Voicing my dissatisfaction

This is one of those posts that I sometimes feel like writing but seldom do, partly because they seem unfeasibly self-obsessed, and partly because I have no idea what the conclusion will look like and I don’t often enjoy sailing out into uncharted musings. So this isn’t the long-promised final post about Creationism (about which I have, frankly, only just remembered); nor is it a post that is currently under construction with a Texan guest blogger on the pros and cons of private gun ownership: this is a post on the idea of finding one’s voice.

Which is, in itself, a fairly highbrow way of saying ‘figuring out who you want to sound like’. Actually, that’s only the first stage. The real trick is managing to sound like yourself. This, I think, I have more-or-less achieved, insofar as I am happy that if you hear me speaking in conversation and read this blog you would be able to see both as the product of the same linguistic stylings. My problem is, I sometimes wish I didn’t sound like me.

I know that on the list of world problems it’s at the bottom. To be honest, it’s near the bottom of the list of things that I personally ought to be concerned about in my own life too. Nevertheless, it niggles sometimes, like a nagging suspicion that perhaps you left the house with the tap still dripping – no big deal, but annoying all the same.

This is a question of style. (Yes, all former students of English, we’re going to try and pin down that notorious mythical beast). My style, I acknowledge, is fairly formal, sometimes quite arch, and with a tendency toward the mandarin (and the facetious). There’s a reason why I find the Screwtape Letters easy to imitate stylistically (though the theology requires a lot more thought!). There’s a reason why the Heckler articles in the Gaudie were readily identifiable as being written by me, and why the editor felt the need to issue a blanket ban on anyone else using the term ‘Dear Readers’. You can, I think, tell it’s me when I’m writing to you.

However, there are other people whose writing style appeals to me much more readily than my own. Neil Gaiman is a prime example of this. I love his blog. Perhaps I am not being fair to myself when I complain that my blogging is not of the same standard as that of a world-famous bestselling author. But this isn’t about quality, or not exactly: this is about (I now coin the word) addressmanship. The ability to relax and informally imply that you and the person to whom you are writing are actually having a private conversation that’s every bit as relaxed and happy as conversations between friends ought to be.

My favourite Twitterer, and for the same reason, is Nathan Fillion. He’s funny and warm and talks to you exactly like that good friend of yours who drops you a text to let you know they’ve found something cool that you will enjoy.

This kind of thing crops up in some fairly unexpected places. A while ago, a Google search on something entirely unrelated to anything salacious left me on the Tumblr blog of, as it subequently turned out, a porn actress. And in it she was funny and nice and when there then came a picture of her with no clothes on the disconnect was all the more pronounced, because you were forcibly reminded that this was a nice person, not merely a nice body, and I for one felt desperately uncomfortable. (This kind of thing is referred to on one of my favourite websites, TVtropes, as ‘Mood Whiplash‘.)

There are newspaper columnists whose columns I like for the same reason. Victoria Coren (Giles Coren’s sister and Alan Coren’s daughter) is a highly educated and witty individual whose columns – particularly the one in which she described her experience meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury – can, on occasion, make me laugh out loud and grab the person nearest to me and read out the funniest bits for their edification too.

This kind of personable blogging/tweeting has echoes closer to home too. Tom’s blog is an endless source of cheerful distraction; Jo’s blog (though more sporadic even than mine) makes me happy too.

I don’t want to make this into a moan or a whine or a whinge or a rant. (This is partly why I have been eager to accentuate the positive in the examples I’ve cited, and why other blogs/columns I enjoy a great deal – such as Charlie Brooker’s – aren’t mentioned above, as they rant far better than I do). I just wonder why it is the case that I’m not very good at being as cheerfully informal as the people I speak of above. If you have any ideas or suggestions, answers please on a postcard, or in the comments below.

G

Your moment of Zen for today:

A small, formal figure

I’m not grown up. I’m just tall.

It was my birthday recently. I am in the last year of my mid-twenties (anyone suggesting I am more superannuated than that will be wrestled to the ground and then irretrievably strapped to a zimmer frame, just to make the point crystal clear). So I am not yet facing the catastrophic decrepitudes of old age, although from what I understand, aging is not dissimilar to updating iTunes: once it’s done, there’s no going back, even though some things may no longer work in the manner to which you are accustomed (or at all), and even though you preferred the earlier version, which was easier to use. Fortunately, all that is in the future (I’m not happy that that is what awaits me, but better later than now). For now, the only real differences between me and my fourteen-year-old self are that I am taller, my voice is deeper, and I am rather better at kissing.

