Premature oldness.

I find as I get older that the floor gets further and further away.

Picking something up becomes so much of a strain.

Getting back up is like an ascent of Everest, a multi-stage affair that ends with a final push where you suffer through lack of oxygen.

It's not just picking things off the floor - getting out of bed in the morning has become the sort of tuck and roll job you might learn to do as a paratrooper, I grunt like Maria Sharapova when getting out of a chair and get a menopausal band of sweat on my forehead climbing the stairs.

This is not the first time that I start to wonder whether I'm suffering from premature oldness.

Remember, remember the ?? of November.

I can't believe that it's nearly the end of October already. I know that time flies when you're enjoying yourself, but I'm starting to think that it remains airborne even when you are not having a barrel-load of fun. I feel so old, the days and the weeks and the months and then the years, they just seem to gather pace as you age and suddenly you're 26 and still living at home, writing blog posts in your pyjamas.

Not that there's anything particularly wrong with writing blog posts in your pyjamas I'll wager - you've got to be comfortable, after all. What I like about writing blog posts now is that it feels like it has become fun once again, something to look forward to. I'm coming up with all these little ideas and observations and that. For instance, this week I am going to introduce a fascinating and insightful series of posts entitled 'photos off my phone'. I shall save it as a surprise what they will be about.

But November. November is a depressing month. I'm not a fan of November - what good ever happened in November? It's a middling segue as the year shudders to a depressing halt. Years have usually made it or breaked it by this point, but I'm still on the fence with 2010. I wrote it a nice letter and everything at the beginning of the year.

October has been my most successful (in purely numerical terms) month of blogging since May, with a massive grand total of 18 posts thus far. Now that is a miserable statistic. I shall remedy that in November. November will be the grand month of blogging. Full of posts about how miserable and depressing everything is - so there we go. That is the good that comes out of November.

Establishing a Bond.

One of the great seasons of my childhood was that autumn of ’99 when ITV did their 00 Heaven season on a Wednesday night – hunkering down with my dad, working our way week-by-week through the Bond oeuvre. It was great, it was an education in the ways of the world, the great places and the beautiful people.

A Bond film if nothing else teaches you that there’s a world out there, even it is full of bad guys intent on destroying it. Luckily none of them are left alive by the end of the piece, making the world that little bit safer.

There’s an easy charm about Connery, something quite likeable. He slaps a woman around in a way that makes you think she deserves it, he’s not as fairytale as some of the chaps to follow. In some ways he’s the most terrifying Bond for being so unselfconscious about it all. Of course Roger was the complete opposite; you were unable to take him seriously as a deadly assassin.

Lazenby was underrated, but he was a brute, like Craig is – you find it hard to accept him as a connoisseur and an intelligent sleuth. With Brosnan he was always so cool and quippy that you wonder what part of his job he took seriously, what motivated him. That’s the thing with Bond that you never quite get pinned down – why the hell does he do all the hell that he does?

Which is why Timothy Dalton is probably my favourite Bond – there’s such a bitterness to him, an edge, he brings you closer to understanding, but not quite. I don’t think Fleming ever really understood what motivated Bond because he never knew himself – writing those books seemed like more of a catharsis for him than anything else, that kind of fantasy of what might have been.

And of course, it goes without saying that it’s all totally unrealistic.

Not very realistic.

I was watching a film the other evening and found myself metaphorically throwing yet another something at the screen and decrying a character’s actions as unrealistic – nobody would do that, I thought to myself in that smug, self-satisfied manner that films bring out in you.

But then, I thought to myself, no-one would watch a film if it was realistic. How dull, to be confronted with the realistic. A good film is exactly the opposite, something to draw you away from the realistic, to give you 90 minutes of solace, to take your mind away from whatever it is you’d rather not be thinking about.

These films are set in familiar places, but in many ways we would be strangers in those environs, the distant blurry extras away from the action. I’m the man three people behind Meg Ryan in the supermarket checkout queue, not the Tom Hanks snogging her in the park.

Can we even trust anything we see in a film? The very fact that something is on film means it can’t be trusted – even an improvised film is contrived by the very nature of observation, but a proper film, with its massively constructed set-pieces and its scripts and nine takes, that’s the least realistic situation I could imagine.

I love the Big Bang Theory.

