Movements.

If you'd like to, read this thing. Or don't. 

I'm a blog post, not a cop.

How does a pawn take a king?

It is a sad old cliché that is cliché for a reason.

Through the movements of his friends, and the tensions of his enemies, I'd say. The outspoken movements of your powerful compatriots, their strides echoing on the horizon.

Walls are put up, and soldiers sally forth to push back the bishops with their words, and the knights with their swords, all in the name of our August Majesty. So where does the pawn make his mark?

Only on the blades of their betters, They'd say.

And yet...

The right pawn in the wrong place. Under the steel wing of a powerful friend, he is ushered into the royal court itself, the clashing of steel and the screams of the dying muffled by the stained-glass and stone. And what does a king do, when confronted by a pawn with friends, a gleam in his eye and a nervous smile on his lips?

He runs.

Harried, and frightened. A giant, made little. A fortress, made ash. His big decisions and his big enemies and his big words and his big thoughts. Made small, blinded to nothing by the light on a chipped sword in the hands of a pauper.

To keep one's head, one must keep one's eyes on the prey, and not the horizon.

So how does a pawn take a king?

The small made mighty by the movements of his friends, I'd say.  

Story Corner - Lazy week update.

If you have a spare five minutes, I've written a teeny-tiny piece after tea as the rain hammers off of the window pane that doesn't mean much of anything, but you might get something from it. Just as a slight word of warning, there is violence in it, and not the pleasant kind.

Are you sitting comfortably?
Then I'll begin.

In Honest Men

The fire was strong, its orange tongues hissing angrily at the rain that landed on its stolen meal. The moon was high but diluted by banks of black cloud that crowded overhead, the susurration of the leaves separating this small clearing from the rest of the world. Two men were seated near the warmth, unable to sleep for the damp ground, their backs sodden, their chests steaming.

One, no more than a boy, sits under the weight of a large chain vest placed atop stinking rags, his normal wild sweep of fringe plastered to his high cheek bones by the rain. A shield, emblazoned with the painted emblem of an eagle rampant and a ragged dent in its lower rim, lay in the mud beside him. At the boy's waist a chipped short sword, too heavy for his meagre frame, glinted in the crystalline drops that beaded its rusted hilt.

His opposite number loomed in the firelight, his monstrously twitching shadow cast against the forest at his back. The leather of his long leather coat shone like steel and his wide-brimmed hat streamed water.

A long ebony cane was unceremoniously used to stoke the flames as they spoke in hushed tones, exchanging stories of times far gone; sometimes laughing, most times lamenting. Buried memories had a habit of struggling to the surface, splinters of sorrow lodged into the pink flesh of contentment; snagging you just when you thought yourself happy.

The larger of the two stared into the fire for some time, the flames warped against wet leather, casting the steam that rose from his shoulders as smoke.

“I was an honest man.”

He shifted, his coat grating against the iron-like bark of the log on which he was sat. “Despite all I've done, I had promised myself that no lies would be spoken. I clung to it, this one good thing - and kept it with me through dirt, and steel, and blood.”

A hip flask was drawn from a pocket and he took a long pull. Proffering it, he waited for the coughs of his young companion to fade before continuing.

“It was thirty two years ago-” he looked up into the clouds in silent calculation, “-to the day, during the siege of Seven Heights that I was caught up in the final push for the outer gate. The men there, they were animals: setting flame and violating everything they touched... it was a siege, I suppose. Funny what looking like everyone else will do to a man. Still.”

He glanced away, gathering his thoughts.

“I was caught in the middle – fighting under no one's banner and more likely than not just another pile of meat to be hacked through. From the screams inside the guard houses I was thinking that it would be important to be on the winning side, so I found myself someone that wasn't all the way dead and took the cloak and helmet he had. He struggled, but he was too far gone. He was weak and bloodied, but the uniform was pretty much pristine.”

The boy peered across as him, rubbing a nick on his cheek with a grubby finger. “Then what?”

The leather creaked in a shrug. “I played the part. I waved a sword around, charged fearlessly with them and shouted a bit. I was trying to get out, to find a way out this madness I found myself in, my objective forgotten. I'd been at the fort for some time waiting for a good moment to take him: the church's influence was weak in this wild part of the world, and the writ, I felt, would have been insufficient to just drag so powerful a man away. So I waited, befriending one of his servants. A young lady – you'd have liked her – a smile always on that pretty face and a fringe that would never quite sit right.”

