Worldofmore

The lift

2010-04-21T07:58:48Z

"What was that? Oh my god, what was that?"

"I would guess, to judge from the loud clanking and the bumpy ride, it was the lift breaking down in some way."

"Oh god! Oh god! No! God!"

"Are you OK?"

"What's going to happen? How will they get us out? Do you think we'll fall? We'll fall won't we? Oh my god."

"No. The lift won't fall. They're very much designed with not falling in mind."

"I can feel the walls closing in. I suffer from claustrophobia you know, I could have a panic attack at any moment. Oh god. Someone's got to get us out. How can you be so calm? We might run out of air."

"We're not going to run out of air. Look, there are ventilation holes."

"I knew I shouldn't have come out. My horoscope warned me. Why do these things always happen to me? I was late to coffee morning when Darren misplaced my car keys, those buffoons at Pret ran out of Diet Coke at lunch and now this. Why me?"

"I couldn't possibly say."

"Life's so unfair at times. I'll overrun on my parking ticket now. And I'll be late for pick-up at the nursery. They'll charge me for late collection again. Honestly, it's outrageous; every time a lunch of mine overruns and I turn up late for darling Portia they charge me £20 for "inconvenience". The nerve, it's as if they don't realise whose cheques keep them from the dole. "

"Hmmm."

"I think I'll sue. Whose lift is this? I'll be out of pocket, and I'll need a good bottle of wine to calm down after this. Who's going to pay for that?"

"You?"

"I don't think so. I'm hardly to blame for this lift breaking down. I imagine it's some workshy council employee derelict in their duty. An immigrant I suspect."

"Madam. Lifts, complex bits of engineering that they are, occasionally break down. You are aware of this I'm sure, yet you chose to take the lift instead of climbing just one flight of stairs. The responsibility for being in a broken lift lies almost entirely with you."

"Pardon? "

"Stop seeking to blame others when it's your own..."

"HELLO. HELLO. HELP. WE'RE DOWN HERE. Did you hear that. I can hear voices. Someone's coming for us. HELP. HELP. WE'RE STUCK IN THE LIFT. HELP."

"They can probably guess where we are without your..."

"HELP. HURRY UP AND HELP. I'VE GOT TO BE AT THE NURSERY IN FIVE MINUTES. QUICKLY."

To the treehouse

2010-03-25T17:07:16Z

"Max!"

He refuses to hear, striding on down the lawn. His ungainly trainers, bought a size too large for him to grow into next year at big school, threaten to trip him nearly every step, but he stomps onward.

"Max! Where are you going?" Ellie is tugging his arm to slow him. "Max.".

He stops, and turns to his younger sister.

"I'm just going. Away from them." He waves his arm back towards the house and, as if he were a conductor drawing music from an orchestra the sounds of angry shouting rise once again from the dining room. Even leaving his lunch uneaten and pushing through the patio doors into the garden hasn't stopped his parents yelling at each other.

"Please don't?"

"It's always the same. Every bloody weekend." Ellie looks fearfully toward the house as he swears. "They pretend like it's a nice family lunch, then they just row. I've had enough."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. Just go away from here for a while."

"What should I do?" Ellie's voice is trembling, her eyes wide open and watery. The pale of her face, full of uncertainty, contrasts the lurid Disney characters that gambol gaily across her t-shirt.

Max breathes deeply, looks at his feet and closes his eyes. He holds his breath for a long moment, long enough for them both to hear the shouting stop, as if silenced by his stillness. He smoothes the front of his shirt with his hand, exhales slowly, then opens his eyes to look once more at Ellie.

Don't worry Ellie. Come with me. Let's o and play in the treehouse for a bit". He smiles softly. Slipping an arm around his sister he steers her towards the bottom of the garden.

Sanctuary

2010-03-10T09:48:37Z

The door closes only with a firm shoulder, creaking over the jamb and ruffling the carpet to isolate a small l-shaped room. More furniture than space; bed, desk, wardrobe and table loom over narrow red-carpeted valleys.

The wardrobe is like a mountain, a blank-faced massif of wooden veneer topped with teetering crags of papers and files, foolscap spilling like snow and threatening to avalanche the duvet far below.

The bedside table's dark wood is bleached with a chorus of halos from overnight drinking glasses. A skewed pile of books sits within easy reach of the bed, train tickets jutting as ersatz bookmarks. Above the bed posters detail improbable mountain-bike stunts and sweat-sheened cyclists powering to victory.

