Captain's Blog: 31st January

     If you want to eavesdrop, you go to the Utica College cafeteria (hereafter, Utica College will be replaced with UC. As is said by faculty, it takes 'UC' to spell 'success'. As one of my lecturers pointed out, it also takes them to spell 'sucks'). The cafe - pronounced calf over here - is, for whatever reason, the area where people tend to lower their conversational guard to somewhere just below the earth's crust an let all their hitherto unvocalised thoughts out for an airing. Take, for instance, the conversation I overheard at lunch, where an issue regularly stumping philosophers since Plato was broached:

"Hey guys, so if a girl has a great body, can she still be a zero out of ten?"

"How d'you mean?"

"Well, if she's got a real ugly face, for example." 

"Hmmm. Tricky one."

"I know, right?"

A few second's pause. Then:

"I don't think so. I think no matter how bad her face, that can't cancel out all the other stuff, can it, really."

Another pause.

"Yeah, I'd agree with that."

"Cool. Coffee?"

     Eating aside, I spent the majority of my Friday evening watching my first college basketball game. The players involved moved rather fast - I slowly came to the realisation that if I'd run onto the court at any point during the match I'd have been reborn and as human roadkill and then peeled off the floor- and I also wasn't entirely sure of the rules beyond the standard ball-meets-hoop love story, so I grew a bit tired of the sport after the first, say, four minutes. To try and amuse myself, I turned to my friend and asked if he wanted to place an innocent wager on whom the victors would be. The loser, it was decided would have to fetch the other cups of cocoa for the weekend's duration.

    

  I'd have said it was a silly thing to bet on. Had I lost.

Captain's (B)log: The Return!

If a hypothetical friend came up to me one hypothetical day (preferably a day where large, hypothetical doses of coffee and biscuits are being freely and un-hypothetically consumed), asking me what I thought the biggest disadvantage to living in upstate New York is, I'd have to set down my mug and explain that one of my major disappointments is that nobody at home seems to actually know upstate New York is here at all. 

  

   Of course I'm exaggerating a tad. Most people do know there is a New York that exists outwith New York City. Problem is, it's rarely referred to in the United Kingdom outside of the context of the city and, as such, I've found it often treated as a sort of amorphous blob that everyone knows is out there somewhere and will be found when somebody actually wants to go look for it.

       This is a shame. NY the state, if a little barren of life in spots - barren like the moon, actually - has lots of fun little quirks that generally tend to make up for it. Take the town names strung throughout the place, for example, either blatantly titled after other cities (here you can jaunt from Syracuse to Rome or Paris and be back well before lunchtime) or else holding a definitely half-hearted feel to them. My favourite examples of the latter from my scanning of Google-earth has included Friendship, Otto and the completely adorable Wirt. Can you even imagine how Wirt came about?

"Hey, Greg, what d'you reckon we should name our new town?"

"What did you say?"

"'Wirt', did you say? Yeah, that could work."

"Sorry?"

"Oh, that's good too! Write it down for tomorrow."

    But I would also confess to my hypothetical inquisitor, if they hadn't by this stage wished they'd never asked and were already away and looking for some hypothetical decent conversation, the lack of information is partly my fault, at least in terms of the people who I've left in Scotland. It's been four or five months since I've last posted a blog - you can chalk that up to several reasons, as varied as they are dull  - and though some people have probably responded to their absence with a miserably lengthy sigh of relief, I've decided to fling the blog back into cyberspace. It's going to be in a different format, though: I'm going to aim for a daily short posting (you have to set up the standards before its possible to let them slip, after all) of a diary of sorts. Some days such a diary that might entail a half page of meandering, some days a perhaps photo or two, some days a pair of sentences standing on their own wondering where the party's got to. We'll find out as the semester progresses with the workload.

I'm also stop stabbing absolutely every post onto social media. You know where to find me.

Until tomorrow!

