I am peeved

I am peeved at spending an insufficiency of time in the company of Yoda and that is perverse. I practiced saying "I hereby ram my ticket to the Christmas Ball up your arse" yesterday evening and then no Yoda. By the time I finished my shift everyone else had put me in a totally vile mood; I could have taken the head from someone's shoulders, anyone's shoulders. Still no Yoda. I feel cheated.

I must write more words without crashing to a halt short of the tape. The temptation to write move directly to stop without passing through the tedious business of writing another 5,000 or so words is intoxicating. I have a piece of paper with those last words sketched out. I must not. I must not.

Long overdue

I haven't shared a Yoda Moment for some time because, by happy chance our paths have crossed only very infrequently recently.

Yesterday she was on fine form. She loves Christmas and she seems to derive particular enjoyment from running the Secret Santa rigmarole that is undertaken each 'festive season'. As a concept Secret Santa was unfamiliar until I worked in The City and there it was a thing done within teams. There was a £5 limit and the idea was to buy a token and therefore meaningful gift.

In this place the management and admin support are the team and the limit is £20, which is up £5 on last year. I refused to participate last year and I've refused to take part this year: knowing my luck I would draw Yoda.

Having spurned the chance to take part I'm now prey to mixed feelings. On the one hand I'm not bitter at having to spend that much money on someone I detest. On the other I've deprived myself of the joy of knowing I'd slipped a crisp £20 note in her envelope; something which she would hate because she loves presents while also leaving her unable to drop poisonous questions as to the value of her gift.

And if she just once more in my presence points out to everyone else there that I'm the one mean-spirited person who isn't getting involved I shall tell her to take my ticket to the staff Christmas dinner (which I'm already dreading in case I end up near her) and ram it up her arse.

I hate Christmas and I don't need help from Yoda to do it.

Exhaustion is my new best friend

The house is a tip. This is all too often the case but right now it is a tip on a scale that might under different circumstances be described as heroic. I get up, I write, I go to work, I come home, I write. That's it. But I'm galloping to the tape. Then begins the arduous task of setting everything to rights: the house, the laundry, the garden, Christmas, and last, but not least a first draft manuscript.

Bad Sex

An over-long, inept, messy business: much like an England football campaign and like many women up and down the country on most nights of the week I'm left thinking "Thank God that's over!"

And is often the case it is the men, responsible in the first place, making the noisiest complaints about what's happened.

That's gratitude for you

A mother is tonight spending her first night in prison after being sent down for failing to get her adolescent daughter to attend school regularly.

The girl had offered a wide variety of typically lame and generally hackneyed excuses (of the 'dog ate my PE kit' type) but one stood out: I don't like Mondays. She didn't like Monday's and all she didn't go to school. So her mother's in jail.

Some people don't know when they're well off.

Rules of engagement

The rules as they apply to the removal of a civil servant in the event of a catastrophic lapse (such as, for example losing a disk containing the personal and bank details of every child benefit claiming individual / couple in the country) are admirably clear: sack the most senior person the government can find who (a) isn't a mate of Fat Gordy and (b) is someone nobody cares about; then describe the sacrificial lamb as a 'junior' official.

So right now some middle ranking Muppet is taking delivering of a P45, a pistol and a bottle of scotch.

Darling's a contrite man with much to be contrite about and while Steve McLaren might be the luckiest Englishman, clearly the former chancellor - now prime minister - is the luckiest man in Britain.

When a heterosexual couple become parents through assisted conception involving sperm donation it is the father who will raise the child rather than the father who contributed the sperm who has his name on the birth certificate. Why?

Clearly the birth certificate reflects a social rather than a biological truth. It was ever thus. The guesstimated level of discrepancy between the social and biological paternity within families is almost alarming, and certainly surprisingly high. That's not taking account all the 'blended' families that exist, and always have.

Back to the cloisters boys, and keep your noses out of other people's lives.

Number crunching

The object of the exercise this month is runs on the board, and never mind how agricultural the shots.

