A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

I am a man.

At times I am a masculine man with a healthy and not wildly unattractive mask of facial hair.

I am, on those occasions, a man in need of a razor.

I would grow a beard. I actually did grow a beard for my trip around the world’s festivals, which begins in approximately 12 hours, but it went awry. My plan was to give both my beard and my head-hair entirely free reign, to cut neither for almost a year, from November 2010 till August 2011, when at Burning Man festival, in the heart of the Nevada desert,  I would shave the entirety of my head, from crown to apple, transforming myself from feral, brutish sasquatch to creepy Krishna with no eyebrows, reborn bald as an egg, ready to be burned and blistered under a sweltering sky. From what I know of Burning Man, that would be exactly the right venue to shed one makeshift personality and start afresh with another. Sadly, not only did a full beard prove prohibitively itchy, but also, and more importantly, it was a ghastly, unsightly mess.

The older I get, I find, the less visibly palatable is my facial hair. New colours appear from nowhere after a couple of days: as well as the rat-brown of my youth, there is now Wearside Grey, Hucknall Red and a couple of other shades that don’t as yet have names. The fact is, my beard makes me look like a tramp. And now that I actually am a tramp for the first time in my life, I’m quite keen to conceal the fact.

This then was to be my last shave on English soil for some considerable time. Consequently, I was hoping for a good one.

As every man knows, shaving time is the perfect time for reflection, both literal and metaphorical. The time a man spends shaving is actually some of the most therapeutic, restorative and important time he has with himself. Unlike the other habitual chores we perform alone – the voiding of our bowels, for example, or the spilling of our seed – shaving is the only one we perform whilst regarding our own face in the mirror, unless of course we are very strange indeed. Shaving affords rare, sometimes perfect moments of introspection. You look at yourself. You see yourself. You address yourself. ‘Where are you?’ you ask yourself. ‘How much progress have you made since last you stood before yourself, hobo-faced and semi-naked? Is your life working out? Who the hell are you anyway?’

So I wanted this shave to be a good one, because I have just given up everything to travel around the world, and I have no money, and few prospects, and frankly, I am afraid. I thought a good shave might buoy me.

Sadly, it was not a good shave. On the contrary, it was a nasty shave that did not leave me, as I’d hoped it might, feeling good and right and ready to face my future, but rather, as well as leaving me, on occasion, hopping mad, it also left me wondering if maybe I’m about to make the biggest mistake of my life, and a monumental arse of myself to boot.

It was a fraught shave. What made it all the more fraught was the fact that my materials were bad: I had no shaving gel and only a couple of very blunt razors. So I ransacked my sister’s bathroom cabinets and the best I could find in a house full of electric shavers was an old, rusting can of something called Erasmic Shaving Foam.

Which was when I discovered that shaving foam has a very definite shelflife. It was no longer foam. It was more like spit, like the angry spit that collects in the corners of the mouths of raging despots. But I soldiered on.

And although I did, on the whole, a passable job, it was not a good shave. When I asked of myself the questions of the shave, I felt I came up short. I was on the verge of a life-changing, maybe life-destroying trip, and despite the fact that my time was fast running out, I still had all the organisation prowess of a drunken Norman Wisdom on a beach full of high-tech deck chairs and I was not a great deal closer to having planned for it. Also, despite having located my passport and booked a ticket to Madrid, I still had very little idea who I actually was.

I was a man. That much I knew. I was a man with a vague plan and little notion of how to achieve it.

Now, with 12 hours to go, I remain that man.

People keep telling me that they envy me. I know what they mean. I would envy me too if I didn’t have the fear of everything that might go wrong. With a little luck, I could be about to embark on the trip of a lifetime. But let’s face it, if that luck eludes me, I could go from sleeping in shop doorways to begging outside of cashpoints to selling my aged flabby buttocks in a Prague pissoir within a matter of weeks.

