This is the worst flat I've lived in since the squat in Hackney (and to be fair, that was in a condemned building).

There is nothing that is not broken. The kettle is fused to the socket, the oven door has fallen apart, the washing machine won't turn, the windowframes are crumbling, the floorboards creak to such an extent that they make our neighbour's light fittings rattle and now the pipes are groaning as if an airplane is passing overhead. (And why the hell do I still have to run central heating in late April?)

Our friends the cockroaches have also made a return appearance, doubtlessly seeking refuge from the cold.

Time to move, I say.

Ok, if I'm going to rewrite my nuclear waste novel as YA and put it to Angry Robot, it means that I should write another one for the Good Housekeeping contest which closes in March (announced in the January issue).

And why not—it can't hurt to try.

AR want five chapters which are just about there, along with the rest of the novel. The whole thing needs expanding by about 20k, with the Bandit King assuming a more central role. And, as some members of my writers' group have said, it actually reads more like YA because I kept picturing the heroine to be about sixteen but tried (in vain) to make her older. If she wants to be what she is, who am I to change that?

Also it can never be too early to educate the young ones about radiation sickness ;)

I don't want to write. Despite the discipline imposed by the daily grind of NaNoWriMo, which has allowed me to keep digging for the story when I thought it'd run dry because I had to, I still feel that I can't get on with it (I hope to reach 75,000 words by December 22nd).

It doesn't help that the novel feels like a damp squib. I bet all novels feel like that at times. Completing the 75k will be a valuable warm-up exercise even if I don't take this thing anywhere further.

But although I keep writing myself out of the holes just as I have done so often during NaNoWriMo, it's getting harder every day. Now I have reached the bargaining stage. When I can no longer justify hanging out on Facebook or reading online stories 'for educational purposes', I'm embarking on displacement activities. Today I decided to pop 'round to Sainsbury's even though I didn't need to buy anything other than fresh bread, which they hardly ever stock anyway.

Now there is nothing wrong with a bit of supermarket shopping. At any other time of the year I enjoy hunting for the odd half-price or two-for-one offers. But it's a measure of how bad things are that I have contemplated going to Sainsbury's during the month of December.

It's not that I'm not prepared. I have an MP3 player but I use it maybe once or twice a year, if I'm stuck in some hellhole in the dead of night and the bus isn't due for six hours or if I haven't heard any Western music in a month or if I need to take urgent evasive action. The reason why I use it so rarely is that I don't like listening to canned music. I tire of the songs quickly and I can't be asked to update the playlist very often.

But evasive action is necessary in the weeks and months before Christmas when mind-numbing jingles are eating into my brain, reminding me the madness and sheer drudgery that is associated with this most toxic of seasons. All I want is silence. I decided to take along a pair of earplugs, but they didn't block out much of the noise and soon the sickening tune of 'We wish you a happy Christmas' was trickling into my brain. I tore out the earplugs, dragged the MP3 player from the depths of my bag, fumbled the earphones into place and turned the thing up to maximum volume.

And then there was peace. To the merry wails of altrock I could go forth and tick off items on my shopping list even though I didn't really need to buy them. I even got cocky enough to go and look for shoelaces when—to my horror—the battery ran out and the music stopped.

I stopped dead too, as if someone had thrown a switch. I put down the item I'd been looking at. I was surrounded by hostile shoppers, every one of them poor and stressed out and driven to distraction by the aural onslaught of jingling bells.

I hurried down the aisle towards the cash register, my shopping list forgotten, motioning at people to get out of the way. Some of the people did not take kindly to this. One shouted at me.

Of course the one thing I still had to pick up was the blasted bread. So I answered back, and soon there was a shouting match in progress. I gave as good as I got, swearing at the wanker who proceeded to shout at me from across the wine section, until it all became too distracting because I had to check the loaves in the vain hope that any of them might be fresh before I could get the hell out of there.

But, oh my, if the bloke didn't leave his station and proceeded to pace towards me. I cast around, deciding that I really ought to stand my ground and not liking it. But to my surprise other shoppers had come to my aid. The bloke would simply not let it rest. Whereas I'd long since fallen silent out of sheer exasperation, his obscenities increased in volume as the crowd grew around him. When they were closing in I made my exit. On my way to the tills I saw several members of staff walking quickly in the opposite direction.

I waited on tenterhooks to be served. From the change in atmosphere it did not seem that things had calmed down. To add to my trepidation the bloke had taken a good look at my jacket when he was eyeing me up. I doubt that I'd be safe walking through the car park. I marched out of the shop without looking back and without checking my receipt (a first), thinking that I could hear sirens approaching from afar.

I won't be back until later in the new year, when the Christmas madness has calmed down.

Back in the day, when I had to leave science, I had become so depressed and anxiety-ridden that I no longer thought of myself as a human being. I was a different species from the flower seller or the café owner because they were obviously people who led normal lives and dealt with things that were no more complex than a four-year-old could grasp. I left science and had a stab at being human and found that running a café isn't that simple after all. So I went back, and then I got crazy for a while.

But now I actually have it documented that I am not a human being. I am of a different species and England is not my natural habitat. The EU is collapsing, taking my peculiar niche with it. I don't know what colour my next passport will be. The people who issue it may as well live on Mars. I speak their language, but I'm not one of them. I walked out on them when I was sixteen and burnt my final school report. I can't go back there; I'd rather disembowel myself with a rusty fork. And—given that I failed in China—that looks increasingly like an option.

