Catmachine

Another interlude that takes place during the novel I started during 2012's NaNoWriMo containing some more of Wendi's backstory. January 1990 After a while the appeal of working in the record shop began to wane for Wendi. She earned little more than she would have by signing on and had only taken it in the first place to get the Restart people off her back. The free promos from the record company reps were all that kept her going - and she wouldn't be able to get them anywhere else - but finding the money to go to gigs and to rehearse with the nascent band her and Peter were putting together was becoming difficult. In the end SoundStore made the decision for her. A new contract from senior management came round which all staff were obliged to sign. One clause said that all promos received from reps were " the property of SoundStore Ltd " which was a bit of a coincidence given that one of the senior managers had just set up a mail order rare records se...

Sometimes it seems as if the world we now live in at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a particularly awful one. There are so many things going on that are simply wrong and make you see red. But don't worry - if you're feeling this at all it means that you're alive and furthermore do have a sense of morality. At least you're not giving up and at least you care. Of course having discovered that you do care, the problem can be where to start. To which of these causes - all of which are valid - do you offer your support? There are so many of them. OK, so you pick the one that means the most to you, the one whose underlying injustice brings your blood to boiling point the quickest. You do what you can for it whether this means donating your own money or your own time. You do what you can to raise awareness. But most important of all, you always remember that you are not doing this to feel better about yourself. You are doing this to fight injustice and if y...

Disclaimer: given that this blog entry is about the correct use of English there will no doubt be a large number of typos and incidences of misuse. One thing you hear a lot about these days is the so-called bastardisation of the English language . These complaints take many forms but seem to boil down to a couple of main griping areas: The old complaining about the way the young use language (thinly veiled youth envy) The British complaining about the way Americans use language (thinly veiled xenophobia). Language is a constantly evolving system. Two key ingredients of evolution are vast numbers and swiftly changing environments in which those numbers exist. The population explosion of the past fifty years combined with the way information and communications technology has enabled an exponential growth of the number of channels via which language can be used and transmitted mean that English is probably evolving far faster now than it ever has before. However the existence of me...

There is simultaneously something sad and laughable about the sight of redundant technology being thrown away. These old plastic and metal boxes, most of them that off-white grey that was so popular for a while, tumbled together in a skip or a dustbin. How clunky and huge they seem, how ridiculously inefficient and pathetically low in capacity. That shoebox-like cabinet that used to sit on someone's desk with a total storage of 100MB, an amount of data that would now fit into something the size of a toenail clipping ten times over. How far we have come in such a relatively short space of time. And yet in a way this old tech is also oddly exciting. When we look at it we remember how not that long ago such a thing was an object of desire. That it epitomised bold new developments in technology that seemed so groundbreaking and enviable. That hand-held scanner that I was so desperate for in the early nineties that looked like a bizarre hybrid of a torch and a miniature vacuum cl...

The most annoying thing about buying a new jacket is the way that the pockets are all sewn up. I mean, why? Pockets are there for a reason and it's a very good one. You need to carry stuff around with you. There's always the wallet and the keys and the phone and not to mention the two separate travel-card holders - one for Brighton and one for London (I have to keep them separate in case the Key and the Oyster card interfere with each other somehow). These are the bare minimum of pocket essentials. Sometimes I might want to carry a USB stick, a padlock, a pen or a Kindle around with me. Which is why it's nonsensical that they sew up the pockets. It just means I have to spend an annoying ten minutes undoing what they probably had to spend an annoying ten minutes doing. It's pointless. Every time something like that happens it's another victory for our old enemy entropy. Some would argue that pockets are sewn ...

There's something a bit creepy about logging onto Facebook these days. What's happening, Chris? I can't help imagining these messages from the system in the voice of Douglas Rain, otherwise known as Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey . How are you feeling, Chris? However, it's not the Halness of these pronouncements that's creepy. It's that they share something with Hal's mode of speech which is a major contributory factor to what made him frightening in the first place. Just what do you think you're doing, Chris? Inappropriate use of a person's name. Of course there's nothing wrong with calling people by their name when saying hello or trying to attract their attention. However, once engaged in a conversation - either electronic or physical - I find it increasingly uncomfortable if the other person keeps using my name. It's almost like being inappropriately touched. The thing is, Chris... Yes, I know you're talkin...

