The Bloke.co.uk | Life After the Lad

It has to be something useful this year.

ahhhh fleece

The year before last I gave up fleece. Made it until October. Curse that soft fabric calling me from the packing box in the loft. Who invented this stuff anyway? Did you know that Mallory and Irvine made it to the top of Mount Everest wearing mostly tweed. And hobnail boots. Not a fleece in sight. You don’t need it. You just think you do.

ahhh red wine

Last year it was booze. A crazy thing to give up in retrospect. I knew at the time it was crazy as I love a massive glass of red every night at about 7pm. It calms me. Makes everything OK. I managed to hold out until early March and when presented with a game pie at lunch time in the restaurant above the theatre I crumbled and ordered a large Merlot. I practically swigged it down in one and remember the most intense warm feeling of bliss flood across the top of my head. Won’t be giving up that again.

So this year instead of giving up on things it occurred to me that I should stop going out of my way to make life difficult and start doing something I haven’t done instead. Can you see what I’m doing here? I’m turning it round on its head. My new years resolution is to do something new. And a chance meeting with a business acquaintance last month got me thinking about reloading my Big Plan.

You see I had a big plan a few years back. Knocking on the door of 40 I decided that I would try and make money from something I enjoyed. I would leave London, sell everything, live in a small village, de-clutter, reduce our expenditure and make a living writing stuff. So I wrote a book called The Accidental Pornographer to test my theory.

So I got published, the book came out, it wasn’t a best seller, 40 came and went and the dream faded. Work and life got in the way of the Big Plan. But of late I’ve been reading all about the Kindle.  Millions were sold this Christmas and the dam has clearly broken on the e-book market.  And Gordon, my lovely agent, didn’t sell the digital rights to the book.  I still own them.

So starting tomorrow I’m going to do it again.  I’m going to dust off the old book, give it a bit of a rewrite, and embark on a journey to become a self published author.

And you’re going to be able to read all about how I did I get on right here.

Happy New Year.

it feels like 2000 again.  crazy ideas from 21 year olds called Zip who are always in the tech press  getting huge funding rounds.  Here’s 7 that I should pitch to some VC’s before this particular bubble bursts.

1. hookeradvisor.co.uk

using your smart phone location function, find your nearest hooker and engage her accordingly.  after the event, and before the guilt kicks in, you can rate the hooker for her abilities to not talk about money in a cold dispassionate way and how she hides her contempt for you with her dead eyes.

2. come_and_remove_dogturd_from_my_lawn_for_a_pittance.co.uk

A new “wage arbitrage” site, this aims to capitalise on the austerity measures by connecting people who are utterly desperate for cash with people who have dog shit on their lawns but cant be arsed scooping it up.

3. www.completely_unessesary_solution_to_a_problem_that_does_not_exist.com

there seems to be an almost daily press release of some tech start up that does something so niche and over complicated that only slightly autistic low slung jeans wearing flipflop people in Palo Alto will find it interesting for the length of time it takes to drink a decaf latte then move onto another pointless non solution.  How about a website that enables you to post a picture of yourself hailing a taxi, that then registers that photo with local taxi firms, who can then bid with each other to pick you up. Or you could just hail a cab.

4. ftw.me

Continuing the recent trend for choosing names for sites that contain no vowels, it is essentially a fatwa site where people can post up details of people they want beheading and hitmen or ex military personnel or even disenfranchised goths with access to automatic weapons can bid to get the gig.  Call it democratisation of the web or some other hackneyed web donkey phrase.  Base it somewhere overseas where the usual international laws don’t apply.

5. SarahBeenyDating.co.uk

a website for people who are interested in dating Sarah Beeny and only Sarah Beeny. All the experts are saying that the internet will continue to segment markets to infinite degrees, so why not?

6. itsmyfuckingdata.co.uk

a website that enables you to sell your own data to companies so they can sell you shit you don’t need all day long instead of some geeks in america selling your data to those companies and making themselves billionaires.  data may be the new oil, but it should be remembered that it is actually my oil and if anyone is selling it then I’d quite like a slice of the action. thankyouverymuch.

