goodbye august

Okay, take two.

I had originally thought of writing a summary of the month of August and so started making a list of words, descriptions of what I have done, seen and been this month. The intention was to expand it out into sentences and pithy witticisms. Then I decided I would leave a list of nouns, the occasional verbs and probably no adjectives - the list would be the blog posting for readers to do with as they must. Then I discovered I had mainly written weather terms so scrapped the whole lot, wrote 'Okay, take two' and tried to explain myself.

Goodbye August, month of my birthday, bringer of rain, of thunder, of rejection from another gatekeeper of the publishing industry. Farewell month of new world sporting records (not to be listed here since I do not cover sport) and month of vast (but not record breaking) torrential downpours.

Tomorrow, the local leisure centre will reopen its children's pool, in time for most of them to go back to school. A slightly shorter month with much to contain, a higher concentration of activities. N will begin at nursery (assuming we get around to paying the fees in time). I will continue to send my beloved writings to be poked at (or ignored) by weary and disillusioned readers and editors, desperately searching for the gem in the slush pile while knowing that they will probably not find it - most likely it is not there but it is oh, so easily missed.

Submissions departments are forever playing 'Deal Or No Deal' without Noel to cajole them or the banker to taunt them. The quarter-million box is unlikely to be on their table, the other guests on the show know nothing either and the chances are that the big prize will slip through their fingers. Only Noel and the banker consistently win and, in the real world, neither one would allow themselves to be seen, eschewing publicity for a snout deeply buried in the trough.

September will bring positivity, a renewed effort and a reduction in postings which grotesquely mock an industry which has not yet let me in. Well, for the first day or two anyway.

There has been no writing on this blog for several days due to a toxic mixture of laziness, inertia and other distractions which I shall not list here. September will bring a more regular programme of writing. Well, for the first day or two anyway.

I suppose that must make me Al

Clearly I can never be the best judge of my own work since hoping for true objectivity when viewing one's own creations is about as sensible as assuming that one would know which of one's children should be thrown from the proverbial hot-air balloon.

Nevertheless, I am still surprised that, with sixteen of the blighters to choose from, the only piece about which I have had any comments is that wretched diatribe I wrote about the financial services industry. (Find it yourself, I'm not linking to it.)

I spoke to a dear friend this afternoon - let us call her Betty for no good reason. She read the offending (to me) article and, from her perspective of working within the financial sector, told me she found it hilarious. Should I be annoyed that my carefully honed literary assault on the sand-bound foundations of our society should be deemed risible? Or should I be grateful that I didn't offend her with my ill-thought-through crie de coeur against the injustices of the world and those perpetrating said injustices on a daily basis?

Either way, Betty didn't see fit to place a comment against the blog posting but I offer her this one as a second chance. Use it wisely and it will not suffer censorship from the blog owner.

In other news, N and I finally saw behind the curtain at our local leisure centre's "Toddlers' World". We were waiting for our session to start and went upstairs to see what was there. From the balcony, we could clearly see the earlier-bird collection of children mangling the play equipment but, beyond them, at the far side of the hall, behind the grey curtain, we could see the talented tumblers, the amazing acrobats, the possible Olympian gold collectors of 2012. It was an invigorating sight and may have been inspirational to N, who appeared to bounce on the trampoline with more fervour and pep than on previous visits.

She was still wary and avoidant of the sponge pool but was fooled and unbalanced by a mat overhang, leading to a smoothly executed forward roll straight in. Moves like that may lead to high scores from the international judges if she can keep the post-landing shock and tears under control.

Today, I applaud Salman Rushdie's non-profit-making legal action against the lying ex-bodyguard turned (false) memoir writer. Since his lawyer will pocket £15,000 for (what sounds like) not doing very much work, one could argue that SR should have claimed something even if only for the waste of his time. But he did not and so kept his hands as clean of this shoddy business as possible under the circumstances.

I look forward to behaving as magnanimously once I am a bestselling author, although I hope that any such opportunities will not encompass having had to recruit bodyguards. Sadly, today I have made no steps towards becoming a bestselling author although, on the bright side, I also did not act in any way that may lead to my needing bodyguards. Not much magnanimity has been shown today either - perhaps that comes later in the career.

anything less than 99p and you're wasting your time

Previously on this blog... In episode two, we discovered that a cheap kite, a lazy and uncooperative wind and a stupid dog could only lead to a lot of running up and down hills with little soaring, much spiralling and frequent crashing.

However, this afternoon, by using a kite priced at 99p (rather than 49p in the earlier experiment), soaring was indeed achieved and maintained. At least three dogs looked on in wonder, several children looked mildly interested for a few seconds, no one was garrotted by the kite string and N spent most of the time bumping her pushchair over the grass in order to get the pretend babies to go to sleep.

All the while, the bandstand wafted the sound of a French café over the park, all accordian riffs and brushed percussion. It reminded me of an interview which Billy Joel gave many years ago. He described the tough neighbourhood where he grew up and how, if the local kids discovered that someone was learning a musical instrument (even pianists could be spotted by the books they carried), they would beat them up. However, if they discovered that anyone was learning the accordian, they'd kill them. This could go some way towards explaining American antipathy to the French.

Today, I have written an extremely short blog posting and have also made no effort whatsoever towards the publication of my books. In my defence, it was a public holiday in this country.

the shame of it, the shame!

...and so, after the thirteenth posting had sounded, he did look back at his work and consider that knocking out two pieces on the same day, while in a slightly picky and mean-spirited mood, might not have been the best way to create great art, or even slightly readable writing.

So I took yesterday off to recover and refocus and got talked into giving the URL of this blog to a friend and thereby got my first comment after what were probably the twelfth and thirteenth best entries. Thank you, Joan, for showing that I'm not just howling at the cold, spinning Californian servers - but please read one (or more, but all would probably be beyond the call of duty) of the other entries. They show the writing which I wanted to force myself to produce when I created this blog in the first place. No pressure, but if they aren't better than Tuesday's maelstrom of whinging, then I might as well give up now.

