What?

Oh, fresh new look? Yeah, I got tired of serif...

Sorted out the lists on the left, too. Who says I never do anything around here?

Status report:

OK, I kind of knew that this would be harder to maintain as time went on, and so it proves. But I still want to do it, regardless of whether anyone wants to read it, so I'm not going anywhere. The lists on the left are hopelessly out of date, and there's something about the Blogger interface which makes me not want to update them, but maybe I will soon. I've been working, and I've been holidaying, and my report below on writing projects is hopelessly optimistic, but I keep thinking that any minute now, some time will mysteriously appear.

But I bought a Frank Zappa CD, because the opening line of the novel-which-I'll-never-write (tentatively entitled 'Prague Autumn' for now) will be:

"I was in the bath when Frank Zappa called."

and I thought a little more research wouldn't hurt.

Also, I was in Turkey on Friday. Or Tottenham High Road. One of those two. It was quite intriguing, really. One of the things which everyone knows about urban Britain is the Asian corner shop (they're rather patronisingly known in the trade as the "Mr. Patels"). It seems, however, that in parts of North London, they re being supplanted by Turkish shops. The original generation of Asian traders - the ones who arrived in the mid-seventies - is reaching retirement age now, and their children have, in the main, loftier ambitions than selling news and groceries - especially given the state of the independent retail market, squeezed on all sides by multinational corporate grocers. So the shops are being sold off, and the new owners, in N17 at least, are Turkish. There was much Cola Turka - to nat's obvious confusion - together with Turkish confectionery (a lot of it strangely familiar...) and Turkish newspapers. I dimly remembered some Turkish words from all that time ago, but being able to say "The man in the street" has a limited value when you're trying to explain why you're doing software testing in the middle of an off licence called, confusingly, 'Highbury Wines'. (But you're in Tottenham, I complained. The owner - Turkish, naturally - pretended he hadn't heard it a thousand times before). And it was bloody cold, too.

So there we are, I'm still here, and I'm still writing. Sometimes.

Things...

Yes. I know this is now more sporadic than a particularly sporadic thing which doesn't happen very often any more (and frequently makes no real sense either). Look, we now have cats, which ought to be sufficient explanation.

So - I'm going to worry about The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (let's keep that hyphen in there, shall we?). Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast is a sound choice, and anyone other than Stephen Moore as Marvin just wouldn't have been right, but I'm worried about Arthur. Martin Freeman was responsible for one of the best TV moments of last year as The Office reached a near-perfect ending, and I know he can hit the right note of bafflement, but - well, Arthur's middle aged; he has to be. To my mind, one of the reasons that all the versions work so well is the first half-hour, where Arthur is a real person in an ordinary life who keeps having extraordinary things happen to him. There's a grounding there, and part of it is because Arthur's known Ford for so long. OK, I'm not going to obsess about this - I remember the shock of seeing Simon Jones in the TV version - it was the right voice, but he didn't look like Arthur - that worked out all right in the end, and I do fervently hope that this will as well. I just need to keep reminding myself that every version is different; the book is not the radio series (there's some good stuff in the radio series that never got reused); the radio series was not the record; the record was not the TV - you get the idea. This will be diiferent, and I think it will probably be OK. Just wish that Douglas Adams was still around to oversee things. Mind you, it'd never get finished.

Mars. Some of those pictures from Mars are just stunning. This one in particular is truly inspiring. I hear people asking "Why should we go to Mars?" Well, why shouldn't we? Yes, there are other priorities. Imagine if 10% of the world's defence budgets went into space exploration instead. Imagine if ...

Tell you what, instead of me imagining it, try reading Kim Stanley Robinson. Then you'll want to go to Mars.

I went for a walk today, tramping through the Bedfordshire countryside. I saw elephants. Yes, I did.

Watty goes all wistful...

I use Google every day. Often in an idle moment, I find myself typing in a long lost memory, just to see what there is on the net about it - I suspect I'm not alone. I mostly use it to find work-related stuff, of course, or to answer obscure questions (this morning's: "Who was in the Arsenal front line in that game against Lens at Wembley in whatever year that was?" Answer obtained in approximately 15 seconds or so). And sometimes, I wish I had Google to hand while walking along the street or driving to work, because that's when I remember things I want to look up. Things I can never bring to mind again when I'm sat in front of the screen.

