The Overnight Editor

Pilgrimage

Two golden bursts, flashing along a pair of burning silver strips.

Like racing magnesium wireflames, weaving, crossing, criss-crossing.  Join-rejoining.  Curving towards me, then falling away.

Train tracks catching the low evening sun.  Leeds to London; two-and-a-half hours of an eight-hour round trip. 

When I asked for a return at King's Cross, the man who sold me the tickets had said "That's a very quick turnaround, Sir"

He was right.  I came and ran away. 

The curious shop on the left as the taxi came up the hilly high street.

And there you were, red and gold.  A laptop on your, well, lap.  As beautiful as I'd imagined.  Moreso.  As your words.

"There's a couple more rooms upstairs." 

Your voice was sweeter, younger, northern and melting.  I could hear your girls in it.

I chose something to mark the journey and left, fumbling your change.  Ordered a cab from the pub down the road, pretty as a postcard.

Plenty of time to think on the train back.  Dozing, lickering warmflick between the trees, two hours watching the sun set behind cirrus and contrails. 

I'm sorry; a silly trick to play, exploiting the asymmetry in our shared little story.

A penny in a bunsen burner.  A brakelight through fog.  Then a glowing hearth.  Finally, some great western city ablaze, just over the horizon.  Red and gold.

But still, I don't know what to do.

Ice and a slice

Smallhours Saturday.  Back to the flat.  Third date and both of us knowing exactly what it meant.  Don't remember the cab ride... must've been one, somewhere along the line.

I leave her in the front room, watching Have I Got News For You from the disk.  In the kitchen, two gin and tonics become suddenly, wildly, algorithmically complicated.  How wasted I am.  Both are.

Steadying the lemon with my left hand.  In the other, my only expensive knife, the only one that's sharp.  Concentrating hard, yellow slices: One, two, three, fou-

And neatly, completely, slice off the tip of my left thumb. 

A perfect little dome of flesh, about 4mm deep and 12mm round, flush to the chopping board. After a minutes dithering I wander back into the front room, armdown and redgushing on a white shirt, numb-sting through the alcohaze. 

"Umm... Think I've... Cut off the end of my thumb, yeah?"

She was quite good, in all, coping with the blood and bandages.  We sat on the sofa for an hour waiting for the bleeding to stop. Me thumb in the air the whole time, like some over-positive idiot.  Then, gingerly, to bed.

Well - if a relationship can survive something like that so early on, maybe it holds some hope.

Oh, and for you connoisseurs, it was Tanqueray Export.

Wanted: Male sex bloggers

Don't believe what anyone says: Human beings have a mating season.

The first properly sunny day in London this year.  Lunchtime. 

Office workers are scattered thickly about the green open spaces, filling benches or making do on unwanted sections of newspapers.

I notice a pretty girl flat on her back with her legs drawn up, and slightly apart.

As I walk past I think, idly, about pinning her arms and beating her pelvis into the soft, damp earth with my own.

Regular readers - all of them female as far as I can work out - will know I sometimes like to bring you these little glimpses of male sexuality.

But are there any genuine, male, UK sex bloggers? 

By which I mean bloggers who document their sex lives online (i.e. sex diarists) rather than bloggers who simply write about sex as their chosen subject (i.e. sex columnists).

Going one-way on Earlham Street

This takes a little time to explain.  Apologies for the long post.

The buzzer buzzed and let me in.  Reception pointed me to the eighteenth floor.  A hired suite, stripped and striplit office space.  Grey carpet tiles ending at a cliff-edge of skirting-to-ceiling glass, and London below.  The whole floor of the building appeared completely empty - apart from a trestle table bearing a laptop and, facing it from respectful distance, a plastic garden chair, in which I sat. 

A familiar disembodied face appeared on the laptop, and spoke directly to me.

"Hello Overnight.  Glad you could make it.  Sorry about the old cloak and dagger act."

First name terms. 

"How long have you been with us now?  Since you transferred to the Office of National Interaction?  Three years isn't it?"

This takes a little time to explain.  It's been a long road.

I burn.  Inside and out.  Still, for her.  Not a flame, not any more, but a smoulder.  Poke it and sparksplit, red and glowing on the inside.  The Girl Who.  For once, not invented, a real person.  Friend and colleague in difficut times.

Barely noticed her at first.  It was only when she told us she was leaving the organisation that I realised how I had grown to depend on her.  Professionally.  Emotionally.  Utterly.  And so began my total, ridiculous infatuation.

