My Toe is Like a Crocodile

I've never broken any of the bigger bones in my body. I've done the odd finger and a bone in my foot once (car engines are surprisingly heavy) but nothing serious. I'd actually not broken anything at all for quite some time. It wasn't something that I was complacent about, I didn't invite danger to come and try breaking a part of me just for the fun of it but it was something that I thought of occasionally. I've not broken a bone in my body for about twenty-five years.

My record has recently been broken. Snapped in two. Shattered. And so has my little toe.

It was my own fault, totally. I did something stupid, so ridiculous and dangerous that I'd urge everyone to think twice before trying it. Send your granny or even a loved one to do it instead. It could end up breaking your toe.

I emptied my bin.

I know, it was a foolish thing to do, especially as it meant going through my back door - the same back door that I've had for decades without incident. So how come I chose that moment to ram my little toe into it at full force? How come I didn't just put my foot through the gap instead of catching the frame? I've no idea. The only excuse I can think of is…  erm…  no, I'm empty on that one. I guess it's one of those things that they call "an accident". You know, those things that solicitors who advertise on daytime television don't believe exist.

There was a sickening crunch. There was a pathetic whimpering sound. The world spun and greyed out for a second. Then there was a wobbly thud as I plonked myself onto a kitchen stool. The bins would have to wait.

My Beloved was (as ever) a star in a moment of crisis. She ministered hugs and strapping and delicately eased it back into position. How toes can point at such strange angles is beyond me. Weird angle, weird size (the swelling was almost immediate) and weird colour.

You know how many of us have been looking (in vain) for the Northern Lights this past week? How the aurora was supposed to send streaks of yellow, green and purple throughout the heavens but eventually didn't show? I know why. It must have got a dodgy satnav like the ones they sell on Barnsley market because it was way off line. Instead of sending its magical markings into the skies it had sent them across my foot. It was, I have to admit, quite beautiful. If you discount the pain. Strangely enough I had a little trouble doing that at the time but a couple of bottles of Old Speckled Hen soon rectified that situation and I eventually appreciated the artistry that my body had wrought. Who needs tattoos?

There was nothing to be done of course. It's not like I could go to hospital and get it set. No, I just had to keep it strapped and grin & bear it. And make sure that my Beloved took the bins out from then on. It was a little inconvenient but after a few days it wasn't too bad at all.

Until I thumped it again.

This time was completely my own fault. If I'd moved the box that she'd been asking me to do for a few days then I wouldn't have had to limp around it when I went to close the curtains. And if I hadn't have stumbled when doing so then I wouldn't have slipped and kicked the wooden leg of my sofa. Same toe: same result. This time the whimper was louder with a touch of anger, but the pain and discolouration was just as vivid. How could I have done it again? Decades without any trouble and now two cases of the crunchies in a week. It was ridiculous.

But not as ridiculous as walking into a bookshelf the very next day. I almost screamed this time. I was certainly reduced to hopping and swearing. Same toe: worse result. It had had enough by now and decided that it had to take matters into its own… er… toe. It swelled up protectively. Within an hour it was almost the size of my big toe and the nail had turned black. If Dulux had a colour chart called "Acid Trip" then I think that they'd pasted one over the end of my foot .I'm sure that you're smiling but it wasn't funny. Stop it, it's not.

It's like my house and the furniture in it are magnetised. They seem to be pulling my shredded toe towards them in a manner that they never have done before. Maybe they're haunted. Maybe the house hates me for that one accidental missed mortgage payment. Maybe I'm just getting clumsy in my old age.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the title of this piece it refers to the old joke…

A man walks into a café and says, "Gimme a crocodile sandwich, and make it snappy".

© Shaun Finnie 2014

Back to Life, Back to Reality

I gave myself quite a lot of time off over the Christmas / New Year holidays. I had a long wind down towards it and I've given myself a long easing back in period too. All in all I've had about three weeks away from doing any real, committed, serious writing.