At the desk and shelves, where the light spills glare over diary, homework and scraps of paper, the music system is surrounded by an ever-expanding kaleidoscope of CD cases and book spines.

At night, car headlights slide across the ceiling, left-to-right at 6:00 as commuters return to the village, and right-to-left at 11:15 when the pub kicks out.

In autumn, the gales rush and push through the trees outside and crash on the window-pane. In summer the window stays open through the night and leaves hush me gently to sleep.

200-ish words about somewhere indoors remembered from childhood.

The observed life

2010-03-02T18:00:00Z

I'll admit it was his body that first attracted me. There is something about the way the line of his torso flares up from muscular waist to shoulders broad and flat that excites me. No outfit masks that beautiful taper, even winter coats reveal the sumptuous dip of lower back before it swells out into buttocks.

It may have been his body to first catch my eye, but since first moment my passion has been anything but shallow. I look past the well-toned figure to see a generosity of spirit as he greets his colleagues, a potentially proud father as he plays with the children of friends, and an inspiring joy as he revels in the bars and nightclubs.

Our time together now is interrupted often as I become overwhelmed by the certainty of future happiness. I see us galloping horses on a beach in Corsica, the warm evening air scented with sea. I see us brewing tea for each other as the winter evenings draw in, quiet conversations in our cosy lounge. And I see us laughing as we push the pram containing our precious newborn through summer parks.

I'm not the only one who notices these things. When we walk down the street, I sometimes spot others performing double-takes, unable to drink enough of him in at first gulp. More than once I've passed young women clustered in a hateful coven and gossiping easily with the cadence that speaks unmistakeably of murmured expressions of lust followed by knots of distasteful cackling.

I bathe in this cascade of impression and feeling again as the front door of his house opens to let light fall into the evening. He stands, silhouetted against the hall light, clad in running kit and ready for evening exercise. As he locks the front door I shift lower into the gloom of the car seat. This is not a suitable place for us to meet for the first time.

Another creative writing exercise, this time with the goal of unsettling the reader through an unreliable first-person narrator.

A walk on the beach

2010-02-22T18:00:00Z

We paddle in the shallows, waves splashing over our ankles. The water cools the skin and forces blood from the toes so we flatten the ribbons of sand with stamps to squeeze warmth back into our feet.

The sky ripples with cloud, and wind squeezes under cuff, up trouser leg and down collar. Our shoulders hunch and hands search into pockets to stave off the cold.

She gossips and smiles, but anxiety billows and ebbs in my stomach even as I grin at her stories. Somewhere at the base of the dunes, where the grass gives way to sand, lies the source of my tension. A ring, sized to slip over her finger, sits in a box, which in turn lies in a bag. It cannot be seen from here but each time she glances up the beach time slows as I wait for awareness to break across her face.

She asks what we will do next. I tell her we need to leave and my gut stabs with nerves as the moment of action draws near.

We pad across the expanse, tracking footprints over blankness, to where our shoes and socks sprawl in the sand. The ring lurks here and spikes my heart with adrenalin.

We both sit to brush sand from our feet, and I glance left and right, again and again. We are alone, only a gull wheeling over the rocks will bear witness to this moment.

I rise from the log, turn and drop on one knee to face her. One hand wrestles the box from the bag, the other flips the lid. Under light filtered through cloud, the ring gleams.

Write like Hemingway she said, all nouns and verbs, no adjectives or adverbs. So I did.

Tech refresh

2010-02-16T13:49:53Z

Kicked by Google's decision to switch off FTP transfer for Blogger created blogs, I've moved this website to the fantastic Movable Type 5. I've used Movable 3 in the past and been impressed, but 5 is something else entirely. I'm still not convinced it's legal for such a powerful piece of software to be free (for me anyway).

Installation was straightforward. Migration was not. There's plenty of sites out there that will tell how to format a Blogger export so that Movable Type will read it, but try as I might I couldn't get MT to parse it correctly. Even more frustratingly it would tell me had been successful, but no entries would appear.

The solution was a little arcane, so I thought I'd post it to help others in the same boat as me.

In short, it seems MT is very picky about line endings. I'd been saving the import file on my Vista laptop, which of course then puts a Windows standard line ending on it, which in turn caused MT to throw a wobbly on upload. All I actually needed to do was download Notepad ++, change the line endings to Unix format and the encoding to UTF-8 and everything worked.