And it was tempting to stop writing after that last sentence.

(Incidentally, as an aside, I looked up 'whinging' on dictionary.com - no, not because I don't know what it means - I just wanted to see their attempt at a definition. And part way down the entry, it says, "To learn more about whinging, visit Britannica.com". It reminds me of the old joke that used to be in the Yellow Pages - if you looked up 'Boring', it said "See Civil Engineering". I couldn't resist checking and, I'm sorry to have to report, that joke has been exorcised. This means that the only remaining Yellow Pages joke is that, if you put the book upside down on your bookshelf, the logo on the spine looks like it's sticking two fingers up at you. The cartoon style means it is impossible to tell whether the gesture is Churchillian or Sex Pistollian and so must be left to the preference of the beholder.)

(And, to comment on my previous aside (I apologise if this appears to be becoming a regular occurrence), I did mean to say 'exorcised' rather than 'excised' since I am sure that the original joke must have been caused by a mischievous spirit.)

N is sleeping tonight under her own twinkling, twinkling little stars. We visited Smyths, a large toy shop which has, thankfully, not reached the level of 'Toys R Us', either in size of establishment or in speed of making its visitors long for death as a blessed release from twenty-first century consumerism. Having wandered around the shop, collecting a few small trinkets and trifles, I had paid before I remembered that we had only gone there to buy some fluorescent star stickers. The lady at the till not only knew what I meant when I asked if they had any but even went so far as to get up and lead me across the store to show me where they were. I would recommend the shop on that basis alone - the staff will bother to help a customer even if he only wants a product that costs £1.99. My only complaint is the name because, if you pronounce Smyths as Smiths, everyone will assume you mean WHSmiths and, if you pronounce it as Smythes, everyone will assume you mean WHSmith but are trying to sound posh. I see no way for them to get out of this quandary except to introduce some random letters in front of their name, as long as it doesn't end up so similar to WHSmith that it looks like a typo.

The stars are lovely and you get 350 for your £1.99. I've used about twelve of them so far. If only they had sold them by the dozen - that would have been about 7p. As it is, I've got 338 spare stickers which I can hide in bizarre locations to surprise people when the lights go out. Perhaps my wide readership could make suggestions?

Earlier today, we visited a toy exhibition at a local museum. The museum is warm and welcoming, closed on Fridays and for lunch, and has a shop selling items most of which cost less than 65p. The toys are a temporary fixture but are mostly to be played with and arranged across the floor of an upstairs room which leans at a slightly disquieting angle and has disturbingly precise warning signs stating that no more than fifteen people should occupy the room at any given time.

(It does not give guidelines for the maximum number of adults who may safely "do the timewarp" although, if anyone were to try it, I would suggest that they do not all stand in a line facing the same way for the opening jump to the left for fear that they may not get as far as the step to the right.)

The contrast between the beautifully crafted wooden toys of yesteryear and the gaudy plastic baubles of today was stark and saddening - although that might merely be a sign of my age. Can we, as a society, not afford wooden toys in bulk anymore or do the large chains merely not want to sell them to us?

Finally, in today's exciting installment, I feel that I should add a regular feature. I feel that I owe it to my public to state exactly what efforts I have made, since the last posting, to further my journey from the nadir of unpublishment to the Nadal of bestsellerhood. (I refer, obviously, to Rafael and not merely the Catalan word for Christmas.) Today it may have appeared to the untrained eye that I made neither progress nor effort and indeed that I did not spend even a few seconds contemplating this Fiennesian uphill struggle. (That would be Ranulph, not Ralph or Joseph and certainly not Geoffrey Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes).

It is unclear which will happen first - the untrained eye being wide of the mark (a metaphor best not literalised), the beginnings of a big push towards literary superstardom or the regular feature being axed.

an infinite number of (purple) monkeys

Richard Dawkins has just completed a wonderful series for Channel 4, entitled 'The Genius Of Charles Darwin'. An odd choice of channel but the programme seems not to have suffered by association with reality television or bogus climate-change documentaries.

In the episode which I just watched, a business analyst poured a small amount of scorn on the idea of the visionary captain of industry, suggesting that if you have a large enough room of people flipping coins, someone will get ten heads in a row and will then try to convince you that his wrist has been optimised for head selecting ability. This is not to say that there is no such thing as a great chief executive, but just that there are probably rather more who coast along by not getting in the way of their staff than those who actively lead by coming up with any decent ideas of their own.

I would like to extend the analogy by asking whether stock market traders (and I include currency, bonds and any other financial nonsense which you care to mention) have any skill whatsoever or whether it is simply a matter of coin tossing. Or, instead of tossing coins, a better analogy here might be the theoretical infinite number of monkeys with typewriters which, given enough time, would type out all the great books (and probably some rank ones as well).

1) If there is any skill to it, the process would have been studied by enough financial institutions that someone would be able to discern a method that worked most of the time. This would show up as one company would hoover up pretty much all the money that there was in the world. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little here and they would probably rein it in a little so as not to arouse too much suspicion. But someone would leak it.

2) Buying or selling in bulk affects the market. If a trader buys enough of anything, the price will go up and then, hey presto, he's a genius because he predicted that the price would go up.

3) Financial institutions have access to more information about companies in which they invest than mere mortals. Yet for some reason, this is not called insider trading. If I telephone members of the board of a major corporation, asking about their future plans and to examine their finances, they would tell me to clear off and mind my own business. Yet if an analyst for a major investment bank were to do the same, they would probably get a different answer. This is, apparently, okay because it is publicly available information - it's just that it's quite difficult for the public to get hold of it without paying the investment bank whose analyst has written down everything the company has told it and, using the genius of knowing that expansion is good, has worked out whether the company is doing well or not.

