One Man's Notes

This weekend, I shall mainly be painting the kitchen, doing some writing and generally tidying up the flat.

I'm so dynamic.

A quick movie, captured on my camera on London’s Millennium Bridge last Thursday.

Maneater

Nelly Furtado

Seriously stuck in my head right now.

My brother's showing off by texting me this picture from the match…

Live from the Franken-Stadion

A Hunger Like Fire (Vampire the Requiem)

Greg Stolze

I finally got around to reading this book over the weekend. In common with so many books I own, it's been sitting on my shelf, unread, for over a year.

First up, a disclaimer: I've worked alongside the author on several projects for the same publisher as this book.

That said, Stolze is one of the best writers they have, and the prose he produces is always readable, and often rises well above the rather mediocre median for the game fiction world. In this book in particular, you can see him playing with themes in a way that's better suited to far more serious fiction than this piece of, with the best will in the world, lightweight reading. The plot, such as it is, chugs along at an enjoyable pace and the characters are far richer than you normally find in this form of writing.

The downside is that this is very evidently the first novel in a series. It doesn't really hang together as a narrative it its own right. While there is a distinct plot arc that is resolved, there are many others that are clearly just gearing up by the time the book ends.

Still, an enjoyable enough read for all of that.

Finally, my login problems have been solved and, I discover, not only can I login, but I can now post. How very exciting.

The posting interface is really clean and easy to use, and I'm seriously looking forward to experimenting with the media options.

But right now, I should be writing a feature, so I'll get back to that...

A stupid, yet fun, cartoon for anyone who has ever used AOL or been called by a parent about a computer problem:

Dad vrs AOL

Some people have asked if the “rubber duck” mentioned in my description of my stay in Edinburgh was, in fact, a real rubber duck. Some even suggested that it was a euphemism for something.

No, it was a duck all right.

My trip is all but done. I’m sat in the departures lounge of Edinburgh airport, enjoying a nice, chilled Diet Coke and preparing for the flight home. I’m not the world’s best flyer. As a child, flying was an experience that I loved. Watching the houses dwindle away beneath me was something I looked forward to seeing. As I’ve got older, though, I’ve become more and more nervous. These days I have to fight down the panic when taking off, and take the time to clam myself if we hit a patch of turbulence.

I’m not sure why this has happened. Lorna has suggested that the older one gets, the more one feels one has to lose if an accident happened. Perhaps. I would put it down to the slight hypochondria and fear of death I developed during my Dad’s illness last year, except that I know I felt this way when we went to Copenhagen and Malta. That said, I remember the flight to New York being OK.

It is, officially, a mystery.

OK. The Apex European Hotel wins back a little respect. That was one of the best breakfasts I’ve had in a hotel in a long while.

Mmm. Haggis.

The adders, on the whole, is a placid beast, not much given to anger or annoyance. He sails through life, letting idiots and their actions wash over him, while he goes about his business. Tonight, circumstances have contrived to vex the adders and he is far from happy about it.

That’s quite enough of talking about myself in the third person. That way lies madness or politics, and neither of those appeals to me right now. I’m in the middle of a brief working trip to Scotland. It’s just an overnight thing: go up there, spend a night in a hotel, do an interview, catch a flight back. The usual features writer’s trip, in fact. So far, so good.

The first thing I forgot was the fact that if you fly Easyjet at odd times, you fly surrounded by scum. Easyjet is generally great. Most of the time, it’s a cost efficient way of getting yourself from point A to point B without having to actually touch any of the ground between those two points. Fly during the day, and you fly surrounded by canny, cost-conscious businessmen. Fly late at night, on the other hand, and you fly surrounded by scum.

I don’t like the word “scum”: it’s pejorative and condescending. However, the people who shared the plane with me deserved it. For a start, there were the two geniuses who managed to stop a lift at one floor for the best part of five minutes by repeatedly pressing the button for the floor they were on and swearing when the lift doors didn’t shut. The group of foul-smelling, foul-mouthed Scots gentlemen waiting to board next to me were worthy recipients of the epithet as well.

Still, we got to Scotland in one piece, and I jumped in a cab bound for my hotel. Or, at least, what I thought was going to be my hotel. No, they informed me, there was a problem with the air conditioning in my room (air conditioning? This is Edinburgh, not Florida) and I would have to be transfered to their European hotel, some distance away. Well, possibly. There then followed an amount of confusion as to whether the European Hotel had any rooms to spare for the displaced International Hotel customers. Finally, a taxi was summoned and I made my way to my new hotel, some distance from both the original and tomorrow’s meeting.