But no. Let’s keep it positive. Everything’s going to be fine. Better than fine. Everything’s going to be fantastic! My agent’s going to sell my novel quickly and for a giant sack of money, and some kindly sponsor is going to pop up out of the blue and give me a wonderful ongoing writing gig. I’ll be shaving my face in the Amsterdam Hilton by April Fool’s Day.

You see if I’m not.

My next shave, however, will take place in Madrid, or possibly Barcelona. After that, probably Bologna. Then, if things go well, Krakow, followed by Venice. If things go badly… nah. Let me not think on’t.

Amusingly, when I had finished this final shave and all I had to do was sit back and await the rash, I sorted through my toiletries bag to toss away the stuff I had collected but would never use, and look what I found…

I don’t remember where it came from. I expect I picked it up on an aeroplane but never got round to using it. That’s something though. My next shave, the Spanish shave, will be a King of Shaves shave. I’ll try and get hold of a new razor too, and hopefully the experience will be a little less fraught.

I made a film of The Last Shave by the way. I rather like it. I look like a mad man.

Bye then.

x

Right. Tax is gone to pot. Four jobs I worked that year, all for less than eight grand. Something better change. Four forms! And never a job at the top of them. Balls to it. I’ll finish it on Sunday.

I spent three hours making a film of me shaving myself today. Just my face mind. Nothing freaky. I’m saving the freaky stuff for the Judy Garland Festival. More to follow.

This is really just to say that I am finally beginning to get excited. Sorry, not excited. Panicky. Blind with panic. And also this: COLLECTIVE EFFERVESCENCE is up and running. Destined to win next year’s Catchiest Website Name award at the made-up awards I’ll be making up and winning every award at. Anyway, add it to your feeds, why don’t you? If you can.

Right, London now to get drunk.

Anon!

So. Things are looking up. Or are they? They appear to be looking up – they look as though they might be about to look up – but nothing is carved in stone as yet. Maybe we can agree on: things are threatening to look up. But I refuse to get my hopes up. It’s much better, after all, to be surprised and elated if things go well, than disappointed and distraught and sick to your very coccyx when they don’t. But having said that, it’s difficult not to hold out hope.

And maybe there’s some good in it. In hope. And positive thinking. Even if it doesn’t come completely naturally – it can’t do any harm. Surely. What about cosmic ordering while we’re about it? I know Noel Edmonds makes a queasy mouthpiece, but he wouldn’t have created an iPhone app if he didn’t believe in it. Not Noel. And if Noel Edmonds believes in it, then I for one am prepared to give it a chance.

So I looked into cosmic ordering recently – about an hour and a half ago to be precise – because frankly, my own personal cosmos is in terrible disarray at the moment. It’s a state. And you’ll never guess – turns out cosmic ordering is just – basically – positive thinking. And writing stuff down. And turns out Noel Edmonds has created an iPhone app for it, which costs £1.19.  (Down from £1.59.) The app has been rated by 76 users and averages two stars out of five. Chris Goodchild got a ticket with his. He gives it five stars:

‘Perfect been using Cosmic Ordering for years and it works for me. No more scraps of paper, just the ticket.’

‘A quins fan’, however, was disappointed, and only gave it one star:

‘Can’t! belive I wasted £1.59 on this sh*t. Don’t! Bother a total rip of.’

One’s of Noel’s wishes must have been to ride a giant golden twat-drawn chariot through the Christmas ratings, rancid with health, wealth and bonhomie, a long tail of desperate, credulous humans clinging to his diamond train, weeping in his wake and frantically polishing their crystals.

Surely only a proper Charlie would actually pay for something so obvious.

Having said that, I reckon there’s something in it. Not much, but something.

I reckon if you imagine what you want to happen in your life, remind yourself of it frequently enough and keep it fresh in your mind – like a shopping list – then there’s a better chance of it, or something like it, happening. But only because thought turns to action much more readily than non-thought does. It’s like if you want to remember to pick up some eggs: write it down. Same goes for beans, coleslaw, love, health, prosperity, radishes and the great gift of being able to fuck everyone.