4) In a big enough sample of traders, someone will have a long-lasting good run. This is to be expected as there are many monkeys hammering away at their trading terminals. However, instead of it being seen as proof of the inevitability of randomness, this 'star-trader' is given more money than a medium-sized town could use on constructing a modest shopping centre and is feted - well, until it all goes pear-shaped and someone else starts doing better.

This is how we base our society. And these ghastly people will tell you that they work so hard and put in such long hours. Yeah, right - they all work four-thousand times harder than a nurse, or a dustman, or a chiropodist and that's why they are paid accordingly...

The industrialists of a bygone era - Salt and Lever and Rockefeller and Getty and their ilk - they may well have personally enriched themselves beyond all reason (obviously Salt and Lever used some of their money philanthropically while for Rockefeller and Getty it fell to the next generation to do the same). However, they employed others in great number. They made stuff with which we built our society. And they risked their own money and, often their own health, in order to do so.

The modern plutocrats are in thrall to the casino of the financial markets. They place money (often other people's) onto the money-go-round and, when the music stops, the snouts go into the trough. Explain to me why someone trading complex financial derivatives with the guy in the bank over there is doing such great things for mankind that he should earn a couple of Bentleys per day, while paying less tax than his cleaner, and I will thank you for improving my understanding of the workings of our society.

I am not holding my breath - but that's mostly because I have a sneaking suspicion that no one is even reading this.

the barriers are coming down

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the age of customer service is dead. It's just not been buried yet and, the sooner it is, the better - because then we can stop wasting our time trying to get through.

Let me give an esoteric example. I am an amateur musician - I play in a band and, occasionally, we punish drinkers in a pub by playing loud rock covers at them. I play the piano but, since pianos are not easily portable, I use 1988's finest keyboard, the mighty Korg M1. You may never have heard of it but you will have heard one as they are all over popular music of the late 80s and most of the 90s like a nasty black and white synthetic rash. Even if you don't like that music and never choose to listen to it, you'll have heard it in a restaurant, in a lift or, perhaps, while on hold trying to get through to a customer services department.

It has the usual keys to hit and also thirty-five control buttons. Eighteen years after I bought it, the keys were all working just fine, good as new, lithe, frisky and responsive as the day they rolled out of the factory. Unfortunately, the buttons were becoming arthritic and, in a fit of pique, I managed to push one of them all the way into the casing while wondering whether it just needed a little more encouragement.

After two and half years of having no idea how to get it repaired, I suddenly had a brainwave and thought of contacting the manufacturer. Conveniently based only forty miles from home, they estimated a repair bill of about £70 and so, up the motorway I went.

For reasons that still escape me, there was no way to make an appointment for same-day repair and so, some days after dropping off the instrument, the estimate arrived in the post. £120. Hmm. Not very much like £70 but there would be a £40 charge for providing the estimate if I didn't want the work done. The phrase 'over a barrel' came to mind. Having accepted the price, they sprang into action for the two hours' work and the machine was duly returned a week and a half later completely unplayable.

True - they had repaired the buttons. However, they had also completely erased the contents of the memory banks which, it turns out, use cutting-edge 1980s technology and so need a battery to remember how to do things like, er, sound like a piano. Presumably Bob Scratchet in the workshop had disconnected everything when replacing the buttons and didn't bother doing anything like, well, switching it on and checking it was okay before sending it back.

At this point, they started ignoring me completely. Two emails brought nothing but electronic silence and so I had to fix it myself. And since I had to reload it anyway (as the memory banks were already blank), I thought I'd replace the eighteen-year-old battery beforehand. Despite a promise on their website that instructions on battery replacement will be emailed out on request, they didn't because they were ignoring me.

In the 1980s, the idea of anything as groundbreaking as a user-replaceable battery was obviously frowned upon and so the little watch-battery is located on the back of the second circuit board from the bottom. (It seems that this idea of not letting people change batteries themselves is not yet dead as Apple are currently using it as a form of extortion on their iPod buying customers. And as for watch manufacturers - if Swatch can put an easy-to-remove cover on a thirty-quid watch that's waterproof to a depth of about three million miles, what excuse does anyone else have?)

Fortunately the instructions are available elsewhere on the internet (and thank you to Google for finding and indexing them). Incidentally, while changing the battery, I noticed that one of the circuit boards was held in by five, rather than six, screws. And, after reassembling the unit, I suddenly worked out what the loose-screw-like rattling sound was. Thanks again to Bob Scratchet for his sterling work.

Having finished this, I then had to buy a fancy cable to connect the M1 to my computer - a cable which I had never needed before and, in all likelihood, will never need again. And finally, after downloading the data and trying a few rubbish freeware products which didn't appear to do anything, I finally found software that could squirt the information back into its rightful place.

To summarise, Korg could have charged me ten or twenty quid to replace the battery. (Price in Timpson's - £4. Price if bought in bulk on the web - 70p. Potential mark-up for Korg - £19.30 for about thirty seconds work, given that the machine was in pieces in their workshop anyway. That works out at £2316 per hour.) They could have followed good practice and reloaded the machine so that it was useable on return - that might have taken another couple of minutes but, frankly, ought to have been included in the twenty quid for the new battery so I'm not going to allow a theoretical extra charge. I would then have thought, "Oh, what a great service centre! They worked out the battery was about to go and changed it for me at such a bargain rate."

