Alasdair Watson

A walk in Streatham Cemetary. Yes, I know. Shut up.

There’s no-one famous buried there, which endears it to me all the more. Sure, Blake’s in Bunhill, and Marx is in Highgate, and there are famous dead people all over London, but their graves don’t mean anything much to me. But to walk in an anonymous cemetary, and see a husband and wife buried together, though they died nearly fifty years apart, that’s moving. A line of graves, all firefighters from the same unit, dead within two weeks of one another. A mother buried with her three week old son. These things get to me. These things need to be seen, just so someone knows that they happened. There’s no such thing as the unremarkable dead.

Dunno why I’m writing it here, to be honest. Just to say it in public, I guess – force myself to live up to it. So, this weekend, I have to:

1) Fix Ninth Art. (Trivial job, once I can actually do what I need to. It’s top of my list because I’ve got to do it ASAP.)

2) Finish the 2 BEATS SIDEWAYS pitch.

3) Write a few hundred words for the inside back cover of SIX STRINGS.

4) Work on the martial arts and sci-fi things.

5) Finish my next column for Ninth Art.

6) Watch Audition.

7) Watch Harry Potter.

Oh, and I’ve got a yoga class in there, too. Thank fuck I’m not doing anything this weekend.

I’ve given up trying to be clever with the titles for these. Here it is. As usual, I’m more interested in the magic than in the comics…

Which is a shame, because I’m really tempted by the Cafepress store here, selling Very Secret Diaries merchandise. Especially the “How I detest this life of vile servitude” and “Lawn Ornament” t-shirts.

One of the best things about our new office is the sandwich shop two minutes away that also makes fresh juices. I’m currently enjoying an apple, grapefruit and ginger drink, which is not only good for me, but tastes ace, too.

I’m just testing something.

That’s just unreal. Instead of the quiet night I had planned, I wound up doing a ritual of sorts. I try to do them when my flatmates are out anyway, just in case something seriously weird happens, as it has a few times. But tonight’s was just fantastic. Despite my comments a few weeks back about satori being hard to tell apart from mad bollocks, I really feel like I’ve come out of this with some serious insights, and by god, it feels unfeasibly good. Possibly life-changingly good. I’ll know better after I’ve had a few days to digest the events.

I am mostly feeling ace, tonight. I have been to see my family, which is always nice, then got behind the wheel of a car for the first time in almost two years and drove home in some mildly nightmarish traffic without any bother. Went to the gym, and stopped to weigh myself on the way out (the first time I have done so in a while) to make the happy discovery that I am now lighter than I have been in some 4 years – still a distance to go before I’m going to be satisfied, but a happy thing nonetheless. While I was running, I came up with a fix for the last thing that was bothering me about the new improved 2 BEATS SIDEWAYS, that’s has tightened the story, imporved the pacing, and made the ptich easier to write.

I have spent the night installing Quark on my Mac, reminding myself of how it works, and taking my first steps toward lettering a comic.

Now to relax. Time’s getting short before Bristol, and I have lots to do, but I know from experience that I gain my time back by stopping to relax than I do by forcing that extra hour or two out of myself every night.

Did it get this late? It’s almost ten at night, and I’m in the office. I got stuck into 9A and a few other jobs, and I look up and it’s ten. I was hoping to go home and get some writing done tonight, but I don’t think that’ll be happening, somehow. I’ll finish up here, then I’m off home for a glass of whiskey and a bit of quality time with a book.

Sad reflection on my life though: I can be in the office until ten pm without noticing, and the most exciting thing I have to go home to is whiskey and a book?

On the other hand, at least the whiskey and the book won’t be pissed off that I lost three hours in the middle of some code.

Written in response to the question: “Tell me about the teachers that changed you life” for a forum I’m on:

Mr Scales, my Sixth form English teacher. Absurdly intelligent, and mad as a loon. I could tell ridiculous stories about this man at some length. The one about him performing his music live on a Saturday morning kids TV show, and being cut away from rather hastily for being to violent, for example.

But with specific regard to his impact on me:

I used to represent my school at debating and public speaking, which Mr Scales was also responsible for. I was pretty good at it. Achieved some of the highest scores in the history of the school.

There was a tradition at my school that if you represented the school in public speaking, you would save the headmaster some work and do your speech at the following assembly. Not only was I the first student ever not to do this, I was denied the honour twice.

In my lower sixth year, Mr Scales came to me and said that there was a local competition being put on at which he would like me to speak. It was quite a posh do (there would be dinner, and everything), and I was a contrary sod, so I chose to do a speech on “Why Christianity is Crap”.

He didn’t bat an eye. Said that would be fine.

So I get to the venue, dressed in my formalwear. It’s full of little old ladies. There’s a painting of the last supper on one wall, a crucifix on the other. The audience is composed of hatched-faced little old ladies in tweed and pearls, and their frightened-looking husbands. Suddenly, I know I’m not going to win. Mr Scales has known this for a while, and said nothing.

The following year, he comes back to me, grinning, and asks if I want to enter the same competition again. The food was good, so I agreed, but added that I had no idea what to do for a speech.

He suggested “Why Satanism is great.” And because we both knew I had no chance of winning, he made some other suggestions, basically along the lines of “ignore the rules, forget about speaking to time or the other requirements, just have a laugh”.

My high school english teacher encouraged me to pace about the stage at a formal event, dressed in black leather, chainsmoking like a maniac, ranting and gesticulating, quoting liberally from Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, and basically keep a room full of little old ladies rooted to their seats with horror and disapproval for twenty minutes.

I learned valuable lessons from that.