Monday 24th October 2005

I got a call from Renata this evening saying that she had run of petrol and could I possibly drive over with a can of unleaded?

This may sound sexist, but it isn’t, it’s fact – women run out of petrol because they drive around without any fuel in their cars.

Get into a car with a woman and steal a glance at the petrol meter. It will, unquestionably, be stuck on zilch with the warning light illuminated. In some girl’s cars, this warning light never goes off, because when they do finally acknowledge that their car won’t run on teddies alone, they’ll go to the petrol station and put in three pounds worth.

It’s like giving a person dying of dehydration a thimbleful of water.

Women and minicab drivers. Both the same. Both living on the edge, running on fumes the whole time.

A man, if he has sufficient funds, will have enough fuel in his car to get him out of any sort of war-like crisis. Men will think in terms of range, not necessarily consciously, but they’ll think about it all the same. Get into any man’s car who’s not a teenager, and he’ll have enough fuel to cover the 100 miles necessary to get out of any emergency, or help anyone in any emergency.

So I did the knight in shining armour act and went to pour some petrol into Renata’s stricken motor. It had failed to start in the Quicksave car park on Park Road in the Dingle. At 8pm at night, that’s very akin to leaving your tank behind enemy lines and when we arrived (she’d walked home so I picked her up there) there were indeed roaming gangs of hooded youths, looking to see what an Autumn night could cook up for them.

If her car had any energy in it’s parched soul, I think it might have audibly breathed a sigh of relief when we pulled up next to it.

The following is a bit sexist, I’m only messing around now, but do you think girl’s only ever put a minimal amount of fuel in the tank with the view to ‘dieting’ the car? Perhaps the idea is that the car will eventually appear slimmer and lighter if it speeds around town with very little in it’s belly. Perhaps the fear of suddenly putting too much fuel into the car at the petrol station would be seen as an over-indulgent binge and the car may become ‘bulimic’, vomiting petrol down a drain merely minutes later?

Whoever said there wasn’t any humour in bulimia, huh? I’ve certainly proved them…right.

Onto other matters… For the first time I’m typing this entry just before bedtime, and at a very sensible bedtime hour too, on the actual day I’m writing about.

I normally write Pathetic Lot the following lunch time over a pot of tea, or sometimes miss a couple of days and then catch up later as some of you nerdy followers will have irritably noticed.

Today is different because I want to completely ‘clear the decks’ for a big day of work tomorrow.

I’ve had an idea, my friends.

And this idea, if it springs to life as I think it well might, could be a very big one.

You’ll have heard me talk about starting the novel, The Best Idea Of The Year, in the next week – and indeed I shall. But I was having reservations about concentrating on just the one, long, project for all that time. I’ve been looking for something to run alongside it, something I can turn to when the novel’s driving me mad and vice versa.

Well perhaps I’ve found it. It’s another book, not a novel, but a fake self-help book. It’s called, or at least, it will be called, ‘The Power Of 10’.

This idea is only a few hours old but when I got the got it, driving home from putting petrol in Renata’s car, I couldn’t stop smiling to myself in a self-gratified way. And then, as I begun to think of the possibilities. I really started laughing. It was one of those moments when a new idea suddenly reveals itself out of nowhere like a sunrise. I know that’s pretentious, but…

When I got home I ran straight upstairs, into the office, and began working on some notes. Then I got really excited and starting jumping around the place – I knew I was onto a winner.

I’m not going to say too much, because there’s only so much I know at this maternity ward stage, but basically it’s a fake self-help book that promotes the idea of living in a new ‘digital time’. 10 ‘new’ seconds in a minute. 100 ‘new’ minutes in an hour. 10 ‘new’ hours in a day. 10 ‘new’ days in a month. 10 ‘new’ months in a year. I’ve done some maths and that means one day last about 58 ‘old’ hours. A ‘new second’ is about 8.6 old seconds. The maths was crippling and I’ve not finished it all yet.

Anyway, this fake author (perhaps an American?) will try and convince readers that living by this maxim is the only sensible thing to do and will revolutionise and improve your life, your work, and your play. He is, of course, staggeringly wrong. He’s going against nature. By his rules, it will get light and then dark again two and a half times a day because there’s nothing he can do about the Earth spinning.

He is, as it will become apparent, a lunatic. But the conflict between the existing world and his regime of living on digital time will be the prime source of the comedy, and seeing as self-help books are often ludicrous and self-righteous anyway, it’s a great genre to lampoon.

I’ve not made any great decisions about this fictional author yet but clearly he’ll have been living on digital time for quite a while himself and so has already managed to detach himself from civilisation. It might be a good idea for him to be married, and his wife – equally deluded or perhaps an unwilling accomplice – is also trying to live on D.T.

There is just SO MUCH material to be taken from this one simple, and wrong, theory.

I was thinking about some of his theories as to why this method of keeping time is better.

“Think of how many times you say ‘give me a second to think about that’. Well, now you have about eight times longer to think. It’s time to digitalize your life.�

I’ll spend a full day on it tomorrow and see what comes up. I looked this idea up on the internet and, remarkably, it would seem nobody has ever thought of it before. Perhaps because it’s rubbish. Or just mad. Or maybe, it really is a good idea. We shall have to wait and see.

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