This week I’m going to be a bit looser, a bit more personal in my approach to the newsletter. For one thing, I’ve been attempting a social life, so not had much time to trawl for links. For another–well, it’s good to mix things up sometimes. Grab a cuppa and a slice of cake and let me tell you about my week.
C and I both treated ourselves to new phones as early Christmas pressies to each other. My old OnePlus Nord in particular is ready to be taken out back and shot. It hasn’t had a security update in nearly a year, keeps spitting power leads out of its feedhole and was all lag, grumble and whine. Sorry, dude, I’m a busy man, I can’t be doing with this performative nonsense.
There’s always a twitch of nerves when getting a new device working. We take it for granted that the transfer of data from one phone to the other will go smoothly. But what if it doesn’t? What if you lose access to your banking deatils, your music, your photos? It’s unlikely, but all the disasters in the world spin round my head every time the progress bar stalls.
You’ll be relieved, I’m sure to know, nothwithstanding a few hiccups with WhatsApp I am back online, also taking the opportunity to streamline processes and clear out some cruft. It’s a good excuse to play–I’m writing this through Google Docs using a fold-out Bluetooth keyboard which refused to play nice with the Nord. Legacy members of The Readership may recall my penchant for al-fresco writing. With the Pixel 8 Pro and keyboard, I have a solid working solution that’ll go in a jacket pocket. I wouldn’t want to write a novel with it, but for shorter pieces, it’s going to work nicely.
Quick review for you techies on the Pixel–good screen, great camera, excellent battery life, fast, smooth, and easy to use. OK, it’s not the cheapest phone out there, but once you factor in use time (seven years of security updates, four full OS upgrades) versus initial cost, it starts to look like extremely good value for money.
The highlight of the week was a trip to South Street (my first since, crikey, lockdown) for a bit of comedy. Emma Sidi, to be exact, with her show Emma Sidi Is Sue Grey. You may know Emma from the most recent series of Taskmaster, where she made an extremely strong showing against strong competition while dressed like a French detective. At South Street she showed what she’s really capable of, with an hour-long riff on how she imagines enigmatic Downing Street enforcer Sue Grey to really talk and act. It was incredibly inventive, brilliantly written and performed and utterly, utterly hilarious. I can’t really talk about the show without issuing spoilers, but clips are readily available on Insta, so take a look. It was great to go along with film pal Ryan, whose enthusiasm and positivity is always a balm to my withered old soul. Kudos to Readership pals Kelly and Ryan, whose improv skills helped turn the evening into a triumph.
In Reading Writers news, I am delighted and slightly embarrassed to note my victory in our Autumn Competition. That’s two wins in a row—I may need to respectfully withdraw from next year’s activities to give someone else a chance.
An exercise in themed writing, judged blind by ex-Vice Chair of the group, author Julie Cohen, the event was a blast. Fifteen entries was our best show-up yet, forcing a minor restructure of the evening from ‘everyone reads’ to ‘everyone reads a tiny bit and the three winners get to perform their story in full.’ Did I regret writing a story featuring dreadful French accents and parrot squawks? Yes, I did. Did I perform them with gusto anyway? Again, yes. I am such an old ham.
Meanwhile, I see Reading Museum are now properly promoting Art Stories, their exhibition opening the archive and encouraging local writers to respond to the pieces on offer. I urge you all to attend if you can, and look out in particular for a short thing from yours truly. The show runs in the John Majeski Gallery until February.
A shepherd’s pie disaster this week, folks. I thought I had the dish completely nailed, but fumbled the ball badly while cooking for guests. I left the mix waaaay too loose (taking some advice from YouTube cook Poppy O’Toole which was a mistake), resulting in a soupy mass of lamb, potatoes and gravy with a crispy cheese topping. Don’t get me wrong, it was delicious. Seconds were demanded, so it wasn’t the culinary apocalypse I imagined. But there are certain expectations regarding presentation and texture when it comes to shepherd’s pie, and my offering failed that test massively. I should have sold it as an obscure Eastern European stew and offered shots of vodka on the side.
While rootling round my online drives for material to delete as part of the general digital spring-cleaning which goes hand in hand with a new phone purchase, I came across a musing on the nature of time, which I guess was part of an RW writing exercise last year. It’s good enough to share, I reckon. Love to know what you think.
They say there’s no time like the present, despite the fact that there’s no time that is the present. Can you live in the moment? Try it. Pick a moment. Where is it? It’s coming up, it’s round the corner, it’s on you, then it’s gone. Think about a moment, and it’s instantly in the past. There it was.
Awareness of time passing is a sense, and the sense of time passing is a key to awareness. Meditation is the closest you get to being in the moment, I guess, because it’s about losing yourself. Letting go of the baggage that comes with thought and feeling. Letting go one breath at a time and in that breath, feeling the time between the second hand moving.
We are all time travellers. We are all moving through our future, one second at a time, building our past at the same rate. Tick follows tock. Here we come. There we go.
Is time linear, though? We view it as a journey with a set beginning, middle and end, but that’s not really the way it works. We always have the ability to review what’s gone, go over it in excruciating detail, especially if it’s something really really embarrassing. As time goes by, those events can seem more real, closer and truer than the moment we are experiencing as we remember them. The past collides with the present… whatever we mean by that. See? Time travel.
I wrote a story once about a girl who could see every point of her life at once. Time as a line, but one you draw on a piece of paper with a pencil. What must it be like, to see all you are, were and could be? What decisions would you make? How would you treat that people that you love now but hate later, knowing that there is that state-change in the relationship? How would you deal with a life when you knew with absolute certainty how and when it would end?
Let’s end with a song. I figure this Jim Croce classic is appropriate.
That’s it from me. How was your week?
See you next Saturday, when normal service will be resumed.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 