You are allowed to enjoy this…

The past couple of days, I’ve been working hard on “Dead Rock Star”. The last couple of chapters have been difficult and this is a good sign. When things start to become an effort that means I am poking my stick into the right anthill, as it were. The first pass at chapters 10, 11 and 12 are done and we are upto 40,000+ words, which is surprising as I wasn’t expecting to hit that word count to around chapter 14/15. Anyway, lots of forward momentum, the introduction of the goth band, the ghosts of Abbey Road demonstrate how clueless they are and the reunion concert at the Shepherds Bush Empire is blighted by a plague of ghosts. So far, so good.
Here’s a little taster of the events at the Empire as the ghosts run amok and ruin the concert:

True enough, to the left of the stage were the presences of Jamail and his band of children, a ghostly Fagin directing his little demons to create mayhem and disaster. The amorphous traces of the spirit children darted across the stage, busying themselves with the various pieces of equipment that were used by the band. The first noticeable problem was with Geoff Simms keyboards as loud squelches and burps could be heard over the PA system. Somehow the children were scrambling the circuitry inside the keyboard and making it misbehave. Geoff could be seen adjusting knobs and buttons on his instrument before switching it on and off. When he realised that it had stopped working completely, he began to signal to the roadies off stage. The remaining members of the band hadn’t noticed Geoff’s technical difficulties and continued to play with guitarist Jon Woodworth stepping forward to take a solo. As he began to play, ghostly hands ran over the tuners on the headstock of the guitar detuning the guitar, rendering the subsequent solo tuneless. Woodworth heard himself making an out of tune racket and immediately stopped playing. The spirits surrounding him loosened his guitar strap and all of a sudden the instrument swung free, the heavy ash body of the Fender hitting him square on both feet. The force of the impact caused him to literally topple over in pain onto the stage.
Malcolm Anthony noticed what was happened and did what every good drummer would do and launch into a blistering drum solo. David Seymour looked around the stage and noticed that his colleagues had suffered various technical difficulties and found himself panicking about what to do next. As Malcolm pounded his drums and worked his way around the kit, he was oblivious to the spirit children unfastening the bolts on his drum seat and as he reached the full momentum of his solo, the seat collapsed and the drummer completely disappeared from view. The music had stopped and David Seymour was left to make an announcement. He stepped forward, but as he reached forward to grab the microphone, he was completely unaware of the spectral presence that had been tinkering with the circuitry of the microphone. As damp skin touched metal, perfect conductivity had been reached and Seymour had completed the circuit. Before he could even open his mouth, a significant voltage surged out of the microphone and down his arm. With a scream, he was propelled backwards across the stage and hit the drum riser with an audible thud. The impact caused the drumkit to topple forward and Malcolm Anthony’s schizoid face adorned bass drum landed squarely over Seymour’s head with a crash, framing his unconscious body with jarring precision. The audience fell silent and then somebody screamed. The lights went out and people began to panic.

Of course, this will all change with subsequent editings and revisions.
The mushrooms I photographed by the front gate have gone rotten and only had a life of just over 24 hours. I am glad I photographed them when I had the chance.
In the post: The Simpsons Series 6 DVD box set (Digipak Edition). I’m a sucker for the Simpsons. I make no apology for it.

It’s mushroom season round our way and with the recent damp weather, wonderful wild mushrooms are popping up everywhere. I took a few snaps of these fantastic funghi. The first shot was taken outside a house on some open grassland. These almost look like the closed-cup mushrooms you get in the supermarket.

The next pictures were taken of a very small, exotic looking clump of mushrooms that have taken root by the base of our front gatepost. Now you wouldn’t notice them if you didn’t look down, but I am an eagle-eyed type of guy and spotted them, grabbed the camera and took some shots. I think they look great.



