Map

I love maps. I always have. I'm not sure of the reason for this. There were no ancient maps hanging on the walls of my parents' house when I grew up. There were, however, books. Probably two multi-volume books paved the way for my current adoration of cartography: the vast, two-shelf-filling American encyclopaedias and The Lord of the Rings.

Why my parents - not particularly known for their adoration of American culture, particularly (in my Dad's case) when it came to the pronunciation of words, had spent clearly a bundle of money on 10 square feet of educational book that couldn't even spell properly I don't know, but these volumes were the main source of all knowledge for me as I grew up. From the moment I could read, instead of indulging my many questions, I was merely told to "look it up". So I did.

The encyclopaedias were, naturally, full to the fake-leather brim with words and pictures. They were also, naturally, full of maps. Lots of maps. Maps in extraordinary quantities. Glossing over their American obsession with dedicating more book space to US states than to European countries, the books contained double page spreads of surprising detail. The detail was particularly surprising because the books had been printed in the 1960s, and large swathes of the planet were still owned by Britain, causing the occasional problem for researching a geography project in 1981. More fascinating, the entire world appeared to be delicately shaded in pastel colours. A gentle pink here, a soft yellow there. I thought for a while that there was some deep relevance to this - after all, England was coloured a delicate shade of green, and that seemed pretty appropriate. If I'd gone to, er, Northern Rhodesia, I would have fully expected to be greeted by a landscape that was entirely yellow (as opposed to the overwhelming lavender of Southern Rhodesia). It would look pretty amazing from a plane. Beyond the subject country's* borders, surrounding lands would be a dull sepia, as if crossing the border took you back even further in time to a world of handle bar moustaches and cheerful oppression of natives. In some cases it probably did.

Fortunately, lessons at my school seemed to steer clear of the late 20th century post-colonial world, or at least the British post-colonial world. This meant the encyclopaedias never got me into trouble, though it also meant that I was 17 before I realised that Britain used to own Canada. No harm done, you might argue.

Real maps were one thing. Tolkien taught me that made-up maps could be even more fun.

It wasn't just that I enjoyed his, fascinating as they were (I particularly loved the tiny, almost 3-D renditions of mountain ranges, so much more interesting than contour charts on a real map). As soon as I worked out that with careful vibration of the hand one could could draw some very convincing coastlines, I was an unstoppable fictional cartographer. Fjords were the inevitable consequence of my wobbly hand technique - no 100-mile beaches in my worlds - but I enjoyed myself with huge inland seas that defied all the laws of nature, mountains that if to scale would probably have been 100 miles high, forests that looked rather like clouds, capital cities that stood nowhere near water courses... you name a naive creative cartographic oversight, I probably committed it. But it didn't stop me. I created continents, island kingdoms, planets, solar systems.

It was a planetary comfort zone. I couldn't draw people or monsters very well (except, oddly, for their eyes) but I could draw the place they lived. I've got whole worlds kicking about on scrappy bits of paper back home, resolutely unpopulated and with unconvincing pole-equator separation that would probably cause havoc with the ecosystem. I sometimes wonder if I dug them out from under my old bed at home, would life and civilisations have evolved, with tiny ink cities sprouting up in the white spaces where no giant mountains or foggy forests were lodged?

I only wonder this very briefly, because it's silly.


* I mean the country that was the subject of the article, not the one that was subject to the British crown - though they were often the same. 

Approximation

I'm sitting on a bus playing with a new toy. I could never blog from my iPhone - the approximation of a keyboard was so small that it drove me mad to do anything other than tweet (at last I understand the point of the 140 character limit). But this virtual finger tip tap dance stage is another matter entirely - it even facilitates my rather distinctive slap base space bar without complaining, though if I end up with a wee hole worn in the screen I may regret this.

Yes, I bought an iPad. It was an act of utter self-indulgence. Though not as indulgent as the day I went out and realised I had dressed to match my iPad-case combo. When you're accessorising to stop your appliances feeling unloved you know you've gone too far.

Gin

This almost never made it to publication. I am slowly stacking up 'draft' blogs that never quite get finished. I'm a bit distracted at the moment by a combination of awesomely good things and heart-breakingly bad things. Well, thing. Alas, at this stage I do not seem to be someone who draws creative inspiration from pain.

Or gin. Which is a shame, since I've drunk plenty of it.

Normally I reserve gin for flying - for reasons now lost in the gin-soaked mists of ginny time, I have developed a tradition of drinking G&T when the drinks trolley rumbles past on an Emirates flight somewhere points east. It probably makes me feel like some sort of explorer. I'm going to start a campaign for compulsory pith helmets on long haul flights. We can all imagine we're sipping our anti-malarial tonic water while keeping our eyes peeled for cloud formations that only we will ever see (unless Mr Johnson in 46B happens to be looking the same way).

