There's a hole in your bottom, dear Monday, dear Monday...

I think I may have accidentally pissed off God this weekend. I'm not sure exactly what it is I did, but She's certainly doing a damn fine job of getting her own back.

To start with, all the lights at the front of the house went, 'Fut!' Just like that. Fine one minute, 'FUT!' the next. And it's not exactly bright around here in the evenings, coming home after five is like clambering about inside a nun. Dark, dark, dark, dark.

"So why don't you replace the lightbulb then, Oh Beardy DIY Wonder?" I hear you cry. Because the damn thing's rusted shut, that's why. All the screws on the outside light have fused together into one brown metaly lump. Not even anointing it with holy WD40 helps. The screws are ... well ... screwed. Going to have to hack it all away from the wall and replace it from scratch.

"Yes," you say, with that mildly bored expression you've been perfecting ever since you first made the mistake of coming here, "but that hardly counts as a disaster of Biblical proportions, does it?"

Not on its own, no. But like all good Biblical plagues, you have to start out small. You don't want to jump right in with the smiting, do you? No, you want to work your way up to it. More fun that way.

So the second thing that happened, was that the 4Trak rustbucket truck of loveliness decided that leprosy sounded fun, and wouldn't it be great if the rear wheel arches decided to part with the bodywork? Tee-hee. Of course, this was after it experimented with mouse infestations. Right now the thing's clarted in little poisonous mouse hotels. Come for the tasty bait, stay for the death...

The third thing that happened was much funnier though -- the boiler packed in. It went 'FUT!' too. And made a noise that's a little bit like 'FUT!', only I spelt it a little differently, with a 'CK' and no 'T'. I pronounced it really loudly too. It probably didn't help, but for a fraction of a second, it made me feel better. Not warmer though. It's sodding freezing right now. Dark and freezing. We have Eskimos outside, stumbling about and bumping into things, complaining that they can't feel their feet.

But that pales into insignificance compared to the little treat God laid on me today. Like some sort of wrathful chicken, whose egg is a big stinky ovoid of vengeance... The laptop curled up it's little digital tootsies and died. Catastrophic hard drive failure, taking everything -- including all the work I've done on Book Number The Sixth -- with it.

All together now: 'FUT!'

I can't hear you: 'FUT!'

One more time: 'FUT!!!'

Tomorrow I think I'm just going to stay in bed.

But spring hasn't sprung...

It seems to be that time of year again, when the frost is crisp on the ground (unless you live somewhere warm, in which case it probably isn't, but you can recreate the same kind of idea by dusting your garden with talcum powder and keeping your socks in the freezer*) and the first green shoots of the early season memes poke through the hoary earth. A time of rebirth, or in John's case getting older and smellier.

I feel his pain**, for this year I too become another year older. Well, I suppose we all do, unless we have a prior appointment with a thin chap in a big black robe wielding a variety of gardening tools. But I have a particular birthday coming up. A birthday of DOOM! DOOM I TELLS YA! *ahem*

Now when I started out as a fresh-faced debut novelist way back in the misty days of nostalgic 2005, I was advised to start lying about my age. No one wants a fusty old debut novelist, they said, people want their debut novelists to be young and sexy and not fusty*** and old. You must pretend to be thirty one.

That's right, dear reader, I was told to lie, like a middle-aged lady forever celebrating her thirty sixth birthday.

Now, I'm not much of a one for lying -- OK, so I sort of do it for a living: making up lies about people who don't exist, but in general life I frown upon it -- so I became increasingly vague about the whole thing. Which caused a certain journalist to forever be stricken from my Christmas Card list.

But this year... This year I hit the big Four Zero. The transition point from 'Not A Kid Any More' to 'Old Enough To Know Better' and a stone's throw from 'Well, He Had A Good Innings'

*shudder*

I can't decide if I want to do something to mark the occasion. Do I want a party? The last one ended up with jelly going everywhere. Do I want to do some sort of extreme sport thing, like bungee jumping (nope - that way lies detached retinas), mountain biking (I'm proud to say that the bike I bought twelve years ago has lain unused in various sheds for ten of them), naked alligator wrestling (high risk of genitalia being bitten****), or even paint balling (all that running around in the woods smacks too much of effort ... and puts me in mind of Deliverance for some reason)

Maybe I should just settle for hiding under the duvet that day, hoping that nothing important falls off?

But, I hear you cry, what's this got to do with the seasonal burst of memes? Well, I've been tagged to do a 'Reveal 16 Random Things About Yourself' by Sandra, but I can't. This is because I have to save up my random secrety things for a panel at this year's Harrogate festival, and if I give away all my secrets now, it's going to cost me a sodding fortune on the night. So instead of sixteen little secrets, I've just let you in on the one BIG one.

Don't say I'm never good to you.

* When you're not wearing them, obviously.
** It's lumpy, if you're interested.
*** I don't like the word 'fusty'. I always want to spell it 'foosty' which has more of a ring about it, and if you're typo-tastic (which we all know I am) it's less likely you'll end up accidentally typing the word 'fisty', which would have altogether less wholesome implications.
**** And alligators don't like it if you bite off their genitalia.