Because of Senior Frustrate Novelist's resignation and departure during the first week and Paper-Shuffler-in-Chief's prolonged illness last week my window of writing opportunity has narrowed almost to the point of disappearing altogether. To be blut I looked at my schedule on Saturday and worked out I would have just three full clear writing days between then and the last submission date which obviously is 30 November.

Therefore it became critical that I knuckle down today and churn out some stuff. As it is and rather surprisingly given how bogged down I'd become I have now burned off over 7,000 words and I'd be prepared to wager something not entirely valueless that not all those words will have been deleted by the time the last draft has been polished off.

This is because I've got past the set-up and I'm pounding towards the really fun bit where the thing I'd envisaged at the outset will be unveiled from within the swirl of wordage.

If the other two remaining full days of writing are as productive as today I will be home comfortably and possibly with some initial re-writing under my belt too.

I am feeling so much better again. The fog has lifted and can see my way clearly. So now I'm opening a book on what disaster will next befall this venture.

Last orders

I went back over posts from last month to get the date and it is 21 October so that's a full four weeks. I'm feeling rather pleased with myself as well as generally rather well.

Another ghastly old duffer

One old duffer's been on the radio describing marriage as an act of faith and a statement of trust and a risk demanding 'quite a step' on the part of the two parties to said union. Given all that and the capacity of humans to make an error why then the problem with people having easy access to an escape route?

Another old duffer's about to go on air to lament the decline and fall of 'traditional marriage' if it is made easier for lesbians to create (with assistance) and raise babies.

During the long(ish) course of human history the 'traditional marriage' he harps upon has been a remote fairy tale for the overwhelming majority of people because for most of that time life has been nasty, brutish and short. Those who lived long enough to procreate were the exception rather than the rule, they then had a limited life expectancy and so surviving parents made do and mended.

We've survived that and we'll survive a few lesbians raising children.

One of the above mentioned old duffers is an archbishop. So is the other one.

At least one of them has some life experience to draw upon in pontificating (ahem) and presuming to comment on the normal flawed lives lived by ordinary people. The other is a decrepit celibate who doesn't have the faintest idea what he's talking about.

Back on track

What I will have in my hands at the end of the month is a very rough first draft but it should be complete. Anyone paying attention would notice that the word count has shot up because I was able to take a big chunk out of the cheese yesterday and I've taken another sizeable chunk out this morning already. That effort took me over the halfway mark and close to the point at which I'm on the home straight in the final third where I can unravel and re-ravel and do all the things I've been itching to do since the very start.

The polishing work might have to wait until the new year, but I will have a complete work to bring out and dust off as an alternative to the maths degree I was contemplating a couple of months ago, or even in addition to it. I just don't know how much I can take on, but I won't know unless I try so at least part of me is saying go for it, and to hell with housework. If the family don't care about clean and tidy, why should I?

Lemons

Being an Australian of significantly scottish ancestry I shall and indeed must say this twice: Cheating Bloody Fancy Dan Italian Footballers.

Cheating Bloody Italians...

And if that wasn't bad enough bloody Israel beat Russia and England are still in it which means we all have to endure more English chest beating and McLaren baiting and FA whipping and testosterone fuelled preposterousness.

And Christmas is coming.

This is all too horrible.

My favourite news story of the week

Yesterday the BBC was reporting that two elderly men in the state of Tobasco in Mexico, the last two speakers of their local indigenous language (one of 350 in Mexico) have had a falling out as a result of which they are no longer speaking to one another, thereby delivering the coup de grace to one more fine piece of of human creative output. It seemed funny in a rather tragic way, at the time.

The report included speculation that the origins of the argument were connected with the floods that recently devestated that part of Mexico.

Awkwardly today's BBC version is a refined version of the story, complete with input from an expert on Mexican indigenous languages, suggesting a more prosaic and less bathetic story. Turns out these two old codgers never were close and have little in common.

But congratulations to the BBC for (belatedly) injecting balance into the story.

