Nick Cave

I probably write out of a different part of my brain when I’m as tired as this. Just lying here, lights down, eyes slightly closed, laptop whirring in the night, fingertips dancing. God bless illuminated keyboards. I don’t try too hard. It’s the pleasure of writing this blog. I don’t care how it sounds. It’s just for me. This is just bare bones writing. No imagination. Just typing.

I took a very quick jaunt around town today, avoiding the preparations for Manchester Pride. A poster on Manchester Piccadilly shouted at me this morning: ‘People are just born gay. GET OVER IT!!’. It never occurred to me that I had a problem and I disliked the implication that I did. The only problem I have is people shouting their sexual preference in my face. I can’t recall the last time I walked down a street and angrily accosted a stranger to tell them I’m into brunettes with large breasts and thigh high stockings. I’m just glad I’ll be out of Manchester tomorrow before the festival kicks off. There’s now a huge glitter ball hung outside the transvestite club across the road from the office. For me, it’s not a matter of having any particular attitude towards what people do in their bedrooms. It really is not my business. But I do dislike the gaudy aesthetic. I’m just not a glitter ball guy.

I don’t usually get out of the office for anything longer than it takes me to get to the nearest shop and buy lunch. I should rephrase that. I can go out for lunch but I don’t want to be stuck in the city for nine hours. However, today, I was a little longer and it ended with me facing a dilemma. I noticed a poster advertising that Nick Cave is signing his new book at Waterstones at the end of September.

This is Nick Cave, in the flesh, in a book shop, signing hardback copies of his new book.

Damn!

I fail to understand other people’s hero worship and I’ve never come to term with my own. There are writers, singers, cartoonists, actors, and directors that I hugely admire but I have never thought of myself standing in line to meet them. The closest I’ve ever come was running onto a cricket pitch as a young lad to get the autograph of a cricketer playing a testimonial for a locally born sporting hero. I think I ran up to Barry Richards. I don’t know what became of the autograph. I suppose I have it somewhere, in the envelope where I keep my Geoff Boycott autograph and a letter from Graham Dilly, who was my favourite bowler as a teenager.

Since then, I’ve tended to avoid famous people when I recognise them. I once walked past Barry Humphries in Liverpool. Nobody recognised me and he gave me a strange look when he knew that I knew. I bowed my head, walked on. The same thing happened when I walked past Alex Cox. It was instinctive that I nodded and smiled to him. I thought he was just somebody I knew. I felt terrible when he nodded back to me.
These days, my only contact with ‘heroes’ (for want of a better word) are through signed books I occasionally find. I have a copy of ‘Breakfast for Champions’ signed by Kurt Vonnegut; a copy of ‘The Village’ signed by David Mamet. I also have a cherished autograph of P.J. O’Rourke. I also other signed books, Will Self, Jeffry Deaver (I know!) and a few science fiction authors.

Most of my long standing ‘heroes’ are dead: W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Peter Cook, Arthur Miller, David Lean, Billy Wilder. Even people I’ve discovered relatively recently are no longer with us: Johnny Cash, B. Kliban, S J Perelman.

Who would I like to meet? Tom Waits, Kris Kristofferson, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, the Kinkster, Andy Hamilton, Armando Ianucci, Galton and Simpson, David Mamet, Martin Scorsese...

Tom Waits is the one person I venerate, though Nick Cave isn’t far from inspiring that kind of awe. I love his passionate songs, his angry songs, and his danger songs. Yet I also adore his religious ballads, with ‘The Boatman’s Call’ being one of my favourite albums.

Do I want to go meet him? Hell yes I do. But it’s not going to happen.

It would feel like I’d be breaking some fundamental agreement with myself. Perhaps it says more about my ego than anything else but I feel like it would be tantamount to giving up. Do I want to stand in line, mutter some oft-repeated note of appreciation? Do I want him to mutter thanks, desperate for the whole sorry evening to be done so he can get back to his life? That’s not for me. What’s the point in meeting somebody you admire without being able to ask or say something meaningful? What’s the point of reducing them to the level of prostitutes you’re paying with the amount of a hardback?

I admire them too much for that. I think I’ll stay away.

[Postscript 1: Here's the strange thing: I realise I already have Nick Cave's autograph. A friend of my sister was in charge of organising a big rock concert in Australia. He couldn't think of who to book so he asked my sister. She asked me. I immediately said Tom Waits and Nick Cave. A month later, I hear that The Bad Seeds were booked to headline the festival. About three months later, I got an autographed programme. I'll have to dig it out just to prove that I effectively arranged to get coins deposited in Mr. Cave's extremely dapper waistcoat pocket. It's my one and only claim to fame.

Postscript 2: I only discovered today that Cave dedicated his recent Glastonbury performance to Farrah Fawcett. That pleases me even more than Harry Shearer's deliciously ambiguous announcement that 'without Michael Jackson, there would be no Spinal Tap'.]

Class

When talking about class, there’s a great line by Billy Connolly (from ‘An Audience With...’) which I usually get wrong. It begins: ‘I'm not saying “love me, love me, I'm thick...”’ Only, I always remember is as: ‘I'm not saying “love me, love me, I'm poor...”’ But that’s the thing with class: where the middle and upper classes can be accused of snobbery, those of us at the other end of the social ladder can be equally accused of inverted snobbery. Class has always intrigued me because it seems to be as useless and it is helpful. Whilst the majority of people seem to conform to the definitions, individual cases don’t. To deliberately misquote Jonathan Swift: I can generalise about mankind but not about Tom, Dick, or Harry.

The problem with class is that it doesn’t totally convey people’s attitudes, and by ‘attitudes’ I probably mean their moral outlook. Some of the people I meet who profess to be middle class are, in my book, woeful human beings. They are duplicitous, conniving, arrogant, and cruel. They achieve much of what they achieve through the wilful abuse of others. When these qualities are seen in the working class, it rightly marks them out as crooks. They are the aspiring gangsters that hang around the gym I can see from my bedroom window. Yet when seen in the upper classes (I have only limited contact with the aristocracy), these low qualities apparently become virtues. Arrogance is assumed. It is not an option.

Perhaps class is only useful when looking at a social group from the outside. We see that ‘Chavs’ conform to stereotype because we don’t know them. The same might be true of university lecturers, journalists, members of the royal family. Class might be very useful when talking about common social types, yet the people that interest me – the people I am happy to call friends – tend not to fit into these stereotypes. Perhaps it’s just that I see something beyond the caricature. Perhaps what marks out a person as interesting to me is the degree to which they differ from their culture. They are square shapes in round holes.

I am from pure working class stock. My father’s side of the family fled from the revolution in Russia when my grandmother was just a girl. My father began work as a wheelwright but went to work in a mental hospital for the job security. My mother, like many women of her generation, became a housewife and a mother.

