Uncharted territory

Hello again. When I come on here and shower you with links, I sometimes feel a bit like a wayward cat who runs off for weeks at a time and then comes home carrying three-quarters of a dead pigeon by way of a gift in the hopes that it’ll make up for his absence. Still, when they’re as good as some of today’s you can’t really blame me for giving it a try.

First off, I was going about my everyday business of Translating Stuff this morning – none of it terribly exciting although I did get to use the phrase “plastics in extruded form for use in manufacture”, as a result of which I’ve been singing Mary Poppins songs all day – when Fran sent me a text saying she’d just seen an advert for a gig by a band called Soft Toy Emergency, and wasn’t that a great name for a band. Well I thought it was – so great in fact that like any sensible person with work to do and access to the Internet I googled them, and found that a man in the Daily Telegraph had described them as “day-glo pop with electro-punk attitude, somewhere between Aqua and a heart-attack”, which all sounded ripping fun (except, I’ll grant you, the heart attack), so I looked further and found their new single on YouTube and it goes like this, and I LUVZ IT:

So much so that I was all for going to see them at this gig tonight, but then Fran did a bit of googling of her own and found out that it was at our city’s further education college’s welcome week event thing and therefore we’d be about the only people there over 18. Which would have been a bit odd, so we haven’t.

Another nice thing is that do you remember a while ago I told you about my friend Gabriel’s blog Verbatim Poetry? Well it’s still going strong and I’ve got two new favourites – this one and this one. Not sure the second one counts, really. Twitter lends itself to poetry a bit too well, I think, cos having only 140 characters to play with forces people to be disciplined. That’s partly why, despite the sound of gauntlets clanging to the ground, I probably won’t ever get round to tweeting myself – I like poetry but I don’t feel like I quite have the type of brain for writing it. The relationship between my brain and writing is a bit like one of those organic veg boxes that arrive on your doorstep from local farms, in that you don’t know what you’re going to get until you open it, and you just hope you’ve got a recipe you can use most of it in. If I had to worry about having all the right words in the box and cooking them in the right order I’d probably never write anything.

Gabriel’s also got another project on the go. He’s writing a novel, and blogging about it as he goes. If you want to know what it’s about and how it’s going, pop over to www.tonguesofmen.com and have a look. It’s an unusual choice of subject but he comes at it with a very thoughtful eye.

*        *        *

Ummmm… so I turned thirty last week. That’s weirder than I was imagining it would be. I don’t know what I was expecting – it’s not as though I thought I’d wake up suddenly all grown-up on the day, with a mortgage tucked under my pillow, wearing a suit and talking about lawnmowers – but it feels… Well, it feels a bit like a new haircut, or like when you buy a new shirt you know you like but which isn’t quite what you’re used to.

Thing is, for a very long time thirty was something that happened to other people. Then it changed and became something I threatened myself with. There’s a line – in The Tongues of Men, actually – about a character “who had feared turning thirty for so much of the last four years that now that he had reached it he was convinced that he must be at least thirty-three”. That pretty much describes me for most of the last year. Thirty was the bailiff at the door, the date your debts came due, the point at which you’d somehow be judged for all the expectations you hadn’t yet met…

And then suddenly, simply by virtue of my going to bed one night and getting up the next morning, it stopped being a threat and became a fact. And facts are almost always less scary than threats, I find. Especially since one of the nicest things about it is that I think, at thirty, you no longer have to obey anyone’s rules. Like, obviously I want to try and obey God’s rules, since they were invented for my own good, and I’m up for being part of what he’s up to in the world, so that’s all good. But I’m beginning to think there’s only three questions worth asking:

• Are you seeking to love God?
• Are you seeking to love people?
• Are you taking responsibility for what (and, indeed, whom) you’ve been given?

But the questions about what order you do the big things in life and whether you go into management and how much you know about lawnmowers – it turns out there’s no-one really asking them. Not God, not anyone I hang around with and not even me if I decide I can’t be faffed with them anymore. To many of you this won’t feel like much of a revelation but to a certain type of person – of whom I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one, or even the only one reading this page – it’s so great a mental change of tack that it does feel like when you get the new haircut/shirt/whatever and can’t quite comprehend the fact that the different and somewhat better looking chap (or lady, as the case may be) in the mirror is still you.

Anyway. Work Boy Work! isn’t supposed to be a navel-gazing blog so I think I’ll stop now. It’s just, y’know. It’s novel for me. I’ve never been thirty before. I’m starting to think it might suit me.

Vindaloo, vindaloo

Happy St. George’s Day! If you, like me, love this damp, draughty, wild, fertile, lush, rolling north Atlantic island and its dogged, compassionate, pessimistic yet idealistic, witty, crude, trashy, can’t-sing-for-toffee, music-spawning people then do yourself a favour and sing it for England (IngerLUND!).

