Month: March 2010

Flash Stance


I should write more flash fiction. It’s a great way of keeping up your daily word count, while at the same time not having to commit to a bigger project or challenge. Lord knows, I don’t need the encouragement to get involved in those (hel-looo, Script Frenzy).

The format, for those members of the Readership unaware of the concept, is what I used to call a short short. A short story under 1000 words, frequently coming in at well under that count. I could, if I had the idea, knock out a piece of flashfic on my train ride to work in the morning. It can be a way of writing a quick joke, or to map out a concept, or simply to fire out a character piece. The choice is yours. The only restriction is the word count.

Yesterday I hammered out my first piece of flash fiction in at least a year. I had, for once, a proper reason to do so. I submitted the story to a new incentive, The Campaign For Real Fear. This is a competition jointly created and judged by horror authors Maura McHugh and Christopher Fowler. The aim is to find stories that tap into 21st century terrors, rather than simply rehashing the same old monsters and tropes. The limit is 500 words. As Maura and Chris say in their intro, “If you can’t scare us in 500 words, you won’t manage it in 5,000.” It’s a great idea, and one I’m happy to both participate in and endorse.

Closing date for entries is 16th April. I know there are members of The Readership who would excel at a challenge like this one. Gentlemen, start your engines.

(Flash fiction is a very different deal to slash fiction, which I can’t write. I’ve got no interest in writing about other people’s characters, and I’m no good at sex. Writing sex. Sex scenes. I can’t do sex scenes. Shut up.)
(That’s probably why I’ve never got on with LiveJournal. I keep trying to explore it, and end up mired in some Russian teenager’s Farscape/Stargate mashup. Which turns into an orgy. Topless Robot have a great thread of the worst slash fic on the web, which I applaud and view as a public service. They go there so you don’t have to. It’s a dark mirror to the excesses of the human imagination. The Pokemon abortion fetish story is especially eye-opening.)

(I shudder to think what that last sentence is going to do to my Google stats.)

(image from Flickr user degan’s stream.)

Rabbit, run.

I have a totem. A familiar, if you will. A spirit animal that is with me always, a nurturing friendly presence that helps to define, while at the same time disguising me. In some ways it is akin to the daemons of Philip Pullman, in others closer to a superhero’s secret identity. If you have seen me on the internet at all, you have seen my familiar too. I allow him to represent me out in the world.

I’m talking about the rabbit. More specifically, I’m talking about Frank Kozik’s Smorking Labbit, who in different guises serves as my avatar, my game face.

I have been fascinated by rabbits for a very long time. Mankind has an ambivalent relationship to them. On the one hand we view them as coote widdul bunnies, and keep them as pets, and wail like the world has ended when a fox gets into the hutch and chomps them up. At the same time, they are pests, turning verdant grassland into desert, breeding exponentially, causing massive damage and subsidence as they dig out their runs.

In myth and popular culture the rabbit is seen as both trickster and messenger. I’m thinking of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, the herald to new and psychedelic experiences. This figure reappears in the Jefferson Airplane song of the same name, and in The Matrix. When Neo is invited to “follow the white rabbit”, you know he’s not going to be led to the nearest McDonalds.

As trickster, of course, the popular embodiment is Bugs Bunny. Ostensibly, his battles with Elmer Fudd are simple hunter/prey stories. Except we know that the end to the story will not be Elmer sitting down to wabbit stew. But there’s a sheer glee to proceedings, and you know that Bugs delights on getting one over on his foe. He’s not looking to get away from Elmer. He’s looking to beat him. Br’er Rabbit’s adventures in the Song Of The South have a similar resonance. In those tales, though, danger is a little closer to the surface. You get the feeling from reading the stories that Br’er Rabbit is really thinking on his feet, surviving on his wits. If he fails, he’s dinner.

Finally, of course, there’s Roger Rabbit. He’s motivated by love of Jessica of course, but also by a creative urge. Witness the point where he and Eddie Valiant are handcuffed together. He can free himself, of course. But only when it’s funny to do so. This speaks very clearly to me as a writer. Going through hoops purely for comedic or dramatic effect – that’s me all over.