I attended a working class comprehensive school that did very little to give us hope. It was run down before people noticed that schools were being run down. It was there that literature, which had my love as a child, was ruined by English classes. It was perverted through Socialist ideals into a monstrous social science. We read ‘A Taste of Honey’ to introduce us to the themes of unwanted pregnancy, homosexuality, and race. Even ‘Hobson’s Choice’ (a film I now love) was taught as a way of talking about poverty. Over five years, I slid down the sets until I ended in the lowest, emerging with a grade 2 CSE.

We did our ‘O’ levels and then ‘A’ levels. The really bright kids did averagely well. Not being the brightest kid – and certainly far from committed to my studies – I did less well. It was only when I left school and began to follow my nose, so to speak, that I rediscovered the subjects I enjoyed. I went to the local college, sat an ‘A’ level in English in less than a year and was in a good University within eight months and went on to do postgraduate degrees.

So, now I’m still in a working class area, doing a very lowly job, but with these qualifications attached to my name. And I don’t think I would change any of it. In many respects, I feel classless.

I no longer enjoy cricket. I prefer football and foolishly support Liverpool in an office full of Mancunians.
The need to read pretentious literature was hammered out of me at University.
I love films, hate most art house, but enjoy foreign cinema.
I prefer to watch documentary channels than TV dramas.
I play the guitar fairly well but I hate English folk music and play only American: Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash.
I enjoy the puzzle of computer games and love technology.
I enjoy great comedy, despise bad.
Though I think I’m polite and believe in good manners, I’m often told off by my middle class bosses for being rude.
My politics are quite centrist. I love the writing of Edmund Burke ("Our patience will achieve more than our force") but despise the ideologues of modern Conservatism. I equally despise Socialism – living with a Socialist council saw to that – yet I see the bad that happens when workers have no rights.
I am extremely scruffy and wear mostly black.
I can’t drive and don’t drink.
I have always wanted to wear a hat.

So what class do you think I am?

The Further Doubts of a Dick

It’s funny. I wasn’t surprised by the reaction of most people to my post. People everywhere are generally decent, understanding, forgiving, and adaptable to changing notions of truth. There are some, however, who are just not my natural audience. They might never have read ‘Private Eye’ (though judging from recent issues, I really can’t blame them) or know the names of the writers by whom I measure my own pitiful achievements. (Surely the most hurtful irony of all was when Richard was blocked by Simon Blackwell, one of the supremely talented writers of ‘The Thick of It’, and then unfollowed by Armando Iannucci, one of the comic titans of this generation.)

Yet I suppose that I have inherited one audience almost by fate and alienated another for precisely the same reason. One audience will never believe that I’ve acted out of a sense of moral indignation. They see it as an outrage, a defilement of something that’s beyond holy: a disruption of the ancient order of ‘celebrity’. These people were drawn to the name that would never appeal to the other audience I secretly crave.

The other audience is repelled by the other me. They don’t want to exist in the mainstream. I know because I’m one of them. Yet many of them have finally come around to understanding what I’m attempting to do. The only problem is that a few have naturally assumed that people in the mainstream can have somewhat skewed senses of humour and have adjusted their opinions in light of that. They tend to live by the battle cry: ‘I didn’t realise that Madeley was such a crazy old duffer but now I love him!’

I still struggle to answer the question: where does the satirist draw the line when they feel the deep burning anger? I try to draw that line everyday when I make certain things apparent whilst feeling that it’s not my duty to explain my every action. It’s like surfing on the front edge of a wave, encouraged by the swell of the tide but aware that your board may slip away at any moment.

Angered by what I’ve done and perhaps for being misled for so long, a fan of Richard’s wrote to me:

‘If you are bitter because your first novel was cancelled, you ain’t going to get far in this world. You bump and grind along that shit track but I still think you are wrong. Would you want to be famous on someone else’s backbone? You have great pride in your writing because it’s yours, not written by someone else.’

It is a fair point if you haven’t experienced the world of agents, publishers, and broadcasters. I speak to other unpublished writers who say the same thing: that all the doors are closed to us. Agents don’t care because they can sell projects easily off the back of establishing names. A person might be able to write the finest cook book of their generation but it’s not getting picked up by the publisher who has just given Peter Andre £1.5 million for his collection of recipes. Whatever the name and whatever the field: getting a book deal is easy. Only if your field is writing does that become next to impossible.

Since I finished my book of cartoons (I’ve still not heard a thing from agents), I’ve written two radio comedies (4 half hour episodes in total). I know they’ll never get read. Agents won’t handle scripts unless you’ve got a production company interested. Production companies aren’t interested unless you have an agent.

Not that I really want either, just a proven writer to read them and to say where I’m going wrong or right. No mentor will come forward via the BBC’s Writer’s Room to help me. They want northern comedy writes for their Northern Laughs project. You can’t get more northern than me. Not with this accent. I’m born, bred, and live in Lancashire, a few miles from Johnny Vegas’ old haunts. Yet the BBC Writer’s Room still returns my script without a thing written on it except the number that marks it out as one of the tens of thousands they receive and reject each year.

People ask me why I perpetuate the charade. I say it’s a whole lot better than being the only person to laugh at your jokes.

Help Me!

So, this is a plea for help. I sent a script to the BBC Writer’s Room about four months ago. It came back on Saturday, rejected in the first 'sift'. This means they rejected it after reading the first 10 pages. No reason why. They just thought it not good enough to read in full.

I understand that the script isn't the next 'Streetcar Named Desire' but I can't fathom that it could really be so bad as to warrant summary dismissal. Anyway, it’s over in my vanity vault of unpublished curios. If anybody would care to read it, I’d be welcome your constructive thoughts. At the moment, I just can’t move forward. I can’t overcome the feeling of ‘what’s the point’...

Huston and Traven

Born today, John Huston, is one of my few real heroes. ‘The Treasure of the Sierre Madre’ might just be my favourite film – hell, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it is. I’ve seen in countless times and might watch it again now, just because it’s in my mind. It’s an equally impressive book, if you can find it, written by the mysterious (he’s always described that way) B. Traven.

Traven's Wikipedia entry tells an equally wonderful story of authorly deception, multiple identities, and unresolved puzzles. As much as I like the idea that he might be Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared while travelling with Mexican bandits, it’s more reassuring to think he was simply an unknown writer. Otherwise, it's the same old story. Why must any achievement be tied to a familiar face? It happens to be relatively often on Twitter. If people find me funny, they assume that I'm somebody else. I've been accused of being David Mitchell and even (heaven help me) Russell Brand. I usually tell them my name is B. Traven.

Anyway, the point of the post: whenever I’m about to hit the road, it’s Huston I think about. I’ll be gone for two days, heading into Manchester. John Huston wouldn’t put up with what I have to endure. There'd be a few harsh words, a brief fist fight, and then a tall man loping off into the distance in a cloud of cigar smoke.