I still tend to think about the same sorts of things. Of course my opinions have been modified by my (slightly) greater maturity, but the subjects on which I hold opinions are more or less the same subjects I used to think about when I was still a teenager. I was forcibly reminded of this a couple of days ago. Just before Christmas, I was in a car accident where someone skidded into the back of me, damaged my car (and me – ouch), but immediately admitted liability, so all repairs and so forth are being paid for out of his insurance. This is great, but inevitably, there are terms and conditions attached. Now, the woman on the phone who called me from his insurance company to go over the details did read through them, but about halfway through her discourse I got distracted, got confused, and consequently zoned out of the conversation almost entirely. I was only brought back to it when she concluded, saying “So, Mr. Browne, is that clear to you?”

I’m afraid I chickened out of acknowledging my ignorance. What I actually said was “Yes, thank you, that all sounds entirely reasonable.” Had I been entirely honest, what I would have said would have been “Actually, I missed the last half of that explanation, because I was trying to decide who would win in a fight between Batman and James Bond.”

I may be 6’4″ with greying hair, and therefore look like an adult, but a significant proportion of my disposable income still goes on toy trains, for heaven’s sake. I’m not grown up, I’m just tall, and it’s astounding the number of people who listen to me talk pish and assume, on the basis of appearance or vocabulary alone, that I know what I’m talking about. Partly it’s because my life is circumscribed by academia, which as a vehicle for one’s career is not dissimilar to a balloon, insofar as it is mostly supported by vast amounts of hot air. Partly it’s because I know longer words than the average teenager and therefore can give an entirely spurious impression of erudition. But mainly it’s a question of bearing, and that is something teenagers don’t have but that you develop as you get older.

But even here I may be deluding myself. I’m not sure that what I have is ‘bearing’. What I may in fact possess, given the aforementioned 6’4″-ness, is an ‘ability to loom’. That’s not presence; that’s just size.

It’s like the deal with teachers and authority. If a class realises that there are thirty of them, and only one overworked and harried adult supervising them, then that class will very quickly take control. It doesn’t happen because the class usually doesn’t realise just how tenuous that teacher’s control really is. Exactly the same thing happens in society at large. The estimated 2009 population of the UK was 61,113,205 (a suspiciously precise figure, but there you go). The number of police officers in the UK at the same time was only 165975. Even if you add a rough 140,000 support staff (including special constables, traffic wardens, community officers, etc.) you still are left with a mere 306,000 law-enforcement officials. Which means they’re outnumbered nearly 200 to 1. Were there to be a revolution in the UK odds like that would pretty much guarantee victory to the civilian population. Civil authority is a remarkably tenuous thing, but it happens because we, who are under that authority, choose to invest it with sufficient command to enable it to enforce its domination. But heaven help the police officer who screws that one up. There’s a great scene in the film ‘V for Vendetta’ where a policeman shoots a young girl and then tries to hide behind his badge, only to realise that the symbol is not going to protect him against the gathering mob armed with shovels and pokers.

I guess my point is that as I get older I become increasingly aware that ‘control’ or ‘authority’ is an increasingly theoretical and intangible commodity. I have written about this before, in discussing why it is that so many people enjoy building model railways, and I have touched upon it elsewhere, when discussing Fantasy literature – the common thread being that of building secondary worlds over which the creator (author/modeller) has unquestionable authority (there is a bigger debate to be had about ‘the unquestionable authority of the author’, and I’m aware that my phrase is demonstrably untrue it most contexts, but not this one – I will return to this at some point, and we can have the discussion then).

I didn’t intend this to be a morbidly self-deprecating post, and I hope it isn’t, but more and more I understand the overwhelming sense of loss that Yeats felt when he wrote that ‘things fall apart, the centre does not hold’. Of course Yeats was almost pathologically obsessed with growing old – an obsession I like to think I do not share – but birthdays, especially when they follow fifteen minutes from the end of New Year’s Day, do force one to consider how things are changing, and whether they are falling apart.

I don’t think I am, and on that upbeat note I will finish this post. I leave you with this thought – getting old encourages these sorts of recollections. Failing to grow older doesn’t encourage any sort of reflection at all – it’s hard to be introspective in a pine box. So overall, if you’re reading this, you’re winning. Why not celebrate?

