The week can just run away with you. Perhaps it’s a symptom of age, maybe a simple matter of perception versus to-do list versus the increasingly urgent need to bank more than eight hours sleep a night. You can only fit so much into a sixteen-hour day. This week, unfortunately, has not provided opportunity for the glean and winnow of the internet which ends up with the half-baked confection that is your soar-away Saturday Swipe.
To put it another way—no linky madness this week, chums. Instead, let me open up and talk in a freeform way about time, roughly ordered into five short segments.
I mentioned last week that my involvement in Dingtown’s longest-running writing group Reading Writers (other groups are available—we have no problem with competition) has deepened this year as I amble gently into the role of elder statesman. I’m prouder than ever of our merry band, and the quality of work I see in our monthly manuscript nights and competition entries fills me with warmth and pride.
I’m not a stand-back member by any means, regularly getting stuck into presentations, event management and entries for our twice-yearly themed competitions. But, my friends, there is a complication, one which I couldn’t really vouchsafe for any other aspect of my life.
I think I’m getting too good at this. I have regularly been a prize winner, but in 2024 I won top billing for both the spring and summer contests.
Immediate clarifications required. RW competitions are overseen by a judge from outside the group, and submitted anonymously. There’s never been any accusation of rigging or undue influence—what would be the point? It’s about the work, not the glittering prizes on offer. I’m not desperate enough for a £20 Amazon voucher to risk my integrity and reputation.
This puts me in a bit of a difficult position. The sporting thing to do, surely, would be to withdraw, at least temporarily. If I do, then I can already hear the derisive jeers of ‘gee thanks for giving us mere mortals a chance, oh mighty wordsmith!’ Damned if I do etc etc. I’ve got until March to figure out what to do. I guess I could write a story and hold it in reserve in case we need an entry to make up the numbers—actually, that might be worse.
Here are the two prize-winning stories what I wrote in 2024. I’m very proud of both. For context, the prompt for The Interstice was a set of photos ‘found’ on an old SD card by judge Damon Wakes of the abandoned Childs Hall at Reading University. Rotting urban infrastructure, which informed the mood of the piece. Hercule came from Julie Cohen’s theme of ‘talking parrots’. I don’t think I need to elaborate further.
I hope you enjoy them. Heads up: The Interstice is a horror story, which includes imagery some readers may find disturbing. Hercule was performed by yr humble etc as part of the 2024 Reading Writers Autumn Competition evening with sub-‘Allo ‘Allo French accents, which those present may have found offensive.
One last thing, which I’ll shout about again closer to the time. Reading Museum is currently running an exhibition called Art Stories in the John Majeski Gallery, which teams recent acquisitions to the collection with short pieces from local authors. Reading Writers is very strongly represented, and I’m in the mix too.
On February 1st, some of the writers and artists involved in the project will be meeting each other and anyone who fancies coming along. There will be readings. There may be emotions. It should be a fun afternoon. 2 till 4 pm. Say you’ll come.
I’ll Outro with one of my most-played tracks of 2024, which also serves as a reminder of new Swipery next week. Yep, we’re right back to it.
At the Reading Writers Winter Social this week, a conclusion was reached – we are in the December doldrums. Consider: it’s been nothing but Christmas since the first of November. You can see the pinched tension in the eyes of every retail worker following six solid weeks of Now That’s What I Call Christmas playing at heavy rotation level on the store stereo. This week is peak works do, making it nearly impossible to pop out for an impromptu bite to eat or quick pint without a crush and a twenty minute wait at the bar. And we’re still two weeks away from the main event. It’s not surprising we’re all suffering from shell shock.
Of course, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, this is old news for us December babies. We are sadly doomed to play second fiddle to everyone else’s good time. That’s if we’re even considered at all. I have dark memories of birthday drinks where a tiny minority (and on one particularly bleak occasion, no-one) showed up. So much for your special day. And folks wonder why I get grumpy at this time of year.
And this is just the background to the sad truth about every birthday, which becomes ever more apparent once you hit your half-century. You start to hear the clock ticking in lockstep with the creak of your bones and the twangs and clunks coming out of your muscles. One step closer to the grave. Here’s a card and a ten pound TK Maxx voucher. Happy bloody merry.
Oh look, this makes me sound like Scrooge on steroids. I know I’m not the only one who struggles at this time of the season for whatever reason, and melancholy in December is hard-wired into us as the weather turns and the nights overtake the days. But I have to be honest, forced jollity never sits well with me. I don’t look good in a Santa hat and have a low tolerance for carols.
