Your Number's Up

They've changed the lock on the bike shed at work. Well, I say bike shed. In reality, it serves all manner of purposes, including housing the snow plough that they finally invested in a couple of years ago to ensure the place never again had to be shut down because of a particularly heavy snow fall. And, of  course, it's worked like a charm: the place has indeed not had to be shut down because of heavy snowfall. But that's mainly because we haven't had any. 

They've changed the padlock, but not the code. This should be a good thing - the padlock will no longer get rusty in rain, or do whatever it did in very cold weather which meant that it just gave up and refused to move like a sulky teenager who's locked themselves in the bedroom with a bag of Doritos and a box set of Girls. Now that the padlock has been changed, everything should be shiny, new and effortless, and the whole putting my bike away thing at the start of the day, and the retrieving my bike at the end of the day thing (both very similar things) should be events that are so mundane that they don't really deserve to be called events. 

If I'm honest, they still are mundane that they don't need to be called events, and certainly not of enough interest to be written about on any public forum (such as this blog, for instance), but at the start and end of each day, I find myself getting needled, rattled and frustrated. These are three feelings you really don't want to be having at either end of the day. You kind of expect them during the day, that's part of the deal, that's why you have endless cups of tea and migraines as coping mechanisms, but the simple act of getting or leaving your bike shouldn't be a source of frustration. 

It's particularly annoying at the end of the day. I have exactly nine minutes to get out of work and catch the train. If I miss that train, it's nearly always impossible to get the following train, because that one is stacked with excitable college kids and gently glowering building site workers. There's not even enough space to claim 'standing room only', and even when there is, most of the kids elect to do this curious thing where they're going to stand in the doorways of the train for the entire journey, even if they're on the train for fifteen stops and forty minutes. Even if, after a while, entire carriages have eventually become empty. It becomes difficult to get on such a train if the doors are blocked in such a fashion, and downright impossible if you've got a bike in tow. People who are needlessly blocking train doors get curiously uptight about letting you on with a bike. 

All of this becomes of paramount importance when I'm trying to get my bike out of the shed. If I can make the nine minute journey to get the earlier train, I manage to get the connection that's pretty much empty. It feels like I'm getting a train in the middle of the afternoon, only used by mothers on their way back from toddler group, and youngsters on their way to sign on to the dole. It's a different world. It still depresses me that it took me the best part of five years to discover that it was possible for me to make this connection. But in order to get to this train on time, I need to simply - get - my bike. No fussing, no messing about. Certainly no enraged tumbling around of the numbers for the twentieth time as I attempt to unlock the padlock from the bike shed door. 

Because the problem with the new padlock is that it doesn't quite work. I should be clear here. If we judge a lock purely and solely in its effectiveness as just that - a lock - then it's a fine lock. A dandy, there are very few locks that are more secure than this lock. The cast of Ocean's Eleven would be befuddled, confused, and finally exasperated by this lock. It wouldn't be as great a film, but it might certainly be on par with Twelve and Thirteen. The aspect in which the lock fundamentally fails is the whole un-locking part. It just doesn't. It refuses. It doesn't refuse entirely, of course, but confusingly, you have to wriggle the numbers around slightly so they don't quite match up in the correct order. Once you've managed to guide all the numbers in exactly the correct position (by which I mean the slightly wrong one), the lock will effortlessly and easily slide open. Like it was meant to in the first place. I don't have time for this sort of thing. Literally, I don't have time. I have a thirteen minute journey to cycle in nine minutes. The amount of time I've got for screwing around with this padlock is one minute, tops. 

But here's the thing. The really frustrating thing. Because, being me, the frustrating thing can't just be the frustrating thing - there has to be another frustrating thing on top of the original frustrating thing, just to put a highlighter pen to the whole, general frustration of the thing. Because, despite the fact that the new padlock is stupid, ridiculous, and unhelpful, despite the fact that it only works if you nuance the tumblers in some secret way that is only clear after doing ten years of mystical chanting and Zen like meditation - despite all that: I'm the only one who has a problem with it. Everyone else who uses the bike shed on a regular basis - and there's at least six of us - have no problem with the padlock whatsoever. 'You just have to wraggle it about a bit,' they declare, cheerfully. WRAGGLE IT ABOUT A BIT?!? I rage, in my head. This is supposed to be a security measure, this is supposed to be the thing we rely on to ensure our bikes don't get nicked. Surely it can't all depend on things being wraggled about a bit? 

