Not many people are online at the weekend and since it was a sunny day, even I was outside for some of it. Work has no windows, it’s vampire territory in there, but the greenhouse is all windows and it’s shut-down time.
I didn’t get much tobacco this year but what I do have is taken in. Tomatoes are gradually reddening thanks to the tips I had on ripening them so the bowl of green ones is getting smaller. One runner bean off six plants, which is appalling considering they all topped six feet. Good crop of gooseberries, fair on the raspberries, few or none of anything else. We were promised that we could grow Kiwi fruit and bananas by now. We should sue the global warmers for false advertising.
Teacher’s whisky is £12 in Tesco but as I was on from 9 to 3 on Saturday, I was too knackered to drink it all. Still I can finish it tonight. Tomorrow I start at one so there’s none of this ‘a.m.’ nonsense. I don’t think spending £12 on a night of booze (well, two nights really) can in any way be considered binge drinking. Most people spend more than that on taxis.
New Job is a whole different world from what I’m used to. For the first time in my life, when I leave work, it stays there. At school we had homework so the day didn’t end when the school bell rang. Same for university and PhD, plenty of work to take home. All through research, lecturing and consultancy, the work followed me home. I’d get home, have some food and be back at the computer working. No extra pay, naturally.
Now I clock off and work stops for me. It’s someone else’s problem until my next shift. I’ve never experienced that before. All my time – all of it – outside work is mine. If they want me to do extra hours, they pay extra, and it has taken me two weeks to fully realise this. At the moment I take all the extra I can get because reserves are at zero and need rebuilding but it still amazes me that I can just stop and nobody minds. In fact they insist I stop, or they’ll have to pay me more.
This should do wonders for writing and model-building. I have nothing to calculate, no lectures to prepare, no reports to deal with. Bills are covered by my regular hours and the extra go into rebuilding the reserve – and whisky. First pay will get me a Penderyn. That decision is irrevocable and since I’m not a Coalition idiot, I will not be U-turning on this.
I have slowed eBaying for a while because it’s school holidays and people have to deal with their kids, because I’m not urgently chasing the next bill any more, because I want to save some stuff for the Christmas rush and because the rate of price rises on N gauge means that I can use some of the remaining enormous amount to stave off the next financial disaster. Forget shares. Buy railway models, keep them pristine in their boxes and put them on eBay in ten or twenty years.
I have the final final edits of Samuel’s Girl. Last chance to fix things. The editor’s changes introduced errors and lots of extra spaces that I must find and remove. These are impossible to find when the pages are full of the ‘track changes’ stuff but now it’s gone, they are clear.
‘Norman’s House’ is the next one. There have been a lot of changes after I passed it around some readers. I’ll persist with real publishing for that one but ‘Panoptica’ can’t go that route. It’s hard enough to keep up as it is and real-publishing can take up to two years from submission to publication. By then it will be a history book.
Someone in Kelso sent me a bundle of extremely fine optical fibres which are enough to equip an entire OO gauge train with smokers, and might well work in N gauge. Let me know if it was you, I owe you a signed copy of a book by an unlikely-to-be-famous author.
I think I mentioned that grounded coach body I intend to turn into an N gauge pub? These fibres are fine enough to just about get away with in that scale too. It won’t be wonderfully accurate but hell, when your people are a centimetre or less, who the hell can see well enough to quibble? I’ll need a thick magnifying glass to do it, I said I wouldn’t do it because I’m too short-sighted now, but bugger it, I am going to try. If it’s a mess then it’ll cost nothing and it will have provided some amusement. The wrecked coach is worthless as it is so no loss there.
I have OO scale Daleks and Cybermen. The Cybermen will, naturally, smoke Electrofags (Cybersmokes) but the Daleks… have I taken it too far? Ex-(hack)-termin-(cough)-ate. How about the one who takes on human form in The Daleks in Manhattan (which should have been directed by Cecil B. deMille)? I have a couple of almost OO scale models of him. I think there might also be a David Tennant…
I also have some old Dungeons and Dragons figures. Hated the game but loved the figures. I never lost and was always able to terminate the game before the pubs opened because I have the Angel of Death. One tiny hole is all it needs now…
I can’t remember who sent me this picture, sorry -
Large-scale figures of Pinhead are available. I have a lot of fibres. Soon I will have a regular income again. What is likely to happen?
