gamboling.co.uk

One of the more obscure social conventions of the 21st century is that friends don’t put friends on company mailing lists. It is a cardinal sin akin, in the modern age, to stabbing.

Companies have cottoned on to this and now they try and bribe people who have already been foolish enough to be caught in their web of doom to enslave others. This is still socially unacceptable but you get to replace your acquaintances with vouchers. Surely everyone knows somebody they’d like to passively aggressively de-friend and this is the ideal way. What says “I don’t value your friendship very much” better than actually letting somebody know you value it less than a five pound gift voucher for Boots that you’ll leave in the fruit bowl until it expires.

So as you can imagine I was interested to work out what was going on when I heard two women on the train and one said to the other, “I signed you up to the mailing list because that way they gave me a free facial”. I expected blows to follow so I took out my phone to call the police, but then the first woman added, “don’t worry I used your old address that way you won’t get the junk mail”.

Weirdly the second woman seemed satisfied with this arrangement. I wonder how long it will be before she realises: there is only one thing more annoying than junk mail, incorrectly addressed junk mail. You can’t contact them to fix the address because then they’ll know you’re alive but if you do nothing the junk just keeps on coming and coming – forever.

I’m going to write a word in the comments in a moment and all you need to do is decide what word comes next. Write that word in the comments and off we go. Good luck to all of us, this could be quite weird.

I was asked, the other day, as I often am, a fairly random question: “why does the beer always overflow the first time I pour a glass”?

Well the answer is pretty simple but some of the other people crowded around the pub table got very much the wrong end of the stick. “You’re not pouring it right” was the most common suggestion, others added helpfully that you always realise your mistake and that’s why the second glass poured better. Good guess but wrong.

The answer is of course, as it is for so many things in life, dust. Basically the head in beer is formed by trapped bubbles. Bubbles that are free fly off through the top of the beer and off into the atmosphere. But all bubbles are formed around dust. The bubbles are formed around any little particles they can find. If there are a few particles then the gas remains lighter than the water and breaks for freedom. But what if there is enough dust grouped together that the gas is trapped under the surface? Well that’s the head and the more dust there is the faster the head grows. The head has more volume than the liquid and so it takes up more room in the glass, hence the overflowing.

Now I will admit that poor pouring is a factor because it means that more of the dust is touched by the beer more quickly. In fact if you are pouring your beer correctly then you’ll probably end up only touching a small section of one side of the glass. And we now know that the reason the beer doesn’t overflow the second time isn’t because your pouring improved but simply because you’ve drunk all of the dust.
The safest way to be sure your beer pours perfectly is to rinse the glass (no soap) and you won’t have any problems.

By around this time you might be thinking, “urgh I don’t like the fact that I’ve been drinking dust all of these years”. But don’t worry, unless the glasses that you’re drinking from are actually dirty this dust is no different than the dust you inhale through breathing. In fact without it you would be dead. So worrying about the dust is silly, but rinsing the glass before you pour will stop you spilling beer and surely that makes it all worthwhile.

When we went to Rome on the weekend I was worried that we wouldn’t see any really old things, but then we did:

That’s a relief!

Afterwards we decided to buy something from a gift shop, it was pretty large but we thought it would be okay.

Unfortunately we can’t fit it in our living room so we’re going to have to sell it, hopefully it will urn a few quid.

Anyway Rome is no laughing matter, there is one road that Katherine and I managed to avoid the whole time we were there:

There is a copy of my book in my hands.* It’s one of the most exciting moments in my life. Thanks for everyone who helped especially last minute heroics from Adrian who got the copy to me before I flew to Rome. However if you feel like you were unable to help thus far and still want a piece of the action then why not buy a copy online. It’s available direct from the publisher now, but will be available on Amazon shortly.

It’s a collection of some of the short stories from the blog. Go on! You know you want to be able to point to a book on your shelves and say “someone I know wrote that”. That’s the kind of thing that impresses some people. People, having seen that you own this book, might even declare their undying love for you and offer to kiss you, and more! That’s the power of this book. I’d want to have that kind of help in my life but I don’t need to worry because I already have a copy. Let me know how your life is working out without it or even better buy the book and let me know what you think!

*Not while I’m writing this of course that would be tricky. It’s a metaphor.**

**Of course I could have been using speech recognition to write this***

***But I wasn’t.

My good friend Larry and I were talking the other day and he was relating the story of how he had met his wife. Larry and his wife had been working together when they had fallen in love. They had decided to keep their relationship secret because it might have caused problems at work. They kept it so secret that they didn’t even tell their closest work colleagues.