A Comment

I started out writing a response to this and at some point in a grindingly awful day here in Manchester, overlooking the 'Ladyboys of Bangkok' pavilion and plotting hotels on a map of Milton Keynes, it became too long to put as a comment.

From the comfort of their well salaried jobs, transgression must seem exciting to academics and critics. It’s a bit of the ‘rough stuff’ to be discussed over dinner with a nice wine. Come live in outer nowhere, they’d meet people leading aimless lives, paying off the debts they amassed buying their big screen TVs which they *simply* had to buy because art to them is spending their nights watching Murdoch’s stream of effluent pumped in for £50 a month. Transgression doesn’t sound that exciting when all you naively want art from art is to be reminded that there’s something better in life. Certainly something better than genital mutilation.

The bus stops around here were recently advertising some ‘extreme’ art event they were holding at the Tate. It had absolutely nothing to do with the lives of the people queuing up in the rain. I don’t know how much the Tate spent advertising their exhibition – funded with EU money, I believe, along with Arts Council grants – but the people directly paying for it through their taxes had absolutely no interest in the art, the gallery, or transgression. You’d hear them talking about it when their bus was late and they had run out of gossip... ‘Look at this pile of bollocks.’ They’d laugh. Nobody would disagree. To them it was a self-evident truth. My mother’s name for Antony Gormley is ‘Antony Gormless’. That is as far as she’ll discuss modern art, despite all the EU grants encouraging her to do otherwise.
Of course, these people don’t understand art any more than I understand art. We’re all too uneducated to really understand the politics of transgression. Screw us. Let the academics share their self-satisfied, mutual-referential theories in their monographs. The rest of don’t deserve to have art in our lives. Except when it comes to being photographed.

Occasionally, I sit for lunch in a local art gallery (usually empty except for staff – there are lots of staff). The walls are covered by photos of disabled people playing sports. The exhibit was paid for by EU money, Arts Council grants, government funds directed to expanding participation in art. Nobody had asked if we really want to look at some 90 year old man in his jogging shorts. Nor did I want to see a close up of a stump, the result of a recent amputation, the product of a lifetime’s alcoholism. However, to the bureaucrat handing out the funds, it was a good use of public money. Art had been supported, supposedly. He doesn’t question whether we need ‘art’ that reminds us that life is full of sorrows; that every human being on this planet suffers in one way or another.

To the politicians, holding the purse strings, art remains a form of remedial social education. It’s the same way they treat literature in schools.

Only I’m bloody sick and tired of art that’s comes at me wielding a baseball bat smeared with dog shit. I tired of grants going to any artist willing to bastardise their craft (if any craft they have) to teach us about what it’s like to live in a sink hole estate. I’m bored with these lofty, pretentious, pseudo-creatives who dress up their high-concept torture porn with a decorous bit of modern typography on the wall of the exhibit.

And the reason I despise them so much is that they are amoral vacuums who suck in what little funding exists in the arts; money that might have gone to interesting artists who are instead ignored or demeaned because they actually care more about craft than they do marketing.

A guy in the office jokingly said to me that he wants to see the empty London plinth used for a ‘f***ing big statue of Churchill stamping on Hitler’s head’. With an absence of real debate about the place of art in our culture, this kind of response is natural. Sadly, it only encourages the critics to tut knowingly. ‘Jingoistic popularism celebrating the barbarity of war. It’s immoral! They know nothing about art!’ Or so the critics would smugly say before going back to their close ups of female genital mutilation.

The Hazel Blears Sketch

I wrote this, along with about a dozen other sketches, for the BBC Radio 7 show, 'NewsJack'. Naturally, it was rejected, or more precisely, ignored. It's hard to tell when your only reply is an automated response.

However, rather than let these things just sit on a hard drive, I'm going to post a few of them here.

F/X CHANTING

PRIEST: We have gathered here in this ancient place to mark the summer solstice and to beg the Gods to bless us with the renewal of our life-force. Approach now, Sister, and state thy name!

HAZEL BLEARS: (VERY BROAD ACCENT) Hello. I’m Hazel.

PRIEST: Welcome Sister Hazel who bears the name of the mystic tree that bears the sacred nuts...

F/X CHANTING: ‘NUTs’

PRIEST: Do you seek renewal at this most blessed hour?

HAZEL BLEARS: I wouldn’t say ‘renewal’ exactly...

PRIEST: Then you seek rebirth? You wish to strip naked and lie in the field to be
one with nature under the ambrosial skies?

HAZEL BLEARS: No, no, not that either. I was hoping to be reselected.

F/X CHANTING STOPS

PRIEST: You want what?

HAZEL BLEARS: I want to be reselected by the good people of Salford.

PRIEST: Are you sure you’ve got the right place? You do know that this is Stonehenge and that we are the ancient order of the Druids?

HAZEL BLEARS: Yes , I saw the bumper stickers on your Volvos. ‘Pip if You’re Pagan’. Very clever. But I’m here now and I’m ready to make my sacrifice.

PRIEST: Oh, very well... I mean, if you've prepared a sacrifice...

F/X CHANTING RESUMES

PRIEST: Sister Hazel, what is it that thy wish to sacrifice to the Gods?

HAZEL BLEARS: Well, I’ve brought these lovely curtains. They came with the flat but Michael said they didn’t go with our new Ducati leathers...

F/X CHANTING stops

PRIEST: Hang on! You want to make a sacrificial offering of curtains?

HAZEL BLEARS: And Michael’s brought his Goblin Teasmade. We’ve also got a sofa but we couldn’t get it on the back of the bike.

PRIEST: So, you're seeking ‘reselection’ based on a pair of curtains and a Goblin Teasmade?

HAZEL BLEARS: And a sofa that we...

PRIEST: Couldn’t get it on the back of the bike. Yes, I heard... Only, it’s not really up to me, is it? It’s the Gods who decide and... Well, I’m pretty certain they don’t need curtains.

HAZEL BLEARS: Of course they need a curtains. Every house needs curtains. Or at least, all of mine do...

PRIEST: But these are the Gods. They don't even have windows. They make the very sunlight that ripens the harvest and turns all things brown.

HAZEL BLEARS: Hang on! All things Brown? I’m not sure I can work under those conditions. (SHOUTS) Michael, pick up that Teasmade. And start the bike.

PRIEST: But such is the great cycle of life. The sun blesses the earth and changes the green of summer for the brown autumn.

HAZEL BLEARS: The Brown autumn! I had hoped he’d have gone by the end of summer. What about spring? Will Brown be gone by the spring?

PRIEST: It is the way. Spring is the time for greens shoots, when the timid creatures finally emerge from their burrows...

HAZEL BLEARS: Oh, so it’s Miliband in the spring, is it? Well, you can’t say fairer than that. (SHOUTS) Michael. Drop that Teasmade. We’re staying. (SPEAKING) Now then, if I am staying, we need to get this place looking right. Would you look at these stones! Do you know what I think they need?

PRIEST: They have been standing here for millennia...

