I started a new job on Monday. It’s teaching me about brevity.
Eurovision live blog: 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.
On sorries and apologies
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.
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Dad’s Cobra kit-car
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.
My brother the DJ
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.
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Writing about sex
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.
Stonehenge
Well the idea was to find Merlin and dress up as druids, or both.
There were five of us and three rucksacks and too many bottles of water to worry about describing.
I was dressed like a prannock and the plan was to go to Stonehenge and take pictures of other people taking pictures and prove to the world that we’d been – which is obviously the point of going to any tourist attraction that you’re somehow massively familiar with beforehand anyway.
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On true crime & crime fiction
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.
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