gamboling

What are you spending your social capital on?

2009-11-05T13:15:00.003Z

In a recent podcast, Joel Spolsky made a very valid economic point about new media (you can listen to it here). He was talking about the decline of print journalism which you may or may not see as a bad thing. He suggested that the new media will find it much harder to support in-depth investigative journalism. I was reminded of this again when reading that Joe Saward is asking for donations to keep him flying to all of the races: http://joesaward.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/thoughts-on-the-f1-calendar/) Perhaps he can make it work, but as newspapers decline, we do lose what Joe calls authority and what Joel calls depth.

Essentially what they are talking about is that print journalists will often be assigned a beat, be it Formula 1, be it politics. They are paid to attend all the sessions of the sub-committee on water supplies in Croydon just in case one time somebody says something that is news. Knowing the subject deeply and authoritively is what makes it possible for you to be objective. It stops the worst of the 'me too' journalism, where an interested party posts a press release and everyone else reports it as news. News should never just be the dissemination of “what we have been told”, but rather it should be “what has happened”. Currently we are beginning to lean too much towards regurgitation.

Print is dead, or at least mortally wounded, and so we have to work out how to pay for the right kind of journalism. Micropayments, tip jars and so on have a distorting effect. People only pay on the days when the story seems worth it, or when you remind them. The previous model means that the celebrity tittle tattle 365 days of the year, paid for the one-off discovery by the Telegraph of the expenses scandal. In the interconnected world of blogs these wouldn’t fund each other because they would be two different blogs. And the expenses journalist doesn’t have a story for the rest of the year because they are doing deep research for the next piece.

The other problem that Joel raised was the economic one. People forget when they are spending money on the internet. It’s an odd concept, money, and it foxes people all of the time. Take Craigslist, the classified advertising service. People love Craigslist because it’s free. But it turns out that classified listings in the back of newspapers were essentially what was keeping the newspapers afloat.

Now, and this is where it gets complicated, we have two stories of what’s happening. Craig of Craigslist explains that what he’s doing is a social good because he has worked out a way to give this advertising away for free. But in economies things don’t really work like that. People and companies that were using his service were willing to pay for their adverts. If you are selling your house for hundreds of thousands of pounds you are willing to pay your estate agent to sell your house, and your estate agent is willing to pay for the advert in the paper which means that the paper is willing to get some readers for your advert. And so we go on.

Now the same estate agent was willing to pay $300 to place an advert can place the advert for free and so doesn’t bother. It’s estimated that Craigslist has reduced spend on classified advertising by around $1 billion per year. That money hasn’t disappeared. It’s gone to making Estate Agents and people who otherwise would have been happy to pay but find £5 in their pocket and do with it whatever they please.

In economic terms, this free product that people were willing to pay for results in that $1 billion is being spent on putting the print newspapers out of business, or more specifically, it’s being spent on putting investigative journalism out of business.

Craig doesn’t want the money, and that’s admirable. But couldn’t he collect it and set up a fund that paid for good quality journalism? Because if we lose good quality journalism, then we lose our ability to know that we are free people.

Making Friends

2009-10-29T11:07:00.000Z

There are lots of great things about the iPhone. The killer feature is the internet access. The fact that you can really actually browse the internet on the move is a huge thing. Like the mobile phone before it, this is such a huge feature that people don't know they need it before they get it, and once they have it, could never go back.

But that isn't the feature people talk about. The feature that people interrupt me to talk to me about is the ability to watch TV shows on the train. It's really simple to get a TV show onto your iPhone. I have Friends and The IT Crowd on mine and there's plenty of room for whole series. You don't need a TV screen larger than the one on the iPhone to watch these kinds of shows. It works great. Once, when I was watching Friends, I heard two people talking next to me about how, having seen that, they were going to get iPhones. And on two separate occasions, people have asked me how difficult it is to get shows on there. And the answer is - it's simple.

Come for the TV shows, stay for the internet.

Are there an even number of even numbers?

2009-10-26T12:05:00.000Z

The other day, I was suddenly struck by the question, "Are there an even number of even numbers?". I mean, is it something that is known?, can it be calculated?, and then I went on to worry about the rather obvious follow-up question involving odd numbers.

There has actually been a lot of confusion about this over the years. The mathematics of evenness and oddness is called Parity. And it was really confused by the Greeks. The rule is pretty simple: if you pick a number and divide it by 2, and there is no remainder, it is even. So 4 is even because 4 divided 2 is 2. 3 is not even (and therefore odd) because 3 divided by 2 is 1 and a half. 2 divided by 2 is 1 and so 2 is even...

'Whoops, hold on', said the Greeks. '1 isn't a number. So 2 can't be even.'

Why didn't the Greeks think that 1 was a number? Because they hadn't discovered the concept of zero yet.

Basically, because the Greeks didn't understand the concept of zero, they had to make 1 do all kinds of complicated stuff to try and get around the fact that zero didn't exist. So they figured the simplest way to get around this was to declare 1 not a number. Therefore the Greeks believed that neither 1 or 2 were odd or even.

But then some smartypants in India started saying zero was a number for sure, and they had the maths to prove it. So if zero was a number then 1 was definitely a number, so suddenly 2 became even and 1 became odd.

But what about zero? Presumably, some of the previous concern about whether zero was a number led to many thinking that it was neither odd nor even. But a lot of people still believe, for some hard wired reason, (perhaps because it is lower than 2) that it must be odd. But it isn't, it is even. If you take 0 and divide it by 2 then you get no remainder, you get zero.

Also, it helps with the symmetry. If you line the numbers up including minus numbers you will see that it's really good to have an even number there between -1 and 1.

So now we know that, we can answer the question. Between 1 and infinity and between minus 1 and minus infinity there are the same number of even and odd numbers. There must be. So everything is in pairs (or parity). But we know there is 1 extra number, the number zero. And zero is even.

This means that there are an odd number of even numbers and an even number of odd numbers. Weird huh?