HAZEL BLEARS: Curtains. (BEAT) Something in maroon chintz, I think. (WHISPERS) And between you and me, we might even be able to claim them on expenses.

END

Some Old One Liners...

• It was announced this week that head of Apple, Steve Jobs, has received a new liver. The iLiver was chromed and had his name etched on the back. Early reviews suggest that it works no better than a normal liver but spending a penny now costs £1.79.
• This week, disgraced cricket promoter Allen Stanford learned that he now faces 375-years in prison. Reacting to the news, ex-England opening batsman, Geoffrey Boycott, suggested that Stanford spend the first 370 years ‘playing himself in’.
• Sean Penn has abandoned Hollywood part way through his latest film after his children begged him to spend more time with them and their mother. In unrelated news: the world waits for Jack Black’s children to start speaking.
• Concerns mount over Kim Jong Il’s health. Apparently the bugger’s still alive.
• Meanwhile Silvio Berlusconi’s grip on power is slipping. But that what will happen when your fingers are covered in baby oil.
• And as Italy continues to be gripped by the tales of Bacchanalian orgies in Berlusconi’s villa where 18 year old super models apparently parade around the place naked, we ask: how do we ensure our MP’s stop claiming for Jaffa Cakes on their expenses?
• Michael Martin continues to claim that he was hounded from office because of his humble working class background. Indeed, there’s nothing more humble and working class than being crap at your job and having your chauffeur drive you to Celtic matches.
• This week ‘The Observer’ reported that Britain’s nuclear power stations have had 1,750 leaks, breakdowns or other ‘events’ over the past seven years. Thankfully, the leaks all occurred in parts of the UK that don’t read ‘The Observer’. Which is ironic, given all the extra eyesballs they have up there...
• As mobile users in Africa get their own weather forecasts, we get a look inside the high tech software that runs the service: Line 10: Print ‘Hot and dry.’; Line 20: Goto Line 10.
• In the world of coincidence: as Ronaldo admits that he’d decided to leave Manchester United last year, a supporter also admits that it was last year when he decided that Ronaldo was a complete tosser.
• As Facebook launches a Farsi service for people in Iran, we ask: aren’t they suffering enough?
• And, finally, Twitter’s in the news this week as Iranian leaders face a new crisis. They must either stop oppressing their people or Stephen Fry will unfollow them.

Head First Into Shallow Waters

‘You said that you only read the first ten pages of a script,’ said the woman whose head I could only see from the rear. ‘So, would it be okay if I made the font smaller?’

This was one of the better questions asked at the BBC’s Writersroom event but even this hammered me deeper into my seat and caused my right eyebrow to begin The Dance of Brutal Honesty.

I could feel it rising: the urge to say something monumentally arrogant. I could see myself standing up and launching into my best Peter Finch impression, shouting: ‘I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!’

But, thankfully, I wasn’t the one answering the questions. I was in the audience at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. Another prospective writer, or, as I increasingly saw it, another sick fantasy wrapped in a fragile ego wondering why the hell he’d travelled at that way.

Yet, too that point, the day had been going so well. I’d reacquainted myself with the best book shop in the North West: Blue Coat Books, which in my student days was housed in the Bluecoat Galleries but has now been relocated to Hanover Street. I had enjoyed the frothed ice of ‘summer berries’ in Waterstones, where I’d also bought Graham McCann’s book on four of the finest comedy writers of the twentieth century: Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, and Galton & Simpson. I’d then made the tiring slog up a hill I hadn’t trod in about four years and felt strangely nostalgic about the exhaustion.

I’d made that walk, from Lime Street to the University, for about a decade, only to find at the end of it that a doctorate in English Literature made me well qualified to despise criticism and critics. Wanting only to write, I’d quit the offered life of academic papers, lectures, tutorials, and marking, for the uncertainty of poverty, low self-esteem, and creative obscurity. I’d not been back to the University since.

Only, now I was back, I found I was being nothing but critical.

The truth is that I despise being around writers. Or, should I say, ‘would-be’ writers. I’ve worked with academics who have published dozens of books and, on the whole, they are flawed, troubled, and occasionally crazy. Yet they are also people that labour under no pretensions as to what they can or cannot do. They go about writing in a professional manner. It’s normal folk who take up the pen that worry me.

Aspiring writers tend to have a crazed look in their eyes, like dogs that spent their formative years with abusive owners and are damn sure that they’ll never be locked in another shed for another long hot Summer. The stench of desperation hangs on them like some primal musk. Everything is easy to them. Writing is not a struggle. They say things like: ‘I’ve got a script here, and one at home, and I finished one this morning, will write another this afternoon... Or do you want me to write something new?’

I felt ashamed to be among them. I could feel the eyes of the theatre staff on me, as though marking me out for special pity. ‘He thinks he’s a writer! Bless!’ And how could they think any different? Like every writer’s group I’ve ever attended, I end up surrounded by people driven by the post-Romantic urge to ‘express themselves’. These are those writers that gather in the local library on a Thursday morning and get their pictures in the free newspapers posted through our door.

‘Me and my friend are going to write a comedy’ asked some young girl at the back. ‘Do you want us to write the whole series first?’

‘Have you written the first episode?’ asked the professional script reader.

‘No, we’re just about to start.’

My other eyebrow began to dance. The opening act to a ballet was being performed above my nose and I knew it was going to end with a tragedy.

Then the guy sitting in front of me raised his hand to ask a question. On his lap: his script. The laminated cover had been reflecting the stage lights into my eyes for the whole presentation. His raised arm allowed me to see the title: ‘A Sample Script For “Doctors”’. He’d written his own version of an established show. But he wasn’t the only one.

A few moments later a hand goes up on the far side of the theatre: ‘Could I send you my script to “Eastenders”?’

Another person asked a question I didn’t hear but the reply suggested they’d asked about a show on Channel 4.

But by that time, I was all out of eyebrows. So my heart just sank. My heart sank and sank and sank.

Yet now I’m home, preparing for two days in my own private Manchester hell, I find that a quite different feeling is enduring about the event. In a perverse way, it has changed me.

I’ve always been hesitant about the purpose of the Writersroom. I’ve suspected it enabled the BBC to appear to be listening whilst going on doing their usual tricks of commissioning work from friends and those already inside the industry. The standard of BBC comedy is such that I’ve believed that no other explanation is likely. My recent attempts to write for ‘NewsJack’ has only increased my cynicism. I would have been happy if my sketches and one liners had been less funny than those broadcast but when I’m sure that my material is strong and still gets ignored, then I have to look for explanations. Perhaps I’m not funny. Perhaps my funny is not a mainstream funny. Did my work even get there?

