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

Time To Be Resolute

I don’t believe in setting New Year’s resolutions. They have a tendency to be discarded along with the decaying stump of the Christmas tree on Twelfth Night. Some don’t even last that long as born-again tee-totallers top up their New Year hangover, or those who vow to have clean lungs for a new calendar promise they’ll quit smoking ‘as soon as I’ve finished this pack’.

Only once have I publically declared a resolution. A few years ago I, a life-long salad-dodging fat bloke, said that I would get of my sofa-filling backside and run a road race in aid of the British Heart Foundation. I found the necessary motivation by committing to do A Good Deed for others.

But this year is different. For once I’m setting some resolutions for me. I need to write – and I need to sell my writing – to pay my bills. So with that in mind I hereby resolve to…

·         Publish at least two books

·         Enter at least five short story competitions

·         Earn a set amount from my writing. I’m not going public with precisely how much that is, but I will let you know later in the year whether I achieve it or not

·         Continue to publish one free short story per month on my www.shaunfinnie.com website.

And while I’m at it, I may as well throw in another, more personal one. I’m still far too fat for fun, so how about if I pledge to lose at the very least two stones in 2012? That’s 28 pounds or almost 13 kilograms if you’re using a different set of scales to mine.

Back when I resolved to run that 10km for charity more than a few people were surprised that I kept my word and kept up a steady jog around the entire course. This time I might even surprise myself.

© Shaun Finnie 2011

Wishing You a Happy… erm…

I’m guessing that it won’t have escaped your notice that this weekend is December 25^th, and for many people around the world it’s a very special occasion. I don’t mean the overindulgence on dried fruits and eggnog (though be honest - have you ever even seen eggnog?) nor the excited kids severely depleting the world’s stock of gaudy wrapping paper and batteries.

Worldwide over two billion Christians will have a holy-day  for Christ’s-mass and celebrate the birthday of Jesus, or at least the date that sometime in the early 4^th century the Roman Catholic church decided would be the day allocated to this feast. Research shows that dates in April and May would appear to be much more likely contenders for the birth date of the baby Jesus but the Roman church, like the British press, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Nor did the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great, who made the date official throughout his empire.

Of course, those ancient Romans loved a good mid-winter bash, so to them this time of year was already party time for the feast of Bacchus and the festival of the unconquered sun, or ‘Dies Natalis Solis Invicti’. The 25^th of December also conveniently matched up to, and eventually assimilated, not only the end of their  festival week of Saturnalia, but also the Greek honouring of Dionysus , the old calendar Winter Solstice Brumalia celebrations  and the feast days for celebrating the birth of the Persian god Mithra, the Syrian feast of Elahgabal and Sol the Sun God. In this way the spread of Christianity meant that those who didn’t really fancy changing their favoured flavour of worship could still enjoy their old festivals at the darkest time of the year.

The Christians won’t be the only ones celebrating this weekend though. For the Taiwanese people December 25^th is important as it’s their Constitution Day. The Vainakh people of the North Caucasus celebrate their Malkh festival on that date too, and Pakistanis will be partying as it’s the birthday of their country’s founder,  Quaid-e-Azam  Muhammad Ali Jinnah Baba-e-Qaum; the great leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, father of the nation. Hindus too will be taking to the streets for the brilliant orange day of Pancha Ganapati, a celebration of Lord Ganesha.

Others prefer to go down more unconventional routes. Some may have no religion at all but still want to join in the mid-winter fun, so they’ve affiliated themselves with such unlikely holidays as Snowflake Day (from the ‘Clone High’ cartoon series), Wintersday (from the game Guild Wars), Feast of Winter Veil (World of Warcraft), Holiday Number 11 (TV series ‘Quark’) or Refrigerator Day (TV show ‘Dinosaurs’). And of course, all good Star Wars geeks will know that this is the time of year that the Wookies celebrate Life Day. Honest.

Non-believing humans who don’t want to be left out have invented alternative holidays such as Agnostica or Frostival too, but surely there’s no need for these? Don’t non-Christians have as much right to a celebration on Christmas Day as non-Norse folks have to enjoy every Wodensday and Thorsday?

As long as nobody gets hurt who doesn’t want to, then I’m not going to knock anybody’s beliefs or indeed complete lack of. Wouldn’t it be nice if we really could have peace on Earth and goodwill to all men at this time of year? Just a few days when the devout refrain from fatwas, jihads or crusades, and non-believers abstain from pointing out that anyone with a religious belief is probably a little too old to have an invisible friend?

However you spend it, have a fantastic weekend and for those of you still using the Julian Calendar, read this again in a couple of weeks. I hope you have a great celebration on January 7^th.