7. www.Let-me-take-you-away-from-all-this.com

You need to consume 12 large jack daniels and coke before fully engaging with this “stripper rescue” site.  The principal objective in this site that as you fall completely in love with the slink hipped 18 year old lingerie wearing nyph that is dripping honey drenched innuendo into your ear whilst making it very clear that you are the only man in the world for her at that moment and can you buy her another champers for £23 a glass and you realise that you are in love. And you hit on this idea that you *can* rescue her from all this.  Right now.  You have a good job in marketing and you could take care of her and spend your evening watching telly in your underwear.

By the way, by reading this you’ve agreed to the terms of  my NDA and if you launch any of them I own 51%.

1. beard oil

2. exfoliating scrub for men that doesn’t cost £8 per tube (considering it’s essentially shower gel and grit).

3. a clothing company that specialises in activity neckwear.

4. dog rental

5. a service that picks up your motorbike, takes it to Geneva, you fly out and meet the bike, fart around the Alps for a week zipping up and down curvy mountain passes waving at other bikers and grinning, after a week the bike gets shipped back, you fly home. Bing Bang Bong.  In fact I would call this business BingBangBongBikes.com

6. a retail site specialising in Abu Hamza Coat Hooks.

Testing a theory about inverted nipples right here right now.

Getting a proper book deal (not including the vibrator one which i shall talk about at some point in the future) was one of the most exciting things that has happened to me.  Its in the top 5. Being paid for doing something you love and are good at hits one of lifes sweet spots in my opinion.Its not about the money either.  Most writers don’t write to get rich and most won’t. It’s someone putting faith in you and your creative output.  Validating you.

But there is a secondry bite at the excitement cherry when your agent sells the rights in another country. You essentially get paid again for simply agreeing to let another publisher translate and publish.  All you do is sign a bit of paper and a few months later a cheque arrives. So when I got the call that two overseas publishers were keen to buy the rights to publish The Accidental Pornographer I was thrilled.  The first was an outfit in Spain the second was, strangely, a firm in The Ukraine.  The Ukrainian one dropped out which was a shame because being read in The Ukraine is not something I had ever imagined and once I’d got thinking about it I started to have visions of doing a book tour perhaps terminating in vodka frenzy in Odessa, once the Costa Del Sol of the USSR.

But the Spanish publishers went ahead and put their money on the table and purchased the rights.

El pornógrafo emprendedor

The publishers did their stuff.  10 copies of the book arrived and I waited for my invitation to do a book tour.  And that was that.  2 years have passed and nothing has been heard.   Nada.  And in truth I had completely forgotten about it until this morning when I was logging onto by back end bit of the site and it alerted me to the fact that someone in spain was linking to me. Asier Marques had written a rather lovely review on his blog (i had to stick it into an internets translator to understand it as i don’t speak the lingo).

I still have no idea if we’ve sold any books in Spain but the absense of royalty cheques or any contact whatsoever leads me to conclude that Snr Marques might be my only Spanish fan.  But it made my day.

