Friday 18th August 2006

I spent a great deal of today rewriting the entries below, the originals of which were on my poor computer and now in the hands of Edinburgh Underworld, or more likely the stinking flat of an Edinburgh heroin addict who has to steal in order to feed his or her nauseating existence. Don’t worry, I’m over it now. I am.

Rewriting stuff, especially reasonably pedantic, personal and unprofitable stuff like this is not particularly enjoyable. I remember having a few ideas when doing them the first time, but struggling to remember what those ideas were, and how to get them across again proved impossible. I’m sure regular readers, let’s call you aficionados, will rate entries between the 12th and the 17th the most pedestrian ever. Not to fear, as soon as I’m caught up completely and simply writing about something that happened the previous day that’s still fresh in my memory we’ll revert back to the poorly conceived half-baked/arsed ideas that has made this Blog the mild distraction for a small number of people it has become today!

But reworking anything… It’s a pain isn’t it? We get our first taste of this at school when we loose our homework or the school bully stamps it into a puddle. It’s the first sour taste of unfairness that will accompany us our whole lives. ‘School bully’… I can’t believe I wrote that. Do schools outside of the Beano or Dandy actually have one, individual school bully? Mine didn’t. There were just a few nobs in every year, I don’t think there was a hierarchy and certainly no all-powerful leader of the bullies. It is true that, like in comic books, the bully did have a couple of hangers-on around him the whole time. Like Nelson does in The Simpsons. Goons. Couple a’ goons, just like any good gangster.

But anyway, having to redo things. Computers haven’t helped. For all the man-hours they’ve saved in computing power, how many (admittedly far less) man hours have they created by crashing or getting switched off without saving your work? Although they’ve saved hugely more man hours than they’ve created – boy oh boy do we remember the ones they create. Why not send in your favourite ‘lost everything mate, absolutely everything’ computer story?

My favourite tale, which came about through the lack of a computer in fairness, I heard very recently. It might have been on Popbitch or something like that. A Swedish academic spent twelve years writing his life’s work, a study into something or other (I don’t know the details, but it doesn’t matter) and typed out the whole thing manually on a typewriter. Granted a vast amount of that twelve years would have been spent doing research and making notes, but his painstakingly prepared manuscript was finally ready, he’d achieved his life’s aim, and he took it to a copy-shop to have it reproduced and some hard copies made and bound. He came back a couple of hours later to find that copy-shop employee had mistakenly put the manuscript through the shredder. The only copy in existence.

What would you do? You’d probably vomit. Then would come denial, thinking that in some way this situation must be salvageable. Then would come panic. Then loss. Then, I’m guessing, a feeling of complete and utter helplessness, despair, grief, and then a strong desire to kill yourself. How could you possibly even entertain the thought of starting again? Would even the hardiest soul manage to even entertain the idea of starting again? If you’re life’s work is now lying in thousands of tiny shreds in a bin, would your actual life seem equally destroyed and worthless. I don’t know what happened to the Swedish academic, but the fact he was Swedish doesn’t bode well. Highest suicide rate in Europe isn’t it? Even beginning to imagine how he felt makes me feel slightly queasy.

It’s like the saying ‘It is better to have loved and lost, then to have never loved at all.’ But that depends what you’ve lost, surely? It’s better to have loved and lost some keys than to have never loved at all. It’s better to have loved and lost a bet on the horses than to have never loved at all. But surely it’s not better to have loved and lost a manuscript you’ve spent twelve years on than to have never loved at all? Ha-Ha, I have deliberately misunderstood a simple saying in order for humour to arise. Ha-Ha.

That might look trite, but it’s all going in the Edinburgh show my friends! Oh yes, that’s the sort of stuff the Scottish capital can look forward to next year! Gold like that!

Here’s another. ‘People have said I’m a metrosexual. But I’ve never once felt sexually excited on the Underground.’ Ha-Ha! Like I say, gold.

Aaaaanyway, a fun night tonight at a club called 43 in Mayfair. I don’t usually go to clubs, indeed I feel intimidated and wrong at the mention of the word ‘club’, because normally this means scary dance music and people who know what they’re doing, but this was entirely different. Wade was the DJ and has a very unpretentious approach, just playing good songs from start to finish before starting the next one. Stuff from the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, even Noughties, so long as it’s good and you can sing and dance to it. The crowd were similar in some ways to the Café Royal last night, Amechi and David were there. Other’s in immaculate 40’s dress were also evident. There was a burlesque dancer. People were friendly and not up themselves. Perhaps there is a place for me in clubland after all? It would make me feel very good about myself to know that there was.

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