Wee

On the first page of ‘The Penguin Variations’ a character has a wee. He is trying to help save the world so he doesn’t flush the toilet. I saw this on a programme on tv. I thought it would be a good fact to put in the book and a good place to start.


‘The Penguin Variations’ is a book that has a lot of facts - I have learnt about aurora borealis, Emmanuel Kant, this history of the Hindenberg, deluge mythologies, who is the world’s tallest man and, of course, penguins. If this isn’t a good advertisement for wanting to write I don’t know what is.


Oh, I also learnt you can recycle your own wee seven times too before it becomes undrinkable. (Undrinkable! I like the way that fits into that sentence.)


I thought, on average, you may flush the toilet four times in one day. I found that the average flush uses between 9 and 11 litres of water. On another website I found that there are twenty-two million households in the UK. (That seems a very precise figure. Who counted them and do they always count in millions? I want them to do my wages and also buy my baguettes.)


By some simple maths this equals 880,000,000 litres of water.


That sounds like a lot of water.


Riding to work for my last shift yesterday, I realise that I work 53 hours in a week.


That sounds like a lot of hours but is a lot smaller figure than 880,000,000. For this, I am thankful.


As I am writing this I’ve got about 52 minutes to finish. I want to be at the gym at 3.


At 8:40 I am going to the cinema.


I can quite see how easy it would be to slip into madness. I don’t think I would mind being mad as long as I was left alone. Or in a small attic overlooking the Seine. A carpenter would live downstairs and he would make me one of those beds that you can lift up into the wall.


When the gendarmes came to arrest me I could press a button and the bed would go up. I would be hidden. Food would be provided by a philanthropic Jewish family on the other side of the river. They would send the food across by boat. The boat-keeper would become my best friend and lover. He would sing in the evening in a bar and have at least two gold teeth. He would advise me not to flush after having a wee.


It being the beginning of the month I have bought some books.

The Life and Times of Allen Lane (Penguin Special) by Jeremy Lewis

Wide Open by Nicola Barker

Big Bang by Simon Singh

60 Stories by Donald Barthelme.

I bought the Barker book as an editor compared me to her, ‘Big Bang’ is for research for the PV and the Barthelme book as the latest edition of McSweeneys has a Barthelme symposium. I’ve just started reading this; it is great, a collection of random reminiscences.


One writer suffering from writer’s block is told to stay up late, read Ashbury’s ‘Three Poems’, drink a bottle of wine and by morning write 12 pages in the style of Ashbury. George Saunders takes apart ‘The School’ and explains why it works.


I don’t know that I have any writerly reminiscences. Or maybe this blog is them. Maybe next year I won’t be working 53 hours a week and writing either before or after work and thinking about wee.


Maybe my life will be better than that.


Maybe I'll be living in a French attic.

Some reviews I wrote -

’Arctic Summer’ by EM Forster


‘Memoires of a Novelist’ by Virgina Woolf

Currently reading - ’Abergavenny’ by Joe Dunthorne


Currently listening - Kate Bush

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