As quiet as a shiver

2010-02-02T18:00:00Z

For the first exercise in my creative writing class we were asked to write something "inspired by" the similies we had generated in class.

He was glad to finally be alone. Four hours of walking had carried him up and away from the bustle of the cars and villages; the nagging intrusions of billboards and shopfronts had given way to a calming view of forest, lake and rock.

His walking poles clacked a rhythmic accompaniment to his strides over scree and boulder at the base of a limestone cliff. He'd been contouring below this vertical rockface for ten minutes, searching without success for a break or ramp to allow him access to the higher reaches of the mountain.

A hundred metres away a bare patch of turf abutting the rockface hinted at a path that ended at the cliff itself, but as he reached the small plateau of dusty earth it became clearer the path continued into a huge crack cleaving the cliff. Jagged fists of stone faced each other across a vertical cleft no wider than his rucksack.

At the top of the cliff the rock on each side of the fissure looked sharp and fresh as if split just today by some ferocious force, but at the base each gnarl and crag was smooth, rounded and covered with the grease of a thousand passing hands.

He eased through sideways, pack held awkwardly ahead of him but still bouncing off the rock as he shuffled through. After twenty feet the split widened somewhere above his head, collecting and filtering more sunlight down to him. A few more feet and he was able to stop shuffling, turn square to his movement and stride forward easily again. And then the previously impassable cliff was breached and he found himself on a ledge above a crater, ringed by vertical walls flawless save for the crack he had just passed through.

Above him the sky was a cool blue and bright sunlight bleached a crescent of limestone on half the walls of the crater, but where he stood the sun couldn't reach. It was cold here, quiet too, and he shivered involuntarily.

A rebirth

2010-01-19T18:00:00Z

For a Christmas present, Islay enrolled me in a creative writing course. Weekly I sit in a school classroom with a diverse array of other aspiring writers. We are given something to write about each week, and must share with the class for feedback too. Given that I was sharing my writing with others I thought I ought to publish up on the hairy great web too. So, expect to see a weekly entry for the next few weeks.

Online engagement

2007-07-31T14:35:00Z

I've had so much fun living the story from the sofa (see below) to today that I haven't felt the need to write about it. And so reinforcing my own comment to Tim that blogging is a mating signal.

Let me keep it brief by revealing that my wonderful girlfriend (who will remain unnamed here to keep her from Google's clutches) accepted my marriage proposal in delightful Sandwood Bay just over a week ago.

Debrett's tells me that in times past it fell to the mothers to inform friends and family, the modern world lets me use Facebook and Blogger.

The end of a weekend

2006-06-16T08:53:00Z

We are sitting on the sofa, talking pleasantly about matters both important and inconsequential. I have made a joke and turn modestly away as she laughs while the next conversational topics are filtered and tested in my head. In the back of mind is the sorry Sunday knowledge that soon I must leave her delightful company to return to the chaos of Linhope and beyond that the pressure of another working week.

Conversational gambit selected, I turn back to face her, and in a movement reminiscent of a cat's pounce J, funny, beautiful, wonderful J, has closed the distance between our lips with a swift bound across the cushions. I see a flash of her red t-shirt and light blue jeans and then am enveloped in face, hair, arms, lips. We kiss.

At a pause in our embrace I look her in the eye, she arches a delicate eyebrow in response and says "you were about to leave, I wanted to make the most of your being here."

I have never felt so wanted.

Surfing the dotcom wave

2005-11-11T16:10:00Z

In my job as an IT consultant for a largish consultancy, I got involved in a project where the primary pitch to the client was along the lines of:

"build an e-commerce website, the stock market will love you for it."

It was true, this was 2000 and the market was still enjoying the early hand-holding stage of its New Economy romance. Any venture with the prefix e- attracted press and cash like a new popstar, and everyone was scared they were going to miss the boat. The second part of the pitch was:

"you're a very traditional [read bureaucratic] company, you can't do e-commerce, you should build a separate business with a separate culture to succeed, we can do it for you".

Classic consulting of the type my company just doesn't do, we seem to prefer to spend our time building systems rather than spouting about the latest fads, and certainly never believe that we're best placed to do the high level strategy consulting. Amazingly the client agreed to all of it, the proposed budget was chicken feed for them, and they believed in our evangelical salesman. He gained their trust and they bought his ideas.