Creativity isn't all big shirts and flouncing around Italy

2009-10-21T20:52:00.003+01:00

Katherine has been being creative over on her blog. Please check out these two posts before you continue reading all of this: http://kathall.co.uk/blog/2009/10/are-monsters-creative/ and http://kathall.co.uk/blog/2009/10/the-wonders-of-pritt-stick/. I wrote a comment on her site that got a bit out of hand. So here it is - it's the creative process, writ large.

I am not sure I agree about the creative process. But it is hard to know. I write in two different ways depending on the context. Sometimes I just keep writing sentence after sentence with little idea of where I am going and hope that will get sorted in the edit. And that works fine in a short thing, and you imagine that when you are going to go and write a novel you are going to do it properly - come up with a plot and fill in the details.

However... That doesn't seem to be the real truth. Sometimes I write and I find myself coming up with the whole story. Sometimes I know I want to write, but I have no idea what is coming next. The sense of painting oneself into a corner is hugely exciting and motivates you through the slog of writing, and it is a slog. I would say that I always find writing less exciting when I know the end before I get there. But the question is - does knowing make the end result a better or worse thing?

It is hard to know whether the excitement of keeping you guessing distracts you. Does it stop you from seeing the wood for the trees? Do you end up with something hideously unbalanced? And yet the question remains - does it matter if, on the other hand, you enjoy the process so little that you can't get to the end?

The issue with this is that the process of creation is somewhat mechanical. This is like parts of the edit for me. The sad news is that you can't have creativity without hard work and a bit of boring mechanical processing. Other people don't do it because of the hard work, and that's part of what makes it worth while.

Just think, you could imagine monster, would that be as good as holding monster? I make up a story with every spare five minutes I have. But it is the ones I turn into reality that satisfy me.

Sometimes, you have to overcome your enjoyment of the process to achieve results. My novel, when it is in my head, is perfect, writing it reveals the faults. In my head, nine years ago, it was a perfect story I told myself one rainy evening. I loved it, and now as people read it, I'll realise the faults and I'll have to be told about them, because, at the end, the achievement is worth it. Maybe we will see more of monster around the house than your collage?

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do collage, of course, but that part of all creative work involves the horrible difficult part where you have to learn all the new things, create rubbish, fail and learn. And part of that is challenging yourself. Making a collage out of materials you've never used before, knitting with a new material, writing a much longer story.

In some ways, if the impending sense of doom and failure are absent, the process isn't going to be exciting. That's why to me, here, the collage is more interesting because you had to do something, and publish it, and that's scary for you. Maybe the next thing is constructing a knitting pattern for yourself, or maybe it's just pushing the boundaries of the scary and knowing that whatever you did, four things are true:

1) You did it
2) Not many people do
3) You started, which is hard enough
4) You finished

Proud isn't enough of a word, for what I feel about you. Now keep starting and finishing.

P.S. If you would like to suggest a topic for Katherine to be creative about then send in your ideas here.

Who edits the editors?

2009-10-21T10:13:00.002+01:00

Christine asked two important questions in the comments on the Draft Dodgers post:

I'm curious who you select to read your work along with you - friends, family, perfect strangers?

Is it hard for them to be brutally honest?

I know how I chose the set of people I am using but I'm not sure how to advise anyone anyone else to find people like this in their set of friends. So maybe I'll describe them and that might help.

Reviewer 1 - Nick Ollivere

I've known Nick since we were 12. We were also flatmates for around 4 years. So we have a secure friendship. Nick is also a writer. During most of the time we've known each other we've worked on projects together. Writing with somebody else means, to a certain extent, having to try and get your bit in ahead of what the other one wrote. And part of doing that involves being able to criticise the other. So we have a long and secure relationship, and because he's a writer he tends to read it in a slightly different way. Brutal honesty is guaranteed. We're used to it, because I guess when writing together we are making something together and so he's used to changing my writing to make our project better.

Reviewer 2 - Katherine Hall

Well most people in a relationship know where their best critic is - their partner. Fair, balanced, truthful and unwilling to let you get away with cheating yourself. The only problem is that while you imagine you don't write with your own voice, of course it's all in there - and Katherine has to hear my voice a lot! This is going to make reading something this long a bit tricky. I mean Katherine is editing this
article before it is published too. But on the other hand that familiarity means she is used to giving me the feedback I need. So brutal honesty - check, secure relationship - check.

Reviewer 3 - Adrian Lightly (fourstar)

I spend a lot of time with Adrian as we are friends and we work together for about 11 hours a day, and we have been doing so for about 5 years. We don't write together but we do create software together. This means that a large part of what we spend our days doing is a kind of critical creativity. We are finding problems and solutions together. When you hear the word criticsise you imagine it as a horrible slight to the receiver of it. Constructive criticism is such an abused phrase by people who want to dress up their mean criticism. But constructive criticism is our
trade I guess. "This button should be blue and be over here because when people press it they are thinking of the kind of actions that go with these other blue buttons, rather than these orange ones over there". There is no malice in there, it's making the whole thing better, and how was I supposed to remember the users were that crazy? So brutal, practiced honesty and long-term secure friendship.

Side note

The group so far are the reviewers who helped with the Book with the Missing First Page. We got the band back together. But because of the length of the novel I have decided to bring in some new eyes.

Reviewer 4 - Dei

Another friend and colleague, Dei is an actual editor for a living. Even though I have known her for less time than the others, it is her job to tell people the truth for a living. So this should be pretty easy for her.

And two others who haven't reviewed for me before, are both good friends, but I haven't asked - so I can't really announce. It will be interesting to see if they will be able to tell me the truth as well as the others, but they will give me a fresh perspective.

Draft dodging

2009-10-17T13:59:00.003+01:00

So draft 2 of my novel is now complete. Which is good news for me. A few people have asked me what the process is and how it all fits together. It reminded me that there is some excellent material in an episode of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe on the subject. At some point during the run of Screenwipe Charlie had a special episode which just focused on writers. It featured a really great set of writers: Paul Abbot (State of Play, Shameless), Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain (Peep Show), Russell T. Davis (Doctor Who, Queer as folk), Tony Jordan (Eastenders, Life on Mars, Hustle), Graham Linehan (The IT Crowd, Black Books, Father Ted). There is some strong language here by the way, but it's worth it.

