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Imagine that you had a burning desire to have an exhibition of your photos in a gallery, or you would like to write an episode of the Archers, or you would like to write a weekly ascerbic, comedic, sports column in a national newspaper. Or imagine your own thing that you want to achieve.

Now stop. Whoah. Stop.

Too many people who would like to be creative get hung up on the destination. They jump right to the end. It is as though they imagine themselves simply waking up at the end of the story and finding that everything has worked out for the best. Because in reality, getting there is too hard and would probably never happen.

So what do you do? You work backwards. First of all, to get your gallery opening, column published or script selected, the selector would need to know you, they would need to know your body of work. Well, having a published body of work still sounds hard and unlikely. But as you get further and farther back, you get to small enough chunks that are pretty easy to deal with.

Practice, publish your practices, tell people, practice, publish, tell people.

I lie to myself all the time. I know vaguely what my big future dream is. But I know for certain that being a practised writer is a pretty big part of it. So I do that bit. Because that bit is fun and easy. Pretend the dream is to have a cool website with a regular stream of content. Why? Because that’s the first step of the other dream anyway.

One super tip here. Do remember to concentrate on the thing itself. The modern equivalent of your overly complex beautiful revision timetable is your domain name, your blog design, your whatever. It’s good to do these things but remember to create that content as well.

As Bruce Springsteen would have it, you’re “working on a dream”. Nobody is going to turn up and give it to you. You better start heading towards it. So start. Start now.

Popular musician and social commentator Sir Mix-A-Lot*, likes rotund posteriors and he is clinically unable to deny said facts. In fact when pushed on the issue, he will happy sing you a song on the subject.

And who am I to comment on the peccadillos of another? He’s free to like them and ignore, as I believe he refers to them, iddie-bittie things. The only problem is with the phrase, “having junk in your trunk”.

First I would like to say, on the record, that I am very happy for popular slang to reverse the usual sentiment of a phrase. To turn the negative sounding reality of having a large quantity of brick-a-brac in your boot, into a positive sentiment is one that I am down with. Wickid.

The problem comes, for me, in the confusion of the word trunk. We already have trunks on mammals. They are the noses of elephants. Now, admittedly, this is because elephants’ noses look not unlike tree trunks, but that’s how the 20th century turned out. No point in complaining about it now.

But because elephants have trunks where they could have noses, people have had their noses referred to as trunks. Having junk in your trunk should really refer to having a bad cold. That’s just the way I see it. Fo sho.

*I have, as yet, been unable to determine the year that Sir Mix was knighted for services to music. I am certain that this is due, simply, to poor record keeping at central office.

Modern life is such relentless progress that it’s hard to know that we aren’t leaving some simple pleasures behind. I’m always on the look out for things we may have left behind, and I think I have found one.

In old movies and books, I am pretty sure that if you went to a restaurant and you didn’t have enough money to pay for your meal, then you would be forced to do the washing up. And of course now that we have modern dishwashers,this noble practice has died out.

I however have some questions:

1) What was the exchange rate?

What I want to know is, say you went in and had a simple bowl of soup, maybe you had some bread which was on the table anyway, surely you don’t have to do as much washing up as the guy who had the Chateauxbriand to himself? And what about washing or drying, is one more valuable than the other? I think we should be told.

2) Could you keep doing it?

So say you don’t have any money, no job, you’re hungry, can you just go back each day and wash up for food?

3) What about the people who were supposed to be doing this job?

What are they doing while you do it for them? You are doing their job, you might be back again tomorrow. Sure, they get the afternoon off, but if you keep turning up and working for food instead of money, the restaurant manager is going to start getting ideas.

4) Most importantly, what is the modern equivelent?

What would you do now? You could work as a waiter or a cook but I would say that both of those jobs are a bit too client facing (if you don’t cook the food properly then you really will be facing the client soon).

So what about the restaurant’s VAT return? Probably not. I suppose that now they’ll turn you over to the police. It’s just a bit less gentle than the old ways.

What do you do when you really liked those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ stories, but nobody seems to be doing them any more? Well, if you are Christine Blachford, then you make a modern version of the same thing. In Christine’s version, you get to read a part of the story and vote on what is going to happen next. Then Christine goes and writes the next part, based on the voting.