This was A Big Mistake. I'm finding it really difficult to get back into the swing of things again. The words aren't flowing. The stories and characters are clichés. And 'Bargain Hunt' is just a little more tempting than usual every lunchtime.

The life of a self-employed writer is different from most jobs. Normal workers pretty much get straight back into their role as soon as they return to work. There's usually a boss breathing down your neck and some procedures in place to make sure that you produce whatever it is that you do in a timely and quality controlled manner. Not for me. I have nothing stopping me wandering to the paper shop or having a cup of tea and a chat with my Beloved. I am my own boss and my own slave driver.

It's really about motivation. In a normal workplace there's someone around to make sure that you're pulling your weight. They have various metaphorical carrots and sticks to ensure that you do the job that you're contracted for. Me? I have… me. I have to tell myself to get it done, to coerce and bully myself into churning the word count. Any self-employment must include a large dose of self-motivation and that's not always the easiest thing in the world.

It's been great having a work-free end to the year but now my favourite coffee shop is open again and I can plop myself into my favourite armchair there, writing all day fuelled on seriously strong Grumpy Mule coffee. In fact, that's where I'm writing this. What I need now is a series of well-paying commissions with tight deadlines. There's nothing like the threat of not getting paid to encourage productivity.

That's it. That's this week's blog. I know that this piece may seem a little disjointed and rambling but, hey, I've got to ease myself into the writing year somehow, right?

It's About Time

Here we are then at the beginning of a whole new year. Hopefully it's started out good for you and will continue to improve as the year progresses. However you celebrated, I hope it was how you wanted it to be.

But let's think for a moment. Is January the first really any different from any other day? It's a good excuse for a party, certainly, and those fireworks manufacturers need to make their cash sometime but it's really just another tick of the clock, isn't it? Why chose that particular combination on the clock's YMCA hand-jive to cheer? In fact, why do we set our watches and calendars the way that we do anyhow?

The idea of turning our planet's orbit around the sun into a standard unit of time seems sensible to me. It's pretty constant and predictable at around 365 and a quarter days so we're quite comfortable with the concept of a 'Year'. And our earth's rotation around its own axis is stable too. Again, a 'Day' is a great way of measuring time, to track the number of sunrises regardless of how long or short the gap between them might be, depending on the season.

But  for shorter units than that? How come we have the seemingly arbitrary idea of twenty-four hours in a day?* And the apparently equally random sixty minutes in an hour?** Whoever came up with those must have had their (however bizarre) reasons but credit to them for making the entire world go ahead with their way of thinking. Personally I'd have had us all counting our time in units of tens. That seems to work for most people (although perhaps not Anne Boleyn). We live with what we've got though and, the French being a notable exception, most people for the last few centuries have got on with it quite well.

In the end though it's not about measuring your time in minutes, hours and days but in smiles and hugs. Every shadow passing over the sundial is an opportunity for fun, love and productivity, not just another tick to be tocked off. You'll never look back on your life and say "I wish I'd looked at my watch more often".

We'll only pass through 2014 once. Live it well.

Notes for those vaguely interested

* Why we have 24 hours in a day - The ancient Egyptians divided their working day (i.e. sunlight hours) into tenths and then added an extra 'hour' of twilight at each end, giving a twelve hour day. If a day was twelve hours long then it stood to reason (to them) that a night was twelve hours long too, which is why they had twenty-four hours in their day, a tradition that we've carried on.

** Why we have sixty minutes in an hour - The Babylonians, who were a bit better than me at maths, liked to do their workings out in a base-60 system. Good for them. I got a bit lost reading a heavy book on why that was the case but even I can see that there's a clue there to the number of minutes in an hour and seconds in a minute.

© Shaun Finnie 2014

What Night Was It?