I once thought my blog only featured one character - me.  I was wrong.  She has been here too, unspoken in very word.  Thinking about her every minute of every day.  A consuming obsession, consuming like fire is consuming, with all else ash, including my mental health.

If I saw another man so much as speak to her, I shrivelled inside.  My chest an urn for a heart's cremated remains.  I'm told it's the hardest piece of the body to burn.  And this, this blog, was where it spilled over.

"This takes a little time to explain, pun intended."

I leaned forward across the table, through the raised voices.  Sleevesticky, jacket and lagerslick.  He should've known better than to ask me what time was. 

"It's, um, nearly kicking out time." I brushed over my watch in the dark. 

"Very funny.  But can you explain time itself?  The concept of time I mean?"

"Well... one answer would be... it's what stops everything from happening at once."

"Cute.  But I was hoping for something a bit more scientific, involving magnetic fields or something."

Once we were sat outside at the pub with colleagues.  Lovely sunny day and her summer itself, like the Earth had dipped to show her off to the sun.  At that point I was still deluded, still thinking there was a chance.  That something might happen between us.  That I'd left it a bit late yeah, but get her alone, tell her stuff, ask her stuff.

"How time flies; I can barely imagine the Special Randomness Directorate without you.  Coffee?"

I had been expecting an interview *without* coffee.  He flicked his onscreen gaze as if catching a waiter's eye.  A previously featureless wall cracked open and two - real - people, carrying the components of coffee, filed out.

"Well, while they're getting that, I'll make a start.  Sorry if I'm teaching your grandmother to suck cocks.  From the beginning - what's the driving force of a knowledge-based economy? 

My voice croaked. "Ah, well research shows it's-"

"Creativity!  Without creativity, London is sunk.  So, the government asks itself, what *creates* creativity? 

He interrupted me - it's not a live link.  It's a fucking tape.

We were in the bar of last resort, under Earlham Street in Covent Garden. 

"OK - Try this.  Imagine I hit a cue ball six inches across a snooker table.  There's nothing to stop me walking around to the other side, holding the cue in the opposite direction, and hitting the white exactly six inches back across the table where it came from, right?  A snooker ball can travel across the table one way as good as it can the other.  There's nothing to stop it going backwards as well as forwards."

Then time was and she had to go.  Got up, kissed him and they walked together to the tube station together.

Watching and his arm his arm HIS ARM and pretended everything HIS ARM was fine.  Keep it together KEEP IT NO

"Um - sorry... gotta... getta... train..." Just made it round the corner before the pressure burst the cheek-seal AND-

I threw up on the pavement.  Suit and tie, in summer daylight, on a busy London street, after one orange and lemonade.

"Not education.  No.  Most European countries have better education systems than the UK.  But so far London's done OK.  It turns out creativity comes not from education, but from interaction - throwing people and ideas together, random noise."

"Look at America - a nation of immigrants.  Complete melting pot.  LA and NY the most.  Result?  The world's largest economy.  Japan, they make everyone live on top of each other, scram them all together.  Dropping the mean separation increases the number of interactions.  Basic physics."

Actually, literally vomited at the thought of her being affectionate with anyone. And that was when I first tasted the acid and teethsqueak of crippling love, which I later gave the name The Peoplehack.

"So what's London's secret?  Well, some built-in advantages; spaghetti streets with mis-numbered houses.  Chaotic local government, haphazard public transport, dodgy post.  A thousand splintered tribes bumping, grinding, cross-fertilising, inventing."

Be clear - we were never intimate.  We never HAD anything.  My obsession had no basis in fact, no rationality at all.

"But we can't rest on our laurels - India and China are coming up on the rails, and fast.  And how are they doing it?  Utter fucking random chaos, that's how.  Did you know that last year there were more misprints in the Taipei phonebook than there were correct entries in London's?"

I figured it was best just to listen.

"If we're going to compete creatively in future, we need to raise our game.  We need to MANUFACTURE randomness.  Or something close to it.

We'd tired of gothmocking at the new Intrepid Fox, and the Lincolnshire Poacher was shut. 

"I 'spose.  So theoretically, time can run either way?"

***

"Yes. I mean, no.  Theoretically it can, but in practice it doesn't.  I suppose it's not entirely rational."

But then love?  It's not entirely rational.

"It's not entirely rational, I grant you.  But it works.  And that's where WE come in."

