Out of ideas

We have a pointless, somewhat masochistic ritual in mid-November. We get in beer, and a takeaway, and our best bad attitudes, and we pile all these up in front of the telly and watch Children in Need until the small hours, bitching, kibitzing and sneering our way through the rice noodles. And then one of us cracks and reads out our credit-card details to an exhausted minor celebrity over the phone, and then we go to bed.

A somewhat extreme cure for insomnia, but hey. I’ll try anything at this point.

Missed highlight of the evening so far: a little skit by two cast members of Robin Hood. Guy of Gisborne (phwoar. Seriously. PHWOAR) confiscates Maid Marian’s Pudsey Bear, but agrees to return it if the Public donate some money. Of course the suckers do, and Pudsey is once more pressed to Marian’s anachronistically clad bosom. While I urgently shouted that I’d've paid very good money indeed to see Guy drop the beastly yellow object into a wood chipper. So disappointed.

Cheerfully, shamelessly, swiped from Charlotte.

1. Do you remember learning to read? How old were you?

Like Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, I never learnt to read. My mother remembers playing with flash-cards with me when I was two or three, but I simply do not remember not being able to read, or being taught in any way. At six, I had a reading age of twelve, at twelve, of an adult, as an adult, I now have the reading age of a depressed adolescent geek.

2. What do you find most challenging to read?

Currently? Course books on Management and Computing. Dear God, but is writing in English an ability not vouchsafed to anyone who knows what a policy documentation trail is?

3. What are your library habits?

I work in a library. I am studying librarianship. I prowl libraries territorially. I rearrange the shelves if they’ve got out of order even in the local public library. I belong to five libraries. I max out all my library cards on a regular basis. You could say I have boundary issues when it comes to libraries.

4. Have your library habits changed since you were younger?

I grew up a long long way from a library, in a land where libraries were not so much of a big deal. And then, age ten, I went to a school with a library and, oh my, I could read any of it, all of it, take it home if I liked… Hooked. Since then, I have always thrown myself into all and any available libraries with desperate abandon. I don’t think much has altered since that first magical visit. Oh, apart from all the books on HTML now littering the floor around the computer. Never thought that would happen.

5. How has blogging changed your reading life?

I had meant to do more reviews, which meant I started reading more thematically, but, really, I read but I don’t think these days. I do see other people’s reviews and make mental notes, but did I mention lack of thinking? Notes all lost. Carpet fluff in there. Sorry.

6. What percentage of your books do you get from new book stores, second hand book stores, the library, online exchange sites, online retailers, other?

10% new (huge and huge and gigantic and huge bookshop right next door to work. Tempty tempty), 5% second hand, 70% library, 10% online retailers, and I suppose the rest are gifts.

7. How often do you read a book and not review it on your blog? What are your reasons for not blogging about a book?

I rarely blog about my reading because, actually, I am too darn chicken. I always meant to. It was one of the original aims of the blog. But alas I have such a horror of looking shallow, or unperceptive, or dim, or having anyone judge my reading habits. This sounds a little wet, really [A little? A little? - Ed]. I know. But you haven’t grown up being told you are as nothing, as nothing, d’you hear? until you’ve read The Brothers Karamazov. And this at an age when Narnia is so much more… appealing. Nope. Still haven’t read Dostoevsky.

8. What are your pet peeves about the way people treat books?

Writing in books. Even in pencil. Folding paper-backs in half at the spine (which, of course, rips all the pages out of the spine and makes the cover permanently warped). Leaving books lying around for hours, days, open and face-down. Again, screws the spine permanently. Using those metal giant paper-clip-like ornamental book-marks - they always tear a page in the end.

9. Do you ever read for pleasure at work?

Of course not! [Bwahahahah!]

10. When you give people books as gifts, how do you decide what to give them?

I try to think what they like, what they’ve liked in the past, what they have already, and basically spin round and round in the middle of the shop until my brain explodes and I have to go and recover in a coffee-shop. Sometimes I get self-rightous and give books I think they ought to read. I try to control this urge, but, hey, certain people just need telling.