That’s why I’ve turned to The Cosmic Ordering Service.

Simple. It’s just like passing a note up the chimney to Father Christmas.

I’ve made seven.

Touch wood.

Things happen.

I hope I haven’t left it too late.

I’ve also joined CouchSurfing, and I’ve kind of fallen in love with it a little bit. The whole idea. It’s very Jesus. No one’s offered to put me up yet, but a couple of people have offered to meet up and say hello. When I began to realise all that CouchSurfing could do, I did that shaking the head thing that I think only people of a certain age do. ‘Kuh,’ I said, as I shook the head, ‘the internet, eh?’ I remember when CB radio went mental. Kuh.

One day I hope to have a couch. And 400 cats.

I’m killing time tonight, waiting for my virtual cosmos star to go out in 31 minutes, having gone about its immemorial work of making everything look, and feel, like a dream.

Well, here we are. Only a week to go, but I’m just about ready. Nearly. Just a couple of massive chores to complete, and a few thousand little ones. The most important things though – the things that will actually get me out of the country – I’ve done. So that’s something. Look!

Buy video camera 
*CHECK*

Visit mother and say goodbye
*CHECK*

Notify bank of strange movements
*CHECK*

Find passport 
*CHECK*

Buy travel insurance
*CHECK*

Get fired and alienate yourself from London magazine publishing world
*CHECK*

Buy tent
*CHECK*

Decide on first destination
*CHECK* (Spain)

Figure out how to get there
*CHECK* (plane)

Buy ticket
*CHECK*

Arrange accommodation for arrival 
UM…

Learn Spanish
¡SÍ, SEÑOR! (estoy bromeando)

Borrow a Spanish phrasebook
*CHECK*

Spend penultimate weekend in the country in the countryside cementing growing reputation for being ‘a stoner’ and playing frenzied guitar
*CHECK*

Pay taxes from two years ago

UM…

Fill in tax return for last year
UM…

Realise laptop is in such an appallingly bad way that you’ll never be able to edit any of the films you make as you go
*CHECK*

Make last changes to novel which hopefully agent can sell within a month or two and enable you to buy a new laptop and keep going for a while longer
*CHECK*

Read article entitled The Art of Round the World Trip Packing
*CHECK*

Mostly ignore article entitled The Art of Round the World Trip Packing
*CHECK*

Start packing
*CHECK*

Now, apart from the things I’m not going to be able to do (buy new glasses, arrange dental check-up, learn ukulele), is there anything I’ve missed?

No? Excellent.

The intelligent man's monthly

I am at fault here. I know that. And I accept it. I made a mistake. Not a big mistake by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve certainly made bigger, and hope I shall again, for mistakes are fine, unregrettable things, just so long as we learn from them. Let’s see what I can learn from this one.

What happened was this. I was sub-editing on a magazine this week, and I heard a man somewhere behind me end a conversation with the following words, ‘you’re just a woman’. As the magazine I was working for is published by the same people who publish Loaded, I immediately thought, wouldn’t it be funny if the person who spoke those words wrote for Loaded. For obvious reasons. So I watched him, the guy who said ‘you’re just a woman’, and lo and behold, he walked the length of the open-plan office and sat at the Loaded desk. Fantastic! I thought. That’s worth a tweet.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. I made a mistake. The guy I watched was not the guy who’d spoken those words. And let’s face it, even if I’d been right (which I wasn’t), it would still have been vastly unprofessional to publish office tittle-tattle to a social networking site.

But it was what happened next that was really stupid. Basically, in an effort to apologise and then maybe even turn the situation to my advantage, I made another mistake. I went home, smoked a joint and apologised. The following tweets were sent on Wednesday evening, from around 9pm….

