Oi...leave our Lucky Genes alone!

Opportunity is one of those rare commodities that never seems to knock as often as it really should.  One could almost argue that for large portions of most peoples’  lives, there's a marked absence of any sound even remotely resembling a knock.

We are a race bereft of things that should normally go right, but more often than not seem to veer off to the left.

Some of us pray for good fortune. We clasp our hands tightly together once a week in the hope that the words we speak reverently on hallowed ground will not fall on deaf ears.

We pray for cash and comfort. For health and happiness. For life and love. Anything, in fact, that can bulldoze away the lives we have, flatten the earth they stand on, and give us the chance to start all over again.

Some sit patiently, relying on the fickle finger of fortune to single them out, never thinking for a moment that all good things don’t necessarily come to those who wait.

Others strap on their boots with vigorous and mighty intent, stride out into the world and grab opportunity by the throat, hoping to strangle it into submission by the power of their own two hands.  

Blessed are the self-made pioneers for they shall inherit more of the earth than any one else has – and God help anyone who stands in their way.

And then there are the lucky ones. The beautiful ones. The ones for whom everything goes right. The ones who live their lives to the beat of the Great Knocker of Fortune, thumping away in the background.

The ones who don’t ask but seem to get. Who don’t pray but seem to have every prayer they never said answered in spades.

I have a theory.

Buried deep inside the fabric of the human genome, curled up somewhere on a tiny little patch of DNA, is the Lucky Gene.

For a few of us, it’s always switched on. For too many, it’s always off. And for the rest of us, it’s a bit like a faulty connection. Sometimes there’s power…and other times it’s as dead as a dodo.

Until now, it’s been sat there doing, or not doing, its job to the best, or worst, of its ability. Untouched by human interference. Nature’s champion of predestination.

Enter gene therapy. 

In the search to cure disease and treat life-threatening ailments, we have managed to poke around inside the matrix of life itself.

We have become the bringers and makers of miracles and it is glorious in all its medical possibilities. No gene will remain untouchable.

And that includes the Lucky Gene.

Before long, we will become the architects of our own fortune as well as the guardians of our own health.

No longer will the Lucky Gene be turned off. No longer will there be faulty connections. The Great Knocker of Fortune will be switched 100% full on, 24/7, 365 days a year. Every year of our lives. For everyone.

You know that old truth that says when it’s raining we wish for sun….and then when it’s sunshine all the time, we’d die for a nice little bit of rain?  Well…

When everyone is lucky, the very meaning of the idea becomes devalued.

So here’s what I propose.

For one day a year we can have the Lucky Gene switched on. Say our Birthday. And on that one day we will be fabulously, unbelievably, life-changingly lucky. Then, at the stroke of midnight, we’ll go back to being sometimes lucky, most of the time not.

By all means lets cure diseases.  Every single last goddamned rotten cursed one of them. But don’t take away our hope.

Please, leave the Lucky Gene alone.  

See you in church next Sunday…

Ok...who threw that rock?

Today I am mostly inventing things.

Before breakfast, I invented a board game that doesn’t involve anyone ending up in the divorce courts simply because they beat the pants off their partner.

It hasn’t got a name yet. I thought of asking for suggestions from friends and family, but that in itself might be a quarrelsome road to travel. There may even be the odd punch up.

Around mid-morning I had a bit of a lightbulb moment and came up with a method of playing the saxaphone that doesn’t involve disturbing the next door neighbours. (I like playing the sax).

It involves selectively extracting soundwaves from the air ( or wherever else they happen to be) and transporting them off-planet to the light side of the moon.

Then, instead of being greeted by the sound of lunar silence, visiting astronauts, can listen to the cool sound of smokey room jazz as they sift the surface looking for meaningful bits of rock.

I’m only in the very early stages of development…and the technology needed to do the deed is a bit on the theoretical side (well ok…a lot on the theoretical side) but as Einstein once said………oh hang on a minute, it wasn’t him…

Anyway…it was around lunch that I twigged the answer to the question that has dogged humanity since the dawn of time, or even earlier.

Namely: Who the bloody hell threw that damned big rock at us that buggered up our climate and got rid of all those cool dinosaurs?

Of course I realise that this isn’t technically an invention in the classical sense, and more of a ‘who dunnit’ in the Bryce sense. But that’s not really the point.

The point is…I have a theory.