***

"As you know, in essence the mission of the Special Randomness Directorate is to out-random the oppostion.  Hush hush, obviously.  Wouldn't work if people knew.  We operate behind the scenes, looking for patterns, then destroying them, creating new ones."

Once, I had met him for real, in the flesh.  If you looked at him with the edge of your vision, he flickered, like a computer monitor.

It was the sort of place people wash up at the end of a long Friday evening.  You know - Flotsam WLTM Jetsam, taxifare and GSOH essential.  Or, to put it another way, a typical Overnight Editor setup. 

In fact I was exactly here before, two years and three pints drunker, saying irreversible things to a girl I'd once cared for.  Some long-time readers might even remember.

And if I could have had one wish, I wouldn't have wished her to love me; I hated myself too much.  I'd have wished me to stop loving HER.  But there's no such thing as wishes-come-true; do you remember that childhood pain-rage?  On learning you are not God?

"SRD are the random-makers.  Whole call-centres deliberately dialling wrong numbers and leaving cryptic messages.  Made to LOOK like pure chance, but actually designed to create connections between people who wouldn't otherwise meet. 

"Putting the Spanish Man in touch with the Czech lady, who accidentally texts the Russian man, who triggers a Moscow coup attempt, et cetera."

Then.  One evening I was lying on the sofa, as I usually did.  Some pointless shit on TV.  Been fiddling with something electronic, taking it to pieces.  The sharp little screwdriver slack in my hand.  Started - absent-mindedly - to press it into my palm, see the mark it made.  Just idle boredom you understand, just a step along from biting your nails.

But then I noticed how that tiny little pain had taken me away.  For a few minutes, taken away the bigger pain.  My mind elsewhere.

"Or just calling in the middle of the night, breathing into your answerphone, and hanging up.  That's us."

"I mean, it's like this.  As I said - If I hit the white ball a little way, I can easily go round the other side of the table and hit it back."

"But what if I hit the white ball into a red, so both balls move.  Could I go round the table, hit the red back into the white, so they both end up exactly where they started?

I pressed harder; this is insane, I thought.  Teenage girls do this, not men the wrong side of thirty.  Now... where can I hurt myself that won't show?

"We've rooms full of people scribbling phone numbers on banknotes.  Swapping the postcodes of temping agencies for those of escort agencies.  Jumbling the bookings for restaurants in W1.  Our operatives sabotage street lights so they keep switching on and off.  Until gullible people start believing it means something."

And now the most difficult part.  Only now am I able to write it.  And only a little of it, and only under this, the heaviest camouflage I can manage.  From the screwdriver, things got worse.  I started hurting myself numb in other ways; taking deliberate risks.

"Um, yeah.  But it'd be harder.  You'd need to get the power and the angle just right."

"Right now, We've got Iodide planes making clouds look like dragons.  Covert agents out scrambling train timetables.  Making sure only undeserving people win the lottery.  Growing root vegetables in genitalia-shaped moulds then leaving them round supermarkets."

"Poor saps think it's luck... their imagination... fucking Karma!"

He laughed himself into a rasping cough, and had to pause before continuing.

"Exactly...  It's possible, but it would take a few goes to get it right.  Now imagine, what if I hit the white ball harder, into maybe two reds, so they all bounced off the cushions?  How would I hit the balls to get them all back to their starting positions?"

Over the next few months I found myself thinking about actions, consequences...  Methodologies.  Yes, that's the word I'll hide behind; methodologies.

"Nowadays we're doing more and more online stuff.  Not just the old spam from random names - which aren't random at all, of course - social networking has massive potential.  The churn-rate we're achieving in people's personal relationships is amazing, more than anyone would have believed even five years ago."

Nothing real, nothing actual, just daydreams.  But plans nonethless.  Ways, means and ends.  Ends; what a world without me would be like.

"Pretty much impossible.  You'd need a team of people, all with cues, hitting all the balls at exactly the right moment."

"Aha - not impossible, just very very unlikely.  Scale it up - What if there were a thousand balls on the table, all whizzing around and smacking into each other?  What'd be my chances of hitting the balls back to the way they were just five seconds before?  Essentially zero."

"Because of us, London has the edge.  We're why other European cities are so clean, so tidy, but so DULL. It's like the way animals propagate seeds.  London is a cherry, ripe for eating.  We make sure we spit the pip as far as we can.  And no-one even knows we exist.