I think he needs just one more, in his mouth. Maybe replace the hooks on his belt with a pack of Dunhill and a Zippo. Surround him with chains with hooks on the ends (thanks for the hooks, Morris, you inadvertently started this idea rolling). A diorama that represents Arnott Hell. Then I might send her a puzzle box.
Smoking Man’s Ride is drying in the garage. I’m going for a green exterior with primer, paint, add chrome parts and then clear-laquer the whole thing. Yes it’s a rush job, a first attempt, but that’s no reason to be totally slapdash about it.
Okay. Enough rambling. Sunday ended two hours ago and I have to post eBay things before work tomorrow. Sleep time.
One more whisky first.
LI,
Have you considered publishing Panoptica in installments, with a modest download fee each time? If it was good enough for Charles Dickens ….
I’m no Charles Dickens
My method is laborious. I write the whole thing, then go through and find inconsistencies, then rip out all the babble. There’s always a lot of babble. It does mean I can end up with a complex tale that doesn’t look like a planned script (because it wasn’t) but which generally makes sense.
So I can’t put it out in instalments because I’ll want to change the beginning.
Six foot runners and no beans? Try checking the nitrogen level in your soil. Nitrogen = All foliage and little fruit. Any signs of cholorosis (yellowing leaves)? NPK kits available from most garden centres.
Sent from the Deep South, where tobacco grows like a weed.
It’s rather colder up where he is, then perhaps people realise. This year, our beans, which usuall give us a hundredweight from about 40 plants, gave us about a stone, or a bit more being generous and eating the ones that are almost firewood too. We are in Lancashire, and have a sunny sheltered garden.
It’s not just the beans. The plum tree has yielded one edible plum this year. Last year I was giving away carrier bags of them. Eight blueberries total, maybe five or six strawberries, no apples at all (but the apple trees are young yet and have only produced a few fruit per year so far). Gooseberries did very well, rasperries were pretty good, courgettes were a disaster – and those grow anywhere. Tobacco only reached about four feet high whereas last year I had plants over six feet.
I think it was that cold snap in Spring. Plants had burst into flower but the insects all cleared off when it chilled again, so hardly anything was fertilised. I haven’t even seen many wasps this year and we usually have plenty of those.
The beans went in where I had tobacco last year, so the soil should have been depleted. Worth a test though. You never know.
”For the first time in my life, when I leave work, it stays there.”
Ditto, since 1 July 2007, when my own employers (highly uncharacteristically, I should say) imposed a premises-wide smoking ban, inside and out, in response to the ban legislation. What a slap in the face that was! Thus, the amount of money which my employers have since lost in unpaid overtime, shortened lunch-hours, work from home and work at weekends which they now don’t get out of me must run into thousands – and I’m not kidding, either. I used to do loads. But, as I see it, if they’re going to be uncompromising and pernickety towards their smoking employees, then it’s fair enough for their smoking employees to be just as uncompromising and pernickety in return. As far as I’m concerned now, I’m there purely to fulfil a contract, as are they. I’m theirs between 9.00 am and 5.30 pm and I work really hard to do a superb job for them within those hours, in return for which I expect them to pay me a reasonable salary, which indeed they do. But outside of those times, now, work just doesn’t enter my head. It’s not my problem any more if the “extras” that made their working life easier don’t get done – they made it their problem the moment they swallowed the propaganda and decided to support the Tobacco Control Industry.
As a result I’ve now got loads more of that elusive thing I never seemed to have before – free time. My evenings are now all mine (Summer evenings are a particularly pleasing novelty, because I now get home whilst it’s still broad daylight and – global warming permitting – even sometimes when the sun’s still shining), I take days off when I’m owed them, my weekends are sacrosanct “no work” zones and I get a full lunch hour (which I now take off premises) with a couple of smokes and a good book every day. It’s bliss! If I’d known how good this “free time” thing was before the ban, I’d have made sure I got more of it!
Do you have a rough idea when Samuel’s Girl will be on sale. Also I would pay to read Panoptica in installments.
John Gibson
Samuel’s Girl should be out on November 1st on Amazon, and gradually appear on Barnes and Noble, Apple, Kobo and the rest of them. It might be a couple of weeks before I get author-copies for distributing signed ones, but the print and electronic versions should start appearing on November 1st.
I’ve spent tonight finishing the final-final edits and checks and sent it back again. Next I’ll get a PDF page proof for ultimate-final checking and then it’s done.
Then I can get back to some form of real life until the next one.
Someone in Kelso sent me a bundle of extremely fine optical fibres
Not everyone can claim that.