Breaking Cameras

Either I've suddenly become a lot more attractive of late, or there are some very strange people out there. Other than you, of course. You're not in the least bit strange. You're ... different. Yes, that's it: different. Not strange at all. No, no, no. *ahem*

Anyway, now that we've reassured you that you're still 'mummy's special little soldier', we can get to the point*.

People keep emailing me and asking for a signed photograph. And believe it or not, they're not actually after one of my nude Gloria Hunniford snaps either. Or even the ones I have of Anne Widdicombe in a thong. No, they want one of me. Perverts.

I honestly can't understand this at all. Yes, I have a lovely sexy beard, but that's not enough reason to go asking for 'artistic' photos, is it? The whole idea of scrawling my signature across a glossy eight-by-ten gives me the shuddering heebies. It's just WAY too showbiz.

And what, exactly, are these people going to do with signed photos of me? Does it feature sketchy stalker-style shrines, to be built upon over the years with used chewing gum, discarded pint glasses and locks of human hair**? Or is the word 'Voodoo' going to be involved? Either way it's creepy.

Mind you, some of us aren't so shy about putting ourselves out there as mega-multi-media-celebrity-types. Take Allan 'Sunshine Horror Bollocks' Guthrie, for example:



As I may have mentioned earlier, I took my very own copy of SAVAGE NIGHT with me to Poland. I read it on the way there, and She Who Must Remember To Bring More Books Of Her Own So She Doesn't Get Mine All Filthy With Her Naughty Fife Fingers read it on the way back. And we both loved it.

It's totally screwed up, twisted, violent and quintessentially Guthrie. She Who Must doesn't read a lot of crime fiction unless I twist her arm, but even she was gripped by the quality of Al's prose. What's the world coming to when a short hamster-like Orcadian can go round impressing other people's wives with the quality of their prose? It's not bloody wholesome, is it?***

Right, I'm off for a jolly good sulk.

* Not that there actually is one. I just like to pretend there is to make myself feel all important and special. 'Special' is another good word, isn't it?
** Probably pubic, you know what these weirdoes are like.
*** And I should probably state for the record, that She Who Must has never admitted to being gripped by the quality of my prose. But I'm not bitter. Oh no. Not a bit of it. But I will be interviewing for the position of 'Mistress' later in the week. If you're looking to apply for the post, please make sure your CV includes a photo and a brief description of three uses for custard not intended by the manufacturers.

Cabbage is the new asparagus.

Much to the relief of Polish people everywhere, She Who Must Be Taken Along on Research Trips To Make Sure I Don't End Up In A Turkish Prison Somewhere* and I are back in the good old U of K**.

And I have returned armed with dramatic information that many of you may not possess - eating too much cabbage makes your wee smell funny.

Now I've long been aware of Asparagus's dreadful effect on the stinkiness of one's wee, lets face it, it's scary the first time it happens, "AAAAAAAAAARGH! I'm rotting away from the inside!!!" but you soon get used to it. What I didn't know was that excessive consumption of boiled cabbage and sauerkraut*** has a similar effect. Oh, the smell's not the same, but it still makes for stinky wee.

Factor in eating way too much of that gloriously dark-red beetrooty borscht as well and you end up with pink pee. Stinky pink pee. As if your kidneys have packed their bags and sodded off somewhere healthier.

And I love borscht. I am now an official convert to borscht. In fact, I'm drinking some now, in a mug. On the last night of our stay in Krakow, She Who Must Be Dragged Round Foreign Supermarkets So That I Can Marvel At All The Weird Stuff You Don't Get At Home and I went on a spending spree in the local Polo. And came home with a suitcase groaning with packets of instant beetroot soup. Mmmm, borscht.

We tried to make it once, out of a Delia book and it was sodding dreadful. I mean nasty to the point of being cruelty to taste buds. The only way it could possibly be consumed was by chilling the hell out of it and adding a hefty measure of vodka. But the borscht in Poland is like unto the beetrooty nectar of the Gods.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go make some pink piddle.

* Well... Turkey, probably. I mean, you don't exactly get Turkish prisons anywhere else, do you? Unless they're like theme pubs. Then you'd be getting arrested and it'd be like, dude: groan. Not another Irish theme prison. All them bicycles on the walls, Guinness posters, and signposts to Cork and Limerick. We're in Thailand for God's Sake. Didn't come all the way over here smuggling crack cocaine to be banged up in an Irish prison. What's wrong with a bit of local culture, eh?
** Or what's left of it.
*** Which while made of cabbage is in a COMPLETELY different league when it comes to producing smells.