Our Local Tescos

So I wake up this morning and I make the kids breakfast listening to Evan Davis on Radio 4 like I do every morning and she comes down and I say “Bob Crow is urging everyone to go on strike which could mean a mega winter of discontent” and she says “oh dear” and then I say “and the weather man reckons it’s going to be one of the coldest winters on record due to unseasonally high isobars or something” and she says “really” and then I start thinking that this could well be the perfect winter storm what with Bob Crow and his plans combined with God and his plans and it could mean a really dreadful winter possibly the worst winter ever on record and it occurs to me that I should probably stock up on firewood for the woodburner now because I bet everybody is listening to Radio 4 and thinking oh my God I must get more firewood because of the really cold winter that’s coming and that dreadful Bob Crow fellow urging everyone to strike and it’s therefore important to get there first before they run out of wood or the laws of supply and demand force the cost of wood to shoot up so I sit down at the computer and try and remember the name of the company that I ordered wood from last year and whilst I’m googling cheap wood in Stratford-upon-Avon I accidentally type food instead of wood and an advert for Tesco pops up so it starts me thinking about all the other things that we should stock up on if we have a winter of discontent because it’s not just about wood fuel it’s about having human fuel and to some extent water although one could argue that if it snows then there’ll be lots of water available on the lawn and then I remember an article that I read ages ago about the whole of the UK food supply chain only having four days of food in it because the nature of the fast moving consumer goods industry means it’s all about supply chain efficiency and not carrying lots of stock so I tell her that after we drop the kids off at school we should swing by Tesco to stock up on tinned goods and she says “I don’t really like Tesco” and I say well it’s not really relevant here because it’s about getting lots of cheap own label tinned goods, not organic lamb kofkas because I think the family needs provisions to be self sufficient for a month at least and we have to keep it a secret too because I’ve seen The Road and I know what people are like when they don’t have food and they’ll murder their neighbours for a tin of tuna particularly our neighbour because the husband seems very highly strung and I dread to think what he would do if he was starving with the spectre of a cruel slow death knocking at his door and a family to support and I bet he’d cut us all down without a moment’s thought to get to our tinned bounty in the garage and when I say don’t tell anyone I mean not even your friend Nat or your mum or your sister or if you do have to tell them because you seem to tell them everything then tell them to stock up too although they mustn’t tell anyone because otherwise word will spread like wildfire of the impending potential catastrophe and it’ll start a total panic buying scenario in Stratford-upon-Avon and so she follows me into Tesco but about five paces behind because she thinks this is a ludicrous idea and I tell her that she won’t think it’s ludicrous when Bob Crow is going on national television urging everyone to calm down and not take the strike so literally but by then it’s too late because the entire infrastructure has collapsed with no heating because of the strikes and outside constant subzero temperatures making it so cold that the river Avon actually freezes over and the starving hoards are combing the desolate frozen land scavenging for scraps and eating dogs and cats and really for half an hour out of her life it’s not really a big sacrifice to safeguard the survival of our family and anyway the only downside of all this is that I spend £200 and we have a garage full of Spam which causes some upset because she doesn’t like Spam but I say that Spam is an important source of fat and protein and that to ward off malnutrition or conditions like scurvy and rickets it’s vitally important to have a balanced diet and also Spam is quite versatile in that it can be used as a base ingredient to create lots of different dishes and I start loading the cart up with lots of Spam and she wanders off and then I go and find the corned beef section and note that it’s all made in Argentina which I find strangely interesting and by the time she catches up with me she’s got three massive packets of loo rolls and I explain that this activity is about tins of food not getting 72 loo rolls and when Bob Crow and his strike and the subzero conditions combine and the the four horsemen of the apocalypse come round the corner with hoofs flailing and their skeletal faces screaming into the wind that loo roll is not going to be what saves us and she says well “what are we going to wipe ourselves with” and I say “when the time comes we’ll have to improvise and use newspaper or leaves or whatever we can get our hands on” and she says “yuck” and then after some thought she explains that she’s going to buy the loo rolls with her own money and put them in the loft and when it all happens she’s not going to share her loo roll and she then goes off looking for water biscuits and I fill the remaining space in the trolley with tuna fish and rice pudding and baked beans and head to the till where the checkout person is looking bored and I remember when I was a 17 and I worked on the till in a supermarket and I never looked so outwardly bored and I notice his name badge says Keefa like the bloke in 24 and I say in a quiet conspiratorial tone to Keefa that I’m stocking up just in case to try and cheer him up by treating him as a person not an appendage to the till and he looks at me blankly and doesn’t say anything whilst I load all the tins up on the conveyor belt and he scans the cans looking off into the middle distance and I joke that if the world comes to an end then we’ll be OK and he says “hnnn” and avoids eye contact and she turns up with ten boxes of water biscuits and a giant bag of marshmallows and raises her eyebrows and says “loft” and I don’t even bother saying anything and we put all the tins in bags and take them home and I open the garage and clear four shelves of unused dusty DIY products and load all the tins up on the shelves and in front of them I put old tins of paint to hide them just so nobody stumbles across them and go inside to google wood.