Did you know the Mancunian Way in Manchester won the 1968 Concrete Society Awards? Oh yes, there is actually a plaque on the side of one of the pillars holding the motorway up, just before an intimidating looking impromptu skate park, and a dark quiet stale smelling place that tramps and druggies go to drink meths and shoot up.

The award apparantly recognises excellence in the use of concrete. They review stability, harmony, the properties of concrete being effectively exploited in the design, and value for money. The winners recieve a certificate and a specially designed plaque to put on their concete. And then they will be invited to The Concrete Society Awards Dinner where there are guest speakers and audio visual presentations about concrete. They also no doubt recieve a complimentary subscription to the CONCRETE magasine as well.

You think I'm joking? Visit http://www.concrete.org.uk/ for details of how to get back issues of CONCRETE magasine, get membership to The Concrete Society, and purchase books such as 'Concrete in Practise' or 'Concrete Simplified - designated mixes for structural applications'. You will also find a mention of the Mancunian Way in the Awards section.

Fascinating. Finally I can find out how to use Adiabatic Curing to increase the amount of Entrained Air in my Lift, I am a happy woman.

This woman (who looks suspiciously like Ruth Badger) wants plastic surgery badly for some reason. Turns out that there is this game in the garden where you can win thousands of pounds. All you have to do is hit a cricketball over to a row of five people sitting on stools and they manage to catch it.

The game is coin operated too, so she forces her partner to break into a nearby telephone to get the coins, and it turns out the phone is filled with chocolate money and this doesn't fit or melts into the slot and doesn't work the other machine. They dig around in their pockets and scrape together the cash. The her partner goes over to the bowling bit and bowls her five balls in a row, and she slices them all or the people on the stools fumble the catch so she loses and has to go off empty handed.

Then I wake up.

Matrix Cow (a slight udder fetish perhaps but quite funny) and a John West Ad.

Have you noticed that I never post anything on a Thursday? How strange. I wonder if I'm being abducted by aliens every Thursday - maybe even replaced for the day by a highly advanced automaton who doesn't know the password to the posting section of this blog. Or an evil twin (though some would argue that its normally the evil twin that's in charge and maybe I am temporarily replaced by the nice one on Thursdays).

Or maybe Thursday is when my will to live is at its lowest ebb, and absolutely nothing creative is springing to mind because by this day of the week I am burnt out, and now merely limping towards the weekend where I can recharge and resurface anew for fresh onslaughts. Not that I have been feeling particularly creative all week this week to be honest, and even the dreams aren't very interesting - which is a surprise really as I should be uplifted and spurred on my the momentous occasion of gaining a green house. Or maybe the excitement of the greenhouse is what has scattered all of my creative thoughts, and I need to calm down and get used to being a responsible greenhouse owner before my mojo returns.  

Oh well. At least shooting fire throwing hell beasts doesn't require sparkling wit or intellectualism - thank god for that. Excuse me, I'm just going to have a quick half hour on 'Prey'....

Well its that time of year again. I don't know if you have ever heard of 'National Writing Month' but there is one, and it's in November, and there is a thing dubbed NaNoWriMo which issues the yearly challenge:- starting November 1st, write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30th. To quote them -

"The ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly. Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down."

I've done this twice now. My first attempt resulted in a 60k novel about a post apocolytic nightmare in which a sword weiling unisex female gets imprisoned in an obscure village and has to get herself out (it was crap - even my Mother couldn't say anything good about it). My second attempt resulted in a period drama which I completed with 50k but was equally awful and subsequently binned in disgust.

This year I was going to ignore it, but a friend is planning to have a go with a novel about [editted because they'll probably sue me if I disclose it] and now I've got the itch. I've got a choice, I can either use this to finish my 3rd novel about a [editted because I still might stand a chance of publishing this - early proofreading has resulted in favourable response] which I never finished...or write a completely different novel about a [editted because I might stand a chance of publishing this too]...akin to The Shining only on a desert island... The only thing is, I had a quiet warm up practise at the start of this month and attempted to do the required 1666 words per day required and I failed miserably so I'm a bit worried about signing up now. Then again, even if I only do 20k of words or something if it will get my ass back into gear that can't be bad. And if my friend gets famous from his attempt I'll really be peed off. And its a cheap hobby it has to be said - its either write novels all weekend or hand around in garden centres buying useless things for my new greenhouse.