• Earlier, in a thoughtless moment – one of a veritable tsunami of thoughtless moments of late – I laid a stupid, irresponsible tweetbomb.
• Or two.
• I have now deleted the offending tweets, but I can tell you, they contained remarks which verged on calumny.
• The remarks were about Loaded magazine, with whom I am sharing office space for the next three days.
• Basically my thrust was thus: magazine’s perceived reputation + naked prejudice on my part = conclusions jumped and remarks regretted.
• I therefore extend my genuine apologies to all concerned, now, publicly, and will do so in person tomorrow morning.
• Fact is, I am gaping finger-mouth perennially stuffed with idiot-foot.
• I have become everything I despise. Ignorant and judgmental. I feel like I should be placed in the stocks, like this week’s Kenneth Tong.
• And to think I’ve just been hassling the editor of Loaded to hire me to write a column from my impending travels.
• ‘What’s that?’ I hear you cry. ‘Why, you stinking fucking hypocrite! You make cheap, insidious remarks with one finger…
• …and with the other you go a’begging for work like some shambling fifty-faced bastard.’ Well, I see your point. But it’s not like that.
• You see, I would actually love to work on a Loaded that could sit with pride in the mouths of its readers, and in any company.
• Not a Loaded that has people champing at the bit to declare it a gratuitous tit-kitty fit only for knuckle-dragging imbeciles.
• In fact, my Twitter fuck-up today could be viewed as highly valuable social media market research. On behalf of Loaded.
• (It wasn’t. I’m just a twat. But that doesn’t make the results any less valuable.)
• 100% of respondents were ready – eager even – to believe that Loaded staff readily bandy bigotries like a gang of barking bushmen.
• If we extrapolate those figures to a pretend world wherein I have 170,000 followers, then you see right there the problem. #totalscience
• As it happens, the remark I overheard was made by an employee of an entirely different magazine. And was wholly humorous in intention.
• I shall apologise to him also.
• But the reaction was telling. ‘Aah, yes,’ sneered the public, ‘but that’s Loaded all over.’ I’m guiltier than most. And it’s a shame.
• You see, I would love to see Loaded turn into a magazine for which men could feel pride, without being slagged off and eye-rolled.
• More Rolling Stone, less Jazz Banquet.
• I’m not saying lose the breasts. Heaven forfend. Definitely keep the breasts. They’re excellent. In fact, if anything, more breasts.
• My own tastes veer more toward being teased – a little underwear, a little narrative – but breasts are good too.
• But maybe a few more thoughtful, daring and generally more intelligent articles.
• What about – this is entirely off the top of my head – what about intelligent slightly unstable man-travel?
• A monthly column.
• Or even: balls-out, brain-faulty, fuck-up-prone, breast-friendly travelogue, taking in 80 of the world’s festivals, starting in 12 days.
• Anyway, I’ve crept off-topic. Once again, sorry for being a dick. I’ll write your first column for free. (Second twice the price.)
• Of course, if Loaded were to give me an opportunity to write for them, this would turn, like magic, into a wonderful Twitter story.
• A wonderful Twitter story rising out of the ashes of a rotten sub-Doocian mess. That would be – as they say – all manner of awesomeness.

So as you can see, what I was banking on, stupidly, was that someone at Loaded might applaud my chutzpah and pay me money to write for them. Turns out that was rather naïve of me.

I did apologise in person, the morning after the offending tweets, but none of the editors had yet arrived. The journalists I spoke to seemed very nice, however. Then, just before lunch, I was told to leave the building.

I wasn’t even working for Loaded! But they’d fired me anyway.

There I was, imagining myself on Newsround, like that guy who got a job by putting his CV on YouTube – I’d be the man who got hired using the power of impertinent tweets. But it wasn’t to be.