At the time there was a guy that Larry had lunch with almost every day. They were very close colleagues who got on very well. But even so Larry didn’t tell him that he was seeing this woman. Then one day at a party this guy introduced Larry to somebody, the somebody that he was already living with. They had kept their relationship so secret that nobody knew. Once they moved in with each other it wasn’t such an issue telling people but Larry had never really worked out a way of telling this guy, because he had kept it from him all of this time and they were supposed to be such good friends. But right then at this party the guy found out, and since then Larry and the guy never really spoke, such was the betrayal this guy felt.

I told him that I had the opposite story. When Adrian first came to work with me we were so busy that we rarely ever got a chance to go out for lunch together – in fact it’s still pretty rare now. But one day Adrian said that we had to go out to lunch. We got to the place and sat down and Adrian told me that his wife was going to have a baby. He had, I think, only found out that day. And of course normally you don’t tell people for twelve weeks. He was bursting to tell somebody, but he said that he felt he could tell me because I didn’t really know him or any of his friends. It was quite an odd beginning to a friendship, but clearly quite a good one – we’ve been friends ever since.

When you’re writing your novel there are sometimes moments when you find yourself dreaming of your book lying in a bookshop. It’s a nice thought for the aspiring author but the aspiring author should always think of how important the bookshop is.

Think about how you choose a book when you are in a book shop. Most people look at the cover, the title, the author and then open it up and read the first sentence. Some people also read page sixty nine on the advice of Marshall McLuhan – but lets ignore that for the moment.

So the title you can pick and choose and it is very important. But you can’t be an established aspiring author so people aren’t going to recognise your name. And you probably won’t be designing your own cover. But you can focus on the first line that is something you can do.

They can be funny, like Iain Banks in The Crow Road,

“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”

Or intriguing like, Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar,

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

What are your favourite opening lines?

The music industry thinks that we the customers are to blame for their falling sales. But actually a lot of their problems are due to them failing to embrace a new business model. Or even to a certain extent them working out what that new business model is.

But there is another problem. There are two kinds of publicity out there. The manufactured kind and the newsworthy kind. The former is pop stars going on kids TV, the latter is a star getting themselves caught doing something illegal. The first kind will increase your record sales a bit, the latter will make you number one.

Now record companies and management have a conflict of interest. They want their stars to act illegally because that sells records faster than writing a good record ever could.

Take Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse. They are so much more famous for their antics than their music. Both are talented (or at least were in Doherty’s case – I remain unconvinced of his solo work) and yet that wasn’t enough to make them famous. What made them famous is that they are prominent drug addicts.

Well I’m not about to get high* and mighty about drug use but I can’t help but be concerned about the other side of this equation. The talent of these artists is being put at risk by what they are doing and the only people who can stop them are their management. But their management don’t want to stop them because what they are doing is selling records.

The problem is that all of these antics will only ever sell one rubbish album. After you’ve bought one rubbish album you won’t want to buy another one. And that’s where the record labels are injecting themselves in the foot.

* Whoops unintended pun alert.

One of the worst things you can do as a writer is litter your work with cliché. It makes the work sound tired and like it was thrown together.

The problem is that there is a reason clichés get used all of the time and that’s that they are a nice kind of shorthand for what’s going on. They tell you a lot of information without getting you bogged down.

There is however a very nice trick you can use which is the cliché variation. This makes it possible to give the sentiment of the cliché without sounding like you can’t write.

What you do is take a standard cliché and change some of the words and leave the sense intact. This actually happens out in the wild with clichés anyway so it isn’t as much of a surprise to the reader. Here are three examples of what I mean all culled from real life.

You couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery

You couldn’t organise a bun fight in a bakery

You couldn’t organise a fire in a matchbox factory

It most often happens out in the wild when the oldest form is seen as being slightly rude (the piss up one).

By creating your own version you use the shorthand everyone knows to convey the sense, but make it clear that you know your turnips from your swedes.

So, fair gamboling readers, it’s over to you. Just how many different ways are there to describe someone who is poor at organising things using this structure?

Antonia has mentioned sucking one’s thumb over on her blog and I couldn’t help but remember why I had stopped.

My parents despaired of me sucking my thumb when I was a lad. But then one of their friends came over to dinner. Completely unprompted by my parents he noticed that I was sucking my thumb and he sidled over to me.

He said, “hey I see you’re sucking your thumb – that’s pretty cool”.

And after ages of my parents telling me that it was the devil’s work my immediate thought was “yes, this is pretty cool”. We connected immediately.

Then he said, “I wish I could still do that”.

Which I have to admit made me feel a little nervous, what possible reason could there be for not sucking your thumb other than because “your parents want you to”?

So I asked, “why can’t you”?

And he said, “well I don’t want to go completely bald do I”?

And I never sucked my thumb again. Thanks Fred.