“But not so today.” The flask was drained and was cast into the darkness. “I would tell no lies, but what could I do? I had found her hiding in the larder. She was so young. I held her as the flames began to lick the thatched roof – I told her, with this good thing in my heart, that she would be fine, that we'd get out of here. It would be okay.” The man's gravelly tones began to crack as he spoke on, head first in his torment. “Then I heard the door behind us open: three of the Legion looking for young flesh. What could I have done? I was in no position to fight them off. But she was going to be fine! We would get out of there! It would be okay!” He was angry now, the stark image of her terrified face boiling across his vision.

The boy leant back as his companion's words sat between them, red and spiky, over the flames.

“What did you do?” His high voice was now a hoarse whisper.

The helmet didn't fit. The smell of the dying man's breath filled the face-plate and the stench of smoke and blood suffused his clothes. The jeering of the Legion soldiers behind him was nearly drowned out by the crackling of the inferno that was gripping the roof, embers falling as stars around them. He looked again at those fear-filled eyes, and felt small fists begin to beat his chest as his fingers closed around the girl's throat. He pressed in, his mind screaming “it will be OKAY!” to her as bruises blossomed under his thumbs. She was trying to scream, and she still refused to die. Remembering the boiling hatred of that guttering croak he released a hand and smashed it again and again into her face, hoping with every fibre of his being that she would fall silent at last, released from this horror and what might have happened had he not gotten there first.

The price of his survival. He couldn't even remember her name.

He stood suddenly, his answer so quiet it was nearly lost to the rain.

“I lied.”

Shouting at the Steering Wheel.

I have accepted the fact that this blog is not viewed by many and so I can just use it as a blinking, electronic chaise-longue at which to rail against.

I have spent a large portion of my day, or week now I come to think about it, being unseasonably angry. Not mopingly depressed as is my usual want, but to the point where I actually used the eff-word in front of my mother. Oh hell yes you read right: I'm getting a tattoo of that encounter, depicted as a small comic strip, across my shoulders as I type. The actual word in question will be represented as "!@*&", as I am not Crass. Though I hasten to add that it was not directed at my mother, otherwise the only way I could communicate now would be through seance.

There have been occasions recently where I have just had to have a good old shout inside my long-suffering Aygo, the screams of futile aggression bouncing off of the dimpled grey dashboard and fading to nothing amidst the plastic bottles and peanut-butter cup wrappers on the back seat. About pretty much anything as it happens, from my day at work, to the state of the country, the fact I haven't been given a billion pounds, etc.

It's all rather exhausting, but I'll do it anyway, because having it vocalised makes it easier, somehow.

I was accused of being too posh earlier this week. You know what? I hope this person suffers a chance encounter with a pack of rabid wolverines, pushed beyond their usual cheerful demeanour by redundancy and ill-spent money on lottery tickets and Internet futures, given a crate of Stella Artois and told to loosen their ties.
I wouldn't drive a '93 Honda Starlet with broken windows and spikes instead of seats if I had an Aston-Martin in the garage - why the ruddy heck would I think about not using words that I know that may contain more than two syllables? Is being too well spoken something to be frowned upon nowadays? Is it really that we live in a world where someone has act less learned than they actually are so other people who haven't spent time reading don't feel all left out? Is being stupid cool now?

Fab. Totes amazeballs.

I will use the word salubrious, if something is. I will mention that I have recently been fortunate enough to have spent some quality time in good company, if I went out with my mates. I will curl my now magnificent moustache into a more colonial fashion when out and about because I don't care about what you do to your dumb face but you seem to do it anyway. 

I keep thinking I should see a person about these random pockets of fury that bubble as swamp-gas through my brain and out through my hands.

Sod it, I'm making a list of things that I hate:

1. Road cyclists and their sense of entitlement
2. Taxi drivers and their sense of entitlement
3. Stupid people and their sense of entitlement
4. Wasted potential and those who use their wasted potential to give themselves a sense of entitlement
5. Supermarket sandwiches
6. My own sense of entitlement

Have you noticed a common theme? That's correct: I'm an awful person who sits in his ivory tower and sneers at everyone else, thinking himself better than they are. It's sort of refreshing to have it all here in print, to know I've really touched bottom with this one. But I'm leaving it up, as a stinging reminder that I'm a bit of a cock with a serious attitude problem, when all's said and done.

The end, no moral.

Drinking in Silence.

