Save Me From Boredom, Blogdom!

The wound in my foot was healing fine until Gabby insisted on swabbing it down with potato gin. Forget gauze pads and sterile environments. My little Romanian miracle worker dragged my leg up onto the coffee table, swigged back a mouthful of her latest brew, and spat it all over my foot. She promised it would kill bacteria. I only know that I can’t feel my toes and the carpet has started to turn white. It’s all worrying but Gabby tells me that’s only natural and swears she can’t remember the last time she had any feeling in her tongue.

This is how you find me, today, Wednesday, my Thonglateers. I’m Bangor’s sexist invalid, hobbling naked around my flat and trying to find something productive to do. I’m not even thinking about how much it is going to cost me to get Romania’s answer to Pam Ayres into print.

As I type this, Gabby is out haggling with Bangor’s stationers; bulk-buying notebooks ahead of her next assault on the north face of Mount Parnassus. This morning, she left me this bit of doggerel to post in her absence. I’ve only agreed to do so knowing that it’s sure to gain me your pity…

My Fun Tuesday

Gabby shot sparrow; Gabby shot a thrush,
Chippy picked gun up and shot himself in foot.
His blood was real messy and such a sight to see,
Before we all went off to Accident and Emergency.
Chippy now is crippled, like bus run over dog,
And makes groany noises like half squished frog.
I could put him out of misery, since he’s lost all sense of fun,
But Gabby must suffer because Chippy’s hidden her gun.

© Gabby, 2007.

In all honesty, can any one of you out there blame me for trying to escaping from reality?

In desperation, I picked up ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys, which is part of the reading list for my FE class. After only half an hour and ten pages, I felt like shooting myself in my other foot just to end the tedium. It was an act of restraint just throwing the book out the window. I have since spent the rest of my time browsing the day’s blogs, which is where I found some slight relief by considering the problems of blog publishing.

Clare, at the Girl Friday blog, distracted me from the pain with a link to a piece in The Guardian by ‘The Girl With A One Track Mind’ about turning blogs to books. Naturally, it attracted my attention. I’m a man with more than one unpublished novel to my name, so I know more than most what it’s like to be at the bottom of the world’s slush piles. Yet it also makes it hard to be objective about The Girl’s conclusions. She thinks that blogging is a wonderful thing, given that ‘the very act of writing online allows for quality material and this is down to one main factor - the readers' comments.’ Perhaps The Wife in the North would share the same sentiments, but I’m sure that I don’t.

For me, the fallacy of blogging is the notion that we can be discovered in a more fair or practical way than the old methods of going about such things. To take Gabby as an example: is there any coincidence in the fact that her genius is only coming to light because others see something in her poetry that I can’t? Her inarticulate nonsense is perfect for a medium which doesn’t suite any kind of thought-out writing. Writers who write literary novels can never hope to be discovered through a blog because their skill takes take time to get just right through rewriting. The same is true of thrillers, comedy novels, and whodunits. Somebody recently asked me to help them write a detective novel online, which, to my way of thinking, just couldn’t work, or at least, not as a blog containing the work in progress.

Blogs are an effective for writers who just want to put work out there, without having to worry about being accepted. Rarely is it about quality. Those that find the most success seem to find it through those same qualities that make other things successful on the web. They tend to be victories for the values of the obscene freak-show. For all its popularity and success, ‘The Girl With A One Track Mind’ represents a height of sub-literary prurience; a single joke that has probably run well beyond itself in terms of originality, but retaining readership because, given the size of the web, there are always people to whom it is new, dangerous, or (mildly) erotic. I don't know how much mileage is left in my thongs but I hope there's more to me than the contents of my posing pouch.

What can I say?

I’m in pain and it’s raining outside. My foot is beginning to ache and I’m only thankful that I can feel my toes again.

And now I can hear a key in the door. I better post this before my Romanian bard comes in and demands that I include the dozen or so poems she’s sure to have written in the space of the last hour.

