pumpkin soup.

Hallowe’en is here again.  Hurrah!  The best reason to buy pumpkins, ever.  I used to hate trick or treat, now I love it.  We get troops of lovely, polite little kids in fancy dress who marvel at the carved lanterns (if I manage to do that this year) and get all goggle-eyed at the big bowl of proffered sweets (while their parents hang back, murmuring “Don’t take too many”).

I know I promised a ghost story this time last year, or maybe at Christmas, but I never managed to follow through, did I?  Well, I’m scribbling away at it again, maybe I’lll have it for this Christmas.  A lot of work for a short story which probably won’t be that good.  But you’ve got to keep your hand in, haven’t you?

Wow, I’ve been on Blogger since December 2000!  That’s nine years, almost.  I should throw a party come December.

i hate answerphones

Why do they exist?  They exist to make us say stupid things, like I was just leaving my contact details and I gave my postcode.  Why?  It only requires a phone number!!  Plus I think I say “er” more times when confronted with an answerphone than, well, anyone ever says it ever.  Ever.

Nearly Hallowe’en.  I have once again downloaded a selection of ghost stories for listening to on the bus to and from work.  I’m making it into a tradition.  Third year in a row.  Last year I classed proceedings up considerably with an all-MR James collection read by Derek Jacobi.  You can’t beat The James for ghost stories, you really can’t.  After his stuff, everything else seems a bit workmanlike.  Although, surprisingly, Dickens is pretty good.  The Signalman comes close to James for atmosphere and slow creep.

Anyway.  Wow, baby is making progress.  She loves being pulled to her feet, clinging onto our fingers with her tiny pudgy hands.  She sometimes seems to enjoy tummy time.  She was munching on her foot last night.  She laughs freely.  Oh, and did I mention the tooth?  Oh, yes, first tooth, coming through!

Last couple of nights, coming home has been so wonderful.  I’m presented with a charming, happy, active, baby.  Warm and snuggly, there’s no, honestly, no better feeling than having her plonked in my arms and then wandering about, chatting to her as she babbles and coos.  I want to eat her.

All very nauseating, but it’s the payoff for being woken at 4am by a whine from the cradle.  Actually, no, the payoff for that is the sleepy, muzzy little bundle sucking happily on her milk as you sit in the dark with her, half-asleep.  Even the crappy stuff is good.  Even when she’s being a nightmare, when she’s screaming blue murder at top volume into your ear, it’s great.  Because she’s there, and that’s kind of enough.

deleted thoughts

deleted thoughts This is last weeks swallowed supplemental update: <<The baby is fine. Shes going through a tricky week, but shes learning stuff all the time. And shes beautiful, just really knockout lovely. Its like 4am and I want to die but she smiles up at me and throws her arms out& I cant resist a cuddle, though I have to couch it strictly in terms of soothing her to sleep so she doesnt think woo hoo! Playtime at 4 oclock! Time to wake up!. Her hair got a bit worn away at the back from lying down all the time (no I dont really understand either), but its growing back and its growing back the same gorgeous coppery colour as before. Phew. She really is a redhead!>> This week, shes a little less tricky, but still exhausting. Laughing more, though, and really seems to have developed some skillz. Shell be rolling over by the end of the weekend, you watch. Supplemental to the hair thing, I notice that she and I have thinning patches in the same places. Hmm. Its been mental at work, so Ive little to say. This week I played about 35 minutes of GTA IV. I have almost finished that Dracula book (though I may actually go mad if they refer to Whitby Abbey as Carfax one more time). I am starting to research what phone I might want come upgrade time. Any thoughts?

I hope everything was all right.

Well, we ditched the baby (Ditched!  We left the baby in the capable hands of her maternal grandmother) and headed all the way to the southern tip of the Victoria Line in order to watch The Pixies – one of the best bands in the world – perform, from start to finish, Doolittle – one of the best albums in the world.

This is a little like being offered the opportunity to hear Jesus doing some of his greatest parables live.  Only better, because The Pixies are real and not a sort of amalgam of various chancers hanging around Roman-occupied Judea claiming to be the Messiah.  Well, enough blasphemy (It’s only blasphemous if you believe it all anyway), what about the gig?

Man alive, they can make some noise.  But it’s not just noise-noise.  It’s the songs.  The songs I love so much, there they were, top volume, slightly raw but note and pitch perfect.  Everyone in that band can play/sing the shit out of those songs and they gave us a beautiful rendition of the album (and some B-sides which no-one knew except proper nerds), seemingly without even trying.

Sure, you’d probably get Wave of Mutilation, Monkey Gone to Heaven (I fucked my voice yelling “THEN GOD IS SEVEN!”) and Debaser at any Pixies gig.  But would you get Mr Grieves?  There Goes My Gun?   Dead?  I Bleed?  Not that it matters, they’re all great (although I felt a pang of disappointment that Silver comes after Hey, such an anticlimax to the album.  Turns out I’d forgotten Gouge Away (how??), so that buoyed me up to keep clapping for the encore).

Oh, yes, encores.  More B-sides, but good ones.  Wave of Mutilation UK Surf, Into The White… ending with the a white-out on stage which cloaked the band, clearing to reveal an empty stage.  A good end, but not good enough for the Pixies, who strolled back out a second time and, with Kim acknowledging “We’re not supposed to be playing these!”, took the roof off with Bone Machine, U-Mass and Gigantic.  A crowd large enough to fill the Brixton Academy to bursting point chanting “A BIG BIG LOVE!” was practically a religious experience for me.  I hope the band enjoyed it a little too.

daednu alucarD

There is an official sequel to Dracula knocking around bookshops right now. I implore you to read it, it’s something else. To say it is shoddy is an insult to shoes. Within the first few pages, there is a glaring factual error concerning the original book – Carfax Abbey, Dacre Stoker, is not in Whitby. It is in Essex. You dunderheaded clot.

It gets better from there, of course. Abandoning Stoker’s epistolary format and instead giving us a poorly-written third-person narration, mired in perpetual cliche, it picks up about 25 years after the plot of the original. Quincey Harker is the dull, dull, protagonist, far as I can tell so far*. Jack Seward is there as a morphine-addicted vampire hunter, “God’s madman” as he hilariously self-defines at one point, just after he’s done some swashbuckling rope-swinging and vampire-fighting. This is a man in his fifties, mind, strung out on the old horse. Jack cuts something of a Zelig-like figure, having worked with Darwin, flown in the same plane which first crossed the English channel and been there at the Wright Brothers’ first demonstration of flight in Europe. One wonders what other late Victorian/Edwardian notables he has knocked around with. Jonathan Harker is a whoring old drunkard. It looks like Van Helsing is a suspect in the Ripper murders. Oh, and the big villain so far is soft-focus lesbian vampire Elizabeth Bathory.

Seriously, this is brilliant.

*I’m barely a quarter of the way through, I’m expecting it to turn into Tolstoy any minute.

Busy ness

I’m really busy!  But in a good way.  At work, like.  Not in a swamped way, either, just with a good healthy to-do list that I can work through in a methodical manner.  Which I must do – work through in a methodical manner.  No scattergun approach this time, no sir.

Baby news!  This week she laughed.  Not, technically, the first time, but the first time I have heard her.  A beautiful bubbling sort of chuckle.  Her mother and I may have cried a bit, between ecstatic exclamations.  She also went to my office and was cooed over by all and sundry, but it was too much and she didn’t sleep for over seven hours that day.  Seven hours! Trust me if you have no frame of reference – that is a lot.