Instead, they did none of those things and now I think they're quite rubbish. Incidentally, the keys of the Korg M1 are actually made by Yamaha - something I would never have known if I hadn't disassembled the unit myself. In other words, the bit that still works wonderfully is made by someone else.

author, writer, hack, scribbler, doodler, toddler

The author sits at the top of the tree, basking in the bright sunlight of recognition while shading all those underneath from its nourishing rays. Trying to push through the foliage, the writer hopes and dreams and toils while the summit sometimes accelerates, sometimes coasts but always seems to float effortlessly up and up and away. The hack sits on the lower branches, munching away at the low hanging fruit, ignoring anything going on above, satisfied with his lot, on which he can grow fat without the urgent grasping for excellence. The scribbler is still carving letters into the bark of the tree trunk - but at least he carves letters rather than the random abstracts of the doodler. The toddler wanders past and wonders what all the fuss is about.

In 1934, Dorothea Brande wrote 'Becoming A Writer', which is still held as an invaluable source and which, in many ways, is responsible for this blog existing.

To paraphrase one of her early points (mostly because I would have to stand up and walk over to the bookcase to quote faithfully), she states that a writer is someone who writes, regardless of readership, success or acclaim. Anyone who writes anything on a regular basis is a writer. As to whether they are a good writer is, of course, a matter of opinion. She insists, however, that anyone who cannot find fifteen minutes, every day, to write something (even if it is only "I am writing, I am writing..." (which, unfortunately, reminds me of the denouement of 'The Shining')), cannot truly call themselves a writer.

Clearly, by her definition, I cannot truly call myself a writer since this is only my eleventh posting in fourteen days. In my defence, I do at least spend rather more than fifteen minutes on these occasions when I do show up for work.

Would an author need to spend at least twenty minutes? Or do we need a substantially different definition - hopefully more sharply drafted than the purple prose introductory paragraph above, although I thought my arborial similes were, if nothing else, at least indicative while being facetious.

(As an aside, is it facetious to point out that facetious is the only word to feature all of the vowels of the English language, once only and in the correct order? Probably no more than to point out that the only London Underground station that does not contain any of the letters of the word 'mackerel' is St John's Wood - speaking of which, I would very much like to know who first noticed this staggeringly important fact and, thankfully, brought it to the attention of mankind.)

(And, as an aside to my aside, having wasted valuable blogging time by Googling 'mackerel st johns wood', I have now discovered, thanks to http://forums.warwick.ac.uk/wf/browse/thread.jsp?tid=4549, that the only element in the periodic table similarly unencumbered by mackerel is tin, the only mackerel proof American state is Ohio and something else about some sporting team... but this is a sport-free blog so I will stop there. This was discussed in November 2003 so I could have found all this out nearly five years ago if I had only thought to look. I suspect that is a common lament in the information age and it probably is normally about facts even more trivial than the above.)

To return to my original topic, this blog is an attempt to justify (mostly to myself, but potentially to others, should the opportunity present itself) describing myself as a writer. I am a writer because I write, and here it is, in all its glory. I am, indeed, a published writer because, once I have finished dribbling words through my computer onto the serves at blogger.com, I shall click on the 'publish post' button. This does, of course, entail the shame of self-publishing or, as I put it so wisely in post number 3 (sour grapes and unreasonable expectations): "the dreaded avenue of self-publication, an avenue of shame littered with broken dreams, shattered hopes, purple prose and wheezing, hackneyed, stinking old clichés".

I feel entitled to quote from my own work because it seems unlikely that anyone else will and it's a whole load less effort than producing something new. And yes, I considered making some eco-crack about recycling but decided it was too obvious and too trite. But then I allowed myself to write that previous sentence so that I could have the cake, eat it and, in this sentence, also sell it to some unsuspecting punter on eBay.

one red paperclip, but the other way around

Kyle MacDonald started with one red paperclip and, through the wonder of the internet, managed to swap it for a house in only fourteen steps. This sounds even more impressive when you appreciate that the steps included a pen in the shape of a fish and a Kiss snow-globe. He wrote a book about his trip and, if you buy a copy, you may hear a slight grinding noise. That would be the sound of Dave Gorman taking out his frustration on his teeth as I'm sure he wishes he'd thought of it first.

Although, since Dave Gorman was responsible for Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, he should feel that he has already had his American Pie moment (the song, not the film). That's not to say that, like Don Maclean, he should never produce anything of similar quality again but merely that he shouldn't feel too hard done by if the muse-of-world-beating-killer-ideas doesn't come to visit again any time soon.

(As an aside, my favourite interpretation of the song American Pie was Don Maclean's own. He was asked what the song meant and replied, "It meant that I never had to work again.")

We are currently engaged in a reverse process to Kyle's, complicated by the fact that it only involves our own possessions and that they must all remain inside our own home. The problem began when we finally replaced the futon which, useful as it has no doubt been, was never intended to have been the place we called bed for quite so many years. At first, given the strangeness of the British furniture market, the new mattress arrived and was duly deposited atop the futon, thus giving a better vantage point from which to examine the ceiling and the tops of the wardrobes. The comfort was excruciatingly good - excruciating in that it led to a torrent of "why didn't we do this years ago?" and other similar refrains. The second step led to the problems. The bed frame arrived.

The futon gracefully stepped to one side, the new bed was assembled, crowned with the new wonder-mattress and slept on with wild abandon and great delight. And yet, like the ghost of sleeping past, the giant grey elephant futon in the room glowered at us, taking furniture-delight in the knowledge that we didn't have the slightest idea what to do with it. It blocked the bookcase. Its lumbering bulk got in the way of the filing cabinet. It doesn't take much for piling to seem easier than filing - and needing to move a futon out of the way effortlessly moved the scales in favour of the pile of pity, the stack of shame, the collection of crepuscular crap.

It was enough to make the hairs on the back of your trousers stand on end.

We toyed with the idea of moving the bookcase away and sliding the futon back against the wall, on the grounds that the bookcase was marginally smaller than the futon and so we were reducing the size of the problem. Still a long way to go to get it down to the size of one red paperclip. The bookcase could then go into the lounge, displacing the CD tower and the wooden shelving unit housing the circa 1989 stereo and, sadly, unfit for any other purpose.