I am a tired Reed. With insomnia. I am very well aware that listening to people droning on about their blasted insomnia is a good narcotic. So I shan’t. I shall go and paste vague, emotional and misspelt comments all over everyone else’s blogs instead.

Day in the life of a full-time mature student with a part-time job:

7:00 Get up. No, really, get up. Get up. Get up. Get the hell up already.

7:20 GET. THE. HELL. UP.

7:30 Drink tea in front of computer, with vague intention of reading emails. Find self staring transfixed at the weather report. Give up, brush teeth, wash, get dressed, find this involves wandering in and out of the bedroom with one sock on and no trousers for no specific reason. Find other sock. Put it down to hunt for comb. Find comb on kitchen table. Put comb down somewhere mysterious to look for other sock. Rinse. Repeat.

8:00 Leave house.

8:03 Re-enter house, hunt frantically for wallet, leave house.

8:15 Arrive at train station. Trains delayed. Platform crowded. Unable to squeeze onto first train. Cuss. Squeeze onto second train. Man is standing on foot. Second man has back-pack on and grinds it repeatedly into my face. Tinny version of Lily Allen drivelling in left ear from perky woman with flash iPod and shitty ear-phones.

8:35 Find self staggering off train to coffee stall. Take coffee and trundle down into deep dark Grendel-infested caverns of the Underground. Underground unspeakable. Coffee cup sole defence between me and crushed claustrophobic panic.

9:00 Arrive at lecture sans coffee, having nearly been hit by psychotic cyclist at road crossing, coffee ultimate casualty, can only hope some of it splashed cyclist, most of it down own leg. Attempt to concentrate. Attempt to attempt to concentrate. Feel ravenous. Remember ghastly organic cereal bar that tastes of polystyrene is in bag. Ponder possibility of eating it very quietly and subtly while sitting in front row of lecture hall with both elbows being gently compressed into ribs by fellow students, both of whom, infuriatingly, have coffee.

10:30 Decide to go and have coffee with peers before heading off to Library for an hour before next lecture.

12:00 Dammit. Sat chatting like jolly chatty person with all time in world for hour and a half. Peers too amusing, clearly. Must find boring friends. Go to next lecture. Am able to actually engage brain. Feel chipper.

1:00 Lunch. Beastly cheap sandwich in horrifyingly crowded and noisy canteen. Some tit leaves via fire-exit, setting alarm off, and adding to Pandemoniacal atmosphere. Can’t run away, as am having lunch with nice person I want to impress with my general affability and sweet nature and total lack of neurotic tics.

2:00 Work, at Library in Other Seat of Learning. Of office full complement of 17, two are off sick, one is off his chump, one is on study leave, two are working from home, and one is Unavailable. Heave a dozen boxes of freshly delivered re-bound journals and books upstairs single-handed. Unpack boxes. Find interesting selection of errors therein. Repack errors. Go to meeting. Return from meeting to find Off His Chump Guy has not shelved any journals today. Go shelve journals. On return downstairs, find mouse in staff kitchen. Work way through heap of tatty battered books that ought to be sent to be bound. Cover self with glue. Find I have missed tea-break, and I must now go on duty at the Issue Desk and be Helpful. With no tea. Get shouted at twice, harangued at length about ‘The Government’ once, thanked three times (personal shift record), and asked about photocopiers seventy-six times.

5:45 Realise I should have gone home 15 minutes ago.

5:47 Run madly from building before anyone can think of a good reason to stop me. Decide Underground and Bus are both to hideous to contemplate. Walk across town to Main Station. Walk takes 35 minutes even when I am sure I am walking very fast indeed. Cram self onto ghastly packed train, get booted in face by rucksack complete with walking boots that someone can’t be bothered to take off while on crowded train, repress urge to defenestrate him, repress urge to also defenestrate girl who smells like an exploded air-freshener.

7:00 Re-enter house, shortly after husband. Realise, dully, painfully, that no one has magically washed up in our absence.

8:00 Watch TV while eating, well aware that This Kind of Thing is supposed to be the Death of a Marriage. Spend evening alternately watching more TV, faffing about online, pretending to read Important Core Text-Book, and failing to wash up.

