Brennig Jones (and friends)

This morning I put three minor edits in to Episode 2 of Shelved (the sitcom I’m working on).

The trouble is that the minor edits (and they really were very minor) had a cascade effect.

Episode 3 had a corresponding scene tweak which led to Episode 4 having a comedic device upgrade. As a result, Episode 5 had a re-characterisation and Episode 6 is up for a rewrite tomorrow.

Which is critical really; Episode 6 being the season climax.

In the last draft I thought Episode 6 was right, but with the new thin end of the ‘change wedge’ springing from the scene tweak in Ep 3, the first five episodes now feel tighter; better knitted together.

The dialogue has better structure, the visuals are leaner but more effective and there’s a new running gag which could feed a second season.

I know I suffer from Compulsive Editing Syndrome (and if that doesn’t exist, it really should!), but just once I’d like to stand back from a piece of fiction and be able to say ‘There, that’s finished!’

The hard thing, or so I’m told by the people who have successfully achieved this, is getting the pitch right and attracting the engagement of the commissioning powers.

But I’ve always had a difficulty in letting go, that’s my real problem.

Anyway.

In other news.

Sophie’s laptop has had life breathed in to it and is now almost silently whirring away, like an almost silently whirring thing.

It’s much faster than it ever has been too.

The hard-disk was fried which was why no amount of recovery procedures could get the thing back on its feet. Fiddling about with the registry isn’t going to work if the partitions are crumbling.

So it has a new hard-disk and a fresh install of XP.

I imported a backup of datafiles from one of the EDD’s I use as three-tiered backup devices.

And the hardest job encountered?

Getting the iTunes database to behave itself.

Really, iTunes, who’d have believed it?

As I was *manually* making squillions of adjustments to the content in that piece of Apple software, I was mentally composing a nested conditional SELECT statement and a corresponding nested UPDATE command which, between the two of them, would have tidied the 2,000+ song records, weeded out the duplicates which iTunes insisted on creating in the first place (because of a bad piece of re-routing in the most recent iTunes upgrade), renamed a few tracks to INITCAP *and* produced a tidy-up exception report, when I suddenly realised that my VB skills may not have worked on the Apple product anyway.

And then I thought ‘No, iTunes on XP has to be VB-compliant’.

But it was all academic anyway, because the exception-handling sub-routine would have needed to be about 80 lines long.

So I persevered and just did it manually.

What did I say about having a deft touch? Not?

But at least Soph’s back up and running, and I can now put my EDDs away.

So there is a slight feeling of satisfaction in this house tonight.

OK, so last night we watched ‘Glee’, then tidied up and went to bed. I read for maybe 10 minutes before sleep hit and that was that.

For about half an hour.

WTF?

For 30 minutes I was out of it and then suddenly I was wide awake and nothing was going to get me back off again.

So I got up, grabbed my book and bathrobe and came downstairs where I read, internetted and generally annoyed the hell out of fellow insomniac and all-round nice person, Ali Booker.

But while all this was going on I was also working on a cunning plan.

And I was smirking a great big smirk as I worked.

At 3am the fruits of my labouring (and smirking) were harvested, right up until the point where Sophie came, blinking, downstairs and asked ‘Are you singing?’

I may have looked sheepish.

I had indeed been singing.

Now you may sit there and ask yourself why I had been singing at 3am. Because that’s a good question. And a fair one to ask.

I am sitting here smirking some more because I have the answer.

And so shall you, if you listen to future episodes of This Reality Podcast. Because that’s where my cunning plan, the source of my smirkage and the reason for my 3am singing will be…

Revealed!

Oh yes.

It is good.

And funny.

Well, he hedged slightly, it is funny to me. And I have just unveiled my cunning plan to Soph and she’s gone upstairs to bed laughing loudly as she went.

So I’m going to say, in an authoritative tone that yes, this is a good *and* a funny idea!

Umm…

Can you make sure that the podcast has your skype address/phone number? Because if we call you up you can:

a) take part

b) win free prizes (T-Shirts, mostly!)

c) join in with the new feature that is the source of such 3am mirth and singing.

Just email your skype address or phone number to ‘thisrealitypodcast@gmail.com’ or, if you’ve got skype, just add ‘thisrealitypodcast’ to your address book.

Thank you.

You won’t regret it.

Umm…

Actually you may regret it, but just a little, and at least you’ll be smirking as you regret it! 

p.s. You really should listen to the most recent podcast (#105), the musical content is possibly the richest we’ve ever produced – and that’s not an idle boast!

To stream just that one episode of the podcast to your desktop just click here or you can right-click on that link and save it to your computer and listen to it later. Or why not add it to your iTunes and listen to it on your iPhone or iPod or mp3 player wherever you go? Better than radio!

Why is it that our Government is playing with a proposal that will mean that all dogs will have to be insured – on the off-chance that they cause some kind of damage or kill someone?

