Help Southcart Books - You're their only hope

You know me right? Living on the edge, Lone Wolf, loose cannon, Maverick, One shot Trevor, The shiniest haddock in the shoal.

What I mean to say is… Everything I’ve ever done, every success I’ve had, every award I’ve ever won and achievement I’ve ever unlocked on the Xbox and Steam has been totally down to me and the sweat of my brow.

And if you do know me, if you have had the honour of meeting me in the flesh at one of my tremendously infrequent public appearances, you’ll know that the previous two paragraphs are complete balls.  Firstly, I’ve not achieved very much at all, and those things I have, have been with the help of people who have a lot more faith in me than I do.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done a boatload of things – I’ve even done some things that didn’t have the capacity to kill me if my faith in blind luck had ever petered out even a little. (Which is why I have a large tattoo of a blindfolded lady on my back. Her name is PISTIS (Πίστις) and she’s the Ancient Greek personification of faith… Blind Faith in this case)

I’d never have written a book without the support of my friends, I’d never have published it without my family, (I’m writing my fifth, sixth and seventh books at the minute, all at the same time – Go me!) And I’m sure that most of you guys are the same, easy stuff is easy… The clue’s in the name, but to get the difficult stuff done, you’re gonna need help.  I consider myself really lucky that I’ve managed to surround myself, both literally and figuratively, with people who are willing to help me do some massively stupid things, purely because they’ll probably be funny.

One such institution has now asked for my help in return – And it’s only fair that I pass that burden on to you people, because you’re friendly types and probably have a lot more money than I do. 

Southcart Books in Walsall. Run by the odd, but tremendously friendly, Scott & Amy. Because of their tremendous financial skills (And the fact that their landlord is doing his best to sell their shop out from under them) are trying to move to larger premises avec le grande vitesse.

They’ve set up a Crowdfunder to cover the cost of fitting out the new place, having a decent frontage installed and helping towards the deposit. There are any number of pledge levels with rewards, from £1 - £500 (Although they’re almost halfway to their £4,000 target already, you see – it really is the type of place that has loyal customers – If only BHS had been so lucky.) There are many more fine photos like the one above on their Crowdfunder page, but you'll notice that none feature me, those pictures are saved for specialist customers and there is a waiting list as long as my... Well, let's just say that there's a waiting list.

But here’s the rub… If you pledge an amount, any amount, they will give you that amount back, in books, it’s as if you’ve not spent any money at all!. So, if you were to pledge, let’s say, £20.00, not only would you get free coffees AND your name painted lovingly on the outside of the shop, you’d also get £20.00 worth of free books. If you were to pledge £500.00, you’d get to run the shop for a day AND get £500 pounds worth of free books – I don’t know, you might get to name a bookshelf after yourself and hold your own Pagan rituals there too, I’m not really involved in the decision making process (for good reason, probably).

So, you lovely, lovely munchkins, click on the link below and swap a pledge for some books, and coffee, and the warm, tuberculosis-like tickle in your chesty-box that comes when you help good people do a nice thing.  Remember, without them, there’d be no me…

Actually no, forget that, I am the Captain of my own fate… I did it all on my own *cough*

Click here to support 'The Southcart Books Big Move Crowdfunder'

Insomnia

A story based on a sleepless night I had a few months ago. In actuality, it went on for about another five minutes or so, but... Well... Some things are best left undescribed.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781

-oOo-

My bladder woke me at 03:30 – and I briefly tried to convince myself that I could hold it until the alarm went off; but the bastard part of my brain, the piece that visualizes dripping taps and waterfalls and gurgling drains, had more immediate ideas. Pulling back the covers as quietly as I could, I padded through the cold darkness to the bathroom, careful not to stub my toe on the laundry basket, or tread on the cat as I so often do.

I fumbled for the light, which only had two settings, ‘Off’ and ‘The heart of a supernova’, or so it felt in the early hours of the morning when the house was quiet and peaceful but for the hushed snores of my wife and slightly louder ones from the dog in the next room. I screwed my eyes closed and tried to flip the switch slowly, willing the light to fade into life, rather than springing upon me like a startled leopard. I saw details of the bathroom furniture through my tightly closed lids and could almost hear the sizzling noise as my retinas shrank.

