Defensive Flying

I don’t have wings, yet I spent much of yesterday flying. The human body isn’t designed to spend hours on end in the air, certainly not cooped up in economy class and most definitely not as the financial plaything of an Irish horse fancier.

I just put in a nine hour shift in the cramped hell of cattle class. By British law a sheep heading to the slaughterhouse is required to have more personal space than I was given on the Airbus. Probably. Whether that urban myth is correct or not, it’s certainly true that an aircraft passenger today has much less space than say, thirty years ago.

I get really defensive of my allocated space on a plane, spreading myself out to its very limits on both available armrests and slumping down in my seat so that I can wedge my knees hard into the back of the one in front. Woe betide the person in front of me if they try to recline their seat. We’ve all paid for the same amount of space, I’ll be damned if I’m letting them steal a few of my ridiculously expensive inches. There’s no way I’m going to fly from one continent to another with someone’s headrest in my face.

Another fun way of passing the time is to draw up a virtual hit list of those passengers that you would gleefully use as floatation devices should the plane go down in water unexpectedly. These are the people that I’d willingly volunteer to be the first overboard should we suddenly need to lose weight to stay aloft. They’re the people who slam their seats back as far as they can go the second that the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign goes out, or those who let their children run riot up and down the aisles in an attempt to tire the little loves out so that they’ll sleep later. But how about those of us who are trying to sleep right now? Does our rest not count for something? They wouldn’t allow their precious cherub to run up and down a hotel corridor at three a.m. would they?

Plane drunks who take serious advantage of the free drinks still found on many long haul flights: I’d willingly eject them at 30,000 feet too, along with chair leaners. They’re the ones who are oblivious to the fact that their resting on a seat back while they chat to their mates causes that chair to pitch back suddenly resulting in instant nausea at best, or occasionally even a Leonard Rossiter / Joan Collins-style spillage (ask your granny).

Of course all of these people are also drawing up their own hit list, top of which is probably the fat bloke spreading out to make sure that nobody invades ‘his’ space… 

© Shaun Finnie 2012

It's Competition Time!

Short story writers love a good competition. Or a bad one. Or any that we feel that we have a chance of winning to be honest.

It’s not the prospect of prize money that gets our creative juices flowing. Indeed, many of the prizes on offer are hardly worth winning. Twenty-five pounds for first prize? I mean, it’s always nice to have a little cash in your pocket but that’s not why we enter. No, the real benefit of winning a short story competition is the kudos that it brings with it.

It vastly improves a writer’s credibility when offering work to editors to be able to type something like, ‘…submitted by Shaun Finnie, winner of the prestigious Bridport Prize for short stories 2012’. That sounds a lot better than ‘…submitted by Shaun Finnie, some bloke who’s desperate for a break as he needs to pay his gas bill’.

The downside of competitions as that they usually demand an entry fee. It’s not normally much, just a few pounds or dollars in most cases, but if you enter a lot of contests every year then there’s no way you’ll ever win your cash back in prize money alone. Or use the prize money to pay your gas bill.

So perhaps there’s another way to use writing competitions to my advantage? Maybe I should look into setting up my own? It wouldn’t get me the acclaim that winning a prize does and I’m sure I’d have to read a lot of dross to find the golden nuggets but it would sure make my bank manager happier. And I’d get to play God with other fledgling (and established) writers’ careers! I’d be able to (hopefully) pick a handful of very good pieces to praise, but the rest I could treat the same way that editors and competition judges have treated me in the past. Ah, I can feel the power rushing to my head already. ‘You haven’t won: you’re fired!’  I could get a white cat to stroke thoughtfully while I read the entries as well.

Suddenly the idea of this is much more appealing. It would be like being paid to be a literary critic. How long have I wanted to pen something like, ‘Dan Brown, you’re books are badly written reworkings of other ideas, designed solely for the crass manipulation of people’s deeply held beliefs. I accuse you of being nothing more than a ruthless hack. That’ll be fifty pounds please.'

Now getting cash to write things like that really would be worth the effort.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

I.T.'s Just Another Job

I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt this week. It read, ‘Just because I work in I.T. doesn't mean that I want to fix your laptop’. I like that a lot, as for over twenty years I did indeed work in the Information Technology world. No matter that I was at various times a bookkeeper, probate officer, programmer and tax inspector, nor that I wasn’t allowed to do any unplugging or moving of the hardware that I worked with for insurance reasons, I was apparently fair game for some friends. I worked in I.T. therefore it was seemingly all right to suggest that I might ‘just pop round for a bit as there’s something wrong with my computer.’ That ‘something’ could be anything from a paper jam to a completely blown motherboard. They had no idea or inclination to find out. It didn’t matter because their  friend was popping round, and that friend worked in I.T.

