Valley of the Trolley Dollies

What a strange week.

As a friend or two noted: Who’d have guessed, this time last year, that Bankers would become the new Paedos. Least I haven’t come home to a burned out car and slogans daubed all over the house.

Yet…

I felt old and tired and fat, and a little sickly at the start, before deciding that, well, I am old(er) than I used to be - there’s no denying the fact; but I’m working on having my Birth Date recalculated by Darling Alistair, so I should come in at 19 by the summer - and I am tired - of not really knowing what to do in my professional life, other than survive, and of the fact that I don’t sleep enough; have been waking on average three times a night for the past few months - and I have put a little weight on, due to the fact that all the Christmas goodies kept on coming through January and Feb, and, coupled with the fact that I’ve been sickly for much of the start of this year, haven’t been exercising as enthusiastically as I did previously.

But it’s all good. You can’t start climb tge hill until you have your feet firmly on the ground. And I now have some Interesting objectives at work - realistic? Possibly not; but fun, nonetheless, and challenging, which is more important. I have a new haircut (see pic), and have made it back to the gym 4 times this past week, gradually increasing the intensity each time til it felt good, yesterday, to pound both the treadmill and the weights.

And sickly? Well, this morning I can feel a bit of a wheeze / sore throat. But fukkit! I am off to the gym this afternoon. I will not be sick in March; it is decided.

I haven’t been reading anything, because I’ve been writing during my commute. Five days, five thousand words (give or take). The new book. What I’m referring to as a ‘gay cosy,’ which is either a great marketing idea, or the worst made-up genre in history. We’ll see.

It’s at the planning stage at the moment, and I’d been killing myself with the usual “Well how long you gonna plan before you write” thing, but you know what? It’s been so worth it. I reckon another week, and we start writing (we being me and the muses - 9 rather buff Mediterraneans, who just fit into this rather tiny room with me. It’s a cramped space, but we’re managing).

6 of the muses. the other two are with me behind the camera

(more…)

I spent part of today reading the Wikipedia entry for Jordin Sparks (don’t ask; I’m just an inveterate clicker of HtML links, and have a tendency to let them lead me to the more obscure parts of the WWW).

I’d gotten there via Jesse mc Cartney, Leona Lewis, David Arugula Archangelo Argueletta, all winners of American idol or it’s UK Equivalent X Factor, and, reading Ms Sparks’ entry, a thought struck me:

Here’s this girl, who’s just a normal, everyday kid, with a certain amount of talent - not an Einstein, but personable, and talented nonetheless - who wins a competition and suddenly her life changes.

She’s flying round the world, recording a lead vocal in LA, a Backing track in New York, meeting producers in Miami (OK, so, to date, she’s mainly flying around the US, but she’s done some overseas promotion, trust me), and it must all be so very exciting: The first class flights (cos you know she wont be flying coach or that jumped up coach - mid class) the fancy hotels, the sudden seismic shift in your lifestyle and your life experience.

And I remembered what it feels like. When I started at a little Japanese Derivative house in ‘93, I went from just another banking grunt at a huge faceless monolith where all grunts were just that - faceless, replaceable non-entities - to being a grunt at a company that had taken the decision - unusual even in those days - to hire the absolute best they could get, treat them as well as they possibly could, and demand a 100% commitment.

We worked long looooong days, weekends, nights, bank holidays, New Years, whenever; but in return, they paid: My salary went, within a short period of time to levels that nobody in my family had ever earned, and the bonuses (at a time when the company I was working for was making per capita profits miles beyond their competition) were satisfactorily high.

But more than that, there were the Business Class trips. To New York, to Hong Kong; the limousines and the 5 star hotels (and, later, when the volume of people travelling to New York made Hotels a ridiculously expensive prospect, the apartments in Manhattan with Balconies and Penthouse Fitness Suites looking out over the Statue of Liberty).

The dinners at top restaurants - everywhere from Balthazar and Pravda in New York to Quaglinos and the Butlers Wharf Chop House in London (this was before the inexorable rise of the Celebuchef, though I do recall a trip to an early Ramsey place).

All now, somehow, tainted as symbols of greed and hubris. But, back then, they weren’t; they were what I said above: Recompense. They said “You are not just worthless cannon fodder; you are a star, and we expect you to behave - and produce - accordingly. And, in return, we will open unto you a world of Limos and Luxuries.

And I LOVED it.

I still have vivid memories of my first business trip to New York (only the second time I’d been there). Of being upgraded to the front seat in the upstairs lounge, and of the door to the cockpit becoming unlocked and swinging open as we took our night time descent into JFK (could you imagine that happening in a post 9/11 world?); of the magic of looking down on the bejewelled black quilt of Manhattan by night from the vantage point of the captain of a 747. Of standing in front of a wall of window in my room - not a suite, but to a boy raised in a two up two down, the epitome of Luxury - on one of the upper floors of the Downtown Millennium at night as Broadway snaked like a glittering yellow brick road beneath me.

Of calling my parents. From the phone in the toilet. And being genuinely - childishly - amused at the concept of having a phone by the crapper (this was in the days before mobiles; seems like every time I head to the loo nowadays, someone’s standing at a urinal, dick in one hand, cell phone in the other, deep in conversation with their mother).

