Resolutions

If you kept your eyes closed, you’d miss it, Christmas. And now the New Year is raising its white flag, wafting it around, begging us to take notice.


In my head I’ve been summing up the year.

Writing = 3
Work = -4
Life = 2.5

Total = 1.5

All in all, not bad. One year I was minus two million so things are looking up.


Recently I’ve been having fantasies about winning the lottery. In these fantasies I don’t spend the money, or tell anyone that I’ve won it. Instead I put it in a bank and then have nightmares about the bank collapsing and losing everything. Then I think I’ll divide the money between lots of banks and then I get stressed about having so many bank accounts. Where would I put all my bank books?


What I think this fantasy tells me is that I crave security. Like America has the Declaration of Independence in a museum, behind thick glass, heavily guarded. It lets Americans think they stand for something.


(I got the above fact from National Treasure, one of my favourite films. Still Life by Jia Zhang-Ke is another of my favourite films.)


It’s depressing every time you look at the news, more people are losing their jobs, shops are folding, rich wealthy middle-class people with university educations are telling us times are hard.


In another fantasy I am walking through a wood with a friend. A chaffinch warbles. I turn to my friend and say, “I remember when all this was shops.”


It makes you realise how precarious the whole capitalist endeavour is. Bring back communism I say. But what did Marx have to say about love? What do capitalists say, for that matter?


Except that it can be bought.


My problem is that I am too easily influenced. Last night I was listening to the Elbow special on Radio 6. They like PJ Harvey, I order a PJ Harvey album from HMV, they play Beck, I buy a Beck song from iTunes, they are friends with the Doves, I write a letter,

Dear Doves,
You don’t know me but…

What I want is to be cool in my own right. I want to be Vince Noir, from the Mighty Boosh. Or rather I don’t want to be him, I want to be a cool me.


Don’t get me wrong, things are ok, and besides this is a blog about writing and books.
I am currently reading, This Book Will Change Your Life, by A M Homes. I am halfway through and my life is still the same. I wonder if I can take it for a refund.


(Just kidding – it’s great!)


I plan to read more books by A M Homes this year, and by A L Kennedy, P G Wodehouse, J P Donleavy, V G Lee, W H Auden.


That is my first resolution. To read books by authors who are known by their first two initials and surname.


I want to travel the length and breadth of Vietnam in a jalopy.


I want to enjoy writing, and do it for me, and not be crippled by insecurity.


I want to be fitter, healthier, and become a lean mean fighting machine.


I don’t want to do the things I don’t want to do.


I want to organise my CDs in alphabetical order.


I want to find the thing in life that makes me happy.


And world peace.

Happy New Year to you all,

Love from

Drew x

Advocat for breakfast

I need to go shopping.


This morning I had gateau and half a tumbler of Advocat for breakfast. And I need to do some washing. If you went into my spare room you would think the Chinese laundry had packed up and left the building.


At the door the Chinawoman stands forlornly, a bus ticket to Beijing in her left hand. “I’m leaving you. IT’S TOO MUCH.”


And I’m not even the kind of person who changes his clothes every day. I can’t afford the goddamn water and environmentally friendly non biological naturally resourced detergent doesn’t go on trees (does it?).


Besides we over-wash. I read it on Green Weekly.


I’m saving the planet, that’s what I’m doing.


In my house only one light is on at any one time. When guests are round the logistics become complicated as we troop from room to room, negotiating arms to manipulate switches. Let me tell you it can get crowded in my tiny bathroom!


I’m kidding you.


I never have guests round.


Actually this lack of shopping is evidence of a good thing. I’ve become a writing junkie again. The proofs to Me and Mickie James are finished and ready to ship, annotated in blue and red. And I’m 20% into the next edit of The Penguin Variations.


I’m loving it. I can spend hours and hours on the same few pages before moving on.


As I was writing I bookmarked hundreds of pages I thought I might need later for research. This week I’ve read about Icelandic Christmas – the book is set around Christmas and in Iceland. The reading might mean that I change only one or two sentences but I am happy with that.


Adding bits. Shuffling sentences around.


But I should go shopping.


I’ve just finished reading ‘Comrade Rockstar’. This is about Dean Read, an American singer who espoused Communist ideals and made it big behind the Iron Curtain before it was melted down for scrap.


Towards the end of his life (in fact at the end) he was found dead in a lake behind his house in East Berlin. The book is an American writer’s attempt to get to the truth behind his death.


In pretty much the first chapter she crosses to East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie and goes to a record store. She picks up a basket and finds that, due to the small size of the basket, almost nothing in the store will fit into it.


For her this is a CATASTROPHE and from here she extrapolates everything that is wrong with communism.


Jeez!!


It’s funny how we can judge a system without thinking of the faults of our own. In the West we can push trolleys the size of tankers around supermarkets the size of space stations gorging ourselves on transfat until we balloon ourselves to an early grave.


Well, some of us can. Those with cash.


Those who car adverts at aimed at. And plush sofas. And hanging gardens.


I just want a cat.


I would like a supermarket with small baskets. I would like no choice of fruit. Or only one kind of tin.


I would like one day to find an Egyptian selling black market oranges from the back of a peripatetic souk. I would buy a sackful and I would visit all the people who can stand my company for just a little while.


“I’ve got an orange,” I would say. “I”VE GOT AN ORANGE.”


Then I would say, if they were nice, “Would you like one too?”

Currently reading – The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland

Currently listening to – Peter Bjorn and John

‘Father and Daughter’ – A fabulous animated short.