Forest of Unicorns

There may well have been unicorns in the forests in Germany, but sad to say, I didn’t see any.  For those who read and didn’t know I went to Germany last week – I went to Germany last week and am now back.  For those who read and did know I went to Germany last week – I’m back from Germany.  Now count how many times I’ve written the word Germany in this entry, multiply that number by 5, add 3, switch the two digits of the number you end up with around, and I’ll come back to that later.

Travelling is rather stressful, and it takes a day or two to stop feeling like you’re still on the move.  That said, the experience is definitely worth it.  Even though the saying “time flies when you’re having fun” holds true, in a seemingly short space of time, you garner memories that will stay with you.  I was reading a philosophy book (The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands) which said that we humans have a tendency to look to the past and the future, but not often to the present.  In my view, we look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, we enjoy things better in retrospect.  “Remember that time we went camping and got absolutely soaked pitching the tents?” “Yeah, that was fantastic.”  What I want to make clear at this point is that Germany wasn’t something I enjoy(ed) purely in retrospect.  The trip was, at the time, fantastic.  In spite of some rather crazy weather.  Konstanz (known in English as Constance) lies at the head of the Bodensee (known in English as Lake Constance), which itself borders on the Swiss Alps.  Storms in summer come pretty regularly, but only stay in one place for 15-20 minutes.  At least they did when we were there.  It’s a really dramatic sight watching them come across the lake, I think I managed to get a photo of two storms converging on one another, I’ll know when I finally get around to uploading them.

Which reminds me, take one off that number you were working on.

So, now that the train’s finally stopped chugging along in my head, I’ve come back to regularity: the occasional working day, playing games I’d forgotten I had, housework, trying to find numbers where there’s next to nothing to play around with.  If anyone’s ever played Timesplitters 2 by the way, see if you can get the Lemming Award.  A little tip though, it’s only really funny in multiplayer mode.

Alrighty, for those who ended up with the number 82, I admire your rose-tinted glasses.  For those who didn’t, I’d be interested to know your answer.  For those who ended up with 82 and are now confused, I will clarify things in my next entry.

Travel in Stygian

A quick word about the title – don’t.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can move swiftly on to some good news. I have received three out of four unconditional offers from the universities I applied for to do a Masters course. One of which was the one I was hoping for, which was the Management of IT course at Nottingham. Another bit of sort of good news is I might, possibly, have a part-time job starting soon. The interview lasted about five minutes, at the end of which I was told, right, you’ve got the job. But I’ll only be starting work there when the current part-time person leaves/gets another job/gets bored/gets ill/dies in a completely innocent and non-circumspect way, none of which I’d wish on them. Honest.

The job centre is grating on my nerves at the moment. Because of the length of time I’ve been claiming for, I now have to go in every week and have to be willing to commute for up to an hour and a half. And it’s not as if going in every week will help any more than the fortnightly trip. Either they’ll say there’s nothing going, or they’ll say that there is something going, in which case I’ll say yes, I know, because it’s the only thing going. More often than not I’ll have already applied for it. The sooner I start work and stop going to that gods-forsaken building, the better.

Anyway, enough of me complaining, and with news out of the way, I can get to the main part of the post.

My thoughts recently have mostly been on writing. Truth be told, I haven’t actually written down all that much, but simply thinking about it is giving me inspiration, and at the moment I’m just writing down some of the better ideas that crop up because I know I’ll forget them if I don’t. The main focus of my ideas has been on characterisation, which I think some authors (I’d name names, but none immediately spring to mind) tend to overlook. It’s all about empathy. If you can’t empathise with a character, you don’t care what happens to them and you end up losing interest in the plot. Even if the plotline’s a good one, it won’t help if the character doesn’t grab you by the shirt and pull you head first into the pages. So my focus at the moment is making my characters relatable. Of course, not every character will endear you to them. Some are downright nasty. Which is all well and good really.

