Writing

I've been working on a covering letter for a job application today, which I'm sure will come as a shock to you, dear reader. Well it would if I had any readers. I was sitting around slaving over each sentence, writing and rewriting - trying to get the tone and style just right - trying to make myself seem like a better person than I actually am without deviating from the truth - and it occurred to me why my blog is generally crap.

It's not because I'm neccessarily a bad writer (although I dare say that might be a factor) it's just that writing isn't easy for me, good writing anyway. It tends to require much more torment and struggle than I like of an evening. I'm like a man who can shit gold bricks - it's a useful skill but the actual process is unpleasant enough to put you off the whole thing.

When it comes to my blog I just really can't bring myself to sit around agonising over every single sentence in the same way that I do when I'm writing under duress. I know that I should try harder, if nothing else because I think it'd probably make me feel good to know that I can write good work without being forced to do so, but I'm not really in the mood for it - it feels too much like work, which isn't something I ever intended this to be.

In addition to that I'm currently worried that prospective employers might be smart enough to google me and find this thing. Which would probably scupper any chance I have of getting a job when they see how much I whinge about nothing in particular.

-Ben

EDIT: Looking at this post after I've written it the other thing I notice is that i'm not generally a very verbose writer - a verbose talker, yes, but not a verbose writer. I spent my time at school expanding my vocabulary to the point where I could usually express myself fairly neatly and efficiently... and then spent most of my time at university desparately fluffing out my prose in attempt to meet the ever increasing miminum word requirements on my essays.

Incoherent Rantings

I've not written anything on here in a while, which makes me feel bad, although I'm really not sure if now is the best time to try and write something new. I'm still unemployed, but I'm making a point of being more constructive and active about this that I was before – you know, actually doing things with myself rather than just sitting around eating and wondering why I'm getting fat again. I'm now going to do something really stupid, which is try and write a piece making a point – this never works for me because I end up arguing round in circles and generally deciding, after giving it too much thought, that I'm too confused to make a stand for either side.

A few days ago (or perhaps weeks, I'm no good at placing things like this) a man, a father and husband, was beaten to death by a bunch of pissed up teenagers for confronting them about vandalizing his property. The public were shocked, I think, the papers said they were anyway – I wasn't shocked but I was sickened by it, a new low in the world of random street violence and a good reminder of why I avoid confrontations as much as I do, people get killed for no reason all the time and I have no desire to join them. When I die it's going to be doing something really stupid, don't get me wrong it'll still be a senseless death but at least it'll be funny in a sick sort of way when I'm crushed by a giant rubber elk or something.

As always with incidents such as this questions are asked, collective souls are searched and fingers are pointed in all directions. As always with these things, and with depressing inevitability, a bunch of really stupid suggestions and conclusions started getting thrown around pretty shortly after. Mostly by vultures seeking to use someone's death as a justification for pushing their own pre-existing agenda as a response.

The response that pissed me off this time wasn't the usual call for public hangings, floggings etc, that always arise from these incidents as society tries to convince itself that destroying some public examples will solve some broader problem of which they are symptoms.(no I'm not going to even speculate as to what the broader problem is, nor am I going to suggest that the people who did this ever deserve anything that anyone could conceivably want)

The public outburst that irritated me following all of this was a senior policeman, some big cheese, who called for the government to legislate to raise the drinking age to 21, to prevent attacks like this from being repeated – to stop the nation's curse of underage drinking.

This proposal seems to stem from either some sort of fundamental misunderstanding of the situation or some kind of staggering naivety about the circumstances by which underage drinkers come by booze. I should know about this, I've done my fair share of underage drinking myself, the vast majority of the time i didn't manage to get served by hoodwinking the staff; I got booze either by appearing to be mature enough that the seller figured I wouldn't cause trouble or by going to places where the retailer really didn't care one way or the other as long as I paid in cash. If the drinking age were raised it would make no difference to either of these situations – if they don't care then they don't care, and if suitability is based on the barman's discretion then that is a set of personal criteria based on experience, which exists independent to whatever the legal age might be.

