Alasdair Watson

Except that I have five spare minutes in an internet cafe. In San Francisco having a whale of a time. Will catch up on correspondance when I return. Hope you’re all having fun.

A thread on the WEF. The question: how did you meet your partner?

One story involves a man attempting suicide (and failing, although seriously injured) by jumping in front of a train, leading to meeting of bloke and lass, who were witnesses. Somewhat later in the thread, it transpires that another forum regular *knows* the guy who jumped in front of the train. Fuck!

Appalling Gut Horror, caused, I suspect, by a dodgy prawn in my cha han at Wagamama on Thursday night. No sleep on Thursday night at all, as a result of said intestinal nightmares. Failed to go to work on Friday. Wound up at Mum and Dad’s on Friday night, where even Mum admited I looked bad. This means I must have looked like I could have died at any moment. I went round there because, come hell or high water, I had to get money changed and measured for a suit, in order to go on holiday, and it was easier to start off from their place.

Mercifully, by Saturday morning, the worst was over, so, slightly over half a stone lighter than I had been (and I do not recommend this as a diet technique) errands were run with only mild exhaustion and queasiness to deal with.

Then it was time to get a tattoo. When things began to Go Wrong on Thursday night, my first thought was “Oh, fuck. I can’t get my deposit back now.” (48 hours notice required for cancellation). But, thank god, I made it. It was painful, but by no means even close to unbearable. Photos when it’s healed a bit, and the current reds and browns have faded to the greys they’re supposed to be. The I met up with Hugh, (who was in town en-route to San Francisco and needed a place to sleep for the night) and James, and since I’ve eaten almost nothing since Thursday night, was talked into another trip to Wagamama.

As Hugh remarked: there’s a weird jet-set tone to your life, when you find yourself sitting with a friend from Edinburgh, in a trendy(-ish) London noodle bar, arranging to meet up in a week’s time in San Francisco.

And tonight, I’m off to see Godspeed You Black Emperor at Ocean in Hackney. Hurrah!

I can never say it enough: I love London. I love the nightlife, I love the tube, I love the shops and the crowds, I love the history, all of it. But what I love most today is, well, it’s intangible. Let me try and explain the moment for you, expanded from my notes. I’d have taken a photo, but I had cunningly left my camera in the office, for no good reason. Anyway:

“A London sky moment. Dead-ice grey, agitated by the high wind. I’m sitting on a bench by the Thames, in a little concrete courtyard surrounded by office space, out of the way, enjoying my lunch in an oasis of quiet. One of those little places that no-one knows about, a single tree winter-bare, the only concession to nature amid the flagstone and steel rails. The wind is biting, snapping my long coat and hair about, as I stare across the Thames at a construction site, high-rise going up, old buildings coming down, watching the waves whipped up by the gusts break against the wall on the far side. My MP3 player, on random shuffle, seems to tune in to the mood, playing “London Calling” by The Clash, following it with “Haunted” by Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor, and topping it off with “Dead Beats” by The Paradise Motel.”

Now, here’s the bit that you might have trouble following: In another city, or to another person, that would be dull, bleak, even depressing. Not in London. In London, to me, that’s a moment like a living, breathing thing, wonderful and dancing with magic. I have a grin from ear to ear, right now.

Yeah, more. You’ll probably get a bunch of them in the next while, as I continue to play with the new toy. Was in Putney, pissing about with the camera at lunch, trying to take a look at the area I work in. I’ve adapted the script I use for the photos to allow me display a text blurb as well. You can take a look at what I saw and thought here.

Can’t get PHP to auto generate .jpg thumbnails. It’ll do .gif files, but not .jpg, it seems. Still, to compensate I’ve thrown together a quick script that should auto-index photo directories. If you visit the link I gave you earlier, you’ll see I’ve moved the photos into a subdirectory, and as I add new mini-albums, the simple act of dropping the directory into place should add them to the listing. So that’s something. And it gives me a use for the webspace I’ve got at Electricana.org, as well.

Bought a new camera at the weekend. Canon Ixus V. So I’ve been taking photos, naturally enough. If you’re interested, you’ll find them here. I’m about halfway through writing the scripts I want to use for photo display, but I’m proud enough of them at the moment – I can drop the script, a config file and a template page into any directory of photos, and have them produce a basic display page. At the moment, I have to put thumbnail files in with them, but I’m going to play around with autogenerating the thumbnails with PHP in the next few days.

Or, Slough, at any rate. Had dinner (and spent the night) at Antony and Marcia’s new place, out in the barren wilderness between London and Reading. A good time had by all.

I’m jealous. It’s a lovely house, for what sounds like a very reasonable rent. Slough itself seems quite pleasant and suburban, rather than the concrete hellhole it used to be – there are still traces of it, but it really does seem to be gentirfying at a frightening rate. I honestly could see myself winding up living there, or somewhere very like in the next year or two.

All I’ve got to do is come up with some way to afford a mortgage. This may be a bit more problematic. I don’t want to look for a new job, because I like where I am, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get a decent mortgage on my current money. Still, I can postpone the decision until well after San Francisco.

In other news: I am informed by several of you that the text message thing I had mentally filed under “complete and utter scam” may not have been quite as bad as I thought – apparently, it’s a service run by Genie, and someone will have fed it my phone number in order for me to have got that message.

Of course, I have deleted the message, which rather preculdes me phoning it back (although I’m unclear on whether or not you get to find out who it was sending the message anyway). But I am rather intrigued to know who would be feeding my number into it. I mean, I think I know all the women who have my phone number, and in the first instance, most of them aren’t single, and secondly, of the two or three who are single, I feel pretty confident in saying that they don’t fancy me.

Yes, it could of course be a man, or someone who isn’t single. I am discounting these options, for no other reason than because if I must have mystery people sending me weird text messages, I’d like to believe they are someone that there’s at least a chance I might want to sleep with. Of course, it could just have been a wrong number. If so, I choose to believe that it was an attractive wrong number.

I was digging about on my hard drive last night, looking for some old reference material I saved, and I came across a fragment of something I don’t remember writing, notes toward something bigger, just needing a spine to hang it off before I make something out of it. A story set in a bar called “Revelations” and populated by a weird cast of deviants, secret people and divine lunatics. I know it’s defintely something I wrote myself – it’s got my familiar thought-shortcuts all over it, and I have unconciously recycled one of the lead characters into something else.

But I have no memory of writing it.

I wish Tom had link anchors on his blog at the moment, because I really want to link to the most recent post on his site. I know I’m a big geek, but god, it made me laugh…