1.10am The room just literally shook. Very gently, but very definitely. At first, with my quaint little history of petit mal and red wine, I thought it was just me, but a few other people say they felt something too.

Was that an Earthquake in England just now?

 
1.23am The BBC is now reporting this

The cynic in me can’t help but think that the recent fire will conveniently pave the way for a total redevelopment of the existing market as a whole.

Sign on, as usual. Have fortnightly banter with my friend there. I call her The Phantom Menace. Tell her about my impending…

Interview - a nice place with red telephone boxes everywhere.

Ballsed it up by letting slip how desperate for cash I am. I am, yes. He slips into second, stumbles into third. He waits weeks not hearing anything…

Get called to a media recruitment agency for an interview. It is one week later. My brain says something like “hooray!” Find out I was called only because they mixed up my CV with someone else with the same name. Like a glimpse into a parallel universe. My name. Me. But a me who went to the University of Westminster and studied Sports Science. I shudder and remember being a limp-wristed adolescent, always shoved shivering in goal. The agency put me on their temping books. I’d already applied twice. They put me forward for a publishing job. I instantly believe I won’t get it. I heard only today what I knew when they put me forward for it then.

I didn’t get it.

Days go on and I hear nothing about job. Any job. The concept of job. It eludes me.

I sign on. My fortnightly two minutes of human contact with the only person who treats me like a person in the building. But The Phantom Menace wasn’t there. I scribble my signature and hope she’s okay.

Email original interview checking to see if position has been filled.
He says the position has not been filled, and they’re still deliberating. Bu he remembers I said I needed cash. He knows someone who has cash.

I say yes. Yes, thank you. Thank you, please. Yes.

She calls soon after and I miss it.
I call back and I miss her.
She calls back.
Neither of us miss it.
She says come in this afternoon.
I say I can’t. I have an appointment. I can’t cancel it.
She says ‘oh’. ‘Oh’.
Then she says ‘come in tomorrow’. ‘Come in tomorrow.’
I say okay.
I hang up. I get a call. I call her back and say I don’t have an appointment anymore.
She says something like “hooray!”
I turn up in eight year old jeans and a T shirt, sweating and panting from dodging dawdling Piccadilly line pootlers and running up a gratuitously endless series of stairs. I turn up hating people.
She offers tea. I decline.
I am myself. I am an honest mix of resolute self-belief with a healthy balance of self-deprecation. I am sweaty, panting and hateful.
She offers coffee. I decline.
We talk. She smiles. She’s nice. I like her. I like the order of the room, I like the way she sits as she interviews (?) me. I like the way she swears. I like the view of Kensington outside her window.
I hate Kensington. I love the view.
She asks if I want a glass of water. I admit I hate textspeak. She nods.
She shows me what it’s all about, and I like it. She tells me what she should have taken out but didn’t. She tells me what it was and I laugh. I snort.
Kensington dims beyond the glass.

Soon I am running down the stairs. I hurry through Kensington. I want a cigarette. I need a cigarette. I call my flatmate and roll a cigarette. Then I call my dad. I’m walking up and down in front of the station dawdling in everyone’s way as they dodge me, pacing off the Piccadilly line. My head’s spinning with nicotine and a sense of adrenaline. I tell him everything that happened. I babble. I tell him exactly what happened.

I tell him I’ve been offered the job I’ve always wanted. I tell him I’m working for an author and a journalist. I tell him about the champagne booklaunch I’m going to. I tell him about her offer to introduce me to agents and publishers. I tell him about the pay. I start singing ‘what a difference a day makes’ and then start laughing as I remember out loud how much I hate Kensington, and then I laugh some more when I tell him I’ll be working from home.

It’s two days later now. The first day is over. Give or take a half hour break or two, I’ve been staring constantly at incoming emails and editing website posts from 10 in the morning till half eleven at night. And I love it.  Tomorrow I go to the job centre to meet my friend, The Phantom Menace, for possibly the last time. I hope she’s okay. I’m not remotely tired. I just want a cup of tea.

The pot is boiling.

A L Kennedy has just been announced as the winner of Costa’s Book of the Year award. In my conceited and inconsequential opinion, it’s an award well deserved.

I first encountered her work on my Modern Fiction course at university, where she was also a guest lecturer in the Honours year Creative Writing module. Original Bliss was easily one of the best things on the syllabus, so much so that a friend of mine whom I co-wrote with at the Fringe the year before refused to donate to me the copy he’d leant, but was quite indifferent as to what I did with his borrowed Jack Maggs or White Teeth. I was such a scab back then - always borrowing books on my course list for fear of spending up to £10 on something I loathed. Books are now my greatest vice after cigarettes, booze and boys.

Not just a great author, Kennedy is very encouraging and insightful in her attitude to undergraduate scribblers. I don’t know why I seem to expect authors to suddenly become aloof and pompous once they’re published - perhaps that says more about my own neuroses. But she instantly struck me as very down to earth, and all the more encouraging because of it. I remember thinking that she sounded a little like Eddie Izzard, in that same almost mock-British mumbly voice I subconsciously stole from him, and still use when I get nervous around new people. And I also remember her gleefully remarking that one of her stories featured the first known mention in literature of ejaculation in space. That’s not the sort of thing you can just idly drop into conversation. She likes herbal tea, I remember that too. Raspberry I think it was.