Yet listening to head of the Writersroom North and the script reader, I did start to have faith in the system I had come to doubt. I believe they believed in the project and that belief now convinces me to believe a little bit more than I did before. I found that I wanted to ask questions, to beg for mercy before them, to say that I’m not like these people with their musicals set around the world of soft cheeses, the reheated episodes of Dr. Who, their questions already answered a hundred times on the Writersroom website. Yet I wouldn’t know what to ask. Not when others have more pressing issues to raise:

‘Can I include real music in my script?’

‘Does it have to look like a script?’

Somebody wise once said: writers write. To which I would add: would-be writers ask stupid questions about fonts.

Just Busy...

Some new writing or lots of new cartoons or the nonsense I Twitter.

Updike

I was going to write something about the cartoons I've posted but I sit down at the PC to see that John Updike has died. Wish I had something extremely intelligent to say. I just feel that another good has been taken from the world. The darkness closes ever further in.

A Conversation

Them: Hi Richard. I’m such a fan. Love and kisses. xxxxxxxxx.

Me: Perhaps you’re not such a fan. I only twitter to advertise my blog. http://www.richard-madeley.com

Them: No, I love you. You’re so funny. Give Judy my love. I’m you’re biggest fan.

Me: But not necessarily MY biggest fan.

Them: Oh, but I am.

Me: But surely a look at my blog will explain everything.

Them: I don’t understand you, Richard. You can be so cryptic. But that’s why I love you.

Me: My blog explains everything. Please read my blog.

Them: Great blog, Richard. Did Judy help you design it?

The Beauty

The restaurant was Brazilian. I assume that the waitress was too. She was also stunningly beautiful, made all the more apparent by the way she hovered in the background and on the periphery of the action. She was something of an incongruity among the showy gimmickry of the rodizio, the waiters with their red kerchiefs and swords. Straight hair tied into a simple stroke that trailed from her authentic smile, she had a clean beauty with nothing artificial, nothing added. Just beauty. The only good thing about the meal. My only point of interest.

I was sitting in a corner of Pau Brasil, a restaurant in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. I was there to enjoy a belated Christmas meal. At the back of the room, flames illuminated the darkness and burned away a few more millimetres from the chef’s eyebrows. He was an intense man, carefully entertaining each lump of meat before he skewered it to make another meat sword.

‘Meat sword’. It was one of the many jokes I wasn’t allowing myself to make tonight but there were so many. I was constantly tempted to say ‘nice meat’ in imitation of Austin Powers. And whenever a joint of beef caught fire, the chef would hit it with his spatula. Every comic instinct in my body wanted me to cry out that he was ‘beating his meat’. I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t. Enough people think I’m unusual as it is and I had spent the whole evening feeling odd and out of place.

I despise my occasional lapses into shyness. I detest feeling lost for words. I like to talk. I often talk too much. I love conversation, making people laugh, discussing difficult things or shared experiences. I like to hear people’s stories. Except there are times when I just withdraw. Like tonight. I sat and watched my colleagues enjoy all the red meat as one sword after the next was brought to the table and its contents carved or slid from the tip onto the plates. In front of each of us, there was a disk, green on one side and red on the other. The idea was to turn the disk over when you’d had enough meat. Mine had been turned over from the moment I’d got there. I was red all evening. I’ve been red all my life, or ever since I was a child and I discovered that I just don’t like red meat. Perhaps that explains my silence.

It was always going to be a disaster. A vegetarian doesn’t belong in a place famous for the 15 varieties of meat they serve in the course of a meal. The salad bar certainly wasn’t the draw and I wasn’t tempted to return to it after couple of new potatoes and few slices of beetroot. I knew I was never going to get the most out of my evening. I was glad I wasn’t paying. Instead, I made a few jokes as my colleagues slowly relaxed, got mildly tipsy, and began to make jokes of their own. The ‘funnier’ that they became, the less I tried to match them. I like the people and I liked being around them. But I was also out of place and I felt like I didn’t fit in. I don’t drink (I’d be a bad drunk and quick to form myself an addition) and I don’t eat meat. I find social dining difficult. An part I’ve not been trained to play. There are also very few common points of reference. I like films, comedy, books, cartoons, art and literature. And I like beautiful women. Like the silent waitress who cleared away the plates.

I did my best not to look at her. You might even say, ironic though it sounds, that I didn’t want to treat her like a piece of meat. But she was just too stunning for that. The only authentic experience of this whole evening. The only real sense I have of Brazil. A nation of too much meat and of significant beauty.

Monday

Three new pictures in the vault. Been in a strange mood precipitated either by an approaching cold or by two days watching the Twitterers go by. It’s as intriguing as it is depressing. Large swathes of human beings have nothing interesting to say but will say it nevertheless. I’d much rather somebody spoke nonsense that read about their preparations for the Sunday roast or how many tax forms they’ve completed. I even find myself defending Wossy who can actually be funny in his Tweets. Funnier, at least, than accountants and ever-so-sincere teenagers moaning on about ‘sickos’ who pretend to be famous people. It’s a difficult balance to strike. I’m tempted to turn Him into a voicebox for aphorisms such as ‘Celebrity is oppression; a tyranny of the few over the masses’ or ‘Fame is toxic and celebrity the result’. If feels like Twitter is now becoming overrun by celebrities at the rate that rats reproduced during the great plague. Yet the truth is that I’d always choose John Cleese’s smallest utterance over the ramblings of yet another social networking guru advertising a blog about media trends. Why do people bore me so utterly? Am I just a freak?

Saturday

A bit of a foul mouthed outburst. I think it's my first. Only, I wouldn't dare post it here, so I've posted it over there.

Friday

Stunned. Confused. After a solid 10 hour sleep -- it's always the way after Manchester -- I'm now waiting for a 1TB drive to format. I don't know what to do while I wait. After about half an hour, it's at 11%. I suppose this is only going to get longer, as we move to bigger drives. But I'm eager to get working. Only, I don't know which way to do. Him or there. I have the book to work on -- had some real progress last night in thinking about it -- plus I have my taxes to do. Ha! Taxes. I'm self-employed because I write and want to earn money from it. This time around, I have to do taxes for the magnificent sum of £110, which I earned for some cartoons about a year ago.

Hmm. Suppose I should get that out of the way. I've been putting it off for months.

Wossy And the West

Another day of Manchester and I’m ugly and tired. I’ve also spent too much money on an external hard drive from Dabs. I’ve had enough of losing work or suffering the torture of last night, thinking that I’d lost work. I’m going to automate the damn thing with a terabyte of disc space to suck up my nonsense overnight. Not a single one of my pointless posts, cryptic cartoons, or unread blogs will be lost.

My mood is probably exacerbated by the letter in today’s mail reminding me that I have to fill in my self-assessment tax return. I’m registered as self-employed given that I did some cartoons last year for ITN, earned a little, and continue to devote a huge portion of my week to my ‘career’. Ho hum. I also thought I might have started to earn money from my book or other writings. It now seems rather sad to be filling in a tax return for a sum as miserable as my earnings so far. Are there any self-employed writers who earn as little as me? I doubt it but I’d be happy to stand them a drink.