What do you reckon...? Should I dare do it?

Just to let you know that I am releasing my own brand of children’s shoe, I hope you like them.

Well when I last left it, myself and my intrepid colleague were about to embark on day 2 of the marathon greenhouse erection assembly epic. We were bloody, bruised, and battle weary and after another full day of grappling with cryptic instructions and lethally sharp or dented parts we had still only got as far as glazing the first few panes of glass. I felt I had exploited my helper enough, so the next day after work I finished the glazing work myself using highly specialised equipment (aka a folding chair, two large socks and a butter knife) and suceeded in glazing 80% of the greenhouse and breaking 4 panes of glass. This was not at all due to my incompetance either surprisingly, but because the manual advised me to use special spring clip things to clamp the panes in near the door and window, and these snapped so violently in place (despite best efforts to prevent them) that they broke the glass every time I used them. In the end I had to throw them all out and use the other clips instead...which incidentally didn't stop the door or window working like the manual claimed, the bastards.

I was very grumpy by then though. There is a pic in the photo gallery of the state of my hands at the end of that exercise as well. However, I was glad it was me that broke all the glass instead of my helper so I only had myself to blame. And what that did was necessitate my learning all about the art of acquiring bits of glass, and where to find glass-mongers, and how to hold a sustained conversation with a glass-monger about why I wanted 3mm horticultural glass though the fittings did appear to take 4mm panes because they hold toughened glass, so as you only do 4mm ordinary glass that will probably do, yes I'll take it thank you.

By Wednesday I had located someone that mong-ed glass to my specifications, and by Thursday I was driving over to Denton with an old duvet in the back of my car in which to wrap said sheets of glass for the journey home. It turns out they fitted ok, and the greenhouse was finally all glazed properly and done and dusted on Thursday evening, which was fortuitous as it was that night that it 'blew a hooly' and I got to find out if the thing was truely watertight and wouldn't blow away. When I got home on Friday the first thing I did was run out into the garden to check if my greenhouse was leaking (it wasn't). And today I filled it full of wonderful things....

Now I just have to see how the thing holds up to sustained us. I'm going to see if it manages to keep my Cheese Plant, Horsehead Fern and Begonia alive for a sustained period and I'll also set some seeds germinating. Okay, this is all not quite as exciting as a Top Gear road test, but hell, I'm enjoying myself...

This was quite a scary one. This was set in a huge empty circular room, all dark and moody as though it were lit up by a few LCD screens just off camera. I was looking down on this from a sort of observation deck and there was a naked woman in the middle of the room sitting on the floor curled up with her arms around her legs.

Suddenly this beam of light comes from the ceiling - hugely powerful because it actually seems to be a highly concentrated bolt of flame, and in moved across the room passing across the woman's right shoulder. She screams and I expect her to fall apart in slices or something but she doesn't, she just has a red mark across her were the bean passed, the sort that will fade away. She rubs in briefly but resumes her pose and the laser comes back across her other shoulder, and slashed a few other times randomly across her, each prompting a scream though nothing 'ba seems to happen.

The session seems to be over, the woman gets up and leaves and now I'm in the room. I seem to have gained a scar or mark down my right leg and my friend, who is brandishing some sort of small laser gun thing, is picking at it and assuring me that the laser treatment is going to make the scar go away.

I don't think the scar is that bad and I was to get out of this treatment, but she insists and passes a laser obliquely across my leg then picks at my leg again. Much to my horror, the edges of the scar have now come loose (all bloodless) and then as I picked more a huge swathe of my leg fell away and I had lost half my calf.

...and at that point I woke up and was very pleased to find it still there.

1. I sleep in my new greenhouse and see if I grow overnight and wake up taller
2. I go over to Crosby Beach and stand around pretending to be one of Anthony Gormley's sculptures (http://www.finn.dreamhost.com/another_place.htm). I'm a big fan of Mr Gormley.
3. I kill a large number of mutant zombies and fire throwing hell creatures on a Mars space station (Doom 3)
4. I buy some more grass seed - whahooh!

Check back later folks and see how well I did….