I saw this episode of the Big Bang Theory the other day - this line jumped out at me as one of the recent classics as the geeky central characters have an argument over what DVD they're going to watch: "I don't want to watch Clone Wars the television series before Clone Wars the movie - I want George Lucas to disappoint me in the order in which he intended."

I love watching Big Bang Theory. I think partly because I'm one-fifth geek (that's as intellectual as I can be), partly because it's genuinely hilarious and partly because it reminds me of fun times with Carolan and Andy, who I was living with when the first series came on in the UK.

Jim Parsons is just magical to watch as Sheldon Cooper, he has a Rowan Atkinson quality about him, a sort of 'what would Mr Bean have been like as a savant' feel. Sheldon answers questions like 'how have you been?' with: "Well, my existence is a continuum, so I've been what I am at each point in the implied time period."

I think it's great to have television that's unashamedly smart in its setting out - I don't get half of the jokes and references in the script, but I do love watching comedy that has been written by people smarter than me. I hate seeing stuff that's written by some half-witted imbecile, feeling I could have written that last line much better.

Chuck Lorre, who writes Big Bang Theory, is some kind of writing come-god. Not only is he hilarious, but multitalented too - he wrote the theme to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ('he's a radical rat!'). And he does these tremendous vanity cards at the end of every episode. I pause at the end of every episode to have a read - it's the most funny blog you've ever seen, and it's in a half-second clip at the end of a sitcom. Amazing stuff.

Weather warning.

Panic stations everyone - because there is weather coming. Nothing stops for the weather, except everything.

The weather is the biggest scourge humanity has ever had to face because it is cold and wet and fierce and dumps lots of mud on top of the homes of nice middle-class families. Nobody is safe. Well, except this guy. He's safe until he sells his house.

I wanted my dad to put a nuclear bunker in when he was doing the front garden, but he said he didn't have enough concrete. Excuses, eh? Let's just say that if I die because for some unsaintly reason Coventry is the bizarre target of a rogue terrorist nuclear attack then I won't be happy.

If that man, with such a fear of being incinerated alive so quickly he won't know what's happened to him, if he can get out of the bed in the morning and sell his house and have his picture taken looking like that, then more power to him. What fears do the world hold for men so bold as this?

All there's going to be is hardly any snow in a minuscule part of Scotland anyway. I'll just put a bigger coat on.

I delete a blog.

I deleted my other blog. I found I was fairly rubbish at blogging regularly about cars. Especially the more I got paid to write news stories about cars.

It’s still there for a few weeks if I decide I want to do something with it, but I really don’t think I do.

I like that I have the freedom to concentrate solely on this one thing right here that has nothing much to do with anything, no pressure.

I don’t think you dear readers turn up every day or every week or once every couple of months to see anything in particular. Just a something. That’s all I need to do, low expectations, but I’ve not even been so good at that lately.

Better though, no? Two weeks solid, post follows post. Thoughts, funnies, words. Freshly laid eggs of something or other. Wisdom? No – there’s only a little bit of that, of course. The name says so. It’s like homeopathy, it’s watered down and barely noticeable.

So the long and the short and the in-between of it is that I am a one blog blogger for the time being. And I might end up writing about cars or writing or jobs or other stuff on here. Stuff you might not find interesting. Sorry about that.

Of course, it’ll be interesting because I wrote it, I say both humbly and realistically. We shall see...

I have been ill.

I have been sick in the recent past. I don’t mean in the recent past like in the last thirty years, as if I’m doing some Simon Schama spiel, and I don’t mean in the head. I mean this past week I have been somewhat ill.

It’s all tiredness really. Last weekend I got half my usual sleep because we’re at the getting-up-ridonkulously-early part of the F1 season. And I’m a masochist. And of course, there was that frankly exhausting trip to London.

I knew I was coming down with something because my balance was off. I get this malady when I’m knackered, I call it my tired disease. It’s my sign to ease back and that. My ears get itchy and I start to fall over whilst standing up. My throat swells shut and then I go all feverish. Then comes the phlegm and the coughing. Sometimes I lose my appetite, sometimes the opposite.

It’s all good fun, some kind of a ritual I go through several times a year. It’s not really a cold or flu, it doesn’t deserve to be treated in those same hushed tones, but my aching joints and tired eyes enjoy it somehow.