The first story is based on F1 and is here. Check it out fiction fans.

Christine and I seem to be on some kind of cultural exchange program. She’s been teaching me the way of the podcast and she blames me for the publishing of her story. To see her side of the story, check out her article on the subject here.

For my part, I am glad to see another writer writing out in the open and I am really loving the interactive nature of the choices. The interesting thing is that I like it despite never agreeing with the popular vote. I wonder what that says about my writing choices?

So you know what it’s like: you and your sibling are sitting in the back seat of your parents’ car and you are looking for a game to play. Well I have just the thing. I realise that this isn’t necessarily relevant for my core audience, but if I am introspective for a moment, I have to admit that I didn’t really get into this blog business to be relevant to anyone.

So let me explain what you’ll need to play the game. First you need to persuade your parents to buy a Land Rover. It has to be one of those ones with the bench seats in the back, the kind that mean you are facing your sibling. You probably can’t make those kind of seats anymore so it’ll have to be a second hand Land Rover. Meet me in the next paragraph when you have that sorted.

Right, so you have the car. Now sit opposite your sibling. Here’s the back story: You and your brother or sister are part of an elite task force that is set to guard the vehicle you are in. The Land Rover contains some special-magic-expensive-stuff and you need to keep it safe.

But the only problem is that you work for the government so there are certain rules. You can’t just randomly shoot people. They have to fire the first shot – got that? Good.

All of the of the other cars have had lazer guns fitted into their indicator lights. When they start firing at you, the lights will flash on and off and you must retaliate by shooting back with your hand gun. If you shoot sucessfully then they will fly right off the road. Generally on the side which they were shooting from, probably because that was where you concentrated your heaviest fire.

Now there is one other occasion when you shouldn’t shoot. You do have a forcefield and a superbomb on your land rover. These may be deployed by your parents. They will indicate that they are deploying one or another through the use of indicator lights on your car. If they indicate on the same side as where the car is shooting you from then, obviously, they are deploying the forcefield. If they are indicating on the other side then they are deploying the superbomb that might take out several cars at the same time. On this occasion you can shoot as well but obviously the main damage will be done by the superbomb.

Anyway, my brother and I whiled away many a drive with this classic game. Hope you find these instructions useful.

This is the continuing series of questions for you in the comments, here’s how it works. I’ll ask you a question, and you either answer in the comments or on your own blog and drop a link to the post.

Question:

What will the third generation be amazed at?

In an article the other day, I suddenly found myself remembering being amazed to discover that my great aunt hadn’t had electricity in her house when she was a child. I was thinking that people will be amazed that the pubs used to close at eleven. But what else will our grandchildren’s generation be amazed by? (or if you aren’t planning to have kids, then your friends grandchildren’s generation.*)

Here’s my answer:

The obvious one is the Internet and mobile communication. That you can now be contacted wherever you are and that you can instantly contact everyone. The communications revolution that happened over the last fifteen years is probably the big one.

* if neither your friends nor you are planning to have children, then imagine that you have a friend who is having children, and these children have children. These are the people I want you to think of.

So what do you think the third generation be amazed at?

There seems to be a bit of a word collision going on with the words mimetic and memetic. We are going to need to sort this out once and for all. Mimetic already means two things. The first is a study of the way in which animals imitate each other. So if you get a man in to study why your parrot is saying “Polly wants a cracker” then the guy is studying mimetics.

But what would happen if instead of studying the parrot, he was working out how much water would be left in the bird’s drink bowl after a certain amount of time? Well, he’d still be using mimetics. Because to work out the flow of water through a permeable membrane you can’t do all of the equations simultaneously, so you have to work out one equation that represents one bit of it and say, sort of, all of these other equations are a bit like this. The process of using these copycat equations is called mimetics too!

But what about memetics? Well, that’s the study of memes. You know those things where people ask each other to answer a series of blog questions and then they tag their friends to do the same. If you study those, then you are studying memetics. Actually memes are about more than just those strange things on blogs. They are about anything that sweeps the zeitgeist. A meme is any way in which an idea spreads around the world. They were proposed by Richard Dawkins and are, to his mind, the idea equivalent of natural selection. And the concept is about how an idea copies itself. So if the man is asking the parrot what its twitter handle is, it may well be to find out if the twitter meme has reached the parrot yet and so he would probably be studying memetics.