At the moment gin is taking its place in a pantheon of liquid medicines, jostling alongside wine, whisky and quite a lot of beer, like some sort of cocktail of... erm, well just like a cocktail. A self-assembly cocktail. IKEA cocktail. Flat-pack alcohol - I quite like to the idea of putting my drink together with dowel rods.

You know, I don't think I've ever written the word 'dowel' before. Astonishing. Thank God for pointless blogging - I might never have written it! Can you imagine the tragedy?

You're probably getting the general idea of why I'm not finishing things at the moment. I'm trying to look at heartbreak in the following way:

Doctor: I'm afraid I know what's wrong with you. The symptoms generally include angina like attacks that affect breathing and cause the sensation of pressure on the heart. There is also sickness and nausea, which may affect appetite and will certainly be uncomfortable. You should be over the panic attacks stage, but reoccurance does happen so be careful. Worst of all though is that, like a urinary infection, this condition does have a psychological effect, which is perversely both symptom and cause. You will find yourself thinking and behaving irrationally. While it is important to remember that this is unavoidable and not your fault, neither must you give in to it, since this will cause an extension of your other symptoms. The bad news is, there's no cure. The good news is it's seldom fatal, and if you follow prescribed advice you'll be right as rain in a few months. Take liberal amounts of gin every night, and if symptoms persist, fucking drink more.

Somebody

I recently changed my relationship status on Facebook. I would like to stress that the change had actually happened some time ago, but the modern world throws up all sorts of new and interesting social mores, in this case "when is it reasonable to change my status?". I left it private, viewable only to me, as I tend to view the public changes of others as irritating statements of smugness or pleas for sympathy (del as app).

Of course, the one entity you cannot keep this private from is the Facebook monster itself. It knows.  And within seconds of saving my edited profile, all the interesting (comparatively) things being offered in the advertising strip (506 of your friends like Beer! Like Beer too!) on the right hand side evaporated like mirages, to be replaced by an endless, and in some cases a tad disturbing, parade of dating and general "make women want you" ads.

You may have guessed the status by now. We'll move on.

Facebook's desperation to get me fitted up with somebody, anybody, is all very sweet, a bit like an over eager friend who's always trying to interest you in a blind date with their third cousin and doesn't understand that you're in no hurry and perfectly happy. And so there's a stream of perfectly non-threatening dating ads, offering a chance to "Date Attractive Ladies" (surely the equivalent of shouting "play good football!" at the telly during England's euro 2012 campaign), or "Boyfriend wanted" over a picture of a woman whose head is twisted so unnaturally she looks like a reanimated car crash victim with nice make up. All fine, in a take it or leave it sort of way.

Except that it seems that Facebook is also that slightly sleazy friend of a friend down the pub who reckons he's one for the ladies and knows all the tricks you could possibly want to know on 'getting birds', normally involving treating 'em mean or monitoring their menstrual cycle.

My worries were first alerted by:

"3, stealthy, ninja sexual triggers to turn women on. TRY NOW!"

Ninja sexual trigger? What the hell is that? Does it involve using your cock as an impromptu nun-chuck?

Then it gets worse. Grammatically, as well as ethically:

"The covert and dangerous tricks to make any woman wants you, FAST!"

Glossing over the peculiar slippage into the present tense, it seems as though Facebook is allowing an ad for rohypnol. Date rape drugs - covert? Yes! Dangerous? Certainly! Do they make any woman wants you fast? No, not really, but they do make it irrelevant! (insert capital letters or multiple exclamation marks where you will).

Compared to that, the "Secret psychology that makes hot women want to sleep with you fast" looks like children's literature. This could be anything. It could be wholesome, like adopting a positive attitude (not very secret), or ever so slightly less so, like breaking into their house/PC to read their letters/emails in order to find out what their emotional triggers are and then exploiting them by reducing them to a psychological wreck that will cling to anyone or anything to feel secure again in this malevolent world.

That sort of thing.

I don't know for certain, because there's no way in a million years that I'm clicking on that link. I dread to think what I might find there if their ads are this weird. But I do know that the advertisers are clearly aware that they're up to no good, because their final offering is this:

"Covert methods for attracting women that dating experts want BANNED!"

What, exactly, is a dating expert? Can you get a degree in dating? Are there perhaps dating guidance counsellors ready to advise newly-met potential couples who feel that their initial "activity-date" at the Laser Tag centre didn't go quite as well as they'd hoped? Whoever they are, thank God that they're out there, looking after us like Swamp Thing looked out for Lacroix, Louisiana.

God bless you, Dating Experts. Are you , y'know, free this evening?

Offing

A drink is in the offing. It's with someone I would call a "fellow blogger", except that would be hideously presumption of me, since she actually keeps hers up to date. This drink is necessary, since I've wasted the first day of the Jubilee spare-time-fest and I'm feeling pretty miserable about it. I did have plans to start a much needed inventory of stuff before my move in July, but instead I pottered around, watch tv and - the highlight of the day - went for a ride on my shiny birthday bike. But it was all rather lonesome, so I dropped a view hints until a friend said that they'd have a drink with me. They probably think they're stopping me offing myself, or something.

