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Waking up gives you cancer

By Matt Hill | Published: January 18, 2009

If you believe the paper you’re reading, waking up gives you cancer.

Barbequed food gives you cancer, or God does. Cancer’s in the air, in your mobile phone, in the stuff you clean your oven with. If it’s not mutating those cells then it’s mutating those other ones. It’s patronising you from your box of cigarettes; it’s picking off your kids. It’s there or it isn’t. It’s got you or hasn’t.

It’s taken your loved ones or it’s about to.

The mannequin

By Matt Hill | Published: January 15, 2009

My mother’s road is a leafy provincial strip in a dying town.

People have two cars, drink wine with their prozac, subscribe to Sky Sports and still think the internet’s biblical.

It’s slippy when it’s cold and the train station wasn’t earmarked for improvements anyway, so nobody cares that Manchester voted against the conjection charge.

It’s good if you like nothing else in the world; good if you like looking at hills in the distance or watching fat women running circuits before and after school.

Ode to brollies

By Matt Hill | Published: October 1, 2008

However expensive they are when it’s raining pots and pans and you’re in a queue for ten minutes because your boots leak and your hat’s not that powerful; however much they ruin your spatial awareness and make you clang into things you’d otherwise miss by three feet; however much they turn inside out, poke you in your own eyes or make you look camp; however much you can’t help leaning on them when they’re by your side, like you’re some Victorian gentryman; however much they dribble everywhere and prang open when you’re least expecting because you bought the one with the button; however much they didn’t hardly use them in the trenches, well.

I quite like that I’m old enough to own a umbrella.

Posted in Objects | Leave a comment

On true crime & crime fiction

By Matt Hill | Published: August 27, 2008

My uncle’s over at the moment. He’s a strange man at worst and a hero at best, but basically he’s dying and everybody’s minded to ignore it.

Anyway, he’s full of trivia and smokes a lot of pot, and since the two are mutually exclusive I get told a lot about the world and all the manly things he’s done and all the things I should do and lots of lurid things I probably won’t ever.

He’s the only man I’ve ever met who looks cool with a walking stick, a permatan and lung cancer.

Apparently he wants me to write his life for him but I tell him I’m too busy writing a semi-sequel to Colin, which is also polite code for ‘It makes me anxious’. Only he laughs at that and puts ketchup and mint sauce on his new potatoes.

But he’s got these magazines, my uncle; these detective magazines. He loves them. They’re all over the house.

Posted in Family, Writing | Tagged crime fiction | Leave a comment

New job

By Matt Hill | Published: August 6, 2008

I started a new job on Monday. It’s teaching me about brevity.

Posted in Writing | Tagged copywriting | Leave a comment

Eurovision live blog: 2008

By Matt Hill | Published: May 24, 2008

I remember my first Eurovision song contest party; I was nine or thereabouts. As it goes I’m fairly sure it was the first time – mothers aside – that I saw another woman’s nipple. She’d quaffed far too much and had flopped on to the settee with it all hanging out. I didn’t tell anybody.

So are you getting excited? Certainly I’m not. I hadn’t really thought out the logistics of doing this solo for three hours on a Saturday night. But – and this is the crucial thing – Eurovision 2008 is T-minus 70 minutes, and all across the country some very obscure flags are being laid out at dinner parties, while countless couples set about arguing on how best to present their cocktail trays to a bunch of guests who really wished they weren’t representing Iceland for the evening.

See you at 8.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged eurovision | Leave a comment

On sorries and apologies

By Matt Hill | Published: May 20, 2008

I must’ve said sorry more times than I’ve eaten bananas, I decided. Just the other day I explained earnestly to a friend that I’d even apologise to somebody who’d just shot me for getting in the way of their bullets.

Recently I apologised in retrospect, via Facebook, for calling a boy a ‘panface’ at school – even though I got punched for the trouble back then anyway.I apologise when I’m ran over by rapid mothers and prams in town.

Posted in Living | Leave a comment

Dad’s Cobra kit-car

By Matt Hill | Published: May 14, 2008

Funeral’s good but it’s not the one. It’s like one, though. I mean we’ve all been standing outside and feeling sick and something has more-or-less died.

What it is really is that my Dad’s been building a kitcar for over twenty years — and now he’s had to sell it on account of he can’t afford to finish it off and it’s been plonked under sheets for a couple of years.

Posted in Family, Objects | Tagged car | Leave a comment

My brother the DJ

By Matt Hill | Published: March 31, 2008

My brother’s gone and moved back home for precisely the reason I did. It’s a bit like that story about two brothers moving home only I don’t remember which exactly – but it is like that story.

Basically it’s that we’ve had our independence for a while and then everything’s gone slightly wrong so we’ve lost our self-dignity, money, food and the good grace not to just hurl ourselves off of something tall instead. Good. Right.

My brother, well he’s a bit smaller than me but he’s broader by two. He’s quite nice usually in so far as we get on for about ten minutes before he’s trying to stab me or before I’m bursting with frustration, but that’s what siblings are supposed to do, right, and always it’s much of a muchness.

Posted in Family | Leave a comment

Writing about sex

By Matt Hill | Published: February 21, 2008

I had one of those world-smashing conversations the other day. You know the ones. About SEX. When basically your parents have decided you’re old enough to talk like adults together, only not before they’ve said, ‘Now then, Matthew,’ like Jimmy Saville, or as if I’ve done something terrible, like forgetting to put an apple core in the bin, and then they start talking about SEX, like they’ve ACTUALLY had it, and as if to say YOU AREN’T AN ANDROID AFTER ALL.

Posted in Writing | Tagged sex | Leave a comment

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