But I am also happy to let others get their jingle on. I internalise my humbug. And of course there are brighter spots. After all, I love Cheeselets and Christmas Pud and day-drinking. Seasonal survival tactics mean leaning into the stuff I enjoy, and away from Whamageddon and dreadful jumpers and the tired argument about whether Die Hard is a Yuletide movie. No thanks. Pour me another port, pass the Celebrations and put Bad Santa on.
Would I feel differently about the whole situation if I was a June baby? I don’t think so. Although I enjoy the excuse to cocoon (I still have yet to receive a reasonable explanation for why winter hibernation is not an option) I prefer warmth and sunshine and greenery. When TLC and I were first married, we’d regularly go on winter sun holidays to the Canary Islands and Ibiza. I miss that. Gintonics on a sunny balcony overlooking the sea in February? Dozing by the pool with a good book while the storms lash at jolly old England hundreds of miles away? Come on, what’s not to love?
But you have to play with the hand you’re dealt, and mine is a hard thirteen. So I’m refusing to mope or gloom this year. Plans are in place. We’re spending the birthday night in a hotel, enjoying a nice meal, and seeing the lights in That London. Cocktails will be ordered. Sure, it’ll be busy. Yes, it’ll be expensive. But it’ll be me and my very love, finding the joy in our own quiet way. And what could be more Christmassy than that? Look, it could be worse. I could be like my sis-in-law Sarah or pal Kate – a Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve baby. Now that really would suck.
Sorry, both. But I will be there for your celebrations. We children of the dark times have to stick together.
To finish, let’s play the only Christmas song which accurately portrays my feelings about this time of year. It’s become traditional to have it as the Outro for the last post before X-Day, but let’s move things forward a week or so. .
See you next Saturday for the last Swipe of the year!
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.
By the time you read this, TLC, Harvette and I will be heading north, up to a real happy place for us—Coniston. As such, normal service has been interrupted for the week. However, as I hate to leave you all hanging, a bit of a free form infodump to keep you all up to date.
To start, and for background, here’s a primer on what we’ll be up to this week, based on our last visit to the Lakes two years ago.
Meanwhile, the Autumn/Winter term at Reading Writers kicked off on Wednesday with a session on the craft and publication of poetry. Which sure yes OK, sounds a little dry. In practice, with the expert guidance of actual poet Katherine Meehan, the evening was a warm and joyful experience. Geeky, yes. It’s a room full of writers talking about writing, after all. Another one of my happy places.
Anyway. There was a prompt writing exercise at the end of the night. Katherine passed out tarot cards and over the course of three exercises, teased us into writing some pomes.
Here’s my card.
And here’s what I came up with.
My father told a story Of a garden constellation That he found one golden autumn In a corner of his field
Seven stars all in a cluster Scattered all across the spinach And he stood and contemplated His bizarre celestial yield.
So he hung them in a garland Up above the farmhouse lintel And they shone there till the skies fell And the heavens brought them home
So we toil and work and suffer But the memory keeps us shining Of the stars my father brought us From the great celestial dome.
So. Yeah. that happened. I’m a poet now.
A few life notes.
The best thing we ate this week was a sneaky little weeknight gnocchi hack from the New York Times. Do not, for the love of all things holy, use brussel sprouts. Broccoli works brilliantly. Take the time to get the gnocchi crispy. It’s well worth it.
We’re watching season 2 of Colin From Accounts and season 375 of Taskmaster. TLC has got into the Aimee Lee Wood and David Morrisey comedy Daddy Issues, which is utterly hilarious. I’ve been notified that the Apple+ show Bad Monkey is showrun by the guy behind Ted Lasso from a novel by Carl Hiassen, so that will need watching. The weather is closing in. It’s telly time.
Prime Reading continues to be a source of useful comics goodness. I’ve just found out that all ten volumes of Jason Aaron and R. M. Guéra’s Scalped is up on the service. A black-hearted, blood-red noir set on a Native American reservation, it’s tight, sharp, twisty and nasty—you know, in a good way. Brilliantly written and illustrated, moves like a truck, kicks like a mule oh look you get the idea. If you enjoyed Justified, you’ll frickin love this.
Oh, and I have a low-key obsession to share.
This is apparently a thing on the TubeGrams…
Which naturally brought me here. Delicious.
And we Outro on a high. An utter gem of British variety programming from the 70s, please enjoy Marti Caine tearing the room up with her disco version of a folk rock classic. You won’t be feelin’ low after this.
Over the August Bank Holiday in 2004, TLC and I packed up everything we’d somehow squeezed into a little end-terrace Victorian two-bed house in East London, and lit out for the sticks. The decision to move was partly to do with work—C’s job was relocating out of London and we needed to find a place within shooting distance of the Oxfordshire science zone near Harwell.