This would then swap down to two items needing rehousing - the beautifully crafted home for the stereo (and the black, seemed-a-good-idea-at-the-time, Ikea CD tower). Unfortunately, it would also remove the bookcase from the bedroom - as well as the calming influence of the presence of books, it also gave a surface for photographs, as well as the Bob Dylan overflow from the black, Ikea, etc CD tower.

The lounge would then have a CD tower in a window bay which would be, let's face it, a waste of window bay space and the stereo would have to sit in place of N's dolls' apartment (as opposed to the dolls' house or dolls' treehouse - any explanation of that will have to wait).

So, we could swap down to one home for city-dwelling dolls while messing up the arrangement of much furniture in two different rooms, all to house a futon which wasn't a particularly great bed and was not endearing itself to us as it was clearly even worse as a sofa. I bought it many years ago - from 2008, looking back, I can't quite work out why.

So, instead, the futon frame has been taken apart and put in the loft - the long piece balancing quite satisfyingly over roof beams. I hope it is stable enough not to make a spectacular re-entry into the flat but, if it ever does, it will at least destroy the kitchen ceiling and possibly take out the fridge, rather than landing on N or us in the middle of the night.

The futon mattress has been cunningly folded in half and then in thirds and leans against the bookcase like a bad yet achingly fashionable chair. The problem has reduced in size. The paperclip seems a long way off. Anyone want to buy a futon? Buyer to collect.

driving without due care and attention

According to N, Daddy is a much better driver than Mummy. I am not convinced that she is right - and have certainly never compared our driving styles in front of her. Nevertheless, she would have changed her mind if she had had any idea what I was doing yesterday.

Frankly, I blame the BBC. They carried this article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7530652.stm

...which concerns the technique called eco-driving. The trouble is, when the screen in the car can give a real-time, as well as average, fuel consumption figure, it is all too easy to drive more in response to what the little wiggly lines and bar charts are doing, rather than being concerned with inconsequential matters such as what the traffic in front is doing.

When I started the car yesterday, it displayed an average figure of about 36mpg - an average based on an unknown amount of time since it also includes the performance of the not-particularly-careful previous owner (quite how he (surely it was a 'he'?) managed to smash the driver's central arm-rest is a mystery to me).

Pressing the reset button for the first time, I arrived at my destination, having proudly achieved 54mpg - and without crashing into moving (or stationary) vehicles, or careering off the road, or choosing a new destination based on where the traffic seemed lightest. Keeping the speed around 60mph on the motorway-class road, I arrived feeling calm and eco-smug, delighted to discover how much quieter the car can be at lower speeds. And I hadn't even driven in the slipstream of a lorry - mostly because the back of a lorry isn't really much fun to look at.

Sadly, the thin patina of enviro-respectability quickly tarnishes. A similar driving style, coupled with rather greater observation of the road, yielded only 46mpg on the way back, together with a realisation that the route had been mostly coasting downhill on the way out and so, inevitably, there was significantly less coasting on the uphill return. Oh, and S arrived after us and so had to bring her car as well.

Today, the outings have involved a walk to the shop for milk and mushrooms. Additionally, N has spent a large chunk of the morning out in dreamland - no doubt recovering from the late night. Negligible carbon emissions for either trip.

And now, I must go and burn some natural gas in order to cook lunch. With any luck, I might even get most of it done before N wakes up. Any carbon dioxide emissions will probably be gobbled up by the Busy-Lizzie desperately trying to take over the windowsill.

choosing Derek as a profile photograph stunt-monkey

Sitting down to write a new blog post without the merest shred of an idea in mind is never a good plan. Distraction and diversion go into overdrive - for example, today I thought that it was suddenly very important to improve my Blogger profile. Specifically, I became horrified at my lack of a photograph.

Being the owner of a digital camera, I have no shortage of photographs of myself - taken by others, I hasten to add. Should I choose the smiling, the thoughtful, the jumping, the morbid, the facile or the neanderthal pose? And how about that one, taken by N, not quite straight, not quite in focus and with my camera-supporting foreshortened arm filling the corner? None seemed to chime with rightness.

And then I remembered Derek.

N has a long-suffering soft toy, Derek The Psychedelic Monkey. Much loved, in need of a wash, bedtime comfort and, sadly, extinct. Yes, the Gund Corporation of New Jersey has decreed that this crazy melange of clashing colours in simian form is no longer to be manufactured and, even on the world wide web, I have found none still for sale. So we'd better not lose him. Machine washable, by the way, but only on the delicate cycle.

Somehow, the calm, steady gaze, together with the dependable nature of that enigmatic half-smile, summed up the qualities which I wanted to get across. A purple monkey - it's not how I think of myself and yet...

N is partly to blame for this since she has inherited the family disease of addressing relatives by a rollcall of names, sometimes stopping at the correct one, sometimes overshooting and doubling back, sometimes passing nowhere near before petering out. To that end, I am often known as Derek-Daddy, a name which I find not at all unpleasing.

The two of them are currently asleep, which is why I find myself able to write anything at all during the day. A brief swim this morning in our local pool has worn us both out ("us both" meaning N and Derek-Daddy, not Derek himself - he might be easily washable but takes an implausible amount of time to dry). The month of August has found the toddlers' and the children's pools both closed for maintenance, thereby throwing parent and infant combos into the main pool with the "youth element".

And I find that there is hope for society - the youths in question being loud, boisterous, keen to splash and to congregate obstructively in gangs in the water and on the side and, at the same time, being fun and polite and careful not to disturb the littler ones and overly apologetic over a barely noticeable splash that didn't even go particularly near to N.