Your moment of zen for today, combining the old with the new:

 

Brand-new Peppercorn A1 'Tornado' is ready for the off with a mail train at Perdido Street Station

A Disaster in the Making

One of the oldest Heckler articles, this one still makes me smile. Very little in the story is exaggerated. No, really. I am this poor a cook.
Can’t Cook or Won’t Cook? Until recently I had never been able to decide to which camp I belonged. I would love to be able to declare with airy nonchalance that there is nothing in the world I enjoy quite so much as the preparation of my signature dish, Provencal pheasant stuffed with handmade herb and red onion stuffing and garnished with fresh quails’ eggs swimming in a delicate white wine sauce – but I can’t. Not only because I haven’t the faintest idea where to start – where in Aberdeen does one purchase a pheasant? – but also because my student budget would never stretch to such luxurious largesse. I can, on the other hand, boil an egg. This is a capability of absolutely no use to me whatsoever as I am violently allergic to eggs.

I can also make Fifteens. Fifteens, if there are any of you out there who have never had the indescribable pleasure of being formally introduced to the things, are an apparently Irish bun. That is, everyone in my home country of Northern Ireland knows what a fifteen is, whereas (tragically) not everyone over here appears to have heard of them, a convincing argument supporting the theory that Scotland is only a semi-civilised nation not yet ready for the responsibilities of devolved government. (Neither is Northern Ireland, by the way: every time we try it it gets confiscated, like an ocarina in a biology lesson). Fifteens are sweet, nut free and probably not good for you. To make them you require fifteen marshmallows, fifteen glace cherries, fifteen digestive biscuits, a tin of condensed milk and approximately half a blizzard of desiccated coconut shavings.

I tried to make them recently. I say tried because it rapidly became apparent that I was manifestly of the Can’t Cook brigade.

The first thing to do is pummel the digestive biscuits into fragmentary submission. Easily the best way to do so is to bung them into a plastic bag and crush them with a rolling pin while making the noise of a steamroller. (The noise isn’t strictly necessary.)

This was when my first difficulty made itself apparent. I had no rolling pin. Hortensia, my sister, suggested a bottle but the only one to hand was one which had until the night before contained Jack Daniels. Since it was square it was not a lot of use until she suggested I stop trying to roll it and just whack it off them. I fixed her with a withering glare. She is training to become a nurse. How, I rumbled belligerently, would she like it if the bottle smashed and my fingers were sliced neatly from my hand in the process?

I shall not relay her reply to you, Dear Reader, for fear of the ensuing damage to your purity of thought and substantial expansion of your biological vocabulary.

Hortensia stalked into her bedroom with all the queenly hauteur of a matriarchal preying mantis and I wandered into the living room, returning with the Norton Shakespeare Anthology. It had not been a lot of use to me in second year – I don’t think I even opened the thing – but it was probably the heaviest usable item in the flat. With it I pounded the biscuits for several minutes. By the time I opened the bag the contents looked rather like an aerial view of Dresden after a particularly trying night.

Since this was what I needed I poured the bag into a bowl and added the entire tin of condensed milk. I took up my wooden spoon and set to stirring with gusto. Rather too much gusto, I realised, as I flicked approximately half the concoction over my face and clothing.

I can be a stubborn individual when the fit takes me. I had a job to do and by Toutatis I was going to do it. Pausing only to take off my glasses, which left me with a sort of horizontal figure-eight splash-free zone around my (by now slightly crazed) eyes, I creamed the ingredients into a kind of gooey mess of rather smoother consistency than that with which I was so liberally coated.

I chopped the cherries and marshmallows into thirds and added them to the mix. Owing to the fact that my concrete-encrusted glasses were lying abandoned on top of the microwave I very nearly added the tips of my fingers as well but further disaster was narrowly averted. More stirring ensued.

I then spread greaseproof paper on the worktop and liberally sprinkled it with coconut. Then I sneezed, causing me briefly to feel like a figurine in one of those novelty snow-globes, and forcing me to throw the paper and coconut out and do everything all over again. I was not helped by the fact that some of the drifting coconut had adhered to me and I now resembled someone lackadaisically tarred and feathered, albeit with entirely edible components. I poured the mix carefully onto the paper, wrapped the resulting log with it (thus pressing the coconut onto every side) and set it in the fridge to set. This is Irish cookery. Instead of heating anything you chill it till it gives in and does what you want.
Finally, unable to move any facial feature due to the Nestlé cement which so thoroughly caked them (almost literally), I made my way to the shower a sad and embittered young man.