The main reason? We were done with the Big Smoke. Too crowded, too noisy, too dirty too—much. We needed a reset. It was time to go west, where the air is clean. We needed to breathe again.
So we looked at a map, drew some lines and circles, figured out the perfect midpoint between where C and I needed to be for work.
Slough.
We reconfigured.
A bit more research and we settled on a big town with a big heart twenty miles west of Betjemen’s bete noire, straddling a river and a canal. A couple of visits and one very fortuitous twist of real-estate fate led, six months after we started looking, to a bulging-at-the-seams Nissan Micra pulling away from Woodville Road in Walthamstow for the very last time, as R.E.M’s Leaving New York synchronistically rolled up on the car radio.
That was twenty years ago, and we’ve never looked back. Reading is our home now, in a way London somehow never was. We have built a life for ourselves here, and although it doesn’t have all the facilities that a big city can offer, Dingtown has a big double handful of gems which give it a bit of a hometown advantage. In honour of two decades in a town called Ding, here are twenty reasons we like it so much.
I have a new love. She is a stylish blonde who garners admiring glances whenever we’re out together. She moves with elegance and grace. She is warm and soft to the touch. She sings a little two-note song when I slip into her in the mornings…
Look, she’s a car, alright? To be precise, a 2024 Honda HR-V in sand khaki. Our first new ride in twelve years. The end result of 18 months of planning, and wishing and thinking and saving.
Milady.
Why now? Well, after we paid off The Big Debt, we figured we owed each other a treat. And I drive getting on for two hundred miles a week for work. An upgrade to a more comfortable, economical and modern primary mode of transport seemed like a nice way forward.
After over a decade in our old whip, the change was a steep learning curve. Modern cars are—different. Science-fictional. The first weekend spent with Harvette was nervous, as we got to grips with all the strange noises and lights, the toots and whistles as she gently showed us how she liked to be handled. Also, she’s bigger and wider than the Nissan Note we’d pulled over 100,000 miles in. All of a sudden the road through Sonning seems very narrow indeed.
Running in a new car is a lot like learning to drive all over again. Where’s the fuel tank lid? Where’s the fuel tank lid release? How do I put on the rear window wipers? All the muscle memory accrued through twelve years of Note ownership went out the window in moments. Reversing onto the drive suddenly becomes a nervy exercise in angle management which, to be honest, the fancy reversing camera isn’t really helping with. I’ll be grateful for it soon, I’m sure, but for now I’ll stick to mirror, signal, manoeuvre.
A lot of research went into our decision. Like, a lot. I became very familiar with the work of Mat Watson of Carwow on YouTube, who is the most approachable and entertaining of motoring journalists. It’s a tough gig, though. Because one thing I immediately noticed once I started digging into our shortlist was that there are very few genuinely bad cars on the market anymore. Sure, there are lemons to be had, but in general if you’re buying new or nearly new, you will struggle to find a car that isn’t comfortable, easy to drive and stuffed with safety features.
Which means that, when reviewing a car, it’s tough to find things to complain about. If you want a perfect definition of first-world problems, look at motoring vids and wait for phrases like ‘scratchy plastics’ (in other words, slightly cheaper finishes on the interior surfaces), gripes about the number and size of cup holders, or rage at the amount of USB-C plugs available. If the worst complaint you can find about a new car is how long it takes the powered boot to open or that it’s a bit noisy when coming up to line speed on the motorway (both grumbles pointed at the HR-V as major reasons not to buy) then frankly, you’re barrel-scraping.
Let’s talk a little more about the safety measures. Most new cars now have more radar sensors and cameras than nuclear submarines. You drive in a bubble of radio, an envelope of security which gives fair warning if anything intrudes.
And I’m all for it. My view after six years of driving into work is that everything else on the road is out to get you. You will be aggressively tailgated if you dare to travel at national speed limit in anything other than the inner lane. People will decide to pull in front of you with half a car-length’s distance then slam on their brakes. In urban situations, pedestrians with their heads in their phone and earbuds in will wander out into the road in front of you without looking up. All of these have happened to me this week, and I thank the full Honda Sensing suite of safety refinements for keeping me out of shunts and crashes. It’s crazy out there. You need all the help you can get.
I’ll be frank. I want a car which makes my commute and everyday travelling needs simpler, easier and less of a chore. In this, Harvette is a star. On the motorway, firing up adaptive cruise control and lane-assist means she very nearly drives herself. I long for the day when I can roll into the back of my motor, say ‘take me home, sweetie’ and be chauffeured back to bed. Autopilot on Teslas or California’s self-driving taxis don’t do the job but, based on the technology available to us here and now, the dream is not that far away. Take the driver out of the equation and road traffic accidents drop to nil. The vehicles aren’t the problem, it’s the numpties behind the wheel.
