Brennig Jones (and friends)

in case it rings bells, the title is a misquote of the cuttingly clever lyric ‘There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face’ taken from the song Life In The Fast Lane by The Eagles…

Because I’m living life in the fastest of fast lanes.

Not.

It’s 2pm, I still haven’t showered, shaved or dressed. I’m sitting on the couch, I’m still in my bathrobe and I’m up to my arse in sitcom scripts and BBC templates for TV productions.

The horses will get today off.

By the way, wasn’t it nice of Soph to pop in and say a few words yesterday?

Back to the writing.

It takes a punishing amount of dialogue to form a single half-hour sitcom episode; far more than a chapter of a novel, or even a graphical scene.

But, strangely, sitcom dialogue doesn’t have to flow in the way that literary dialogue does.

There is a… (don’t want to say ‘art’)… there is a knack to writing TV sitcom scripts; it’s such a different form from lit. prose/short stories, and slightly alien at first.

Anyway, it’s now 4.30pm so you can see that I haven’t been giving exclusive concentration to this post for the last couple of hours!

But in other news, we have found the missing-for-a-week HSBC Online Banking dongle, so I can now login and pay myself once again.

Yay.

Now then, all I’ve got to figure out before I start writing the next scene, is how to make a suicide funny…

And before I go, here’s some brilliant wordage on writing for television from James Henry, a talented chap who I would consider to be a ‘proper’ scriptwriter (well, he’s responsible for – amongst others – Bob The Builder, Smack The Pony and Green Wing):

Thing is, of course, sitting about on your arse all day is perfect training for career in writing scripts (less so for acting, sadly). Further useful skills you could learn in this valuable period:

1. Sighing heavily.
2. Looking things up on Wikipedia, getting distracted, finding yourself spending an entire afternoon on the history of Transformers.
3. Trying various condiment combinations for toast (peanut butter plus brown sauce = yes, cheese, marmite and sliced raw onion also = yes, but with repercussions).
4. Watching a lot of Lady Gaga videos, and starting to think she really might be a lot smarter than that Poker Face song initially suggested.
5. More sighing.
6. Buying stationary stationery, until you have an entire shelf of A4 notebooks, all of which have only the first three pages written in, but which can’t be thrown out, because there’s also some AMAZING D&D maps scribbled in one, can’t remember which.
7. Looking for spare change down the back of the sofa.

Need to write something.

Nothing on the telly (again…).

Have slept for hours this afternoon.

Lay in bed last night and the night before with lots of ‘Oooh, I must write that down’ type bollocks tripping through my poor frazzled brain.  I come to write it down today, now, and it has turned into lots of ‘Oooh, I can’t remember what was so amazing that I couldn’t be arsed to get up and write it down last night’ type bollocks.

Hence I am, once again, rambling.

But that’s OK, because I have the week off.  So surely one of those days shall be spent being creative and clever, rather than drinking coffee and meeting people for lunch?

I did take my laptop to Costa yesterday.

Well, it’s been complaining that I never take it anywhere…

OK, that’s not funny.

No, I wrote a minuscule amount towards the Worst Business Plan In The World Ever ^TM and then checked the word count (and then a family came and sat right next to me so I quick shut down and stepped away from the coffee shop before screaming children were killed).

Only another couple of thousand words to go then.

I have written a ten thousand word dissertation for fuck’s sake! Why am I finding this so difficult and evil??

Well, I know the answer – I was interested in my dissertation subject (Stanley Kubrick film adaptations of twentieth century novels).  I couldn’t really care less about this business plan.

Plus, I spent my first degree writing essays and being creative and stuff.  Writing a business plan or anything report-like is almost beyond my academic comprehension.

But it’s nearly a new year, which means the inevitable and exhausting re-evaluation of everything and re-reading of self-help books that contradict each other and confuse the heckfire out of me.

So, no doubt, along with ‘stop biting nails’ and ‘stop eating bad things’ I’ll be adding ‘do some fucking college work’ to my New never-to-be-kept Year’s Resolutions.

But that’s a whole other post.

Tom’s first day of turnout after more than three weeks of ‘confinement’; things were fraught!

By 7am we were schooling in the indoor arena.

An hour and a quarter later Tom was out in his new field, cavorting around like a two-year-old; bucking, rolling, bucking, rolling then bucking again.

Then he had a canter around the field, checking out the new fencing. I don’t know if he was looking at it thinking ‘Nah’ or sizing it up with a ‘That would be easy!’.

After what seemed an age but was really less than five minutes he’d got it all out of his system and was head-down, grazing.

I stayed and watched for ages, just to make sure he stayed put and then legged it out of the rain in to the tack room for tea and ahem biscuits and ahem cake.

