The Bloke.co.uk | Life After the Lad

I do think somewhere along the way that when my brain was put together that certain key synapses were not connected.  My memory is extremely bad.  It’s planted some obstacles in my life:

I’ve failed practically every exam I’ve ever taken.

I forget peoples names, sometimes seconds after I’ve met them.  And often because I can’t remember their names I avoid them so they think I’m rude. Somebody once told me a trick to help remember names which has you reply very firmly “nice to meet you Ken”, so that it locks the name in your head.  It never works with me, I just ended up sounding like a car salesman.

I’m chaotic and frustrating to be about because I forget to do things people ask me.

On more than one occasion I have lost my car.  Once in Colchester where I had to enlist a taxi driver to drive me round until I saw it.

But there are also some advantages of having a terrible memory:

I can watch a film 6 month after watching it for the first time and be completely gripped by it, unable to recall the ending.

I can read a favourite book many times over safe in the knowledge that most of the facts are buried somewhere in the back of my head in a little unreachable corner.  My favourite for this is Storm from the East which is all about the rise to power of Genghia Khan.  In my opinion it’s one of the best business books you can read.

And finally, i can read my own book and feel like its been written by someone else.  A peculiar feeling.

I do remember that I had set my self a pretty tight schedule to finish the book and the last quarter could have been slightly punchier.  Or it could be that now 5 years older my style has matured a little.  Whatever the excuse I’m continuing to give the book a polish before I upload it.

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.