The best thing though, in my experience of writing, the absolute best thing that can happen is when a character (your own creation, whose every detail you thought you knew) surprises you. Sometimes I’ve found that, even as I’m writing, characters will take on lives of their own. It seems odd, but my characters do surprise me. And this spurs me on to challenge them further, see how they react, what they do, and I quickly find that I’m not so much writing the story as being drawn along with it, pulled into the world I’ve created. It’s as though all I’m effectively doing is watching a film and recording it in words. This is the job I want, this is what I really want to make a career out of, but reality gets in the way. So for now, it will remain a hobby, and for now, that’ll do for me.

Lazy Eye

If I took the time to explain every time a huge gap appeared in the timeframe of my blog, I’d be writing more excuses than what I actually want to write about.  Not only is that not fun for me, I know from experience that it’s also not that fun to read, so the less time dwelt on it, the better.  Now, three major things of note have cropped up since the last time I posted.  First of which being the Cartmel trail race.  I was taking part in it for two reasons: I wanted to see if I could do it, and everyone who finished got some of Cartmel’s famous sticky toffee pudding.  Now to weave the tale…

The drive down through the Lakes that morning was stunning.  There was barely a cloud in the sky, and the mountain tops were clear.  A good day for a run, even though it was only 3° C (37° F).  When we got to Cartmel, we had some time before the race started, so we went for a wander round the town.  I know quaint English country village is a cliché, but that’s really what the place was.  Little cottages and terrace houses, a huge church, and a racecourse just outside the town itself where the race was starting from.  At the starting line, all sorts of people lined up.  Old, young, chubby, thin.  It was actually impossible to feel out of place.  We set off to the music of Franz Ferdinand playing through a set of loudspeakers nearby.  Whoever thought that was a good idea, I don’t know, but it was played at the start of the last race I took part in as well.  The race would be 16km (10 miles), so I set off at a steady pace, barely taking note of how fast others were going.  I managed to keep up with my dad and sister for the first kilometre, but then I was hampered by a stitch, which unfortunately became a theme for the next 7 kilometres (I’d prefer to measure in miles, but this is how the race was split up).  It having warmed up to 5° when we left the car, I was surprised when, just a short way into the race, the heat of the sun started blazing down.  I’d started the race in a t-shirt, fleece and windproof jacket, but I was soon down to just my t-shirt.  I’d decided not to carry any water with me as well, so when the first water station came up half-way through the race, it was a huge relief.  I was getting into my stride at that point as well, my stitches had gone, and the bulk of the uphill was over as well.

In races, you find yourself running in and around the same group of people throughout.  I was honestly quite surprised at the group I found myself with.  One person had absolutely no breathing pattern and seemed to wheeze a lot.  Another was clearly overweight, and a third person, only just within earshot behind me sounded like he was retching every two-hundred yards or so.  On the downhill sections, I was able to overtake the group, but found myself running level with them on the flats and uphills of the race.  I know I’m not especially quick, and I haven’t been training that long, but their speed surprised me.

The second water station at around 13 km was another huge relief.  I’d been feeling a bit dizzy before that, and my pace had slowed, but a drink of water and several jelly beans later, I was running back at my usual pace.  I actually had enough, if you’ll excuse the car metaphor, left in the tank to manage a sprint finish.  Results published later showed I ran the race in 2 hours 13 minutes, beating my aim of 2½ hours.  It was also revealed after the race that they had in fact measured it incorrectly.  16km became 18km.  Which was nice.

Event number two is the job interview I had, which is the furthest any application I’ve sent off since Christmas has been.  I didn’t get the job, but the interview itself was a positive thing.

Finally, the third event of note – Cockermouth Company of Archers Easter Egg Shoot.  I surprised myself (again) by coming second in the senior archers’ head-to-head competition.  For those of you who don’t know how archery scoring works, this is a really good achievement.  For those who do know how it works, know that I was helped massively by my handicap of 35 (the person who won had a handicap of 44).  After that came the fun bit.  Some of the junior archers (I assume) had made large Easter egg targets, onto which were stuck balloons, and, later, teddy bears.  Suffice to say, aiming for those was extremely tempting.  So, in the spirit of Lent, I gave into that temptation.  I pierced two balloons and a teddy bear, the latter of which I still have, though I removed the arrow from it.  As the saying goes – all fun and games!