Of Pickles and Crossbows - Variety and American Superstores

You’ve got to understand: we don’t have anything like Walmart in the UK. We have superstores and supermarkets, sure - huge, square slabs of buildings where you can pick up some food or pencils or toothpaste or whatever else - but we don’t have anything like the sort of variety that you can find a five minutes’ drive away from Utica College. 

I made my first pilgrimage to the store of stores about a day or so after arriving in the US on exchange. Jetlagged, disorientated and in dire need of some coat-hangers, I picked a cart from the entrance and rattled it on inside and, immediately, was distracted by a colorful BACK TO SCHOOL sign that was looming overhead. I started rummagine through all kinds of flashy but entirely unnecessary products. Where, by the way, have rainbow colored pencils been all my life? 

After a few minutes stationary with the stationery my eye was caught by some other aisle, then another, then another - before I knew it, I’d been sucked up in the irresistible materialistic pull of all the weird, wonderful, and often pretty nasty items on display. Craving a quick snack? Ty one of our pickles, sealed in with its juices in a handy ziplock bag! Take a look at out new range of ‘wildlife’ bathmats - step out the shower and onto the stinking beast of your choice today! Feel your firearms are missing the mark? Set your sights on one of our new crossbows, available online!

I couldn’t really buy much of anything, of course. Student budgets don’t usually tend to accommodate croquet mallets or inflatable bounce houses. Even so, it’s not so much my wallet I’ve been fearing for. My wallet has a picture of Batman on it anyway and can probably take care of itself. No, what I’m all too conscious of every time I rumble my cart through the doors of Walmart (and other stores like it) is how much time I could spend exploring in one trip. Truth is, every time I go in I can’t help but get sidetracked and go off exploring. It’s not safe, really - there’s a real danger that one of these days I’ll pop in for some cereal and emerge fifty years later, blinking at the sun, waving a box of fruit loops and apologetically mumbling something about “getting a bit distracted”.

Moral of the story, then. If you ever see me half-submerged in the box of discount DVDs, spending half an hour contemplating what kind of thickness my pillow should be or something else entirely unproductive, do me a favor and drag me out of the store. I pay in pickles and crossbows.

My Week as a Recovering Nail-Biter

My First Fortnight at Utica College

Captain's Blog: Diary of an Exchange Student, 1

Since my last post I've been reading:

Last of the Mohicans - James Cooper

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Memories of Ice - Steven Erikson

Captain's (B)log, 7th - 13th September

Because every day should be meaningful, except Tuesdays.

Saturday 7th September

Spent my first eight hours playing Dungeons and Dragons with some new friends and, seeing as I slept in until the back of noon, didn’t manage to do much else. I played as Cain - a middle-aged half elf ranger who had spent the majority of his life roaming oriental plains, eliminating varieties of dangers for less experienced explorers. As it turned out, Cain spent most of today messing around in taverns, interrogating locals in his stilted B-movie monotone way of speaking, and staying away from action for the sake of self-preservation.

Overheard a guy having a chat on his phone while sitting in a bathroom stall. “Yeah, I’m doing great, man”, he said down the line as his bowels took off in such a way as to make the Apollo missions hang their heads in shame, “what about you?”

Sunday 8th September

International department hosted an event - ‘Meet and Greet over a Sweet Treat’ - their way to get older, full-time international students meeting those who’ve newly arrived (with sugar as bribery). Thirty or forty people showed up, and each of us were made in turn to stand and tell the sugar-high group their name, nationality and one interesting fact about yourself. I muttered something about enjoying books. It’s quite painful coming to terms with your own banality, though someone suggested later that I should’ve opened with ‘My name is David, I’m from Scotland and I actually quite miss the colonies’.

Speaking of reading - cracked the spine of Moby-Dick today, which I have to read in the next two weeks for class. It’s a monstrosity; I wonder why Captain Ahab didn’t just take the darned whale down by cracking it over the head with a set of Melville’s complete works.