Pity pint. I can live with that.

Hellish

It all seemed like a good idea at the time. A nice trip home to see my old mum, check out the commute to see if I can bear to do it while I try and buy somewhere to live, get out of the house. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, not much in the big scheme of things, but I'm certainly not getting the best of this train route. Firstly, the West Ham fans up for their Wembley play-off today appear to have 'started early'. In their generosity, they must have responded to the parched look of the train floor and altruistically offered it quite a lot of beer. The floor, however, is clearly teetotal, and has refused to soak up any of the offered alcohol, which is now adorning the surface with a sticky and nasally offensive sheen. 

But I regret complaining about the beer, since I can no longer smell it. Not just because as I get out to the greenbelt my hay-fever is getting worse, but because Shenfield has supplied the latest in anti-beer smell air-fresheners by loading a tramp onto my carriage.  He's sitting in the next set of seats, and I can honestly say that I miss the smell of stale West Ham beer.

In commuting terms I suppose he's unlikely to be able to afford the peak fares, and city types - for all their flaws - probably don't crack open the Tennant's lager at 7:30 in the morning. But it's not cheering me up about the possibility of having a 100 minute commute to work not only in the middle of the bloody Olympics, but through the middle of the bloody Olympics - Stratford every morning. If I don't come up with plan B I'm looking at a hellish time in July.

But at least I'm better off than my carriage mate. All things in perspective.

(Hurray! He's getting off!)

Soap

A slightly unorthodox blog today – random word comes not from my beloved “Watch out for Snakes”, but from a simple Facebook comment:

“Now it’s your turn to write about soap”.

Far be it from me to shirk a challenge (unless said challenge involves any kind of physical risk or requirement to hard work) , here I am, writing about soap.

I don’t watch soaps anymore. I’m not sure when this happened. They were as big a part of my life at one point as they were of any fiendish telly addict’s. For several years I didn’t miss a single episode of EastEnders (with the notable exception of, weirdly, the very first one* and two that were broadcast while I was staying in a Paris tower block as part of our school’s French exchange). My addiction even survived University, where I didn’t watch any other telly other than the cricket and Quantum Leap. Years before that, at junior school, I would watch “The Sullivans” at lunchtime , if only to update the lollypop lady as to the latest plot developments (such as they were). What I still don’t understand is how she came to be so interested in a show that, because of her job, she could clearly *never watch*. Odd.

And then it stopped. This, I suspect, is because soap watching requires momentum. Soap isn’t about the grand plots, it’s about the details, the tiny things the characters do or say to each other. They are shows very much about people – poorly written and insufficiently motivated, and even more dreadfully acted as they may be at times – and as such you require an investment, a real desire to know what they will do next (even if it has no impact on a wider storyline). Miss it for a few weeks, and you no longer have any compass to tell you why people are behaving in a certain way, and you quickly stop caring.

The same applies, oddly, to snooker.  Stop watching for a year and the procession of spotty automatons that replace the ‘characters’ you so enjoyed watching will make you imagine you are watching some sort of humourless mash up with I Robot, and you’ll find greater satisfaction in watching your shower drip.

Of course, the very fact that I’ve just wittered on about “soaps” and not “soap” just shows that except for frequenters of “Lush” and other purveyors of high-end smellies, soap is just a word that jostles for attention alongside shampoo, shower gel and hand wash.  I don’t think I own a bar of soap, and if I do I probably stole it from a hotel in Kuala Lumpur.   My cleanliness routine relies entirely on various forms of liquid, which is probably terrible for the environment since said liquids require an ever more advanced concoction of plastic packaging to keep them in place. On the other hand, Nizorel shampoo aside, I don’t have to worry about animal fat in gels and liquids, and shower gel just looks less like it’s up to something than soap. Bars of soap look like they’re planning a takeover of the world. Nothing that slippery is ever up to anything good – just look at George Osborne. I remember being slightly disturbed by the contents of the built-into-the-tiles soap dish in my bath back home (I nearly wrote “in my bath where I grew up”, but people might think I was a bonsai human). As a child it was on my eye level, and never contained bars of soap as much a strange, bubbly blobs of green matter floating in a few millimetres of disgusting looking cloudy water.  I assume my mum thought that the overall mass of the soap was what mattered, not whether each molecule was actually joined to the next. She did grow up under rationing.

I, on the other hand, felt like Zach Galligan’s mum having to clear up the bits of Gremlin after she microwaves one. No-one ever thinks of things of that.  Cif lemon just isn’t going to fix it.

* I boycotted after the intensely irritating previews featuring characters from the square saying their names. Mee-shell? Really? And I still can’t stop myself thinking, if I hear the name “Debs”, of “and Andy” in a Scottish accent.