a quiet Tuesday evening

The evening started sedately enough.

A quiet drink standing outside a pub by the river. Even a brief stroll along a short part of the tow-path. Of course, later there were the suggestions to move along to a nearby curry house, which was within sight, but on the other side of the river.

Rain and the full descent of darkness, to a point where I couldn't quite remember if we'd arrived at the pub in daylight. I do remember a skiff being rowed with small headlights on each end of it though.

We made our way through the rain in a slightly disorderly fashion across the bridge, around a corner, down some stairs, past a couple of arches and into the restaurant.

A default 'Menu for 12' or however many we had in the group. "Will the complementary wines be red or white?" came the waiter's question and we settled for some of both.

Now I was being good and sipped my still water, whilst others quaffed robust quantities of whatever was on offer. The poppadoms arrived and we fiddled with the chutneys and yoghurt whilst engrossed in animated debate. As the evening moved along, I noticed some of those about me beginning to fragment and lose their full sentence structures.

I also discovered that several had booked to stay in an adjacent hotel, so I was one of the few with plans to head home afterwards. At about 'very late' a small group of us "homeward bound" left together, leaving the hotel gang to further wine and discussion. I also rescued a coat and umbrella left behind by an earlier tired and emotional departure.

Tomorrow there will be fragility and headaches for some.

@chuckmanners would know what to do

biking to the sorting office instead of taking the Alfa to Cannes

My thanks for the various emails and wishes associated with the imminent publication of 'The Triangle'.

This morning saw me spin across to the sorting office with a backpack of the books. I've started to send out some reviewer copies and this was the second tranche.

The rest of today is taken up with other activities, so I knew if I didn't act immediately, it will probably be next weekend before I have any more time. I'm not expecting full page advertisements in the weekend supplements, so the marketing will need to be self-generated.

I should make a special 'Thank you' to one individual for helping me get this far with this. Fellow blogger Debra and I met together in Amsterdam quite some time ago, after I'd waited outside the rather dubious looking 'Mellow Yellow' koffie shop.

Debra had then shown me to an ironically altogether more mellow establishment where we'd sipped drinks and talked about each others attempts at writing. We agreed to swap fledgling manuscripts and have been cheerfully critiquing what one another has been doing. In the meantime, Debra has moved country and published a rather excellent photography project whilst I've struggled on with the novel in stolen minutes.

The origin of my writing was one of the annual NaNoWriMo competitions which run every November, during which I cranked out most of the original words, largely based upon the actual places I was visiting at the time. For example, there's a scene in the novel in a rather plush hotel room, which is completely based upon a random hotel upgrade I received at the time.

I can't claim any biographical elements in the story, but I have featured a number of places that were part of my world at the time of writing. So whether its London, Normandy, Cannes, Riyadh or Washington, I was flittering through these places and the various settings whilst writing. Probably only the novel's character Brophy can spot the laser point on this sign above my hotel suite. The New York scenes will have to wait for the sequel.

But for now, back to the weekend shopping, and no, I don't have an Alfa.

authorised triangular post

It's still technically 'pre-publication' but I received a consignment of promo copies of "The Triangle" yesterday.

It was actually quite unexpected. I was working at home, the postman had come and gone and about five minutes later there was a loud knock on the door. The delivery driver was already unloading boxes and I wondered what I had mistakenly ordered.

A moment later, I realised that the three large boxes and a smaller one dumped in the hallway were early copies of the novel.

Now what?

Its another month or more before the book gets to any catalogues and I believe the first public appearance is actually at the Miami International Book Fair in Florida.

I've been contacted by the marketing representative, but am thinking that I'd prefer to exploit some sort of guerilla approach to getting the book known about. I'm also still realistic, that this is mainly a bit of fun, but its worth seeing what happens as the next stage plays out.

I'll progressively contact some of my blogging accomplices and amusingly a couple are modifying their twitter icons to add a triangle to the corner.