A friend asked me to write a column for the school paper, perhaps about my experience in Utica as an International. I agreed while immediately starting to wonder what kind of stuff I could get away with...

Monday 9th September

Created a new game today, though still needs a name. It goes like this - whenever I take the lift (sorry, elevator) up to my floor, I stand to attention and salute just as the door is about to swing back. Had a couple of strange looks so far, and a few people who’ve laughed at/with me as we walked past each other. Still waiting for the hero to return the salute but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere.

Passed page 100 of Moby Dick. Established so far that we’re to call the protagonist Ishmael and that he needs to sit down and define the relationship with his buddy Queequeg. 

Finished the day by playing some night-time ultimate frisbee on the football field. In other news, recently uncovered a hidden fear for fast, disc-shaped objects.

Tuesday 10th September

A  small part of me died at lunch today when I overheard a girl at the table behind us say through her nose “I’m telling you, calculus is literally a killer”.

Aside from that, studied. I can be wild sometimes.

Wednesday 11th September

Baking hot today. There was a clubs and organisations fair on at the student lounge which I only managed to attend by peeling myself from shadow to shadow and stopping every fifteen paces for a water break. Somebody brought a snake along with her (“She’s from the bio lab, we were going to bring the tarantula but we thought that seemed a bit much”), which got passed around as people signed up for a few different bits and pieces. I put my name down for the Reading Society and the League of Extraordinary Nerds (you know you’ve found a solid group when they name themselves League of Extraordinary Nerds). 

Also, got a new mattress today after I complained that the old one felt as though I were resting on the bones of the previous occupant. This new one feels a bit moist. Might just sleep on the floor for a semester or two...

Thursday 12th September

On a mission to convert the floor to Doctor Who - sat a friend down tonight and made them watch Matt Smith’s entrance episode. I think they enjoyed it, but it was hard to gauge their reactions over my giggles and squeals of delight at every third line of dialogue.

Was informed in a breezy, off-the-cuff sort of way in one of my classes that we have a ten page essay due in a fortnight.

Was a bit late for dinner tonight (meals are fully paid for at the start of each semester)ended up being told the place was closing up ten minutes after I sat down. Smuggled a full loaf of bread out in retaliation. A crime for the ages.

Friday 13th September

Page three-hundred of Moby-Dick has been breached, and I’m proud. Found out that the Flesch-Kincaid test (which measures the readability of a novel, the lower the number meaning the more difficult the text is to read) measures some parts of the book as low as -146.

Got a chance to write up my column for the school paper, a piece about Walmart and how they have to stock everything under the sun and then some solar winds just to show off. I had quite a bit of fun writing it, almost entirely because I got to use the line ‘It’s not my wallet I’ve been fearing for. My wallet has a picture of Batman on it and can probably take care of itself’. My number one fan is pleased, at least.

For an adventure with Krom and the Customs desk, click here,

Or for a worry-ridden pre-exchange ramble, click here,

Or go here for my discussion of a certain socially-dismissive Bangkok driver

Since my last post I've been reading:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

The Last of the Mohicans by James F. Cooper

Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson

The State of the States: My First Fortnight in Utica

The name-badge pinned to the hefty chest of the man at the customs desk told me his name was Krom. Krom, the first man I met in the states, was a heavy guy, probably somewhere in the late thirties; he had a crop of shortish black hair and a horizontal, unsmiling mouth. I strode up to his desk, handed over my passport and papers and, already jet lagged, tried hard not to curl up into a ball right there and then and drift off to sleep. It had been a long flight sandwiched between queues, and, by local time, it was only eleven in the morning. 

Krom began to tick through what I guess was standard procedure for a teenager with a visa. Thumbprints; paper-checking; having a staring contest with a stalked camera with wires buried somewhere into Krom's PC terminal. I started to buzz with a tired satisfaction. Soon, I realised, I’d be through, off to start my student exchange properly. I let my mind slip to a kind of dazed planning area. I’d have to catch a train to New York City first. Grab a coffee, perhaps have a wander through central park. Take another train north and up to-

“Where are you staying?” Krom's sharp New Yorker’s accent, surprisingly high, sliced through my thoughts. “What’s your purpose of coming here to the U.S?”