A team was born, and I joined it. About twenty young, excitable, consultants and a few client staff started bouncing off each other to build the venture. Our first home was the top floor of our client's headquarters. We worked in a small, cramped, sweaty office, piled high with coffee cups, paper stacks and air conditioned by the incessant whir of server cooling fans. Our room was surrounded by senior managers' offices, quiet oases of beige carpets and long forgotten good-employee prizes. We were a team blessed by the New Economy and we rebelled against the unwritten rulebook of the stuffy residents; we dressed down, stole printer paper from resentful PAs, listened to music while we worked, smiled and laughed, played Half Life and Quake after hours.

Needing to move out from the parental home, a modern, glassy, open plan office in Reading was procured; blue carpet, table football, comfortable chairs, decent coffee. Now we had our own space to work, play office football, blu-tac data models to the walls, fill up with McDonald's wrappers.

The venture gathered momentum faster than anyone expected, a CEO, a CFO, a COO, a sales team were all appointed, and we in the development team rolled on and on. We built prototypes, converted prototype to system, padded and patched, suggested and added features, pointed out problems then solved them. We worked like never before, wrapped up in a world of belief. None of us were motivated by money, even if the project came to rule the web, as external consultants we wouldn't get options or IPO bonuses, we didn't even get paid overtime. None of us cared much for glory either, although my tail wagged hard when praised.

Our eyes weren't shrouded as to the harsh realities of the new e-commerce world - quietly we would say it was doomed to fail, the user figures on the business case were almost certainly unachievable. It didn't matter though - we were wrapped up with hacking and hacking until the damn thing worked. Our need to deliver what we knew we were capable of overcame anything that could have stood in our way.

And underneath all the corporate funding and consultant bullshit we felt the same as the garage start-ups and the dotcom pioneers, those entrepeneurial spirits who fed off their own ambition and self-belief when all others doubted them. Clearly we weren't in the same league - we had job security and plenty of support from our bosses - but we got caught up with the same dizzying vibe, we worked 15 hour days for weeks on end, we came in at weekends, we were on call at 2am, we worked, played and (a few) slept together.

At the point we launched we knew we were the greatest team in the world, we could have landed a man on Mars within six months if only NASA asked. It was a great website, built on a great idea, and we built it slickly and brilliantly. We gleamed and shone in the glorious bright light of our own creation. Omnipotent, we had bent the world to our will.

Later, the world bent back. The venture has subsequently failed, a victim of corporate cold feet as the winds of recession blew through the paper thin walls of the New Economy. The all-conquering team has scattered and moved on. Even the domain name has dropped off the DNS Servers now, typing the URL into a browser will send a few lonely packets pinging through the gateways and routers with nowhere to go.

And five years on, even knowing that it ultimately failed, I'm proud enough to know it's the best work I'll ever do.

Some notes on the relative adhesiveness of post-it notes

2005-10-13T10:52:00Z

For a good portion of my life to date, I thought I would change the world. Maybe I'd invent a new form of transport, such as cars on legs or the hover bike. Perhaps I'd write a novel that quietly and unfussily became a life changing favourite of millions. Perhaps I'd rival Lance Armstrong for domination of the professional cycling calendar. With age my grandeur driven dreams are scaling back; I'd settle for being a junior cabinet minister or assistant manager of a non-league football club. But I still seize the chance to change the world for the better whenever I can.

And so it came to pass that I made a suggestion to our company procurement department that we get some better Post-It notes, as the packs that fill our cupboards only barely qualify for the adjective adhesive and have the embarrassing habit of fluttering from the wall like autumn leaves as long workshops drone on and on. In a transparent attempt to shame me, my suggestion did not disappear into the normal corporate black hole and I got a response:

we would like to conduct a small trial to determine the stickability of different post-it notes. We propose putting up sheets of both brown paper and white paper in a meeting room, and placing '3M Post-Its' and the Banner equivalent on them to compare. We can leave them overnight and next morning count numbers that have fallen and/or curled to determine whether there is any significant difference between the two. We would like you to be present when we put stick them all on & count them the next morning.

It didn't even end there, they've now actually conducted the trial and I am simultaneously smug and appalled that experimental evidence has backed up my assertions. My hopes and dreams have come to this then. I should be developing a domestic cold fusion reactor, instead I'm trying to persuade my employer to switch supplier of small slightly sticky bits of paper. Next week: biros.

