‘Come thou, love, my own, my only,
Through the battlements of Groan;
Lingering becomes so lonely
When one lingers on one’s own.’
- ‘Linger now with me, thou Beauty’,
from Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

On Thursday the University of Wolverhampton hosted a lecture by Sebastian Peake, son of the poet, author and artist, Mervyn Peake, most famous for his beautiful Gormenghast books. Biting cold kept the hordes away, but I was appreciative of the intimate nature of the talk; Sebastian shared many things about his father’s upbringing and personal life, and indulged us with a question and answer session at the end (after frantically scrabbling for a vaguely intelligent question, I settled on asking him about his recent recording of Peake’s Progress for a centenary audiobook). It was highly enjoyable; I got a copy of Mervyn Peake: Two Lives signed by him, and can now brag about having shaken the hand of someone who held hands with Dylan Thomas whilst being walked to school. Oh yes.

Have you looked outside, lately?

Yes, yes, England has snow. It’s nice to look at and all, but honestly, for all I care it can sod off. It’s cold, it’s wet, old people shrivel alone, cars crash, buses fail to climb hills, I fall over in it, people throw it at me, it ruins carefully straightened hair, it makes walking a chore. I’m avoiding Facebook and Twitter because  every damn time it snows, people behave like they’ve never seen it before. It’s so ~MAGICAL~ and so we must rush out into it, severely underclothed and begging attention from frostbite and friends. Good grief. Ask me to choose between gallavanting around in the snow and curling up on the sofa with homemade pizza and a bad comedy…well. Gimme dat pizza.

I’ve got some days with which to do something, this week. I want to write, read, find something to apply for, do some work on my book (I can’t bear to wait much longer – anticipation is a torment), go for a wander…I need to buy a new pen. One that won’t smudge, this time. Have unsmudgeable pens been invented yet?

Try not to lose sight of what inspires you. You might change, and grow, and move on, but remember that the flicker came to you once. Words that were powerful to you then are still magical now, if you read them the right way. People don’t stop being brilliant, they just forget how to show it.

Now darlin’, don’t you ever grow up.

“I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.”

He’s such a maniac! He likes tea, biscuits, steals toast from your plate, quite enjoys the odd pizza crust if he can swipe it while you aren’t looking…what a hoodlum! Chip has also been feeling adventerous lately, though not quite on the same deranged level:

They keep me on my toes, I guess.

Anyway, you may have noticed that the ‘Work’ category is gone. That is a decision I have made and will be sticking to…that part of my life stays away from the internet, permanently.

I’m staring down the barrel of two days off in a row…I plan to get a few things done. First of all, I will rise at a sensible hour tomorrow (ie. not before 6am, thank you very much) and devise a plan for the latest chapter of Nom. I’ve decided to write out a few characters this time around, and one of them is quite important…I’m now at the point where the resolution of a chapter actually revolves around this character, so I have to think up a suitably insane scenario to replace the passage I already have. I’ve got a couple of ideas, but that’s all they are so far. I need to spend an hour or so brainstorming so that when I sit at the computer, I don’t just end up surfing the web aimlessly. I need a rabid St. Bernard chained to my leg, making sure I don’t procrastinate.

I don’t think there’s much more to say. I put £600 in my savings account this month, and will try to add at least half that amount again when the 20th rolls around. Wednesday is the open day at Warwick…let’s hope I feel inspired there.

For now, enjoy some Keats, and find yourself wishing you had half his talent like I do:

To Sorrow,
I bade good-morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind:
I would deceive her
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.

Not gonna lie, I’ve had a pretty crap day off. I have five straight days of work ahead of me, so I thought maybe, just maybe I’d enjoy my day off…but nah. It started off badly and just got worse, to be honest. I’m pretty pissed off about the whole she-bang, but what can you do? I’m going to put my bad mood down to the tension headaches, and hope tomorrow passes quickly.

So, the week’s schedule, starting eight o’ clock tomorrow morning:

• Monday: Work (10:30 – 6:30)
• Tuesday: Work (10:30 – 6:30)
                 Possible venture to a pub in the evening
• Wednesday: Work (10:30 – 6:30)
• Thursday: Work (10:30 – 6:30)
• Friday: Work (10:30 – 6:30)
• Saturday: OFF
• Sunday: OFF (supposedly)

…I cannot wait for that blessed weekend to arrive. The hours aren’t all that bad when you look at it like that, but when you factor in the two hours of prep and travel both before and after…it’s a long day. I can’t wait to sleep.