A Christmas interlude that takes place during the novel I started during this year's NaNoWriMo . It's not part of the novel and not written in November so is probably more of a NoNoNoNo... Saturday 25 December 1993 Wendi opened her eyes to find herself lying on the sofa in front of the muted television. On screen Noel Edmonds was wearing an obscene jumper and talking on the telephone. She felt about for the remote and the cathode ray tube relaxed into inactivity with an electric sigh. The sun was shining through the large glass window and against the odds - it had been pissing down the night before - it was a nice day. She wrapped the blanket around herself and stood up. The penthouse flat was bare and undecorated. The record company had purchased it only recently and were intending it to be used by the more successful members of the talent whilst in London. Whilst Beam certainly were flavour of the month in some quarters they were hardly the most lucrative act on the...

The other week I was delighted to discover, via the medium of a #FollowFriday tweet , that Claudia Brücken was on Twitter. Claudia Brücken! One of my favourite singers from the 1980s. Now whilst any regular readers of this blog may already have noticed from earlier entries that during the 1980s I was a big fan of Toyah Willcox, there were of course many other bands that tickled my fancy during that era. One such band was Propaganda . Picture the scene. It was 1984 and the pop world was in thrall to Frankie Goes to Hollywood as they bestrode the charts like Liverpudlian colossi thanks to the skilled media manipulation of their label, ZTT Records .  It was impossible not to be aware of the furore and whilst I as a 19 year old goth might have liked to scoff at the blatant commercialism, I couldn't help but be caught up in the hype. Despite what people now might remember, Frankie were not the only band signed to this cunning outfit.  Propaganda were also on the roster and...

One of the advantages of living where I do is that it is relatively easy to go out in London in the evening during the week and get back in time to get a reasonable amount of sleep before going to work the next day. All very convenient but one downside of this practice is that it means sometimes I have to catch one of the late trains back. One of the Drunk Trains. We've all experienced the Drunk Trains. The ones that run after the pubs and theatres have turned out and as a result are full of people whose social skills have been dulled by the liberal application of alcohol to the brain cells. Now I like a drink as much as the next person, but even when I have been drinking I don't take it out on other people. I don't start trying to guilt trip them into engaging me in inebriated conversation with an undercurrent of menace lest they appear a humourless party pooper. I don't, I would hope, turn in to an Aggressive Drunk. A lot of people do though, which is why the dr...

Whilst I realise that the frequency of my blog entries is not what it once was, November 2012 turned out to be the first month for several years that I didn't write a single entry whatsoever. This wasn't due to my laziness or me spending too much time partying hard to be able to put finger to keyboard. Quite the opposite. Despite the lack of blogs, it's quite possible that I wrote more in November 2012 than I ever have in any single month in my life. I am talking about NaNoWriMo . NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and is an annual affair. It's basically a challenge - write a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and 30. When I first heard of it back in 2009 (when the project was already ten years old) my first thought was that it was impossible. An absurd thing to hope to achieve in one month whilst still trying to hold down a day job and live a normal life. This year I felt differently. Not only had I got into the habit of daily writing via the si...

Anyone who has seen any of my social media streams will know that every so often I spent some time proselytising the website 750words.com . For anyone who doesn't know it's an aid to writing, a kick-start to the productivity. It taps into the addictive power of social media to force the user to write at least seven hundred and fifty words every day in pursuit of badges and an impressive streak. Since I first started using it in December 2010 I have filled it in every day religiously. Even though the site does now include the facility to schedule time off I am too superstitious about the whole process to make use of it. Suppose it doesn't work? Over the last 700 or so days I have variously used it to finish a novel, put together blog entries, write short stories and ramble incoherently. When doing the latter I often completely forget about what I'd written and so if revisiting the archive (not something I do very often) I can often be taken com...