There’s almost something quite satisfying with being A Bit Ill – just a reminder to appreciate when you’re feeling on top form, an excuse to hold back and take it easy – sorry, can’t – I’m sick. The downside? Well, obviously the actually process of being ill, and then there's the vitamin C tablets my mum forces me to have. They're massive. Like swallowing suppositories.

I left a week ago.

I was in IKEA the other day. I went up to one of the assistants.

“When are you next in?” she said.

“I left a week ago,” I said.

“Oh,” she said.

I worked at IKEA. Clearly the in-store gossip isn’t what I thought it was, because a week after my departure people in other departments are still unaware of the fact that they haven’t seen me. I’m that memorable.

I sold kitchens for seven months to get me through my masters degree. It was a job. I couldn’t pretend it was anything more, anything profound. I wouldn’t last long if that was my entire lot in life, all that I was going to reach.

If I thought that the heretofore was the sum of my existence I’m afraid I would simply expire on the spot. Don’t me wrong – I’ve loved my life so far, but on the basis that I am continually learning, and developing and getting better and doing new things. Any other vantage point is supremely depressing.

But Swedish furniture. Another string to my bow. Onto the next.

I did some commuting.

It’s been a goodly while since I’ve done “the commute”. During my week’s professional sojourn to the fair Britannic capital city I had to commute into my adopted place of work. It was fun, for the first day. A bite of nostalgia, and then the elbowing and the sweating and the cancellations kicked in.

Commuting during my masters study was a 25-minute walk, at one point within sight of some trees, which isn’t to be sniffed at in Coventry. That was pleasant, even if it did occasionally insist on raining, at which point I would insist on taking the bus. Which is to be sniffed at, in Coventry. But that’s another urine-soaked post for another day.

The London commute was mildly epic – walk, bus, train, bus, walk. 55 minutes. Of walk, bus, train, bus, walk. Or if you fancied the variety – walk, bus, train, tube, walk. I had forgotten that absolutely everywhere you go in London requires at least an hour to get there, no matter where you’re going. It’s just that kind of a place.

But the tube. Man, the tube. And the train. Oh, the train. Getting a seat on either before half nine is what I imagine being buried alive is like. Something was odd about the first train I had to take each morning – the second day I realised what it was. I was literally the only person as far as I could see in the bizarre Overground carriages sans frontiers who wasn’t reading something. It freaked me out – you’ve never seen someone pull a magazine out of a bag so fast before.

There is a knock at the dodgy hotel room door.

On my final morning in the hotel, when I had finally got used to the lumpy bed that made my arms numb, the unadjustable heating with a temperature like the core of the sun, the window that couldn’t close and the House of Fun linoleum in the bathroom, when I had finally got used to the idiosyncracies of an establishment so low rent it felt like an audition for Hotels from Hell, when I had set my alarm early and finally got into the shower...there was a knock at my door.

I ignored the knock at the door – as you would at half six in the morning. Who knocks on your door at half six in a dingy hotel? I thought I was about to be kidnapped by some kind of Nigerian terrorist cell, or toilet papered by a squadron of rowdy German kids.

The knocks continued. “Yes? What is it?” I called out of the shower, presumably waking up everyone within a four bedroom radius by producing any noise louder than a fart. No answer. Eventually I got out of the shower to try and get an answer. No such luck for two more rounds of knocking. They probably had a gun.

Eventually – “It’s hotel security. There is water leaking into the room below yours, can I come in please?”

Hotel security appeared to be incredibly dim. I told hotel security that I had switched the shower off and they could come back later. This apparently wasn’t good enough, because hotel security needed to open the room door. I was wearing nothing but head and shoulders and a small towel. And probably an angry face, but I couldn’t see that.

I told hotel security to sod off and come back later. They didn’t.

I spent a second night in a dodgy hotel.

On the second night I had bought myself some dinner at the chip shop and was bringing it back to my hotel room to get corpulent and greasy on the bed when I witnessed the most terrifying and systematic invasion I have ever seen.

Within a space of two-and-a-half minutes as I approached the hotel, two coach loads of German children disembarked in rank and file and invaded the complex. Once I got into the place to get the stairs up to my room we were fully occupied. I finally understood what Belgium felt like.

The whole establishment suddenly had the air of a raucous boarding school at half-term.