11:49 Realise one could have always done teeth and gone to bed with Important Core Text-Book hours ago. Duly brush teeth, clean face, search for comb, plait hair, leaving comb somewhere completely daft, like in bread-bin or under book-shelf.

12:15 Finally stop idly discussing plans for spending Christmas at the bottom of a well, as being preferable to Family, and go to sleep. Or, stare into darkness, resentfully, while spouse sleeps like happy little log.

Repeat ad nauseam.

I have just found out, to my intense irritation, that some of my posts don’t appear in all browsers or at all times or on all computers. I swear, I really swear, I am posting daily. But the internet gremlins are clearly a censorious little bunch of toadstools [with excellent taste, of course - Ed] and there we have it. Glitch. Unfixable, because whenever I’m actually logged in, everything is present and correct, if drivel and rubbish, so I can’t see whatever it is I need to see to know why you, oh gracious readers, can’t see, and you know what? At this rate, Bernard Levin can kiss my subordinate clauses (metaphorically. On account of being dead for three years). And I do feel that this paragraph has gone to hell in a hand-cart, taking any gist it ever had down with it.

['Twas ever thus.]

It is also time to plunge back into the serried armies of lectures and seminars and practicals and viewing the Library as a source of (sporadic, possible) information and neurotic hives rather than a cause of irritation and, err, hives. As work is savagely kicking my arse at the moment, I have an inkling, in a pocket somewhere, that I will at some rapidly approaching point, melt down. Possibly with tears, and alcohol on a week-night, and such.

Or maybe it’s just the horrifyingly imminent prospect of the Christmas Holidays. You think I’m being funny. Ahh, no, Christmas is a Slough of Despond and of dismal pressure to be jolly in the face of a dog-pile of tragic memories at the moment. Ze familee, you zee, iz broken.

In any case, Universe one, Reed nil.

Update: Found glitch. My own very dumb fault. Universe two, Reed nil.

The headache, she persisteth, oy vey. What a bloody waste of a weekend. I shall have to offer you a little more antique verse, while I lie down again and fuss because I find reading even so much as detective fiction quite hard going at the moment.

It is very safe to say that I have spent entirely too much time writing ‘practice’ poems, designed, say, to exercise one’s ability in the teeth of Spenserian stanzas on the set subject ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. But I was technically writing a PhD at the time (don’t ask [Oh, please don't ask - Ed]), so it’s hardly surprising I spent hours and hours on this kind of thing instead.

At night the rain is snapped out by the gale,
A waterlogged white sheet spread through the air
And pinned to grass and sky just like a sail
Whose trailing edge is tethered to my hair.
It pulls me forward, astray, without a care,
A sailing leaf, a fishing-boat, a bark.
Lost under seas of stormy sky I dare
Go home the long way through the roaring dark,
Across the streaming grass, across the tree-bound park.

Above the oaks the air lies two miles deep -
A mass of wind and water roiling by -
And all the darkened houses crouch asleep
Beneath the roaring oceans of the sky.
On watery nights like these we humans lie
Or safe indoors or stray beneath the rain;
A few of us can hear the weather’s cry
And walk abroad despite the anchor-chain
That lets us run yet brings us safely home again.

At last I went away from the wet trees
Between the rushing walls of rain and light
That streaks the rain. The street-lamps that one sees
Are saffron gate-ways splitting up the night.
They mark me as I come back from my flight
Into the elements to loose my soul
And wash it clean in storm-winds like a kite.
So wet and wild into the house I stole,
Still fierce with gales and oceans, bright-dark night, and whole.

Now, is this a fairly good poem, or an utterly shit poem? We’ve all looked at it for hours, and we can’t quite tell.

Saturday. A whole Saturday with nothing to do in it but watch the laundry dry. I should be cooking up a very long and eloquent post about something important, like Charlotte’s post on AIDS - I mean, I have the time.

I also have a headache and freezing-cold hands and feet. And a mouse in the flat (damn all rodents to rodenty hell). And an uneasy feeling I ought to be studying. There is always an ‘ought to be studying’, though and I am getting very good at ignoring it. This will probably bite me on the arse at some unspecified time, no doubt in conjunction with a deadline.

NaBloPoMo, I suppose, means you get to watch me being uninspired, gloomy, dull. Lucky lucky you.