I don't have time to say any of this, of course. I have a train to catch. In less than seven minutes.

Bye Bye Baby, Sci-Fi

A couple of hundred words today on 'Broom Handle'. Not many, but they feel like important words, because I'm starting on the actual background details of the story, the whys and wherefores of the world I've created, rather than the narrative and plot. There's a problem, though: this story is sci-fi. And sci-fi sucks.

The thing is, I don't actually like sci-fi all that much. I mean, to watch, in film and TV, then great, but I've rarely come across sci-fi book (or speculative fiction, as it's increasingly being called) that I've really been blown over by. Of course, you could argue that that's simply because I'm not looking hard enough, and that would be largely true. I've not read any Phillip K Dick, for instance, and very little Ray Bradbury (although it was a collection of Bradbury short stories that first inspired this story). No Asimov, no Arthur C Clarke, very little John Wyndham (which I really should rectify at some point). I seem, rather, to have gotten trapped in reading, or trying to read, very poor sci-fi, stories that spend far too much time setting up this strange new world that's entirely normal to its inhabitants, but needs to be described in exposition heavy detail to the audience. I remember going to a couple of writers groups in Worthing, when I still lived there. Authors were invited to read extracts from whatever they were working on. On one particular session, a chap spent forty minutes describing in loving detail a post apocalyptic world in which women ruled, and men didn't wear the trousers. He wasn't talking figuratively. He literally meant that all the menfolk were banned from wearing anything below the waist. In the end, the person running the evening had to guide him off the stage.

It's not always like that, I should point out. I only managed two writers groups in Worthing, but at the second, the mood was somewhat grim. Everyone who had read had exhubrent confidence that was in direct inverse proportion to the talent that they displayed. More tension filled the room as everyone realised that no matter how much they hated everyone else's work, it was still better than anything they could produce. Eventually, an overly serious looking teenage girl stood up. She told us she was going to read us her poem. The room tensed even more; poetry is challenging enough even when it's in a book that you bought yourself. Then, as a final aperitif, she informed us that it was about her best friend who had died in a car crash a few months before. The tension felt quivering enough to snap: most of the stuff already read that night had been between mediocre and terrible, but it hadn't been introduced with the baggage of a dead best friend. She began to speak. It was, of course, beautiful. Simple, elegant, unfussy. Just a regretful goodbye to a young woman who had died far too soon. Somehow, she kept her composure throughout. The same couldn't be said of her audience.

Partially it was because that grieving teenager was a skilled writer, tapping into simple emotions and reactions, that brought out the best in her words, but it's also true that there's something about sci-fi that seems to bring out the worst in people, full of exposition and explanation by characters who don't need to explain the universe they live in, because they live in it. It's what I'm struggling with slightly in Broom Handle: there's a few details I need to explain, but I don't want to go overboard; just because we, the readers, don't know what's going on, doesn't mean that the characters are in the dark as well. That said, I'm a great fan of trusting an audience's intelligence: even if they don't exactly know what's going on, they're quite happy to play catch up. For instance, George Orwell's 1984 drops you right into another world without explanation from, literally, the first sentence, and trusts that you'll work out what's going on. It's about finding the balance.

Broom Handle is only a short story, of course - it's probably going to come in at about 4000 words - but I'm fond of it already because it's really the first story where I've had the initial idea, and actually managed to get it down on paper, before it fell apart like a badly mixed cake (or, indeed, like an ill-chosen metaphor). Quite often, I'll come across the first three pages of a story that I began writing some years previously. And the first three pages are pretty good. And the only ones that have been written. And here's the crunch: I have absolutely no idea what to do with the story. The white heat of the initial idea has long since faded, leaving only a dull, uninspired blank.

This blog, of course, helps. Obviously, it gets in the way (I'm writing this paragraph when I could be writing the opening paragraph of my next story), but I find that it's begun to focus me, if only to remind me that jotting down a few words in the evening could easily be a few hundred. And not be that much of a chore.