How often have I been sat at this desk that I do not own?

It's strange to think that I somehow end up orbiting this place: Scotland, to here. From Westbury to here. From Guildford to here. And now, from Trowbridge to here.

I slingshot back and forth to this one, deathly silent place, and how often I end up drinking on-offer Leffe and projecting poorly written booze-addled tripe into the computer; sitting as it does like the knight in the Last Crusade. It's unusual, is what it is. My world, as it stands, has not changed much. Apart from that guy. Yes. Apart from that, things have remained very the same for a while now - which makes things difficult to write about. I have not yet made my fortune as a third-party rubber distributor, or discovered some lost archipelago (I just love the word and by God I spelt it correctly first time out) and brought back silks and spices with the tales of exotic faraway lands upon my lips, but I am muddling on.

The cat who's house I've invaded is crying at me now, in his peculiar girl's voice. He is a large Tom, and what he lacks in logical thought, grace and not-looking-extremely-gormless, he more than makes up for in bulk. He is what would be referred to as a Lump. I would imagine a meow from such a predatory creature to be possessed of a deep and noble timbre, perhaps if you were to listen to a hearty chuckle from George Clooney - but no. I have mentioned Joe Abercrombie before, but if you've read the books just picture Bremer dan Gorst: brushed upon in book one but magnificently elaborated on further in the series. (I am so glad he did: one of the most real characters I've ever read)

Though, living in this space has allowed me to indulge in strange pass-times. Take my advice: spend one night a month at least, doing nothing. On your own. Drink your favourite alcoholic beverage and allow it to seep into your veins. Feel the glow, like a winter sunrise, wash over you, and don't fight it. Never fight it. In company we become loud, and happy, and maudlin and energetic and tired... On our own we have no one to play to, no one to impress - so we become who we really are, unbound by social convention. We as social creatures never really appreciate what a good drunk is, and as pathetic as it sounds being sat in the near-dark with a good wine or beer, allowing yourself to wade in up to the neck in drunkenness is a rare treat.

Do it, and learn about yourself.

And thank me later.

And now a word from our local feel-good representative.

We are a society founded upon failure. How many adverts have you seen that say “you know what, we're all doing a pretty good job” or “keep up the good work!”? Positive reinforcement is something that we find offensive, and it makes us cagey. The only thing you see is something that scares you: “Your children's high chair is covered in bacteria”, “if you don't use this cream all the girls will think you have a small dick”. We are frightened and browbeaten into things. PPI been mis-sold? Had an accident anywhere in the last decade? Want to not be a grotesque, flabby loser? Call us. We can give you free money, but only if you can blame a stranger. It boggles the mind at how easily we sell each other out and swindle people we don't know so we can buy a bigger telly. I remember, two years ago pranging a big Audi on the way to visit my mother. “Bugger” I thought as the woman got out of the car and stepped to the side of the road. She was on the phone, understandably so, so that she may call an ambulance for her.. to maybe contact... wait. A taxi turns up, and a huge tattooed traveller gets out of the driver's seat and tries to threaten me.

Ignoring him, because he was a stupid person, I spoke to his frail wife, who in the end shook my hand and said that everything was fine, there's no damage done and it was just a mistake, easily made.

Seven months later I receive a letter from a solicitor stating that I caused this fully mobile woman to suffer whiplash a few weeks previously and that my insurance is now going to go up. There was nothing I could do. I appreciate that people telling these stories, usually slurring their words and spilling their beer, would exaggerate the details to make them look the innocent party but I swear to whatever Gods are listening that this is what happened. What could I do? It was her and a strangely debilitated doctor versus me, a schmuck in a weather beaten Aygo. But to think that this person decided to cost me the best part of a thousand pounds in premiums so she could spend a day (as stated in the letter) off work astounded me. How have we become so callous to others? It is these experiences that make a heart grow cold.

But we as human beings are shaped by grief, and want, and tragedy: have you met or otherwise encountered someone genuinely interesting who have only experienced balance and happiness? I sure as hell haven't. These people, few though they are, are nice. We label things as nice because they are not bad, but not necessarily good. In the heart-rate monitor of reality they are not the panicked spikes of elation and sorrow but a flat line: no happiness, no sadness. No height, and no depth. They are a totally neutral death-state of existence. You imagine that they would react to a lottery win in much the same way they would react to a death in the family: they would just nod thoughtfully, and drive their silver Vauxhall Astra from their new build Barratt home to the nearest Wetherspoons for a cold pint of Carling, then maybe watch the football. They don't play, but they follow that foreign guy who manages that team they like. They would smile, and they would ask how you were, and they would nod again with a thoughtful expression before asking about your day. They are nice. And they are inoffensive, in much the same way as a fridge does its job but does not cause you to explore its innermost depths.