One of my problems, I know, is that I’m frequently nowhere near as funny as I think I am. I do know it. And I have to accept it. So when I think I’m being devilishly amusing and somebody else does not, I can’t just call humourlessness on their part and stride off with my nose in the air. That was my first thought on being dismissed. ‘Bloody Loaded eh?’ I thought. ‘No sense of humour.’ But that’s not fair.

They were not amused. They were angry. Fair enough.

Apparently one of the things that made them particularly angry was my inference that Loaded is not the most intelligent magazine on the market. I guess I can understand that. No one likes to have their intellect impugned.

You would think though, that they might have just let their intelligence speak for itself. Rather than throwing a hissy fit.

Anyway, I thought – in the name of fairness – I should have a proper look at Loaded. So I’ve got a copy of it here in front of me. I’m looking at it now.

I’m currently looking at a 12-page spread of Hollyoaks actress and February cover star Jorgie Porter. She looks about 16. But that’s irrelevant. Mostly.  The pictures, I have to say, are neither remotely original nor faintly erotic – here we see her, for example, bending over a chair, and here she is with a fire hose between her legs. But hold on, maybe the commentary is where the intelligence lies. Let’s see…

‘Whether it’s for the storylines or the sexy ladies, we all have a cheeky flick over to Hollyoaks every once in a while, and it’s far from being something to be ashamed of. When you have the likes of Dot Cotton and Deirdre Barlow as the eye candy in EastEnders and Corrie, the girls of the Channel 4 soap will always be a shoe-in for top telly totty.’

Oh.

Oh dear.

(That’s shoo-in, by the way. Any decent sub will tell you that.)

I’m now looking at Lucy Pinder. She is naked. She is looking at the camera. Her eyes are dead. A large pull-quote hovers over the crack in her arse. It says:

‘People diss Hollyoaks, but there’s nothing better than watching it with your dinner.’

Um… What’s going on?

I’m now reading the magazine’s only column. It is written by James Buckley, the actor who plays Jay in the popular light entertainment television programme The Inbetweeners. Oh, it’s his first month! He is a recent hire. This is the direction in which Loaded are headed. To those critics who accuse them of hankering after the glory days of James Brown when Loaded was an iconic title with genuine cachet and considerable social significance, rather than just one of a sticky handful of grotty tit-titles that it is today, they say HA! They say CHECK OUT OUR NEW COLUMNIST!

Buckley’s first column is entitled, intelligently, ‘ALL THIS SHOPPING IS DOING MY NUT IN!’ It begins…

‘Right, so Loaded have decided to give me my own column, where I can write about whatever I want. I imagine they’re after something funny and interesting, which I don’t think are words my mates would use to describe me. However, instead of cowering like a kitten stuck behind a radiator, I’ve decided to give it a go. Writing that is, not getting stuck behind a radiator… This month I want to talk about the Christmas shopping us blokes had to do last month. It’s bullshit isn’t it?’

It ends…

‘Anyway, I better chip off now, the missus is begging me to take her to the sales. Now where’s that air rifle?’

It had this bit in the middle…

‘I thought about my girlfriend’s gift so much it felt like my head would explode. It’s probably the one gift you really, really do have to think about. And, as a guy, thinking bloody hurts.’

Actually, you know what? I don’t think I want to write for Loaded after all. Sorry, Shandy, I retract my offer.

So there it is. Another career lies twitching in the dust. Not to worry. I’ll be in Spain ten days. Or somewhere.

Have you ever been fired? It’s great fun, isn’t it?

In my day to day life, when it comes to money or anything of a financial or administrative nature, I am horrifically, savagely impractical. Something happened yesterday that brought it all home. I’ll come to that in a moment.

I never pay my tax on time. I miss credit card payments. I forget to file invoices. I never check my bank statements. I’m always overdrawn. I sometimes leave direct debit payments set up long after I ought. I never check my change. When someone sends me a form to fill in – an accountant, say – I’ll procrastinate so instinctively and with such alacrity that suddenly I’m back at school and the accountant’s referring me to the letter of three months ago and the form she’s not yet received and I realise, and I know it’s true: I’m a fucking child. A simple child at that. An imbecile. Like the baby in The Wasp Factory with maggots in its brain but somehow all growed up.