Things like the Trigan Empire. Now I must think of the Trigan Empire 5 or 6 times a year, but never when I'm in a position to do anything about it. Until today. Today, I read an obituary for Don Lawrence, who did most of the artwork for the Trigans, and I hastened over here to look and see if any of it is online. And, unsurprisingly, I suppose, it is.

Sorry. I've lost you, haven't I? I don't consider myself an aficionado of the comic book, or the graphic novel. or whatever, but if I was, it would all be because of Don Lawrence and the Trigan Empire. Yes, I'm getting to the linky bit. The Trigan Empire was a comic strip in the late, lamented (by me, at any rate) "Look and Learn" magazine in the late 60s and early 70s. It was a neat amalgam of Romans, time travel and monsters, and it all took place on a planet with two suns and two moons. I just devoured this stuff as a child, and it is one of the reasons why I got interested in that whole SF / fantasy thing. Of course, I had my head turned by whizzy spaceships, and turned into more of a space-opera kind of boy, but there is still a germ of the fantasy reader in me, and it's only now that I realise why I enjoyed reading that Guy Gavriel Kay book so much last year. That was kind of Trigan-like.

Anyway. This post has supplanted the planned one where I worry about the film of Hitch-hikers. That will have to wait.

Watty's been reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves:

Number one in a depressingly frequent series, I fear. I have recently received these two letters, both presumably designed to make me want to do business with their senders. The first one is simply incomprehensible, the second, which I received yesterday, is incomprehensible and spectacularly randomly punctuated. Names have been changed to protect the guilty, for some reason. See if you can make anything of them:

I joined [Company name excluded] on 22nd September 2003 as Senior Business Development Manager. During my first 8 weeks at [Company name excluded], I have been focusing on some clients who we have had a strong relationship in the past.

As a company [Company name excluded] are moving towards a much more professional IT service provider and as to which the skill set of employees in all departments have now changed which is the reason I have come onboard.

---

My [Company name excluded] role is very clear. Any IT plans you would have, I act as the facilitator for both parties, to monitor, advise and ensure any projects where [Company name excluded] is an integral part of the overall goal; is carried out in a manner that ensures Service, confidence and reassurance are always met. Our teamwork on projects every day, to market concepts for new streams of revenue to business's like yours.

[sic, all of it, I promise.] Don't you just love that semicolon?

retires, shaking head sadly

Ahem...

No, I think it's been working all this time. Just - things. Things and stuff, and I haven't been writing. So, for the remaining few who haven't yet given up, here's my current predicament:

I have approximately no time available to me to do any writing, and - as we know - writing is one of the things I'd really like to do a bit more of. My main problem is that my free time is at the end of the day, when I'm tired. Despite this, there are a number of things on the go at the moment, none of which seems likely to be finished any time soon. I'm not looking for advice (though don't let that stop you), just kind of putting down a marker of some kind:

The Chronicle of the Lean Months - not, strictly speaking, written by me. In fact, not in any sense written by me, this is a wonderful piece of family history in the form of a diary of the late 1920s kept by my grandfather and his brother. I have been transcribing and researching it, and it is substantially complete. I think it probably needs an introduction or preface of some kind, and I am actively pondering this, but I think I need some more background material, which means more research, and that may have to wait. Although, I do have a lovely tale of my visit to the British Library Newspaper Collection to recount. Remind me, won't you?

Morningside Crescent - complete in one sense, in that there is no more story to be written. I haven't looked at it for over a year, though, because when I did look, I frightened myself with the amount of work needed to make it internally consistent. Serves me right for writing a serial, I suppose. I'd really like to get it done, but I somehow doubt I ever will.

Going Back - nice idea for a short story, born out of my account of the school exchange trip to Germany which I did manage to write earlier in the year. Unfortunately, it resolutely refuses to remain within the 'short story' boundaries, and now needs to be completely reworked into a much longer piece, which I wonder about having the energy for. I only started it because the pivotal scene occurred to me one day and is still fresh in my mind, despite my never having written it down anywhere. I'm a little afraid that if I get that far, I'll consider it done.

Untitled thing - I've foolishly gone and had an idea, and I know that this is a full-length story and I know I'll never have time to do it. I have a sort of vague concept of a retired rock singer suddenly discovering that one of his songs was an underground anthem behind the Iron Curtain - the story proceeds in a kind of parallel state; one thread the imagined riches of a successful career, the other the reality of a faded dream, and some kind of twist involving giving up your dreams for something or other. It's a bit unformed, as may be seen, but it's an idea.

I wonder if any of this will ever see the light of day.