Immediate business completed, I washed up and tried to put the hand-towel back on the radiator through pupils the size of pinpricks. Turning the light out as I left plunged me into the darkness usually reserved for particularly deep dwelling badgers and professional kidnapees. I stumbled back into bed, offering thanks to whoever had initially thought of en-suite bathrooms for making it so that I didn’t need to go out onto the landing and enter the domain of the inquisitive, but vision impaired, dog that sometimes haunted the corridors.

Pulling the covers up to my neck, I chanced a look at the clock. The bright green LED numbers displayed 03:37. I closed my eyes, planted my feet flat on my wife’s previously warm thighs, smiling at her grunt of mild discomfort as she turned over, and tried to go back to sleep.  The clock showed 03:51 and my attention was drawn to the light shining from the gap above the curtains. Was it getting lighter? The sun doesn’t usually rise until 06:30, until after I had fought my way out of bed, which meant that the sun was lazier than I was, or significantly more clever. But what if it was Saturday? Is it Saturday today? I looked at the clock and saw the single LED in the corner that showed me that the alarm had been intentionally set; so no, it wasn’t Saturday. Perhaps it was a Bank Holiday and I had set the alarm in error – There’s always that hope. I thought about setting the alarm on a Friday night, just so that the alarm would sound at ‘Stupid O’clock’ on the Saturday morning and I could just turn it off, roll over, and go back to sleep, with all the feelings of empowerment that came with it. I thought of my own confusion, I thought of the dead-arm that would unquestionably result when my wife discovered what I’d done, I hastily thought better of my plan. It was 04:07, less than two hours until the alarm went off and the repetitive electronic screaming presided over the birth of another dull, soul-less day.

I stared at the wall between the wardrobe and the door to the hallway.  It seemed darker than the rest of the wall. It wasn’t a shadow, the dim light from the curtains bathed that entire wall, but the specific area I looked at was darker, and the longer I looked at it, the darker it became.  I scanned along the wall, until I was looking at one of the small pictures that my Wife had bought in a desperate bid to give the room some ‘character’. I remembered that old writing exercise where lazy English teachers ask you to write a story about a generic picture that had far too many elements for you to adequately cover in your allotted time. Mine invariably featured devious Lovecraftian experiments, or an underground butchery ring, or a trusted upstanding member of the community being unveiled as a cannibal. Jesus Christ, was it any wonder that none of my writing ever sold? If you look up the words ‘Formulaic’ or ‘Derivative’ in the dictionary, there was a picture of me, looking self-satisfied. In later editions, I often had a revolver pressed to my temple. In the Children’s editions, it had a flag, with ‘BANG!’ written on it sticking out of the barrel.

My eyes lowered to a point on the wall directly below the picture; almost immediately, the wall began to darken in a clearly delineated circle around the point I was staring at. Sweet Baby Jesus, I was going blind! At the very least it was cataracts, I’m not even 50, a failed, derivative writer, trying to make enough money to keep himself and his family fed on a diet of watery soup and second-hand crackers.  My children would point and laugh at my crumpled Dickensian form, panhandling for sixpence pieces by the side of the road. My wife would leave me for her tennis coach and she doesn’t even have a tennis coach. She would take the last of our money, hire a tennis coach, and leave me for him. I would change my name to Michael de Santa.

04:21. Should I just get up? I could see if I’d had any more life-affirming ‘likes’ on Facebook. I could go through my backlog of unopened emails to see if my Agent had received any life-changing acceptance letters. I could see if those pictures from my tequila party were ‘Trending’ on Twitter. Who am I kidding? I’d either be playing an on-line game until I made myself late for work, or opening an ‘Incognito Window’ on Chrome and hoping the floorboards didn’t creak too rhythmically and wake someone up before I had experienced a personal ‘petit-mort’.

I’ll make a cup of tea. Can I be bothered to make myself a cup of tea? Maybe coffee? Maybe I could make a pot of coffee and score some brownie points with the wife when she woke up. Would it stay warm long enough? It was 04:45, it’d be close. I’ll do that, I’ll make a pot of decent coffee.