What raising the drinking age to 21 will do will be to create a culture of underage, illegal drinking that is far more widespread and culturally accepted than what we have now. Students will spend their entire time at university drinking cheap cider in parks and houses – which will, in Canterbury at least, probably put half the pubs in town out of business and create much more friction between the student community and the local populace. And in amongst this mass of people secretively bingeing their faces off it'll be much harder for the police to locate the psychotic 14 year old pissed off his tits and spoiling for a fight with whatever moves first.

-Ben

Fritz Joubert Duquesne

Wiki Page

The man lived an interesting life - even if half of this stuff is wild self promoting fabrication, the other half is definitely enough to qualify him for the status of 'international man of mystery'

No respect

I went on a very long walk today, all over the place, I'll write about it properly at some point, probably tomorrow when I'm bored shitless. The thing that is currently springing up in my mind however, is a strangely frustrating encounter I had with someone as i was leaving Greenwich park today. As I was making my way towards an exit there was a small grouping of young people, I think it was a couple (or at least a girl and guy who were – consciously or subconsciously – giving the idea some thought) and two other guys. This sort of grouping is always bad; generally the two unattached blokes will be wheeling around and generally being twats, partly because they want to impress the girl but more (although they would never admit this, or even be particularly aware of it) because they are trying to get the attention of the distracted alpha male, like a bunch of five year olds whose mum is on the phone. I glanced at them when I was about 10 metres away but didn't consider them to be particularly worthy of notice. As I was walking past them however, one of them, the more strangely dressed of the two hangers on – who was shouting in a borderline incomprehensible patois I think is a mixture of south east London street and Turkish – started screaming insults at me and flung an empty drinks bottle at me whilst yelling all the insults he could think of, some directed at some feature of mine – fat, ginger hair, glasses, beard – and some just general cussing. He continued until I was some way off, gradually trailing off as he ran out of inspiration and motivation.

The thing that annoys me is how often this happens – just completely mindless attacks – he almost certainly wasn't looking for a fight like a proper nutter - he probably picked me precisely because he thought he could take me (he probably could – you have to get me very angry before I can be bothered to hurt anybody – if throwing stuff at me and cussing my momma had that effect I would have been expelled from secondary school in my first month) and because I don't look like much of a fighter. It happens a lot though, kids, usually in their teens, just randomly insult me, throw punches at me, heave stones at me. I have no idea why, it must just be something about my face. The worst incident I can remember is feeling a coke can bounce off the back of my head and hearing the unusual sound of a voice within arms reach – I spun round and came face to face with a boy who couldn't have been any older than 12, and I'm not going to hit a twelve year old, no matter how cocky the little fuck might be.

The most frustrating thing about it is that I'm used to these attacks and I've tried just about every way of reacting under the sun to them in the last decade or so. Reasoning doesn't work, neither do comebacks (witty or otherwise) - anything you say will be laughed at as if you'd just turned round and told them you'd peed yourself (plus my voice means that generally opening my mouth is an extremely bad idea). Violence doesn't work; there is always the suspicion of weapons backing up their otherwise unaccountable confidence and generally at any sign of a threat they scatter and hurl insults and projectiles from a safer distance. All in all the only method I've found that doesn't make things worse is just not reacting, if possible not reacting in the slightest – not even a twitch of a face muscle to reveal any awareness of the insults. This works, today the kid stopped pretty quickly, sounding a bit sheepish that his finely crafted insults had garnered no reaction whatsoever, but man is it frustrating, you end up spending the rest of your walk home pondering kicking some righteous arse, old testament stylee – meeting with the little shit and breaking some nose.

Which always leaves me feeling a bit worried by my own imagination.

-Ben

Family Slang

I was thinking the other day about the unique phrases and words which families develop, they are like the in-jokes that form between friends only more so; they are often passed around the extended family, handed down through generations. Most interestingly, because they are treated as normal by the older generation, the younger generations of a family often take a long time to even realise that they aren't common parlance. A cousin of mine, for example used one of these phrases amongst some friends and was embarrassed and surprised to find that none of them had ever heard them before. The words and phrases I've written out below are a just a few notable examples of the vocabulary that I'm pretty sure is unique to my family

Pelly Bags- A bag, usually a supermarket carrier bag, which is filled with clutter and jammed into a cupboard prior to a party – these bags are usually packed haphazardly and with little attention paid to the contents – many a valuble item has been Pelly bagged, forgotten, and declared lost, only to turn up in a cupboard years later. Named after a family friend who died some years ago, whose surname was Pelly, and who described the hours leading up to the beginning of a party as being spent “running around sobbing and stuffing rubbish into plastic bags”

The Headstaggers – A disease which affects small furry animals, such as gerbils, hamsters, Guinea pigs etc. It is characterised by odd stiffness of movement and is a sure potent of the imminent death of the aforementioned furry creature.

