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.

But fear not, gentle reader, for if you cannot wait (or indeed afford) to read my masterpiece in the prestigious pages of Poetry.com’s latest Compendium of Truly Great and Outstanding Verse* then I can offer you an exclusive peak at my, no doubt, winning entry right here…

In fact, why not consider making your own entries to this reputable and world renowned competition? It costs you absolutely nothing (that’s right! Nothing!) to enter. Your poem is all but guaranteed to be published - it’s a dead cert! The only things you’d ever need to pay for are silly small details, such as actually receiving a printed copy of your work, or attending the compulsory banquet to discover if you are indeed the overall winner of the annual contest. In Washington.

I know, it’s hardly a new thing. These scams, and indeed this particular website, has been around for years, and yet they still exist. I’m not as naive as I probably sound when it comes to confidence tricksters, and how they prey on people’s faith, trust, and aspirations (and, yes, often greed). I just appear to be turning into something of a Grumpy Old Man cum armchair vigilante in my old age. I recently had a conversation that stretched over a month or so via email with a lottery phisher. You know the types - “Dear winner, you have won the lottery!!! To claim contact us at this hotmail address, now!”

So I replied.

Not as myself of course. I replied as a doddery old woman, completely clueless as to where her late husband had put her bank details, let alone how to use the computer, but extremely grateful for the opportunities that all this cash could bring after a very difficult year that saw the loss of her husband, a long spell in hospital and financial worries that had all but wiped out her savings (I did work it a little more subtly than it sounds). This was not entirely to waste the time of the individual who’d contacted me personally (oh yes, all my friends call me ‘winner’ don’t you know), and had zero issues about ripping off a dotty old woman. It was mostly about having some guilt-free fun at their expense.

If you have a go, then let me know how you get on and indeed what you submit. The most ludicrous entry to get a notification of publication gets a pint of Guinness and a packet of pork scratchings on me. You’d be mad not to!

Mad.

*For most people genuinely applying to Poetry.com, verse is another word for poetry.

The box. The box is a metaphor in itself. It doesn’t exist in any tangible sense, but oh, what a metaphor. What a cliché. Open the cliché and BANG.

This is the box I shut away and buried - forgot it even existed - so I could never remember again.

He felt the indifference surrounding him - the hard seat of the pew, the flagstone’s chill leeching into his heels and toes. He no longer looked to the statues above, no longer watched the unattended altar and wondered. He simply stared on at whatever his eyes encountered, no longer even asking for answers, no longer waiting for a response. No longer waiting for anything. Just waiting.

Chapter 10 is done. It’s done. It’s done, it’s finished - the last of the ’safe’ chapters before we get to the series finalé crunching three parter. This particular chapter has taken me over two months to write out in full. About a week of that was doing the last scene alone, the last few days were spent on the last three sentences. Not that the last scene was particularly difficult other than the fact that once I’d finished it, I’d have completed another chapter. I seem to have huge issues with closure. As soon as something ends I don’t seem to want to acknowledge it, as if it’s already over anyway, so why bother going that last mile? As I’ve said before - mostly since starting this particular novel two years ago - the more you write the more you find out about yourself.

Nanowrimo? You have to be kidding. I’m still trying to finish what I started for Nanowrimo 2005 and have the whole of the eighteenth century to do before the end of the month.

Current word count: 104,458

Everyone’s in their own bubble, their own world within the void. Each of us, in our own polished steel sphere, all float aimlessly about the cosmos, without steering, without gravity. Without control. The closest we truly get to one another is when we bump, just briefly, but always moving on our own path, sometimes parallel for a time, but not by design. By coincidence. All of us carry the force of our encounters with other bubbles and the impact they had and have upon ours, the straight line back to our origin long lost, contorted in coincidence after contact after collision. Connection. Our paths are irrevocably changed by every contact we make, some slight, some head on. Bubbles do not burst, they do not merge. Steel grinds against steel, resonating into the void in choirs of high frequency harmonics. This is the sound of our friendship, our loss. Our loneliness. Our love.

I bring my own order to chaos.

Never underestimate the motivational power of an ordered, tidy room. Dig doggedly enough through the detritus of mundane living and you find something made of silver - a talisman shining old-fashioned smiles from beneath the receipts and pennies. Beauty within the dirt. Buried treasure. Follow the map back to the tale of extremes - raw chaos, ability, of beasts of the field grazing in fields of emotion.

Twist something rare from the weeds, the mud and the splinters.

Everything now is Potential - the garlic crusts baking in the oven beside the cheap Merlot, gulping tobacco’d air in unspluttered breaths; the fat pumpkin waiting to be mashed, gingered, chilied and made Autumn soup; the pretty blond things bewilderingly queuing up like a box of assorted courtisans, their words all warm and sweet like the husks of baked honeycombs. The future is a great big wide open cliché of a road, leading to the promise of adventure for someone who never learnt to drive manmade machines, who prefers the crunch of granite and leaves beneath tattered shoes, who wants to inhale the world itself as he’s walking through its many perfumes, always moving towards somewhere where there’s ocean, towards any great big sprawling unconquerable chaos.

That’s what life is. Not this city. Not this existence. This is just a war.

Its dirge of benefits, overdrafts and allowances gives way to shameless indulgences in innocence - the desire to live life itself. Moods are polar by nature, humans are creatures of mood. The world spins ungrudgingly on its axis - night, day, Spring, Autumn - flesh reigns and smothers the spirit before spirit emerges and carries flesh away like a sail. Imagination and belief defy human science. It will out. Always.

The last charges of the war rage outside - the dying cracks and thuds of Bonfire Night. A distant flash, a boom. The smell of gunpowder like a constant yeoman. The war ends, tonight.

Death’s cloak has a silver lining.

Hallo. I’m Maureen, the mildly despondent pumpkin. I have seasonal affective disorder. Have pity on me.

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…