I just had my mp3 playlist on random and was treated to something I hadn’t listened to for a while aka Niamh Parsons “The Briar and the Rose”. It’s actually a Tom Waits song, but Tom Waits (a bit like Leonard Cohen) is a brilliant songwriter but *sometimes* doesn’t have the voice to do justice to the song. I say sometimes because Tom Waits has a unique style that is sometimes bloody excellent for the songs he writes, but occasionally his songs require a delicate touch and not his ’40 cigs a day for 40 years’ voice. This, in my opinion, is one of them.

 

Anyway, “the Briar and the Rose” is a lovely, simple song and it has very nice lyrics too. If you ever have occasion to acquire it, you should.

 

 

I fell asleep down by the stream

And there I had the strangest dream

And down by Brennan's Glenn there grows

A briar and a rose

 

There's a tree in the forest

But I don't know where

I built a nest out of your hair

And climbing up into the air

A briar and a rose

 

I don't know how long it has been

But I was born in Brennan's Glenn

And near the end of spring there grows

A briar and a rose

 

Picked the rose one early morn

I pricked my finger on a thorn

It had grown so high

It's winding wove the briar around the rose

 

I tried to tear them both apart

I felt a bullet in my heart

And all dressed up in springs and clothes The briar and the rose

 

And when I'm buried in my grave

Tell me so I will know

Your tears will fall

To make love grow

The briar and the rose

 

I just wish I understood why someone would shoot you for tearing down a briar bush...

I dreamt I had to learn how to 'pull juggle' for a show 'we' were putting on (though I didn't know who these people were though we seemed to be in some sort of travelling troupe of entertainers). All the other members got other tricks and I was considered unlucky cos my trick required facial surgery to do properly and 5 staples being put into each cheek. The surgery couldn't be done until tmoz though so I thought I would practise in the meantime, and the pull juggle was like a yoyo only much more meaty like one of those metal things you attatch your access card to and you can pull it out on a wire from your belt to use. I was supposed to be able to do tricks like 'walk the dog' with this thing only the way the yoyo thing snapped back was lethal and i quickly gave up. I think we were in an old school building and I was practising by candle light up in the loft. When I came down, the rest of the troope were all doing their thing with hoops and balls and things, but a nurse saw me and beckoned for me to come with her and get the surgery done. 'Don't worry, X had it done and she's fine' I remember the nurse saying as she dragged me down a long wooden clad corridor by the arm...and then I was saved by the alarm clock.

I'm still wondering how the staples in my cheek would have improved my ability to pull juggle but there you go...

...and coming to the Library Theatre in Manchester in February. I dearly love this play. Seeing Shakespeare from the back, as it were - for those who don't know it,  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two characters in a Shakespearian play that get about 10 lines throughout the who thing, but get the final mention after everyone else has died tragically, when a messenger comes in and pronounces (effectively) "...Oh and by the way...Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead". Stoppard clearly thought these characters were somewhat overlooked so he decided to give them their own play where they stumble around in the background as Hamlet goes on, thoroughly confused, and basically just kill time until their untimely demise. It is comedy, tragedy, and philosphy - a great tale. I adore the fact that real bits of the play are woven seamlessly into more contemporary bits. And of course the film with Tim Roth and Gary Oldman seriously affected my youth - I was playing 'Questions' all through University and irritating the tits off everyone.

(From the film) <Ros and Guil have found an abandoned tennis court and stand facing each other across the tennis net>

Rosencrantz: Do you want to play questions?
Guildenstern: Questions? How do you play that?
Rosencrantz: You have to ask questions.
Guildenstern: <looks smug> Statement! One... love.
Rosencrantz: Cheating!
Guildenstern: How?
Rosencrantz: I hadn't started yet.
Guildenstern: <looks even more smug> Statement! Two... love.
Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: Foul! No repetitions. Three... love and game.

Rosencrantz: ...<pouting> I'm not going to play if you're going to be like that....

Of course it has its slapstick moments, but it also has some pretty lovely speeches in it as well. The top dog of these - and apparently the single paragraph that made Gary Oldman not just want to do the part, but effectively also do it for no money and pay his own plane fare over to the set, was this one:-

"Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words,out we come, bloodied and squalling...with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction and time is its only measure...."

Of course its all very well going on at you about this thing, but I better get my ass into gear and book it pronto else I'd miss the good seats. Excuse me will you....