At one point they did talk about multiple drafts: (2 minutes 40 seconds, Paul Abbot, Graham Linehan, Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain and then Tony Jordan)

One of the most crucial things to get right when writing is dialogue. This from Tony Jordan is spot on: (50 seconds)

There is a scary thing about writing, which is also addressed really well here. It's tremendously hard work, and it's nowhere near as enjoyable as you hope. But at least they are in the same boat as you: (2 minutes 58 seconds, Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, Russell T. Davis, Tony Jordan and then Russell again)

And finally, they were asked if they had any advice for writers. I've been accused here of constantly going on about how important it is to start. Russell T. Davis points out how important it is to FINISH!: (2 minutes 34 seconds, Tony Jordan, Sam Bain, Paul Abbot, Graham Linehan, back to Tony Jordan, and finishing with Russell T. Davis)

Also I love Graham's analogy for writing there.

Anyway my second draft is complete. What happens next you might ask? Well now 6 lovely people, and me again, get to read it and tell me what they think. And then I decide if I agree with them or not and then comes draft 3. See I told you it took a long time. But I watched Russell T. Davis telling me to finish when I finished the first draft, and I watched him tell me to finish again now when I wrote the second.

And I'm going to get there, I am quite determined.

My muse is like Sharon Stone

2009-10-02T14:36:00.003+01:00

I totally subscribe to the Elizabeth Gilbert theory that it is much healthier to act as the Roman and Greeks did and imagine that genius and inspiration are seperate to yourself. Obviously we know that this isn't true in reality. We know that when we sit down to a piece of work we sit down on our own. But it's hard to deal with what happens when things don't really flow. Who's fault is it? Well it's obviously some internal thing. This is the same mind that was able to produce ten pages yesterday. But is it helpful to go down that avenue? You may have had a glass too many of wine last night, you may have just got some bad news on e-mail this morning. You are out of the zone.

I've always felt that it's better to just pretend that it's nothing to do with you. I'm not saying that it's okay to have that extra glass of wine. No there are some things that are in your control. Try and have the same breakfast, the same order of things before you start writing. You create little rituals which can get you in the zone. But be careful with these. You want to be able to write standing on your head if the inspiration hits. Remember these things are to help the inspiration hit. Once it has hit you are supposed to drop everything and go for it. Don't get these things mixed up. If you start saying that you can't write without your 2B pencil you're going to miss things - and have very hard to read writing.

I've always felt that my muse was like Sharon Stone in the pretty poor Albert Brooks film - The Muse. She goes off and runs around the world picking up inspirational things. She's that part of your mind that daydreams the fantastical. That part of your mind that hates the practicalities, the harsh realities of drudgery.

You have to entertain your muse. You have to take it out and experience things you don't normally experience. You have to allow it its flights of fancy. But there are two reasons your muse will leave you, if you're too serious, or if you're not serious enough. Remember your muse is here for you to do your creative thing. You can't just daydream you have to start.

I am a rational person and the muse is of course a part of your own mind. But just like Feng Shui works in some regards because imagining how a dragon would flow through your living room will stop you making the design mistake of parking something in the middle of your living room. This is the same, imagining your muse like a person who needs entertaining but wants results will give you what you need without feeling like the formal drag of a system. It might feel a but silly, but a willingness to embrace a feeling of silliness is a big part of being creative.

Last thing - for reasons I don't fully understand my actual muse might be like Sharon Stone in the Muse but she looks like Jenna Elfman.

Travel website idea

2009-09-29T06:31:00.000+01:00

Okay so this is the dumbest thing I could possibly do, but I'm probably never going to make my millions from a web startup. So I'll give you my idea here.

Here are the facts:
I like to go on holiday
I don't have any children

So travel websites don't work for me

Why not?

Because it doesn't matter when I go on holiday at all.*

I also don't really know where I want to go on holiday.

What I want, and there must be other people like me, is to be able to say:

"I would like to go on holiday in the next three months, I want the average temperature to be between 25 and 35, I would like to be on holiday for around a week and to have at least 9 interesting museums / art exhibitions / monuments so I can do something each day and have the illusion of choice. One of the points of interest should be a modern art gallery. We won't go there but it's good to know that it is there. I would like my hotel to have wifi and to be nice but not fancy. I want to have a choice of fancy restaurants but also know that there are enough at the lower end that are decent - so I can eat for the rest of the week once I've been to the fancy one."

The point is I don't want a package holiday. I don't want you to sell me that experience. I want you to show me all of the places that fit those criteria. And then rank them by price or number of fancy restaurant choices or whatever I want to rank them by.

All of this informaion exists in guide books, and in theory a travel agent in a shop might know this. But you want me to talk to somebody? Urgh!

But I don't know where to go on holiday and don't mind when. Go to any travel website and look for a holiday. If you don't know the start or end date you can't start. What do you mean you don't know where you are going?

You can, of course, browse but you can't search. All of the existing travel websites fail because they work based on the easiest way to present the data out of the database. They don't represent the way that everyone actually thinks when they decide to go on holiday.

Come on - tell me it already exists and I've missed it.

* As long as it's not during the Formula 1 season, obviously.

Lets not argue about it

2009-09-23T16:58:00.000+01:00

I think we have another language problem on our hands here everyone. I think we've gone and broken the word "argument".

I think it's happened because we've all decided that "debate" is too pompous. It might well be too pompous, as it goes, it sounds a bit high falutin', doesn't it? Would you like to enter our debate? Will we be using the Chatham House Rule?

But what's the word for what you do with your friends, or your partner, when one of you kind of takes up one position and the other takes the opposite one? Not in a forced debatey kind of way, but in a natural conversational kind of way. Debate is probably the word really. But it isn't what people say nowadays, oh no...

"So Susan, are you going to lay that patio?"
"Well, funnily enough, Paul and I were having an argument... well... discussion about it last night."

That's right, the new word for this situation is, "argument... well... discussion".

"Discussion" isn't the word by itself because it implies that you might well agree about it, "we were discussing it and we both think we should go for it."