I’ve also been trying to write something funny for the other blog but my energy runs out after about a paragraph. It makes writing this blog quite a pleasure. I find that writing the other blog almost a physical activity, like holding my breath and swimming down for a kind of deeper state from which to write as somebody else. I only had the energy to post a couple of new Twitters as Him.

Playing the Twitter game amuses me enormously. Or at least, in short periods of about thirty seconds. Twitter is like blogging but in minutia. It’s a place to write in aphorisms or to attempt to be funny through brevity. I think that’s why Stephen Fry is so good at it. He’s genuinely eloquent and always worth reading. I’m trying my best to make every one of my Twitter posts funny. It’s hard to get an idea into 140 characters but I hope my Twits are more amusing than the usual rubbish I read posted. I’ve probably moaned on about social networking before (and if I haven’t, I’d happy do so right now) but I really don’t want to read puffs for other people’s projects or links to things they find interesting on the web. I’m not actually that interest in knowing if somebody is on his way to pick up the kids. Do people really think that it’s interesting to tell me that their train is ten minutes late but they’ve bought themselves a pasty from the station canteen? As far as celebrity Twitterers go, John Cleese has it about right. He’s always worth reading. And, as I said, Fry is fun, if only to read his ejaculations. Ejaculations? Bless me! Heavens. I don’t think. Tut, tut. Shudder!

I notice that Jonathan Ross (Wossy) is enjoying his new Twitter account. 5000 followers and rising. Ah, the blessings of fame! He can’t stop offering to text/email/ring his celebrity friends to check to see if they are ‘a fan/nutcase’. Those are his words, not mine. Well, actually, they’re from somebody who asked him what celebrities think of fake Twitters pretending to be them. Interesting reply. ‘Most famous people really [l]ike their fans, but pretending to be you then that's clearly strange and unwanted’. That’s probably a good reply to the wrong question. Or at least, the premise is somewhat misleading.

Fake Twitterers are probably neither fans nor nutcases. There are a few who are probably more fun to read than the people they spoof, such as Will Self’s double who is delicious arch. Even if there are a few attempts at spoofing that are genuinely strange, most are probably just like me: people who find it laughable that a system exists by which every mental bowel movement can be recorded for posterity. Twitter is a haven for mediocrity and it’s hard not to want to parody it. That’s not to say that it sometimes worries me that I’m perceived as a ‘nutcase’. It makes for such heartening moments when people understand my game. On the other hand, I do get tired of people missing the joke and being unbelievably nice to me because they think of what I can do for them. It’s embarrassing to see it happen across Twitterspace. They turn up, big grin, slide across the room, a hand slips around my shoulders. ‘Richard, you’re looking so good... Listen, chum, I’ve got this project if you’ve a moment or two to wag chins.’

The one surprise of reading Wossy’s twitters is the realisation that some celebrities do actually live in that insane world where every friend is another celebrity. He has them all on his mobile and texts them to see if they Twitter. Charming but rather sad, I think. Celebrity is a drug and I think some people are liable to overdose.

Scrub That Order To Panic ...

Well, that was a fun couple of hours...

Turns out that the anti-virus software had tampered/corrupted my BIOS settings and the PC was booting from the wrong device. Sounds simple now but at the heart of the maelstrom, where I panic because I think of two weeks work lost, it wasn’t so straightforward. It took me a little while to figure it out but it’s a good lesson learned. Tomorrow I will be taking my half-hour at lunch and I’m going to see if I can find myself a reasonably priced external drive. I don’t know why I’ve never thought of this before but I should have a second hard drive running parallel to my main PC with software to back my important directories up at night.

Heading to bed, relieved though still pretty annoyed with myself. I should have got more work done these two weeks. A few dozen cartoons and some blog posts isn’t enough to help push me beyond this job.

[Expletive Deleted]

It's like my main PC knew I was feeling moody because I'm back in work tomorrow. Why else would it choose tonight to lose/corrupt/destroy its own hard drives?

I did a virus scan tonight and it detected some threat which it immediately deleted. It then asked me if I want to reboot, which I did, and then it tells me that there’s no system disk. Hate to think of all the work I’ve lost. And before anybody says it, I know I should back work up. And I do. Just no so regular as to make this really painful.

When I bought the machine, it was already set up to use the two 250Gb drives in a Raid0 array, which means that it put the two drives together to create a single drive that was just under 500Gb in size. This array has now disappeared, along with... I don’t want to think about it. Writing, cartoons(!), emails and email addresses... I knew over twelve months ago that I should have reconfigured it to use drive mirroring. Now it’s come back to bite me. Hard.

I don’t suppose anybody has any ideas on how to recover that data? Or am I lost? To make matters worse, I won't be able to do a thing about this until Friday. I have a feeling that things are going to be really quiet around here for the next week.

Typical

For years I've bought the 'Artists and Writers' Yearbook'. Then I stopped buying them since I never found the bloody things helpful. Last year, I had a change of heart and bought a copy of the 'Writer's Market UK', which has proved similarly useless. Only now I need a copy of the 'Artists' part of the Yearbook and I haven't a copy in the house.

I'm in Manchester for two days -- I can't believe I'm back so soon -- which will at least give me a chance to pick one up, along with another packet of this HP photo paper. That's if I take half an hour for lunch and work through until five, catching the later train home. The temptation is always to get the eight hours out of the way, to get home earlier...

I'm collecting all my drawings together and keeping them in a folder. I have about thirty printed out in high quality (they do look stunning), and a dozen or so more to tidy up and print. I have no idea if they're worth anything but I have to live in hope. Especially when I have two days of proofreading leisure reports ahead of me in Manchester.

And just when I was getting back into the routine of writing and drawing...

My Gaming Biography

I’m continuing to discover the energy-giving properties of peanut butter which today resulted in a couple of new cartoons (I'm very proud of the parrot), a Madeley post, some tinkering on ‘the book’ and now this post. There was also some less cerebral action taking place on the PS3 where my love for computer games has found a new outlet in the ‘Valkyrie Chronicles’.

I rarely (if ever) talk about my gaming activities. I suppose it’s not something I’m particularly proud of admitting to. It’s like saying that you like to sit watching Coronation Street with a large box of tissues and some Cadbury’s Roses. Well, I don’t watch soaps, I’m not so keen on chocolate, and I have no idea what the tissues might be for. But give me a packet of pistachios and a good game and I’m set for the evening.