The Strunts – Similar to the headstaggers but more generally applicable. Similarly fatal but can, however, occur in milder forms A touch of the strunts.

Fitchy-Foo – To feel 'fitchy-foo' is to be bored and restless. Also occasionally chanted to indicate boredom in a social setting. From a long dead, and very strange, distant relative who used to wander around the house mumbling 'fitchy-foo, fitchyfitchy-foo' ad infinitum when he couldn't think of anything to do.

I might add further examples when I can think of them, but these serve to illustrate my point well enough. What I'm curious to know is whether or not other people's families form similar personalized vocabulary.

Guitars

I've been working on guitars a lot recently, not as a job, just as something to do, and occasionally for a little extra beer money. As you can see from the cheese grater and salad in the background, I hardly run a sleek professional sort of operation.

(Tony's blue Tanglewood mid-way though the fretdressing and cleaning process)

Today I rummaged around the house for some old classical guitar and mandolin tuners that had been left over from some repairs dad made to his instruments many years back , then cannibalized them for parts. I took a hacksaw to one set and liberated the worm gear and button for use in the completely knackered machinehead in Tony's guitar


(It's hardly an elegant solution but I'm not being paid enough to source a matching button, so he'll have to make do with a girly one for now.)

After that I did a little repair work for my own amusement - my mum found a tiny half size acoustic guitar with it's neck broken off, no strings and no machineheads. A little wood glue, some more parts liberated from the machineheads I found and whammy! I have a tiny guitar.

(it's only got four strings because the nut slots for the highest and lowest strings are buggered. The strings it has are tuned E-A-D-G, like a bass, and tuned to the same pitch as a guitar. Which gives the thing marvellously slack strings that can be bent and wobbled to my heart's content)

Here's a shot of it with a normal sized classical acoustic and a 3/4 size classical acoustic to give you an idea of scale.



I'll give it back to the school at the end of the summer holidays but for now I think it's going to be my special barbecue guitar.

-Ben

Psychology Study

(quoted from the website because it doesn't seem to be a stable enough url to link)

This study investigated the relationship of working memory to open and closed belief systems. Two hundred college students completed a working memory span test to measure verbal working memory, and Rokeach’s Dogmatism Scale (1956). Regression analysis was undertaken to determine the contribution of verbal working memory to dogmatism. A negative correlation was found between dogmatism scores and working memory scores (p = .002) confirming the hypothesis that those participants who display a larger working memory capacity would show lower levels of dogmatic beliefs than participants displaying a smaller working memory capacity. Error analysis was employed to determine the significance of inhibition processes; indicating that capacity limits in verbal working memory, and not processing deficits, were primarily responsible for poor working memory scores. Dogmatism was not found to be related to gender, age, ethnicity, religious affiliation, academic major, or level of education.

What little I can find out about the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale mentioned in the abstract this study doesn't necessarily consider 'dogmatic' purely in the sense of religion, although the only sample question given in this article seems to. I'd assume that the findings are equally applicable to the politically immovable and the religiously dogmatic. It must be considered, however, that I'm not even close to having the slightest understanding of the terms discussed so anything I say is a humanities graduate speculating aimlessly about science and should, therefore, be ignored.

-Ben

Wet-th

I'm been threatened with vicarious rocks, so I suppose I better write something here. Although I have no idea what I could write as little has happened to me of note recently. I read the last harry potter book the other day but I'm definitely not going to talk about that here, I decided after I read it that I was to going to try not to talk about it at all regardless of company, so spouting my views on the interblag is certainly not something I'm about to do.

Mostly what I've been doing in the last few weeks is sitting around in my house watching the rivers running down my street. You know that post a few weeks back where I talked about the biggest most extreme thunderstorm I'd ever seen? Yeah, well they've become pretty much normal now – it's been pissing it down so much that the Thames is rising to dangerous levels, the Thames! I didn't realise that the Thames was enough of a river to do that anymore.