I settled into the room, with its suspiciously canine odour, and decided to check my e-mail before bed. Could I get online? Could I hell. Could I get an outside line? Could I hell. I called reception to enquire about this little problem, causing the receptionist to have a panic attack, based on the sounds on the other end of the phone. He squeaked something about getting me another room (errr…aren’t you rather short of those?) and promised to call me back. In the 20 minutes that took, I established the lack of a minibar for immediate whisky-fueled relief and he established that my phone had had outside calls barred for reasons unknown. The phone problem is now fixed, but the whisky issue has yet to be resolved.

However, they have provided me with a rubber duck for my bath. Well, that’s all right then.

The guilty parties here are Apex Hotels. Avoid them.

There’s a few new sets of pictures in my Photo Album, if anyone’s interested.

And yes, Mac geeks, this does mean that I’ve paid for .mac. I think it’s a really good suite of services for the price.

I’d like, if I may, to talk about death.

Right, for both of you that are still reading after that little announcement, I’ll explain why I’m broaching that taboo subject. After 29 years of cheerfully avoiding any real experience of death, the grim reaper has come knocking on my doorstep twice in the last year. The second time, he came to my doorstep quite literally: a man perished just outside my front door a week ago.

Lorna and I were heading down the A12 on our way back to London, when Mum called on Lorna’s mobile. She was a little panicked, because she’d heard that the road I live on had been closed, right where my flat is. She was worried that we’d got home quickly and been caught in an accident. As it turned out, about 11am that Sunday morning, a 50-something man had come hurtling down my road at a great rate of knots, lost control of the car, hit the post box just outside my flat, skidded to a halt with his car upside down on the pavement and died of his injuries shortly thereafter.

By the time I got into my flat (I dropped Lorna off at her place first) the evidence was all but gone. All that was left was a demolished post box. a small piece of headlight and a steadily growing shrine of flowers to the dead man. The newsagent down the road filled me in on the details of what happened a few days later.

Now, the reason I was travelling down the A12 that day (still following?) was that the day after would have been my Dad’s 66th birthday. His death, of course, was my first direct experience of death. His corpse, lying cold and still on the double bed in my parents' home, was my first experience of a dead human body. The thought of how cold it was an hour after he died still chills me slightly and brings tears to my eyes.

My Dad was blessed in a way: he never lost anyone close to him through death during his life. He was the first person I lost, yet I was utterly unprepared for it. Why? Because no-one talks about it. No-one talks about what it’s actually like when a relative or loved one dies, or how they feel about their own impending mortality. Even religion these days seems to focus (with some justification) on the process of living in faith rather than what happens when you die.

My mother was the only person who had dealt with bereavement before. Her mother died just before she and Dad got married 40 years ago. She was the only one with a language to deal with what had happened and, despite the fact that she was hardest hit by Dad’s death, she guidance me and Mark through those early days of grief.

My point is, I think, that death is all around us, yet we studiously ignore its impact much of the time, leaving ourselves unprepared to deal with it when it hits. And like that man who died on my doorstep proved, we never know when death will be at our doors, for us or for those we love. Perhaps our society needs to open a dialogue about bereavement once more, so we can better support those who are going through it.

As I walk home tonight, and stare at that shrine of flowers building by my door, I’ll wonder yet again if this is really the best we, as a society, can do to remember one of our own who has passed away from us.

Well here I am, stuck in a press conference, desperatly trying to stay awake. The speaker is a man of unrelenting tedium. It’s a hot, warm room and I didn’t get much sleep last night. The subject is harly gripping. This is a recipe for disaster. Luckily, the whole thing is rapidly drawing to a close, so I can get out of here and relax somewhere cool. Will this stuff make it into the mag? I doubt it. What a waste of time.

…will not be heard anywhere near my keyboard. I’m going to be flat out this week, so don’t be expecting regular updates from me. Ha. Like you do anyway. The reason for this is an occasion on Friday which offers me the chance of great success and a reputation boost or major humiliation, and not in the interesting sexual sense, either. More about that (possibly) soon. For now, though, I’ve got to get a feature done prior to a press conference.

Anyway, for those of you who are curious as to how the boat trip went, you can peer at the photos here.

For those of you who were wondering about my previous and rather mysterious entry, I was testing out a way of posting to Livejournal from AvantGo on my Handspring Visor. It seems to work, so lots of mobile posting for me. Hurrah!

Nothing to see here. Move along please.

Management here at the UK’s Leading Property Magazine (First Choice For Property Information) have decreed that tonight, we socialise. And where are we going to be socialising? Why, on a boat sailing up and down the Thames, of course.

At first glance, this might sound like an attractive concept. Free food and free booze on a boat, with some of the loveliest urban riverscape in the country on either side. Well, that’s true enough. However, journalists being journalist have seen through this veneer of pleasure and spotted the unpalpable truth of the situation. We have to spend five hours with our “colleagues” in ad sales and web databases with NO HOPE OF ESCAPE.

Eeek.

Well, I’ve got the digicam and a few magazine with me if worst comes to worst. Oh, and the voucher for six free drinks might ease the pain a little.