It's been a desire of mine to write the great British novel since I was old enough to hold a pen. And I would have done it a long time ago, be it not for distractions like Sky television, the internet and video games.
I'm happy to say I've finally started jotting ideas down, stretching them out, scrunching them up. I don't expect for a second to become a published authour, it's more a project whereby I write something that I would write if I was going to do something like this full time: going through the motions of writing a book, testing the water, seeing exactly what it's like to be a writer of books.

I'm under no illusions that I'm the next Oscar Wilde, but I'll show it to friends if and when I have something on paper that I'm sort of proud of. The prospect just seems fun. I thought that it would be nice to try to map out here what I feel are my influences and inspirations at this moment in time, taken from various mediums. Pieces of the things I love that I hope will make it into the book.

The setting is going to be what I'm calling ULTRA REALISM. There here and the now, set in the middle England I've always known. The old disclaimer that 'the book is entirely ficticious and any resemblence made to any person, living or dead is entirely coincidental' applies but the book could be set anywhere you know, it features the brands we're familiar with, it's inhabited by the famous figures we love and hate. I want it to be like the British television sitcom PEEP SHOW. I want the book to be something of a proverbial time capsule filled with everything that makes up June 25th. 2008. Similarly, I want the book's protagonist to narrate in the vain of Peep Show's two main characters Jeremy and Mark, particularly the latter. The character has to be something of a MISFIT, a PESSIMIST. This is a line of thinking I can sort to relate to.

I have a plot outline, but it needs a lot of development, which is where I'm at currently. I plan to update later with a few more details. Until then I'll sit with a notebook and shape, scrunch and scrape.

Feline Baggage part Deux

I write as I struggle with my eyes...

Four AM it was all over. Three kittens, non sexed, mother and baby doing fine.

:)

Feline Baggage

The last thing you probably want to read about today is my Feline Baggage. She's a she, and goes by several names.. To most people she's known as Heidi, the handle I nominated for her when she was a kitten out of desperation. Before I owned her I could have thought of a million names for a feline, but when it came to the proverbial crunch, nothing would fit. So Heidi it was, out of desperation - her only characteristic as a tiny kitten was that she ran away and inserted her tiny body into nooks crannies. (And, to a lesser extent, I suppose I've always sort of felt an affection to Anna Sewell's blonde-platted Alpen Elfin)

The name stuck with everyone else. And I suppose everyone else I know thought it's just rude not to give a cat some kind of name. To me though, she's just 'the Cat'. (Well, if the glove fits the paw...)

Around sixty days ago the cat (let's just call her that for now, just to avoid any confusion from the outset) decided to go out and find another (male) cat. We all know the facts of life, and nature took its course, and here we are now, nigh on sixty days later, and still no sign of a litter.

My quest for knowledge of a cat's gestation period has been constant since she started showing a slight bump, having trekked through what seems like thousands of pages of text on hundreds of cat birthing websites. I could probably pass an exam tomorrow on the subject, if one were to exist and was being sat in the area. As far as I've deduced, she's very nearly there: Nipples a pinky colour... Check; Body bigger by 25 per cent... Check; On edge and needy... Check; The desire to sneak into nooks and crannies and cupboards and under the coffee table has always in there, hence her sometimes-name Heidi, so not sure on that score.

It could have been quite different, had I have followed the advice, been a more attentive father and followed her pregnancy as the websites suggested. But that would involve taking a temperature the only feesable way; a mercury thermometer coated with KY Jelly and inserted into her back passage. Her temprature would be a certain level when it was finally time to go into labour. But chances are she'd have my eye out if I tried any trick like that!

At time of typing she seems both restless and lethargic at the same time, if that makes sense. She's usual quite an independent thing, usually ready to give affection but not really that keen to receive it. Now she's climbing all over me, and isn't really put off by me rearranging the way she's sat when she has a paw digging into me .A couple of weeks ago one accidental touch somewhere that was obviously tender because of pregnancy, caused her to growl, hiss and maybe even take the odd swipe. Now, she doesn't really care about that, and is purring loudly. Usually she treats my lap as somewhere warm to get her head down and sleep. Right now she's sat here, seemingly glad of some company. She's been milling around a lot too, looking for somewhere small, dark, enclosed, but somehow getting edgy if I go somewhere else. I've turned my pantry into a makeshift maternity ward, but typically for a headstrong cat she hasn't really wanted to know. I showed her to my spare bedroom where she sat down and started licking herself. This is a trait of cat labour, so I left her to it, but within about twenty minutes she was downstairs milling around and mewing at me discontentedly. Right now her respiration seems to be faster, but I could just be imagining it. So neither of us are sure yet.