I would still rather have a roped-off section for parents with young children - not to protect the young children, of whom the other kids are already sufficiently protective, but more so that the older children can have more of a rumpus without worrying about who's getting a drenching.

a broken pretend gear stick

I was driving. N was watching me intently from the back seat - or so I assume as I was, of course, giving my full attention to the road rather than to the two-year-old sitting behind me. Her view is rather improved since I thought of removing the headrest from the unoccupied passenger seat.

"What's that stick?" she asked.

After working out that she was talking about the gear stick and explaining that it was how I could tell the car how quickly I was going to need it to go, there was a silence, either of intellectual satisfaction or possibly complete incomprehension - it can be difficult to tell the difference while giving my full attention to the road.

"My car has a broken stick," she announced after the next junction.

"Then you won't be able to drive it," I said. "You'll need to get it fixed. The shop where you bought it will probably be able to do it for you." It is a pretend car, often found in unlikely places such as parked behind the armchair near the television or, occasionally, resting under the washing that frequently airs behind the sofa (one of the many joys of the second-floor-flat life).

Some time later - in fact, on the return trip - she told me that Winnie The Pooh and Aunt Larlie had come to visit and had mended the broken gear stick.

(You probably know Winnie The Pooh. You may be less familiar with Wibbly Pig's Big Aunt Larlie who features in the wonderful-in-every-way "Tickly Christmas Wibbly Pig" by Mick Inkpen. You can see a picture of her if you follow this link and use the 'Search Inside' feature:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tickly-Christmas-Wibbly-Pig/dp/0340893516
There's no kind way of putting it - Big Aunt Larlie is a fat pig but, boy, can she knit. Anyway, in N's mind, Big Aunt Larlie, in an act of series cross-fertilisation has escaped from Mick Inkpen's stable and invaded A A Milne's world. She hangs out with Winnie The Pooh every chance she gets and (I hope this won't put you off your dinner) they are definitely cohabiting.)

"That's great!" I said. "You can drive your pretend car again."

But she hadn't finished.

"Winnie The Pooh fixed it," she informed me. "Because he's a man and men know how to fix things."

Where did this come from? I promise it wasn't from me. Being a twenty-first century father, I immediately, and thoroughly, explained that many men couldn't fix a small tear in a paper bag, even if given the correct length of non-twist sellotape, and that many women could actually build all of the ludicrous contraptions that the A Team always managed to throw together out of whatever old scrap was lying around in whichever surprisingly well-equipped barn they'd been locked in.

It might have been more interesting, if rather less useful, if I'd actually phrased it like that.

fourteen cards, a credit card bill and a new bin

Today is my birthday and so the postman gave to me fourteen cards, one credit card bill, a flyer from AA Insurance Services and a brand new kitchen bin.

Top marks for customer service go to SimpleHuman for their generous and friendly approach to, well, customer service.

And the special award for outstanding effort in a pointless and bizarre endeavour must go to the ParcelForce deliveryman who carefully pulled a heavy, yet tall and thin, plant away from the front door in order to hide the bin behind it. The box containing the bin is about three times as wide as the plant so any opportunistic bin swiper would need to be serious myopic to fail to spot the item of his dreams.

As I was lying in bed, wondering how long I would be allowed to stay put, N ran into the room and launched into a spirited rendition of Happy Birthday. She then handed me an envelope on which she had drawn some boisterous squiggles. "It's a man," she said, pointing at the greyer lines. "What's he saying?" I asked. "He can't say anything because he hasn't got a mouth," she answered. "Maybe you could draw one on and then he could," I said.

She looked at me as though I were simple, but in a kind and caring way - the way I hope a nurse might look at me in another fifty or sixty years when I become totally incompetent. "He's just a picture," she said, finally. "His mouth won't open." She is two and three-quarters and already nonsense must be on her terms or not at all - even on my birthday.

We chose the indoor option for my party yesterday. By late morning, it seemed clear that it would either rain, blow a gale or both during the afternoon - which would not be particularly well suited to sitting on grass, drinking Pimms and munching far too much cake. Bad weather gives me no pleasure but perhaps there was a frisson of schadenfreude when the torrential downpour came in the middle of the afternoon. (Okay, it's probably not technically schadenfreude unless you know the people doing the suffering but I thought it was a fair assumption that some poor idiot somewhere was trying to picnic.)

There's plenty of cake left, which I blame on dieting guests. There wasn't a blog posting yesterday, which I blame on Pimms, red wine, friends staying well into the evening and too much clearing up to do because the party was at home rather than in a field. Only the last of those scapegoats is a bad thing.

another summer birthday party

Tomorrow I celebrate another birthday, even though my actual birthday is not until the following day. And it looks as though the weather will be sweeping us indoors with our Pimms, our crisps, our fairy cakes and whatever other goodies the friends are bringing.

When I originally said, "If the weather is rubbish, we'll relocate the whole shebang to our home," I had high hopes that we would be basking in a luke-warm summer afternoon, sitting in the gardens of a stately home, eating as much cake as would still allow us to drive home afterwards. Indoor eating may save an untold number of paper plates from landfill but does still present the two additional challenges of clearing up and getting rid of stragglers. The new Nick Cave album ought to achieve the latter but doesn't offer any clues on the former.

N was reluctant to go to sleep this evening, possibly due to an impromptu and lengthy late afternoon nap. Bringing her to the lounge to watch a recording of Top Gear didn't persuade her that sleep was preferable, while a three month old Later With Jools Holland just made her run round the table, waving her arms in the air. I can't really blame her for that one as I was running round the sofa, arms similarly waggling, but at least my steps were in time with the music.

I have not set foot outside the flat today. I'd like to blame bad weather but I fear inertia may have played a part. I'll also blame cakes. There are so many of them to bake for tomorrow.