So why Harvette? That’s a question with two answers. To be honest, we made the choice when we first started looking at cars last year. I drew up a shortlist which TLC quietly decimated. The cars I’d picked were too big for her. But, after she had summarily dismissed the Honda CR-V (which is, to be fair, a big lump) she spotted its smaller classmate. Within three minutes of settling into the seats, enjoying the high, wide views and cooing over the soft-touch steering wheel, we were smitten. And to be honest, every car we looked at after that didn’t have the warm fuzzies we got from the HR-V. A test drive this February settled the deal after a nervous wiggle around the twisty B-roads around Swallowfield, and we signed off on finance before Easter.
It’s all in the gut, I guess. If you drive, you know what sort of car suits you. Neither of us are petrolheads or speed demons. It’s nice to have a car with the legs to get you out of trouble when a three-lane trap of caravans and Amazon lorries is closing in front of you, but we don’t believe in monstering it. Reviews of the HR-V highlighted how it was built for people who didn’t care if their car was a bit—you know, boring.
That’s us, Readership. Target market. We want a decent boot. We want fold-flat back seats which also, cleverly, flip up like theatre seats when you have a big plant to bring back from the garden centre. We want a smooth and elegant ride. Who needs to blast when you can cruise?
And yet. Honda are riding high in F1. The Honda Civic regularly breaks lap records on the Nürburgring. And Harvette will pull 0-60 in under nine seconds—quicker than the 80’s hot hatches so many car journalists revere. We were looking for a boring, practical car. We ended up with a speedy looker. And that colour! It’s sort of champagney with a hint of green. According to the DVLA, it’s ‘beige’. Heathens.
So why Harvette, part two? Well, the name was always going to be Harvey (HR-V, come on, keep up) until Darren at Marshall Honda referred to the test car in feminine terms. After that, well, we didn’t want to misgender. And Harvette sounds like a cool 50s motoring marque that only the real nerds know about. She has her own personality, we feel. A classy lady with a practical bent but a quietly wicked sense of humour. And she really does toot out a little tune when I start her up in the mornings. ‘Hi, Rob’ she says. ‘Morning, sweetie’ I reply.
God it’s pathetic.
In summary, then. We bought a new car. I like it a lot. I’ve been boring everyone I know about it, so now it’s your turn.
And this is why we will never charge for content on Excuses And Half Truths.
And lo, it came to pass the days known as Betwixtmas fell upon the land. The people were filled with dolor and langour, picking listlessly at food prepared days before, gradually becoming as one with their sofas, eyes wide but unseeing as yet another rerun of that Only Fools And Horses Christmas special with the hilarious Batman bit unspools on the telly.
Woe and alas, even yr humble author was afflicted with the inability to recognise the passage of time, and so it was late in the week before he realised he should get his lazy arse off his armchair and grubby mitts out of the tin of Quality Street, lest his beloved Readership be deprived of the high quality bloggertainment on which they had become so dependent.
Greetings, then, from the library at Littlecote House in Berkshire, the venue for this year’s overview of Events What Has Happened. TLC and I have retreated to this bucolic country retreat to break up that Betwixtmas feeling and get some gentle relaxitude into our aching raddled corpuses. As Storm Gerrit rattles the 500 year-old rafters, we’re indulging in all the tea and cake we can cram into our feed holes, braving the weather after the rain passes to bimble in the surrounding woodlands.
Let us, while musing on the choice between fruit and cheese scone, Darjeeling or Orange Pekoe, take a moment to look back on 2023. I’m sure you have your memories, good and ill. Here are mine.
Lincolnshire has always been one of those liminal zones. The places you go through on the way to somewhere more interesting. We regularly spin past the county on the way up to the Lakes or our beloved Northumberland. It always seemed perfectly pleasant. Just not enough to stop.
That was a mistake I’m delighted to finally rectify. Lincolnshire is well worth slamming on the brakes for.
The idea of ‘voice’ in writing seems a bit odd if you stop to think about it. Consider: you’re reading this sentence. No-one is actually saying anything. What voice are you hearing in your head? It’s very unlikely it will be my Essex-via-East-Anglia twang. It’s more likely to be some version of the way you talk—unless I’ve been artful enough to use slang, idiom or odd turns of phrase to somehow get you hearing me. There’s a real trick to that, and I ain’t sure I’ve mastered it yet.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 