All these characters are masters of disguise too. They are fluid, ever-changing, trying on new clothes and faces in a whirl of re-invention. Bugs is especially mercurial, and his penchant for cross-dressing is well-known, and has led to endless internet discussion on his sexuality. I’m not so sure. I think it’s more the case that he’s bursting to constantly try new ideas, new ways of winding up Elmer, and he knows that dressing up as a girl is one way of getting a rise out of his enemy. Erm, figuratively speaking, of course. Although the question should be asked…

Me neither. Jessica Rabbit, now…

Ahem. Yes, well, moving on.

Frank Kozik is an American artist best known for his concert posters, coming out of the underground rock scene of the early eighties. But to me his most enduring creation will always be the Smorking Labbit. It embodies everything I love about their mythic qualities. It can be cute and decidedly not at the same time. And, because of the nature of the drawing, open to reinvention and reinterpretation. This really speaks to me. I love the idea of my disguise being able to wear a disguise. He can be custom fitted for different events and fora.
This here is the classic black labbit, sweet but a bit fierce. My icon of choice, and possibly ink someday.

This little fella is was up until recently my Facebook … face…,
Until I replaced him with this Kent Culotta image, which somehow seemed a bit more me.
And this chappie is ideal for SF and steampunk forums.

This is really just scratching the icing on the metaphor. Do an image search on smorking labbit and you can see how multifarious my little daemon can be.

One last story, which in a way describes where the rabbit idea came from in the first place. When TLC and I first started seeing each other, we were living a five minute walk apart. It was easy for me to spend more and more time at her place, until I had practically moved in. At which point I discovered that her flatmate had coined a nickname for me.

I was “Bobsy Rabbit, the lodger.”

It’s all been downhill from there, really.

A Writer’s Rites

As we’re coming up on another month of writing, I thought you might be interested to know how I go about knocking out 1670 words or four pages of script a day. It’s not as tough as it sounds.

My prime time for writing seems to be the morning. It’s when my brain seems to spark, and the words come out with very little effort on my part. Frequently, the only thing stopping them coming out in one big lump is my typing speed. This at least gives me the chance to think ever so slightly about what I’m slinging onto the page. After about two o’clock, I can feel my mental processes slowing a little, and writing then becomes a bit more of a chore. I’m an early bird, not a night hawk, and I work accordingly. I’ll only work after 8pm if the situation is desperate (which with NanoWrimo, it often is).

I write on the move. Specifically, on the train between Reading and London Paddington, which works for me on a ton of different levels. Firstly, it falls into the right time slot for creative thinking. Secondly, it’s distraction-free. I can’t hop onto the internet, and phone signal goes into a black hole at least twice on the trip. I have become adept at picking the train that will always have a free seat (the 6:56 from Worcester Shrub Hill, if that level of detail interests you) and for the half-hour journey into That London I can successfully immerse myself in the task at hand. A lot of my recent blog posts have come from the train. If I’m using my iPhone and the excellent WordPress app, then they can be written and posted before I get into Paddington. Anyone that bitches about the iPhone keyboard clearly needs to give it a bit more time, because if a fucknuckled gimp like me can knock out three hundred words in a train trip, then anyone can. If I have to work a weekend, which means slower trains, then I can easily get a thousand words done.

I can and do write at home, but then it’s in concentrated half-hour bursts, After that the temptation to hop onto Twitter or browse my Reader feeds becomes just too strong. I read somewhere that concentration on any one task will slip after 45 minutes. It’s slightly less than that for me, or maybe it’s just for the five years that I’ve been using this method I’ve got used to working in half-hour sessions. But really, it’s down to organisation. I find that if I break the word count for the day down into easily manageable chunks, then I’m less likely to give up and fart around on something else. In simple terms, if I have a day at home, three half-hour sprints would get me a day count of Nano. That’s not really such a bind, and if I work through the morning that’s me done before lunch.

My writing tool of choice nowadays is a Dell netbook, the Mini10v. Dirt cheap and simple to use, with a great, full-width clicky keyboard. It’s light and portable, and doesn’t have all my stuff on it, unlike my beloved Blackbook, which is starting to show it’s age after years of being lugged around.

