Alasdair Watson

Electricana. I appear to have generated interest with this one. So, a short explanation. Electricana is my new web project – a supplement to Ink Stains, in a very, very different vein. I’m still planning the whole thing out, but at the moment, it’ll house two seperate fiction projects.

There are two things beyond that that make me excited about this: one if the fact that the entire site (barring admin work) will be run from my Visor. All the content will be generated and uploaded “on the road” as it were. This has been an ambition of mine for the last couple of years. Yes, I am a geek.

The second one, well, that’s the scope of the fiction projects. That, you’ll find out about as they progress. One of them is, well, interesting. The other, if I pull it off, will blow my mind, at least.

Saturday evening, from my notes:

Kingston Hill is gorgeous in the late summer evening. This is how I remember it, when I think of it, and I think of it more often than you might expect. This is the point when the world reminded me it was out there, in so many ways and on so many levels. Not only had I just left school, full of notions of my own grown-up-ness, with the all the confidence and arrogance of a teenager, but I knew what I wanted and how to get it.

God, it makes me laugh, looking back. And it looks like you can go back again, but only to look around. There’s not a lot different more security, but there are still squirrels everywhere, and the air has that early autumn chill to it. The need to smoke Marlboro reds and listen to Alanis Morisette is suddenly very strong indeed. It’s time to wander away, but there’s part of me left thinking “what if…?”

What if I’d never gone to Edinburgh? What if I’d never met the people I did after leaving Kingston? What if I was still in touch with the people I knew at Kingston. Aside from sporadic e-mail exchanges with Claire, there’s no-one I’m still in contact with from Kingston. It’s a dead part of my life. The only person I still see that I first met during that phase of my life is Andrew, and I met him totally separately from the rest of it…

God knows how I’d have turned out. But still, it’s interesting to come here, and surround myself with the ghosts of what might have been.

Back to the real world. The barbeque is calling me. My friends are there, and there’s only so long you can spend in self-induglent imaginings of your other selves. Here’s to yesterday, and to all the tomorrows that never happened. I hope they’re doing well.

Cracking time last night, catching up with Hugh over drinks in Notting Hill, and then over whiskey back at the flat. OK, so the whole “not going to bed ’til 3am on a work night” thing was a bit ill-advised, but still, very pleasant indeed.

Have you ever noticed how life just utterly rocks?

I love this time of year. End of the summer, when the air cools, and I have some energy again, but the sun is still warm enough that I can get away with a t-shirt and a light jacket. Walking across Putney Bridge with the midday sun glinting off the Thames from a blue, blue sky dotted with white clouds, I can feel autumn coming in and all of it makes me smile. Transmetropolitan weather.

No, not the comic, the song that the comic takes it’s title from. This is weather to “kick up bloody murder in this town we love so well”. Yip-ai-ay, indeed.

So, I had this long post written about why I write this thing, and then my browser ate it. (I write this straight into the browser – I know people who write what they want to say in word first, and then spell check it and generally tidy it up. Kind of seems contrary to the spirit of the thing, to me.)

So, instead, an irrelevant diversion: “Fame a la mode” (Polnareff, still) covered by Blaine Reininger is a fabulous, fabulous song. Seedy sounding, a kind of desperate glamour, weirdly kitsch. Ace.