The floods are arousing the usual army of commentators in the press: The lefties are split, half saying that the floods are the fault of global warming, the other half declaring that disasters in the third world are much worse and we should all go and feel bad about that instead. The northerners are whinging about how floods in the north don't get so much attention paid to them in the media. The right wing papers seem to divided also, torn between arguing that they used to have better floods in the old days, and that people these days are a bunch of sissies, and figuring out ingenious ways in which the weather can be blamed on the government. And the sun, is, of course, just trying to figure out ways of getting somehow flood-related pictures of half naked women.

Whilst sitting around inside watching the rain I've had to amuse myself somehow and it's mostly been through the medium of listening to heaps of CDs; bought, borrowed, and found. I have concluded that Seasick Steve is badass, Our Endless Numbered Days by Iron and Wine might be the best album I've heard in a few years and that the Spinto Band and Tapes n' Tapes are both up to 30% more awesome than there nearest comparable competitors.

I'll think of something intelligent to say at some point in the next few days, I hope.

-Ben

Mr Ben Has Graduated

I am now a university graduate, I wore the gown and shook hands with the vice chancellor and everything. I even wore a suit under the gown and not just a tshirt with a suit printed on it.



Note the extremely stiff and awkward stance of someone who is very uncomfortable in smart clothes. I did, however, only wear the suit for about 20 minutes longer than I absolutely had to - very soon after I was out of the ceremony i was back to looking like this



The evening went downhill from the point when Matt said 'Biddendens?' and I said 'hells yes!'

also - my last encounter with the campus bunnies.



Who didn't seem to remember me, they just ran away.

-ben

Shock and Awe

It's a strange feeling, that sudden realisation that you are, quite frankly, small time. To see someone do something that you thought you did well better than you had even realised it could be done, moving the ceiling of what you thought was possible. It's like being told you are an eight, an eight out of ten, you assume, only to discover that in fact the highest score is in fact 100.

I think the trick is to respond with 'I can be 100? awesome!' but it can be hard, especially when you are sitting around listening to the Flecktones or reading Joseph Heller.

-Ben

New Title

It's not great, but it's better than the old one - which I only chose because it was written in large friendly letters on my wall (a sign I'd made to help me through my exams) and my mind was blank.

The new one is actually a phrase used to angrily describe me in a seminar discussion by one of my lecturers - I've always been rather proud of it.

-Ben

Open Mic

This evening me and my dad went out scouting for new venues in which my dad can, and I quote, "assault the ears" of the general public - we went to an open mic night at a pub in a quiet corner of greenwich behind the edifice of greenwich town hall (Pointless Fact: it has a nuclear bunker underneath). It was interesting passing through greenwich now that the smoking ban in public places has gone through, there were lines of damp smokers huddled around the entrances of the many pubs we passed along the way, especially outside the Auctioneer, which was always an unpleasantly smoky pub.

In the pub we went into (I can't remember the name off my head, but it was quite nice) it was strange, but quite cool, to be able to stand around in a small, crowded pub and not be wreathed with smoke like the beginning of an amateur production of Macbeth. I'm not a particularly militant non smoker; unless it's really heavy generally pubsmoke doesn't bother me, yes, it makes my clothes smell bad, my hair smell bad (when there was enough of it to smell) and often leaves me talking like Barry White the next morning but I'd never really given it any thought. That's just how I work - I accept things as they are rather than getting huffy about what I'd prefer them to be. So the way I feel about the smoking ban is roughly the same as the way you feel when someone makes the tea that you so badly needed before you even realise that was what you were after.

but yeah, the open mic night was interesting, some quite good people, the overall quality wasn't great, but it wasn't that bad - some good singers doing good covers and some passable original stuff. The only downer was the odd bloke.

Allow me to explain, whenever you get a gathering such as this one there will always be the one odd bloke (it's always an odd bloke in my experience) - one guy with a complete tin ear and/or useless guitar playing who, due to the fact that he lacks important social skills, is completely unable to read the looks of dread which strike the faces of the regulars when he walks toward the stage as a hint that he should stop.