Returning to a subject on which I ranted earlier this week - my latest rejection letter. I can cope with sentences like this one: "Regrettably I do not feel either novel would be strong enough for our list." It's clear, it's to the point, it expresses personal opinion which, while disappointing, can be respected since everyone is entitled to have one.

I do, however, take issue with this: "Too many names/characters bombard the reader, with not enough focus on the person who is to be the protagonist. The frequent shifts in scenes, too, don’t help to anchor the thrust of the stories."

So I wrote a prologue - a few pages at the beginning of one of the two books, not dealing with any major characters explicitly, in order to set the scene. In a book of about 175 pages, I spent a few pages at the beginning on a prologue. I felt that, as the main protagonist is, well, the main protagonist, I could perhaps wait all of three pages before letting him loose on the story except, of course, he's in the background in those three pages - the reader just doesn't know it yet.

Maybe it doesn't work very well - in which case it could be excised without too much trouble and the main protagonist could enter on page one. Hell, I could even make his name the first two words...

People say that I don't respond well to feedback and, er, I suppose I don't respond well to being told that. I dislike lazy feedback and feedback which I can't use and feedback which is so trifling as to not be worth thinking about. If you don't like the prologue, it can be taken away. It doesn't give you the right to assume that a narrative style employed as a lead-in will be wholly indicative of the rest of the work, to such an extent that the part must stand for the whole and the whole must therefore be worthless.

And what about the other book? Nothing at all about that one. If the rejection letter had just said, "Regrettably I do not feel either novel would be strong enough for our list," then I would have been much happier.

I really need to package up my happy words and post or email them to the next literary agent on my list. It will add an extra frisson of excitement to the sound of the postman or the sight of the Outlook Express progress bar as another message is sucked in from the outside world until, finally, the reply comes and I either celebrate or complain somebody else not appreciating me, the tortured artist.

writer's block and house prices

Day four of the blog and this big empty white square on the screen has been glaring at me accusingly for about ten minutes, no doubt wondering whether anything will be imparted. I'm anthropomorphising a website dialogue box so that can't be a good sign.

A lovely house, a while on the market, has had its asking price reduced. Can we afford it? Who knows..? It depends on whether a buyer can be found for the flat, how generous that buyer feels at the time and, more desperately, whether the (no doubt forthcoming) book deal brings a flood of untold riches.

Anyway, the house is great but the location is potentially rubbish. We are discussing testing it by finding a volunteer to walk around late on Saturday night (around ten past eleven ought to do it), braying into something that looks like an iPhone and carrying something that looks expensive. Mind you, it'll probably rain tomorrow night which would invalidate the findings.

Speaking of rubbish, the new kitchen bin still hasn't arrived. The replacement, nearly three years ago, of our old Brabantia pedal bin by a gleaming, brushed steel SimpleHuman bin was a day of joy. No more would the disposal of kitchen scrapings be announced by the harsh clang of the lid closing. Instead, a smooth glide and a soft clunk would reassure that the smell would be kept in.

Well, that was the case until a couple of weeks ago when the hinge went all squiffy and the lid went all wobbly and clang-bang-wallop ensued. To my amazement, a simple email to SimpleHuman elicited a promise to replace the entire unit free of charge due to the surprisingly generous ten year warranty. But the replacement is yet to arrive and we are now outside the seven-to-ten-days. Maybe it was working days. The clanging continues.

We need a good bin in order to collect an aspirational price for the flat. We could even risk the wrath of the taxman by trying to sell the bin separately for a few thousand quid as a stamp duty work-around.

This plan, however, is probably contingent on the bin being new and fully functioning and also on my being a famous published author, thus endowing a potential receptacle for my rejected scribblings with a value far exceeding sensible expectation. Didn't Dickens sell his dustbin for a few thousand? Amis probably wouldn't even get out of bed to sign a bin unless he was paid a six-figure sum. Archer would be cheaper but one could argue that he never discarded any writing, just gathered up the off-cuts and put them in the next book of short stories. Oh dear - am I having a go at successful authors again?

While writing this, N has woken up and stridently complained that I didn't give her a good-night kiss. This is blatantly untrue but, to be fair, she was asleep at the time so may not have fully appreciated it. She then scrambled around the bed, retreating under duvet, turning suddenly, flailing around as though drumming up business for the dentist. I could almost believe she was trying to prevent another loving fatherly kiss from being bestowed and thereby, in half-asleep infant logic, proving herself right.

sour grapes and unreasonable expectations

Is it healthy to feel hatred towards someone whose only crime is to not be interested in my work? Probably - after all, the bile has to go somewhere. And such a large portion of bile now that my hot lead has replied with great coolness.

I have wrestled with whether or not to go on the offensive, to rant, to scream and shout and whine and whinge and complain about fairness. After all, I send my work, my carefully honed and polished and cossetted babies, out to the market to see if anyone will buy - and what do I get back but weasel words and patronising platitudes and the strangely comforting form letter?

In some ways, the form letter has much to recommend it. "We don't want it - so shove off." Would I prefer what I received today - ill-considered feedback, tarring two books with a quick impression based on, at most, two pages? Then again, am I being fair? They don't like the work, they have so much more to read before they can go home and have dinner, or watch television, or go to the gym, or meet a friend for a drink, or even go to a book launch and have to network and chat and sell, sell, sell the product. Why should anyone read beyond the point when the attention slips to how cold the coffee has become? They don't owe me anything, my expectations are unreasonable.

Then again, how about common courtesy? But then again, no one asked me to write a book and certainly no one asked me to send it to them so that they could waste minutes of their lives reading it. And there are plenty more sending this stuff in all the time and they only need a handful more every week, from the bulging mailsacks.

This is becoming a rant. Looks like I made that decision while writing this posting. But I won't name names. Not yet anyway. And every rejection drives me ever closer to the dreaded avenue of self-publication, an avenue of shame littered with broken dreams, shattered hopes, purple prose and wheezing, hackneyed, stinking old clichés. And, having written that sentence, I feel overly qualified.