© Shaun Finnie 2011

The Deadline Before Christmas

It can’t have escaped your notice that it’s nearly Christmas. I didn’t realise until the start of October when I heard my first burst of Roy Wood in Debenhams. That was the time that I knew I should start writing a short story on the theme of Christmas for a woman’s magazine. I had a plot worked out that I thought would get me into the magazine’s Christmas Special with no problem. It’s about a boy who wakes up at precisely the wrong (or, for the sake of my story, precisely the right) moment and chats with Santa, telling him that the one thing he really wants this year is to help his ailing mother pay off the bailiffs. She’s dying of severe X Factor withdrawal and the only thing that can save her is to see her son make an incredible journey on Skating on Ice. Probably from the changing room to the recovery room. Something cloyingly sweet like that always goes down well at this time of year.

I rang around my list of potential buyers to find when they wanted subscriptions in by, and that’s when my spirits began to drop lower than a dachshund’s dangler.

‘August!!! You can’t have wanted them in that early! I was enjoying the sunshine then, not thinking about Santa, carols and sickly mothers on ice!’ As one magazine editor politely put it, she knew of several thousand other writers who hadn’t been sunning themselves over the summer.

I’ve now learned a valuable life lesson. If I want to support myself and my Beloved through my wordsmithery I’ll have to live my life several months in advance. So watch for the post: your Easter eggs may arrive any day now.

And while I’m on the subject of timings, I thought I’d share a story that my Beloved told me this week. She received yet another unwanted spam text message the other day, but this one was a little different. It wasn’t asking if she’d had an injury in the last twelve months or if she wanted to change her energy supplier. No, this text was reminding her of the great deliver service that a certain pizza company provide. The only problem was, they were in Basildon. I suspect that, as we live in Yorkshire, they wouldn’t make good on their promise of, ‘if we don’t deliver in half an hour you get your pizza for free’!


© Shaun Finnie 2011

Down Down

I sat at my desk the other day, typing away as usual. There was the sound of the wind howling around, the tippet-tap of my fingers on the keyboard and the thundering of jackdaws clog dancing on my dormer roof. All quite normal sounds for here, even the world’s heaviest jackdaws.  However these were then unexpectedly joined by another noise: A ‘pffft’ sound almost exactly the same as that made by the air escaping from a Scotch egg when you bite into it.

Sadly though the noise wasn’t accompanied by the Scotchy’s delicious salty meatiness and rough texture on my tongue, rather by a slow but inexorable sinking feeling. The compressed air cylinder in my chair had given up the ghost and I slid ever so slowly towards the floor.

I suppose I should be grateful that it hadn’t exploded, catapulting me though my attic office window and launching me into the twinkling night over the grim ex-mining towns like a portly Billy Elliot. Only I’d be the version without the aid of an Elton John tune or stagehands struggling with heavy duty flying cables, obviously.

So it now seems like I needed a new office chair. That would be about £150, which is money that I simply don’t have to spend, especially at this time of year. There’s no way that I can afford it. The cash I’d saved for Christmas had already gone to Santa’s financial services (at only slightly better rates than Wonga.com) and I’d already blown my recently awarded ‘Twenty years’ service’ money on setting up my home office. So like most of the western world I’m officially skint. And of course it’s not my fault, oh no.

I blame the government. That’s usually the correct thing to do when you have no money isn’t it?
And a large portion of fault has to be apportioned to the previous government too. Like the BBC, I have to be seen to offend all political persuasions equally.
And the Greeks / Irish / Italians / whoever’s in the worst Eurozone trouble by the time you read this. I can’t keep up.
And of course the bankers can be accused of anything. They’re a popular scapegoat. I think they were behind 9-11, the faked moon landings and Kennedy’s assassination too.
And while I’m at it I’ll also point the finger at Jeremy Clarkson. He won’t mind.

Or I could just be insolvent because I spent too much on beer and pizza?

Despite my financial embarrassment I still needed something to sit on, so I did what I usually do in these circumstances: I looked in the Argos catalogue. Glory be, they had the perfect  black (fake) leather number. I couldn’t afford it, but what the heck, it’s Christmas.

Just before I set off I had one final fiddle underneath the chair, and guess what? I found another lever, a teensie weensie one that I hadn’t noticed before. And guess further what? It was a locking bar, and it had worked loose. Once I slid it into the correct position the chair worked perfectly again. It went up. It went down. It went boing-boing when I bounced happily on it – an action which may, if I’m being honest, have contributed to it failing in the first place. You can imagine how foolish I felt.

But looking on the bright side, I’ve now got £150 to play with!