T'was the night before Christmas, and all through the night
The author, Shaun Finnie, had stayed up to write

He stared at his screen in the gathering gloom
And churned through the words for a deadline did loom

Just a thousand to go then his work would be seen
In a national monthly glossy magazine

He focussed intently so didn't quite hear
The noise from above (he's just got one good ear)

The clatter of runners and thunder of hoofs
Left tracks in the snow that lay deep on the roofs

But Shaun was engrossed in his literary script
So he wasn't aware of the old man who slipped

into the room, then with a "Ho!" and two more
Said, "You don't have a chimney. I kicked in the door"

"But what are you doing awake at this hour,
"When good boys and girls snore at forty pig power?"

Now Shaun wasn't stupid. He'd soon worked it out.
There was only one man with a triple-ho'd shout

And he was a master at meeting deadlines
He'd done it each Christmas for several lifetimes

"Oh Santa, please help me," the stressed out Shaun asked
"I'm so far behind in the work I've been tasked

"I'll never achieve all the things I should do
"I'm so far behind so I thought I'd ask you.

"How do you manage, in only one night
"To give each kid presents and judge them just right?"

"It's easy," said Santa, his eyes filled with twinkles
"I felt a bit old and got too many wrinkles

"So now I plan early and just delegate
"I have helpers worldwide. I just sit back and wait

"I can't do it all, not a man of my age
"So I employ an army on minimum wage

"They do all the work but the credit's all mine
"They're all sworn to uphold the traditional line"

This set Shaun to thinking he could do the same
And use foreign employees to achieve his aim

A workforce with English as their second language
Who cares if the work they come out with is garbage?

He'd meet all his deadlines and hit all his wordcounts
He'd soon see a rise in his bank balance amounts

But greed's an emotion from which we all suffer
And Santa disliked what he saw in the other

"You can't go outsourcing your tasks while you shirk
"Using  cheap staff's no way out of hard work"

So Shaun didn't get any gifts from the sack
And the things his Beloved had bought were sent back

For Santa had placed him on his naughty list
But here's where the story takes on a new twist

For Shaun sent the writing to Indian chaps
And now they type stories and blogs while he naps

Who cares if the qualities not quite as good
And if Shaun doesnt pay them as much as he should

Because nobody cares about gramma no more
And spellcheckers only find what they look for

Nobody puts in the hours that it takes
To make sure that the work isn't full of misteaks

At least the delivery deadlines met, right?
"Happy Christmass to all, and too all a good nite!"

© Shaun Finnie 2013 (after Clement Clark Moore and possibly others)

I am Falling, I am Falling

Hard work never killed anybody, my grandmother used to say. I'm not going to disagree with my beloved granny but this week, it certainly came close.

My Beloved's father has been building a barge over the last couple of years and this week the time has finally came to launch it. It's now in the water and pretty soon we'll be off on its inaugural voyage. But there are a few things to be done first, as you'd imagine, like converting the inside of it from a building site to a habitable living space. I really hope that no health and safety inspectors come visiting for a while.

I'm astounded at how he's built it single-handedly without any plans. He just got some sheet metal and started welding. Fabulous. It's even more impressive when you learn that he's seventy-three and just does this as a hobby. If I'm half as capable as that at his age I'll be happy. Actually, I'd like to have been half as capable as him at any age in my life. With my sedentary, chained to a laptop lifestyle, I don't come close. He's incredibly fit - note that I didn't add "for his age"; he's just incredibly fit whereas I'm more…  well let's say I'm cuddly and leave it there.

Older readers might recall an advert from the 1970's that went "Weebles wobble but they don't fall down". For those too young to remember, Weebles were little egg-shaped toys by Hasbro. They were weighted in the bottom so that, while they may have appeared unsteady on their feet, they were difficult - if not impossible - to knock over. That's what I'm like moving around the boat. Some people don’t like shimmying around the thin walkways or wobbling along decks that are constantly moving below their feet but I'm fine with it. It must be something to do with my low centre of gravity. Just like those Weebles toys.

Which is why I felt such a total plank the other day when, for the first time ever, I stumbled on deck.

It was my own fault. I'd tried to squeeze myself past a mate on one of the thinnest parts of the deck. He pressed himself against the hull and was hogging almost all of the handrail so I sort of tried to hop around him. It was, I realise both now and at the time, a very foolish thing to do. I would normally never have bothered but I was cold, it was late in the day and (most importantly) I was bursting for the loo.