It was an easy question, needing less mental processing power than what did you read on the plane or David, why were there so many typos in your blog posts anyway to answer. For whatever reason Krom's question took me totally by surprise, and I spent at least three seconds standing silently, staring just below the little ‘tache where the question had come from. Krom wasn’t amused.

“Sir?”

I let my mouth clunk open to allow what felt like the entire universe poured out:

“Sorry just tired I’m an exchange student here I mean an exchange student from the United Kingdom coming here I mean New York for two semesters which starts on wednesday at Utica College and-”

“Where did you say you were studying?”

        “-Sorry I though I said I’m studying at a place called Utica-”

        “Where did you say that was?" Concern in his face.  "New York?”
        “-Yes Utica College New York-”

The man’s eyes burrowed themselves into concerned slits - he'd clearly no idea where I was talking about. Properly awake now, I wondered what happened to persons suspected of making up their destination. A quick google check? A more serious conversation in a darker room? Would Krom just press a hidden eject button and watch the spring-loaded floor launch the liar back across the Atlantic? Probably not, but I thought best to brace and prepare for take-off just in case. There was another few seconds pause, then Krom’s face slackened and his mouth dropped to a small oh. “Oh!” he said. “You don’t mean Ewe-tick-ah. You mean You-deh-ca!” 

It took everything within me not to say “No, you-deh-ca!”

I smiled, relieved and happy that we understood each other now. Krom handed my papers back to me, flashed me an official - but not entirely cold - smile, and beckoned me past into the land of oppurtunity, where, somewhere, the wake for the letter T was being held.

It’s been two weeks since I’ve arrived in the country. I’ve savoured (or savored, depending where you’re reading) the delights of Taco Bell and Dunkin‘ Donuts; I’ve been to Wal-Mart and gotten lost, twice. Since meeting other international students I’ve been partially cured of my geographic ignorance and can successfully locate Finland and Serbia after a minute or six with an atlas. The reason I start right back with Krom and You-deh-ca, though, is that my first conversation with my first American was enough to recognise there are some details to American culture that I’ll never properly get to grips with. Pronunciation, as it turns out, being pretty far down the list. 

For example, the fist bump. In the UK, the knocking together of two fists only ever occurs as a joke. Here, the fist bump is completely interchangeable with a handshake. It’s not hallowed territory, but it’s not taken ironically either. I can’t get used to it. When somebody greets me with their knuckles all I can do consistently is flinch.

Or, take the driving culture. In Utica, nobody walks. No-one. One day, early on, a few internationals ventured out for a snappy five hour stroll and we couldn’t see a single other human being on the pavement (slash sidewalk) that whole time. If Neil Armstrong was so desperate to step on fresh, unexplored ground, he could have saved himself a lot of man-hours by visiting central New York. The lack of pedestrians is so disconcerting, actually, I’ve started referring to off-campus meanderings as going through the graveyard - it’s got that same you’re-doing-something-wrong sense coupled with the eery certainty that somebody, somewhere, is watching you. 

Also, the parties. Well, the party - singular. I’ve only been to the one, a college-organised affair that I assumed would be fairly safe to drop in on. Imagine the look on the face of the almost-entirely inexperienced, bespectacled teenager who still cherishes his childhood toys, therefore, when he walked onto the dance floor and saw a hundred or so Miley-wannabes bent over and gyrating around the middle of some classy gentleman, most of whom looked unsettlingly pleased with themselves. The windows were drenched with sweat, keeping out any light that wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I turned to a friend and tried to calmly explain to her we’d somewhere walked past the dance floor and somewhere into orgy central, but she just laughed. “Oh, that’s just how we do it here!”, she said, moving off into the crowd. I didn’t dance very much that night.