And "argument" sounds too strong. It sounds like you might have been really cross about what you were debating. "Argument" has a frisson of emotion to it. And goodness gracious me, it would certainly never do to entertain the possibility that you have an emotional depth thicker than a sheet of paper.

But isn't there already a word for the times when an argument goes a bit too far? Yes, it's "row". "Row" sits nicely between "argument" and "fight".

So it would seem we are too squeamish to use "argument" now. We don't want to admit that we are passionate about our point of view. When we say "argument", we think other people think we're saying "row", but being nice.

And I know why - it is nice and polite. I know I'd say, "bit of a debate" probably to avoid saying "argument". But my characters, who are hopefully more realistic than I am, will probably say, "argument... well... discussion".

What would you say?

Go to bed

2009-09-15T12:46:00.000+01:00

"Sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite."
Why do people say this? Does it make any sense to you? Really...

...

...no, it doesn't, does it? First of all, why would you want to sleep tight? That sounds awful. Sleeping loose is clearly the first requirement of a good night's sleep. You can almost imagine this person sending you to bed by saying, "sleep tight and don't forget to grind your teeth".

No sleeping loose is right at the top of my bedtime agenda. So that's at least 50% of this phrase that plain doesn't work.

Let's look at the other half. "Don't let the bed bugs bite." Maybe this is why you're sleeping tight? Because you are supposed to be keeping ever vigilant for these bed monsters who are coming to devour you.

Bed bugs - the actual things - don't actually bite you.* So why lie? Is this just to scare children? I mean, if we're going for that then we can surely do much better. We're clearly just allowed to make up anything.

How about:

"Good night, oh just before you go to bed, just keep an eye out and let me know in the morning?"
"About what?"
"Well, when I was in your room earlier, I thought I could hear your duvet breathing. And I swear it finished making the bed itself. I was probably confused though. Let me know in the morning."

I am sure you can do even better. Do let me know in the comments.

* Look, let's be all non-squeamish about this - but don't read the next footnote if you don't like that kind of thing.**

** They eat the bits of skin you are no longer using.

As I was saying to Mick Jagger...

2009-09-07T14:28:00.002+01:00

A few years ago, I was driving towards Castle Howard when Katherine started reading from the guide book. She explained that Castle Howard was built in 1712 . "Oh," I said, "so it's not as old as my dad's house."

This has become a bit of a trope. Things get mentioned as being older or younger than my dad's house. It's a defacto standard of measurement. I'm surprised that those crazy cats over at SI or ISO haven't been in touch.

So the other night I was at the theatre with Mick Jagger. He was there in the row behind me, minding his own business. Afterwards we all trudged out. There's nothing like being stuck behind people. It doesn't matter if they are mega famous or if they have loads of people in front of them - it's easy to become antsy.

"Excuse me, Mick," I said.

After we were out of the theatre, Katherine and I compared notes. He was a bit short, very wiry, he looked like he was almost dancing - at all times. These were all part of his cool.

"Well I dropped out of the London School of Economics faster than he did, that must mean he is less cool." I said.

It was Castle Howard all over again.

Maybe Mick thinks he is cooler than me. But as I said to him, "excuse me, Mick"!

Go for odd

2009-09-03T13:08:00.001+01:00

I know what you're thinking. Imagine if, as well as reading whatever crazy thing comes across my mind, you could also see and hear me. Sounds unreasonably excessive, doesn't it? But you know what they say about the Internet: somewhere, out there, is an audience for everything and nobody knows that they are a dog.*

So just in case that aphorism is accurate, I have created a new site - goforodd.com.

Go For Odd is different to Gamboling. Here I tend to talk about things that have happened to me or about writing and actual fiction and all that stuff. Go For Odd is primarily going to be about talking to interesting people about odd things in their lives and recording it. Imagine it like Panorama but with jokes.

Anyway it sort of explains itself over there on the site, so if you're interested, head over there and subscribe.

Don't worry - I won't forget gamboling. [I'm not worried! - Ed.]

* I may have got that slightly wrong.

Radio GaGa

2009-08-28T22:26:00.002+01:00

When I was a boy, one of my favourite things to do was write and produce radio shows. I would essentially be copying music from CD to tape and talking over the gaps between the songs. I would do it for hours. In fact I did it so much that eventually I stopped bothering to record the shows.

Something about it was really reassuring. I like to find music for other people and I started getting quite lackadaisical about it - spending the time when the track was playing furiously trying to find the perfect next track. I had fewer and fewer written links and more and more ad-libed from-top-of-head-thoughts about what I was playing.

All the time I would be doing this, I would have the music coming out of headphones rather than the speakers so that I didn't have feedback. I have no idea how mad I must have sounded to anyone walking past, just speaking to myself. But when I emerged with hot ears I would feel drained but satisfied.

All of that time I knew I would one day be a radio dj just in the way that other kids know they are going to be a professional footballer or whatever their dream is. But over the years that dream slightly fell away.

And now suddenly, rather unexpectedly, it has happened. How strange life is. I find myself co-presenting an hour long zoo radio show which has music, phone-ins, competitions and features and us (the team) desperately trying to keep up with reading a comment every 10 seconds. It's also about Formula 1, but almost tangentally.

I have to publicly thank Christine Blachford and her mysterious partner in podcasting for fulfilling one of my life's ambitions.

The charge I get from live broadcasting is unlike anything else in life. Perhaps it's closest comparison is like exercise. It's hard work, but worth it, sometimes you feel clumsy, sometimes things seem to connect and everything seems to work. And at the end of a show you're exhausted.

I don't know how those two talents at Sidepodcast do so much of it and hold down day jobs. But I'm really glad that they do. Working with such professionals made my intro quite a bit easier.

Here is a link to the shows in case you fancy a listen. It's designed to be live and about formula one so it may make no sense, but I'm proud of them.

http://www.sidepodcast.com/category/parade-lap/

My view

2009-08-23T08:05:00.003+01:00

Spillage

2009-08-11T06:08:00.001+01:00

In the continuing series of articles highlighting my ineptitude it's time to come clean about my ability to spill things. While growing up there was almost a compeition at the dinner table to be the first to announce who had managed to splash a spot of pasta sauce on themselves.