I really need to think of a Hallowe’en costume, and fast. My amazing ideas include rock, paper, scissors, the Scooby gang and Team Rocket. All three involve a group effort, and of course, nobody would help me out. At the moment it looks like going as sodding Minnie the Minx, which would just be a rehashing of my Dennis the Menace costume, but with a beret. Urgh. It’s going to be such a shit Hallowe’en, at this rate.

In other news, I finished reading Tom Holland’s The Vampyre, and absolutely loved it. It has reignited my interest in Lord Byron, and today I picked up another of his books, this one involving Oscar Wilde. I’ll start reading it on the train tomorrow.

There’s so much more I could complain about, but my fingers are tired of typing. The other moderator over at equations abandoned her post this week, leaving the community with four days sans update, and so there’s a shit load to catch up on. You can probably guess how my next few hours will be spent.

Urgh. What a day. I’m so glad it’s nearly over.
And just for the record, Firefox is an infuriatingly useless pile of crap.

I just wish people could survive without the drama. It doesn’t appear to be possible for everybody else.

I have a job interview on Thursday, at Waterstone’s. I’m excited. It’s only a temporary position, but I think I’d be good at it, and it would also be good for my writing. There’s little more inspiring than being surrounded by books. I’m going to work on a chapter of CON right now, just because I finally feel ready to.

I can’t wait to have my novel finished. I can’t wait for you to read it.

You can have skirting board shoes
and plug sockets on your knees,
I’ll hang a painting on your lip
and put tinsel ’round it at Christmas.

You can’t keep us inside much longer, pal.
We’ve seen the view from the window.

It’s glorious outside!
Have you seen the time?
Have you seen the tide?”

- from ‘Wall’ by Enter Shikari.

I am quite sure that I am being replaced.

Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery and Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett, The Gunslinger by Stephen King

 What do the above books have in common, you might wonder? Why, they’re the books I’ve read this week. Well, over the past four days, at any rate. Okay, so I haven’t finished The Gunslinger, but by this time tomorrow I will have. I honestly cannot recommend so many books to a single person in such a short space of time. My brain is firmly lodged in Pratchett’s Discworld and who knows when I will be thinking “normally” again.

I had a back log, you see. I don’t know about you, but I despise back logs. They prey on my mind. I was innocently sitting, looking at the endless queue of books on my shelf that I fully planned on reading one day, and just felt so nauseous. I vowed to read through as many as possible this week. Five is pretty good going. A couple of the Discworld books are re-reads, but I’d forgotten what happened in them. Now that my brain has been re-introduced to Mort, I remember why it has always been one of my favourites.

Anyway, back logs. I hate the buggers. I also have a back log of video games, but whereas a book can be read in a handful of hours, epic RPGs take decidedly more time. Like Magnacarta, the PS2 game I started playing in 2005. That’s four fuckin’ years ago. Granted, I’ve been neglecting it…it’s not my fault its so boring and tedious. But a game never goes unfinished. I made the mistake of looking up a walkthrough for it the other day, confident that I would be near the end, only to discover that I am only on part 12 of 40. 40! FORTY! FOUR TEA! I will be playing this game for the rest of my life.

I’m in the mood to clean today, which is unusual. I’ve hoovered my room (managed not to murder any socks this time), and had a MAD RECYCLING SPREE which was utter chaos and devastating to observe. The flatmates, if they even notice, will be all “ *KAPOW* oh my life, where has all the recycling BACK LOG gone?!?!?! ”

On that day, I will bow until my forehead smacks off the floor.

I really want to clean the kitchen, so that our cleaner will have a shock in the morning upon realising there is nothing for her to do. I don’t want to clean with other people around, though. It’s not that I don’t like socialising with the flatmates, they’re nice people, I just have nothing to say to them, and if they catch me scraping their mouldy plates of pasta into the bin, they might heroically try to stop me. Or offer to help, and expect a conversation as they do so. I’m cringing just thinking about it.

I think I’ll stick some quality pop music on and tidy up my own room a bit more, instead. There is a pile, nay, a MOUNTAIN of washing that is glaring at me from the corner, and I could also do with clearing off the top of my fridge. Seriously, if there is space, I will fill it with junk.

And on that note, I’m hungry. I have no food. The student life crushes me with its poverty and general lack of nutrition. Woe is me.