The Dell is running Ubuntu, a version of Linux that I’m starting to really enjoy. It’s like all the good bits of Windows without any of the virusy nonsense. This is intriguing, as one reason for my choice of the Dell was that it was relatively easy to hack into running OSX, a process called Hackintoshing. I don’t plan to do that now. I’m having much more fun playing with an open system, and getting it to work in the way I want.

I’m not leaving The Church, of course. I am and remain a profound and evangelical Machead. However, working with Ubuntu has taught me that I’m actually less platform dependent than I thought. Without really thinking about it, I have been moving away from proprietary software and towards open-source equivalents. I’m a big fan of OpenOffice.org, which has great auto-correct and formatting tools. I haunt the internet using a mix of Firefox and Chrome, depending on mood. Both are pimped. There’s no excuse for anyone running Firefox not to add extensions like Flashgot and Shareaholic. And I rather like Scribefire, a fully featured blogging platform running in the browser.

My email and calender needs have been cloud-based for a while now, and an arcane net of apps ensure that events update to all our devices, both at home and away. Google Docs and the brilliant Dropbox take care of syncing and back up of all my writing.

The key is flexibility and mobility. I’ve learnt to my cost that I have no control over when and where an idea will drop on me. The seed for Pirates Of The Moon came out of a single misheard phrase in a conversation. Sometimes I don’t even get that much of a warning. The point is, I need to be ready. if an idea is not written down, if an appointment is not noted when I make it, then it may as well not exist. I have a small leather satchel (not a man-bag, alright? A satchel. Shut up.) which carries the Dell, chargers, notebooks, et al and means that I’m prepared for anything, anywhere. I carry my writing space with me. Give me a chair and a flat surface, and I’m good to go. Actually, at a push, I can write standing up on the train. But that’s maybe pushing things a little too far. I may be a nomadic writer, but I’m not a masochist.

Script Frenzy


Because I believe in making life difficult for myself, I am doing Script Frenzy this year. Hence the badge over yonder.

This is the script-based version of the Nanowrimo challenge that I’ve done for the past 4 years now. Same challenge, different discipline.

The idea is to come up with a 100 page formatted script in a month. That’s as restrictive as the challenge gets. It can be film, stage or comics based, and on any subject. As long as you get those hundred pages out, the rest is up to you, foolish writer.

This year, to add to the firsts, I’ve decided to write a graphic novel. My love and respect for the form knows no bounds, but it’s been a while since I did anything creative with it. It’s about time I put out and got some words on paper which is, after all, the ethos of Nano and Script Frenzy. Their logline should be Just Do It, but I think a plimsoll company got there first.

Just to make things even more complex, I’m trying an experiment in form. A couple of members of the Readership have been bored to oblivion already by me banging on about the transformative nature of the comic I’ll be writing, and you can probably figure out what I’m going to try if you look up my recent comics posts. I don’t want to say too much, because I think I’m onto something genuinely new here. Let’s just call it an old school response to the idea of digital comics.

It begins, appropriately, on April Fools Day. I’m prepping like mad now, working on format and structure. I did some sums last night, and realised that to do the story I have in mind properly, I will need to write 112 pages instead of the hundred required. Seven blocks of sixteen pages. I’m breaking the task down into managable bites, figuring out page counts for each day and week. This, to me, is the only way to do it. The breakdown works out to just under 4 pages a day. A hundred pages of script might not seem like much, but I’m planning on getting 25 panels into some of them. (Any comics professionals reading this just winced at the last sentence. Comics generally have between six to eight panels per page. Watchmen was notorious for sticking to a nine panel grid that is a pain to write and draw.) At some points, I think it’ll be pushing it to get a page a day done.

I’m nervous and incredibly excited about this project. It genuinely feels like a leap into the unknown. If it works, then I think I might just have hit on a new way of getting comics onto the page.
If not, then hey, it’s only a funnybook, right?

Cape Wrath

...and you really don't wanna know where he keeps his supply of web fluid...