At work the main danger is, of course, the coffee spill. It is made especially bad because when you are most in need of the coffee is when you are at your most clumsy.

Anyway, on one particular morning a few years ago I managed to spill a cup of coffee completely down my shirt. No amount of washing at the sink was going to sort this problem. Luckily near our office there is a large Marks and Spencer so I walked over and picked up another shirt.

I decided to make some idle chit chat at the till as I often do. And so I pointed out the stain on my shirt and the new shirt, and looking for some kind of reassurance, I said, "I guess you get a lot of people buying shirts at times like this".

She looked at me, looked down at the till, tapped some buttons, looked back up at me and said, "computer says no".

When did you realise you were a geek?

2009-07-22T05:41:00.000+01:00

I was talking with some friends the other day about when they realised they were geeks. And one of the friends in the conversation claimed - shock horror - that he wasn't a geek. Ridiculous! I claimed, of course he was. He argued that he didn't care that much about computers, but that isn't actually the point - the point is that a geek is somebody that is obsessed with something. The kind of person who knows where the best shops to go for their particular obsession are, the kind of person who starts thinking about a small corner of their chosen subject and six hours later realises they have forgotten to do anything other than think about the problem. This is different than the nerd, the nerd is the person who is so absorbed by the subject that they can't do anything else.

Imagine, to pick a neutral subject, that we were talking about cooking. A geek would be the kind of person who would love, no, need to spend time in the cookery section of the book shop, loves going to cookery accessory shops and picking things to own, might even have a wishlist of things to own. The geek loves cooking, loves experimenting and enjoys it. The nerd knows that the Mixifier 5000 is better than the Ingredalot 360 because the different attachments are far superior and are interchangable with the entire Emulsify range. They don't ever use any of the things that they buy, they keep them in the original box and eat processed cheese on toast.

So I guess my friend realised he was a geek right then, when we were having the conversation, and maybe reading this you are recognising this in yourself. My question is this, when did you realise that you were a geek and what happened to let you know?

Visiting the doctor

2009-07-14T19:25:00.001+01:00

Now I don't think I know what I'm doing as I go through life, and I certainly don't feel that I give the impression that I know what I'm doing in life. I mean, I'm the kind of person who spills fish and chips on themselves. But clearly some people think, upon seeing me, that I know what I'm doing. And the only possible reason is that I wear a collared shirt all of the time - even in bed - and when I'm out and about I am partial to wearing a jacket. And by jacket I do not mean bomber or leather, no I mean what is called in America a Sports Jacket. And what is called in England - a jacket.

This used to make me look like a toff (and to some it still will) but because people don't wear those kinds of clothes anymore, and because I'm not over forty people seem to think that this means I work wherever I am standing, or that in some way I am in charge. It's odd because often when this happens to me, I am actually scouting around quite vigorously* looking for somebody who works there or is in charge.

I'm asked directions a lot. No, I know, you're asked directions from time to time too. I would say that it's rare that I go two days without being asked directions. I was once, while lost in Italy, asked directions by an Italian in Italian - that's how approachable I am.

Approachable used to be what I thought it was. I had that way about me, where people weren't afraid to walk up and say, "excuse me, what time is the train to Basingstoke"? But there is something else, maybe people think I might know the answer, or maybe, as I've come to suspect, people think I might be in charge.

Yes, I think it's the clothes, the shirt with a collar, the jacket with a collar, they make people think that I probably know what I'm doing. That I have some authority. I suspect this because of an incident that happened to me during a visit to the doctors. I was suffering from a blocked right ear and I decided that I needed my ears syringed. I suppose one is supposed to visit a doctor who refers you to the nurse who does this, but I clearly didn't have time for such shilly-shalying around. I wanted to get this baby syringed. I phoned the surgery and they booked me in and I turned up. Now this is the first occasion that I have been to the doctors in 5 years*** and we've moved and so therefore has the doctor. So I haven't been to this building before.

I find the place well enough and as I approach I realise that there are no obvious way into the building. Two entrances look viable but there is no sign.**** I approach with caution and then at the last moment make a bold play for the larger set of doors.

Once inside, I realise I have made the wrong choice. I could, of course, walk back through the door, admit defeat and enter the correct way. But that wouldn't be the manly way to do things. I decide to stride on purposefully. I plan to edge towards the other entrance as well as I can given the internal geography of the building. After a few moments of panic this genuinely seems to have worked. I am now near the doctors surgery. I walk past the receptionists and I see that they are all facing into a room that I can't see a way into. After a moment or two I realise there is a door but you can't open it from this side only from the other side. Presumably I have come in the exit. I walk, no stride, back to the receptionists.

The three ladies are sitting in a long thin room with a desk in front of them with telephones, computers, blinking lights and a big glass window at the front of it to presumably stop the diseases from getting to them. But they have thankfully left the door to their room open, presumably because it is blinking hot and their office would essentially otherwise become a greenhouse. I am in the side alley, the side alley onto which their door opens.

I sidled up and said, "Erm, I have come...", I make a gesture, "Ear Syringe".

Now, I admit, that I could have used more words. I could have said, "to have my". But that's just not the way I speak. I leave out vast swathes of information, it's my way.

I'm sure you're well ahead of me, they gave me directions this time, and instead of thinking I was a patient, they clearly thought I was a doctor needing to visit the nurse to discuss her current case. They told me where to go. It sounded feasible that this was a secret way back into the waiting room.

I walked, I turned, I firmly opened the door... And discovered the nurse giving another patient the ear syringe operation.

"Ahh... Doctor..." she said.
"I'm not a Doctor," I said.

I realised with alarm that she hadn't stop syringing the poor blokes ear. He looked aghast at the news.

"What," the nurse quite reasonably asked, "are you doing here then?"
"I think I'm your next patient. I think there might have been some mix up at the desk."
"Yes there must have been."
"I'll...," I said, "I'll go."
"Yes," she said.

I went back, walked all the way around, back outside and into the reception the proper way and luckily the receptionist who had pointed me in the direction of the room earlier was on the phone. This time everything worked.

What I'm trying to say is, "don't ask me for directions".