The Trouble With Edwina Currie

I discovered Gabby in a black mood this morning. She was sitting at the kitchen window with her air pistol, shooting at sparrows in the garden below. I made my way slowly around to the fridge, having discovered on many previous occasions that it’s dangerous to disturb a trigger-happy Romanian with a handgun.

‘So,’ I said, as I began to squeeze my morning orange, ‘are the sparrows biting today?’

Crack. The distant squawk of wildlife, though I can’t dismiss the possibility that it was the postman.

‘Edwina Currie thinks I have talent,’ said my death-dealing buttercup as simple as an accusation gets before noon.

‘And so do I,’ I replied, but inwardly steeling myself for an argument I knew I simply would have to win.

‘So why won’t you lend me money?’

‘I haven’t got a penny to spare,’ I said. ‘My financial thong is empty. And if it wasn’t, we can do better things than pay somebody to publish your poetry. Vanity publishing is just that. Vanity. When they see your genius, somebody will offer you good money to publish it.’

She frowned, fired, and a starling suffered a mortal flesh wound.

‘Edwina said…’

‘I don’t give a damn what Edwina said,’ I cried. ‘You have to still to learn some things about the British. We’re a nation who like to see people make fools of themselves.’

‘So why did she say I was good poet?’

I hadn’t the spirit to explain the rest of what the needlessly profane one-time Junior Minister for Health had to say on the matter of poetry. I merely regretted that the bad language she’d been recently displaying on my blog hadn’t been put to more use a decade ago when she should have been more vehement in explaining the dangers of under-cooked poultry. I might never have suffered the food poisoning that led to my dismal A level results, eventual rejection from university, and led me to my current low paying work as a male stripper.

These were the distracted thoughts that went through my head as I snatched the pistol from Gabby’s hand and managed to shoot myself in the foot.

‘Damn that Edwina Currie!’ I cursed, falling on the floor as blood made an early appearance over the Chipster’s slippers. Even then, I was proud of myself for not resorting to profanity, even as I felt the blood begin to seep between my toes.

‘Chippy? You okay?’ asked Gabby, rushing to my side. ‘It okay if we don’t publish poems,’ she added, cradling my head. ‘I’m not good at rhyming yet…’

‘Shot… foot,’ I gasped, feeling suddenly faint with the pain.

‘No, no, that not good rhyme,’ said Gabby, apparently oblivious to the serious nature of my injury. ‘Cut rhymes with foot. Soot rhymes with foot…’ She went silent and I believe I passed out for a few minutes. The next thing I remember was Gabby slapping my face and forcing a piece of paper into my hand.

Gabby shot a sparrow, then a thrush,
Then poor Chippy shot himself in foot.

‘Does this rhyme?’ she asked.

I was beyond caring. My foot was a congealed bloody mess the likes of which have slapped many a certificate 18 on a film. Tears ran down my cheeks and pooled on my lips. ‘Help me,’ I pleaded. ‘My foot…’

‘Pah,’ said my Romanian humanitarian looking at my yellow slippers, now completely covered with Chip Dale’s finest O positive. ‘Gabby uncle once shot foot off with shotgun. He did not stop work until he pick up every potato on field.’

‘Please…’ I begged.

‘Finish washing up,’ said Gabby, dropping my head onto the tiled floor. ‘I want to finish this poem before we go.’

An hour later, I was in Bangor’s emergency room waiting for a nurse to bandage my foot. A doctor has just pulling a lump of pellet from it, which Gabby had taken as a souvenir. ‘I think I make into earring,’ she said, holding the bloody mess up to a lobe.

‘It suits you,’ I replied over lips parched dry with suffering.

‘So, do you think Edwina Currie would read my collected poems?’ asked Gabby. Now having turned her attention to a box of scalpels she’d found in a drawer, she began to juggle three.

As I watched the razor sharp blades arc through the air, I thought of the nine hundred pages of tightly typed manuscript sitting at home, waiting to be discovered like an extra forty cantos by a Romanian Ezra Pound.

‘I’m sure she would,’ I said with a grimace or a smile. ‘I’m sure she would…’