Oh go on it’s fun.

Ooh, actually, here’s another song I thought of earlier on today to celebrate the day as well. Okay, so Neil Hannon’s Norn Irish, but St. George was Turkish and the Queen’s German/Scottish, so who’s counting?

Now, I’m very much looking forward to sitting down and writing something half decent but real life has been rather busy of late, so this isn’t quite going to be it. It’s probably one of the ironies of writing about your life that the more stuff you do that might make a good story, the less time you have to write about it. Ah well.

Mainly it’s been jive. I mentioned a few weeks ago about the jive night being put on by some friends from my church who are off to do something terribly exciting in Kenya, the details of which escape me but I think the words “school” and “street children” have been mentioned, possibly in connection with each other. Someone will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong. Anyway, so we hired a village hall just outside Exeter, got a guy to give a couple of basic (but very good fun) jive lessons and then the band (which was the bit I was involved with) did an hour or so’s set of Quality Party Tunage. Apparently it raised £700-odd (so that’s, what, must be over £500 profit, surely?), and the atmosphere was just perfect. Nearly twice as many people came as our more pessimistic expectations, and slightly more than our most positive. I shouldn’t talk about it for too long as I’ll just end up going on about what an amazing job everyone did and how hard they worked and how proud I am of a huge list of people, including but not limited to Laura, Christine, Dave (who manfully played Video Killed the Radio Star twice, even though he hates it), Andy, Ali and Pete (respectively the Marlon Brando and Al Pacino of techy cleverness, but only in terms of cool and control, not murderousness), a smattering of brilliant Rachels, a host of Pinnigers (spelling?) and Airdries and many others. There is a danger at this point of my turning into a kind of Oscar-speech train crash, so I’ll stop now. I’m well chuffed, though.

Incidentally, I have to say, massive props to God. One day I’ll learn to remember he’s trustworthy before I do the stressing.

(“Massive props”? Who am I, Westwood?)

Peace out fo tha 09.

blogboyblog

Flippin’ ‘eck it’s good to stop! Goodness me. Yeah, no, sorry I’m late, rather a full week. Having now finished the week, though, I’m at that delightful stage where a nice cup of tea and a sit down is pretty much the ultimate pleasure. I simply can’t think of a question to which a sofa and a cup of tea would not be the right answer. At this point I would very happily spend the rest of the weekend, if not the whole of the Spring, doing nothing but moving from one comfy chair to another, filling myself with hot drinks and hobnobs (they’re like Marines) until I was so awash my ankles started swelling. I guess this means I’m feeling my age.

Actually it means no such thing, does it, it means I’m feeling my mum’s age. It’s okay to say “It’s good to stop” when you’ve hit middle age. Nothing wrong with that at all. My mum has sometimes mooted the idea of having “It’s good to stop” engraved on her headstone, and given the commitment with which she lives her life I won’t blame her if she does. But I’m 29; at my age David Livingstone was living in South Africa revolutionising Christian mission and getting mauled by a lion, Freddie Mercury was writing A Night at the Opera and Alexander the Great was getting ready to celebrate the big three-oh by conquering India. Meanwhile I’m making happy little grunty noises when I sit in an armchair and constantly wondering where I left my glasses (the answer is always – always – the bathroom). Still. Ne’er mind, eh? I happen to like making happy little grunty noises when I sit down, and the novelty of always finding my glasses exactly where I left them has not yet faded.

Er… yeah, so, also, I’ve finished being in Geneva. Great few weeks. Really good. Work was a bit dull, but I suppose that’s why they call it “work” rather than “excitement”. And even if work was dull, I’m blessed with the sort of colleagues other people dream of – funny, irreverent, not too bothered by office politics – so I got to hang out with them, even if most of the hanging was done in lunch hours and tea breaks.

Lovely as it is, quality though my friends are and prolific as the graffiti artists may be… ooh, I have to tell you a sad thing, by the way. You know that picture a few posts ago of the graffito (singular of graffiti, apparently – who knew?*) of the woman’s face next to that doorway? The next day it was painted over! Sadness! Anyway, lovely as etc. etc., being in Geneva for a bit has confirmed Just How Much I like being in Devon. I kept describing my life over here to people and thinking, blimey, that’s brilliant. I get to spend my time fiddling about with language and getting more or less paid for it. I live with great people, I get to play with kids twice a week (that is, I do children’s work at my church) and, quite excitingly for me, help them see a bit what knowing Jesus looks like from the inside, and periodically I get to play Chuck Berry songs at jive nights. Seriously, next time I complain about my life, get a fish and slap me with it.