* With my eyes only I don't wield binoculars or put my hand above my eyebrows, as though putting your hands above your eyebrows suddenly makes you see further**

** Although I do of course do the hand / eyebrows thing from time to time just to check.

*** The previous time I went was the day after the 7th of July bombings in London. Imagine having your blood pressure taken while a) the 7th of July bombings had happened the day before, b) you have just had 2 pints of coffee, c) you are about to make your way into London, d) your mother is sitting outside in a cafe waiting for you so that we could all go into London, e) to meet some friends who had warned us not to be late for a busy restaurant with wall to wall reservations, and f) there had been a forty five minute delay seeing the doctor. It was a little high.

**** I later found the sign in a hedge.

Three lessons from writing

2009-07-10T10:29:00.001+01:00

Right, one more post about writing before you all get bored (too late! - Ed.) and I go back to normal things.

While writing most recently, I think I have gleaned three lessons.

1) You can't write a concerto because you can hum

You can hum, you can probably sing to some degree, you could even - if stretched - come up with a tune that you're pretty sure is original. But you wouldn't expect to sit down at a piano and write a whole concerto without stopping and going back. You probably can't even visualise which keys play which notes on the piano - I don't remember. You have an idea of what the song is, but as you press the keys you are hearing a dum, dah, dam, blunk. And then you find the correct note and you go on. But you couldn't expect to write a whole song like this. You couldn't work it out at the piano as you went along. It would be much better to hum the tune into a tape recorder, then later work out what each of the notes you hummed were, and finally figure out how to play your tune. If you kept stopping all the time you'd lose all of your rhythm. So stop imagining that when you start writing what will come flowing out of you will be ready for print. Stop thinking that it's a good idea to pause every five seconds and correct yourself. You have a creative brain and an ordered brain and they don't work well at the same time. Write then edit. Don't do both at the same time or you will be so discouraged you will stop.

2) What to do when you see all those rubbish books out there and think if they can do it, why can't I?

They don't know what good writing is - do they? Of course they don't! So how did they get a novel published when you've been so sorely overlooked?

Well, for a start, they wrote one.

It's actually easier if you don't know what good writing is, because you aren't constantly stopping yourself from writing a sentence, just because it might not be in the correct tense. Separating the writing from the editing is crucial. It is the law. Do it!

3) If it was fun, easy and didn't take long it wouldn't be something you'd want to do

The good news is that it's really, really hard. I can't imagine, or presume to know, how hard it is to do well. I'm not there - yet. It must be close to impossible.

And that's great because a big part of wanting to do it, is because you want to be able to say you've done it. And the only reason you think it's a good thing to say that you've done, is because it's a rare and hard thing to do. The good news is, it is hard. Because otherwise, it wouldn't be something worth doing.

4) I thought there wasn't supposed to be a 4?

So start? Please. The most clichéd thing in the world is to say, "what's your five-year plan for this"? People have a beer and talk to a friend, or they chat over dinner with their partners, and they talk about what it is they hope to be doing in five years' time. But you know why those things are things you hope to happen in five years and not... like... tomorrow? It's because you can't do them in a single day. So if you don't work on them during the five years, you won't ever get there.

Ten years ago I wanted to be a novelist in five years. It was only nine years later that I started actually really working on my novel in a way that would mean I would ever finish it. If anything of this is ringing true - and you actually want to get to that place. Please, please, just start.

Draft one complete

2009-07-08T19:11:00.002+01:00

So it is finally done. The first draft is complete. That was a bit of a slog in the end but it was certainly worth it.

I really need to thank all the people who motivated me all the way through. But I don't want to do it yet because this isn't over just yet!

I started this particular novel back in 2001 and a mere eight years later the first draft is complete. I ended up writing about a third of it over the first seven years, around a third during the week Katherine was in Turkey earlier in the year, and the final third was done in the last 30 days.

And I have to say that this most recent system was by far the best. Writing five thousand words in a day is fine (kinda) but it doesn't leave much juice in the tank for the next day. But even that strategy was better than the first one of writing about 3,000 per year. That can get quite dispiriting after the first six or seven years I can tell you.

I decided to focus on pages earlier in the year and that really worked well for me. I think that on an average work day I can crank about one and a half pages of A4 on my commute. But that's around 750 words.

My thinking was that if I set a target of 1,000 words I would most days miss my target (weekends obviously I can write more). But using the pages method I would be ahead of my daily target every other day. I wasn't saying I wrote in a vaccum this many words today or this many pages. If I was three lines away from the end of a page I would get my new page count really early the next day and that was very encouraging.

So it was probably a trick but it was a really handy one. On one dark day in the process I looked at where I had got to on a page and said, "that's the end of a chapter". Inserted a page break and wrote "Chapter X". And that was my page complete for the day. And for people confused by this, it was the previous page now being declared finished that bumped up my count.

Have some rules and stick to them. It worked well for me, but that's probably a conversation for another post.

Only twice in the entire process was I ahead, but I never let it get too far behind. Here's what the 30 days looked like in detail...

The weird thing is when you break it down by weekday... I did a lot of writing on Sundays but actually because of that I did well on Mondays. I would start the morning finishing a page which encouraged me all day. Other days I didn't have a page to donate to tomorrow. Also skewing the results Katherine went out twice on Mondays, and also there was 1 more Monday and Sunday in the 30 days than any other day. I have to wonder if I'd have been able to make it without that luck of dates!

It's finished, and that's all that matters.

A novel idea

2009-06-23T05:27:00.002+01:00

Sorry for the lack of updates on here I have been working furiously on my novel. I am closing in on the end and at this point I am desperate to finish the first draft. This has, perhaps unsurprisingly, led to a bit of a gap on here. I had been planning to fill it but I don't think I can. So I'm afraid you'll have to put up with me talking about writing.

So how's that going? Well a couple of weeks ago I realised that based on my structure I had about 60 A4 pages left to go (around 30 thousand words).

And I decided that 2 pages a day was about do-able. And so I decided to write 2 pages a day. Even on the first day I only managed 1 page. But the idea was to slay the monster over the thirty days - on average.