It’s A Good Thing™ when established authors you admire, and actually like, receive the laurels they deserve (as several other articles mention, this one is certainly long overdue). And, for an unestablished author, it’s surely no harm done to have an aspirational roadmap based on such authors’ achievements.

Book of the Year might still be a little bit beyond my current mileage, mind. I hear you have to finish one to even be in with a chance.

They certainly didn’t waste any time. Having only seen it today I’ve no idea when it began.

Retro World is gone. The arch the surplus army store squatted in has been demolished. Those insane little stalls, deep within the catacombs that sold everything from shop dummy limbs to old coins to military buttons, Britpop badges and 1920s cricket bats now no longer exist. This is because the catacombs now no longer exist. Stables Market was Mos Eisley, Diagon Alley and the unseen vaults of the TARDIS all in one. It was one of my favourite parts of London. But now it’s all gone, forever. Irretrievably. It’s just rubble, bricks and dust.

The new Stables Market

Maybe the proposed redevelopment won’t look so bad. Maybe it will retain the character of the original Victorian market whilst improving accessibility, functionality and catchment, just as they say. Maybe it won’t be just another high street Bluewater.

Or maybe it doesn’t really matter what the new Stables Market will be like. Because it won’t be Stables Market. London has already lost one of its most unique and wonderful hidden treasures.

Forever.

Regular readers might have detected a slight fondness for a young musician named Patrick on this blog in the past.

Now I’m not a groupie, honest. Nor am I an obsessive. Not really. I’m just someone who loves his music, marvels at his brain, and was happy enough to meet him earlier this year after a gig in Camden. Admittedly I was a little drunk, still deaf from the loud Glaswegians on immediately before him and a little excitable, but I’m sure Patrick just thought I was charming when I rubbed his arm for half an hour (drunk) whilst shouting his name from one foot away (deaf) and then all but headlocked him into a photo with me (excited).

 

 
So, when I found out his recent tour brought him to a charming little Canadian city called Vancouver (again, a place you might have heard mention of here before), I bullied a friend of mine there into attending his concert. Naturally, he didn’t. But he did say that a journalist friend of his was interviewing him, and humoured my schoolgirl screeching for an autograph, or at least some other bauble or freebie from The Wolf. My friend said he would see what he could do.

This morning I received said note. (Do you see how I just wrote that last sentence all blasé and nonchalant, as if I hadn’t been checking the post every morning for the past month?). It was in an envelope decorated in his own unique way (annotations for the postal staff including “corner” and “stamp” complete with arrows, and friendly instructions on the back as to how best insert the envelope into my anus). Thanks, Brad. Sincerely.

Its contents have now, naturally, become one of my most prized possessions, with the envelope its appropriate chariot. Unfortunately, it’s not the sort of thing you can proudly show off to your grandparents or small children. I can’t help but think my aforementioned friend had something to do with its content as well, as Patrick pondered what to write…

It’s just not what you’d expect is it?

I love it.

After the gratuitously unnecessary (and now increasingly disputed) redesign of the Enterprise (it looks too predatory - too sleek and angular, unshockingly more like a warship rather than an explorer, though a lot of fans are now claiming this is not the official redesign) the latest indication that the producers are continuing Enterprise’s trend of paying absolutely zero attention to the show’s existing continuity has come in the form of Winona Ryder, cast as a younger version of Spock’s Vulcan mother.

What an otherwise lovely idea.

Unfortunately however, Spock didn’t have a Vulcan mother. He was half human, on his mother’s side. Like the Eighth Doctor, apparently.

Nobs in space.

I realise that a blog post about Star Trek can send most readers away in embarrassed droves, like knocking on the wrong door and finding yourself in an Incontinence Anonymous meeting. It’s just I really used to love this show as a kid. The cringingly reflex idea of a Starfleet Academy ‘first adventure’ plot was something that Gene Roddenberry was dribbling onto his laminated jotter in his final years, and duly politely ignored then. Ignoring the fact that the original crew never met at the academy, as an idea it’s still weaker than Red Dwarf 8.

I was trying though. I even thought Zachary Quinto as Spock was a good move. I smiled in polite optimism at the curious idea of Simon Pegg as Scotty. And I really wanted to believe that this movie wouldn’t just be a blockbuster reinflation of a very tired cash cow. Maybe I’m just doing what all fanboys do and getting in a big trainspotter tizz about very little. I’m sure I’ll probably resist watching it right up until the last moment. I just think if a show like Doctor Who can be resurrected into a multimillion international commodity through good writing (Fear Her aside) whilst avoiding rewriting or just plain ignoring entire chunks of its mythology, I don’t see why something as huge as Star Trek can’t do the same.

Then again, I still refuse to watch Sylvia.

Yes, I know. There is a war on, it’s a nice day outside, get a job etc…

This is really quite impressive as a piece of forward thinking. Unfortunately for me, it’s from an author I am particularly jealous of/frustrated with, but she’s clearly the only person in literature with the gravitas to pull it off. And indeed the balls.

Dumbledore doesn’t like girls.

A generation of children will now be growing up seeing just a few more things as normal, which means the usual psycho-loonies in the far right Christian Faculty Against Witchcraft and Buggeration will be denied many future acolytes to keep their vile pestilent philosophy of hate going.

Must… resist…. urge to praise…