Quickly

The reason for the relatively few posts this week should have been a consequence of serious word churning on my part; sadly that is not the case and after satisfactory first week progress things have almost ground to a halt right at the point when I should be enjoying myself most in a romp between the awkward business of setting things up and the tricky business of delivering the denouement.

I had budgeted for Senior Frustrated Novelist's departure, I hadn't banked on the Paper-Shuffler-in-Chief coming down with some bug and Being Away From The Office for the week. That's left me carrying the office, in the sense of getting done what normally takes the efforts of three people over a week of shifts running 6am to 9pm. These have been long and exhausting days of 4:30 wake up calls and drawn out evenings trying to persuade my exhausted body that I really should be going to bed at 9:00 to go to sleep.

It is too early to throw in the towel, next week might be a whole lot better, but at the moment I have quite literally lost the plot (and the character and motivation and tone and voice and ... ). Some time yesterday I hammered out enough words take me slightly over the 25,000 (half way) mark.

I'm not sure I'll be getting to 26k this side of Monday evening.

All the best reports have something in common

The thing they have in common is that you or I could essentially write them, without recourse to hours of tedious hearings or millions spent on research, junketing and the photocopying bill.

Australia's blessed National Audit Office has released such a report and its findings amount to the quite astounding non-news that the John Howard government's regional projects fund has been essentially nothing more or less than a means of ante-poll rewarding those who vote the Right Way.

For all their bucks invested in the investigatory process the Aussie Taxpayer has learned that there has been "political interference, disregard for rules and guidelines and a lack of transparency". Well gee, fancy that.

All the money spent on this exercise has produced the remarkable news that there was a "surge" in grant approvals just before the 2004 election date was announced. Would you have imagined it?

Emblematic of the general aura of maladministration exposed in the report is the behaviour of DeAnne Kelly, the then parliamentary secretary for regional services who, over a 51 minute period in the two hour period before the government assumed Pre-election caretaker status, displayed quite extraordinary and hitherto unheralded heroism in signing through sixteen grants to the total value of a rather nifty $3.5m. How awesome is that?

Bet it never crossed your mind that politicians could behave in such a manner. Thankfully though, we've got grossly overpaid, unelected relatively anonymous officials to junket about the country Club Class, stay in five star hotels and write hundreds of pages of drivel telling us all what we already knew and could have set out on the back of a fag packet in the room still left after all the health warnings are taken into account.

Road rage

The suspended sentence handed down to a bicyclist (with 'learning difficulties') who knocked over and killed another man while cycling at speed along a footpath has brought out the vituperative anti-cyclist lurking just beneath the skin of the average British non-cyclist.

According to the average enraged driver all bicyclists are law defying hooligans and a menace; which is rich coming from a bunch who seem to acquire a 'god'-complex the minute their little hands wrap themselves around a steering wheel and the foot begins to depress the accelerator pedal.

These are the people who think it perfectly normal and acceptable road behaviour to drive along the wrong side of a main road in order to park (facing the wrong way) on that side of the road. These are the people who don't properly confine their kids, dogs, fags, make-up, food, drink and most of all mobile phones while in control of a moving motor vehicle.

These are the people who dispense with the fine print of the rules of the road the minute the vital pass has been achieved. Thereafter they regard speeding a matter of honour and the great sin (and outrage) as being caught.

These are the people who treat road signs as advisories, use indicators and lights only haphazardly and as the mood takes them, and undertake, overtake and generally drive in an intimidating manner when it suits.

They run the local bookies and are perfectly prepared to run right up the back of a a mother cycling her child to school in their flash silver sports car and intimidate them to the point of getting off the road and dismounting (and waiting till she's had her way before resuming our own journey - on the road).

And if you do it again you cow I will put your registration number and other car details HERE. OK.

And then we'll all pay for her accommodation

Moira Ryan is a 69 year old woman who by her own admission is obese. On the other hand she has worked and paid the taxes that fund the National Health Service. That latter fact gives her the right to be an unhealthy weight and have the the hip replacement required by her paid for by everyone. Her local heath trust wouldn't take forward her case and operate until she'd lost a little of that unhealthy excess weight.