At the time, somebody (or race of somebodies) in a galaxy far, far away, took a look at us and didn’t like what they saw!

In fact I’d even go so far as to say that they clapped eyes on our young little planet, saw all our cute animals and thought; “Shit…they look bloody vicious if you ask us. Give them a few million years and they might even get a bit adventurous. Maybe even start poking their noses around our neck of the solar system. Bugger that for a game of asteroids!”

So, like any scared little bully boys worth their weight in salt, they started throwing rocks at us in the hope that we’d get the message and stay where we were.

Of course, space and time being what they are, it tends to take a fair while before anything that’s chucked from a gazillion miles away actually gets close enough to do any damage.

So just for good measure, they kept on chucking rocks for a few billion years, in the hope that somewhere down the line, one of the big ones would actually hit.

And whaddya know. A bloody big one actually did. And the rest, as they say, is history. Or rather pre-history.

End of dino and all the other sauruses. Beginning of Man and all the other kinds.

The thing is…

What have our extra terrorising-extrials been doing since they clobbered us?

Keeping a watchful eye on our progress (or lack of it)? Ignoring us completely and hoping we’ll eventually fizzle out as a species? Gathering up more rocks?

One can only hope that the passage of time has helped them see the error of their ways and that the only things they decide to chuck at us are mysterious and interesting attempts at communication.

Unless, that is, they’ve already done so…

To the Great and Elder Gods of the Published Word...

I’ve always been the sort of writer who enjoys coming to work when the owls come out to play. The words just seem to get the best out of me when the sun goes down.

I don’t know whether it’s because darkness shortens the distance between my fingers and my brain, or whether it’s just too damned noisy to write worth a shit any other time. Silence reigns…words pour.

The problem is….when words pour in my fiction…silence also reigns from any prospective agent or publisher.

I have a theory.

Rejection, is merely an occupational hazard for any author. Scribes once unknown who are now household names have papered their walls with letters of “thanks, but no thanks”.

To date, Ray Bradbury has had a thousand rejection letters over his 30 year career. And he’s still getting them! Does it put him off ? Does it buggery!

So…my theory is that instead of letting rejection plunge me even deeper into the pit occupied by some rabid Churchillian ‘black dog’, I shall now embrace it. Wrap my arms around it, pat it on the back and hug it like a long-lost friend. I’m even going to give it a name. Loki. (Ok…I like Norse mythology).

And why? Because I believe rejection is a trickster and a cunning spalpeen. I believe that he has been sent by the Great and Elder Gods of the Published Word to test us. To see which of us is worthy enough to have their blood, sweat and tears translated into print on page.

If we wither and fall kicking and screaming at the first, say, 100 hurdles, then we’re not worthy to wear the mantle of published author. Whereas if we keep on punching and refuse to give in, then we show the kind of mettle that these denizens of print are looking for.

Now you might say that there’s a damned mighty flaw in my theory. Maybe even a glaring black hole in reasoning. Namely...

The Great and Elder Gods of the Printed Word have given their approval to a damned load of shit over the years. Books that belong more in a lavatory than any library.

Go into any bookshop. Look on any shelf. There, nestling comfortably alongside brilliant, half-decent, not too bad, tough going but ultimately worth it…there’s a plethora of ‘how-in-the-hell-did-this-pile-of-crap-ever-get-published!’

My theory is that the GEGPW have off days, weeks, months, years and even, dare I say it, bloody centuries! And it’s on those off (times), that excellent writing falls through the cracks and crap penmanship gets the nod. It’s the only reasonable explanation.

So agents and publishers... it’s time to get your shit together. Time to pull up your socks. Time to stop running checkbooks-in-hand towards the nearest numb-brained celebrity with no story to tell and precious little understanding of the written or spoken word. Time to fess up, stick your nervous heads above your pretty little parapets and listen to the collective voice of the great unpublished author.

Oh…and Loki…if you’re listening from a dark corner of in the Great Hall of Valhalla, understand this.

We may, as yet, be unpublished. We may be rejected. But we shall not give up. We shall not wither or pull up lame or spooked. We shall neither waste away nor shall we give up the ghost.

We shall gird our collective loins, battle on, persevere and ultimately triumph!

Bloody well believe it…

The Underwood 5 that never was...

Now as anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm not the kind of fella who takes his obsessions lightly. In fact I have an intense and almost primitive distrust of anyone who doesn't harbour at least one teeny weeny obsession.

