problem is, I know what's going to happen. Last time I really didn't, which made it easier; this time, I have a plotline which I ahve to stick to, and it's taking a long time to play out. I may not even reach the good bits before the end of the month!

“Hey, Panab.”

“Hmm?”

It was Chris, from the acceleration couch next to his. They had been relocated to the briefing room; theirs were the only two couches in here. It felt lonely.

“You think the Martians could’ve sabotaged our route?”

“What?”

“You know, mined it or something. It’d be awfully easy – I mean, we haven’t exactly been silent in our approach, they’ve known we were coming for a month at least.”

Panab pondered this. “It wouldn’t take much, would it,” he agreed sombrely.

“A few pebbles in the upper atmosphere, a low orbit maybe. Crack that heatshield and we’re toast.”

Panab grimaced. “Well, thank you for that happy thought.”

“Sorry.”

A long pause. They were about twenty minutes away from Titan’s upper atmosphere now; the view from the few cameras still pointing forwards showed a distant curve of the planet’s horizon. Panab knew that that horizon line was slowly flattening as they approached – but it was happening too slowly for him to be sure he was seeing it.

The canteen smelled faintly of old meals, of greasy meat and boiled cabbage, of cold coffee and ageing plastic.

“Sorry, buddy.” Chris said eventually. “just this silence makes me nervous.”

Panab turned his head to look at him. “Chris, my old friend,” he said, surprised. “It is out of our hands. If God wills it, we die here. If not, then we continue. We can never know the time or the place. How many times in your life have you, could you have been killed by some careless movement from someone else?”

Chris gave him a look of disbelief, then laughed shakily. “Thanks for those encouraging words, pal.”

Panab shook his head, frustrated. “Sorry, I expressed that badly. But if you are worried because it is now up to fate, or God, or whatever you wish to call Him, well – it has always been so. As God wills it, it will happen. Once you accept that thought, well, you still get scared, but at least now you have a handle to help control it. A handhold on the precipice, if you like.”

Chris considered this. “I never took you for the religious type, buddy.”

Panab laughed. “Well, that’s the way I was brought up. My parents were Moslems of the Ohio Heresy. They left Earth when the Middle Eastern Moslems began their purges, and… stop me if you’ve heard this.”

“No, really, go on. What’s Ohio?”

“It was a town in America. There was… well, that’s beside the point. Anyway, my parents left Earth, stopped on Deimos for a while, but never really settled. When my grandparents died, they inherited some money, and came on out to Ganymede. I think they hoped there’d be religious freedom there, but-“

“There is. “Chris looked confused, his baffled frown looking perhaps offended.

“Yes, of course there is… but back then, well, there was religious freedom, but there was a lot of stuff to do it was a hardscrabble life. So although they were practising Moslems, many of their practises had to be curtailed just because it wasn’t possible. I mean, praying five times a day when you’re-“

“Woah! Five times a day?! I don’t even eat five times a day.”

Panab frowned a little at that, but carried on. “ – when you’re in a spacesuit, or teleoperating a robot for nine hours straight, it simply isn’t possible.”

Chris chuckled. “Sure, I can just see some big construction rig getting down on its knees in the middle of a building site!”

“Precisely. So, they remained Moslem in their hearts, and hoped to get back to practising their full religion… but, well, to cut a long story short, they brought me up with the theory, but not much practice.”

Chris absorbed this, staring up at the ceiling – which is the only truly comfortable position in a proper acceleration couch.

Suddenly the room shuddered. The ship creaked and groaned alarmingly, popping noises came from all around them. And a thin thunder started somewhere behind their backs, echoing round the ship until it was impossible o tell where it came from.

“Relax, my friend,” Panab said loudly over the increasing noise. “And remember, we have a job to do as soon as we come out of the other side.”

Then, gradually at first, the weight began pressing down on them. It felt like someone was pressing them into sand, burying them alive. Breathing was a great effort. And all around them, the ship thundered and groaned. There were a couple of distant bangs… but they weren’t suddenly engulfed in a fireball, so Panab told himself that it was something none-essential, and concentrated on regulating his breathing.