We seek darkness in others. This contrast, this difference and in some cases this misery makes a person titillating to be around. Would you rather speak with Jordan or Hawking? Beckham or Lovecraft? Andre or Fry? They are all humans, but that streak of difference makes the man, not the suit.

And you see these little grey people wandering about their torpid little lives, and that moment strikes you and tells you that maybe, just maybe, you're not actually that different. What makes you different? How are we, at all, original in any way? We have life experience, and a quirky place to live, and facial hair and a penchant for weird trains of thought but how is that different to anyone else? How can you know these people are as how you imagine?

You can't. Your only choice is to swim on, and drink your designer beer or your red wine and do those things that make you different enough to not be drowned in the crushing tidal-wave of inequity that we believe everyone else is floundering in. The only thing that makes you different is that you express openly these strange thoughts and feelings in an effort to infect those around you. To make you seem different. To make you unique.

Just like everyone else.

The Death of Original Thought.

Howdy y'all.

I have come to a strange and paradoxical conclusion based on nothing more than a random thought and a Google search.

We spend our time being creative. We write, or draw, or paint, or record our thoughts and feelings in the vague hope that it will come across as the next great Insert-Your-Nationality-Here work - and I have found that there is simply nothing new any more to say or do. It is merely a rehash or re-imagining of a fundamental idea. Take fantasy for example: there is a staple set of "rules" that govern a fantastic world - anything that deviates from this set of criteria run the risk of becoming too abstract and so will fail to engage a consumer. Consumer. That looks like it's spelt wrong.

Wait a second.

Nope, it checks out, so anyway. Tolkien had given a large audience what we now as a collective consciousness refer to as 'fantasy' - Elves and Dwarves, Magic, epic destiny and so on. Trying to be original in a world where the standard template is that of the above is pretty tricky; it has been done, but only by toning down such ideas and making it more 'real' - Joe Abercrombie's "The Blade Itself" series is an awesome example, touching lightly on the concept of magic but instead of branching out within the genre it chooses to sit firmly within the trunk. That's fine, and his portrayal of his characters as merely fallible people is amazing.

I have written a book you know. I now pull on my finest smoking jacket and smuggest, most shit-eating smile I can muster. I enjoyed writing it, but I felt constrained to comply to this archetype of Fantasy and the Hero's Journey or Monomyth in which the hero goes through a set of attitudes and challenges (Wiki it; it's very interesting to look through and compare it to anything you've read so far; you may even raise your eyebrows whilst exhaling through your nose at it), simply because everything involving fantasy, even from the Redwall books I read as a nipper to the Wheel of Time follows this template to a certain degree.

Still, in my story a man gets a clout in the mush. I won't say who, because it might spoil it.

OR DOES HE

Maybe the template is just a means to insert your own attitudes and beliefs into a fantastic setting through which you engage the reader, and in doing so put across those beliefs without feeling contrived or preaching. Who knows?

In other news, I went biking with a good friend of mine for four days. I was awesome, and then I fell off, hurting my limbs, body and face areas. It hurt. And still does, though not as much. I didn't cry though; at least not in view of anyone, so that's pretty manly, right?

This whole, stupid block of text came about as a result of a conversation with my better half and realising that ducks, instead of beaks, were wearing dog masks. Seriously, Google a duck and look. Underneath this dog mask they have either:

• A grotesque, Lamprey like maw, all fangs and cartilage
• A perfectly formed human mouth

I considered going to the park in which to apprehend a duck, leaping upon it and wrenching the vile disguise from its head but that could either reveal the ducks for what they truly are, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, as they would decide that now they have been rumbled they should wreak havoc upon the world. Or more likely, result in my arrest for breaking a duck's neck in a public park in front of two misty-eyed toddlers feeding them bits of a bread. I'm not sure my conscience could take it.

You win this time, winsome water fowl. I actually Googled 'duck dog masks' and found that a lot of people had the same idea - hence the title.

I bring shame upon the clan.

How it steals my senses.

I'm fairly sure normal, mentally stable people do not do the things I do when they've had one too many.