I’ve had it with superheroes. There, I said it. I’m sick of capes, bored with masks. I’ve had enough.

There’s no one event that has led me to this point. No real tipping point. Rather, it’s a feeling that’s developed gradually, as I flick through the rows of books in Forbidden Planet, then gently put them back and walk away, shaking my head. It’s a terrible thing for a comic fan like me to say, but I don’t think Marvel and DC have anything to offer me.

Superheroes are no fun anymore.

I’ll try to untangle the sick knot of dread I get when I pick up a mainstream superhero book. If I could quantify it into a sentence, it would probably be “Oh. More of the same, then.” This is not really the fault of the writers or artists, who in some cases are doing splendid work. No, it comes down to the nature of the superheroes themselves, and how little they can change.

Consider. Superman’s first appearance on the front cover of Action Comics was September 1938. Batman haunted Detective Comics not long afterwards. Most of the Marvel heroes we love came out of a massive bolt of creativity blasting out of Times Square in the early 60s, although Captain America and the Sub-Mariner can be traced back to dubyadubyatwo. A fledgeling comics writer coming to these characters is faced with at least 40 years of backstory, reinvention, retcon, downright oddness and ill-thought experimentation. All of which is canon. All of which, if misinterpreted or misread, will have fanboys on your back like a horde of ravening ferrets. The Batcave HAS to stay the Batcave. Superman will never move out of Metropolis, and Wonder Woman will never get out of that ridiculous bustier. There’s the chance for great opportunity there, but it’s constrained within the tropes and iconography of characters that haven’t changed in a real sense in decades. You can’t change the costume. Well, you can, but it’ll change back within the year. You can’t change the thin slick of motive that clings to the characters as closely as the spandex they wear. Batman will never get over the death of his parents. Supes will always be the immigrant made good.

Most importantly, you cannot kill them. As Si Spurrier put it most eloquently, superhero stories have beginnings and middles, but no end. The death of a character is simply a hook to hang a year or so of storyline from before you bring them back. Steve Rogers, the original Captain America, and Bruce Wayne are both about to reappear after a year dead for tax reasons.

Both these resurrections have taken place after massive multi-book, months-long events that have promised to completely redefine the universes in which they are set – which will do nothing of the sort. There will be a big bang, and when the dust has settled, the landscape will re-emerge without looking any different. These books, which I call Crisis storylines, are at best bloated and self-indulgent, and are blatant marketing exercises

A trope of the Crisis storyline is that they involve deep trawls through the archives to dredge up characters and situations that really should have remained buried. They are convoluted, arcane in detail and expensive to follow, requiring the hapless reader to buy not just the core book of the series, but the rags of the associated characters as well. They are certainly no good as entry-points to the genre. In fact, if I have to recommend comics to the beginner, the current raft of superhero books would be the last place to start.

These events are the point where I really lose patience with superhero comics. They’ve been a part of the Marvel and DC universes since the 80s, and have to my mind never been up to much. They involve characters that are at best second-stringers being pushed forward, messed about with and then shoved aside. Often they will be reintroduced and then despatched by the Big Bad of the story in a couple of pages.

The most horrible version of this in recent comics history occurred in the Identity Crisis storyline, when the wife of Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man was raped and murdered. Ralph and Sue were always light, funny characters – the Thin Man couple with superpowers. By putting them at the centre of a hamfisted attempt to bring Law And Order – SVU to DC, the writer Brad Meltzer managed to make the Dibnys both pathetic and vulnerable. And as a result, a lot less interesting. Identity Crisis ended up making me feel like I needed to wash my hands after reading.

The trouble with taking your average superhero into dark places is that it’s too easy for the whole enterprise to collapse into silliness. It takes a writer like Alan Moore or Frank Miller to be able to take the inherent ridiculousness of the superhero concept and place it into a slightly more realistic setting. Notice I say slightly more here: Watchmen and the Dark Knight books are both set in places that are absolutely not supposed to be the world we recognise. That’s how they get away with it. Without a careful approach, you end up with a book like Identity Crisis, that manages to be both horrible and stupid all at once. A fair old achievement.