To Poland I will go

Right, we're off to the airport in a minute, after a litany of travel-type disasters yesterday. Serves me right for having a moan about being tired -- our hotel room on Saturday night was nice, but seemed to have been built directly over the WORLD'S LARGEST EXTRACTOR FAN, which wrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrred all night. Those low, subsonic never ending noises that get louder and louder the longer you hear them. So very little sleep for beardy Stuart.

And on the way home from the train station, the clutch cable went BANG! on the 4Trak. And that damn thing is a big bastard to push. Which means packing got done at midnight with much shuffling and groaning. Real George Romero, Pre-Holiday Activities of the Living Dead, style stuff. And as soon as my knackered, beleaguered bonce hit the pillow... 'ping!' wide awake.

So today I resemble a half-shut knife that's been left in a septic tank for about a month.

Still, I'm hoping now that we've got all our crappy travel woes behind us, and everything will be plain sailing till we get back on Saturday.

The In-Laws are up looking after Grendel while we're away (in case you're wondering, I'm leaving the cat in charge). I've asked Little Miss not to post any photos of dead mice on here while I'm gone, but you know what she's like...

Fatigue - in which our Bearded Protagonist reveals that he is knackered

Do you remember that resolution I made at the start of the year? The one where I said I wasn't going to take on heaps of things all at the same time, so I could really concentrate on suffering my way through writing Book Number the Fifth? That I was getting knackered by taking on too much?

Well, just to prove that I have the willpower of a buffalo in a moustache factory, I've managed to sod that one right up this month. Thursday was out at Aboyne library where lots of lovely people were traumatised by my tales of abattoiristic naughtiness (I don't know why, but somehow describing how a cow goes from 'Mooo' to a little shrink-wrapped package of meaty goodness, tends to upset some people). Good event. And I even managed to not do a great deal of naughty wordishness. Well, less than usual anyway. The only trouble with the event was that Aboyne's a three hour round trip from Casa MacBride. In the dark. With the SatNav thing sending me via every twisty arse-end-of-nowhere back road in-between. Cue Stuart getting home at nearly 23:00 with bags under his eyes the size and colour of your average aubergine.

Which on its own would have been shaken off after a few day of lolling around in a smoking jacket, while a naked Gloria Hunniford peeled grapes for me. But alas 'twas not to be, for today didst dawn at Dear-Jesus-It's-How-Early o'clock, so that She Who Must Be Shown What A Galmorous Life We Write-ists Live and I could catch the train to Glasgow for the Aye Write festival of bookly delights. Said train pulled a fast one and decided it would arrive a mere 45 minutes before the event. No problem. I'm a manly man, I can handle that. Jump in a taxi and away!

Only I didn't, did I? No, I took some idiots word that the hotel was just around the corner from the station and decided to walk it. Only it was about three million miles away, all of them uphill. Half way there, when the previous abundance of taxis suddenly dried up, panic begins to set in. Stuart steps up the pace, gets to the hotel five minutes after he's supposed to be in the festival green room, relaxing and getting himself outside a complimentary bottle of wine. Then discovers the venue is another four or five blocks way, on the other side of the motorway.

RUN! RUN FASTER YOU BEARDED FOOL!

So by the time I finally burst through the doors of the Mitchell library, I resembled a pervert in a sausage factory. Sweat pouring from every available surface. Puffing and panting. With a bit of wheezing thrown in for good measure. Ah yes, nothing like being all relaxed and calm before an event. Nothing sodding like it at all.

On the bright side, we did get to hang about in the bar afterwards - She Who Must, Allan Horror-Bollocks Guthrie, His long-suffering wife Donna, Russel the Boy Badger, and Duane Swierczynski, some strange Philadelphian homeless bloke Al and Donna were letting sleep on their sofa. There was a distinct whiff of whitespirit about the man, and he kept going on about haggis tempura. But at least he kept his hands to himself (after I slapped him two or three times -- well, I'm not that sort of boy), unlike Guthrie, who tried to French me up at the end of the night. Disgraceful.

Another bonus was buying a copy of SAVAGE NIGHT, the evil Horror-Bollocks' latest volume, which looks pretty damn funky. I shall save it for the plane next week.

Yes, in addition to schlepping halfway across Scotland to Aboyne on Thursday and halfway down Scotland to Glasgow today, She Who Must and I are off to Poland on Monday for a week of research and sausage*. Which means that although I'll be working, I won't actually be writing. Meaning that the chances of me hitting my deadline for this God-Forsaken-Tome-Of-DOOM are about the same as my allowing that skanky Ho, Kate Moss, anywhere near my manly parts. Not even with a jar of mayonnaise.

The knock-on fun and frolics will be that I'll still be trying to get the thing finished while I'm promoting FLESH HOUSE. Ah, a perfect recipe for the terminally confused write-ist to sod things up!