I'd have left a note.  It would have been addressed to her.  It would have read "http://overnighteditor.typepad.com"

The random pop suddenly offs and the lights come up.  No more service at the bar.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME   

"Which brings us to you, Overnight.  Your background in information warfare marked you out as a suitable candidate.  SRD's work is about creating, not destroying, nNonetheless I've already been impressed with your work so far."

"Scale it further.  Think when they put the blackcurrant in your snakebite at the Intrepid Fox."

"Bit of a blast from the past that drink."

"Yeah.  Now at first, the shot of blackcurrant sits there in a purple puddle in the middle of the lager.  Then the barman stirs it three times clockwise, mixing it from a concentrated purple to a pink, spread evenly throughout the glass."

"Let's see...  Leaving numbered biros about the place...  False WikiNews entries reporting the end of the World...  Fictional organisations threatening to disrupt the newspapers...  Counting in Polish with Chinese numbers on the back of toilet doors; quite a feat. 

"I especially liked the way you crashed the Glastonbury ticket servers, so no-one could meet up with their friends - and had to make new ones.  Quite the artist.  And I see the mysterious graffiti you've been leaving round the city has already started to pay off."

But here's the thing.  Writing things down changed them.  Made them silly, whimsical, small.  It got better, Two years and the flames die down.

"Hopefully your algorithm for generating missed connections on Craigslist will do the same.  Miss Bakerloo - You smiled at me on the Northbound escalator... Almost wish I was still a street agent."

"What's to stop him then stirring it three times counter-clockwise, drawing the pink colour back together into the purple, and reversing the mixing?

"Um..."

"So, chase, cutting, et cetera.  I wanted to be the one to break the news.  We want to offer you a promotion.  Entropy Fund Manager, backdated to February 29th.  There's just one concern."

She can't be erased; all the girls I've ever been in love with, I'm still in love with.  If this were a book it would be dedicated to her.  But that's all the frontispiece needs to do; start the story.

"I'm afraid one of your recent reports contained an omaly.  The opposite of an anomaly; something that looked deliberate.  A series of encounters between yourself and a certain young woman.  Engineered to appear random, when in fact, they were anything but."

"Nothing, except the enormous probabilities against it.  It's like a trillion trillion red and white balls bouncing off each other in a giant bucket.  And that's why time only goes in one direction.  Processes like that don't go backwards.  It's not impossible - just vanishingly improbable."

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME   

"You know you're not allowed to aim for specific outcomes.  Firstly, it's unprofessional.  Secondly it's against regulations.  And third, as you of all people should be bloody aware, it simply won't work.  As soon as you apply deliberate intent, you're adding human intelligence to the mix.  You only end up SUBTRACTING randomness, not increasing it.  So play the game."

"So - what you're saying is, mixing is one-way, and something that burns, stays burnt. "

"No-one wants the boys from Coincidence Audit sniffing around, least of all me.  So no more freelancing."

So now I've told you.

"I'll lay it on the line.  If you ever try to engineer contact with her again, your license to random will be revoked.  You'll be expelled from the Directorate, and returned to life as a civilian.  Trapped forever in a plain, ordered world of cause and effect.  I know how much you'd hate that, and I don't want to lose a talented operator."

"So what's it to be, Overnight?  Up or out?  Choose wisely.  I hope your decision is easy."

From now on I hope she will appear a little less.  Thwarted love is not irrecoverable.

But it is irreversible.

"Yeah - it's irreversible."

"But be in no doubt - it is irreversible."

Reading material

Alice has a cat.  She also has pale, bad skin and cheap clothes.  She is standing up, leaning against the yellow pole.  Her cat is not with her, nor does she have anything to read, and no MP3 player.  She looks off and up, at the rounded ceiling of the tube train.  She is slim, with streamlined features.

I guess that she is a Polska.  A piekny Polska, I would say.  I am standing and watching her from the other end of the carriage.  I don't have a book either.   In between Alice and I are six people sat, three by two, in six seats.  All of them have brought something to read.  Six sat and two standing making eight in all, on our way home after work. 

The first of the six people sat down is a small woman with mousey hair, or perhaps I mean a mousey woman.  She is holding a novel by famous writer.  On the front cover is picture, maybe a painting, of a submarine in a thunderstorm, below the author's name.  The author's name is printed bigger than the submarine.  I recognise the name but have not read the book.  Although the author is famous for writing thrillers, the woman does not seem thrilled.  She is falling asleep.  Her eyes are closed and her head is nodding into the book, as if she might fall in.