Last of the Wilds

I came across a new term the other day (new to me at least), which was blogosphere.  Thus, I made it my aim to work that word into a sentence in this entry, and I have, as unsubtly as a large brick with the word BRICK painted on it in luminous pink letters which has just come through your window.  If that did actually happen when you read that, it’s because I’m psychic.  If it didn’t, it’s because I ran out of paint.  Ahem…

I feel I should apologise for this week and a bit of silence, things have been busy recently and my usual “blogging” time has been taken over by sleep for the most part, so I’m writing this a bit earlier than usual.  Who knows, it might actually maintain coherence for a change.  Could be hoping for too much there though.  Coherence and a typing speed faster than my mind works generally don’t really mix together well.  My thought processes only kick in after I’ve written something, by which time my fingers are writing something else leaving my mind playing catch-up.  I suppose it’s not a bad way of doing things, but it doesn’t leave much room for error since, if I make a mistake or realise that I didn’t quite word that correctly, I know that if I stop typing, I’ll lose the flow of what I was writing altogether and I end up thinking about that mistake so much that I end up writing a really, really long sentence while my mind works to reach a point I can stop and go back over it.  A good example being that last sentence (though that second ‘really’ was unnecessary and over-accentuated the point I wanted to get across).

The source of my busyness over the last week has been mainly getting application forms for Masters courses put together.  I’ve also managed to get a volunteer position in Oxfam (I won’t call it a job, because the only pay I get from it is for transport costs).  They were looking for “computer-literate” volunteers, so I went in and immediately thought I knew why.  I was greeted by two ladies who were struggling to operate the till, and was quite surprised to learn when I asked about the position that till operation wouldn’t be a part of it.  I would in fact be spending my time upstairs cataloguing things for the shop’s webshop.  After talking with the manager for a few minutes, I almost laughed when he said that they would soon be installing a new till system.  As if the staff didn’t have enough to worry about already.  I retained the laugh though, and merely responded with an interested-sounding “Really?”

The hunt goes on for paid work.  I’ll definitely need something to alleviate the added debt I’ll be getting into going back to university (fingers crossed I do actually go back).  The problem is, until I know for sure whether or not I get onto one of the courses I’ve applied for, I don’t know if I can make commitments to any long-term employment contracts or graduate schemes.  So it’s looking as though I’ll have to wait to hear back from the universities before I decide where I want my career to go next.  In the meantime, any part-time, even full-time work, is… I want to say welcome, but that’s not quite the word I’m looking for.  Never mind, it’ll have to do.  I’ll probably think of the word in about two hours time and wonder why it took me so long to come up with it.  If anyone reading knows the word I wanted, feel free to let me know or have a guess at what it was.

It seems strange, but I’ve only really just discovered the best place in my room for me to write, which is lying on my sofa, head near the radiator, laptop in my lap and my PC playing music in the background.  I guess it’s because it’s just easier to type like this rather than sitting at my desk.  It’s certainly more relaxed at least.  I’m hoping this recent discovery will further the production of my novel.  Yes, though I haven’t mentioned it yet, I am writing a novel.  It’s been in the workings for about six years now and I’ve finally got the plot worked out for the prologue.  The trouble I’d been having with it was that a) the information gleaned from it wasn’t really necessary to the rest of the book, and b) it didn’t go anywhere, nothing lead on from it, nothing really came of it.  So now I’ve got the plot leading somewhere, and the information gathered from it is vital to the rest of the book.  Now all I have to do is get the thing finished so I can pick up where I left off, somewhere in chapter 5.  Though, having changed so much in the prologue, there are a few things in the main storyline that now don’t quite fit, that need tweaking or just taken out altogether.  It might take a while, but I’ll get it sorted eventually.  Hopefully, I’ll also be able to get my act together to enter into a short story competition this year.  If my prologue falls within the word limits, it could possibly act as an entry.  I suppose that will depend on whether or not it can stand up on its own.  We shall see.