I stayed in a dodgy hotel.

So anyway, London. I stayed in this fleapit hotel in Crystal Palace. It was as good as you could expect for £34 a night, which is 74p everywhere else in the country. I only got up late enough for breakfast on one of my four sleeps there – cloying white bread through the industrial toaster, apple juice out of a vat and chewy rice crispies. My usual B&B wasn’t available.

The lobby was beautiful, all graceful marble and nicely-lit coving. It seems the budget ran out at this point, for they only had £130 to do the hundred-odd bedrooms. The smell on the first floor took me a couple of days to place – I realised that pernicious whiff was my car when I bought it. All damp and melancholy – it had been owned by an old man and then kept in storage for seven months.

The decor in my room could only be described as care home chic, all textured wallpaper with a protective covering of magnolia and grime. Adjoining rooms had at some point been separated by filling the door frame with papier mache, I could hear everything going on next door. The first night wasn’t too bad, aside from the 13-minute (I timed it) discussion between the two northerners dwelling therein as to whether their shower had a curtain or not.

The second night I managed to watch an entire episode of CSI: Miami without ever switching the television on and they stayed up until three in the morning watching one of those horrifically inane win-the-universe-by-answering-this-stupidly-easy-question-calls-cost-£8-from-a-BT-landline phone-in quiz programmes that make me want to die. I had to be up at 5am, I wanted them to die.

I spent a week in London.

I recently had cause to spend a week in London, doing some writings on the Paris motor show. It was much like actually being at the show, despite being in an office in London. I reached a heightened state of typing, especially in the last two days of the week. Feral, knackered and totally on edge having written, picturised and uploaded nearly 40 stories on all the cars you’re not interested in from the hottest show you’ve never been to.

Having sifted and resized and waded through and pored over literally hundreds, if not thousands of images of the Paris motor show I genuinely feel like I’ve been there. In my mind it’s that hazy certainty of a dream you’re not quite sure whether it’s real or not. I have certain memories of certain views, an irrelevance that my image is of an image.

It’s incredible how the mind can even consciously just make it up and rewrite it as it goes along. I’m like Russell Crowe in that thing with the people and the papers and the numbers, except I’m crap at maths.

Phone calls are tough, aren't they?

Phone calls are tough, aren't they? I have an aunt in Germany who makes very quick calls - they happen and are gone in about thirty seconds, like she's a heart surgeon in the middle of a crucial procedure - which I know she isn't, because she's 80 and grows vegetables in an allotment. My dad is similar - we once had a three-minute conversation on the phone, that was the longest one ever. Although thinking back I do wonder if he forgot we were talking during the middle of the conversation.

My mum always says goodbye three times before hanging up the phone - I end up doing that thing where I've pulled the phone away from my ear to hang it up but I need to look at the hanging up button just to make sure that it's still there and hasn't moved (only Horatio Kane can hang up a phone without looking at the button, it's something to do with the human condition), but then I hear my mum say goodbye again and I face a dilemma. Do I carry on with the hanging up process? We're rapidly reaching V-Max here and it's a lot of effort to abort at this late stage of the manoeuvre.

I end up doing a sort of embarrassed half crouch into the phone and whispering goodbye as I press the button, cutting myself off mid-syllable despite the fact that I am in fact the one controlling that part of the hanging up process. It happens every time, you would think that I might have worked out a system by now. Perhaps just hang up really quickly, have my finger waiting on the button when my mum sounds like she's nearly done.

I was on the phone to someone else the other week and the whole conversation was odd, but I had the strangest feeling after I'd pressed the hanging up button that I had actually hung up on this person, that the conversation wasn't quite over. I knew it was over, we both knew it was over, but I was distracted by the lack of a 'bye'. A 'bye' is very important in the phone call process, it's the punctuation of the sentence, the oil upon which the machine is greased, an intricate part of the process. To not use a 'bye' is to throw the entire system on its head.

I just didn't know what to do with myself.

Some thoughts on stomach problems.

You know how something can give you The Shits? You know, like - I had this dodgy beef thing at the Chinese the other day, it really gave me the shits. Don't touch the prawns, they'll give you the shits.

Does it always have to have the? Like it's the Congo, or the Midlands, or the Pope. I just find it odd. Specific shits, not non-specific shits.