Dear Reader, I may be, by reason of incompetence, of the Can’t Cook brigade, but my heart belongs now and forever to the camp of Won’t Cook.

Your moment of Zen for today:

The Pannier Tank struggles manfully (not unlike myself) over nearly-insurmountable obstacles.

Moans, Groans and Wines

An article first published in the Gaudie. I am not as alcoholically-minded as this would have you believe!

I, Dear Reader, am the Heckler. I live an exotic life filled with glamour and excitement – and then I wake up and realise that I’m still a student. This means I am impoverished, permanently facing deadlines and living beyond my means, which consist of an overdraft. It also means that I spend some of my non-existent money on alcohol.

Spirits are easy to get the hang of, and so are lagers and ales, but the terminology on the backs of wine bottles is almost incomprehensible. So, in the knowledge that this is an area in which the benefits of my experience may actually be beneficial, I offer you my wisdom.

WHITE
The only wine you are likely to be offered at a Klan meeting. Nick Griffin’s personal favourite.

RED
The colour the Klan chief will go when you ask him why he holds his meetings at an accident black spot.

ROSÉ
An indecisive wine for indecisive people, I think.

RATHER CHEEKY
One glass will have you flat on your back singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”

VERY CHEEKY
Uncorking the bottle will have you flat on your back singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”

NUANCED AROMA
This smells odd and we don’t know why.

FINELY NUANCED AROMA
This smells odd and we think we do know why.

£1.95
The perfect gift for your mother-in-law. Best served on chips.

FINE BOUQUET
Best offered to a loved one only if concealed within a huge bunch of flowers.

CHEAP AND CHEERFUL
Part A is absolutely true. Part B is woefully inaccurate.

SUBTLE HINTS OF…
A vineyard worker dropped his packed lunch into the vat and we were unable to recover it before it contaminated everything.

ENJOY WITH FRIENDS
You will shortly require a support network.

NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED
We are defending the indefensible.

SERVE CHILLED
May develop complex bacteriological cultures or, in extreme cases, explode, at room temperature.

BEST SERVED WITH RED MEAT, WHITE MEAT, SEAFOOD OR PASTA DISHES
Anything to distract from the actual taste of the wine.

ENJOY RESPONSIBLY
Don’t blame us, you raving alcoholic.

A STRONG INFUSION OF…
Don’t say we didn’t try to warn you.

A WONDERFUL NOSE
A working sense of smell may be an active disadvantage in appreciating this wine.

RICH
You cannot afford this bottle.

FRUITY
Suitable for consumption in a certain type of bar.

RICH AND FRUITY
Suitable for consumption by Peter Mandelson.

WAXY
This wine’s active ingredient is tallow.

ELEGANT
You are not the sort of person who can get away with drinking this wine. This wine is reserved exclusively for ambassadorial receptions, and is best served alongside a mountainous platter of Ferrero Roche.

BOSKY
Absolutely chock-full of bosk.

FULL-BODIED
You will be if you keep drinking this stuff.

SCREWCAPPED
A suitable wine for the fifth bottle of the evening – that point when corkscrews can unexpectedly turn on you and become utterly lethal instruments.

FAINTLY CHEESY
See ‘Subtle Hints Of…’, above.

DRY
This bottle is in fact empty.

BONE-DRY
This bottle is not only empty but has been buried in the Sahara for the last seventy years.

OFF-DRY
This bottle is still damp to the touch, but what remains is only drinkable if you have the moisture-gathering abilities of a cactus.

RIPE
Your language and your jokes will be if you keep drinking it at this rate.

CHARDONNAY
A wine almost irretrievably sullied through giving its name to a character on Footballers’ Wives.

MATURE
We’d forgotten all about these old, sub-standard barrels, enabling us to market them for a king’s ransom.

SURPRISINGLY MATURE
Aged beyond its years with a timely infusion of anti-freeze.

A WELL-KEPT SECRET
Everyone’s agreed: this wine is almost irredeemably hideous. Its one potential saving grace is that it is really excellent for cleaning silverware.

…WITH REAL CLASS…
If you have seen this wine being drunk on a council estate at any time, we want to know about it.

ROBUST
14.5% alcohol. Let the good times roll.