It doesn't matter how quaint or warped it is. It may be right out there in the open for all to see, or hidden safely away in the dark, damp recesses of a fragile personality. But it's there and whoever it belongs to I'll love them for it.

One of my heaviest obsessions is around 80 years old, black and about 30lbs in weight. It is mechanically breathtaking and beautiful in its iconic design. It is the Underwood number 5 manual typewriter and even the thought of caressing its glass-top keys is enough to make my pulse move into fifth gear and my fingertips salivate.

I can see it now. Sitting like a queen on her throne smack dab in the middle of my leathertop pedestal desk. Commanding me to approach with anything that even remotely resembles a blank sheet of paper and a thought that deserves to see the light of day.

But I blink...and she disappears from view. My Underwood 5 is, unfortunately, still an unrealised possession. A blank space. An unfulfilled dream. A missed opportunity.

It's one thing to obsess about something you own and treasure and display proudly. It's a whole new twisted breed of damned obsession that forces you to do so POST-possession! It may even be a sickness. A medical condition worthy of an article in The Lancet.

The other day, I was almost able to reach out and touch my holy grail. Almost.

I could see it in front of me. There on eBay in all its glory and photographed in various poses. It was a semi-colon away from being pornographic.

"Bid for me" it whispered, and my finger did its bidding before my brain had even excited enough synapses to prod the keys of my accursed laptop.

I bid and I bid all the way up from 99p right up to £35 (plus £15.99 p&p), each time told that my bid was the highest bid so far.

I was 20 seconds away from possessing the noble creature. TWENTY SECONDS, I swear, when she was cruelly and for ever wrenched away from my waiting arms, by the devil called technology and a damned failed internet connection!

By the time I had reconnected to the 'wicked world web', the auction had ended and MY Underwood 5 was on its way to sit on someone else's desk. Someone else whose internet connection hadn't failed. Someone else whose ONE POUND higher bid had won the day!!

So now here I am, the victim of cruel fate and heartless circumstance. Underwoodless.

But my obsession is built of strong stuff. It does not weaken easily, fear rejection or run from unfeeling misfortune.

My Underwood 5 that never was has sisters out there, somewhere. And some of them have owners who will one day put aside their own Underwood love affairs and seek divorce in the high court of eBay.

And I shall be waiting......

Gravity has a lot to answer for

There is a cruel yet sweet irony in the knowledge that what prompted me to give birth to the TypeNighter blog is my enduring love of manual, low-tech, analogue typewriters. Yet here I am talking about them via my cute, hi-tech Mac laptop.

Of course I love what my Mac does for me. But I also hate what it's done TO me. It's made me lazy and shoved all the addictive power of the world wide damned web so far up my cerebral rectum that it's hard to write anything worth a damn.

Do I love automatic spellcheckers and grammatical slaps on the wrist. Absolutely. Do I revel in the freedom to throw my stream of consciousness down on the gently glowing screen in front of me, to mess with at my leasure? Hell yes! I'd be lying through my diminishing set of upper teeth if I said otherwise.

But...and this is a mountainous BUT...what it has given me has been stupifyingly overshadowed by what it has taken away, namely, the ability to switch my brain on before putting my fingers in gear.

So I'm doing something I should have done years ago. I'm going back to the joys of pounding away on the keys of a manual typewriter. Just as soon as I can fix myself up with something that has a soul at the beginning of every sentence and a 'ding' at the end.

I say "going back" because I am rediscovering rather than merely discovering the delights of going "unplugged".

My first foray into the world of "real" writing machines came about over 30 years ago, when a magnificent Royal 10 spoke to me from the window of a local second hand shop. One glance from its shiny, black, chunky body and I was instantly smitten.

Not for me the lightweight, tinny clacking of the plastic brigade. This was a world of cast metal with bodies you needed real muscles to lift and keys that punched the living daylights out of the English language with a clatter you could hear halfway down the street.

Alas, gravity and my Royal 10 were enemies right from the get go. And after a few slippery fingered near misses moving from one desk top to another, she eventually took a long tumble down a short flight of stairs, coming to rest on the bottom step, physically and emotionally broken beyond all repair.

I tried to replace her, but the magic just wasn't there any more. The power of the PC and the magic of the Mac beckoned and I ran towards them like a lamb to the slaughter.

Until now...