In the meantime, if you are one of the bloggerati and would like a complementary preview copy, comment me/ email me and we'll see what can be arranged!

as I continue to elude your vigilant ways, the light is almost here again

Back to London on an early flight. I could already hear the violin chase music in my head. My part of the airport didn't have any windows, so the day/night thing was lost on me. It felt as if it should have been an evening rather than the crack of dawn that I was travelling.

Las Vegas lighting without the gambling.

Then a full day of office meetings during the bit where the really loud tympani kick in. Finally, home accompanied by a phone conference.

I decided to go to bed early on Thursday to let my head unscramble.

And now I must demystify the uncommon dreams; stranger things have come true.

temporary apartment flashback

No, I'm not back in the Temporary Apartment of early 2009 in Copenhagen, but I'm having a sort of flashback moment.

It's another city and I was here a week ago and am back again, staying in the same location.

Today has been busy, an early start and then main meetings, followed by an unrelated coffee where someone from out of town swung by to say hello and chat.

Then, immediately afterwards me walking into the nearby restaurant, spotting colleagues and pulling another table across to join in the discussion.

The waiter asked if I needed a menu, but to catch up with the pace I ordered from the plate.

So its not the same as the Temporary Apartment, but has a similar feeling about it. At least until tomorrow, when I fly out again.

inherent vice in analogue

I accidentally strayed onto Facebook a couple of days ago, mainly because I was clearing down some of the applications that seem to create repeats of my messages. I think I deleted around forty so-called applications that had somehow installed in my Facebook.

How careless of me.

Anyway, I also stumbled onto this little quiz from the BBC about books. Apparently the average person has read six of these. I must spend too much time on airplanes and trains or something.

If you want to have a go, copy this source into your own browser/editor. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (2)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Total: 7

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 3

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens x
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x

Total: 6

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres x
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x

Total: 4

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins x
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan x

Total: 6

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth x
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x

Total: 8

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac x
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy x
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie x
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 7

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson x
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (started it)
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome x
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray x

Total: 5

80 Possession - AS Byatt x
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro x
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 2

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks x
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 3

Grand total: 51

Of course, I've read them over quite a long period of time, but I do occasionally dip into some of them again.

Ever technologically enabled, one approach is through the little book reader on my iPhone. Its called Stanza and has 45 titles stored in it at the moment. Most of them are 'public domain' in the sense that they are classics long out of copyright - which is like many on the BBC's list.

But the heavy artillery is the little eReader I used when I was travelling around in the USA earlier this year. I think it currently has another 160 books on it, including some modern ones that I've actually paid for. Whereas the iPhone is all glossy full colour the eReader is steadfastly black and white and uses the electronic ink technique of refreshing a page and then switching off, which means the batteries last for ages because when its simply displaying a page, it doesn't consume any power.

Now I can almost hear the sighing of others at the thought of electronic books; "doesn't have the sensation of paper/end of the world etc." but my own experience is somewhat different. If I want read a book for the first time, then the real item is still a good place to start. I've just read Pynchon's "Inherent Vice" and despite its hardback bulk, it was a good way to enjoy it.

But what's fun with the electronic readers is the ability to dip into a book. Like those piles of books by the bedside, its quite easy to select a few and just browse/refresh. To skim read something again because its available. Don't ask me why, but Machiavelli's Prince and Carroll's Alice in Wonderland were a couple of my recent choices. Not to mention another 5-6 pages of Ulysses on the iPhone.

Of course, I'm mainly beta testing the future doing this, to see what will happen when the high serial number devices start appearing.

I think it provides a different way to access books, like Wifi radio provides a different experience (almost any radio station in the world) and VOD, iPlayer and iTunes change television viewing and music listening with time-shift and infinite libraries.

Naturally, I intend to keep buying real books as well as encouraging others to do so (especially a certain one that is moving inexorably towards proper publication), so I'll see these other mechanisms as additions. It will be interesting to see how it all develops compared with television and music.

cheese and chianti, anyone?

I thought that Mono Amine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs) were no longer used as an antidepressant.

That selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) had taken over because they had less side effects.

So when I see this stuff in the press about our Prime Minister connected with the use of prescription drugs, I assume its just some scandal mongering.