I now have to find a nice tactful way to tell HarperCollins that won't make them want to string me up by my goolies. Any suggestions?

* And I don't mean that in a rude way.

Brassica rapa

She Who Must Be Kept The Hell Away From The Remote Control and I were watching the TV this morning, enjoying a hearty breakfast of various dead things. And beans. When who should pop up on the old idiot box, but some American woman styling herself 'The Barefoot Contessa' (despite obviously being neither married to an Italian conte*, descended from one, or awarded the title in her own right). And she was wearing shoes too. Completely false advertising.**

But what should we expect from a nation that allows places like Pottery Barn to exist? Which aren't barns and don't sell pots.

Anyway, this 'so-called Contessa' was cooking Thanksgiving dinner (so not only is she falsifying her title and wearing shoes, she doesn't know what time of year it is) and she looks at the camera and holds up a turnip. Then she says, "Now you may have seen these in the stores and wondered what to do with them..."

It's a turnip.

A TURNIP.

Who the hell, in the history of mankind has ever wandered into their local purveyor of root vegetables and said, "Well I'll be damned. Mavis, come look at this!"
"Ooh, what is it, Henry?"
"It's a ..." He squints and reads from the accompanying card. "Tur-nip."
"Wow... Tur-nip, huh?"
"Yup. Ain't it pretty?"
"Oh yeah, it's pretty all right, Henry. Pretty and exotic!"
"Yup. Pretty and exotic."
"Ooh! ooh!" She starts to jump up and down, clapping her hands. "Can we get one? Can we Henry? Huh? Can we?"
Henry sighs and puts the exotic turnip back on the pile. "I wanna, Mavis, I really do. But I got no idea what we'd do with it..."

It's a bloody turnip! You peel it, chop it up and boil it. Not exactly rocket science, is it? Of all the challenges facing mankind today -- global warming, disease, tea-towels, poverty, people who wear white socks with black shoes and trousers (WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU FREAKS?), and politicians -- 'what to do with a turnip' doesn't even make the top ten.

Mind you, maybe I've been spoiled in my life? You see, we had turnips on a regular basis. Oh yeah, all the time, Baby. Turnip-tastic, that's us. It was about the only thing that made haggis palatable when I was little. If you buried that nasty mushed up sheep's innards under enough buttered turnip (or 'neep' to give them their correct nomenclature) it was just about possible to choke the vile stuff down.

So I've never been intimidated by a turnip. In fact, when it comes to root vegetables I'm not scared of any of them. Oh yeah, a couple of Jerusalem Atrechokes tried to beat me up once and steal my wallet, but I just boiled them in salted water for ten minutes, and ate the bastards. Coz I'm that hard. Coming round here acting all rowdy and tuberous. I showed them.

Up here we don't take no shit from vegetables.

* Don't be rude.
** According to that font of all lies, half truths and the occasional unsubstantiated rumour Wikipedia, she's named after a shop she bought from someone. Which is a pretty bizarre way to come about a nickname.

Retail therapy – not medically proven

After a visit to the local sawbones last week I decided I needed cheering up. It was around the time of my birthday, so what better tonic to a morning being jabbed with needles and made to wait in a smelly room with diseased individuals, and the obligatory ancient copies of National Geographic with the rude bits scribbled over, than heading off into town to buy myself a shiny gewgaw?

Birthday boys deserve shiny things, it's the law. You can check if you don't believe me. So off I tootled into the great metropolis of Aberdeen to do that retail thing. And with the whole smorgasbord of modern technology laid out before me, do you know what I ended up going home with? A pack of five tea towels and a new wooden spoon.

Seriously.

A couple of weeks ago I was pondering getting a PlayStaion 3, yet I end up with a cooking implement and probably the most boring thing anyone can ever buy in the whole history of boring things for buying: tea towels. WHO THE HELL BUYS TEA TOWELS? What kind of screwed-up shit is that? I'm young(ish), still got all my teeth and some of my hair, and yet: tea towels.

Tea towels.

Maybe I'm having some sort of anti-midlife crisis? Instead of the clichéd motorbike and mistress I'm going to buy a cardigan and a caravan? Tea fucking towels. For God's sake.

It probably doesn't help that I'm currently clawing my way, word by painful word, up the North Face of Book Number The Fifth. Base Camp -- where all this seemed like such a good idea at the time -- is a long, long way below; the summit is a long, long way above; and now I'm stuck in the bit that's full of mountain goat droppings, Yeti footprints, and discarded plastic bags.

Worse yet, there's not even anyone to cannibalize to break the monotony.

But at least I can make a crude shelter against the snow out of tea towels, and if that Yeti shows it's face I can stab the ugly bastard with my wooden spoon.

Grrrrr!