In the flight plan, the aerobraking manoeuvre was supposed to take just over half an hour. In reality, it seemed an eternity. Panab had just about got used to the noise by the time it began to subside. Gradually, his joints ceased to feel as if they were being put through a mincer, and became merely painful; then, blissfully light once more.

Phil’s face flashed up on one of the screens in front of them. He looked pale and strained, but composed. “Panab, Chris: have you established contact with the probes?”

“Not yet… ah, there it is. Probe 1 now online, probe 2 still not responding… okay, we have probe 2 now. “ Chris sounded as fresh as a daisy, in total control. Panab had to look over at him to see the sweat on his pale face, to see how much he’d been affected. “They’re all nominal, Phil. No sign of a response to our re-entry from the Martians.”

There was no response.

“Phil? Come in please. Anyone on the bridge?”

Finally, Phil’s voice came back on the line. “Chris – you may not see a response. But we’ve got one up here.”

“Bridge?”

Phil was suddenly brisk. “Yep, okay, probe team. We’ll fill you in on the details later. It’s just… the Martian commander has transmitted a brief, voice-only message to us. Hello and welcome to the system, sort of thing. We’ll replay it to the rest of the crew when we’re fully squared away with parking the ship.”

“Roger that, bridge.” Chris said formally. “We’ll continue to monitor the satellite surveillance. Probe team standing by.”

It took a good ten minutes for the post-manoeuvre checks to be sort out. The bangs Panab had heard turned out to be a camera which hadn’t retracted fully and had sheared off, hitting one of the ultra-low frequency antennae and taking it with it.

“Nothing serious, then.” He said with relief.

Freda was down with the EVA team checking out the damage. Her voice sounded intimate in his ear. “No, not at all. The ULF antennae was really only there to be used if we got submersibles into the sea – but even then, we may not even have wanted to talk to the ship in orbit, we may have had some support vehicle much closer. So it’s pretty academic. And the camera was just an inspection system, we can replace that easily. So pretty light damage, in all.”

It's called 'Rain over Xanadu', by the way

I have to say, this time around I'm a bit disappointed by the quality of my writing. Am I always such a lecturer? It isn't flowing, it's sheer hackwork. Hey ho. Bash on - hopefully the next 18,000 words will come a little easier than the last lot.

Approval was granted swiftly, and suddenly everyone was talking about it. Panab didn't remember them having made an announcement, but Drew stepped up and revelled in his new role as official spokesman of the Steeplechase Committee. This was good, becaues Panab didn't really have that much time to spend on it - he was still being worked hard by Phil in an effort to get as much intelligence on the Martians' activity as possible. It was tiring, wearing work - but at least he had something else to talk to people about. It was funny - he'd gotten so used to people sidling up to him and gently trying to tease clues about surveillance out of him, and now they were doing the same thing to try and get some clues about the steeplechase course! The first time it happened he laughed out loud, just from relief. In fact, it got slightly out of hand: deprived of group entertainment for such a long time, the crew of the Wednesday's Child fell enthusiastically upon Panab and Drew's idea like a pack of starving hyenas. It was strange fro Panab, though; his work with Phil was intensely private and quiet - nobody was allowed on the bridge while they were up there, and with just the two of them working in the darkened room, it was a very intense experience... and then he'd come offshift, and be surrounded by people wanting him to make decisions, or help out with the course, the competitor lists, even choosing the font for the runners' numbers.

In fact, interest in the steeplechase got to such a fever pitch that the steeplechase committee began meeting at night, and even then its first three attempts to choose a course had to be called off because people had gotten out of bed specifically to follow them around the ship and try and find out where the race would be held. In the end, Phil ordered the virtuality kits to be broken out of deep storage so the the committee could walk around a model of the ship and pick the course that way. Breaking out the VR kits was a major undertaking; it hadn't been expected that they'd be needed until quite late in the settlement process, so they were buried underneath everything. At least one spacewalk had to be undertaken just to reach them. This seemed rather melodramatic to Panab, and to many others, and caused some debate about whether the whole steeplechase thing ahd been blown out of all proportion - but Phil was quite firm that it was necessary, and even encouraged the whole process. When he mentioned this to Drew, though, the big engineer laughed.

