I love the SeaLife Centre, and
love the fact that it’s practically at the end of my road. The curators (or
owners, or management team, or whatever they are) have done a really good job
of creating a genuinely other-world feeling place, and some of the fish are
really jaw-dropping. I’d recommend it to anyone. I do have vague memories of
going there as a kid, long before I actually moved to Brighton – long before,
in fact, it had ever occurred to me that I might live here – but I’m not sure.
The dolphins were moved out in the seventies since it wasn’t exactly humane
(humane? Is that the word when you’re talking about animals?) to have
performing dolphins in what is essentially a confined space. The sharks are
still there, though, although we’re assured that they’re not man-eaters. I don’t
know how often they test that theory.
I’m reminded that I set the finale
scene of my novel on the rooftop of a fictionalised version of the SealLife
Centre in the novel that I wrote last year. Yeah, I know, a novel. A whole one.
OK, well, a short one, and it was one that was hacked out in a month, as part
of 2012’s Nanowrimo, but still, there was a fair amount of it that I quite
liked. Don’t get me wrong, most of it was fairly dreck (it was hacked out in
thirty days, after all, and it’s not like I actually wrote for every single one
of those thirty days), but there was a reasonable amount that might one day be
salvageable for some kind of pulpy kindle-friendly novella. In fact, the only
problem I had with it, even more than the admittedly haphazard plotting, was
how Mary-Sue the main character was. Added to that, I couldn’t quite decide if
my main character being a bit of a Mary-Sue was actually a problem, since this
was a deliberately dime-store style pulp novel, and as such, the lead is
traditionally all of the above and more: beautiful, intelligent, witty and
kick-ass.
Another look at the manuscript
would tell me if I’ve just created a wish-fulfilment woman, or if she’s a
decent character in her own right. At least, it would if I could find the damn
thing. But I can’t. It’s vanished, all fifty thousand (and plus) words of it. I’ve
gone through a laptop since then, which simply stopped working, but I don’t
think it’s there. What I do have is a couple of external hard drives. Not just
USB memory sticks, but heavy, bigger than iphone, external hard drives. These,
also, have stopped working altogether. They are now not so much use as
somewhere to store works in progress, but reasonably unattractive paperweights.
I will need to start emailing myself everything I write (because I don’t do
that enough yet) in order to insure myself against any more potential losses.
In the end, I couldn’t get into
the SeaLife Centre, because it seems that my annual pass expired. About three
weeks ago. I’m not entirely convinced by this, because I’m sure that I renewed
the pass in March (‘March this year?’
the otherwise helpful chap at the desk asked. Yes, March this year). It’s going
to take me a while to check my bank statements for earlier in the year, but
knowing my luck, I’ll have got things wrong, and I’ve somehow managed to black
out for eleven months, not realising that time has passed me by.
That kind of thing is always happening to me.
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