Just three differences between cultures, enough to make the point. Still, the fist-bumping kerb-hating dance-mating qualities of my new home make it all a bit more interesting, I think, and practically every day a new nuance presents itself for inspection, too many to be referenced in a post like this. From now on I’ll try keep a daily diary of my time in the land of the free post chunks of it up between (more sporadic) regular posts. Watch out for the first lot of entries in a week or two. See you then - in the meantime, if you find yourself at a US college party and feel like dancing, bring protection.

How did I feel about the exchange before I left? Click here to read some pre-travelling angst,

Or here to see my world-wide pledge to stop nail-biting,

Or here if you want to join my little book club. No biscuits, lots of self-indulgence. 

Since my last post I’ve been reading

Nineteen-eighty Four - George Orwell

Memories of Ice - Stephen Erikson

Howards End - E.M Forster

The Wayfaring Adventurer versus the Melon-sized Butterfly: Contemplating a Year Away

You can find Utica pretty much bang in the middle of New York, almost exactly at the shallowest point of the Mohawk river (or so wikipedia says, at least). The city holds a population of somewhere just over sixty-thousand people, as well as the 1993 Guinness World Record for the largest donut. Seriously. Utica has been mentioned several times in the Simpsons; several films I'd never heard of have been partially shot there. If you try and find if anyone important lives in Utica, a Google search will essentially respond with a ‘not anyone you’d know, silly Brit.’ 

Why the information? Well, because Utica also happens to be the place I’ll be spending my next year as an international student. In just over two days’ time, I’ll be blearily wandering out Newark airport with a bag filled with textbooks and ugly shirts, set to spending a while in the land where colour has one less U in it and where pants are the second thing you pull over your legs each morning.

My year away has, understandably, has been the main conversation I’ve been having of late. 

Are you all ready to go? Pretty much, I think so. 

So you've packed everything yet? No, but the David of tomorrow will be all on top of that job. 

Okay. And how are you feeling actually going away? 

That’s a good question. Say, have you watched that new Breaking Bad episode?

I’ve not figured out to reply to that ‘how are you feeling’ question yet, at least not succinctly. The truth is, when I sit back and think properly about the fact I’m shunting myself several thousand miles to the west, a whole boatload of feelings rear up in my stomach, sail the hydrochloric seas for a while before firing their cannons somewhere into my internal organs.  

There’s excitement, obviously. Taking the initiative of moving to a strange place makes me feel like some sort of wayfaring adventurer, going independent and choosing his own cereal in the morning. Though I’m actually legally becoming a child again by moving to the states, there’s a very real sense that my doing something this dramatic is the big step towards being a fully fledged man. A man who goes into sulks fairly easily and owns several water pistols, but a man regardless.

On top of that, there’s a feeling of potential that comes from the move - that anything-could-happen-ness of flying into a new place with new things. Granted, I’m more one for tea parties than keg parties, but still there’s a new backdrop to poke around in, and not just on a small scale. Utica is situated at the red star, below-

- and its position, I feel, gives an oppurtunity to head to a bunch of places during holidays or if there’s a dip in the workload that would be cost a bundle in flights otherwise. I could go to New York or DC, I can finally visit this Walmart place everyone is apparently so very keen on.

Third, last, there’s the fact I’m a bit scared. Am I allowed to say that? When I told one friend I was feeling the nerves they took my hand, but then when I told another he told me to stop being such a tool and man up. Naturally, I sulked for a bit and shot him with my water pistols. 

There’s quite a lot of fear, actually. What if I struggle with the way things are done? What if the learning jump is too big - or worse, too small, leaving me to play catch up in my final year of my degree? What if people don’t understand my accent? Most struggle in Scotland. It’s all a bit scary. I have to leave my dressing gown behind. I wasn’t lying about that excitement and sense of potential, but I have to recognise I got a lot of it from videogames and they get me to explore by sitting in the same place and wiggling my thumbs. I’m not easy-going, my DVDs are arranged alphabetically and I get close to breaking down if there are toast crumbs in the butter. Throwing myself into the unknown like this is new, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t as nerve-wracking as it is exciting. 