Did she diet and thereby save a few bob against a holiday she'd be better able to enjoy when lighter on her feet and with her hip duly replaced. No. She put her house at risk to pay to go to Malta to have the operation NOW! so she has a new hip that's better able to bear all that fat.

She's now pursuing the health service through the courts to recover the eight grand she forked out for her trip to the Med. and I rather hope she is successful as this on balance will be the lesser of two evils - the other being this fat woman next throwing herself on the mercy of the state for funded accommodation, her house having been repossessed.

Twist

Last week when I was in the first flow I was so in alt I was prepared to commit to turning around and in January and, all on my own, attempting the same thing with a second idea for a novel I've been kicking about for a while without ever getting serious about.

Now grim reality is setting in as I wade through the middle bit which has already exposed the false starting position and threatens to make the starting position unreachable. About four days after having my baby I was absolutely fired up and ready to go again. Then the happy hormones drained away and I was left wondering what the hell I'd gone and got myself into.

I can't wait for the end of the month so I can go back and weed out the crap which is a good 95% of what I am generating at the moment. And I can't hang about here all day moaning. I've got crap to write.

Local wild life

The cat has turned out to be a good mouser. Perhaps a local farm would be interested in him. I know cats catch things. I know they tend to catch things for the sake of it and have a nasty habit of not killing their catch quickly or bothering to eat what they catch when it eventually dies.
I object to the cat because he is mean spirited, which is mean spirited given the grim start he had in life. I can't help it, I can't like him.

Yet I accept him catching pigeons and littering the garden with their feathers, setting up camp on the neighbor's garden shed right above the nesting box they so kindly attached to it.

What I find difficult is coming downstairs and treading in entrails that are strewn across the carpet. I thought I had developed the knack of intercepting him as he brings these creatures in; I've succeeded numerous times in liberating field mice and birds he's brought home.

I failed last night; he came in with a mouse clamped between his jaws. I was at the far side of the room and he knew what I would attempt so he backed out through the cat flap. Bye bye mouse. I just wish you hadn't squealed so pitifully on the way out.

Now the nasty little rat faced interloper is curled up on My Bed, looking like butter wouldn't melt. Want a cat? Excellent mouser. Free to Good Home. Must be prepared to collect. [Neutered male, vaccinated.] Even his cute girlfriend can't save him. And if her arse gets any bigger she won't be fitting throught the catflap.

As if that wasn't enough we're heading for an almighty row over things. It is bad enough that he drinks himself legless every night. One night this week I came home to find the house wide open and the offspring fending for herself. He hasn't cooked her a proper evening meal all week, she hasn't had any help with her homework. He regards his parental responsibilities as being met when he escorts her from the gate back to the house in the afternoon.

Once he's settled her in front of the television with a microwaved meal on the table in front of her he is at liberty to return to his Ricard or his vodka, fags and book outside. I suspect that they don't exchange a word from one hour to the next, then he shuffles her off to bed without a wash and without brushing her teeth.

I suppose I would be castigated for giving up my job, flinging him out and throwing myself on the mercy of the state, when obviously this current arrangement of us being married and working creates a so much superior environment in which to raise a child.

I'm depressed and words are not flowing, or at least not useful ones. I'm going have to work myself up into a temper and get out of this.

Puddings

Senator Sprig of Holly has led the rank and file of the Christmas Pudding Party back into the fray with a plausibility-busting deal on preference distribution in the Queensland senate election that offers up a consequential prospect of a return to Australia's parliament of that reeky pantomime dame Pauline Hansen.

Just when this election had grown rather stale the floral decoration has been driven onto the back foot by this decision, and as a diversionary tactic he has launched a fairy tale economic policy platform centred around making petrol (gas) cheaper by delivering a substantial cut in petrol tax.

According to Senator Sprig "It is irresponsible not to cut petrol tax … it helps people make ends meet and … puts downward pressure on inflation." It is also obviously economic suicide not to chop down every last tree, dam every last river and dig up every last tonne of saleable mineral.