How to fill a long gap in friendships

2005-10-08T16:33:00Z

Over a long enough time period, nothing happens to anybody. For proof, conduct the following simple experiment: phone a friend you haven't spoken to for at least six months and ask them what they've been up to, chances are they will reply something similar to "ah, nothing much". If you're me the conversation will then die, and you will have to invent a dinner that has just finished cooking, a sudden knock on the door or a small housefire as an excuse to hang up and end the embarrassing silence. Social faux pas aside, I hope you concur that I have proved nothing happens to to anybody.

Now try this experiment: phone another friend you haven't spoken to for at least six months and ask them "what did you do yesterday?". Don't accept a short answer, genuinely quiz them about where they were when they woke up, how they got to work, what happened to them during the day. Lo and behold, plenty of things happen to everybody all the time. If you listen to people's answers and ask them plenty of follow up questions you can cover hours of conversation with this one simple question and avoid the awkward silences that pervade my Christmas reunions.

Back to bachelorhood

2005-06-27T09:40:00Z

Compared to our previous (two? three?) separations, this one was remarkably free of histrionics. Neither tears nor angry words clouded the final severing of ties, just a fug of inevitable and knowing sadness that surrounded us as we sat in the quiet Monday night pub and she said the words that despatched me to singledom. Her face normally carries a pale sheen of anxiety when she's about to break bad news; a patina of stress and bottled-up emotion laid over a foundation of worried sleep. Her skin looked healthy this time and there was a previously absent calm certainty in her voice that invested her words with weight and credibility.

After a mostly fun year of weekends and nights together, I'd suspected that the next step in our relationship would be make or break. By December, I predicted to myself, we would either be choosing curtains together in Peter Jones or individually working out whether to send each other Christmas cards. We'd not really talked much about the future, and I sensed a certain reluctance on her part to bring it up in conversation. In the end, my account in her ledger book slipped into overdraft. Despite my numerous and regular credits, I incurred a large debit by falling short against the unspecified measures she uses to size up husband and father material. Comparing our relationship with those of her friends she decided to write off the debt.

So, I'm a little sad and lonely again, albeit with the faintly amusing knowledge that we've split up several (three? four?) times before and I've passed through precisely this painful rebuilding process. That knowledge doesn't comfort me now, as we wordlessly pass by in the office, or as I scroll over her name in my phone book, but it anchors me to a certainty that I will be OK again soon. Time will heal me.

Drive By Truckers

2005-06-18T15:20:00Z

Based on a sample size of one gig and two albums, I am confident in my assessment that the Drive By Truckers are peerless rock gods.

Barry introduced me to The Dirty South, their latest album, praising it and playing it on one of our innumerable trips to the hills. It didn't stand out that much alongside all the other folk/rock he subjects me to on those long car journeys but when he offered me a spare ticket to a rare London gig I thought it would make an interesting departure from a normal week night out.

At the small and sweaty Camden Lock, in a not-quite-full venue peopled by middle-aged rockers, slightly misplaced London fashionistas and a baffled me, the five Truckers sauntered out unassumingly on stage and then took control of the evening. Every rock and roll cliche came true in the small gap between where I listened slack-jawed and where created their tender and ferocious sound. They played with such obvious enjoyment and drunken exuberance I was converted from dispassionate observer to whooping and hollering participant in a rock and roll night out.

Languid, lazy and loud, they passed a bottle of whiskey between them during songs and drank liberally. Each of them got steadily drunker, swaying crazily as they played and finding emotion and heart to drive out their songs. Patterson Hood, excellently named core of the band, howled and raged and captivated me as he told his stories.

The only other remotely comparable gig I've ever been to was The Pixies touring Surfer Rosa seventeen years ago. I've waited half my life to see another gig of similar quality. When the five Drive-by Truckers swaggered off just after eleven, I hit a high that stuck for two days.

What the energising live experience didn't reveal, but repeated listening to any of their albums surely does is their abundant talents as lyricists. It's not just Patterson Hood who can write a mean set of words, all three guitarists seem to be equally capable. With a poetic economy, they paint vivid pictures of Southern American life. From cheery anthems about Steve McQueen or dirt track racing, to sad tales of suicide attempts and the woe of a dirt poor life in a wealthy society, even 6,000 miles of cultural separation can't hide the versimilitude of their tales.

They're playing more gigs in the UK later on this year, go and see them.