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.

Maybe if I stare at this for long enough, I’ll see a Guardian article on dispossessed rising novelists or an ‘About the Author’ blurb on the inside sleeve of a Random House bestseller, instead of an unemployed layabout with half-snacked on delusions of grandeur.

We move in silence.
I whistle along to the tune in my mind like the breeze over granite-coloured water - the sea air washing through my head alone, salting each thought. You say nothing. You never do. You just stare at the horizon, dumbfounded. Only you could be dumbfounded by the simplicity of a straight line. We sit like this in British Expeditionary Force uniforms - me cradling spheres and your mind grasping at lines, each surveying the idioms that once were our battlefield, bobbing like survivors in the sea.
Somewhere else unheard, unreal, we catch the coarse sounds of the fishing boats returning to harbour - the sharp clunk of lobster pots spilling their fresh catches, the hacking glottal wheezes of white bearded sea-dwellers in yellow oilskin, leather-faced from a diet of saline air, tobacco and rust.
You notice as the world distracts me - enchants me from my unheard song, lures me from your unwatched horizon, anchoring me crudely to one sphere amongst many. None of this is real.
“What was that?” you ask, indignant that the world now snares me so much more easily than fantasy.
“That was trust,” I reply. “Trust like a kid looking up, wide-eyed - wide-eyed but not shielding their eyes from the sun.”
But you don’t understand. You don’t know what a child is because you never left childhood behind. You sigh, or maybe it is me, and watch the marbles in my hand as I stare hard at your distant line. We acknowledge abeyance with a nod. We have to find common ground. Here, on the sand.
So we build a fort upon No Man’s Land and declare war on the sea instead, holding hands with unclutched swords and flying an invisible banner above. Our banner, crafted by our own hands, stained with our own blood. We watch it dance in the wind, deep red spasms against endless cloudless blue, neither of us shielding our eyes from its glare.
We watch it move in silence.

Watch this rant and find out.

(Updated. Twice. Those Scientologists really don’t seem to want people watching this.)

The recent desktop obsessions of a full time nerd, obsessive and schoolgirl masquerading as a part time novelist…

Today is the first Down Day of the New Year.
To celebrate this, at precisely 3:41pm today in the past, a man will be standing in Leicester Square, dressed in a business man costume and smoking a cigarette.
He’ll be watching the pigeons pecking and scuffling amongst the scraps underfoot. He’ll be looking, empty-eyed at the near-faceless people who pass him, clacking and scuffing the heels on their feet. He will glance, indifferently and without focus, at the clouds rolling past overhead, fluffing up the sky in frayed un-safety-pinned cottons, and the seeping sunbeams that bleed from between them.
He’ll be wondering which of them got it right, and why that means he got it wrong - why he can’t be a person, anymore than he could be a pigeon or a cloud.
But mostly he will be smoking a cigarette and wearing a business man costume, standing in Leicester Square at precisely 3:41pm.
The performance will last for, at most, several months.
Hurry. You will miss it.

The writer no longer burns.
He cools himself with lukewarm instant coffee, eats cheap chocolate and doesn’t cut his hair.
He reads Vonnegut, bus tickets and old journal entries alike, the latter filled with the ash of long-cooled embers. Still not yet a Random House novelist nor a Faber poet. No Boy Nextdoor in the bed beside him. No such person now under the name he was given. All just names now. Words.
He collects, inventories and categorises words.
He kids himself that this is the calm before the storm - the nowhere time barely filled with games of Patience, idle lovemaking and staring thoughtlessly into starless skies. Silent. The universe and fate sharing a last breath like lovers about to be lost.
The writer no longer writes.
The writer reads. He watches. He waits.
He breathes.