August 2008 - Posts
Now that the Olympics are over (hooray I hear you cry), and the Alonah Reading Cambridge is up and running as fast as it will ever be, I am picking up the literary pieces from some months ago. I hope I have recorded everything as I have forgotten the cunning plot twist of Alexandria Part Two. Anyway at present I can spend time sorting out a really bad bit in Draft one, Chapter four. In a moment of mild inspiration I found Alexandria on Google Earth and zoomed around the city and along the coast. It was all rather useful background.
I am reading John le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy which is very elegantly written and plotted. Being John le Carre he has reached page eighty and has only just finished introducing the characters and back story. At times he makes James Joyce seem an easy read, but something will happen soon, I just know it will.
I re-read a short story I wrote last year for American Radio. It couldn't find a home because Americans don't understand irony. But after this lapse in time it seemed rather good, so I'm sending it off again on the rounds of publisher's waste paper baskets. I also broke a New Year's Resolution and entered it for a competition, probably a bad move.
Okay, I know, I got the number of Olympic medals wrong. What really hurts is that a politician got it right. But wait, the thrust of my argument was correct. Team GB( Middle Classes) did an amazing job, with a small hiccup from the Equestrians due entirely to under par horses. With a few exceptions (one of whom arguably should not have been allowed to compete) Team GB(the rest) did their usual shambles. We had men's relay (disqualified), women's relay (dropped baton), BMX - not a real cycling event, so very much the rest - (fell off), triple jump ( dramatic failure at last jump) and so on and so on. The result, at the time of writing, looks like dropping us to fourth behind the Ruskies in the medal table. So instead of the good old National Anthem we will hear the new Russian anthem instead, While We Were Marching Through Georgia.
No doubt much will be explained afterwards, but a few questions are raised. Take running as just one example. Blacks are great and respected runners, so their success at the major events was expected. And good luck to the amazing Jamaican squad which, I think, had nearly forty runners in it, one of whom is now the fastest man on the planet. But the black population of Jamaica is only twice the black population of the UK, they did brilliantly, we had small success ( one of whom arguably should not have been allowed to compete). We should really do something about Team GB(the rest) before 2012, or spend the money allocated to them on some boats and a couple of good horses.
What is a train station? Since trains were invented they have stopped and started from railway stations, but now we have train stations. Today I heard it used on Miss Marples, by Miss Marples would you believe. It only goes to show how far the stories have deteriorated since boy writers began writing them for television. If television ever gave up reality programmes I would expect to hear the appalling words in some boy writer's revised version of Hamlet.
Our updated Alonah Reading Cambridge website is nearly up and running. All I have to do is get my web-builder chap to provide an auto -responder and we're there. Sadly he is finding that task very difficult. I have no idea why and he seems reluctant to tell me, which only reinforces my lifetime motto. 'If you want anything done properly do it yourself.'
I am carefully watching the Olympic Team GB medal tally. The experts tell us thirty five are expected. A politician forecast forty two, but that was based on the usual political mixture of hubris and ignorance so should be discounted. I fear for the thirty five medal tally.At the time of writing Team GB(Middle Classes) have done really well in Equestrianism, Water Sports and Cycling . Now we must depend on Team GB(The Rest). Could we be heading for the usual embarrassing disaster. I will be delighted to be proved wrong.
As we know, our peoples' Government is determined to concrete over Southern England in order to provide affordable homes for teenage single parents, who will then vote for it out of gratitude. But sadly the economy is about to collapse due to ten years of living beyond our means and a nudge from the sub-prime market.
Meanwhile Kevin Loadsamoney, CEO of Mega Construction plc, sits in his office on the twentieth floor of a glass and steel ego trip by Norman Foster in South London. Through drifting cigar smoke (smoke alarm illegally turned off) he spots the quarterly profit returns of Mega Construction(House Building) plc on his computer. The graph looks like the track of a diving gannet. Stirred into action he calls a board meeting and stops all work on newbuild in the private sector. Later he sits in The Ivy, gloomily considering the sale of his Roller and a return to his roots on the Isle of Dogs.Then he perks up. Old money! The country house conversion racket. Must mix with the toffs. Kevin Loadsmoney hurries out muttering, 'If you can't beat 'em join 'em.' He is off to buy the Daily Telegraph and an Old Etonian tie.
On another side of town Tracy Scrubber, sixteen years of age and with a one year old child named Daren, Aeryn and Dave after his possible fathers, is not happy. She was convinced she would get an affordable house, it is her human right to have an affordable house and if she doesn't get one she wants compensation. For the moment she is living with her Mum and it isn't working. If she doesn't get a house soon she will be very annoyed indeed and out of spite will vote Tory. Oh dear!
We note that the silver tongued Senator Barack Obama in his presidential speech to the adoring people of Berlin did not fall into the John F. Kennedy trap. As is well known, although not to President Kennedy at the time, a Berliner is a type of pastry. Hence when the president said the never to be forgotten words Ich bein Berliner, by a simple slip of the tongue he did not say 'I am a Berliner', but 'I am a fruitcake'. No doubt he was pleased by the cheering of the crowd.
I do hope that Senator Obama does not get too carried away with the John F. Kennedy comparisons. To only just avoid the Third World War and then get shot is probably not a very good role model.
I have been watching with interest the lack of progress on the Cambridge Central Library site. Although it is hard to see what is going on inside, it lacks the usual cheery building noises. Radio 5 Live, offensive whistles at nubile teenagers, sandwich wrappers thrown out of windows and F words were, on my last visit, all sadly lacking. There was the same silence as on all my previous visits since the Grand Arcade opened last spring. Could it be that we are just a heartbeat away from the site being flogged off to ***?
Amazingly I have finished the overhaul of our Alonah Reading Cambridge website. Everything is now off to the grandly named Webmaster, who will in due course send me a mouth watering estimate for the cost of the changes.