Venerable Beads

Chrissy tells me occasionally that I should start blogging again. Who am I to argue? And I suppose, given the fact I haven't written anything in this space in over a year (I was scarred by that macaroon dream, you see), it's fitting that I should write about the Milk Bottle of Motivation.

The Milk Bottle of Motivation sits on my shabby-looking makeshift desk, and when I move back down to Cambridge it will sit on my handmade mahogany desk and be carefully polished by the Boy that all scholars of the college are assigned to see to their every need. It is simply a Dairy Crest milk bottle with the terms of its use written on the outside with a permanent marker. The rules are simple. For every hundred words that I write in a day (excluding filthy filthy degree-related stuff), I put a green glass bead in the bottle. This act is often accompanied by a vague thought of John Ruskin that does nothing to improve my day; it is always accompanied by a pleasing little "plink" noise that improves my day immensely. If I write a thousand words in a day, I get a bonus bead, this time in blue. The bottle slowly fills up until a day comes when I write less than a hundred words, at which point I tip it all out and leave the empty bottle to publicise my shame, except it doesn't publicise it very much because it lives on my makeshift desk and not in the Upper Crust in Birmingham New Street.

Now, a hundred words is really nothing; you can bash that out in a few minutes. It's very difficult not to feel silly rewarding yourself for such a paltry achievement. That's why the Milk Bottle of Motivation is serving me so well. It's so easy to pull a hundred words out of whatever part of your anatomy seems most appropriate that there's never any excuse for having to tip out those beads. And while there are often days when I sit down planning nothing more than to knock out a quick century to cling on to my hard-earned bottle filler, most of the time I end up writing substantially more than that. The first hundred is enough to get you sat down putting words together; moreover, because a hundred words is so tiny, by the time I finish the thought I started with I'm usually well into the next beadsworth. And you wouldn't want to waste those words, would you? Not when the next "plink" is so close...

Before Going Into Politics, He Had Been A Pro Wrestler

Last night, I had a dream in which Gordon Brown body-slammed a macaroon.

Needless to say, my support for the Labour party has dropped enormously since I awoke.

At Least This Time It Wasn't My Fault

There are lots of things you don't want when you're halfway through an essay. The discovery that all your library books are overdue, for example, or the crushing realisation that the one key assumption on which all your arguments rest is fundamentally flawed. I think I would happily have taken any of the essay-woes I've been treated to in the past, though, over the point yesterday - round about the seven hundred word mark - where Windows decided that actually, on the whole, I probably didn't want any of the data on my hard disk and it would save everyone a lot of hassle if it just wiped the whole lot. After all, a little modification to the casing and I could easily turn my freshly-bricked laptop into a fully-functional garlic press, and that would save an awful lot of fiddly chopping when making stir-fry.

It's possible that it just thought it would be appropriate, while I was writing about Ovid, to transform my laptop into an attractive doorstop. Thoughtful though that was, I do already have a very nice doorstop with a little wooden duck named Trinculo perched on top of it, and as I currently only have one door that's really all I need.

On the plus side, I managed to get a lot of reading done while Linux was installing.

Chavs Do Not Think Things Through

When my hair is quite long, they shout "Get a haircut!". But we both know that if I did, they'd just shout "Ginner!" instead.

It pains me to see breath wasted like that.

If You Want Something Done Properly, You've Got To Do It Yourself

Really, Mark, if you don't want me to clandestinely muck about with your blogger account, you shouldn't let me know your password and then not update for four months. Despite both these things I still feel rather guilty (I'm sorry, I am bored, largely because I have lost one of my procrastination tools due to the fact that YOU NEVER BLOG ANY MORE)... so feel free to delete this post once you've read it. Really, the main thing that's compelled me to post despite feeling rather guilty is the curiosity to know how long it will take you to actually notice this exists...

I've sat here for a little while pondering whether to make a vague effort to be anonymous and mysterious. I've decided that I will, futile as it may be, mainly because I can't think of a way to sign off after this little paragraph without looking silly.

For Your Delectation, Three Games We Invented Last Night

1. "Rough Guide to Copenhagen" or "How To Survive A Robot Uprising"?, in which players must identify from which of those two fine books a (very) short extract is taken. Not as easy as it sounds.
2. Read The Headlines Backwards, in which you do exactly what it says on the hypothetical tin. Every bit as dull as it sounds almost all of the time.
3. Greek or Roman?, in which Paul is presented with a classical figure and asked to identify whether they are Greek or Roman.

Warning: This Post Contains Vowels

Warning from the trailer for An Inconvenient Truth:

"Contains images of ecological disaster."

Look out, parents!