The story was out in the Independent a few weeks ago, but yesterday's big television interview saw it reach a wider audience just before the start of the Labour conference week.

And then around midnight I heard the Chancellor's highly critical speech decrying the state of his own party, which initially I thought was some kind of spoof, until I listened to more of the programme.

I suppose it will be like this for a few weeks now. The new political season creaks into life, everyone assumes that Brown is hanging out for 2010 so we'll just have to put up with the static. But we can't allow ourselves to get depressed about it. Think of the side effects.

(painting L Schindler)

chant

Just 7.5 degrees Centigrade this morning, making me wonder whether my hurried choice of tee-shirt was such a good idea.

Then grey mist before the sun smiled through to blast it all away. I was enjoying the morning before the majority of people had started their day. There's a sense of accomplishment to have 'done something' before others are even awake.

Where I spotted others, they were mainly walking or jogging in ones and twos and as I flickered past on my bicycle.

In that traffic reduced and quiet time of early Sunday, several times I heard people humming or chanting.

Peacefully at one with the morning.

spider hunt weekend with buglife

The roaming reporters for rashbre central have advised me of the excellent news that this weekend is officially spider hunt weekend.

I had no prior knowledge, but it turns out the buglife charity has organised spider spotting complete with a groovy spider spotting guide.

Fortunately I preserve the anonymity of rashbre central's exact location, because it could very well be an epicentre for bug spotters based upon the recent bathroom discovery. Anyway, by using their reference pictures, I'm pretty sure that the bathroom spiderettes are descendants of pholcus phalangioides - daddy longlegs spider (not daddy longlegs the insect).

Why?

Because I eventually found the parents skulking in corners of the same room.

The squat little hoppy spider that hides around the wires by the computer is presumably a common zebra jumping spider and the ones on the outside of the windows look like true window lace weavers and slightly larger garden cross spiders.

The one with the thundering hooves in the garage is probably a hairy legged house spider.

Or an orc.

Anyway, armed with my new knowledge, I decided to conduct a small rescue operation for the ones in the bathroom. A strawberry jam jar, some A4 paper and about ten minutes of activity has seen most of them migrate back to outdoors.

I have a feeling that some of them will be back.

love spiders

just the beer light to guide us

Watching the sun rise this morning, over the Amstel River, in Amsterdam.

Last night I'd been driven to a fancy restaurant, in a colleague's new car which is like something from Star Trek. It booted up with a barrage of flashing lights including a head up display onto the windscreen. A few minutes drive and we'd locked radar on to the car in front. The system used the car ahead's speed to guide us. If we switched lanes the auto pilot would speed us up until another car in front was acquired in the speed management system.

Then for parking. The maps on the satnav disappeared and a closed circuit television picture of the kerbside appeared. Touch the screen to show where to park and the car reverse parked into the spot. No hands.

Eventually back to my hotel, with its flat screen telly in the bath. I didn't have time to watch it though, because of the early start this morning to head back to London for another busy day.

Compared with last night, my taxi back to the airport was decidedly less space age, having some difficulty with modest gradients, showing its quarter of a million kilometres on the dial.

Then, much later, after a day of meetings and watching the same sun set, I'm finally back at rashbre central. I've decided I will leave it until another sunrise before I check for the spiders from mars in my own television free bathroom.

bathroom chronicles

I only noticed a couple to start with.

In the bathroom.

They stood out against the white paintwork on the windowsill. Hardy visible, it was a small movement that I caught from the corner of my eye.

I’d just put down a cup and I think the vibration disturbed one.

or maybe a splash of coffee.

Spiders.

Tiny ones.

I looked more closely and there were several more. I soon counted to a dozen. But I was in a hurry and just closed the door on them as I headed for the car.

I’ve been away a few days and not been back into that room. I did today.

They have spread out. Dozens. They are on most walls. In the bath. Still tiny. Mainly not moving. I can’t easily see their webs, except if I get close.

Right now, I’m on the road again, but wondering what will greet me when I return and open that door again.