'Working in I.T.’ is shorthand for ‘knowing everything that there is to know about every piece of hardware, software and connecting apparatus that has ever been invented, from the nineteen sixties to present day’.

Many of my old colleagues say the same thing, that at every party we go to we hear the words, ‘Really? I.T.? Oh, well I’ve got this problem. Would you mind..?’  It must be the same for doctors. Everyone has an ailment and it’s so tempting to take advantage of the trapped medic. Or software developer.

So, fellow geeks, here’s a suggestion. How about if every time we’re called upon to fix a P.C. problem we reply with the following?

‘Sure I’ll have a stab at it, on one condition. How’s this sound? I know that you're not a professional chef but I’ve heard you say that you make meals at home. So let me ask you a favour in return. Would you come round to my house at a time of my insistence and cook for me please? I don't know what meal I want you to create, or how long I'll expect you to be there, but I'll know whether what you’ve prepared for me tastes nice or not. If it isn’t we’ll bin it and you can start again. I’ll let you go home when you’ve made something that I enjoy, OK?

It may not make you many new friends, but it might lose you a fair few unwanted acquaintances.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Back in the Saddle

There’s an old saying about a healthy mind needing a healthy body.  I have lots of great writing ideas for this new year but if the maxim’s true then I’ll be in no fit state to write them if I’m consistently moaning to myself about how unfit I feel. So, like so many others at this time of year, I’ve started to do something about it, and one of the first things is to refuse to spend all day locked in my office. Of course I need to write as many saleable stories and articles as I can but I also need to get out of the house every day, to get in touch with nature. Life makes you feel alive and I won’t see too much of that locked in my garret all the time.

That was fine in theory but the hurricane force winds we’ve had around here this week soon sent me scuttling back indoors. I could hardly stand upright, let alone lift my head to appreciate the glory of the natural world around me. And anyway most if it was flying past at 80mph including what I’m convinced was Yorkshire’s first flying squirrel.

But I still badly needed a workout so I decided to blow the dust off my monstrous old exercise bike. Sadly ‘blowing’ didn’t do the job very well and I had to resort to my K-Tel Filth-Magnet duster glove and Ronco MuckBuster rechargeable mini-hoover. And even before I put those to use I had to clear away all the shoes that had accumulated around it. Honestly, it was astounding how some hiking boots, a couple of pairs of trainers and the Beloved’s one and only pair of heels have managed to become a magnet for what appears to be the entire Timpsons end-of range stock. Size 10. So what should have been a cycling workout began with some serious arm and shoulder action until eventually I could see something vaguely cycle-shaped underneath the dust bunnies. And so, Dear reader, I mounted it.

My muscles must have very long memories as they soon fell into the old familiar up-down, up-down rhythm. Sadly my lungs had remembered what to do as well. They quickly resumed their old wheezing and gasping as my chest got tighter and my forehead wetter, and the atmosphere in the room underwent a swift transformation from chilly Yorkshire midwinter to tropical steam bath.

Some people swear by motivational music to keep them focussed and maintain a steady rhythm while exercising. I listened to a reading of Sarah Waters’ award-winning novel ‘The Night Watch’, a tale of illicit liaisons and sexual adventure in 1940’s London. It wasn’t exactly Heather Small asking me what I’d done today to make me feel proud, but I already knew the answer to that one: ‘I got on this damned bike, Heather!'

It was the first time I’d been aboard my trusty tubular steed for about a year, so I was quite pleased to get through half an hour of non-stop leg pumping without needing to pause at any point for a spot of death. The way that I do it, it’s actually more than just exercise; it combines vigorous massage as well as my thighs pummel my belly with every stroke. I like the fact that I’m battering my tubbiness into submission from all sides.

It would be good at this point to tell you the distance that I virtually travelled in that sweat-soaked thirty minutes but unfortunately the bike has been sat unused for so long that its batteries have packed in. Well that’s what I thought had happened as the screen has been blank for some months now, but about an hour after I’d finished punishing it the bike began beeping, I’ve no idea why. Perhaps there was supposed to be an accompanying message on the display but it didn’t have enough electrical charge to show it? Or maybe each beep was a little scream of agony at my huge bulk being perched on its tiny saddle? Whatever, yanking the batteries soon shut it up.

If I had to guess at how far I’d pedalled I’d say about 50 miles, something like that? The way that my legs felt the day after I think it must have been at least that distance.

So that was my training for the day. I think I deserve a treat. So I’ll ask you to please click to another screen pronto as the pile of leftover Christmas chocolates is calling. Things might get messy.


© Shaun Finnie 2012