I kept checking on him, but every time I looked he was a) still in place and b) grazing peacefully.

The weather deteriorated so I fetched him in at 11.15; the conditions were so awful that Tom walked up to me and put his head down for the headcollar.

After I’d swapped rugs and carrotted and generally loved both Vin and Tom, R arrived.

I showed him around the yard, introduced him to the girls who were on duty (I may have said that he was single and loaded and in to horses) and then we legged it through the sleet to The Lamb Inn in Shipton-under-Wychwood.

Lunch, beer and gossip was had.

Back at home Soph and I fell asleep whilst watching High Society.

And now it’s back to the diet of Grey’s Anatomy and Pringle sandwiches.

Welcome to my day.

I have the urge to write – creatively – but I’m not sure I have the patience to do it properly at the moment and I think I’m too tired as well, so instead I’m blogging. Maybe you’ll know what I mean.

I have an idea for a sitcom that, frankly, plays so well to the imaginary audience in my head that they alternate between laughing loudly and weeping gently.

I don’t want to give too much away because I think this is a flyer. It plays on a humorous level that’s dangerously close to the funny-bone-ometer set by Coupling, Men Behaving Badly and Game On.

I’ve written the characterisations, I’ve drafted the first episode, I’m working on the second.

So yes, I have the urge to write – creatively – pretty badly right now. But, as I said, I’m not sure I have the patience to do it properly right now; not sure I can give it the attention to detail that it deserves. And I’m tired.

So instead I’m watching Soph pad around the lounge, naked (it is a very diverting sight!), while Grey’s Anatomy plays in the background and my nose is assaulted by the smell of ‘setting’ Pot Noodle.

And I’m patting at the laptop keyboard in an attempt to try and ease the creative pressure that’s being built-up by the creative head of steam because if I don’t then I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight.

My head is spinning with the sitcom, sketches, set-plays, one-liners; they’re rotating and tumbling like a hundred iconic drawings each painted on the back of a playing card. A hundred floating, spining, tumbling playing cards being blown by some mad kind of creative wind.

I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open and yet my head is on cruise control at 70mph and showing no signs of slowing down.

I have to leave the house at 6am, get up the yard and ride Tom; he needs to be well-exercised, then cooled and back in his stable for breakfast at 7.30. While he’s eating I’ll groom and rug him up.

Why the early morning activity?

Because after the exercise and the feeding he’s going in to his new, super-high-fenced turnout tomorrow; the first time Tom will be turned out off the lead-rein for almost three weeks.

So my not-so-cunning plan is to wear him out and feed him up and hope that if he is both knackered and full-bellied, these factors will curtail any ‘going totally mental’ tendencies he might have tucked under his little brown belt, waiting for the day he gets turned out for the first time in almost three weeks.

Have I mentioned how tired I am?

The 2010 Eventing Season is really close – given that the Entry date for competitions are so far in advance of each actual One Day Event.

And because I’m anal about planning things, I’ve designed a draft schedule which gives us three ‘training’ competitions before the season starts, and then leads in to the season ‘proper’.

In addition to these calendar instances, I’ll have regular help from Owen, and will also go out to school at other venues.

I’ve also mucked around with an incremental scale of increasing difficulty, but we’ll see how things go!

Wanna see?

The Christmas Eve show brings our listeners five totally excellent tracks, much wide-ranging and very varied conversation that includes:

• The Cheese Game taking an unusual tack as we play one of the little-known Italian variants
• Soph picking holes in Bren’s syntax and Bren taking umbrage about it
• Bren having his work Christmas lunch with the horses today. They had carrots and Bren had carrot cake
• Tom’s new paddock has been built – 10′ fenced!
• Soph having an ASBO and working unpaid at the local coffee bar
• Bren’s thought that ‘Asbo’ would be a great name for a chav
• Falling asleep whilst watching Shrek 2 and dribbling (and a short discussion about how brilliant that film is)
• A random discussion about camel-toe spotting on Buffy
• Bren hatching a plot to get Jeremy Clarkson on to the podcast
• Soph’s car breaking down earlier in the week but it’s better now after throwing hundreds of pounds at it
• Bren’s car being serviced today and getting the thumbs up
• Bren has planned his 2010 Eventing competition schedule. Be afraid, be very afraid
• A discussion about Simon Mayo leaving the BBC Books podcast and Adam and Joe leaving BBC 6 Music – and Bren knowing about all of this several months ago
• Bren wrapping one Christmas present too many!
• Bono being a short, Irish hypocrite
• Band Aid being a comedy record, whereas Band Aid 2 was just a really shit record

To stream this 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!