I returned to the bank yesterday afternoon and went to the teller to ask for a new bank card. Apparently, there was some kind of block on my account and a new card may or may not have been dispatched but was never delivered. They couldn’t be any more specific. I asked the whens or whys of this, but you might as well talk to your own open palm. I don’t blame the worker, they are just the frontline. So the teller got me to fill out a form stating that I had changed my address (I hadn’t. I remember filling the same form out 5+ years ago when I moved into the area). When I presented the form and my various forms of indentification, she told me that she could order a new cheque book for me there and then, but if I wanted a new bank card, I’d have to go home and call a number and speak to someone in India for them to order it for me. What kind of twisted logic says that this is a better way of doing things than getting this woman, to whom I have presented my three different forms of ID, to press a few buttons and order the card for me. At the second window, a woman was trying to order a new bank card for her severely disabled brother, who had communication problems.
“How the hell is he supposed to use the telephone to do this?” she asked, “You people have no consideration for disabled people.”
Meanwhile, I notice my teller lowering her head and smirking everytime the man groaned and gesticulated to his sister in order to relay his wishes. Pathethic, I thought. So I left in a huff, returned to Woolworths and got my DVD replaced with one that actually had the discs in it and headed home. I phoned the number to order the card and spoke to Sanjeev, who dealt with my request with no problems. This was the first time I’d ever dealt with a Indian call centre with any degree of success. Either they must be getting better at understanding my East London patois or I am getting better at understanding their rich Indian accents?
With the firework explosions getting louder and increasing in frequency, Alex the Wonderdog is looking for new and more secure places to hide from the barrage. Yesterday, he decided to try and sit on my guitar equipment.

Hey, this is quite comfortable…

It’s one of those days. You know, a day when things conspire to annoy and irritate. So I needed to deposit some money into my bank account. We have two accounts and my personal account is for all my income tax money, so when the taxman-cum-highwayman comes knocking I can handover the goods sharpish. So I trudge in the damp and the drizzle to the bank and put in my card into the ATM machine, type in my pin, get the envelope, put the cheque in the envelope, type in the amount and then press ENTER. The sodding ATM rejects my card. As a result, I decide to deposit the cheque in our joint account with no problem. I look at my bank card and discover that it is out-of-date. It had expired in September, but somehow the bank didn’t think it was important enough to inform me of this or send me a new card for my account. I look at the bank queue, realise that I don’t have the obligatory ID to deal with the bank (you know, passport, driving licence, utility bill, vial of freshly drawn piss for toxicology reports, a blood sample for DNA anaylsis, etc), so I head outside, vowing to myself to return later, fully equipped.
So I decide to console myself with a visit to Woolworths. There were no CDs that I liked the look of, so I decided to purchase the new Star Wars III DVD (I know, I know. It is a guilty pleasure – I enjoy that sci-fi dross, OK?). I am feeling a little better because at least the journey resulted in a little bit of retail therapy. The guy behind the counter doesn’t give me a bag to put my DVD in, so I mutter something about service and retreat, the sealed DVD in my pocket, protected from the drizzle.
After 15 minutes of walking, I am back home, coffee in hand, homemade chicken and stuffing sandwich at the ready and I am ready to have a little preview of my new purchase. I rip the protective polypropylene sleeve and open the case. There are NO DVDs inside.
Oh well, it looks like I’ll be returning to the bank and Woolworths this very afternoon. Whoopsie fucking do!
Meanwhile, it is getting closer to Guy Fawkes Night and the locals are letting off rockets and other noisy fireworks. Alex the Wonderdog isn’t a particular fan and has been seeking protection in the small space under my legs between me and the computer table. It’s a tight squeeze, meladdio.

“I hate those pesky fireworks”

Just saw the glorious sunset and thought I’d share it. I love my digital camera!

Nicked from the MediaGuardian website:

BBC staffer makes ‘Maguire’ exit
Jason Deans, broadcasting editor
Friday October 28, 2005
A BBC employee who left the corporation after he was discovered playing an “inappropriate” email game about his work colleagues signed off with a “Jerry Maguire-style” email to his bosses.
The BBC factual employee left after the emailed “shag, marry, or over a cliff”-style game was discovered by management. Following a disciplinary investigation other staff also received verbal warnings about the incident and the use of internal emails.
The researcher emailed his BBC bosses and the director general, Mark Thompson, to tell them television is “facile” and “full of silly programmes that mean nothing”.
The farewell email also criticised colleagues for having a “derogatory, condescending BBC-knows-all attitude” towards ordinary people who feature in their shows.
In his email, the researcher said TV was full of people who “really do get off on drinking Starbucks, talk about ‘being stressed’ and are happy to call sitting around a brightly coloured room work”.
Entitled, “A Jerry Maguire type of email”, the email also bemoaned the lack of mental stimulation and risk-taking in TV.
“I have had enough of television and not that it matters in this small and irrelevant way of me saying I’m off, but I find it all so facile,” he wrote.
“It costs around £10,000 to make around two minutes of television, which is verging on the vulgar itself, so how is it really that stressful? It really is not that big a deal.
“TV, it seems, is made up of people that really do get off on drinking Starbucks, talk about ‘being stressed’ and are happy to call sitting around a brightly coloured room work.
“We try to represent real life on screen everyday, but work on any production and just listen to the comments about the people we work with. Not in the building but the contributors that make up the content of our programmes. It is a derogatory, condescending BBC-knows-best-attitude that is 50 years out of date.
“Television by default is not real. It is a stage. A small part of our scheduling is real but it is, in reality made up of silly programmes that mean nothing. What happened to mental stimulation? What happened to taking a risk?”

That made me snigger. You have to be a certain kind of person to work for the BBC (or any large corporation or publisher for that matter). When I had a career, I had two interviews for different jobs at the BBC. The first was for a sub-editor on one of the BBC magazines and the preliminary interview involved a long and frightfully dull subbing test lasting over an hour and a half. As I finished my test, someone entered the room who appeared to be something big at the department. They immediately spotted one of the candidates in the room and said something like:
“Hello, Rupert! So glad you decided to apply for the position.”
At that point, I should have just tore up my test and walked out because it was obvious that Rupert was well known and it may have been an internal promotion dressed up as a “proper” interview. Or it might just have been that I was monumentally shit at being a sub and so I never got called back?
My second interview was a much more postive thing. The job was one that I really wanted, working as an editor/developer of the BBC’s interactive TV services. The interview went really well, I wasn’t nervous or fluffed anything up and at one point I thought the job was mine. In fact, I know the job was mine because they started talking money. The lady interviewing me suddenly became very apologetic and explained that to due to budget cuts the actual salary was very low. Again, she reiterated how important the job was and how I was right for it and how the rewards would outweigh the low salary. Unfortunately, I would have had to have taken a pay cut of several thousand pounds to accept the job and, I think you’ll agree, I’d have needed a labotomy to do so. At this time, we were looking to buy a property and we needed cash and I was imaging going home and telling the Missus that I had just taken a massive paycut to work for the BBC. She would have hit me around the head with a blunt object until my senses returned.
So after a few moments of consideration (and the thought of poverty) I retracted my application and effectively rejected the BBC. After that, I gave up ever getting a job at Auntie Beeb. Who knows? If I had taken the job, I might be one of those totally ineffective wankers pissing your licence fee up the wall!

In an attempt to raise the bar and increase traffic to this blog, I have started to rent out advertising space via the Blogexplosion website. If you look at the right sidebar and scroll down to the middle, you will find a link to Spaghetti Harvest, a blog from an American mother with her own business. Why did I accept her offer for my advertising space? Well, she was vaguely normal for a start. The other applicants were either boasting about their sexuality, preaching about god or had a fascinating with the National Rifle Association and so were discounted. Click on the link and check her out. Every week I will be giving people the chance to advertise on that space, so keep an eye on it.
On a separate note, I realise I have reached a crucial point with “Dead Rock Star”. I am now at 10 chapters and 31,000+ words. I am approximately half-way through it and the old syndrome is kicking in. Do I stop and start writing something else or do I continue onwards into the word blizzard? Chapter ten was surprisingly tricky and it invovled the character Daniel De’Ath convincing his bandmates that the idea of a ghost writing lyrics for a new album would be a good marketing tool. There was a lot of dialogue and a lot of arguing and I am not sure if it worked yet. Still waiting for a report back from The Missus. I am now sitting here with the chapter “The Ghost of Abbey Road” staring blankly back at me. I know where I need to go with this, but I’ve forgotten the route. Do I feel lost? Yes! There’s no roadmap when you write a novel.