But there is one word missing from all of these. What if the man stops concentrating on the parrot and then decides to run on the spot? What if he suddenly seems to be stuck in an invisible box? What if he’s studying mime? What’s the word for that? There doesn’t seem to be one. But I’m going to guess that it’s going to be mimetics or memetics and I’m not sure that’s wise. I think those words might be full.

After a gig one night, I was sitting in a chip shop with the lead singer of a band. We’d come here because at the time there were very few late licenced venues. All of London would close at eleven – remember that? Madness. That will be one of those things that generations to come won’t believe. Just as I couldn’t believe it when my great aunt recounted to me the introduction of electricity in her house. She had been alive before you had electricity in your house – unbelievable.

Anyway, this chip shop would sell you cans of beer to drink at the table, so we bought a stack and sat down. The lead singer wasn’t from the UK, so there was easy small talk about how things were different here than back home.

She talked about some of the more obvious differences between Iceland and here. Finally I decided to ask her, what was her favourite thing from the UK? She thought for a second, and then I could see that she had decided.

Her favourite thing was the History Channel + 1. The channel that shows what was on the history channel an hour ago. “Why,” I asked, “is that your favourite thing?”

“Because,” she said, “it’s the history of the History Channel, live.”

We currently don’t have an Italian restaurant and it worries me. Well, of course, that’s not exactly true. Senor Grilli on Goodge Street in central London has been a regular haunt of mine since 1998. At our old flat, we had a great one, Aldo’s, but we moved away and it went out of business – this may be related. But since we’ve moved – nothing local.

Why is this important? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but it is to me. All of my life there have been places I’ve been where people know who you are when you walk in the door. And always these places have been Italian. Perhaps this is related to spending some of my formative years in New Jersey.

If I go into Signor Grilli, John asks me how I’ve been. Aldo and I are friends on Facebook. There’s something comforting about it. It’s related to that line in the Billy Joel song, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”.

“I’ll meet you any time you want at our Italian restaurant.”

There’s something homely and comforting about it. You can meet somebody there and just have a beer while you wait, nobody is going to mind. And somebody might even keep you company.

There’s a place down the hill that we’ve seen but haven’t been to yet. Maybe that’s the place? I’ll let you know.

There is something I love about random management phrases. I mean obviously I don’t like to actually use them, because they sound totally mad and often they really confuse the issue. However there are two words to do with the areas of your control and expertise that I really like.

The first is wheelhouse. It’s the name of the room where the captain of a ship stands. Literally, I guess, the room that houses the wheel of the ship. And this one is something you want more things in really. People say, “hey that’s right in Alex’s wheelhouse”. Well they don’t because they don’t use any of the cool phrases at my work, they just ask me to “action the pre-meeting”. But that’s what they would say to mean, “that’s right up Alex’s street”. It’s sort of about it being in your comfort zone, but comfort zone sounds a bit too wimpy. It’s actually used in baseball a lot to suggest that the ball was thrown to the place that the batsman really likes to hit from. So I guess you want more people to think that such-and-such will be in your wheelhouse.

Now bailiwick is the other word I like. Technically, this comes from the world of bailiffs and still exists in that world today. It means essentially ‘area of jurisdiction’. And of course, you might think, you as a young thrusting person would like to have more things under your control, the phrase is seldom used that way. It’s really used to explain what you aren’t in control of. Somebody says to you, “hey Alex, can you take this broom and sweep up the kitchen?”, you have to turn to this person and say, “I’m sorry Sir, but that’s not my bailiwick”. Basically, it’s a fancy way of telling somebody to shove off while also explaining that it’s “not my problem”. Of course I have never really used it [not at work, anyway – Ed] because it would make you sound like a mad person.

So while I fear those who freely use phrases such as, “We need to pro-actively seek to add value going forward”, I secretly also want the freedom to pepper my dialogue with these really cool words. Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to happen. Perhaps saying such words isn’t in my wheelhouse?