Course Open For Play

Day One

This job is, unliterary-sounding as it may be, a total piece of piss
and yet already I am starting to uncover hidden trials. The cabin at
midday reminds me forcibly of an episode of the A-Team where the 'Team
track a gang of refugee-smugglers into Mexico. Various struggles ensue,
and Hannibal ends up getting locked in this small hut / chicken coop
type of affair, about four foot high by six foot wide and made out of
corrugated sheet metal. It's meant as a torture, and ultimately as a
means of execution if he doesn't talk (which of course, being Hannibal,
he doesn't), but then he escapes yada yada yada the end.

Escape's not quite as easy for me. There's a phone connection I could
use to hook up to the net, but that'd just be an excuse for wasting yet
more time. I'm reading Catch-22 at the moment, nearly halfway through.
It's a big porridgy slurry of a book - maybe it's just the heat, but
most of it's read like an extended Chuckle Brothers' sketch. It's all
(actually often rather amusing) cross-talk comedy skits with the timing
mixed up. I'm not enjoying it but want to get to the end just so I
don't pick it up eighteen months down the line wondering why I never
finished it.

I like the solitude here. Perhaps I'm a cantankerous sociopathic old
toad but not having ostensibly 'superior' fuckwits breathing their
noxious armpit fumes down my neck, and not having to kowtow to twatty
customers - both of these things are pluses. I mean, ultimately it's
still a job and therefore ranks lower than 'free time', but I've got
big plans for it. Short stories and the burgeoning Ambercorpse saga are
two possibilities. A worst-case scenario is I just read lots. It sounds
infinitely more desirable than that services arse.

Day Two

Hmm&;#8230; it's just after nine and a tad inclement for golf. It's
overcast and a mist over the channel is mercifully obscuring Wales.
Actually, yesterday in the searing heat the Welsh shoreline was as
sharp and lucid as a photo in a travel brochure. The view was rather
arresting, to tell the truth. It made something swell in my chest
(probably a tumour).

I should imagine the weather will improve as the day wears on - I can
already see gasps of blue amongst the clouds. The water's surface is
patterned like a fingerprint or a piece of old leather; it's like the
crazied tan spine of one of my grandfather's hardbacks. There are brown
and white swells where the whale's back of a sandbar rises towards the
surface. Sometimes you feel it would be possible to trace a causeway; a
path you could tread at low tide. But I'm confabulating now. I just
wrote that because it sounds good, vaguely mysterious and eldritch.
Bristol has the second highest tidal variance in the world, or so I've
been told, but the sandbars are formed from that lethal kind of mud you
always hear about on the news, when it's swallowed up a family of four
and their border collie.

I'm doing my level-best to remain laidback and convivial in this job.
In all my others, I realise with a modicum of shame, I often compensate
for my subordinate role by being an oikish (oikish? What's an oik? I'm
going for phonetics over semantics here) little jobsworth and insisting
that all sorts of petty rules be observed.

Ah gash - the clouds are breaking up. Wales is emerging from the fog
like some big gaelic stallion. It's still a wee bit nippy but, well,
I'm sure soon even that small comfort will be lost to me.

There's a big round cloud overhead now, hovering above me like the soft
grey underbelly of some monolithic flying turtle. It's bringing cool
winds and further - albeit fluffier and whiter - clouds in its wake.
The time is twenty to one and I've been reduced to serial texting,
yielding a paltry one response. Ah, now that number has been increased
to two. Whoop whoop. Still, my next big challenge is to get some tales
down in black and white.

*sman*

When a boy of gentle bearing
and good manners

Ah fuck it. I just wanted to compose a lewd verse involving the phrase
'assuage the sausage', the latter being an acronym of the former, and
vice-versa, of course. This afternoon, I think I ought to have a pop at
some speed prose. Looser bounds may be in order; two hours rather than
the traditional one, thus allowing me a little planning time. I'm not a
huge fan of planning (as something of an aside, my
dictionary-cum-thesaurus contains the word 'preplan'. Preplan? How can
you plan something during or after you've carried it out? I ought to
compose a pedantic, amiably-indignant letter and send it to the
Telegraph!) but as I learnt so memorably during my A-Levels, it does
rid me of that niggling performance plateau I achieve on native wit
alone, and gives what I write a much better sense of structure.
Rain! Now I know how it feels to be a desperate, impoverished South
American subsistence farmer, weakened and hungry and kissing the
cracked, arid ground with parched lips as the heavens open and the
first chilled beads of moisture drop and explode against his face. Agh
- and some twat, while it rains, has just come and asked for a game.
From his slurred, miscued consonants I thought he was pissed, but he
turned out to be partially deaf. I suppose though, that if one's
deafness stemmed from inner ear damage or infection, then it could
potentially disrupt one's balance centres, making one stagger as if
inebriated. What a concept. Take me dancing naked in the rain, I
say.

I've ventured outside now. It's ten to five. The silver caps of the
grey channel crowd together the farther west you gaze. The clouds
overhead are all but gone. It's just that dizzy, heat-haze azure that
keeps threatening to drink you in; you feel like you could inhale and
suck it into your lungs. The gate beside me is almost entirely rust,
the bars cracked and hollow, a white arc scored into the concrete where
it's been dragged, shuddering and protesting, open and closed, open and
closed. There's a pile of fat chipped paving slabs, stacked unevenly
like giant beer mats.

A chap awkwardly side-stepped the gate earlier and asked through gaping
piano-key teeth if this was the original course. "The original course?"
I echoed like the sullen little bugger paid work often makes me. (often
makes me? Now there's a case of distorted reasoning if ever I heard
one. It's me who chooses to be a Grumpy Gus or not, surely)

"Yes," he said. He had the clipped, monied tones of someone who's been
balding all their life. "Because the pub," he gestured towards the pub
to assist me (as if I wouldn't be able to locate a pub! Ha - the
irony!) "used to be the club house."

"That's right," I said as blandly as I could, confirming the veracity
of the statement whilst underlining its utter banality. Had I been of
sharper wit or, indeed, had any desire to prolong conversation with
such a corpulent dungheap of a man, I would have nodded towards the
opposite shore and remarked: "S'Wales, over there."

Day Three

It's twelve-twenty and I spent the morning finishing off Catch-22. It's
pretty cool how Heller manages to describe the same event again and
again without really repeating himself, edging closer to the gory,
scarcely palatable crux of it each time. It's patchy clouds with random
strobing outbursts of sun. The temperature inside the hut fluctuates
from a still, crypt-like chill to a dry, dusty heat that teases
perspiration out onto my forehead and leaves it there to turn sticky.
My nose is stuffy, perhaps from the remnants of my hayfever. A bead of
mucus is permanently nestled in the hollow of my left nostril and
resists every rough drag from wrist to fingertip, every sniff and
snort. I think all the sniffing, combined with the heat, is giving me a
headache.

I heard some asshole's getting 32 million quid or something ridiculous
for writing a children's fantasy trilogy. Good Lord - Harry Potter
isn't even that good, for goodness sake! It's sloppy, derivative trash.
At least when I was reading you had good, wholesome subversives like
Roald Dahl happily butchering family members considered immoral and
gleefully fulfilling lots of kiddy fantasies. I remember being put onto
a book called Wagstaff the Wind-up Boy when I was nine or ten. It was
about a truculent, uncouth young lad of the type mutton-brained inbred
tabloid hacks enjoy demonising, who got nailed on the hard shoulder of
the motorway whilst hurling eggs at cars, and got rebuilt (somewhat
implausibly, but it seems contemporary children's authors are loathe to
do proper research - *sigh*) out of clockwork parts.