I was almost around him when I felt something tugging at my foot. A capstan that had been there all along must have suddenly grown a little as it grasped my ankle and pulled me off balance. I stumbled. I fell. I scrabbled and clawed at my  pal's back. He grasped the handrail even tighter, clenching his entire body in case I actually managed to cling on to him.

He needn't have bothered. I missed completely, grabbing at the air behind him. For a moment I hung in mid-air, one leg and at least half of my bodyweight leaning over the port side of the ship. I could hear the water lapping against the hull below me like a siren beckoning me down to the murky depths. Not that canals are very deep. The odds are that I'd be able to stand up in it and the water wouldn't come to much above my chest, but that wasn't the point. I had no desire to get completely soaked on a freezing December day, not least of all because I didn't have a change of clothes with me.

I looked down to the muddy water, fully aware of what fish had done in it for centuries. I looked up at my mate, still clenched solid in terror. I did the only thing that I could. I dived for the safety of the deck.

Unlike those Weebles I did indeed fall down, but by some miracle I stayed dry. I made a perfect one-point landing that rang around the metal hull with a satisfying echoey 'boing'. The aforementioned spikey capstan hit me flush in the trumpet causing me to let forth with a very unmanly shriek of pain and surprise.

The boat rocked.

I rolled around the deck like a very unhappy beached whale who'd just had a metal capstan forced into his blowhole. This way and that I thrashed, trying to find something that I could hold onto that would stop me from wobbling over the side.

The boat rocked in the other direction.

The seventy-three year old boat builder came running from where he had been sawing wood on the top deck to see his son-in-law (in all but name) impaled on his best capstan. And he still wants me to help him with its maiden voyage.

I hope he doesn't have a gangplank.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Eat, Drink and Be (Very) Merry

I've been to quite a few employees' Christmas meals while working for quite a few different companies in the last thirty years. We've eaten in corporate boardrooms, football grounds, posh hotels, small family restaurants and quiet, specially reserved upstairs rooms in pubs. The quality of food has varied wildly from almost gourmet quality to stuff I’d be ashamed to have cooked myself.

And, sorry to say, I've seen food fights in just about all of them. I've never personally been involved, you understand. It's only through other people that I know that an empty party popper filled with black pepper and plugged with a cold sprout makes an excellent and rather explosive missile. Allegedly.

All of the places that I worked had one thing in common. Whether they were small, family run businesses or multi-national corporate behemoths every one of them had put a little - and in some cases a heck of a lot of - cash behind the bar, paying for the employees' drinks for their Christmas celebration. The money always ran out far too early but that didn't stop us from making the most of it. Without exception every single work's do that I've ever been on has descended into drunken carnage. Every last one. It was seen as a kind of stress relief for the under-pressure workers at the bottom of the corporate food chain, as was the occasional sight of newly-connected couples sloping away from proceedings when they thought that nobody was looking. Naturally they were never as invisible as their beer-fuddled brains thought, much to everyone else's delight the next day at work.

Now I'm not condoning these events of alcoholic hedonism, I'm just stating the honest facts. That's what has happened at the office parties I've attended. They've not always been fun but they've always been memorable and since becoming self-employed I have missed the camaraderie that these kind of events reinforced among the workforce. Being a sole trader I don't have that day to day banter at the drinks machine, that social intercourse that cements workplace relationships. What I do have is lunch with my Beloved every day which is infinitely better, but it would still be nice to have a work's Christmas do.

So this week I arranged one. Not that I officially employ anyone these days, I don't think that my writing income will ever stretch to that, but I do pay people for work occasionally. Mostly the aforementioned Beloved, my primary proof-reader and muse, but occasionally others get reimbursed for their reading and suggestions. I made a few phone calls and one afternoon this week a few of us gathered at a local Toby Carvery. Hey, if I'm paying then I get to pick what and where, and I've never been one for fancy food. Make it simple and plentiful and I'm happy. Suffice to say that it was and I was. The people with me were happy too. We had old fashioned roast dinner, a couple of beers, a lot of fun chat and (best of all in my book) there were no silly party hats.