Finally, though, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Marvel and DC are starting to twig that something ain’t right. Both publishers have run storylines where most of their characters have been resurrected as zombies, which shows at least an iota of irony and self-awareness. If you’re gonna bring someone back from the dead, do it right. There is also a move towards a lighter, more inclusive style of storytelling, breaking from the gloom and darkness that has settled over the books for an awfully long time. There are always exceptions, of course – Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Connor’s work on Power Girl has been a joy, with the right mix of exuberant storytelling, self-deprecating wit and just the right level of cheesecake. And you can’t go wrong with anything coming from the desks of Jeff Smith and Darwyn Cooke. These guys do work that has a retro sheen, but modern sensibilities. Solid storytelling and art that isn’t afraid to laugh at itself.

I would point at DCs Wednesday Comics experiment as a template to adopt or at least an idea that’s worth a second look. Rather than massive and confused webs of storytelling, the focus here was on weekly, single page shots. Espressos instead of venti moccochoccachinoes. Based on the Sunday newspaper foldouts that were a mainstay of American comics experimentation in the 50’s (the funny pages were where Will Eisner, one of the masters, learned his chops, after all) the Wednesday comics are big, cheap foldouts that are best read spread out on the floor, to be pored over with milk and cookies to hand. Imagine a Crisis storyline run through a couple of issues of something like that, where each page brings a new character, a new struggle. I’m reminded of Paul Grist’s work on Jack Staff, which took the multi-story, multi-character approach of British comics like Victor and my beloved 2000AD, and then weaved a single storyline through them. There’s less inclination to ramble when you only have six pages to get your characters in and out of trouble.

They were a revelation to me when they appeared last year, and I feel appropriately evangelical about this format that my next writing challenge will involve a story using those formats. Trust me, no capes involved.

More news on that in my next post. Stay strong, true believers…

For Your Consideration

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Oscar season is over for another year, the tents and awnings are coming down, the pretty dresses are, for the most part, going back to their designers.

What have we learnt this time around, Readership?

1. It is possible to be both Best and Worst Actress at the same time.

2. You can win a Best Cinematography Oscar even when your cameras were principally used as motion capture devices.

3. You will win an Oscar eventually, if you hang on in there for long enough. The Oscar will never be for your best work, but for the one that most accurately portrays your public image. For example, Jeff Bridges didn’t win the Oscar this year. The Dude did.

4. Oscar ❤ Pixar, unconditionally.

Every year I can depend on the Oscars being even more bloated, self-congratulatory and pointless. There were no major surprises, no astonishing turn arounds. I’m pleased Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker grabbed so many awards, but what does that prove?

5. Oscar ❤ war movies.

5a. Oscar hates SF. Avatar was there because Oscar is scared of James Cameron. District 9 was there because Oscar ❤ Peter Jackson.

The question we should be asking is why does it take until the second decade of the 21st century for a woman to win Best Direction Oscar?

Further, the illusion of choice in the Best Film shortlist drives me nuts. Expanding the list out to ten does not give us more choice. There’s still a shortlist of 5. It’s just been bloated out with a B-list that have no chance of getting the award. Oscar has been capable of some deeply eccentric choices over the years, but it was blatantly clear this year which movies were in with a shot. The football movie? Uh-uh. The harrowing race/abuse tale? I don’ sink so. The cartoon? Gimme a break. There’s already a slot for Best Pixar Movie of the year.

And then there’s the Moon debacle. The short, sharp debut of a bright new talent, featuring an astonishing, nuanced performance from one of the best actors of his generation was ignored by Oscar this year. It’s partially the fault of Sony, of course, who decided that the film was not worthy of consideration (way to back your creative teams, there, guys. Nice work.) Nonetheless, there should have been an inkling that the film was perhaps worth a look after it did so well at the Baftas. By then, it was probably too late. Another missed opportunity for Oscar to show that it had interest in a broader range of films. But no. Once again Oscar showed hisself to be old, slow and out of touch. It’s the awards show that’s just too easy a target, too bloated and dumb to actively hate. It’s just there, wheezing into view every March like a despised older relative, staying that little bit too long, before blubbering away again leaving nothing behind but a faint whiff of cabbage water and a couple of trinkets that’ll just gather dust on the sideboard.