The Christmas Pudding party is locked in mortal combat with equally fringe and narrow interest parties such as the Fern Friendlies: according to the Puddings the tree huggers are 'extreme' and have 'extreme policies' and are possessed of a soft policy on drugs. It seems finally even on the lunatic fringes of public debate it is recognised as no longer astute politicking to grub for single digit volumes of votes by demonising single mothers and poofters, so the Green Party has been co-opted to fill the void.

Sadly with all the excitement of squeezing the Friendlies into frame the good Senator then went completely over the top.

His logic escapes me; the Fern Friendlies would have to be possessed of potent magic that, out of government and without influence, their proposed policy on drugs has yet created a culture of drug delinquency within the Australian Football League. Sadly I think it is Senator Sprig who is away with the Fairies.

Missed that one

Gratuitous rudeness alert. New Zealand's rugby league team turned up, sort of. England, and are now gone with tails between legs. Oops.

Hot on the heals of embarrassment in the world cup of the union version comes abject humiliation. In the third, final and quite completely pointless match in the three match series the England team required only a half to defeat the Kiwis; they chose to sit out the first half and watch the sheep shaggs prove that they do actually have a nodding acquaintance with the rudiments of the 'game'.

Stupid game though. Played by Sydney-types and therefore getting its first, last and only mention here.

The thing is insatiable. It demands and it demands and tonight I am too damn tired. I have to be up at some uncivilised hour, in order to be at work at 7:00. This is obscene. What possessed me to agree to this?

I shall be too tired tomorrow afternoon as well. That's two entire days of not wrestling with the lumpen creature. I have a clear run on Monday and Tuesday, but I thought that this time a week ago only for the offspring to be felled by one or other of the viral illness doing the rounds, it being that time of year.

That said the brief period at the keyboard this morning was sufficient to get me over the psychologically important 20k mark as it puts the half way stage in clear sight. The home stretch is likely to be a nightmare of reining in, but at least I shall be able to feel the thin buckle and submit to my will.

I'm too tired to have a proper moan. I'm off to bed.

I read other people's blogs, and the list I read is not confined to those for which links are provided. I browse other people's work out of curiosity. I return to those that challenge or reaassure, entertain or in some way touch me.

I write this one as a form of release, albeit well disguised a lot of the time. Things are less than absolutely wonderful, and it wouldn't be a good idea to put the less than wonderfulness of things on paper, for paper has a tendency to finish up in the wrong hands. I'm not well placed at present to allow things to get out of control. So I ditch the baggage on the ether and soldier on.

Well a couple of those who write and whose work I read have meditated very recently, each in their own way, on the morality and danger of blogging. So now I have something else to worry about.

It will be three weeks on Sunday. Some really good words, though not enough, have flown from my finger tips this morning. After this brief interlude I must return to that work; the weekend will be practically a wash out, so I must make an impression on my target today.

Not (yet) drowning, waving

Holy somewhere a long way from Toledo, Batman. The excitable man on the radio is talking about catastrophic flooding down the east coast, taking in Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent.

Have a good look at the map and see if you can spot the rather big and in parts quite heavily populated problem with this.

Hint? It is there, between Suffolk and Kent. It has three rather largish rivers either forming a boundary or passing through it.

We live on one of these flaming rivers. Some of the more vulnerable folk of Yarmouth are being evacuated, those left behind are fighting over the last few sandbags in town. Sandbags?

We haven't been evacuated. We haven't seen a delivery of sandbags. If I'm not here tomorrow you will know why - I'm a corpse bobbing up and down in the North Sea, tossed hither and thither at the whim of tide, current and wind.

Must do more words.

Change of heart

The London Assembly has passed a vote of confidence in Ian Blair. Oh dear. Now I'm having to reconsider my position. I have written No Words this evening, which is very naughty of me. Pollies are obviously suffering a hang over after the early week's excesses and are not saying anything stupidly interesting. They are being even less fun than usual. This is unreasonable behaviour, which is just typical of our elected representatives.