INTENSE
20% alcohol or better. Happy days are here again.

Today’s zen:

27xx Pannier Tank drifts through the marshalling yard, with Bert and Harry not seeming too fussed about getting anywhere on time...

Lucy, the Great Escapod

Dear Reader, today I’m going to tell you about the day I fell in love with Lucy. She lived in Portaferry, Northern Ireland, and though I only worked there with her for a short time…it was enough. She won me over with her don’t-give-a-damn attitude and her breezy contempt for the rules. Lucy had sass oozing out of every pore, legs that went all the way up and huge liquid eyes that melted every protest you could have thought of against working with her.

And there were plenty you could have levelled. Lucy was as temperamental as an old Skoda. Her rages were fearsome to behold and she was not averse to tearing a strip off you if the mood took her. When you saw the colour rising, it was time to give her her space. I got to know her well enough to try and repair her home, which was far beyond decrepit – it was actively rotting. She shared with two others, Mike and Francesca, but there were no doubts in anyone’s mind as to who was the boss – Lucy, through sheer force of character, ruled the roost.

The problem lay with the fact that the roost they shared was only six feet by two. Lucy was an octopus, and she had clearly learned far too much from Richard Attenborough. She was the Big X of octopodes, and she was continually frustrated by the limitations of her domain. As you walked past in the morning she would jet effortlessly alongside you, her tentacles trailing, as streamlined as a catwalk model in a ball-gown. If she was feeling particularly affectionate she would spread herself in a star shape across the glass of the aquarium and show her desperation for your company. She was utterly beguiling.

On the fateful day, the day when I realised I was lost, Tamara, Bob and I set to cleaning the tank. At that time Lucy, Mike and Francesca lived in an aquarium the backing of which was comprised of chunks of driftwood, mimicking the supports of many of the jetties found in Strangford Lough, the natural habitat of the Lesser Octopus. Driftwood looks great for a few weeks, but then it starts to rot. It goes black and disintegrates. Ink is easier to see through than water full of dissolving timber. In consequence, Lucy and her companions were having a hard time of it.

I had only been on the job a few days. Tamara, as senior keeper, was undisputed queen of Exploris. Exploris is Northern Ireland’s only public aquarium, in which they keep examples of most of the species of marine life found in Northern Irish waters. Tamara knew them all, their individual quirks and eccentricities, and detested them all on a basis both cordial and indiscriminate. It was Tamara who convinced me that cuttlefish like to be tickled under their chin (cuttlefish have no chin), which resulted in my being drenched with ink when I tried to stroke one on its belly. It was Tamara who, on my first day at work, set me to gutting squid for four hours.

But back to the tale. As the three of us plucked chunks of rotten wood from the black waters of the tank, Lucy and her cohorts investigated the small crate in which they had taken up temporary residence. We pumped fresh seawater in continually and the excess slopped over the side…as did Lucy. With the scent of freedom wafting over her suction cups (octopuses smell with their arms) she took one look at the further horizon and had it away on her pseudopods. She gathered herself up onto her tentacles and was out the door at a speed that had to be seen to be believed.

I was the only one to notice. Driftwood had long lost its thrall and I was desperate for distractions. I pointed out that one of our octopi was missing and was the undeserving recipient of (appropriately) salty language. The three of us abandoned our task and ran outside. Lucy didn’t have a death wish, as far as we knew, but she was a marine invertebrate dodging traffic in a carpark when we found her.

Tamara was utterly fearless when it came to dealing with her charges. She reached out, grasped Lucy (who by now was a little distressed – you could tell by the way she was cycling through colour schemes like a Dulux salesman with Multiple Personality Disorder) and was clung to with all the fervour of a lovesick limpet. Tamara carried her back to the crate, where she had the greatest difficulty in prising her loose, and restored Lucy to an environment more conducive to her general well-being. A few hours later she was back in her home, the matriarch of the marina.

I went and saw her again recently. She’s still healthy, still the boss…and still as ravishing as only an octopus in her prime can be.

The Zen of the Day:

The infamous Lucy herself, now in a sparkling, driftwood-free environment

Throw a drowning man a helpline

Good afternoon, Dear Readers, and after recovering muchly I bring you another tale of woe from the Heckler. I wrote this last Christmas, from the depths of Her Majesty’s Prison ‘Technology’…

I am no nerd (well…alright; I am, a little bit) but even I acknowledge the necessity of the evil that is a modern PC. I can print, e-mail, do most of the basics, and even set one up. I have basic skills. I can use computers as well as most people and better than quite a few. Which is why my father, the Elder Heckler, is such a source of computational anguish.