FB - if you ever read this, you might recognise yourself as the target. Am I being unfair? Would you reconsider either your opinion or the manner in which you expressed it? Drop me a line, or send me a comment on this blog which I can moderate.

More positivity tomorrow. After all, it's my birthday on Monday and I must get in the right frame of mind.

keeping momentum, which is more than could be said for the kite

No reply, as yet, from the editor looking at my work but then I only wrote the (chasing) email last night. This is probably just as well since I cannot imagine that a quick reply could indicate any interest in reading samples of a couple of novels. Not that this makes it good news either - all I can say is that no news is no news and the waiting game continues.

This afternoon, N and I took one of her kites to the park. We had intended to blow bubbles but, unknown to me, the bubbles had been moved to the cupboard under the kitchen sink which was, of course, a place I did not look. Kites, however, were in abundance, all still sealed in their original packaging. I don't know why there are so many here. I chose the most colourful, of course. We assembled it and tried it on a short leash in the car park, until it became clear that it probably wouldn't rain and that the thing might fly, given half a chance.

It didn't really get half a chance but it did get a few trips up and down the hill in the park. It mostly bumped along the grass, occasionally flying alongside us (sadly, rarely above us) before tediously spiralling into the ground.

We mostly attracted the interest of a noisy and very stupid dog which stood about twenty feet down the hill from us, barking incessantly and glaring. I was reminded of an ex-colleague who claimed to have accidentally killed a dog by kicking it as it savaged his ankles. This creature never came close enough for ankle biting so I never had to discover whether I could bring myself to kick a small dog, no matter how annoying it turned out to be. I suspect I would have shooed it away inefficiently and probably tutted and moved away myself instead, while holding N out of reach.

N is my daughter. She is two years old and, without a doubt, the best and most fun little girl ever. I speak objectively, of course. I look after her while awaiting the book deal. This is slightly the wrong way around since, if I get a book deal, I'll be able to continue doing this and, if I don't, the wonderful world of wage slavery awaits. It's tricky though since, while I would know the exact moment at which I signed a book deal (at which point I would continue doing what I'm doing), the points at which I haven't yet signed a book deal could stretch off over the next many decades (please, no), in which case when do I give up the lack of day job? When the money looks like it might run out could be a sensible answer. But it's dull, oh so dull.

Whether this blog is similarly dull is not for me to say. But I am keeping the momentum going by managing to post a second piece on my second day. It might appear that, as an unpublished author, I'm not exactly trying very hard - either to write a lengthy blog that considers the weighty matters of the day or to flog the already completed books sitting expectantly in the hard drive of this computer. This is very true but, looking after a two-year old does not leave a huge amount of spare time in the day, especially now that the afternoon nap is no longer required (by her - I could certainly do with one). Next month she starts nursery, at which point my mornings become available for bothering literary agents and, possibly, starting the third book. Neither of my books were written in mornings - maybe they would have been better if they had been.

I long to have some comments so that I can find out what happens if I click 'Moderate Comments'. In the lack of any requests to the contrary, I might tell the Korg or the kitchen bin story tomorrow, unless something dramatic happens.

me as a blogger, and dealing with the subject of J K Rowling early

Does every new blogger begin with best intentions of twice daily postings, witty repartee with those posting comment, early serialisation in respected journals and, before the year is out, a book deal, a film deal and a percentage of the soundtrack and action figures? Probably. Well, I'm not convinced I'll manage all of that, although there may be a niche in the market for an executive toy blogger figurine.

As you will know already, if you've read the title, I'm an unpublished author. I've written two children's books and am part way to being able to redecorate my home using rejection letters as wallpaper.

Maybe my writing is just no good, maybe my style doesn't fit with what marketing says is needed this year or maybe the literary agents I've contacted so far only read every seventeenth letter that is sent to them due to the problem that their days are no longer than those of mere mortals (such as I) and yet they have a Herculean amount of ordure shovelling to perform just to check that their desk is the same colour that it was last year.

Maybe I'm out of touch with what children read. There could be truth to this. Other than JKR's HP books, I haven't read any other children's books since I was a child. And, just to deal with the elephant in the room right now...

I'm not expecting to be the next JKR. I feel that, at the very least, my writing is not any worse than much dross which is already published and so I deserve a chance, at least as much as the next scribbler. I do not begrudge her a penny of her income (even though, from what I read in the newspaper, I felt her attack on the author of the HP Lexicon was petty). Personally, I felt that the HP books became overlong and bloated towards the end, almost as though the editor was too frightened of being replaced to suggest a much-needed pruning. But those feelings might have been manifestations of my growing ever more envious as the series continued. I hope not.

The latest news on my journey to publication is... (Well, I don't want to name names because it's inadvisable to pass comment on someone who might provide help, guidance, income...)

So, the books are with an editor, who is an acquaintance of a friend and who works for a major publishing house. This editor kindly agreed to take a look. And, after waiting about two months, I wrote what I hope is a polite and friendly email about twenty minutes ago as a reminder. I claimed it wasn't meant as a nag, which probably will sound like a lie, and that I was only asking for a guess as to when I might hear something. I then padded the email with some other nonsense about how I'd only sent a sample of the work but that I could send it all (which I'd said two months ago when I originally sent the work) - mainly because I felt I should at least pretend I had something more to say.

I'll post updates on here, which will either be celebratory or, if not, will probably be unfairly vitriolic but hopefully interested, pithy, etc.

Further posts may or may not deal with such subjects as maintaining a Korg M1 keyboard, whether SimpleHuman will actually send me a replacement kitchen bin free of charge, and why my local swimming pool has closed the children's pool for the entire month of August. If anyone reads this blog and has any feelings about which, if any, of the above are interesting, feel free to place a request.