Teddy shaped binbags
(I love these) Indicators for your ears
Light-up bras
Pawsense - software that senses 'cat typing'
A dog thong
A see-thru toaster
Robotic carp for the person who are sick of herons eating their real ones
Fly glasses...for the fly that has everything
A really fantastic Dragon bag
Chicken suits - fashion for your chickens
Bed books
A Headblade
Also check out http://www.jamesmcadam.co.uk/ and his 'Safe bedside table' - which converts into a shield and a bat to beat a burglars brains out with....

And finally this...Do you find this faintly disturbing or is that just me?
http://www.cashelcompany.com/dad.php

Round it all off with:-

Dinner suspended 50metres in the air...
…and a fancy ride home on a sofa

Also two sundry items that appealed to me

Taiwanese breed green pigs that glow in the dark

And the Desktop blues

For a second I thought this was from the Annals of Improbable research but it's not.

Molecules with silly names

My particular favourite is Penguinone (because of the chemical structure) and Spamol.

Okay I had a dream last night, I love having dreams. I was outside this rickety house on stilts like a pier over a pebbly shore and out to see with some old guy. The sea was lapping in and out, but then all of a sudden was pulled taut and then wiggled like a shiney blue bedspread, it looked most perculiar. The old man next to me tamped his pipe and looked wise and said 'all that was wrong with the universe will now be put right'. We went inside and it appeared that the house was actually a petshop full of cages of exotic animals. A small black bird landed on my hand and I started crying out excitedly 'the wierd black bird thing is back! the wierd black bird thing is back!' and a couple of other birds also turned up and landed on me and started twittering. Then the cockateil started talking. I'd forgotten in the dream what they looklike so when it said 'hey it's me the cockateill it then had to guide me to the right cage to look at it. It explained that it was all very well putting things right in the universe but what of you are someone elses wrong put right. Then he disappeared in a cloud of fluff and I had a horrible sense of impending doom. I started to rack my brains for bad things to do for others and I looked outside over the strange sea and saw a part of the sky fold in on itself and become dark as a blackhole. Then I remembered...

...then thankfully I woke up.

I have to apologise to some viewers for my unnecessary use of the word 'erection' during my discussions about Greenhouse assembly in previous articles such as this, and this.

Other terms have been kindly suggested to me. If anyone feels that one of the below terms is more appropriate, please don't hesitate to contact me and I shall adjust my entries as fitting.

assembled
brought about,
cobbled up,
cocked,
composed,
constructed,
created,
effected,
elevated,
established,
fabricated,
fashioned,
fitted together,
forged,
formed,
found,
framed,
fudged together,
heightened,
hoisted,
initiated,
instituted,
joined,
knocked together,
lifted,
made,
made up,
manufactured,
mounted,
organized,
pitched,
planted,
prefabed,
produced,
put together,
put up,
raised,
reared,
run up,
set up,
shaped,
stood,
stand up,
thrown together,
thrown up,
upraised,
upreared

Now I will just check if my flange is correctly inserted into my rear end gusset and drive it home with a big thick tool. ...<blinks> What? Look it's printed here in the damn manual, come see! Shish!

So we're in Day 2 of the Greenhouse Erection Epic (GEE). I am aching and whimpery, my helper is battered and scabbed, and the four main side pieces of g/h that are now assembled are flecked and spattered with blood, as if someone was clubbed to death during the making of it. Someone nearly was.

Meanwhile, the patio contains reminants of the battle - sheared bolts, screws with the head all crushed, strange fragments of metal that look like they should have been used somewhere for something but somehow never were. Thankfully, according to the instructions we're about 3/4 of the way through. Our brains finally went into system shutdown yesterday when grappling with the instructions for attaching the wheels to the door frames, but that was only after a long afternoon trying to identify side glazing bars from end glazing bars, horizontal bracing angles from ridge gusset plates and bolt slots from beading tracks. After all that, trying to work out which way round to attach a wheel to a door was enough to get us tearful and over emotional so it was about then we gave up and when down the Chinese for beer and chicken satay.

Luckily, my helper didn't flee the country at the prospect of a rematch, so today we're going to grimly press on from where we left off. One window vent and a couple of door wheels is theoretically all that stands between us and the glazing experience which *should* be the easiest bit. Then again, this time yesterday I was optimistically thinking we could get the lot done in a couple of hours so...more blood may be spilt before this day is out.

