Nearly done now, so the mind begins to wander back to blogging. Not mush incentive to read or write blogs when you are rattling off thousands of words a day or sitting for hours reading dreadful, indigestible books written by authors with a mission to confuse and distress their readers. After a hard day at the (unnaturally quiet) British Library and a long ride home on a (stupidly noisy) bus full of people determined to yell into their mobiles as if the batteries had failed and it was just lung power that was getting them through – a man frankly doesn't feel like dealing with any more literature. By then I resent reading people's tee-shirts.
I have about 114k words to kick around, and by now I feel I should be chucking stuff out, not sticking it in. It takes me four days to read it top to bottom, while 'interrogating' it, which is an expression I picked up from an old friend who writes features for a national paper. He is the only proper writer I know and he says it is a 60/40 writing /editing split for him. With me it's about 30/70. Something wrong perhaps.
What else then? We went on a day trip to Whitstable on a nice bright Sunday a couple of weeks ago. A brilliant idea, and one that about ten zillion other people had too. So we literally couldn't find anywhere to put a foot down, never mind a tyre. We ended up in Tankerton, which is the next place along the coast, and appears to be a town built around a convenient bus shelter that somebody noticed in the 1930s. These days, judging by the shop fronts, the inhabitants are defying standard economic theory and actually are doing nothing except cutting each other's hair.
Comic Relief is coming up, and for ex-musicians like me this is when the phone rings and they ask you if they can use x y z piece of music you're on again without paying you. I said yes and am awaiting my good karma. The piece in question is actually 'The Biscuit Rap' from the Two Pints 'musical' special, wot I did five years ago and never actually saw. Thank heavens for YouTube! With a minimum of googlization I found it and watched it. I quite enjoyed it although I have no detailed memory of doing it at all. My children do though. The only downer in all this is that I picked up this Saturday's Guardian Guide and spotted one of those '20 Things' pieces about Two Pints. "Ha!" I ventured. "Bet they don't mention the Biscuit Rap."
But they did. They said it was 'rubbish'.