***

The next of the six sitters is an older man.  He is wearing an old-fashioned hat, a panama or is it a fedora.  He is reading a book of sheet music by a man called J S Bach.  There are no words at all, only notes on the page.  He is sight-reading the music, bobbing his head and twitching his eyebrows in time to the tune paying in his head.  The twitching makes him look odd, but every now and then he comes to a particular phrase in the music and smiles with his eyes.  His ears are uncovered he is not hearing the noise of the train.

I have heard of Johann Sebastian Bach, but I can't read music, at least not quickly enough to sustain a tune.  I never learned to play an instrument.  I watch the man and feel jealous, or is it envious, for the MP3 player in his head.  I wonder if it is crowded where Alice lives, a house full of gangling girls, a trip back to Polska Londyn like I always promised myself.

Alice does have a cat, and has not borrowed it.  She is thinking of food.  Food that she will cook when she gets home.  She prefers Polish food, though the food in shops here was not completely alien.  Fresh vegetables and loaves of chleb were expensive, but of good quality.  There was ketchup, if not always Pudliszki, and many przyprawy.  Some shops sold food  especially for the Polskas.  Shallow tins of Filety Sledziowe, in vinegar or brine.  Flaki - even though the Angliks looked down on these parts of the cow - and Klopsiki, Pulpeciki, Kielbasa - tins and jars with bright, friendly labels, like a letter from home you could eat.

***

I have tried the Polish food myself.  Furtive at the back of that 24-hour shop near Waterloo.  Faintly mystified and trying to work out what was inside from the pictures on the packaging, like a straight man buying gay porn.  Irregular lumps of fatty porkplastic with individual price stickers.  Loombulging specimen jars and knobbly green picklemaggots.  Tripe casserole.  Comedy spellyngs like Majonez.  Tinfoil traylids resembling upmarket catfood - but concealing a gristlier spam.  And recently, a special section of Tesco - online ordering leaving it less a supermarket, more a garish showroom for strange new products, ever further from 20th century concepts of food.  Stick to the sausages, to the sauerkraut. 

The cat is owned by Alice.  She was given the cat by a friend who was returning to Poland.  Alice sometimes amuses herself by worrying about the cat's nationality.  The cat has only ever lived in London, but has been brought up as a Pole.  Alice looks stares at a point across the carriage and smiles at the thought of her cat filling in the papers for a Wielka Brytania work permit.

The third reader is a younger man with big teeth and glasses.  He is staring intently at a book by a scientist I have heard of.  The book contains few words, but many graphs and equations.  His brow is not bobbing up and down, but furrowed in concentration.  His mind is not following straight lines of sentences, but twisting curves and splines.  The young man is thinking how none of these shapes on its own can completely describe reality - each just represents one aspect.  It occurs to him that the names we use for different slices through a solid shape - like aspect, view or side - are also names for different versions of the truth, as they might appear to different people.

***

Alice, meanwhile, really does have a cat.  She is thinking now about British food.  It was weird - the bacon was not proper wedzonka; it was thin and raw, you had to cook it at home and stink out the house.  There was all the food from China and India, even though these coutries were hot and faraway.  Eggs from Scotland, covered in pork meat and fried, and butter... made from peanuts!  And all those brightly-wrapped chocolates, which were all so different on the outside, but inside all tasted the same.  So little cooking and so many restaurants, no wonder the Anglik girls were so fat.

But the the fourth reader is ignoring Alice and everyone else.  He is tall and thin with a weathered face, long white hair and a beard.  The beard is stained brown around his lips, as if from a pipe.  He is reading what is usually called a graphic novel.  It is called "The Sandman" and is by a writer called Neil Gaiman and some other people, who did the drawings.  As he reads, he squirms and writhes gently in his seat.  His mind is not in the carriage, but transported, away in a fantastic but fully-imagined world, darker but somehow better.

I have heard of that book, but never read it.  I wished I had, because I know that it is very popular.  Seeing Alice think of food is making me hungry.  I wonder if the other people in the train have noticed me looking at them.  None have looked at me.

***

I gaze at the map of the underground on the opposite wall of the train and think about what I might post on the blog tonight.  I imagine writing a sex scene in which all the rude words have been replaced by the names of tube stations.  Then I look down onto the book in the lap of the woman sat nearest to me.