Still, that’s partly why the whole thing will be so good for me. The odds are the opening line of my next blog will be The first thing I did in America was get lost, and getting lost is a learning experience and therefore possibly a good thing. 

So, excitement, potential, nerves; all merging into a melon-sized butterfly that lives in my stomach and flaps about whenever somebody asks me how I’m feeling. At the same time, though, I couldn’t expect myself to be feeling anything else. I’m ready (as I’ll ever be) to get on that plane, and I know full well - if the worst that can happen is I spend a year in a room reading second-rate sci-fi - I’m going to have a good time, evil butterfly and all. Keep the irn-bru chilled, folks: I’m off for an adventure and I’ll see you in a bit. 

Oh, and nobody mess with my DVDs while I’m gone. 

Click here if you want to see my attempts to go cold turkey on my nail-biting habit,

Or, if that’s a bit too high octane for you, I review classic literature here.

Since my last post I’ve been:

Reading Dickens’ Women by Miriam Margoyles and Sonia Fraser

Reading ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Watching Firefly/Serenity (and wishing it hadn’t taken me this long to get around to it)

My Week as a Recovering Nail-Biter

Like many addicts, I can point to a single scene as the source of my nail-biting habit. I was somewhere near four years old at the time; my main investments were in orange peel and jumping on things. I wasn’t showing any signs of being a child prodigy, then, but I did get that there was something up when I wobbled into our kitchen one evening. Dad was eyeing the back of his hand, my mother standing beside him. He was looking disappointed in himself, annoyed, like he’d stepped on scales and found out he’d packed on a small cow. 

“WhasamatterMummyandDaddy?” I said, using my best growed-up voice. 

“Well,” said my mother, looking at me between the fingers of her husband’s left hand, “Daddy’s been biting his nails again.”

“Wieseedointhat?”

“It’s not always on purpose”, Dad told me, dropping his fingers. “Daddy sometimes doesn’t realise he’s biting them when he is, see?”

Here the images flicker and my walk down memory lane comes to a brick wall. Probably, my tiny self-absorbed self said something close to “Ayeonleewanted Abiscut Notchyoorlifestory Gosh” and wandered back out the kitchen, but I can't say for sure. Regardless of what else happened, anyway, that day became the first I thought it might be a fun idea to bite down on the keratin at the end of my digits - and that wild ride has only sped up since. Fifteen years on, I chew my nails when I read, and I chew them when I write. When gaming I chew between loading times, and it'd likely be slower to take a buzz-saw to my hands after each study session. As my days as a teenager begin to dwindle (and thank goodness for that), each finger looks on its way to a party dressed as a car crash.

I’m not very proud of being part of the Nail Biting Society. It’s not part of my twitter bio. I don’t join Nail Chewing Rallies and I usually give their Facebook invitations a decided Ignore. Eating the ends of my hands is something I just tend to do. So when - fifteen years after they accidentally set me on my habit - my parents sent me the message 

“Visa appointment fixed. They take fingerprints so better stop biting nails ASAP”

I wasn’t that worried. Hey, I thought. This’ll be easy. I’m a strong kind of guy, after all. Resolve of iron. I bought myself some of that anti-biting solution along with a few packs of gum. I was travelling with friends so I had people to provide counsel and, if needed, a chastising flick on the ear. Give it a week or two, I was sure, and I’d be hand modelling for cash in my spare time. 