Until a horror movie wins Best Movie, I shan’t be watching again.

How A Geek Rolls


There seems to be a visual shorthand that film-makers employ when they want the viewer to quickly get the idea that their lead character is something of a geek. Oh, sure, there’s the usual sartorial (glasses, trousers that run slightly too high above the ankle, slogan tees) and home furnishing cues (retro SF movie posters, computers front and centre, toys EVERYWHERE), but there’s another, slightly more subtle method.

The film geek will not go to work or school in the usual means of transportation. No, we’re looking at grown men on bikes. Or cars that are falling to bits, strangely decorated or just plain don’t fit the landscape.

The humble bicycle is a great way of letting your audience know that your character is a bit … well, different. You will see them on their contraption within the first ten minutes of the film, frequently within the title montage. If your protagonist lives in a college town, or god forbid Oxford or Cambridge, then it’s a cert that they will be cycling to work. Steve Carell’s character in the 40 Year Old Virgin hits all these notes, negotiating rush hour traffic with an aplomb that he simply can’t apply to his love life. The fact that he doesn’t drive actually becomes a plot point later in the film, but nevertheless he’s easy to pick out of a crowd.

This trope doesn’t just apply to the movies, of course. Uber-geek Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory hasn’t been behind a steering wheel since driver’s ed. This again becomes a plot point in the season three episode “The Adhesive Duck Deficiency” when he has to drive Penny to hospital after she slips and falls in the shower. Hilarity ensues.

There’s a message here, of course. Geeks ride bikes because the rest of us drive cars.* If you choose not to drive, then there is by pure deductive reasoning something a bit odd about you, and the writer can use that off-key note for comic or emotional effect. Just look at John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, reimagining the universe while spinning through Princeton on a Shwinn.

If the geek can pull him or herself together and get behind the wheel of a car, then [deity] forbid that they are put into a Ford Focus. No, although the cues are a little more subtle, the geek choice of ride will be either an old banger or a wilfully obscure choice of marque. Take, for example, the Ford Pacer that Wayne and Garth cram into in Wayne’s World. Molly Ringwald drives a beautiful, if somewhat battered, VW Karmann** Ghia in Pretty In Pink. And of course, let’s not forget the geekiest transport of all – Professor Emmett Brown’s time-travelling Delorean.

I watched Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs this week, and was heartened to see my theory in action. The circusy recyclers of the title use a fine array of old lorries and that peculiarly French method of transport, the lawnmower-engine powered truck-trike, to get around. It’s a neat juxtaposition with the villains of the piece, who smooth about in high-end Peugeot limousines. In fact, it seems to me that the quirkier the transport, the more heroic the driver. Their ride seems to reflect their personality. Just look at the Munstermobile.

But to my mind, there is one car that rules them all. The car that belongs to fiction’s alpha geek. The quintessential loner, a technological whizz who has trouble with girls and spends more time in front of a computer in his basement than he likes.

But MAN, does he ever have a sweet ride…

*I ride a bike. This has nothing to do with anything.

**Due to poor research, I initially had Andie’s ride down as a Carman Ghia. Cheers to Charlie, the Readership’s motoring correspondent for setting me right.

Food Hell

Let’s start with a song, shall we?

Amanda Palmer has, I think, nailed the experience of food hate. We all have one. That foodstuff that you don’t just dislike (sprouts), or refuse to have on your plate (sprouts) but will actively force you out of the room. Marmite have built an entire advertising strategy out of this, positioning their product as one that neatly divides the nation. I fall into the hater camp, I’m afraid. I will, on occasion, use it in a stew or casserole to give some of the deep, rich umami tang for which it’s rightly known. But spreading it on toast seems such a ridiculous concept to me. You may as well dollop gravy browning on your morning slice. Or a turd.