Preliator

I was watching Time Team this evening (unusual for a Saturday), and they were uncovering a Norman castle which had been attacked when Stephen and Matilda were battling over the throne of England. I remembered I’d actually learnt a bit about that battle in my first year at university, and it brought home to me the fact that I’m actually starting to forget some of the things I learnt there. Memory loss is something one normally associates with old age, but I don’t think it’s quite that which I’m experiencing here. I recall learning about things when I hear about them again, when the memory is triggered by something I see or hear, or even touch or smell.

If I think about a smell triggering a memory, what springs quite vividly to mind is a trip to Yorvik I went on eleven years ago. There was a part of the museum, I think, where you got into a cart, and “went back in time” as they put it. The cart took you past all these displays of how people lived back when the Vikings were invading York (or didn’t live in some cases), and the overriding thing I remember about the ride was the smell. I think, I can’t be absolutely sure, but I think the smell was burning peat. Of course the Vikings were famous for their burn-rape-pillage approach to visiting other countries, but the burning of peat (if that is indeed what I remember) would have denoted proper settlement. Some Vikings did settle, as did Romans, Normans and Saxons.

I apologise if this is reading a bit like a History lesson, I didn’t really mean it to be. My aim was more to see how my memory reacted when I drew from the metaphorical well that I consider to be my knowledge of History. Sadly, the well isn’t as deep, nor as full, as I would like it to be. When I hear about these events that shaped the world as we know it today, I want to know more about them, to understand why things happened the way they did. Some of the things left behind by our ancestors I find both astonishing and fascinating, and I can’t help but wonder – what will our legacy be? I wonder this, but I’m not sure I really want to know the answer.

I saw a film recently called Origin: Spirits of the Past, wherein what we know today (cities, skyscrapers, a sea of technology) has been swallowed up by nature. It’s a sort of post-apocalyptic world in which humans are forced to co-exist with nature in harmony. They can’t actually get something as simple as water without asking nicely for it. The film is incredibly similar to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, but in Origin we see more of what used to exist “pre-apocalypse” as it were. Oddly enough, the world doesn’t look too shabby, and some people even see it as a playground that they can go exploring in, finding hidey holes and uncovering new things. It seemed strangely idyllic, and I found myself thinking when I was watching it that it wouldn’t actually be a bad place to live (ignoring the huge city outside the forest which belched out smoke and fumes and looked like a giant steam-punk mess that had just been thrown down at random in the vain hope that somehow it would just work).

Spectral Mist

The main problem with not planning these posts is they don’t make for very easy reading. Rather than a smooth transition between paragraphs, or even sentences, you get jarred, jolted. It’s like going along a bumpy road with seemingly no end in sight. So, while I endeavour to keep the spontaneity of my posts, I’ll try to iron out the metaphorical creases as best I can. Hopefully this will make this blog easier to read. With that bit of preamble out of the way, let’s get on with the show.

I say show, it isn’t really a show, it’s more a static image of what I’ve typed. Theoretically, I could film myself typing this and post it up and then it could possibly be a show, but it wouldn’t be very exciting. Since it’s just an image of what I’ve typed though, expectations of being entertained are considerably lower, so I stand a better chance of being entertaining. Make sense? Oh well, so much for ironing out the creases.

This should now be the point where I say - “And speaking of creases…” – and then carry on seamlessly (see what I did there? Crease? Seam? No?). However, I really can’t think of something relating to creases, so I’m just going to sit back and marvel at the fact that I’ve managed to keep writing this blog for a whole week. I really never thought that I’d keep it up, but to be honest, I’m finding it quite cathartic. It’s getting some of this mess in my head untangled, though given the messiness of the posts thus far, I’m beginning to wonder just how it’s doing that. Don’t worry, the rest of this post won’t just be …………… as I reflect on my unkempt thoughts, I will actually be putting some of these thoughts down.