This guy set off alarm bells with me when he wandered in the way of the person performing at the time and produced a case with 'Ibanez JEM555' written on a handwritten label on the bottom. I have no huge objection to that guitar, other than the fact that it is a little tarty and out of place at an open mic night, what worried me was the label on the bottom - only two sorts of people have to write labels on their guitar cases; people with more guitars than they know what to do with; and weird obsessive types who have to arrange everything neatly. Niether of these possibilities bode well for a musician in my opinion. This guy launched into a rendition of erm, something, which was lacking in skill and soul and half drowned out by his horribly oversaturated effects.

It wasn't the bad playing that distressed me particularly, I've heard myself play way to many times to be bothered by that, it was the fact that he was so completely oblivious to his own inability - it didn't even seem to dampen his enthusiasm when the compere abruptly ended his song early. The problem for me is that when I encounter people like that and I can't get this thought out of my head:

'If I was like that, I'd never know... perhaps I am like that'

I don't think I am, but i know that I'm very bad at reading people and can be a bit obsessive when I'm interested in something, often to the point of driving people around me nuts. I wonder if perhaps I'm a nutter who has learned to do a passable impression of sanity through sheer effort.

Then I remember that I've never done anything by sheer effort in my entire life, and calm down.

-Ben

The Weather

I'm aware that talking about the weather is a terrible British conversational cliché, so I've been trying to avoid mentioning the weird apocalyptic storms we've been having lately out of a fear of looking even more boring than usual. But I've caved in, they are just too unusual - so unusual that in a country where the sensible take a raincoat and snowshoes out with them on a summer's day 'just in case' people are getting confused.

Firstly, it has been raining, really hard, like way more even than a normal British summer. The windscreen wipers have been on what is referred to in my family as 'holiday speed' pretty much everyday for a few weeks. Entire towns have submerged under the water, Sheffield, especially, seems to have done something really bad to incur the wrath of whatever deity was nearest - when we passed it both going to and coming from York this weekend it was blanketed by gigantic stormclouds and masked by a dirty bastard of a downpour.

As if that wasn't bad enough, this crappy weather, not content with just soaking northerners, has the tenacity to disturb us in London - a city where weather patterns have to check all weapons before entry and behave nicely. The road outside my house was a river the other day, it was washing away heaps of building materials from the innumerable extensions and garden projects that happen on this road in the summer. It must have been around a foot deep in places and formed big pools in hollows.

To cap this all off, we had a hailstorm. A big hailstorm. I'm not talking hailstones that sting your ears and scare cats, I'm talking hailstones the size of ping-pong balls that stripped the pointing off our walls, cracked the windscreen of our car and put some dents in the bodywork.

This clearly all wrong, extreme weather doesn't happen in London, it gets lost - forgets where it is going and just ends up dribbling on people. Poor innocent commuters were staring at each other on train platforms, their frightened eyes windows to panicked minds searching for long since atrophied vocabulary.

"eerm... very erm... moist?.. Crunchy?... weather we're having today? Eh? Clarence?"

-Ben

brain farts

I was just thinking I wonder if anyone would sponsor me if I spent an entire day telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth for charity. I mean think about it, it'd be interesting, sort of the mental equivalent of shaving your head - it makes you look very unattractive afterwards but people give you a sort of grudging respect. All questions, no matter how personal and unpleasant would have to be answered frankly and unambiguously. It'd be a test of willpower, resisting the urge to omit some grisly detail, character assassination for a good cause.

-Ben

York, etc

I have returned to London, having spent the weekend in York sampling the parties and hospitality of Sarah and her fellow grad students. Who'd have thought that postgraduate medievalists partied so damn hard. Me and Matt attended a Sci-Fi/Fantasy themed fancy dress party, me dressed as Jesus* and Matt dressed as Rimmer from Red Dwarf, as his desire to dress up stretched as far as sticking a letter H to his head (it stands for 'hologram', fact fans). The next day we had the hungover tour of the Town plus a very very tasty meal in a pub with more spirits behind the bar than I knew existed.

I have a very bad memory for parties, generally forgetting them even on the rare occasions when i attend them sober (this wasn't one of them) so I'm having a great deal of trouble writing anything coherent about it (I'm actually having a great deal of trouble writing anything coherent at all for some reason, I've rewritten this whole thing twice now). What I do remember mostly consists of beer pong, a guy dressed as a faun, a woman dressed in a incredibly well made Nanny Ogg costume, someone whose robot costume made them look like a baked potato, and a man with a water pistol loaded with tequila.