Today I discovered that a relatively sizey sum of money (although naturally I don’t know exactly how much), which was donated to me on the back of something I wrote when I was pretending to be slightly deformed, never made it into my Paypal account. I knew this at the time – I was receiving the notification emails but not the money. I kept putting off calling Paypal because… well, because that’s what I do. I put it off until yesterday in fact – a total of 15 months later – pretty good going, even by my dismal standards. And what I found out yesterday was that because I’d changed some details of my Paypal account but not had them verified, the donations had been returned – after a month – to the donors.

I’m pleased at least that I wasn’t ripped off by Paypal. But I’m pissed off that, essentially, I was ripped off by myself.

Really, if I wasn’t over all that stuff, I would take myself outside and beat the bejesus out of myself.

Useless.

I tell you, the only reason my debts aren’t sincerely much more overwhelming than they actually are, is because my mother is both generous and insistent, and I am weak and worthless. Thanks to the kindness of my mother then, I only owe a relatively small amount to the bank. But of course I owe another somewhat larger amount to my mother. Oh, the shame. We’re only talking a few grand though. Only. Jesus. And God knows what I owe the tax people, from whom – it looks increasingly likely – I am running away, yet again. In retrospect, I picked the perfect day to leave the country.

Speaking of leaving the country, there is another aspect of my personality, which I should – to give myself credit – recognise here.

I do get stuff done. Some stuff. I went to Italy, for example. I made a decision and I followed through on it, and lived there for four years.

I did do that.

However, not only did I fail to learn the language beforehand, and fail to arrange anything to do when I got there, but I also left lots of unpaid utilities bills and consequent ball-ache for the friends whose address I was using as a forwarder, friends who ended up having to contend with threatening bailiffs’ letters on my behalf.

Useless.

See, I don’t mind my general unpreparedness. I think that makes for interesting times. But making your friends’ lives distinctly unpleasant simply because you’re too careless, too thoughtless and too plain selfish to pull your head out of your arse and sort shit out is unforgivable. (It wasn’t unforgivable in the end, because I have good friends, for whom I am grateful.)

I don’t think it’s just selfishness though. I don’t think it’s that simple. If you want to know the truth, I think I might be mentally ill. You know, slightly. My brain has some key hiatuses. (Haiti?)

An inability to relate to money is one. I mean, on any kind of useful level – I can spend it like a prince, obviously, but I can’t answer its questions. I can barely understand them half the time, I swear. It’s ironic really that I worked in finance, indirectly, for years, teaching foreign financiers in London how to speak English. I used to make them explain everything to me in layman-cum-simpleton’s terms. ‘Imagine I’m a complete idiot,’ I used to say. They would smile. And then they would explain reinsurance to me. Or they would tell me again why the credit crunch happened. And I swear, I would get it for a while – the pennies would fall from my eyes – but then they’d be snapped up by the disease in my head and confiscated, because I did not truly understand.

The other unfilled space in my brain concerns direction and, less succinctly, my lack of any definable sense of it. It takes me a full two days in a new house to remember where the lavatory is. I make stupid, unbelievably stupid mistakes when I’m out and about in London. Long-familiar routes for no better reason than lack of concentration and a complex mental illness are transformed into the urban equivalent of the giant maze in The Shining and I become convinced that THEY HAVE BEEN MOVING THE BUILDINGS. But they rarely have.

I’m not sure what this illness is exactly. I’m no doctor. But fuck it, if dyslexics can get away with it, I don’t see why I should be labelled ‘just a bit thick’.

So, two things. Money and direction. And general admin. Three things. Money, direction, general admin and science. Four things.

This is why I am the last person in the world who should be about to head off around the world visiting festivals. With no money.