Marmite are now trying it on a bit, I think, by launching the Marmite Bar. This is a cereal bar, one of those sticky, oaty slabs that can sometimes do the job if you’re up late and don’t have time to put milk onto a bowl of cereal in the morning. Most cereal bars have some manner of fruit in them to lighten the mix. Marmite Bars, and my gorge is actively rising as I write this, remove the fruit, and replace it it with Marmite. It’s a savoury cereal bar. Just what you need to smack your tonsils awake on a Tuesday morning. It’s a product that Marmite are actually pitching as a dare. “Have we gone too far?”, the posters cry. It’s a bold move, but I can see it backfiring. I know I’m not the target market (probably the opposite, in fact) but I can’t see anyone wanting to buy the horrid things. I have trouble conjuring up a more revolting prospect.

Oh, who am I kidding? Let’s talk about my own personal food hell.

(Digression. I’m a fan of the BBC cookery show Saturday Kitchen Live, which shows archive food shows alongside live cookery skits and a spectacularly pointless omelette race. One silly feature is Food Heaven, Food Hell, in which the token celebrity of the day is quizzed on their favourite and least favourite food, and then subjected to a vote in which they will eat a dish based on either. No-one yet has dared to pull the bullshit alarm on this trite concept:

“So, (B-list celebrity with something to plug) , what is your Food Hell?”
“Well, (avuncular host) , my Food Hell is prawns.”
“Oh, really? (initiate flirt/banter mode, dependent on gender of guest) And why, pray tell, is that?”
“Because I’m violently allergic to them, and if I eat one I will go into toxic shock and die.”

It’d be nice to see that once. Don’t you think?)

Aaaanyway. My food hell. The humble egg is a cornerstone of world cuisine, a foodstuff as versatile as it is loved. Millions of people go to work on one every morning. They are cheap, nutritious and the foundation of the Great British Full English Breakfast.

Put a fried or lightly scrambled egg in front of me, and I will run out of the door. My lovely wife, my deary darling, will sometimes indulge in a breakfast of scrambled eggs soused in ketchup, which will send me to the bottom of the garden with my hand clamped firmly over my mouth. I have a friend that will send me photos of any particularly runny fried egg sandwiches he manages to get hold of. I’m not kidding here, the thought of it is making me feel a bit sick.

It’s partially a texture thing, partially a smell thing. I do have a problem with gelid foods, which I think is a common problem with Food Hell in general. Many people I know will cite tomatoes or mushrooms in their spit list, because of the squishy, half-set texture. It’s notable, I think, that I don’t have a problem with eggs per se. I’ll happily cook with them. I make a mean pancake, will happily eat a quiche or even a Spanish omelette, and will even whip a just cracked egg into fried rice. But the concept of runny yolk does not fit well in my gut. And I honestly have no idea where it’s come from. As far as I know, I have always hated eggs. There must be a memory I’ve blanked out somewhere, of a particularly runny soft-boiled egg and soldiers that just flipped a switch in my tiny head. In his memoir Toast, Nigel Slater writes of how his mother’s insistence of forcing him to eat runny egg put him off them for life. I think I’m the same.

This made me a particularly miserable vegetarian, of course. In fact, it was eggs that turned me away from the righteous path. On a driving holiday through France, it soon became clear that the only thing that was available for salad-huggers like me and TLC was omelettes. Even the salads had hard-boiled egg in them, which tainted them completely. I tried to man up, and ordered a cheese omelette one night. I managed one bite, and that tiny morsel ended up back on the plate. I spent a week eating bread and cheese, and the occasional bowl of frites. It was horrible.

Finally, on the last night of the trip, I cracked. We went to a seafood restaurant in Le Havre, and I ate cod with puy lentils. It was a magnificent, Proustian moment. I can still taste the meal now. It was back down the slippery slope for me from there. I lasted barely a year as a vegequarian, and am now a rabid, unapologetic carnivore.

Some years after that trip TLC and I went to Paris, and found a decent vegetarian restaurant. it was fantastic. The food was simple, pure and delicious. If there had been more places like that in Brittany in the spring of 1992, I’d probably still be a courgette-muncher today. (I still am, but not exclusively.)

So, let me know, Readership. I’m intrigued. What foods really don’t do it for you? Are you a Marmite lover or a hater? More to the point: would you eat a Marmite Bar?