Piri Piri Potatoes and a Half-Baked Novel

I MADE A PETTY IMPULSE PURCHASE last week! The first one in about ten years (not counting food, drugs, drink or necessity-type items). There I was queueing in the post office (that means standing in inexorable, interminable life-drainingly long line to you Americans. Of course we're queueing next to numerous novelty stationery items and had ample opportunity to examine them, being stood next to them so long. My eye was caught by a tiny notebook, I think it's A6 size which is smaller than I usually like ~ but it was covered in circular holograms of the most amazing motion, like a symphony of ever decreasing circles. Or increasing ~ depending on which way you hold it. "If only I could bring this back to the time of the Pharaohs this would be worth more than the finest jewels," I mused. Then I thought "well you could bring it with you if you went travelling to remote parts. Shark-spearing locals might swap it for a gobstopper sized blue pearl or something..." I looked at the price. About £1.29. Up to that point it hadn't even crossed my mind that I might buy it. To me, things in shops are like museum displays. I never want them because I never even consider them on sale to me. This is one of the many petty bridges I feel burned, or steps taken down to the stygian depths of addiction that separates someone like me from someone like most of you. Something I'd not usually recognize in day-to-day droning dullardness because I'm so used to it I forget, but it puts you and me in totally different worlds...

Anyway I bought the notebook and was nagging at myself early this morning (having woken up at the cheery hour of 4am) on having got nowhere with this book I really do want to write. Seriously it's an A1 idea, I just couldn't muster the joy to get it going. Because it's based upon actual events I'm constrained as to the course of the story, though how I plot the novel and the characters I people it with are of course entirely up to me. We're talking ancient history so I have pretty much carte blanche how I tell it. So I'm thinking, I need to put in this and that and this perspective and that happening. Then I realized if I ignored what I "think" I should put and plan out scenes I want to write instead not only will I have more fun, but I might get a better book out of it. So that's what I did and it seems to be working. In fact I came up with a slapstick comedy scene set in the dungeons that wouldn't otherwise have festooned my brains in 1,000,000 years ...

Righty-ho on to the potatoes. It was Sunday night and I was penniless and totally unappetized by the nearly-empty frozen veg packets and Iceland diddly crispy potatoes. The vinegar had nearly run out. There was no butter for my green beans and worst of all I had no Bisto gravy to slick all over it. Inspiration struck and I piri piri'd my potatoes with Schwarz Cajun seasoning mixed to two parts paprika and a generous couple of pinches of the salt/MSG mix I vandalize my food with every day. Anyway this sprinkled liberally over said diddly roasting potatoes, the potatoes being turned and resprinkled at ten minute intervals, made them gorgeously piquant and crispy. They were a bit like the wedges you used to get at KFC 25 years ago, when they also did black cherry flavour milk shake...

Righty-ho now before I go just to make it clear yesterday I was not slagging off the idea of working ~ whether 9-5 or any other hours. What I was getting at was that you can be spiritually dead, creatively bankrupt, ambitions unfulfilled and all that whether you're working or not and occasionally I realize this and don't feel quite so bad. But as I was saying yesterday, I never envisaged a life of idle wasting and hate living it now. Most of my life "goals" are what you'd call career-oriented. There are loads of things I've always wanted to do, including: become writer of popular novels of worldwide renown; get bit part in French film; design a board game; design a gameshow and get it on TV; make a "grandad and the singing gnomes" type novelty techno record if I ever live past 70; become an internet cook; set up and run a picture library and design, produce and sell a range of novelty hamster homes the like of which nobody has ever seen because they're so amazing... and so on and so on. So there I'm not lacking in ambition I'm just manured in a morass of drug-addicted apathy I cannot seem to clamber out of so what am I going to do? It's all down to me it's all down to me I know. That's what makes it so scary!