Popping down the pub and chatting up the human being that is closest to me, or taking off my clothes and skinny dipping, or picking a fight with a total stranger, or finding true love for a few hours, or laughing myself silly at the old stories of when we were all in school would be a more normal thing for a person to do.

Yet, I found myself two thousand words into a tirade about the human condition and the nature of survival at ten minutes past midnight. I am beginning to get the feeling that I am a bit of a jackass. All these grand ideas thought up when alcohol with a yellow label slips under my brain and goes "You know what? We should write a novel!" were laid out in the window that I am typing into now, in the drunken hope that my daft thought processes would blow the lid off of the entire world.

We all think these things and have these ideas: after a couple of pints we all become philosophers and gain the ability to put the world to rights, and then in the morning where everything is too bright and white noise is buzzing in the back of your head and the pound, pound, pound of dehydration and lack of blood-sugar is marching through your veins we find ourselves half-chuckling to ourselves and thinking at what a bell-end we were those few hours ago. I find myself quietly ashamed of the thoughts I have when I am hammering away at this poor, re-conditioned laptop's keyboard, but why should I? Another part of me thinks that these tangential thoughts are really what define us as individuals: my thoughts may align, but not replicate, someone else's, and that in itself is fairly wonderful. Chances are I'll look through this and think to myself that I really should smash my router to bits with a hammer to prevent the world from being exposed to this pseudo-conspiracy theorist brand of bullshit.

But hey. In forty years when I am sat at the same desk in the same flat with a gut that sags more and hair that is more silver than black I'll think to myself "Hey, at least you didn't wind up swigging the cider you're drinking in the park!".

Oh well, small blessings I guess. Chances are I'll wake up and read this, grimacing to myself at what, as above, a bell-end I am.

But as with everything else, I will leave it up as a monument to my inadequacy, as it is my faults and cracks and fractures and scars that make me who I am, and make me stronger as a person.

Fade to black, roll credits, something touching on a piano.

Doing it properly, again. Honest. Maybe.

Well, this is a strange feeling.

I have, in the interests of keeping myself off the streets, peddling 'Mary Jane' and 'Jazz Cigarettes' to our impressionable youth, I have decided, once again, to re-re-start this blog. This will document my boring little life, the people in it, and any alcohol-induced thoughts that I might happen to stumble across when I buy whatever beer or wine that has a yellow price tag in Tesco's.

You see, gifted though I am with a lot of free time, my ability to fill this time with things other than listlessly looking at pictures of cats is lacking. I am constantly filled with the desire to push myself to great and noble deeds: to write the next great British novel, to lift a car over my head and to play the saxophone on the back of an aircraft carrier, whilst wearing a billowing linen suit-jacket.

However, though the mind is willing, the body is sluggish, pasty and slightly translucent from weeks of not seeing the sun. I will take a deep breath and rise from my chair with a pressing desire to change the world – this feeling tends to last between four and twenty seconds, at which point I will sit down again, slightly out of breath.

It is clearly not I that is to blame here, but society. When I am confronted with nothing to do there is no pressing need to survive, as my survival is more or less guaranteed unless I try to eat batteries out of the remote or try to ride my bike down the stairs; these things would be my fault, and as I am too lazy to try them, I remain alive through inactivity. However, the choice I have when deciding on things to do paralyses me: so high is this level of choice I am no longer selecting one activity but eliminating thirty others. This blog is a way of adding yet another choice to the already heaving mountain of trite time-sinks.

Good on me. I give myself a pat on the back.

Back in second, I just need to check something.

I have discovered that it is eight paces from the desk I'm sitting at to the front door; handy to know, in case a gunman runs up the sixty or so steps to my flat, runs past all the other doors to mine and kicks his way through to my living room. That should give me just enough time to lethargically rise from my seat before I am riddled with hails of psychosis-fuelled gunfire. As I lay bleeding on my charity shop rug I gaze through the lounge window, and the last thing I see is the permanently shocked/perplexed expression of a local pigeon.

Well, I've run out of things to say. I might update this again, but knowing me I'll just forget about it, because let's face it: I'm a bit of a twat. I'd like to talk about cooking, and D&D, and bikes, and the horrors of writing something longer than a blog post, and the heart-breaking levels of abuse you must receive as a result of such an endeavour, but we'll see.

I am now off to a place where I will try and do a karate chop on someone then fall over, giving myself a concussion.

Good day. I said good day sir.