I have been posting my updates about the previous day on Twitter (@alexandronov) and if you want to check in please do. The main point though is that because I'm posting the update every morning I'm having to face up to what I have or haven't done. It has been hugely helpful. As has my friend Kris who has been replying to a seperate e-mail with great words of encouragement (a hard line to walk because if you're sycophantic I'd believe it wouldn't matter what I did, but too tough and I'd give up too).

So anyway that's the story and here's the graph.

Street party

2009-06-13T07:00:00.000+01:00

Sandra put her arm out of the kitchen window. A couple of tiny raindrops landed on her hand. IT IS NOT GOING TO RAIN. She didn’t really know who she was thinking this to. She hadn’t been to church since last summer when she’d tried to will the vicar into helping with the tombola.

Sandra closed the window and turned back to her kitchen. Rows of sandwiches were arranged with military precision on trays. There were bowls of hula hoops. Enough, by her calculation, for everyone to have five hoops each. More than enough.

There was no cake. She’d left the cake to Dorothy. A risk certainly. But a calculated risk. Last year Dorothy had brought one cake along (Sandra had made the other six). And all anyone had spoken about for three months was how nice Dorothy’s sponge was. Well, it’s all very well making springy sponge when you only have to make one, and you aren’t making the sandwiches, sorting the drink, making Matthew collect the drink, so Matthew can talk about how he’s sorted the drink, getting the council to close the road despite the objections of the Robinsons (as usual). It’s all very well making cake in those conditions.

This time Sandra had made it quite clear to everyone that she was making no cake and that it was all Dorothy’s responsibility. Dorothy was a flake and couldn’t really be trusted. In fact the only thing she could be trusted to do in Sandra’s opinion was to cause trouble - something that she excelled at. So by that reckoning there would be no cake a all. Sandra turned and strode into the back room and opened the door to the larder. There were two victoria sponges each in their own Tupperware with a third Tupperware container with some raspberry jam, long spoons and some napkins.

Nobody knew of these sponges, not even Matthew. Would, Sandra worried, Matthew know how to collect these when Sandra sent him back for them? She couldn’t have there be no cake, that would reflect badly on her. That would mean poor organisation. So she had some backup cake. It shouldn't be necessary, but if Dorothy didn’t appear then Matthew could run and fetch them. She’d have to keep Matthew off the lager until the cake materialised one way or the other.

Everyone, except the Robinsons, had removed their cars from the road as asked. She had taken Reggie out for a walk and seen that it was all done. Then she had made the sandwiches - all the other food had been done the night before. If there was one thing Sandra didn’t like, it was soggy sandwiches. Then she had attacked the hoovering pausing loudly near the children’s rooms and knocking repeatedly against their doors with the hose. And now she was ready. She took her pinny off and hung it behind the kitchen door. Now to shower. She looked back over the room. She slid open a drawer and pulled a pad of Post-It notes out and a pen. Then she wrote on a note that said, “Matthew, I know how many hula hoops there are in this bowl - don’t even think about it”. She placed the Post-It note on top of the bowl and went for her shower.

As she left the kitchen the clock ticked over and proclaimed the time to be seven o’clock.

Sweet shop

2009-06-02T08:09:00.000+01:00

A few years back, I had an idea for a new kind of old shop. Everyone harks back to the idea of an old fashioned sweet shop, don’t they? They want to see the jars of sweets piled high to the ceiling and some benevolent old man weighing out sweets with enormous scales. Cola bottles, gobstoppers, white mice, those white chocolate buttons with hundreds and thousands on them.

The problem with these kinds of shops is that they can’t work for us anymore as adults. As adults... we are too tall. We are the same height as the people running the shop. We can see over the counter, we can reach the jars at the top.

So the answer is pretty obvious to me. What we need to do is build a really big shop. The counter for the shop should be 6 feet high. Giant animatronic puppets should work behind the counter, weighing things. Puppeteers would have plenty of room to hide behind the counter.

The ceilings would have to be really tall and then up at the top you would employ dwarfs to climb around taking things off of the shelf to make it seem even further away than it is.

It would be a totally odd operation, obviously. But if you sold every kind of sweet and you had the shop in central London - Covent Garden suggests itself to me - then you could make it a tourist destination. Probably best to get the Tussauds group involved to have a steady supply of actors and so on from places like the London Dungeon and have a bit of cross promotion.

People would go into the shop just to have the experience of going to the shop. “When in London,” people would say to each other, “you have to visit this crazy sweet shop”.

The only problem is that I don’t have a name for the shop. What do you think? Something old-fashioned sounding would be ideal.

The moon under water

2009-05-27T10:25:00.000+01:00

Many years ago George Orwell wrote an article specifying what the 10 things that he thought the perfect London pub should have. Country pubs were different and he didn't go in to the details. His ideal pub was called "The moon under water".

Rather terribly there is course a chain version of these pubs now. This supposedly was the template for the Wetherspoons chain of pubs. The only thing that they seemed to listen to George about was his dislike of music. Everything else they seemed to get wrong. Wetherspoons pubs have had a complete atmosphere bypass, and I think the idea of several pubs all being exactly the same, being exactly as crap as each other and using his name would have wounded George. One line from his article is thus,"If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its 'atmosphere.'" On that rationale, would you ever choose a Wetherspoons?

Actually here is the article...

----

Evening Standard, 9 February 1946

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of "regulars" who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its "atmosphere."

To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull's head over the mantelpiece —everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars, and the Victorian lay-out of the place gives one plenty of elbow-room. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies' bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, a dining-room.

Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women —two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone "dear," irrespective of age or sex. ("Dear," not "Ducky": pubs where the barmaid calls you "ducky" always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

Unlike most pubs, the Moon Under Water sells tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirins and stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone.

You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.

Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch —for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll—for about three shillings.

The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have draught stout with it. I doubt whether as many as 10 per cent of London pubs serve draught stout, but the Moon Under Water is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.

They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.

The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.

On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.

Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children —and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.

The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be —at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don't know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.

I know pubs where the beer is good but you can't get meals, others where you can get meals but which are noisy and crowded, and others which are quiet but where the beer is generally sour. As for gardens, offhand I can only think of three London pubs that possess them.