And yet cyclists, who we know do cause damage and have killed people, are not going to face the same requirement?

Answers on a bent piece of logic please…

There may be swearing in this. If you don’t like that you can f-f-f-fade away…

Lunchtime today I dropped in to one of the public libraries in this county.

I browsed around and, after a while, found an interesting-looking book which I took off to a less-busy – indeed *quiet* – corner of the library.

I’d been reading for about 20 minutes when two late-teenagers (a boy and a girl) came in to the area to use the two public-access internet terminals near where I sat.

They talked to each other across the intervening gap (about 1m80) and they talked to each other across the gap *loudly*.

They had no consideration for me, or anyone else in the vicinity.

It wasn’t just the loudness of their childishly meaningless, inane and mostly monosyllabic chatter that annoyed the hell out of me (and why, for Heaven’s sake would they even think that anyone within 5 nautical miles would be remotely interested in them verbally relaying to each other what they’d just said on their Facebook chat sessions to their ‘friends’?).

It was their complete and utter disregard, their unthinking attitude, the total absence of consideration for anyone else.

That’s what I’m absolutely bloody furious about.

Because the noise they made went beyond ‘talking loudly’.

There was the wheeling over to each other’s terminal, the slapping, the pinching…

And the swearing. The constant litany of ‘fucking’ this and ‘cunting’ that, that came from the pair of them.

Yet less than 3m away was – get this! – the children’s area!

Did the close proximity of the children’s area stop our two future Jeremy Kyle stars from swearing at loud volume?

No, of course it didn’t.

Don’t they know how to behave in a library?

I mean, how old are these two?

Well actually I know the answer to that question.

The girl – Sileas Campbell – is 17 (going on a mental age of 9). I don’t know how old the boy is (but I fully expect that if you combined their IQs, the total score would still be in double digit territory).

How do I know her name?

Because she left her internet terminal to ‘play’ with her friend and she left her Facebook homepage in full, public view.

So Miss Sileas Campbell, not too bright are you?

In fact, you display the same awareness of physical computer security as you show awareness of the needs of anyone else in the library.

If I knew the name of the guy who was with Miss Sileas Campbell I’d name and shame him too.

Whoever he is, he displays the same emotional and mental immaturity, the same total disregard for anyone else and the same lack of knowledge for the correct way to behave in a library.

Their parents must be really proud of them both.

I, however, am not proud to be a member of the same species as this selfish little cunt.

Sileas Campbell on Facebook

Sileas Campbell on myYearbook

I know I’ve been quiet lately, and here’s the reason…

I’ve spent the last few days mulling a very difficult issue, spent so much time thinking about it that at times my brain felt as if it had a reduced operating capability, while a portion of my mental RAM was allocated to this other task.

Burial or cremation?

Having to decide which – and having to decide which of these for someone else – is more difficult than I had thought.

They’re both so… final, which, given the circumstances, is good, but there’s the almost aesthetic principles to weigh up.

The decision has to fit the person, if you know what I mean?

And that’s so… hard to reconcile.

Because we never really know – not 100% really and truly – another person, do we?

We all have the capacity to surprise – and be surprised by – someone else.

Even if that someone else was your own mother.

You can’t tell me that you *really* know someone, to the point of knowing what he or she wants all the time, no matter how long you’ve known them; I’m not sure I would believe it, not believe it would be so *all* of the time.

So, burial or cremation?

It hasn’t been easy, but yesterday afternoon I decided that cremation would be more appropriate.

However, imagine how I felt when I rang the undertaker to tell them my decision, only to be told that she actually had to be dead first?

I am completely gobsmacked.

[p.s. I'm sorry if this offended you. It did shock Sophie, but I tried to explain that it was just my sense of humour being let out for a ramble. There's no real malice here, it's just a piece for inclusion in my short story anthology]

Today, for the first time in months, the sun shone, the sky was blue and there were hardly any clouds in the sky.

To celebrate this rare event I cut things short at 1.30 and headed up to the yard.

A short while later Tom and I were hacking up the track, and across the lane and on to… the racing gallops.

I love those gallops.

White post-and-rail and a daily-harrowed sandbed to ride on make the experience almost too good to describe.

We jogged in through the start bend, settled in to an easy canter and held it for the first 1/4 mile.

And then I took a short, forward seat, gave away a little more contact and asked Tom if he had any more.

Lots!, was his reply.

We slipped effortlessly from a working canter to a fast hunting canter, and within a further two dozen strides Tom relaxed some more, opened up his chest and showed just how easy it was for him to change up to a gallop.

He held his easy, large-striding, ground-covering gallop until I asked him to ease back to a slower pace as we passed the first set of white posts.

Half-a-mile of easy-moving, big-smilingly, blisteringly fast canter passed beneath us as we transited back to a working canter for the last 1/4 mile.