Did I mention that I failed my A level economics?


© Shaun Finnie 2011

Christmas is Coming

‘What do you want for Christmas, love?’  It was a little early but my Beloved likes to plan. So she asked the question straight after I’d finished unwrapping my birthday presents in July. I know from experience that it’s easiest to just go with the flow, but I don’t think that she expected my truthful answer.

‘I’d really love a huge encyclopaedia of criminal pathology please.’ It’s true, it’s what I really want, much more than the usual annual underwear upgrade, and as an author I’m all set. I’ve got a desk, paper and pens, a shiny new laptop and a printer. What else does someone who writes for a living really need? Apart from talent and a really good proffredder, obviously.

As I’m in the middle of a crime novel at the moment then a book about the criminal mind-set would be just the thing. I know that I could just trot down to my local nick and ask to interview some bad lads and lasses, but I don’t thing that would be tax deductible.

I’ve always been told by accountants that if, as a new business, you don’t make a sizeable loss in your first couple of years then you’re not trying hard enough. If my projected income for next year is as low as I suspect it will be then there will be no problems on that front .

But what would I legitimately be able to claim for as a business expense? I know that it’s a bad idea to say this publicly (as the tax man may be reading) but I don’t have any real expenses. I’m never required to travel anywhere for my work; I can email everything off, so there won’t be any delivery charges. All of my saleable stock comes from my imagination; it’s not as if I have to buy stories in and then sell them on. And I certainly don’t want the restriction of allocating a room in my house as a dedicated office. I like the idea that, if needs be, it can become a bedroom again at very short notice. All I have to do is unfold my sofa bed if the Beloved and I have a quarrel about something like stupid Christmas gift ideas. And when the time comes for us to sell, I really can’t be bothered with the business of working out capital gains tax on the one room, as would be required if I declared it as a designated work space.

So I’ll be self-employed with (initially at least) very little income and just about the same amount of outgoings. At least there won’t be many transaction charges on my bank account.

© Shaun Finnie 2011

Happy Anniversary

I went to a gig this week. I know, look at me trying to be hip and trendy at my age. But don’t get any ideas about me seeing any cool young bands. I went to see a guy called Mike Peters, who was celebrating 30 years of his once-quite-popular beat combo The Alarm. He’s older than I am and so were many in the audience. There wasn’t much thrashing, moshing or stage-diving in evidence. To be honest there wasn’t much movement from the crowd at all, unless you count the frequent trips to the loo. Well at our age, and with many of us having a prostate the size of a goat’s head, after a few beers it’s a case of one in, one out.

But it was a great gig, I loved every moment of it, just as I did when I saw 10cc not too long ago. Kiss were fantastic too and so were the old guys in Yes. I think it’s fairly obvious that I don’t see young bands these days. I prefer to relive my youth, my glory days (not that there were that many of them - and they weren't particularly glorious).

But isn’t that what most of these guys are doing? OK, they’ll maybe throw in a few new songs in the hope of attracting interest in a new album (and to give us in the crowd time to replenish our glasses) but in most cases they’re living on former glories. Some of them are blatantly cashing in on them. Bryan Adams’ upcoming ‘twentieth anniversary arena tour of the Waking Up the Neighbours arena tour’ springs to mind. He has nothing at all to promote apart from an evening of unabashed nostalgia. But hey, if it makes people happy.

A look at the upcoming gig list shows that Big Country, Shakin’ Stevens and Go West are all soon embarking on thirtieth anniversary tours. Rush, W.A.S.P., Level 42, Ultravox – they’ve all recently done the same with varying degrees of success. Perhaps I should take a twenty-night road trip around the country, seeing a random band in a new city every night to celebrate my thirty years of gig-going?

But why should this kind of thing be restricted to musicians? Many major authors do book signing tours too, and those are usually much more intimate affairs than seeing a band in a huge arena or even in a sweaty club. With authors you usually at least get the chance to get your copy of their latest product signed and maybe even have a little chat with them. It’s much more civilised.

So as we approach 2012 I’ve come up with a cunning plan. I’ve taken a look at a list of books published in 1982 and have decided to have a word with my local branch of Waterstones to see if they could arrange some thirtieth anniversary tours.

Published in 1982
Graham Greene – Monsignor Quixote
Sidney Sheldon – Master of the Game
Robert Ludlum – The Parsifal Mosaic -
Isaac Asimov – Foundation’s Edge
Arther C Clarke – 2010:Odyssey Two
Roald Dahl – The BFG

Ah. Looking at that list of authors, I think there may be a slight flaw in my proposal.

© Shaun Finnie 2011