One thing that’s been on my mind of late, as I’m sure it’s been on a lot of people’s minds, is the snow. It’s not the abundance of it, but the lack of it. Having watched the news where a lot of the country has been covered in a thick blanket of snow, I feel somewhat deprived living in one of the few places that hasn’t got any. Well, that’s not strictly true. There’s snow on the mountains, and we had one day where we did have some low-lying snow. It just seems disproportionate to what other places are getting. I realise it makes travel difficult, that people are struggling to get to work, that people are slipping and injuring themselves, but these are the same people who were disappointed we didn’t get a white Christmas (which is determined by whether or not a single snow flake falls on a particular roof in London, I forget which one). It’s snow! It gives that sense of nostalgia and that bubbling up of the child in us that make us happy! Why complain? If you’re constantly slipping, get some crampons. If you can’t get to work, play in the snow, make the most of it. Seriously, people get so stressed with work these days that surely any reprieve should be welcomed with open arms.

Speaking of work (and that’s the last time I’ll use the phrase “speaking of” to link two paragraphs together, honest), I have now given my details to so many companies, recruitment agencies, and graduate schemes that I really can’t remember them all. I’m sure a lot of people have done this, but I can’t help but get the feeling that my name appears in so many places that some people will begin to think I’m famous, hire me as, I don’t know, a news-reader on some random channel whose main demographic don’t want to watch the news, at least not in the way that that channel portrays it, be blamed personally for the lack of rise in viewing figures rather than the channel’s admin thinking it’s getting something wrong, get fired without any redundancy package whatsoever and be known thenceforth as “that bloke who couldn’t read news properly” and cry every time I hear the words “channel 5 news”. I admit that’s not very likely at all. I wouldn’t cry at the words, just send a series of polite emails with barely contained anger attempting to get between the lines. And I’ve just realised that most of the paragraph has been one sentence, for which I apologise (in part to my fingers, which I shall now rest).

Fields of Hope

As I said I would, I’ve been out for a longer drive, two in fact, since I last wrote here. The last one I was quite proud of since I managed to drive myself safely home after a one hour, forty minute run. I think I surprised myself there. It was a strange, and actually quite dramatic run I had. I’d decided to do a loop round Melbrek, since I knew the route already, but I didn’t want to drive to where one would usually park when going there, because it involved some really narrow roads and, depending on how busy it is, some very awkward parking. So I parked slightly further away from the track, thus giving myself a longer run. It being winter, I’d set off quite late in the day, and didn’t actually start running until twenty to four, and by the time I’d got to the track that looped round the mountain, it was just gone four. Light was beginning to fade, and what had started out as a beautiful winter’s afternoon was turning. Clouds were coming down over the mountain tops, and moving quite quickly. I picked up my pace round the back of the mountain, keeping an eye on the weather, and the other on where I was going. By the time I’d picked up the path that contoured up and swung back around to the lake, the wind had grown cold and dusk was beginning to take hold. I didn’t know if, or when, it would start raining, but the clouds looked rather threatening. I left the path I knew for what I thought might be a slightly shorter one, realising my mistake but a short time later. I had gained quite a bit of height by then, so I began a swift descent in the direction of the stream the main path followed. I had been running for maybe an hour by the time I came all the way down to the lakeside path, but the rain had held off, and I was feeling pretty good considering. Alongside the lake, I made pretty good time, and got to the path I had set out from after about another half hour. From there it was just ten more minutes back to the car. That ten minutes was hard, very hard. But I made it.

I think the low-lying cloud, the low light level and the few bits of snow dotted around the surrounding mountainsides made that one of the most dramatic, visually stunning runs I can remember doing. That said though, anywhere you go in the Lakes, on any day where you’re not in a thick blanket of cloud or fog, is visually stunning. But the lighting affects how you see things, can sharpen or blur your memory of the sights, make them stand out or seem relatively unremarkable. Today was definitely the former of the two.