Of the magic and wonder you can only experience when you look up from your desk on the 80^th floor of the much missed World Trade Centre and look out at clouds beneath you, with the tip of the Chrysler building poking through them in the distance.

Of meeting people - people from other countries, other cultures, other worlds, it sometimes seemed, and finding so much in common, and of finding how much you liked them and how much they liked you. Of being unguarded and open and, somehow, all together in this amazing adventure.

Of being Toto and Dorothy and The Lion and Tin Man and Scarecrow all rolled into one.

And it was - there is no other word for it - wonderful. Every day was exciting, filled with wonder, filled with hard - often stressful - work; but I was learning so much, and I felt the tectonic plates moving beneath me; my life (and David’s, cos we both shared this adventure) was changing, sometimes in little ways, sometimes in scary ways, and, in some areas, seemingly, not at all; but my life was changing as a result of what I was experiencing, and, I just knew, would never be the same again.

And now, it’s changed. And I look at the Jordin Sparks and the Leona Lewis’s of this world (there are only entertainment examples to be had; nobody in Finance is having that sort of excitement nowadays, believe me) and I know how it must feel for them.

And I wonder: Is that it? Have I had my excitement? Is my life - the changed, and, believe me, no-regrets-changed life I have today - fixed now?

Or is there still magic out there, waiting to be discovered?

My Saturday was, supposedly, spent doing a final draft of a novel I ‘finished’ (ie last picked up) two years ago. It’s got some good stuff in it, but it’s not great. Still, I figured, it’s worth one last run through the machinery, if for nothing more than I hoped it would get me back on the writing horse.

Anyways, about one third exists in electronic form on my laptop, whilst the remaining two-thirds are a printout from a long-lost e-copy.

So, I copy the laptop files onto a cd, and decide I’ll retype the missing parts onto the home PC (I know: more typing than writing, but the action is forcing me to read it, and analyse it - which is how I’m happy stating that it’s got some good stuff in it, but it’s not great) .

After an hour and a half, the disc, which I had inserted into the dvd drive on the home pc eploded. No, I mean EXPLODED!

I open the drawer, and am showered with bits of silver foil and glass (or plastic; whatever the fuck those sodding things are made of). I’ve probably got asbestosis now. Or Silver lung (which sounds like something the Cybermen would give you. Hmmm, there’s an idea. What’s Mr Moffat’s email addy again?)

It gets worse: There’s clearly still a shitload of fragmented cd in the machine.

This coming weekend, we hope to be able to open the thing up, replace the dvd drive, and hoover out the bits without - it’s desperately hoped - having destroyed the hard drive itself.

The good news - I found Sunday - is that I had saved the work to an external hard drive seconds before the explosion, so I still have a redraft to finish off, as well as the new book to start , and a few competitions to go for.

Which sort of brings me to the point of this ramble: It’s almost the end of January. I deliberately didn’t make any new years resolutions ‘cos I hate the whole “Do it through January and then let it drop by the wayside” mentality that that engenders. But I did say that I wanted to set some goals - professional, personal, domestic - and try my damndest to make them work; and so far, I’ve sort of done some stuff, but with not much of a plan or a conscious objective.

Time, this week, then, to fix that: D is already signing us up for a 5k a 10k and, as of minutes before bed last night, a half-marathon (to a disco beat, apparently). Which gives me something to train towards; which gives me, in other words, some personal fitness goals to work towards (I also want ARMS for the summer; which makes me sound slightly thalidomidy, but you know what I mean).

The writing is scary, cos I could just continue to tinker with the not-too-good-but-has-some-good-bits book above indefinitely, but it’s time to start entering competitions, putting stuff out there, focussing.

The house needs some work. It’s not falling apart, but there’s the matter of the en-suite shower, the carpets which could do with either replacement or, at the least, steam cleaning, paining and decorating some, if not all of the rooms, and clearing out the garage for once and for all. All (or at least all that require expenditure of a monetary nature), sort of, on hold until I see what my salary numbers are like in a fortnight or so. I don’t expect a payrise - in fact, it’ll, all-in, probably be a cut, but there’s a lump sum year-end payment (we don’t use the B word any more in banking - it tends to get the media frothing and there’s nothing more distressing than a frothy media), due in February, so once that’s in we can start to budget for the big ticket items.

There’s some debt - most notably our mortgage - which I think could seriously benefit from renegotiation - interest charges are right down to the lowest levels in history; so why are we still paying 2006 interest rates?

And there’s work, where my boss (who has just been announced as a departure from the, um, department into the Crème de la Crème talent program) advised me that my objectives this year would be all set by myself (Excuse me: Isn’t part of the job of management to provide me with some guidance? Not, I guess, if you’re the Crème de la Crème). The goal at work, I guess, is really to keep the job whilst not getting too stressed about anything, continuing to work from home when it suits, and ensuring I finish on time every night. But see: None of those are the sort of goals I want to write down and hand in to management, so I’m gonna need all those creative writerly skills to whip up some frothy bullshit that sounds a little more, how can I put this, professional?

Later,

Mwah!