"Well, sure. He's adding to the theatre of it, the whole media fuss."

"Why?"

Drew punched him lightly on the shoulder. "Because it's taking people's minds off what we're heading into, dumbass! The more fuss there is over the Race, the less they're fussing over evil Martians with ray guns waiting to blow us out of the sky."

"There aren't any evil ray guns, do not be foolish."

Drew adopted a shocked pose. "Woah, man, did I hear that correctly? Was that a top-secret military secret that just fell from your big secret agent mouth?"

Panab hit him, and Drew drifted backwards, laughing. "Dude, you're one hopeless secret agent. Can't even keep a secret - and anyway, where are all your secret gadgets? No invisible spaceship? Does your watch have a laser beam in it? Is there an AI on your shoulder telling you secret stuff? Is that why you have that vacant look on your face the whole time? Oh, no, sorry, that's just your expression."

"Ha ha."

"And, dammit all, where all the hot chicks? If I'm hanging out with a secret agent dude, there should be good-looking ladies practically dripping off me! You're a failure, Khaledi, a failure. More secret squirrel than secret agent. It's all very disappointing. Let's hope you're a better running-mate."

"What? I'm not taking part."

Drew stared at him. "Of course you are, man! Everybody else is, you have to too."

Panab was about to protest, but hesitated. "Everyone? Even Phil?"

Drew nodded. "Yup."

NaNoWriMo revisited: Pan and Titan revisited

I've been thinking about NaNoWriMo again.

I was planning to focus on the story of the first colony on Titan, that I alluded to in Government Joe Must Die - the disastrous settlement which collapsed and resulted in the Howl which haunts the Saturn system in GJMD, and which gave rise to Government Joe itself. But I decided that there probably wasn't enough material there to let me reach the magic 50k word count. So I've been thinking about the other real character from my first NaNo novel: the Bantolith.

The Bantolith in GJMD doesn't talk. He manipulates people like automata, and anyone within the boundaries of his domain can never be sure if their actions are the result of free will or the Bantolith's machinations - so subtle are the AI's directives that it's impossible to tell the two apart. But why does it operate so obliquely? How did it come to be so silent, so unknown?

I'm thinking that the two stories - the birth of Government Joe and the creation of the Bantolith - are maybe not so far apart. Perhaps they were both created by similar events - failing colonies which demanded drastic action. And while Government Joe was created by a terrible act of treachery, the Bantolith's silence might have been some sort of self-sacrifice - a last-ditch attempt to save an ailing colony by assuming near-direct control of the people within it.

So what we have then is an interesting contrast. Two failing colonies, a few decades apart: one damned by the treachery of an out-and-out baddie, the other saved by an unselfish act of deliberate self-mutilation.

When you've tried the best (call for list)

In this life, I have certain fundamental beliefs which I hold to be fundamentally true. They are:

Everyone is born equal and deserves to be treated equally.
Habitat, despite being a furniture shop, sells the best dressings gowns in the world.

Just occasionally, you come across a product offering which is so good that you'd never want to try anything else. I have two: the aforementioned dressing gowns (big fluffly clouds of towelling, just perfect for curling up with a cuppa on the sofa - wonderful) and Body Shop's Men's Shaving Cream (not so much for any skin benefits it offers, but because the razor always rinses perfectly). I firmly believe that these are the best dressing gowns and shaving creams in the world. Everything else, I could be tempted to try different suppliers - I'm not picky about what sort of bread I buy, or what brand of car I drive (I'm currently driving a bus pass). But dressing gowns and shaving cream... nah.

My question is: do you have things which you'd never, ever buy from anyone else? Products which will leave terrible holes in your life when they finally cease production? Caviar, cars, socks, hairnets, waffles, whatever...

The Customer is Always Right (or, A Comedy of Errors)

I have a confession to make.

At the beginning of the summer, I had cause to book some train tickets for a weekend trip to London. I booked them well in advance, via the website of the train company involved - the estimable but increasingly inaccurately named Great North Eastern Railway. The confirmation page poppeed up, complete with the reference number which I had to take to the station to collect my tickets. I duly printed this out, and thought no more about it - until the day I was due to travel. The timetable was a little tight, so I was going to the station straight from work - but that morning, I got to work and realized I had left the piece of paper (with the reference number) at home. With no time to go back and retrieve it, I worried briefly - but then I realized: all I had to do was log on to the GNER website, call up my account details, and the transaction would be recorded there. I logged on, found my account details, and inspected my list of recent transactions.