It’s that time of the year when my mind slips itself off the lead and bounds along the snow-covered, hedgerow-lined fields of memories, like a mental three-year-old Dalmatian.

It pokes its nose in little tumps of snow; sniffing, sneezing and snorting, it teases and playfully worries things that aren’t there.

And things that are.

At the moment my mind is playing around in the field that I like to call 2009.

How’s it been for you?

I don’t know if I’m deluding myself but I think I’d classify 2009 as ‘Not Too Bad Really’.

And yet straight away I’m on the back foot, defending my performance with a concession that the planned 2009 Eventing season didn’t occur; Vin developed headshaking and that immediately killed off all prospects of competing.

And I’ll defend again with the statement that after six months of looking, I found Tom and he seems to be Perfect In Every Way (to quote Mary Poppins).

Except he isn’t, because I’m paying £1,000 to have an 8′-fenced paddock built for him.

But that’s horses, eh? Except this puts the balance in to the debit side of things.

But on the plus side of the overall balance sheet, I’ve been very busy, both in my ‘day’ job and in the world of my various writing projects (reviewer, feature-writer, novelist and short-storyist).

And yes, I know being very busy is brilliant, but there exists, in my head at least, a general air of dissatisfaction in this field. There’s a feeling that I could have done everything so much better, with a more qualitative attention to detail, if only I’d tried.

Or had the time. And thus begins the vicious circle…

[pause]

The music side of things has gone brilliantly.

I almost grudgingly concede this, as if I am reluctant to set the thought free because the counterbalancing thought might be too much in the negative.

But really, there isn’t a counterbalancing thought. My own guitar playing has been scant, but that was never really on the radar anyway.

And all things Podcasting have been excellent, the growth of our audience has been tremendous.

And the web statistics indicate that the redesigned website is popular with feed-readers and googlers, and besides – and indeed over-ridingly – the Podcast is fun to produce.

Recording it is never a chore and I usually start feeling a growing sense of anticipation about three days before Studio Day. It’s fun, it’s a regular weekly event and I love doing it.

And, of course, as a result of producing the Podcast we have been fortunate enough to listen to some excellent musicians – and doubly fortunate to be able to go on and number some of these very talented individuals as friends.

No, there’s nothing in the debit column on this one.

So that’s music and horses and work and writing.

[another pause]

Family, at first glance, looks like it might be all debit and no credit, but that isn’t how I see it.

There have been two cataclysmic events in this aspect of my life this year. Each shook my self-confidence and erased the ability to believe in myself to the point where, for a while, I didn’t really have a life, I was just going through a series of daily processes and trying to come out the other end unscathed.

The earth-shattering nature of these events isn’t for public discussion, but there was a while, back in 2009, when I lost my rudder and just drifted along, buffeted by the big stormy waves.

But now the rudder is back on and the big stormy waves have abated and although things are a little more choppy than they used to be, at least the water now more closely resembles a boating pond and not a Force 9 in the South Atlantic.

Generally I feel positive about family; the dysfunctional relationship that separates my siblings and me is a source of amusement and not a concern. I was surprised that one of my brothers popped up and left a comment, but when I pinged the email address he’d left and found it to be a dead one, my surprise turned to much laughing out loud.

The Soph and me family feels good and I am optimistic for the future.

And I’m comfortable with my relationship with Soph’s family, though heaven knows what they reckon to me.

So if I had to sum up the whole family thing under one heading it would probably be on the positive side of ‘Meh’.

Which makes me wonder why I’ve spent so much time, this morning, thinking about the past. The deep distant past.

I blame Christmas.

There’s something about this ‘festive’ season that seems to encourage this free-ranging introverted retrospective; the bonkers Dalmatian looning around snowy fields metaphor is a good one. Hang on to it.

I might use it again next year.

2010 promises so much potential; horses, music, writing, family. But I’ve stopped banking on future events. What will be will be.

And other clichés.

How do you feel about your fellow human beings today, Bren?

Just don’t ask why I seem to assume such a weird voice when I talk to them…

… slightly different…

I love Twitter.

No, really.

I am a massive fan of the microblogging service. I like the brevity of 140 characters. I like the fact that it works on my phone and I can use it anywhere.

But I have some issues, not so much with Twitter, but with the way (or ways) the service is being used by just a few folk.

*Issue #1*
I have noticed – and increasingly so – that there are some people who sometimes just ‘say’ things on Twitter, simply for the sake of ‘saying’ things. Like, for example, when they have run out of things of their own to say.

Which, frankly, is stupid.

Let me paint a picture with a hypothetical question.