(Unrelatedly, what do you make of this? I really, really want it to be real but I’m not sure it is. What do you reckon?)

Anyway, you’ll have to excuse me now, I’m afraid. An excellent young man by the name of Mark has arrived in our house with the new Royksopp album so I’m off to find a comfy chair near a stereo.

(*The Italians did.)

A nice touch

Just a quickie, this, but: when you ring the passport service for British nationals abroad*, when they put you on hold, they play you Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks (not this version, but isn’t it nice?). How both beautiful and appropriate is that?

*A brief and boring story; suffice to say there is probably now some young rapscallion from Paris travelling the world under my identity like in The Talented Mr. Ripley and it’s entirely the fault of my carelessness. Ah well. I hope he’s making the most of his brief window of luxurious jet-set pampering that mentioning my name will get you in the world’s finest hotels and spas.

Navel Gazing (or: Never Date a Finn)

(Okay, before I go any further with this I need to tell you that, because I am working on a Swiss-French keyboard with some of the letters swapped around from the English one, the above heading originally read “Navel Gaying”. Should get some interesting Google searches.)

One of the excellent people on the blogroll at the bottom of this page is talented wordy type and all-round good egg Fran Palmer. She it is, incidentally, who bears the primary responsibility for why my latest glasses are just so darned cool. (In that I begged her in the street to help me buy them, in order to avoid the “I Think I Look Like David Tennant But Really I Look Like Him From The Eighties Mr. Muscle Adverts” problem, and she, charitable to the last, agreed.) Anyway, so she has a new post up about (and this is why I say I’m navel gaying, here) what the heck one’s supposed to write about if one’s writing for an audience – in this case, through blogging. So I started a comment, and then thought, meh, let’s make it a post, eh? What’s the worst that can happen?

(I’m reminded at this point of the bit in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where Arthur Dent says something like “I’m having a lot of trouble with my identity”, and the sound of his words drops through a wormhole in space-time and starts a war between two interplanetary civilisations, because it means something horribly offensive in their language, and the war lasts for centuries until they all realise where the words came from and send an attack party of space ships off to earth to obliterate us, but in the end they’re all swallowed up by a dog because it turns out they were really small all along. So, in one sense, that’s the worst that could happen. This caveat aside, on we go.)

Ooh, actually, it might also be of interest to you if your name is Stuart, because if it is, and you’re the Stuart I think you are, and not some random Stuart who’s walked in off the street, possibly out of interest in navel gaying (though if you are, welcome!), then it’s vaguely relevant to the stuff we spoke about the other night over exciting pizza (by exciting, I mean in the sense of goat’s cheese, creme fraiche, cured meat etc., not in the way that some people’s chocolate brownies are exciting) regarding how you can write if it’s not an actual letter in the context of an actual relationship.

So anyway, writing for an audience. (This is the bit that used to be a comment.) Well as far as I can tell so far you just have to be yourself and it works out okay. Though which bit of yourself you’re supposed to be is a conundrum. For instance, I’m pretty certain I’m not supposed to be blogging the bit of me that worries unnecessarily or imagines it’s about to mortally offend people for no reason, as those bits, while part of me, are also, in a more fundamental, Romans 7-ish sort of way, very decidedly NOT the truest part of me.

But then I can’t just try to drum up massive spiritual insight all the time either and do sort of Sunday-School-answer blogging, because that probably wouldn’t be terribly believable either, coming from me, because I’m not the sort of Christian who… well… I know God knows all the answers to stuff, but the main thing I feel about that is, oh good, that means I don’t have to know everything then. I mean I’m pretty certain about some things (we all need forgiving and only he’s big enough for the job, for instance) but I try not to be one for deep pronouncements too much. I mean to say. I’m English, after all.

But then I wouldn’t want to avoid my faith altogether (for example, there’s a post brewing on one such topic and due to make landfall, as it were, in the next few days, so best batten (spelling?) down the hatches) because it’s part of that mysterious Californianism, Who I Am. But most of the time what I really want to talk to you about is Stuff That Has Struck Me As Funny.

To which end, here is why you should Never Date a Finn.

If you have a recentish Nokia phone (mine’s about a year old so things may have changed since then), I’d like to invite you to take a little journey with me. First, go into Messaging. Scroll down to Saved Items, and, once you’re there, open up Templates. In amongst all the “Meeting is cancelled” and “I am running late” and “Please call me on” there is ACTUALLY one that says:

“I love you too”

That is, without question, the most unromantic thing I have EVER SEEN. But also somehow brilliant.

Oh, by the way, snowshoeing is every bit as awesome as I predicted. Piccies coming soon, once I’m on a PC, because Vincent (who I’m staying with)’s Mac and WordPress don’t seem to be particular BFFs.

Later chaps.