We hacked back to the yard the long way – a 2-1/2 mile stroll around the headlands of a few fields, the sun on our backs and (I like to think) a smile on both our faces.

That was, without doubt, the fastest that Tom and I have ever been. I’m still smiling.

If I’d put a full set of boots on Tom before we’d left the yard, we could have *cough* hacked back to the yard via the cross-country course.

I’d feel happier if we could get out and practice our cross-country and show-jumping more, our first one-day event is in two weeks and I still feel slightly under-prepared.

If I could find a show-jumping arena on grass, I’d be there like a shot!

I had a bad night last night due to *ahem* environmental difficulties

So as I was awake at 3am and, prodded by a podcast listener’s email asking about something I mentioned on last week’s show, I spent the early hours of the day in the company of google, facebook and linkedin, trying to answer the question ‘Whatever happened to…?’

John Deloach. Or is that John De Loach? Who knows.

John was a presenter on the radio station AFN SHAPE.

I used to listen to AFN SHAPE, and John in particular, whenever I was recalled ‘home’ to NATO’s No 4 Wing, 2nd Allied Tactical Air Force permanent base, from wherever in the world we’d been sent to, on yet another detachment.

I liked his microphone style and his personality.

I would have described John as an American version of Kenny Everett. Not as madcap as Kenny, John was still a long step away from his more mainstream colleagues.

And I’m not naive, I know that he had a set-list and an A and a B playlist, but it was obvious, from listening to his colleagues, that John mixed it up as best he could.

And the music was good; AFN SHAPE played more diverse music than any of the German or Benelux stations we could get on FM.

Anyway, my googling, facebooking and linkedining were mostly fruitless, but I did come across a four-year-old discussion, on Craigslist, that offered up an email address of someone who used to work with John when he moved from SHAPE to USAF Ramstein.

So maybe there’s a chance.

And what happens if that chance bears fruit?

I’m going to drop the guy a line and say ‘Hi John, you don’t know me but 250 years ago I used to listen to you on AFN Shape and…’?

Lame.

Lame, lame, lame, lame.

No, I’m not going to do that.

But, you know, I just want to *know* that he’s still around somewhere.

Still OK.

Still using that sense of humour of his.

That’s all.

And on this week’s podcast I’m going to play a snippet (maybe more) of the first track I heard John Deloach (John De Loach?) play on AFN SHAPE, all those centuries ago.

Oh yes.

And the music is still excellent, even after all these years.

I do wonder how many people get the Magic Roundabout references that pop up here from time to time…

Anyway gang, it’s been fun. No really. Real fun.

I’ve been up since 8am and it’s 9.25pm which, by last night’s standards, is a very late night indeed.

Thanks for your company. I’d love to stay and chat with you all some more, but I’ve got a hot date with a hot woman and a certain Mr Hornby Of The School Of Cool Writing.

Bastard that he is, because no-one should be allowed to write as well as he does.

Anyway.

And tomorrow, you know, it’s promising to be another busy day.

I have a feature on record labels to finish, it’s weeks overdue. And I have to finish audio editing a loooong interview with a band, it’s months overdue.

And I have to finish resurrecting Soph’s laptop from the dead.

And I need to ride a couple of horses – one of them needs cross-country schooling if I can swing some time up on the course.

And clean and polish my work-shoes.

Clean out the car.

Take the lorry out and tank it up.

Breakdown, clean and oil 3x saddles and 2x bridles.

And I need to enter the one-day event at Larkhill too, but there’s a couple of days left for that one.

So I’m going to bed now.

‘Cos there’s lots to do tomorrow.

Have a nice one.

Woohoo!

What a bloody gorgeous day.

There’s almost bits of almost blue in the almost not overcast sky. The sun is almost shining and it’s TERRIFIC!!!

I went to bed at (wait for it, wait for it) 8.15 last night.

I read for about 5 minutes.

I talked to Soph for about 8 minutes (but can’t, for the life of me, remember what was talked about).

I was asleep from just before 8.30 until Soph woke me just before 8am.

Today I am full of energy and bouncy bouncy bouncy happy whee and other expressions of an overactive nature.

I FEEL BRILLIANT!!!!

Here, have another exclamation mark – just because I can:

!

Soph’s laptop is dead.

Whee!

I’m temporarily between contracts.

Wahay!

Life is just brilliant.

(sorry about this, normal service will resume as soon as my sleep overdose has slipped away)

The news that Ronnie Kray’s criminal record turned up after being lost in an office in Durham police headquarters for forty years is obviously a point worth pondering – especially if you ever have to send valuable information to the rozzers.

But the amusing strand of information in this story is that the East-End criminal listed his occupation as ‘Wardrobe dealer’.

Brilliant.

I want to be a wardrobe dealer.

Is it like being a currency dealer, only slightly more wooden?