There were many other things but unfortunately the act of describing things requires a certain amount of in-head coherence in which I'm somewhat lacking, any attempt to write more could cause me sound like a modernist ponce. It's all strange shapes and garbled chunks of memory in my head.

As things currently stand, however, I'm feeling distinctly manky, I think I was ambushed by some dastardly northern germs that my southern pansy immune system was unable to withstand. On that note, I realized today, with the exception of some stress-related migraines, a minor inner ear infection and a couple of colds, I've not been ill in more than four years. Which is a bit strange, I'm worried that perhaps it's like that scene in the film where the guy turns to his pursuers and makes his best scary face and they all run away, only for him to discover that they were in fact running from the scary monster lurking behind him.

In other news Tapes n' Tapes are awesome, as is the Tyranny of Distance by Ted Leo.

-Ben

*erm, yeah, I'm a bad person

New Guitar

Tweaking and modifying mostly completed I think I can declare this guitar worthy of mention. Yes, I know it's an encore. Yes, I'm aware that the polepieces don't really match up with the strings properly and yes, I have noticed that it only has five strings. But it's still good, it has a nice sound and low action and...

This switch, which gives the guitar magical powers with the aid of some cunning rewiring and additional gubbins.

Also, did I mention it was free? ooh yes, no money down.

-Ben

Two Chunks of Nerdery

Today was a very nice day, all sunny and shiny. I was up early in the morning to help my little sister carry her amplifier and electric guitar to school for a rehearsal with her band and after that wandered off into the woods with my new copy of The Master and Margarita to read it in some nice shady spot under the trees.

The reason why I have a new copy of one of my favourite books isn't for the usual reason - I've not read it until it fell apart, no, it is instead because I was curious to read the other - more critically praised - translation of the original russian text. I've found this reading of the book to be much more enlightening about the political and social commentary of the book which is rather subtle and below my radar when I'm not in proper academic mode but I'm not sure whether this is because the language of the book makes these points clearer or because the footnotes flag up the examples of it and make you aware of the ways in which bulgakov presented politics.

Overall I have decided - shock horror - that I prefer the earlier, Michael Glenny translation. The language is more natural, more clear and well, english. You see, with the Peevar translation you are never able to forget that the book is a translation - there are too many strained attempts to accurately follow the phrasing of Bulgakov's language. There are numerous occasions where the language has obviously had to be oddly warped and battered to include some sort of thematic motif which the earlier translation - unable to fit it comfortably into english speech patterns - omitted.

I think that the high opinion of the later translation is based on a rather flawed understanding of what a translation should do - The standard reason given for preferring the Peevar translation is that people who can, and have, read the novel in both languages prefer the langauge of Peevar, finding it more representative of Bulgakov's original. I, however, think that this is precisely the reason why the Peevar translation is weaker - I'm sure that if you know the Russian phrases which Peevar is straining the phraseology to express in English then it seems fine, but if you are unfamiliar with the original language (and, let's face it, most of the readers of the book are - that's why they are reading the translation) then it just seems like clumsy dialogue. The Glenny translation seems to try and find phrases that are equivalent in usage and implication, rather than translating russian turns of phrase which don't really transfer well. This means that it often misses some subtle reference to something or other which makes it less suitable for critical study, but I think as a book to sit down and read, the Glenny is better.

Mind you, having not read it in the original language, any attempt at a scholarly argument along these lines would be rubbished by people who have, and who therefore win in the game of intellectual one-upmanship. There is also the fact that I've not read the glenny translation in a good few months - it might not be as good as I remember.

------

Having used my brain for the first time in a while I decided to finally get off my arse and do something constructive as well - so I sat down and wrote an intelligent and attractive CV....

Pfft.

only joking - I got my tools out and dismantled the electric guitar that Ed and Lucy gave me in exchange for my old bass.

This guitar was in the worst state I've ever attempted to resuscitate a guitar from. On first examination early indications weren't good - the neck was bowed back and there wasn't any visible sign of a truss rod adjuster, the action was very high and the tremolo was stuck in the foward position.