I woke up to hands on my chest, warm hands, a palm resting gently on each of what I laughingly call my pecs, but everyone else calls ‘moobs’. I slowly open my eyes to the yellowish light streaming through the kitchen window, a bright day, a warm day. I’m lying on the coffee table, maybe eighteen inches off the ground. The smell of fresh coffee permeating the air. I look up, along the bare arms of my masseuse, to the shoulder of the fitted mini-dress, rising to a thin, pale, neck, sporting a golden necklace finer than a human hair, from which hung a gold and diamond crucifix nestling in the valley where her translucent skin was barely covered by the sheer material. I blinked, trying to clear the slight blurring of my vision, “Aren’t you…”

She smiled, “Just call me Madeline.” She took a step forward, her manicured nails moving through the hairs on my chest, down to my stomach; her parted thighs gently brushing the tops of my ears.

“Madeline… Smith? I saw a film with you in it… Last night… You were…” It was then that the alarm chose, in its infinite wisdom, to go off.

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu.

Just looking through some old emails and found my 'Goodbye' letter to my previous colleagues.

(Please note, this was sent to friends within the company and not to anyone in the management team - I can do professionalism sometimes you know!)

Thought you lot might find it funny.

So, that was my last shift for the unstoppable global technological supergiant that is [My previous employer].

 

Cool.

 

It was quiet, but then you’d expect that I guess, with the first part of the Helpdesk transfer to India now being completed.

 

Firstly I’d like to say that on the whole, the past sixteen months or so (apart from anything involving actual work or being able to pay my bills of course) has been, at worst bearable and at best, uproariously funny.

 

The people I’ve worked with have been a mixed bag, mostly mad as badgers (But in a good way) a couple certifiably psychotic, and still fewer with their heads so far up their respective poop-chutes that it’s a wonder they don’t jump to another dimension every time they break wind.

 

OK, so this is the part where, traditionally, I should rail against all the injustices that I believe have been visited upon me without fear of retribution…

 

Well, here’s the turn-up for the books – I’m not going to. It’s pointless, we all know about the history of ill considered, knee jerk reactionary, short-sighted, parochial decisions that have been made on a more and more regular basis over the past six months or so. We’ve all received the same morale-sapping, draconian, divisive emails. And if any of us had cared enough for it really to have been a ‘showstopper’ as our colleagues over the pond might say, then we would have stood up and tried to do something about it or at least voted with our feet.

 

Instead, let’s remember some of the good times:

 

The night the drunken old guy got in and urinated down the stairs before the Police arrived.

 

The ghost of the cute little girl upstairs (Now I’m not sure that anyone who hasn’t worked the nightshift has ever experienced her) but you can often hear her running around up there in the early hours of the morning – And it’s quite an experience the first time you get woken up by her giggling or tugging on your shoe if you’ve fallen asleep on the sofas in reception during your break. (And as of last night we have two new believers).

 

The vending machines with the undocumented gamble feature – I don’t mean the gamble you take that there’s actually anything in the vending machine when you come on shift and the shops are closed (Same applying to tea, coffee and/or milk) – But the gamble when you put your money in and it either eats it then sits there looking at you with that ‘Come at me Bro’ expression on its readout, or the crisps (because it’s invariably crisps) get stuck against the glass and you spend your next 60p using another bag of crisps (bag price 49p) from the row above to try and knock them down.

 

So, time to sign off because I’m starting to bore myself, and I’ve got a lot longer attention span than most of you.

 

I’d just like to take this time to thank [My Manager] for doing the best job he could be expected to do with the tools he was allowed to use (and finally agreeing to put me out of everyone’s misery) and [The Customer Services Manager] for reminding me on several occasions of the importance of not indiscriminately murdering your workmates with a blunt instrument.

 

I’m not going to send everyone an individual ‘I liked you because..’ message, because I’d probably forget someone, and there’s the whole thinking of nice things to say about everyone issue, which most of you by now, will know that I’m not particularly good at.

 

Good luck to the Helpdesk team and Luke, I hope you make a go of your new positions within the group (P.S. Luke, my Dad – Who spent a lot of time in Germany after the War - advises using this formal, traditional German greeting every time you meet someone new “können Sie mir helfen? Ich habe meine Hoden in der Küche Schublade gefangen”)

 

It’s time for me to go now, but let me leave you with my one and only regret…

 

I only ever got to see one of you completely naked (and if that single, completely true statement, doesn’t put the rumour mill into overdrive, I don’t know what will)

 

Please feel free to keep in touch using the details below, connect to me on Facebook, use smoke-signals, carrier pigeons or an Ouija board – Whichever makes you happy.