It's back to those internet cat birth sites now, to read up again, and see if there are other signs that the arrival of three to seven tiny kittens is imminent. The towels are there, as are the blankets. This period may last twenty four hours, maybe three days. However long it's going to take, one things for sure; sooner or later my Feline Baggage is set to multiply. This excited stepfather can't wait.

The secret life of the obsessive buyer

CD copy of the Long Blondes' new album ''Couples'': 9.99

Various Groceries: 4.25

Not buying an iPod: Priceless

I stand in three Worcester stores salivating over a black MP3 player juggling the economics of the foolhardy in my brain, wondering how hard it could be to live on the remains on your already beleaguered wage packet, exactly seven days in.

Normally I would have done it - I would have taken my chances... maybe skipped going out drinking this weekend, next weekend and the weekend after... maybe try to get by on the half a bag of a bag of frozen chick peas and a few packets of nine pence ramen noodles for three weeks.

But this time, something quite different and unexpected happened: some chemical messenger or other lit a gas hob at its ignition point in my brain, illuminating a light show that spelled out

'BILLS'

Normally I would have done it; pointed to what I wanted, handed a piece of plastic to an overworked and underpaid cashier and typed a series of numbers known to me and no one else, into a machine with excited hands. I would have taken a shiny black box with shinier contents home on the bus, taking it out of the bag to make sure it's still in there... thinking about what I was going to copy onto it first; how I could fit onto it every album, single, B-side, live version, remix, demo, forgotten song - with ample room left for full episodes of TV shows, maybe even the odd movie - I would imagine watching a Clockwork Orange sat in a regular class train carriage, en route to places like London, Manchester, Hereford.

Just whose fault is it anyway?
Is it their fault for having a bottomless safe of money to spend on advertising in order to blanket my consciousness?
Is it my fault for buying the corporate shit?
Is it just the way we've evolved?

'Retail Therapy' is a term often banded about by skinny girls, showing mock/real/mock concern for a credit card bill that probably won't even fit through the letter box when it arrives, weilding countless carrier bags carrying logos... Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Chanel No. 5.

'Dave and I had, like, this major fallout, so y'know, thought I'd go for a little retail therapy'

There's something in it. I don't have to feel terribly low to feel the need to go out and buy something new for myself. I too often feel the urge to replace my brain with a certain happy substance that is found only inside inanimite objects; electrical goods... clothes... shiny flat round discs in translucent boxes...

It's now new cure either. One of the reasons I fell in love with an an all-female post-punk band called Slits, (as well as the fact that they posted naked in mud on the cover of their debut album 'Cut', of course) is their song 'Spend Spend Spend' which is probably the best song ever written about 'Retail Therapy'.. as long ago as 1979, no less:-

'I'm trapped in a flood but it isn't raining/I have a tendency to get bored too quickly/Recently my dull life seems to have no meaning/I am stuck with someone and we're not communicating/ I want to buy/Have you not been affected/I want to buy/You could be addicted'

But then, as I mentioned before, I wasn't terribly miserable today. That means at some later date, maybe after a difficult day at work, or during a hangover that leaves me feeling pretty sorry for myself, I can't promise I'm going to see something and not want to take it home and hug it. It's just a risk I'm going to have to take.

But right now I am hungry, so I'm going to eat some of those groceries while I still have them. I might even listen to the new Long Blondes record while I cook.

Notes from the sofa

Another weekend is drawing, as they do, to a close. Haven't really done a lot to be honest. It's been one of those can't be bothered weekends: Can't be bothered to get out of bed until afternoon dawns; can't be bothered to shower or shave. I've walked a few hundred yards for life's essentials; tins of soup with crackers, carbonated water, swigged from the bottle, the release of fluids and to change the CD or to plug in the Freeview receiver for 'Harry Hill's TV Burp'.

Seems I'm not the only one who's been lazy this weekend. My cat lies sprawled, her back against the books on my shelf, paws crossed. I remember a Robert Smith quote in a music magazine from the eighties when he talks about cats having it good because all they do is eat, sleep fuck and make weird noises. There has to be something in that. I'm much the same at the moment. Apart from the fucking.

Nice to know the one thing that divides you from you and a feline is sex, or lack thereof.