Why can't you come down with non-specific shits? Man, that last coffee, it gave me such shits.

It just doesn't quite work. I suppose the reference is more towards an action, than any particlar kinds of faecal matter that might be contained in your bowels as a direct result of any specific action. Can you have two different types in there? I wouldn't even know, I'm not a bum-biologist or whoever deals with these things. The shits is more of an adverb, perhaps? Or a verbial noun of uncomfortable pooing, maybe.

I'm determined to get to the bottom of all this, as it were. And if India didn't have to cancel those the Commonwealth Games, then we can make this happen. Truly.

Wit and Wisdom, or some other foolish title.

It’s strange. As I write these words to myself, sat here just me and my notebook, people are getting all worked up about Norman Wisdom’s death.

I can’t often work myself up into a lather over a celebrity – the Diana thing perplexed and baffled me, the Queen Mother thing mildly amused me. The Michael Jackson thing – well, that disturbed me.

Can people be that sorry that Norman Wisdom has died? He was suffering from fairly severe dementia and hadn’t been able to recognise himself in his own films for a couple of years now. There was no particular quality of life there at ninety-whatever-it-was. Are people sorry for his passing, or for the passing of him at forty-something, playing an iconic role?

Diana spent the months leading up to her death frolicking on yachts with her playboy man friend, no fairytale weddings. Michael Jackson spent his last days in a state of induced catatonia and frail rehearsal for a comeback that may or may not have worked – certainly no Thrillers. The Queen Mother...well, when were her golden times? Her legendary status was mostly institutional.

I just don’t quite understand this national thing that happens at the moments – are these deaths a reflection of our own lives? Because certainly only a minuscule number of us even meet such people, let alone enjoy them as significant figures in our lives.

The worst thing for me is that as I look on Wikipedia to try and clarify some things about the man I notice that his death has been recorded already. Reacting in a soppy, sentimental way when you hear about the death of a celebrity is one thing, but dashing to the computer and changing their online encyclopaedia entry? That’s a dedication to sustaining the homework of lazy eleven-year-olds beyond my ken.

A run of posts.

This was going to be my beginning-of-the-month run of posts. Where I get all impetused up and write for about two weeks before getting distracted as the month smothers me. Like a single hand sinking lower into the quicksand.

Then I began to wonder whether if I just didn’t say anything until the middle of the month I could start then and buck that trend, but then I realised I was being slightly mental. But it happened like that anyway.

Every month I try this particular tactic – that is, just to keep writing all the way through the month – but it never works. Seven posts in September was particular rubbish, I’ll admit that.

I started off 2010 with all those noble ambitions of posting every day – not profundities, but something at least. Just to keep connected with that something, that thing that keeps those juices flowing.

It’s never like I have nothing to say, but perhaps it’s the way that I say it. Or don’t. Meandering posts without any point are fairly pointless. Like this one. I’ve not really sat and thought about what I’m going to say here, just that I want to say something. It’s like a one-and-a-half-sided correspondence – more than a diary, slightly less than a conversation. Streams of consciousness.

But I like it, I always have – I think I mentioned the five years of ALBOWIEB from August. I played with blogging back in 2003/4. But now my words are reaching ever more people – my words, but not perhaps my thoughts – I have to think there’s something more to all this than simply doing it. Now there’s a thought.

Having the time.

You know when you get a few moments free, when you’re sitting there and you’ve not really got anything on at the moment – those are the moments that I pass feeling guilty that I’ve not written anything on here in a while. It’s just too much pressure, you know?

To have that ten minutes, or the gnawing thing at the back of your mind that you should be somewhere else – you just don’t have the time to think about writing something interesting, or creative.

Something like twitter, that has become the wallpaper of your existence - the sort of thing you can do whilst you’re doing something else, or when you have thirty seconds free. It’s almost the opposite of considered and thoughtful blogging, it’s just something careless and instant that you come up with and then it’s gone.

It’s not that twitter takes you away from these things, it’s that the more thirty seconds you have the more twittering you do, but the fewer 15 minuteses you have to sit down and reflect. The symptom, not the cause.

I’ve been doing lots of writing elsewhere this past month or so, the stuff that takes your mind away. I’ve never really thought that a person only has so many words in them a day, but I think perhaps the creative brain does.