It was empty.

Huh?

"Okay," I thought to myself (and bear in mind, this was about three weeks after I'd booked the tickets), "maybe I didn't use the GNER website; maybe I used the trainline website." (For non-UK residents, thetrainline.com is a website devoted to selling train tickets. Hence the name.) So I called up the trainline website, and checked. But no! No recent orders there, either! My order had disappeared!

So I got onto their helpdesk, and received this advice: order more tickets, then apply for a refund on your old ones.

That was it, and in about as many words, too. No 'sorry we can't help', or 'you poor thing, what a terrible position'. In fact, it was more like 'we think you're probably trying it on, so buy some tickets you cheapskate and we'll consider whether to give you your money in our own damned time.' On the face of it, this advice, while irritating, stupid and rude, was not utterly foolish; but what got me steamed up was two particularly personal aspects. First, these tickets are not cheap, and if the refund did not arrive promptly, I was going to go over my overdraft limit and get charged by my bank for the privilege. Second, I had originally booked first class tickets (really, the only way to travel), and first class tickets bought 'on the day' are ruinously expensive, so I would be travelling cattle-class instead. Argh.

Anyway, I had a nice weekend in London, and wrote a rude letter to GNER's customer service explaining the situation and grousing about the abruptness of their support staff.

And waited.

Six weeks later (knowing that by now I was going to get overdraft charges two months in a row, and by a margin which a GNER refund would have cured), I wrote another letter, angrier and (um, much) more sarcastic than the last. I printed out the customer support emails I'd received, and was about to attach them to the latter as proof of abruptness, when I realized I'd actually emailed the support staff the thetrainline.com, not GNER. Oops. So now I was complaining about the rudeness of someone else's support staff.

And then several things happened at once. First, I got a nice letter of apology from GNER, saying they were sorry I'd been dealt with abruptly, and of course they were refunding my tickets, and here were some vouchers to spend on more train tickets. (The value of the vouchers didn't quite cover the overdraft charges, but hey ho).

The other thing that happened was that my girlfriend - who'd been living with me at the time, and doing all her internet stuff on my laptop - checked her email for the first time in several months, and discovered an email from GNER saying 'your tickets have been ordered and are ready to pick up from the station.' I'd accidentally ordered them on her login, and they'd been quietly sitting in her account waiting to be used.

So I'd been complaining to GNER and demanding an apology for a mistake I'd made, and topped it off with griping about someone else's support staff.

Bugger.

L'hydroptere

It's not the best photo, but you can see the central hull lifted out of the water.

While I was on holiday, sailing the west coast of France, we stopped one day in a sheltered cove for lunch. As luck would have it, anchored in the same bay was this contrivance - which has its own page on Wikipedia. It's a sailing hydrofoil - a rare beast indeed!

More photos of the holiday here.

A medical update

Realized today that I haven't really been keeping up the medical half of this journal recently, so y'all are due an update. In fact, the last post was in the middle of May, a hefty few months ago... so, let's see, what's happened since then?

Not much, really. I've been a bit hit-and-miss with the alendronic acid, but that seems okay. My colitis, however, does seem to be slowly gaining on me. After a very successful start with the 6MP, my blood tests over the last six months or so show a gradual increase in ESR (more inflammation, basically), to the point where Generic GP sent me a letter about it. As a result, GP consulted with Kindly Consultant, and I'm taking some very baby 'gastro-resistant' steroids for a bit. So we'll see what happens.

For myself, I just feel... well, pretty tired, basically. Very tired. I'm starting to get some stomach cramps again, too, and my poo is very runny and gaseous. For a while, it burned, too, like I'd spent the last year eating nothing but curry! So the prospects don't look so great right now. However, I take comfort from the fact that my stressful summer of weddings, etc., is now over, and I can relax a bit. It's cheering, too, to know  I'm being watched pretty closely by my NHS guardian angels.