After finding the truss rod, and using this... interesting setup I managed to get the neck to bend foward until it was straight and level



All the containers are filled with water to push the ends of the neck down whilst the batteries hold the middle up. I left it like that for a few hours, until it learned its lesson and stopped sassing me.

and after some fairly drastic lowering of saddles and tightening of springs i got the thing to the point were it was actually really nice to play - and to my shock I found that it actually has a really nice sound - very erm. bitey and sharp, kinda dark red and crunchy...

So now I have a decent electric guitar and if ed and lucy sent me that guitar as some sort of bet I think I've won.

Huzzah.

In other news the wireless network stopped talking to my computer within about 10 hours of it starting and I can't seem to persuade it to resume diplomatic negotiations.

-Ben

Unpacking

I’ve spent a lot of time today trying to make my bedroom habitable as, due to the rates of rent round here, it looks like I’ll be living with my parents for a while, or at least until I get some sort of inspiration about what to do with my life. I have no idea when that might be, could be a few hours, could be a few years – I hope it’s soon because I’m getting bored already.

The reason why I’ve not really posted anything in a while is because I couldn’t get my computer –in an attic bedroom*- to recognise the existence of the house wireless network. I managed to solve this problem with my usual method – that is, treat the router like a huffy child and just leave the thing alone until it decides to arbitrarily change its mind. Which worked.

But anyway, back to the making bedroom habitable thing. The obstacle to my bedroom being habitable is the fact that it was my brother’s room. I’m not saying that he has a lingering, powerful stench or anything, just that he has a lot of stuff. Due to the fact that this room is much bigger than my old room he never had to do the purging for storage space that I did – there are boxes of stuff in his cupboards that I was astonished to find are still sealed with removal company tape from when we moved here from Plumstead 9 years ago.

As a result of this general lack of order in Ed’s room the process of moving my stuff in is rather slow – for every box of my stuff I unpack there is an equal amount of Ed’s stuff that needs to be sorted through and either packed or thrown away. Most of it is, as it has been left behind, fairly obviously rubbish – just the detritus of someone living in the same place for many a year - I am, however, not very well equipped to be the judge of what, if anything, is worth keeping amongst the heaps.

There are, for example, things that I keep that don’t appear to have any particular value, train tickets, for example, whose only reason for preservation is a date on them, a date which only I know the significance of. Without Ed to tell me otherwise me I’m spending a lot of my time imagining the significance of many of the items I chuck and feeling bad for throwing them away.

Mind you, Ed isn’t nearly as weird as I am, he probably doesn’t attach such significance to pointless inanimate objects. I should finish this unpacking tomorrow and then I’ll actually feel like I’ve settled in and can start doing more constructive things – like getting off my arse and getting a job.

-Ben

*ugh. That line has reminded me of a line from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley – damn, the one thing I would most like to forget about my uni experience would be Ezra Pound’s god-awful poetry.

London

Today my dad came down to canterbury, we picked up my amp from Bal's, then jammed all my worldly possessions into a battered looking rental van and chugged off home. It's the first time that I've ever actually packed all of my stuff in one place - other than my room - I've been accumulating this stuff for the last two years and I've never actually taken it all home before, I have quite a lot of stuff. I think I'm going to have to get my own place soon, just so that I can stuck all these boxes somewhere.

I'm going to have to draw out some plans of the floor space in my room, and just jiggle the stuff I need around on paper until I find some sort of tessalating pattern in which all my stuff fits inside my room without the need to clamber over heaps and use my bed as a guitar stand.

It's odd being back in london and it being niether a brief 'see as many friends and relatives as you can' stay nor the familiar summer routine of settling in and preparing for death by boredom. I'm currently in a sort of uni/not-uni wasteland between leaving uni town graduating - i'm home, but I don't feel like I'm 100% finished with uni yet.

Mind you, that's probably because I don't want to have to face up to the unsexiness of work which is the inevitable consequence of not-uni.

Oh well. At least the shock value that me getting a first holds should keep my family distracted from the issue of me being a directionless, jobless slacker for a while.

-Ben

My Degree

I'm waay too drunk to write anything sensible on here right now, too much beer pong, but I feel I should mention that I got my results today and I am now the proud possessor of a first class degree in english and american literature from the university of kent. Better still, I'm one of about 6 people in my whole department who got one, and one of 3 doing my course who got one. Which makes me very smug.

I rock.

That is all.

-Ben