I began gaming way back when computers first hit UK homes. I was among that generation of programmers who began with a BBC Model B, which all of its 32kb of memory. I taught myself BBC Basic and then 6502 assembler, discovering every ‘peek’ and ‘poke’ of the machine's operating system. (I once got into trouble at school for writing a program that enabled one machine to take over another. A friend abused the power I’d given them by sending messages across the network to the teacher using another machine. It was the only time I got into serious trouble at school but they did ‘punish’ me by putting me in charge of the network and allowing me to do an ‘A’ level in computers. I suppose it was their way of keeping me out of further trouble and curtailing my career as a hacker.) My early enthusiasm for all things ‘geek’ was beat out of me at university where I spent three years learning to program in Cobol (such an ugly language -- I hated it!) on an old Vax system. It was hardly a cutting edge course but I didn’t have cutting edge exam results. I was always too busy teaching myself how to program. On the third year of the course, we touched on assembler language and they introduced us to the concept of pushing and pulling from ‘the stack’. I’d done that when I was about 12. No wonder I hated the course and came away with a lousy 2.2. The only thing left of my computer proficiency is that I’m pretty good at hacking my way around HTML, SQL, PHP and whatever is thrown at me. I keep telling myself to learn C or C++ and get a decent job as a programmer but I have neither the time nor motivation. I used to be red hot at Clipper and dBase IV but it all changes too quickly and when things went ‘object orientated’, I couldn’t be bothered to start again.

Gaming comes from my early love of computers. Back then, I’d sit for hours pressing down cassettes into tape decks to get games to load. I’m probably one of the few people who still have an original ‘Elite’ badge after attaining that legendary rank on the BBC (‘Right on Commander!’). Then disk drives came along with the five a quarter inch floppy on the BBC and then 3.5 on the Atari ST. I celebrated my first hard disk when I bought an Amiga 500 (a great machine!) before I finally moved on to PCs, a slight detour to and from Macs, and then to the consoles.

I suppose I feel slightly self-conscious about admitting to my history of gaming because the majority of computer games are so poorly written. Most but not all. I recently finished playing ‘Far Cry 2’, which on TV is advertised as a generic shooter, when, in reality, it’s a less then generic shooter with lots of references to ‘Heart of Darkness’. Good writing makes the world of difference but it’s so hard to find. This year I’ve been blessed with a few exceptions. I finished ‘Fallout 3’ (I had already played 1 and 2) and found the post-apocalyptic world surprisingly fresh. I finished ‘Mass Effect’ on the XBox 360 and cried my eyes out at the end, something I’ve not done in such a long time. I always enjoyed the wit of Lucasarts adventures (the Monkey Island series or Sam & Max) and regret that adventure games have become a rarity these day. Fable 2 was fun but not particularly gripping, though Stephen Fry provided a welcome touch of humour.

The thing I look for in games isn’t the repetitive tasks that make them addictive as much as the mental problems I need to overcome. It’s the thing that most people who knock gaming seem to forget. It’s much less passive than TV and the best games are really just large and complicated logical problems that need solving. ‘Valkyrie Chronicles’ is one such game, which brings out the military strategian in me. I can spend a relaxing couple of hours deploying my troops to make flanking manoeuvres or conserving my forces for the right moment to push home an advantage. It’s also one of the most radical looking games I’ve seen in a while. It has some fancy techniques for producing a cross-hatched effect on the cell-shaded characters. I love to see great programming. Reading great code, like following a great mathematical proof, can be like poetry. I just wish I were better at all three.

There: another little known fact about me. I’m a one-time geek, now a ‘graphics whore’, and I’m proud of it.

Sunday

Three new cartoons.

My Last Words On 2008

Moving on means that I've been very busy writing content for another of my blogs. It’s a blog that I haven’t yet publicised here or anywhere, and I still have to decide how to launch it into the real world. It needs the right kind of exposure; a nudge not a push. The premise is very funny but it’s not a true blog. It only provides ‘back story’ to something else I have in mind. I’m also somewhat reluctant to move on from Madeley, chastened by Selena Dreamy’s generous words: ‘If you want to drive a man to become a radical destroyer of his proper genius, just give him half a dozen blog.’ Well, let’s just call it half a dozen plus half a blog.

While looking to link this other project into the blogosphere and find it some unsuspecting readership, I came across the following. It’s an article about the collapse of The Friday Project (or TFP as it’s become known in my darkest mutterings).As some of you might know, it’s a story very close to my heart. This is the last time I hope I'll feel motivated to write about the last year but I write this for myself. Just to put it on the record so I don't forget.

The piece awoke some of the bad feelings I had about my dealings with TFP. Yet I should make it clear that I never had bad feelings about the people. Clare Christian was always polite, friendly, helpful, and, much more important for any writer, supportive. After the collapse, she clearly regretted what had happened. I was sorry that she felt so sorry. I felt sorry that her business had collapsed and that she was suffering the fury of other unpublished bloggers who treated her as thought she was the anti-Christ. I might have had reasons to be angry but that's not my way when it's a case of good intentions failing in the real world. Was I too sympathetic? I don’t think so. I don’t believe that people set out to hurt others. The whole business was regrettable. I had to just dust myself down and move one. It was another lesson learned the hard way.

Yet the news that my novel wouldn’t be published was the beginning of a year of hell. I had taken a proof-reading job for two days a week in Manchester. I thought it would only be for the short term. Now it’s a year later and my role has expanded from proof-reader to include IT support, graphic design, designing Powerpoint presentations, reformatting documents. I like the people but the hours are too long in front of a computer screen (8 hours without much of a break). It is slowly destroying me. My eyes have really been suffering lately and my spirits are shot.

The book’s cancellation also marked the beginning of the months when my father collapsed with an aneurism and I was visiting him in hospital, trying to help him recover his speech. There were good moments, bad moments, and then the end. I remember one Thursday in October, standing without an umbrella in the rain on the end of the platform at Manchester’s Oxford Road station. I was sobbing like a child. I’d just been told that there was no hope for my father. Everything about my life came together in that one moment. It was the worst moment I’ve ever known. I’m still not right. I still cry when I come into the house at night. I cry if I’m alone with my thoughts for too long. Everything I feel now is the product of 2008 and I’m happy to put that year behind me.

Yet, before the truly bad things happened to me, there was the novel, which I’ve never really talked about. The article, published months ago when I was too busy to care, sours whatever lingering good feelings I had about The Friday Project. Not because of my own sense of abandonment. I’ve had enough of those in my life. What disappoints me is the talk of excess. There’s money owed and monies paid. Huge amounts of money; debts of over £1 million. I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad. I made nothing from my book and lost only the months it took to write, rewrite, proofread, and prepare for publication. And my debts aren’t in the millions -- yet. But I still think of what I really wanted from the publishing deal. What would have made me happy as a writer? £10,000 a year, perhaps. I could have written one or two very funny novels a year, made my name, living poor but happy. Was it too much to expect? Or weren’t my ambitions big enough?

‘Publishers are wary if you’re too prolific’.

That was the advice of the only literary agent I’ve ever spoken to.