He has no grasp whatsoever. There are blind nomads in Tibet who regard wheels as suspiciously modern and unproven contrivances but who can nevertheless type faster than he can. I am, in consequence, the household’s expert. This is why I found myself setting up a brand-new PC over the Christmas holidays. At least, they began as holidays. They eventually turned into a kind of Compaq Gulag, where every movement was dictated by, and every moment filled with, adjustments to the new PC. The strength of my feelings is perhaps most clearly conveyed by my DVD choices over the three weeks I was home: Papillon, The Great Escape, The Mackenzie Break, The Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke, The Green Mile…

Things started off well enough. A brand-new Compaq PC, with Packard printer and Samsung flat screen monitor, was bought and taken home and the packages drooled over by those lost in a sense of newly possessive pride. Then I was left to it.

It took me 40 minutes to set things up. Of those 40 minutes, 25 were spent working out how on earth to connect the speakers. The sockets were hidden, the cable looked like no audio cable I had ever seen before and there wasn’t a whisper about them in any instruction booklet or on any diagram. Eventually, however, all was set and off we went, turning on the power for the first time.

Things went absolutely swimmingly until we actually tried to start doing things. First of all, connecting to the internet. “Dad, do you want an Anytime contract, where you pay a flat fee each month; a Broadband connection, which is far and away the best option; or a Pay As You Go deal, which no one uses anymore because it’s slow, unreliable, and potentially the most expensive of the three?”

Naturally, we paid up and went. So, to go with our new Wanadoo Pay As You Go account, I set up a new e-mail address. Which refused to let anyone but me use it, despite everyone using exactly the same user name and password (“Must be the woman’s touch,” remarked my brother, nastily, after it had refused him access three times in a row and then let me on without a quibble).

This, clearly, was utterly intolerable and so on to the helpline I went. “Roight you be, there, sorr,” came a rolling voice in an accent we might term Comedy Irish. “Now what’s the problem?”

I explained as best I could. “Roight, now let me just log on to your account meself…” Diarmuid said from the other end of the line. There was a longish pause, in which I could hear much tapping of keys, then “Bejazus, sorr, the whole system’s fecked at our end. Hauld onto your underpants a minute…” There was a rising babble of voices, in which the only discernible comment – and I promise you this is absolutely true – was “…it’s spreading disruption faster than a snapped corset…”, then Diarmuid came back on the line. “Roight, sorr, we’re rebooting our system, so you’d best be leaving it till after lunch.”

“By ‘rebooting’ you mean…?” I asked.

“That’s right, sorr, we’re giving it a damn good kicking. But in a technical way. Enjoy your lunch, now, sorr.”

After lunch I discovered that the internet was working as it should and so I started into the mammoth, two-hour downloading of the Norton components we needed. To while away the time I decided to watch a DVD.

Instant problems.

Back to the helpline.

“Let me show you how it doesn’t work,” I said, impressing even myself with my ability to show a DVD down the phone. I held the phone up to the speakers and treated the individual on the other end of the line to the sound of Mr & Mrs Smith played at half speed. “You see the problem?”

“Ah, dis na foine, foine ting,” he said, reaffirming my belief that I was asking IT advice of the Fon of Bafut. “Dis na bery bad DVD driver. But fix ’im in no time, in foif step.”

“Five steps?”

“Dis na way we go. Na firs’ ting, uninstall the CD/DVD drive. Ting two, kill black cock in white chalk circle under new moon in der middle der night. Ting tree, go have big drink an sit dere small time on ’e larse. Ting fo’, paint tower in na dead beef blood down na both way. Ting foif, reinstall na drivers and watch na bad movie.”

The next morning the DVD was working as it should have and all was well until that evening, when the Elder Heckler announced that he wanted to send an e-mail. Two minutes later he was out of the study. “Why can’t I send an e-mail?”

“You can’t?”

“There isn’t even a Send button on the Outlook toolbar. Look, I just want it set up the way it is at work.”

“I don’t know how it’s set up at work.”

“None of your cheek.”

Back to the helpline.

“Roight, sorr, what can I be helping you with this time?”

“I want to set up the computer to electrocute the next person to touch it.”