A little bit of greetings-card philosophy

I've been rereading Andrew Smith's Moondust - an excellent book for anyone even vaguely interested in the Apollo moonlandings, by the way, when I accidentally misread the phrase " I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent beng unnecessairly less than that myself". I thought it said:

"I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent being unnecessarily less than myself"...

....and I would have gone on thinking that that was what it said, and nodding to myself at the profundity of it, if I hadn't checked the quote in order to post it here. Hah. Still, for some reason, the misquote chimes more deeply with me than the actual one.

Congratulations Tom and Ellie!

My little brother got married at the weekend.

Hear me, O gurus of photography

I did a bad thing this week. I spent a lot of money I don't have on a camera: an Olympus E-500 dSLR.



Hear me, all you who are wise in the ways of photography, and please reassure me I did a wise (or at least, not crashingly stupid) thing.

I think I ate a bug.

I had the weirdest
dream last night.

I dreamt we had a
fishtank at work, and that there were some little fish in it which - despite
looking very much like miniature koi carp - were supposedly whitebait (for the uninitiated, whitebait are great to eat whole, deepfried in batter). At
lunchtime me and my boss decided to have sushi, so we each took three of these
little orange 'whitebait' and dared each other to eat it. He chickened out
completely; I let two of mine go, and went to swallow the third... but I
snatched it away from my mouth at the last minute. All I bit down on was a
little fragment of spine at the tail end, which tasted crunchy and
bitter.

I think I may have
swallowed a bug in my sleep.

Cool Hunting: Tea Time

http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2007/04/tea.php

Ceci n'est pas un Philippe Starck paintbrush. In reality, c'est un infuser de tea.

I've backed off a bit from the habit now, but at one point I was getting worried about the depth of my tea fetish. Seems I needn't have worried - however low you go, there are always those who've taken it to the next level. And some of them are gadget obsessed. Coolhunting has collected a bunch of these little gizmos. Personally, I thought I was doing okay with my Bodum Assam teapot and my beloved long handled infusers... not for me the variable-temperature electric kettle from Nothing But Tea, which does sound like every tea fetishists must-have...

Places to see before I die: Alang Beach

Ever since I first heard such places existed, the idea of
the Alang ship-breaking yards
has haunted my imagination
(scroll north - it keeps going for a while).
This is where the world's shipping goes to
die: one long beach where vessels are run aground, to be stripped down
and chopped
up by workers of all ages in the most horrendous conditions, using axes
and hammers and their bare hands.
I'm not sure how close I could get, as a westerner - but I'd sure like
to try and see it for myself. The image of this enormous beach,
scattered with these vast steel behemoths shimmering in the heat haze
of a thousand oxy-axetylene torches, while people swarm over them like
ants over a carcass...

Urgh

Why on Earth am I here? What am I doing with my life? How the hell did I end up here, doing this? More to the point, who picked up my life, 'cause this one sure doesn't feel like it belongs to me. And whoever's got it, can I have it back, please?

...urgh. Not yet 9am, and already I'm riven by self-doubt. It's gonna be a bad day. Oh well - nothing for it but to crank up the Radiohead and knuckle down. Like the man said, some days you're the grasshopper, some days you're the ant.

Right now, though, I feel more like the slime left in the bottom of the washing machine drawer.

Bye bye Summer Girl

So I've had to return Summer Girl to her friends and her life, and it's
left me feeling a little like i've just had to put a fish back in the
water. We agreed this was going to be a Festival fling only, and now
she's off to study... something set-related... at RADA, down in London.
She has no idea how much I envy her that. To be able to go and do
something creative, as a student, in London... Well, I've been there,
and my jealousy is like a physical thing, twisting in my gut. All I can
do is watch, and wonder bitterly how I ended up where I am. And
wonder where the hell I go from here.



For some reason I've always been a little glamour-struck when it comes
to the theatre, in spite of knowing full well how haphazard, strung-out
and sordid it can be. Plus the fact that we got on so well, and she was
so sweet, makes it doubly hard. Creative, talented, funny -
that's the sort of combination that makes me go weak at the knees.



But hey ho. Go, little fishie!