the moving

I am utterly unprepared for the move, of course. After forty years, more or less, in the same house, the process of clearing out my room is as complicated and time-consuming as an archaeological dig. So many layers. So many rediscoveries demanding classification. So many horror anthologies. And Ed Wood’s Let Me Die In Drag - I thought I’d lost that. Or dreamed it.

And these aren’t even the essentials. I know there are many absolutely vital things that will be overlooked. I imagine waking in sudden terror on the first night as the realisation hits me that I have no soup spoon. No soup spoon! How will I eat soup? You think I’m joking, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that can keep you awake all night, until the dawn light filters in and with it the gradual realisation that Wilkinson’s will soon be open… and that, after all, you could probably use a dessert spoon if it came to it… and that there’s no soup in the house anyway.

I know, I know - I worry unnecessarily. But if I didn’t I’d end up worrying about things that really mattered, which would be quite intolerable.

I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ll be just fine. My goal while in the new house is to finish my novel. It’s called All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy.

Apparently, they’ve forecast snow again…

moving

I went to have another look at the house I’m moving into. Its worst feature is arguably a kind of towelling soft toy fish creature, which hangs at the end of the light cord in the bathroom. I’m sure it was all very amusing when first installed: now it is grubby and (no doubt) piss-stained. It just swings there, mocking our inability (in rented accommodation) to do anything to it.

The garden is less secluded than I thought - only the most token of fences separates it from next door’s, which looks alarmingly like a mini-adventure playground. Mat can’t wait to meet the neighbours - and ask them when they go on holiday. The only way he’ll get away with that as a conversational opening gambit is if he becomes their barber.

Mat and Dave were familiarising me with the kind of noises they make when playing Operation Flashpoint. Some of them are quite alarming; particularly, I imagine, at four in the morning. I don’t get computer games. I’m beginning to see that I’m going to feel rather bemused and bewildered in this house, like some elderly relative living in the attic, wondering why the Vietnam war is still going on downstairs.

Not that I understand my parents any better. The other day my Dad thought he’d developed uncanny precognitive powers because he could predict the ending of Robson Green vehicle Northern Lights. And my Mum popped her head round the door of my room to tell me that she liked the track I’d just been playing. It was the droning death metal of Sunn O))): a hoarse voice shouting ‘Burn it to ash’ (or something) over massed guitars. So at least I know what to get her for Mother’s Day.

leaving, returning (not necessarily in that order)

At work I have been mostly upstairs, assembling epic post-Xmas returns. People seem to imagine that, just because I am not stationed behind the counter, I’m not working. They think I’m upstairs sipping cocktails or something. And what if I am? I can still do my job. Have they not heard of high-functioning alcoholism? It’s very stressful assembling returns, especially as the majority of the books you send back these days are going to be pulped. It takes a hardened heart to put children’s books about fluffy animals and holocaust survivors’ memoirs into a box marked ‘DESTROY’. One doesn’t quite have the same problem with Jordan or Sharon Osbourne of course, but how can you consign to its doom - as I had to do - a book called Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive The Bus? Not without reading it first anyway. I did, and it is as good as it sounds: amusing and instructive.

I suppose I ought to mention that, at the age of forty, I am finally leaving home. Am I excited? Of course not. I only get excited about films, books or CD’s. Real events just make me apprehensive. You have to bear in mind that I’m moving in with someone who talks loudly in pubs about ‘having fleets of spaceships with really cool names’, so that, to the casual listener, he sounds insane (he is in fact, involved in an online game called Eve). The other night he said this: ‘I’m going to make money on turbo squid. All I need is a realistic head’, and I thought for a moment that I’d stepped into a parallel universe.

nobody knows i'm a celebrity

Preston was on XFM talking about how the new-found success of The Ordinary Boys has justified his decision to go on Celebrity Big Brother. Apparently, he was over the moon because someone came up to him and said: ‘You sold out the Brixton Academy in four hours!’ Or to put it another way: You sold out. Not that he ever had much to sell in the first place that didn't already belong to the Jam or the Specials or...

I heard that Chantelle is having a road named after her in Wickford. Though perhaps an alley would have been more suitable. Or a bypass. But everyone loves Chantelle, because she’s so ‘down to earth’. Just like an ordinary person! Oh hang on, she is an ordinary person. Surely we need celebrities to be different from us. To be glamorous, spiteful, freakish; like Pete Burns. Throughout the five minutes I spent watching Celebrity Big Brother, I never quite got over the novelty of this Scouse docker’s voice emerging from between the hyper-inflated lips of this weird doll-like creature. He was the ventriloquist and the dummy rolled into one. Now that’s entertainment.