While lying in bed under a heap of toast-crumbs this morning, I distinctly heard someone on the radio announce that Norman Mailer had died. When I went over to the BBC News site to confirm this, I also saw them front-paging a story about how Kate Moss, whoever the hell she is, mistook David Cameron for a plumber. I can’t think what I am more grumpy about, that we’ve lost that irascible old marvel Mailer, or that the BBC puts such sleb-flavoured foam on the same front page.

Though, possibly, the Nation does need to know just what a colossal dork Cameron actually, cheerfully, and self-confessedly is.

I have had a horrible bloody day - the sort of day that starts with a headache and ends with shouting at people and crying into my gin.

Obviously the only remedy to this is more gin. I shall go and apply it forthwith.

I was playing with the NaBloPoMo Randomizer this morning, as one does when one knows very well one ought to be making notes on Library of Congress Subject Headings. (And, yes, Ed, you are quite right, most posters seem to be graduate students in the throes of essay-avoidance). It was a fairly amusing experience, if slightly heavy on the cute pet pictures.

I noticed, at some point towards the bottom of the coffee mug, that I would read several posts on some blogs, and click away from others within three seconds of landing. It occurred to me I had no clue as to what was triggering the instant dismissals, as the subject headings were preying on my mind, and therefore there was no conscious reasoning going on [then or ever - Ed]. Not that preying ever equates to me picking the book up again, and, frankly, the subject headings will have to do better than that if they want a share of the caffeinated goodness that is my full attention.

So I went back, to see if I could see whatever it was I hadn’t wanted to see in the blogs I dismissed out of hand. And here is a list of the most obvious and immediate offenders. Dear God, but I’m a cruel and sneering bitch.

1. Multiple exclamation marks. I don’t care if Nyarlathotep himself turned up in your front room with an entourage of maddening flute-players. Multiple exclamation marks make you look like a teenage girl who has run out of Ritalin. Stop it.
2. no capitals. ever. because the shift key is sooooo hard to press, oh yes, especially when pressing something else with another finger of the same hand, though i see you can press it neatly enough when you need to tell us just how exciting you are finding nablopomo!!!! LOL!!!!
3. Sentences that are capitalised and punctuated perfectly normally, but ‘I’ is in lower case. This does not make you look modest and self-effacing. It makes you look barmy. And not in an interesting, blue-haired, Jim Carey attracting way. If you want to self-efface, you could always not spend three paragraphs describing your favourite breakfasts.
4. Religion. Sorry. I may well be missing out on the most fascinating and heart-warming reads of my life, but the phrases ‘our church’, ‘my husband the pastor’, ‘allow Jesus into your heart’ and ‘living according to G-d’s Law/ Scripture/ Plan’ induce a spasm of near-epileptic helplessness in my mouse-hand.
5. Photo-essays on how you have tidied your hair-accessories/ made cookies/ tidied your lounge, complete with before and after and before with family and after with family and before with pets and after with pets. If you want me to look at that many views of your furniture, you need to have set fire to it, or at least have stacked it on the lawn.
6. Spelling ‘Austen’ (as in Jane), ‘Austin’. Instant dismissal. Instant.
7. Blogs entirely dedicated to telling the universe how lovely, cute, special and precious your kids/ spouse/ doggies are. Because I am a bitter and twisted old hag.

Also, work sucked poisonous green bunnies this afternoon, everyone is either off sick or out of temper, our new suppliers have now screwed up twice in the same order, and for a part-time girl I seem to be doing someone else’s full-time job on top of my own, which, now that I think about it, violates at least one law of physics.

Having spent the entire day doing pointless, non-NaBloPoMo things like hauling self to the supermarket and back, forgetting to do laundry, actually working for money, and going to the movies (Stardust, thank you for asking, no doubt I’ll spectacularly fail to review it at some point), I have now landed at eleven pm, with a post to write, nothing I can think of to write about in less than an hour, and a general consciousness that I really am rather asking too much of the Gentle Reader if I expect him or her to, you know, fill in the gaps and imagine any of this is witty, apposite, or worth the bloody effort to read, let alone write.

Sorry.

Damn.

Sorry.