Sure enough, I found days one and two on the wagon (a little less crowded and easier to stay on than the gambling or alcohol equivalents) a pretty comfortable ride, though mostly because there wasn’t much to try and chow down on. For those first forty-eight hours, I went about with a kind of happy determination that the world was on my side and nothing could possibly defeat me. When I woke on day three and saw - to my horror - my nails were growing to what seemed an absurdly long length, that optimism dissipated. I felt I'd become the Wolverine's gangly second cousin at some point during the night. A small voice at the back of my mind began to slither its way forward; telling me to repent of my wandering ways and get my nails back to what to their standard stubbiness pronto. 

Regardless, I held on and decided to persevere. I am strong, I told myself. I shall not let my mind fall prey to the desires of the cuticle. My nails will soon be of fair length and my brother won’t be able to point at my fingers as a way to break the ice at gatherings. 

It’s hard to explain the allure in biting nails. At bottom, thinking about it, it’s just a nagging sort of feeling that won’t go away until you cave in. Like having to finish a drink even if you’re not thirsty ,or a bad joke that your brain won’t let go until its told. Thank goodness for the solution I had purchased, then - I’d put my fingers in my mouth and get hit with a dose of anti-nail biting solution, a taste next door to running your tongue down Sauchiehall street on a Friday night. Worse, the gum I was chewing would soak up solution and make the flavour stick around until I could find a place to spit the whole mess out.

Day six was worse than the first five piled together - the morning and afternoon were made up of driving down one of Australia's more dull, rain-specked highways with that annoying voice tagging along for the fun. Then, once we’d stopped at our motel for the evening, we were forced, in the name of hygiene, to spend time in a hokey little laundromat and watch our clothes spin themselves clean. Bored, I had to spend most of that time pacing and trying very hard to forget I had hands.

“We’re all very proud of you, David,” one of my friends said, leaving those beside us to guess for themselves what class-A substance I was recovering from. “Real proud.” I glared at him, unwrapped a fresh stick of gum. Somehow I stumbled to the end of the day digitally intact.

I crumbled on day nine. We were boarding a lengthy night-flight to Singapore and my travel buddies had somehow managed to beat the seatbelt sign to switching themselves off. I couldn’t sleep myself but I wasn’t fussed about it. I had a book, after all. And an iPod. I had one of those head-rest televisions...but, I realised (with a little jump in my seat that startled a couple of air hostesses a little way off), what I'd forgotten to bring in my hand-luggage was my nail solution. Worse, since we were headed for Singapore and very much hoping not to be flayed on arrival, all gum had been binned hours ago. If I was ever going to give up, I was beginning to realise, it was going to be right about...

Several hours later I walked through the baggage stands with ten fresh stumps where my progress had been. I was back to car-crash hands, and all the battles I’d fought that week had been thrown out the window thirty-thousand feet up. . The little nagging voice had shoved to the front of my head, wreaked havoc and, job done, had abated. 

The injury I'd done to myself in heading back to my nail biting ways went deeper than my fingers, too - it had lowered my self-confidence the same level as the guy whose girlfriend introduces him with “this is my...friend...”. I had taken on my habit, with bravado, and had lost rather easily. So much for being resolute, I thought. So much for being strong. 

Now, If I stopped the words flowing at that last paragraph, this would turn out to be a fairly depressing post. I failed, after all, and failures as a rule tend not to do very well at things. Why not write up the sequel to that high school blog or another post another game review? People laughed at those. Sometimes even in the right places. 


Well, the reason I'm sharing my failures with you, fair readership, is that I’m going to try again. The second I hit that ‘post’ button marks my attempt to get back on the straight, nicely filed path of hand hygiene and drag myself back onto the wagon. I hope it’ll work. I’d like to be able to open canned drinks again without help. That's the dream, isn't it? So, you catch me a week from now with nails looking anything like this:

Be a pal and flick my ear for me, would you? Thanks.

[No nails were harmed in the composing of this blog]

To see me self-righteously dismissing well-loved literary classics, go here,

 here I tell a slightly distasteful yet unfortunately true tale of a recent car ride.

Since my last post I've been reading:

Prince of Thorns - Mark Lawrence

The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

God Collar - Marcus Brigstocke