"We shall assemble them on the landing grounds, we shall assemble them in the fields and in the streets, we shall assemble them in the hills; we shall never surrender" (Winson Churchill - speaking about Greenhouses)

Well here I am on the brink of erecting a greenhouse. Over the summer, gardening sort of crept up on me. It started off as an exercise to reseed the lawn, but as soon as I'd poisoned all the grass and reduced it to mud, suddenly it became a good thing to dig out all the flowerbeds too, and transplant all the good plants to different places, and erect an arbor, and plan out some vegetable patches, and and and etc. It was all too easy. I seem to have a flair for this sort of thing too - I'm as surprised as anyone about that.

The greenhouse is about the last thing I'm going to do this year - I'll just erect it and set it up ready for next year's growing season. I've enlisted some help for the erection process as well. I've done a lot of crazy things on my own but I'm not about to start fiddling around with sheets of glass without someone being on standby to call the ambulance should I accidentally decapitate myself. Ooh yes, I saw The Omen. I saw that poor priest guy get his head lopped off by a sheet of glass sliding off a lorry. Okay, I haven't pissed off the Antichrist recently and its going to be harder to be in the position to get my head lopped off whilst glazing a 4x8 foot greenhouse with horticultural glass...but none the less it doesn't do to take chances does it? Especially as it was only last week I had to prove I was over 21 to buy a lawnmower, which was equally bizarre.

Anyway my helper is due here any minute now so I have to go. Wish me luck...

(also see my Greenhouse adventure photoalbum)

I'm wondering if I can get away with trying to join the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists with a 10 year old and-never-used-since BSc and a handful of hypothetical experiements on hamsters. If you know anyone likely to be interested in membership, please encourage them to apply.

NB I'd also heavily recommend The Annals of Improbable Research generally to anyone with a slightly sciency bent and a decent sense of humour. It contains classic ground breaking research such as:

An Astrology Chart for Bacteria

Does a Cat Always Land on Its Feet?

The Need for Double-Strength Placebos

Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

The Sleep-Retardant Properties of My Ex-Girlfriend

Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake

The Morphology of Steve

Feline Reactions to Bearded Men

There's also the book which was one of the more formative publications of my young life along with Tank Girl and "Seawater and the Dragon" which sadly, seems to have gone out of print. Enjoy!

Exerpt from a very wonderful book I’m reading

 

“What is your colour?”

“My colour?”

“Surely you know your colour?”

“People often remark on my red face”

“I do not mean that at all”

….

“No doubt you are aware that the winds have colours. A record of this belief will be found in the literature of all the ancient people. There are four winds and eight sub-winds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day quietly on the hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their rise and fall and changing hues.

 

“A persons colour is the colour of the wind prevailing at their birth [and you can] tell the length of your life from it. Yellow means a long life and the lighter the better.”

 

“Please explain”

 

“It is a question of making little gowns. When I was born, there was a certain policeman present who had the gift of windwatching. Just after I was born he went outside and examined the colour of the wind. He had a secret bag with him full of certain materials and bottles and he had tailor’s instruments also. He was outside for about ten minutes. When he came back in again, he had a gown in his hand and he made my mother put in on me.

 

“Every time my birthday came, I was presented with another of these gowns identical to the last except it was put on over the other one and not in place of it. You may appreciate the extreme delicacy and fineness of the material when I tell you that even at five years old with five of these gowns together on me, I still appeared to be naked. It was, however, an unusual yellowish sort of nakedness. Of course there was no objection to wearing other clothes over the gown. I usually wore an overcoat.

 

“With each year and each gown, the colour will get deeper and more pronounced. In my own case, I had attained a bright full blown yellow at fifteen although the colour was so light at birth as to be imperceptible. I am now nearly seventy and the colour is a light brown. As my gowns come to me, the colour will deepen to a dark brown, then a dull mahogany and from that ultimately to that very dark sort of browness that one associates with stout. The colour will gradually deepen gown by gown and year by year until it appears to be black. Finally a day will come when the addition of a new gown will actually achieve real and full blackness. On that day, I will die."

 

“So from the colour of your birth wind, you can tell roughly whether you will be long lived or short lived?”

 

“Yes. Some of them like purple or maroon are very bad and mean an early grave. Pink, however, is excellent and there is a lot to be said for certain shades of green or blue”

 

What is your birth wind colour do you think? I really hope mine is the lightest shade of cream....

 

(excerpts chopped loosely and paraphrased from Flan O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman”)