It was around the summer of last year. After the book was cancelled, another blogger (who probably wouldn't want me to name but who was unbelievably kind to reach out to me) asked her agent to talk to me. I had a phone call from Patrick Walsh of Conville and Walsh. Walsh was impressive from the moment he began to speak. He was articulate, interested and interesting, and with the kind of rich melodious voice that made my own Lancashire accent seem like the flooded gurgling of a peat digger stuck in a patch of boggy marsh. This was the man, mentioned in the article, credited with landing the biggest deals for bloggers. And he told me at once that there was ‘no novel in Richard Madeley’. Of course, I thought he was wrong and I still feel that he’s wrong. I also believe he was more concerned about issues of copyright, rather than the idea for a book. I tried to explain how it was satire and quite flattering satire at that. In this postmodern world, I still think that a pseudo-biography could work very well. If Sue Townsend can write two fictional accounts of Queen Camilla’s life, I don’t see why I couldn’t create a book set in a fictionalised world of celebrity, Bill Oddie’s owls, and Jeremy Clarkson’s rocket car. However, that was a book I was thinking of writing. My finished project was still looking for a home. I sent him a copy of the manuscript to ‘What Ho Proles!’, the novel that The Friday Project had abandoned.( Incidentally, I had restated the original title ‘What Ho Proles!’ after TFP had made me change it to something that would clearly not attract readers of Wodehouse. They had managed to slip some bad language into the title, to make it sound ‘funnier’, like their other humorous books such as 'It Is Just You - Everything's Not Shit' and 'My Boyfriend is a Twat'.)

So, my manuscript was in the hands of an agent and, naturally, I’ve heard nothing since.

I suppose my novel is still out there. Forgotten. It’s the way of the world. Or so I tell myself. I’ve wasted three years of my life blogging, waiting for a break. Compliments keep me going but... Well, I’m still confused as to how the publishing world works. I go around Borders and Waterstones at Christmas and notice that they are heavily promoting humorists. Funny writing sells. Or so it seems. Yet where did TFP go wrong? Was it because they assumed that comedy is anything with ‘shit’ in the title? Or was it that they tried to ride the gravy train known as ‘misery memoirs’? The article describes how Rachel North’s book had 'projected sales of more than 30,000' but 'underperformed, selling only 5,000 copies'. And this after she’d been on Richard&Judy talking about her story. I hate to think what the projected sales of my own book would have been? 500? 600? Half a dozen?

My problem with The Friday Project wasn’t that they had the wrong business model. It was that they were selling the wrong books. There was nothing in their catalogue which I, as a regular reader and book buyer, would go out and purchase. They relied on impact sales, not on the slow success of an author publishing a series of books. They were all about one off hits. Perhaps that says something about my own book. In terms of their humour books, they seemed to rely heavily on the Christmas market – the stocking fillers bought as a joke but left unread. Yet my book, even retitled, was never going to become another ‘My Boyfriend is a Twat’. It was sub-standard P.G. Wodehouse with some Tory politics thrown in. Perhaps it was no surprised when it was dropped. Perhaps I should be thankful that it never made it to bookshelves.

In the end, I confess that I don’t understand any of it. I see that the Friday Project intends to begin again as an imprint of HarperCollins. They’re beginning with a book about ME. An uplifting title, I’m sure. They clearly know what they’re doing this time around. But if they want a misery memoir, perhaps I should write extensively about my bad year. I have a tale to tell, which they might find quite close to their hearts.

Tractors

So who wants to collect tractors? The ad on TV says that each week, I’ll be able to collect a new model of a piece of farmyard heavy machinery. There are dozens and dozens to collect. If you like tractors.

Tractors...

I’ll trying to think of something interesting to say about tractors. Proper bloggers would know what to say. Some might even own a tractor. They would comment on farming subsidies and how there aren’t enough tractors in the country because of Gordon bloody Brown. Only I can’t think of something interesting to say about tractors. My attempts at being ‘me’ and a ‘real’ blogger are failing miserably. It was easier being somebody else. I could make something up about tractors.

Didn't somebody once write a good poem about a tractor? Or am I thinking of Adge Cutler? He really was worth listening to. I’m no fan of the Wurzels post Adge. But, if you think about it, Adge was probably the closest thing we’ve had to a British Tom Waits.

Hang on. They sang about a combine harvester.

So, in the end, I didn't actually have anything interesting to say about tractors.

Bugger.

Blogging Meltdown

Generally, it isn’t wise to make resolutions. They are fragile things, likely to break under the merest cheesecake or a must-buy hardback. However, I’m starting the year intending to carry on blogging as myself, a couple of times a week. ‘And this is me,’ as Mike Yarwood would say. Of course, we always knew it was him. He was to impressions what David Cameron is to conviction politics. But I really do mean it when I say ‘and this is me’. In fact, not only will blogging as ‘me’ be great, I’ll be a better version of ‘me’ than you’ve ever seen.

No doubt about it: ‘me’ will be something special. Naturally, I intend to be far less honest about my bad moods and my bad luck. No more late night posts about the neighbours. I’ll also cut out all the moaning and anecdotes about how life in the North tends towards misery, compiled into a compendium of gloom. Instead, I’m hoping to reinvent myself as a genial sort and pose as a briar pipe smoking Tory, with just the occasional wry little post on political scene, popular culture, and the worthy things that my colleagues in the blogging community get up to.

Oh, 2009 I salute you! You are the year when my nose will be rank with the sweet aroma of flattery.

2009

A couple of new cartoons.

A new post.

It's been a busy year.

Elton John

Elton John sounded rough this morning. But perhaps I’m not the best man to judge. I always think that Elton sounds rough. Sit him behind a piano and microphone and he reminds me of bullfrog trying to swallow a fat bluebottle. He’s the antithesis to everything I want from my music but I didn’t particularly warm to the sight of the cloying loveliness of the Tarquins and Theresas smooching in the audience as dear Aunt Elton coughed up his lyrical syrup. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about me but I don’t do ‘sweet’. I also don’t go in for large toothed, high income, big collar, Range Rover driving accountants snogging their pearly perfect wives/girlfriends/secretaries on my TV while I’m still trying to digest my morning yoghurt.

I was also feeling tired. I’d been woken at 7am by the children playing in the bedroom next door. The great benefit of living in a semi-detached house is that we can all enjoy the noises of children playing whilst their parents sleep off their New Year’s festivities in whatever strange bedroom or bedsit they’d found themselves.

Despite the above, I am in a better mood. Yes, I sometimes get up feeling cheerful and today was one of those days. I put this down to now being on the other side of the ‘festive season’. I’ve also just finished a sketch of Elton’s lead guitarist which I’ve posted over there, for the few of you who have asked to get in (I do need your email address to invite you in). I’m quite pleased with it, having been studying my Ronald Searle to get the face just right. I’m now going to spend my day printing out gags. I bought some quality HP inkjet paper and have the ‘Artist and Writer’s Yearbook’ beside me. I have no idea how to go about this process of submitting cartoons. I also think that most of mine are too surreal to get accepted. However, I’ll give them a try in the belief that with a new year, anything is possible.