But, to be fair, I do know of a few pubs that almost come up to the Moon Under Water. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect pub should have and I know one pub that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no draught stout, and no china mugs.

And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.

-----

So what on earth was Tim Martin thinking when he used the name for his pubs?

There are some changes that have happened since Orwell's article. Almost every pub serves stout now (sadly, generally only one kind). And there is no chance of bringing smoking back to the pub. And of course sacrilegiously I sometimes like music in a pub. Not always. It depends on the general noise level. I can deal with what my father calls "Wallpaper music" when the pub is quiet. That way the pub never feels totally empty. But it should never upset the possibility of conversation.

But what do you all think? What makes the perfect boozer for you?

How I write

2009-05-25T13:14:00.000+01:00

One of the things I find so difficult about writing a novel is that you have to have a plan. Even if you don't think you are planning anything, then you have to remember that you have planned to write a novel. And even that thought can upset some kind of delicate balance in your mind. Things are different with a plan.

Surely, though, you would think that there must be some planning going on, even in a short article. Even then you are deciding to write about a particular topic. Not really. Not for me anyway. I tend to start, write, do more writing. See if I can find a strand of an idea in there and throw away the other stuff.

For example... And this is absolutely true... Last week's short story about Amber started off as an article about Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. I didn't decide at one point, to shelve the Gladwell article and start writing fiction. The Gladwell stuff went in the edit. I don't think there is any connection between the book and the short story even. As far as I can objectively tell the two are separate. I think the story had more to do with the Laura Marling album I was listening to at the time.

I got a bit stuck on stuff to write about the Gladwell book and so I noodled off onto something else. I'm guessing other people don't do the same, but I don't really know. Perhaps I am an outlier after all?

The book is interesting in that it talks about how you have to work hard (more than 10,000 hours work before you become truly proficient in anything). It also talks about how society, timing and luck are very important to your likely success. In many ways, it is the opposite of a self-help book. Too many books offer the promise of "how to succeed in 14 and a half steps" this book says, "to succeed you need to work like crazy, for ages, and even then it's not likely to happen". It is a bit of a downer, I guess. Not because that's depressing, it isn't. It's bound to be really hard to be commercially successful, otherwise it would be devalued and everyone would be doing it and then it wouldn't exist. Successful by that rationale means being surprisingly more successful than others. It's only because you have lots more money than people that your large bank balance means anything - just ask somebody in Zimbabwe what they think.

The depressing thing is that this is what is seen as successful. Being a good and decent person is success. Being happy is success. Being rich means something else.

In Gladwell's book he talks about outliers and at the beginning he talks about a town in the United States where people are the least likely to have heart disease. It's not that they eat better than people in other places nearby. It's not that they do more exercise. It is that they are less stressed. Working too hard is stressful, so is working too little (somebody is always after you for something). Most people know each other, most people check in on each other and see that they are okay. Most people learn to live with each other. They live in a community rather than near a community like most people do today. It's no surprise that we're all looking for books on how to be successful. It's just a shame that so few people get a chance to discover what success really means.

Wow that was lots different than what I wrote last time about Gladwell. Maybe this is me just trying to justify why I haven't finished the novel yet. I mean, maybe I don't have to finish the novel to succeed. Yeah, right.

Amber

2009-05-19T22:18:00.000+01:00

Amber lay on the sloping bank, her feet cooling in the river. She looked across the river to a house. A dragonfly hovered in front of her nose. Dragonflies do live up to their name, she thought. They seem so old. Amber felt old, too old to be lusting after young boys, well, young men. On the opposite bank of the river, in the garden of the house, were three such young men. They were probably about 25 and they were mowing the lawns. She had been walking along the river and one of their naked torsos had caught her attention. She hadn't really thought about it but suddenly her feet had felt quite hot and tired. Perhaps cooling them in the water might be good after all.

Amber stopped, sat and took off her shoes. She suddenly wasn't sure about the water. It looked clean enough but it had only really been warm for the last few days. The water was liable to be freezing. She didn't have a towel to dry her feet afterwards either. But she decided that it would look better if she was cooling her feet. Otherwise somebody looking might have thought she was just there watching. She wanted it to be clear that she had just stopped to cool her feet. That the lawn mowers had probably arrived afterwards and that their noise was probably an annoyance rather than anything else.

But the noise was perfect. The drone of the mowers, the slipping of the stream, the birds calling out to each other. Amber wondered if there were bashful birds? A Zeppelin-like bee came poot-pooting past. It was doing a pretty fair approximation of the lawnmowers. The breeze was making the grass tickle Amber's fingers. The sun was warming her face and chest. Amber experienced the summer version of "did-I-leave-the-gas-on?" which is "did-I-remember-sunblock-this-morning?". Which of course she had. What about her feet? The water was probably washing it off. It was supposed to be waterproof, but she had never really believed that, when the children were young she had always rubbed sunblock back in the moment they had come out of the water. She started wondering how the children were doing. Neither of them had called for a few days. What were they doing? She hoped they were happy.

Amber caught herself. She had forgotten the moment she was in. For a second she wondered if any of these three had called their mothers recently. Of course they had, she decided, they were good boys. Despite the sun on her the running river was robbing Amber of her heat. It was probably time to move on. Amber began to worry as she often had in the last few weeks. Even in the perfect situation she didn't seem to be able to live in the moment. Her brain kept cycling on.

She wondered when she last did something impulsive. Something tried to tell her that just stopping and admiring the view had been impulsive. But not really, she knew it wasn't really. She had worried what people who saw her would think. There are no bashful birds, she thought.

And with that she stood up, and threw herself into the river. She righted herself and launched herself upwards, breaking the surface of the water. She started treading water and shouting, "Help, help".

Her dress, waterlogged, had stuck itself very tightly to her body. All three of the young men who had been mowing the lawn heard the noise, downed tools, and started running towards Amber.

"Interesting," Amber thought, "I wonder what I should do next?"

"No," another part of her brain said rather firmly, "we will just have to find out what happens next. For now, it is not for us to decide."