I have the feeling that I'll have to write 50,000 words of crap before I can begin to write this novel. It is hard to combine my actual experiences with fiction, particularly because so many of them feel dream-like and fictional anyway, yet I can't write them as that. As soon as I picture a real scenario I'm torn out of the world of Lynn and David and veer off at an angle, following some memory of my own. It feels as if my imagination has taken a holiday (even the names 'Lynn' and 'David' are taken from my Chinese textbook!).

But I have weird dreams at night and so I know that this is simply not true.

I just have to hang in there.

The icon this year is a fitting one, given that my WIP is all about travel:



But easing into NaNoWriMo wasn't so easy this year, and not just because of the usual website troubles.

In preparation for this project I'm reading 'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen" by Paul Torday and 'The Hungry Tide' by Amitav Gosh (the one that I'd originally saved up for Thailand). The problem is that it makes me dream that I'm back at the lab, about to go on a field trip, and I wake up wanting to take lots of pills.

On the other hand there should be plenty of good material there. As Brian Keene puts it, "cut yourself open, and bleed onto the page." To begin with I have tried to start each chapter with a near-death experience. But that won't work because I'll end up all over the place, from the sea off Zanzibar to the streets of St. Andrews. Among all that blood and sweat, where will I find the plot?

This is also not supposed to be a work of non-fiction. I have written enough travelogues. Somewhere there must be room for the fantastic. I'm trying to see whether the characters crystallise out from all this. Today I've found two of their names: Lynn and David. A man (or demon) called Joe may be the sinister influence in the shadows. Or he may not. I'll have to wait and see.

I've never been less prepared...

I'm getting set for the start of NanoWriMo—still without any idea about where to begin— milking a previous NanoWriMo effort for a possible submission to Writers of the Future, working on a new story and mulling over an idea about how to turn a previously cringe-worthy story around.

Have I mentioned that I've not written a single word of fiction in over a year?

Chinese-Western fusion cooking sounds like a recipe for disaster, but I had an idea for a warm seasonal dish that relies on local ingredients and exotic spices and captures the spirit of my recent up-and-downs in China and the UK: Tea-and-cider-poached roast duck with caramelised apples and pears & mustardy cabbage.

Sounds like a mouthful? That's because it is. I have often wanted to cook tea-smoked duck but decided that I'd better not get the fire brigade involved, and the weather is decidedly too cold for outdoors cooking at this time of year. In fact, Shanghai and London share the same temperatures today (14-15^o during the day, around 7^o at night—it gets cold in Shanghai too).

So I thought I'd experiment with duck poached in tea and then roasted. A spice glaze added before roasting would boost flavour and warmth and, since duck partners well with fruit, I decided to add cider to the mix and serve it with caramelised apples and pears. Mustardy cabbage struck me as a good counter-balance to the richness of the meat and sweet, buttery fruit.

With regard to the latter, it is important not to make this dish too sweet. Duck is already sweet but is mostly served with tooth-achingly gooey sauces or glazes. I halved the sweetness content of this recipe and made sure that the sugar was caramelised to the point of bitterness before adding the fruit, but your mileage may vary. As for flavouring, I used whatever was to hand: a number of ancient Oolong tea bags with a best-before date back in 2005 and a few drops of lemon essence stood in for the Earl Grey tea used in the original recipe.



( Read more... )

I'm getting a cold (now there's a surprise!) and suddenly I realised that we are in the middle of elderberry season.



I really didn't want to go out today. However, you can't ignore the turning of the seasons.

Ironically it was almost exactly a year ago that I went out on this same errant: picking elderberries along the banks of the New River. It was almost the first thing that I did in our new 'hood (I had made a start in Tadley while we were packing up), and I loved it. I was full of optimism about our new life in London and already preparing for the citizenship exam, which was when everything started to go horribly wrong.

So now I'm back in very different circumstances. It still doesn't feel real to me; at times it feels like I'm watching myself act in my own movie. Things are still superimposed, and I'm still confused. I would not have been at all surprised to see lotus grow in the slow-flowing canal or to hear shouting in Chinese from the building site. We had one on the corner to our flat that wasn't so much different, and I'm sure that what they were shouting about there was much the same as what they shout about here.

But here I was, caught in a time-loop. Reset to zero, picking elderberries. Groundhog Day.

I wonder whether this represents my own turning point. What will the next year bring? And where will I turn to?

As I stretched to reach for the drooping clusters hanging above my head, a white-bearded man on a red bicycle weaved down the path. He slowed and did a double-take, then gave me a little nod and a smile. One of the Real Ale Brigade then.

Ye Gods, I'm really home, am I?

*This entry has been called 'Excess Expectations' for ages. And I call myself an English teacher? Ouch.

Whenever I travel I usually look with disdain at expat enclaves, shut off from local life, their denizens mingling only at work or when playing tourist on their off-days. But it is amazing with what speed things can change when you take a suitcase along instead of a backpack, move into an actual flat and hang your office garb up in the wardrobe.

At that moment you enter a dual existence, and I have found out that living a dual existence can be dangerous for those of us who are not either bi-cultural or superheroes with secret identities, or else have a very solid social base (hence the enclaves). This is because the two worlds will clash and the expectations of one will run up against the demands of the other. And this can affect a person's sanity.
( Read more... )