Post Olympics

So, that’s it, then. Two weeks of watching the planet’s athletes doing what they do best are now at anend, and now Great Britain can go back to doing what it does best, namely, returning to a foul mood and not being quite so positive. It must have been quite a strain for the nation’s cynics over the last fortnight, like a middle aged man holding his stomach in when a pretty girl walks past.
Having little or no interest in sport, I ended up seeing little to none of the games. In fact, most of what I did see was essentially the opening and closing ceremonies, both at big screens – one in Brighton, on the beach, and the other, tonight, at the BBC Garden at the Edinburgh Fringe. There were, of course, these big screens in town centres all over the country, allowing people everywhere to soak up that atmosphere of fun, comradeship and support for the nation’s Olympians. Well, except in Worthing, where last week someone nicked the laptop and cable that were needed to transmit the footage from the BBC. Maybe in Worthing they assumed that basic thievery was an Olympic sport, and they were going for Bronze. And by ‘going for Bronze’, I do of course mean simply pinching it from a railway line.
However, the atmosphere at those screens was wonderful. A lot was said about how easy it was to get caught up in a sport that you had no real passion – or, indeed, fundamental knowledge – of, and that’s even more true within a crowd of amenable people on a sunny day getting swept up in all the high drama of, say, dressage.

We’ve learnt a lot from these games. We’ve learned that we’re in dire need of stronger role models than the cast of TOWIE. We’ve learned that despite what we’re continually being told, that actually most people are pretty fond of Great Britain. We’ve learned that an alarming amount of people want to sleep with Tom Daly, regardless of what they thought their sexuality was. And, I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned that every time from now one I use a taxi, I want it to be like the ones the Spice Girls use.

The Long Walk

I was late for work today. Not by a great deal, but enough to make me tetchy and nervous. That's the thing when you rock up late to your job, you imagine (at least, I do) that everybody else is sitting in judgement, darkly commenting on your inability to do basic things like know the time. No matter that when it happens to someone else, you really couldn't care less. But it makes no difference: I still assume that my work colleagues have less than flattering things to say about me when I'm late. Actually, I assume that they have plenty of stuff like that to say even when I'm early, which probably points at some underlying paranoia stemming from the fact that my parents didn't buy me a BMX bike when I was a kid, and is probably more a complicated series of neuroses than we really have space to get into here.

Actually, talking about bikes, it was a puncture that caused my lateness this morning. I cycle to Hove station, and then cycle from West Worthing station in, well, Worthing, to work. Both cycling bits of the journey take just under ten minutes each. However, if I find myself without a bike, and have to walk, both take about half a hour each. That's a hour added to my morning journey, which isn't the best way to start your working day.

The closer I got to work this morning, the more frustrating this became - to be so close to my destination, a route that usually takes only about eight minutes, but to know that it was now going to take the length of an episode of The Big Bang Theory to get there, was pretty annoying. I began to wish that I could be taller, so that I could take longer strides, and have at least an outside chance of arriving on time. This would have advantages and disadvantages. True, I would get to more places more quickly, but once I'd arrived, there would be more people asking me what the weather was like up there.

A few years ago, I knew an extraordinarily good looking woman who happened to be reasonably tall - around six feet. The combination of these two factors meant that men who were attempting to hit on her in night clubs were fairly unoriginal in their approach. 'You're really tall!' they'd declare happily as their opening gambit, presumably under the impression that she hadn't spotted this physical anomaly for herself. After a while, her reply ended up being equally unoriginal: 'I know!', she'd answer, in the tone of voice one normally reserves for conversations with toddlers and victims of recent head trauma. She's married now, and I'd be willing to bet that the man who won her fair heart did so by the simple expedient of managing to find something else to discuss when they first met other than her height.

If we're honest, however, a hour at both ends isn't the worst hardship that can be added to my working day. I'm pretty sure both my parents had to walk even longer to get to school each day. Of course, this was rural Ireland in the 1950s, and they didn't get to catch a train for the middle portion. While we're at it, the train can be a bit of a strain, too, when you're carrying a bike. Even when you restrict yourself to those sections of the train that are specifically designed to carry bikes. People seem to delight in standing directly in the doorways, thereby getting in the way of everyone else trying to get on or off the train. This is even more exasperating when you've got a bike in hand, since many people seem to think that, as a cyclist, you absolutely shouldn't be allowed on board.

But, anyway. I shouldn't moan. I need to save my energy: it's nearly home time, and I've got a long walk back.