“Ah, the Brits is it, sorr?” asked my new-found friend.

“Seriously, though, how do I link Wanadoo into Outlook?”

“No problem sorr, let me just learn meself…” There was yet another longish pause, then Diarmuid came back. “My colleague says, draw a white chalk circle…”

So this my year, my only resolution is to leave computing strictly alone. I’m running out of chickens.

Here is your moment of Zen – the second Youtubed Starlingford movie:

(The music playing dimly in the background is Mazzy Star ‘Into Dust’ – a track I can’t recommend highly enough.)

No Worries

Good afternoon, Dear Readers, and after a week spent at home spent mostly ill, I have little to report – except that ‘low-grade viral infections’, the current medical catch-all, is clearly just a get-out phrase meaning ‘we haven’t the faintest clue what’s wrong with you’. I spent the week with low-grade nausea, shaky hands, a headache…all in all, not all that relaxing.

So, in lieu of the usual unfocused ramblings, I present to you an article I wrote a couple of years ago for the student newspaper here in Aberdeen, the Gaudie. The weather here at the minute reminds me of the situation as it was when I wrote this. Enjoy!

No Worries

I was speaking to an astonishingly pleasant individual the other day. A bright, attractive girl who was, through the blessing of a Southern Hemispherical birth, Australian. She was, and I feel I must be very, very clear on this point, not called Sheila. She was called Kimberley and she had the kind of figure that makes monks feel funny and renounce their vows at the earliest possible moment. (I nearly said ‘at their earliest possible convenience’ but it was the kind of figure that reduces monks to not giving a monkey’s about anyone’s convenience.)
Not that I got the opportunity to mention this to her. Our conversation was, though technically on a one-to-one basis, enjoyed in the context of a rather larger group of people. There is nothing like a large group of people to destroy any chance you feel you may have. Large groups of people are rubbish. I’m blaming this particular large group of people for my total failure to get off with Kimberley. I was witty and charming and, best of all, not Scottish, Welsh or English.
I know nationality was a factor because I was able to observe Kimberley’s reaction to being introduced to Scottish, Welsh and English people. She had a particular type of smile she used that was very different to the one directed at me. How I wish, Dear Reader, that the smile sent to me in all its genuine antipodean warmth was offered because of the aforementioned wit and charm. But I know it wasn’t; it was mine because I’m Northern Irish and can therefore be held in no way responsible for the lunatic punishment of sending people to Australia to pay for their crimes.

Compare, if you will, mainland Britain to Australia. One has endless blue skies, the Great Barrier Reef and some of the world’s best surfing; the other has rain. Endless, unceasing, permanent drizzly mists of damp insipid unpleasantness interspersed with sudden downpours that make horrendous the already ghastly business of living here. Lawrence Durrell called this ‘Pudding Island.’ “Think of all the times when absolutely everyone you know has the cold,” he said, and rapidly convinced his family that the only possible solution was to up sticks and move to Corfu.
The man was a genius. Kimberley knew this, which was why the mainlanders who came to talk to her got the benefit of a smile reserved in the rest of us for use exclusively on the inmates of institutions for the criminally insane. Deportation to Australia isn’t a punishment, it’s a reprieve. In Dorset there is an old stone bridge which still has a plaque bolted to it saying ‘the punishment for defacing this bridge is deportation.’ I’m amazed the structure is still recognisably a bridge. If I could remember exactly where it was I’d be making my way to the village tomorrow armed with spray paints and a sledgehammer and a pre-written confession.

But as of this moment I am still stuck in one of the greyest cities in Europe. The streets, the buildings, the sea, the sky, the faces…ye gods the gloominess. I once dated a German girl who spoke fairly fluent Spanish (arguments with her were exhausting; she had a tendency to leap from language to language like a serial bungee-jumper on a world tour of high bridges) and who had earned for herself the nickname ‘Señorita Multicolor.’ She liked bright colours and was therefore regarded with suspicion verging on hostility by our less-enlightened natives. “What the hell does she have to look happy about? She lost the war!” was clearly at the forefront of each grey mind. “Quick, pack her off somewhere she can’t do any damage. Try Australia.”

As it was she returned to Germany, which seemed every bit as unfair. So this week, I want to see as many students as possible dressing in defiance of the overcast, and I’d also like Kimberley to take me Down Under, please.

And oh yes – here it is, your moment of Zen:

Southern Steam as viewed across Starlingford's marshalling yard