Sixteen days to go.

*gulp*

This weekend I dug out an article I wrote about two festivals I attended in New York in June 2003, which was published in the extraordinarily ill-fated London News Review. I wanted to call the article A Tale of Two Festivals, because that’s what it was, but it wasn’t up to me, so it was given a horribly pretentious and fairly nonsensical title. But never mind. Worse things happen at sea. And indeed in the offices of ill-fated magazines… But that’s all in the past now. Reading the article again after a very long time, I was pleased that it made me laugh and I must say, surprisingly, I’d forgotten all about that exclusive Radiohead interview…

– –

A couple of nights ago I made an excellent decision. One of my best, I think. And timely too.

I decided that rather than attempt to visit 80 festivals in one year as originally planned, I will try to get my old job back and spend the year reading about management team revamps, partnership boosts and fixed-fee tech boutiques.

I joke, of course.

Rather, I am removing the time constraint.

Boom!

I can and I will!

I will and I have!

Consider it done.

I only ever introduced the endurance element because I thought it would make the project more commercially viable. This, thus far, has proven fallacious.

Damn you, Branson!

And the closer I get to having to accept that a lack of funding is going to make the original plan impossible, the more the notion of taking as long as I like appeals. And the more thought I give it, the more sense it makes. It would, after all, make the whole experience that much richer.

If, for example, rather than 80 festivals in one year, I did 80 festivals in six and a half years (which would work out at a meagre one a month), would I not get to experience each festival so much more fully? Why, of course I would! I would have time to choose more carefully, to prepare more completely and to explore more profoundly. And I wouldn’t have to dash everywhere like a blue-arsed eejit in a constant panic, missing planes and leaving beautiful, unfinished moments behind.

Although I can see that that has a certain charm to it too, and if a big bag of money were to land in my lap, I’d still love to have a crack at it.

So, recognising the increasingly savage unlikeliness of that, it’s time to start planning for the next best thing. Which already, happily, is sounding even better.

Of course, even with the slow version, there still remains the question of funding. The only difference being that I’ll have more time to find it and therefore more options to play with and hopefully, over time, more chance of getting the thing to pay for itself.

And I can work at other things too, of course. I’ve no qualms about working – and not just writing work, which would be ideal, and not just manual labour of the agricultural variety which would be second-favourite, but also any kind of old crap at all, as long as it doesn’t take place in an office on Oxford Street.

So I’m still leaving on January 31st, but now that the pressure is off, I’m actually looking forward to it again.

What I’m thinking at the moment is concentrating on Europe for a while. First I need to contact the people who were keen to help with the original version and find out if they’re still keen. Then I need to pay off last year’s income tax instalments and see how much money I’ve got left.

We shall see.

I must admit, although a large part of me much prefers the idea of being able to do exactly what I please, there is also a part of me that would have loved to have been taken under the wing of some TV production company or other and packed off with a wad of cash and a geezer with a proper camera. Ah well. Not to worry.

I did have a couple of media sorts interested there for a while actually, but I think my lack of experience in front of the camera was one of the things that put them off.

I should of course have shown them this gem of a short film from 2004, in which I portray a struggling artist called Darryl. Darryl lives in a dilapidated West Norwood bedsit and has alarming delusions of grandeur. Fashion icon, musician, campaigning pro-Semite. In fact, Darryl is none of these things. He just has mental problems.

Why I’ve not been snapped up by BBC Three is anybody’s guess.

So yes. That’s the new plan. There are two festivals in Italy in the first month which I can definitely manage, and depending on my cash situation in a couple of weeks, maybe one in Spain too.

So that’d be a start. And of course if I do it well enough, a discerning sponsor might always step in at any moment and make everything go a little bit faster.

So that’s that. Oh, and late last night I finished the latest and hopefully final draft of the novel. Now let the praying commence.

And you, are you well? I do hope so. January’s fucking miserable, isn’t it?