Would you stay subscribed to a person’s blog feed if a significant percentage of their output comprised randomly uncompiled links from some (pretty rubbish) sources, out-and-out marketing hooks and thinly disguised adverts for various hardline commercial concerns?

Would you?

No, of course you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t either.

And that’s why I am here now, making a firm statement that from this point onwards I have no intention of following a Twitter feed if it is composed of a similar calibre of utter piffle.

Harsh? Yeah, maybe, but look.

I know that every year a few bloggers give up blogging for no reason other than they’ve they run out of things to say.

But if a Twitter user has run out of things to say (and seriously, it’s only 140 characters – and, you know, there’s no *compulsion* to use it every hour of the waking day) what’s wrong with just taking a deep breath, kicking back and… saying nothing, for a while?

I mean, why do people retweet marketing shit from some global, commercial beauty products conglomerate?

Why?

And while I’m on that particular strand of thought, why would *anyone* retweet pure *marketing* information from some beauty products company who, by their very own admission, actively supports and funds an organisation whose members have repeatedly been convicted of violence?

Yes, I’m talking about you, Lush, you hate-crime funding bastards.

So tell me, why would someone do that?

And why would anyone retweet grammatically incorrect, factually dubious, puerile nonsense from some American ‘life coach’ (whatever the fuck one of those is)?

I mean, if you’ve got nothing of any value to say and you just want to push buttons to validate yourself and get your Twitter ID out there in front of people because you’re feeling so insecure you might fall off the face of this planet in a minute (deep breath), why don’t you find something *useful* from someone else’s words?

Or something appropriate or relevant?

‘Wear sunscreen’ by Baz Luhrmann, how about those words? Those two words contain some of the most helpful, and one of the weightiest pieces of advice ever given to any member of our species.

Wear sunscreen.

And how about ‘Don’t shop at Lush because they give a shitload of money to people who terrorise innocent, law-abiding folk’?

In fact ‘Boycott Lush for life’ would be words of almost equal value as ‘Wear sunscreen’.

*Issue #2:*
Here’s another Twitter nonsense that is, frankly, beyond all sensible, reasonable logic:

Follow Friday.

What the hell?

Look, here’s my piece of thinking on this Follow Friday Phenomenon, condensed down to three simple sentences.

Don’t.

Do.

It.

If I want to know who you follow I will look up your Twitter profile and… look up who you follow. I may even read their backdated tweets.

It’s easy, isn’t it?

And it cuts both ways.

If you want to know who I follow on Twitter (and that’s a pretty big ‘if’ for a start, because why would you?), why don’t you go to my Twitter profile and just… see who I follow?

Honestly, the notion that I can single out a handful of the worthies who I follow on Twitter for praise, from the hundred or so people I do follow is, frankly, ludicrous.

By the same string of logic I don’t understand how anyone can single out a handful of who they follow, in order to highlight them to a wider audience, without tacitly devaluing everyone else they follow.

Unless, of course, people are highlighting *everyone* they follow by rotating them on a regular basis to ensure everyone gets equal coverage.

In which case, WTF is that all about?

Does anyone else understand just how much this kind of situation demeans the whole tool?

Or the service?

Meanwhile I’m supposed to sit here and have Friday’s incoming Twitter streams clogged up by some people I follow, each promoting a dozen or so *other* people who I could look up?

If I could be arsed?

Am I really supposed to put up with that?

Here’s a hypothesis for you.

How about this: I follow people who I want to. But if they start acting bizarrely (see any of the above) I’ll unfollow them.

Deal?

*Issue #3*
Here’s another pile of Twitter wrongness.

People constantly retweeting random people.

Look mate, you follow them if you want, but your default position should be that every one of your followers *does not* want you to recycle someone else’s tweets.

And here’s a scenario for any serial retweeters out there: 35 retweets and reposted links in less than an hour? Do you think that’s good? I’ve got news for you, it’s very bad.

Look, if people do that, then under my 2010 Twitter Etiquette, I will unfollow you.

If people are looking to reduce the number of people who follow them, they should just carry on with the multiple fucking retweets and reposted links and see what happens.

In my eyes anyone who produces multiple retweets is doing something that is on a par with producing spam. Think I’m alone in this view? Ask around.

In fact, does anyone think my logic is left-field on any of these things?

Think again.

It’s a little like blogging; if someone constantly behaved as badly on a blog, their blog would haemorrhage readers – and everyone know it!

The same applies to Twitter.

Simples.

So this is my Twitter Charter for 2010.

I shall live by these rules.

I’ll close with one simple statement:

Twitter users should follow the (heavily paraphrased) words of Bambi’s mother: If you can’t think of anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.

It’s the quality that makes the tool good, *not* the quantity.