And there was no food fight and the only people who went home together at the end of it were me and my Beloved.

Result.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Sanity Clause

I'd like to point something out, something that all shops and media seem to have forgotten. It's a simple message, just six words, but I feel it's important to get it off my chest.

There's still a month to go.

We still have a week of November left. It's nowhere near Christmas yet so why are they already trying to whip us into a festive frenzy? The run-up to the big event seems to start earlier each year, destroying the magic of Christmas. Whatever your religious views, is there really any fun to be had in starting shopping for the festive celebrations while the deciduous trees are still green?

Carry on like this and by the third week of December I'll have exploded in a starburst of tinsel and cranberries. It's too early. It's too early. I keep telling myself that but it's no good. I have a stupid amount of writing to fit in between now and Christmas so the earlier I can get my shopping done the better. Christmas shopping in huge crowds drives me crazy.

I think that somewhere, probably in the depths of one of the Catholic Church's secret vaults known only to the Pope and Dan Brown, there's a special annotated version of the Bible. It has an extra line with an extra promise from God detailing how he would, at an unnamed date in some far flung future, repay his followers for creating the shopping frenzy of Christmas. It will contain just one extra line, reading as follows:

"And lo, on the several billionth day, God created Amazon."

I, for one, am very thankful.

Today is known as Black Friday in America, the day when many people turn their thoughts from the Thanksgiving holiday towards preparing for Christmas. This time of year, when December is itching to be uncovered on my calendar and we've already seen the first snow of the season, seems a much more civilised time to start, not the end of October (which is when I first heard "I Believe in Father Christmas" playing in a shop). It's Cyber Monday in a couple of days too, the day when more money gets spent on online shopping than any other, apparently.

Much as face-to-face interactions are sometimes nice, if you want to avoid the crowds the it's much better to stop at home and settle down with a coffee and a well-prepared list in front of your screen and keyboard. I spent an afternoon like that this week, in blissful isolation, clicking away and handing my Visa details over to the Russian Roulette of the virtual bankers. Within a few hours pretty much all my Christmas presents were ordered. If the Royal Mail can manage not to go on strike for just a few weeks then maybe my family will get their presents on time.

But some things you can't really buy online. Some things have to be seen or felt to know that they'll be the right gift for the right person. And that they'll fit. With that in mind I decided to take my annual 'do everything in a morning' shopping trip to my local massive mall this week. It's a huge indoor shopping centre, one of the biggest in Europe. It's fine when it's relatively empty but the busier it gets the less I enjoy it. Guess how full it's starting to get already? So I employed my standard Christmas shopping strategy - get in, get done, get out before most people have even got out of bed. It worked a treat and I got everything that I needed but it was still far too busy for my liking. Last Tuesday morning was as heaving as a normal Saturday afternoon. 

And I heard Greg Lake telling me how he'd woke with a yawn at the first light of dawn far more times than was enjoyable.

So I've done three separate sets of Christmas shopping this week. The hellish one at the large shopping centre, the pleasant afternoon spent at home in front of my laptop, and yesterday a wonderful trip to a Christmas fair and market in the grounds of my (relatively) local stately home, Chatsworth House. For those of you who don't know it, think of it as being halfway between Downton Abbey and Buckingham Palace, both in size and in poshness. It was decked with classy trimmings and there was no piped music, just a hurdy gurdy and a brass band. The smells of cooked pig and roasted chestnuts filled the air as did the mist of my breath in the cold, damp atmosphere of a beautifully clear end of Autumn day.

I bought no presents whatsoever, just wandered around a load of food and craft stalls. The only things I bought were some cheese and a jar of jam. My wallet stayed relatively full but my stomach became even fuller as I sampled as many edible wares as I could. Bliss.

Now that's the way to kick off my Christmas preparations.

© Shaun Finnie 2013