Beef "Jerky"

JimmyMcgee
Originally uploaded by mertleblu.

So it's Spring! It was the first day of Spring yesterday and I went outside in the balmy February sunshine without a warm jumper to celebrate!

I've been doing lots of things. Well, actually, I feel a bit like I haven't been doing anything, but I'm going to commiserate by writing about some of the things I have been doing, which will make it seem like I've been doing lots, so to speak.

It was Tommy's birthday yesterday. Despite feeling thoroughly antisocial; "What have you been up to?" "Nothing."
I went out anyway and found a great gathering of people at the Globe. I'm a bit wary of the Globe since the only two times I've been there were 1. Splattering blood all over my nice yellow t-shirt at a poetry night (possibly more on that to follow) and 2. Being well and truly thrown out after losing a fight with a bat (animal) and umbrella (mineral) after bi-fest, but it was actually okay. It's still stiflingly hot in there, and the four wall-mounted fans did their best, but I still ended up getting far too hot. Daniel Taylor was really sick on Saturday night and Anna gave Tommy a shrink-wrapped package of Spice Nutriment Boke in the shape of a fish. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is friendship.

I wrote a big load of stuff in a text file for my blog and I think I've lost it. My laptop is slowly cracking up again, and even the thought of installing Photoshop on it is a distressing prospect. Tom has put a password on his computer which means if I want to make any graphical images I have to use this program which came free with a scanner my dad bought in the late 1990's. No amount of pleading will affect Tom's 'one rule for all' system. Which is admirable in a way, but I'm glad he's not my teacher. And I'm glad I'm not still at school. Not just because I'm 25 and it would be a disasterous situation to be in.

So you might have to wait for the bloodstained yellow shirt incident and the Poetry VS MCs incident, etc, with the bated breath I have come to expect from you all.

Me and Anna made sushi. Actually, Anna made sushi whilst I tried to chop things and dabbed at soy-sauce with some old bits of bread, but I was helping in spirit.

I'm trying to put a book together. It's a book of poems and short stories and it's going to be called "City Boy in Blind Spot Trauma" and it's going to be available from May at the latest if everything works out. Which is quite exciting in some ways but again quite difficult in others. And I'm going to buy a dot com, or at least a dot org, but I won't mention the name yet in case someone gets in there first. Ha.

Amy is organising a Cornish Celebration in aid of St. Piran's night at the Evening Star (5th March, 7.30pm) which is going to involve Pasties and Cornish Dancing and Cornish Ales and other things of the West. It seems everywhere I turn I encounter a cornish person at the moment, so it will be well attended, but as the flyer proudly declares, "non-cornish welcome". Which is both fortunate and necessary.

I bought my first big block of stilton and first big jar of garlic pickle of 2007. Fine dining tonight!

Hair

chris and bag of hair
Originally uploaded by bumpoowilly.

If evolution is anything to go by, I am going to become bald and fat. This realisation came to me as a teenage biology student, and shocked my indestructable but awkward frame with the cruel truths of age and death. I, however, got off lightly.
An unremarkable peer named Ryan enquired how, as his mother, father, their respective parents, and his siblings all had brown eyes, his eyes could be blue.
"What colour are the milkman's eyes?" was not the reassurance he was expecting.
My father is neither fat nor bald, and therefore, due to the primitve grasp of genetics I had previously held, I never feared either condition would ever descend upon me. However, with the dark hair and eyes, not to mention the stature, of my mothers' side, I began to picture my maternal uncles. They were all fat and bald.
Currently, I show little signs of becoming fat and bald. I have cut my diet to a bare minimum, and sport a fine shock of hair and mightly sideburns, although there are some signs of recession above both of my temples. The problem is, I can control my weight but not my hair growth. I may never be fat but baldness is inevitable.
Consequentially, I have started collecting hair.

Materialism

high five!
Originally uploaded by bumpoowilly.

Things I have accumulated in the last few days.

- thousands of vitamin C sweets, each of which contains 100% of my daily allowance of vitamin C. I'm averaging 700% a day.

- three pints of fresh brewers yeast

- a massive bag full of hops

- a terrifying mug of a dog with rolling eyes

- Lyrical Ballads

- 481 sheets of white paper

- a registration form for a poetry brothel

- humiliation

- a drinking problem

- a thursday-night-friday-ad

- two feathers for my hat

- a big jar of garlic pickle

- halloumi

Opening chapter.

Pregnant
Originally uploaded by Scrybl.

The sound of music twice an hour
Ever since I was a boy, I had always loved rock ‘n roll. So when I get into the business at the age of twenty two, I was surpried at the ab sence of sex and drugs,the companion volumes of rock and roll. However, after six months in the business, I realised that the sex and drugs were merely overwhelmed by the frantic and adulterous hot action with politicians the job involved.

Again, I turned my face away from the typewriter. Another day, another story about parliamentary infidelity. I was beginning to think I should have taken that Daily Mirror job. It wasn’t even popular infidelity. I scoured the book of parliamentary scandals (published 1997) for inspiration. This latest tittilation featured no Minister who had ever served under Thatcher. I had to get out.

This is how I found myself bound aboard a 19th Century whaling vessel, bound for the Pacific Whale Peninsula. And this, dear reader, is not where we need to be.

Bovine Macbeth

"But who would have thought the old man had so much cud in him?"