She is in her thirties or forties.  She is dressed in a red woolen jumper, red corduroy trousers and red leather boots.  The different reds do not quite match.  She has a sour expression on her face, although I cannot tell if she feels sour, as I have not seen her face before.  She is working her way through a guidebook for mountains in Europe.  In the book there are photographs, maps and complicated charts.  She is thinking of her holiday, of ice and snow and climbing, of carrying heavy packs, breathing freezing air, cold wet fingers and "personal challenge".  She is worrying about organising the other people in the group and all the things that could go wrong. 

The relationship of Alice to the cat is one of ownership.  Alice will feed her cat when she gets home.  She is wondering whether it is cruel to feed an English cat Polish food, or vice versa.  Still staring at the other side of the carriage, Alice next amuses herself by thinking of the English fashion for eating food that was made especially not to contain meat.  Or even contained fake meat, which sometimes cost more than the same food with real meat.  Alice thinks her poor cat would not like fake meat, being quite confused enough already. 

***

The sixth and final person in sat in this part of the carriage is a young black woman wearing a fluffy white beret.  She seems nervous and twice takes out her mobile phone to check the time.   She is holding a crumpled free newspaper taken from the shelf behind her head.  She is not really reading it, and certainly not taking it in.  Her mind is elsewhere, turning the day's events over and over.  The newspaper gives her hands and eyes something to do. 

It is just the cat that Alice really has.  She is thinking about making more friends, perhaps with an English boy where she works.  Alice considers that, if she were to have an English boyfriend, she might have to learn to cook the strange English food.  Like custard.  Peas deliberately mushed up in the tin.  The toad that was in a hole, but was really sausages baked in batter.  Or the pudding from Yorkshire, served not as pudding, but with beef.  Perhaps she might teach him to like Polish food instead. Smacznego!

I pull my eyes back from Alice to the door at my end of the carriage.  We have arrived at my stop.  I am glad I did not bring a book onto the tube - there's too much to read as it is.   A silent grin grows across my face.  I walk through it and off the train.

Finding biros on Prince Consort Road

I'm aware it's only about 18 months since I promised to tell you a story about where missing biros go.  It got... mislaid.  But here it is.

Put it this way:  You think you understand the world.  Cause, effect, all that.

But you don't. And the stuff you do to try to make it understandable just makes things worse. 

Listen.  I dabble.  You know; order, chaos all that.  We've all played with dodgy copies of FRACTINT.  Nothing you or I couldn't do with a biro, squared paper and a couple of billion lifetimes.

I told you about my tracking down an old girlfriend online some years ago.  Before Facebook.

Well, I am serious internet old-skool, having had a web presence more or less continuously since 93 or 94.

So these days, when something like Facebook comes along, I simply peer over the edge to how much of a crevasse for my time and energy they could become.  Facebook looks pretty deep, so I've pulled back.

But you can't help dabble.  Like looking into the past.  Old friends, old mistakes.

I went looking and found her again.

It's a shame to think that one day, someone's going to figure out exactly what the internet is actually for, and the fun will be over.

***

Her photograph takes me back to a tatty, underlit grotto of a student common room in the basement the laboratory off Prince Consort Road.

The coffee machine would dribble my mornings into life with a hot brown liquid whose colour, as I remember, matched exactly the solid deposits at the bottom of the urinals on the floor above.

Back then I only used black biros.

It was an affectation - my trademark when such things seemed important.  Once I even wore zero-dioptre lenses, just to give myself a wider facial vocabulary.

Truth is I don't need glasses, even now.  But I kept losing the damn biros.  Could swear I was getting through a box of fifty every fortnight. 

Just where did the little fuckers get to?

I wouldn't have minded but it was cutting into my beer money.  Forget Douglas Adams and his planet of lost biros.  This was science fact.  This was *solvable*.  And I resolved to be the first to solve it.

So.  I buy 200 biros and some sheets of numbered stickers.  I number the biros, 1 to 200, each with a sticker on the end and a little length of sellotape wrapped round to keep it in play.  200 consecutively numbered biros.

Then, the monday morning, I take biro number one to lectures.  When I lose it I break out biro number two.  And so on.

And at the end of each week I note down which Biro I am using, thus compiling data on biro loss rate, with a view to (a) more detailed analysis and (b) losing fewer.

After a few months I move to the next 200.  But here's the thing.  The analysis is unambiguous. 

After initiating the experiment, the rate I'm losing biros isn't decreasing...  It's increasing.  Disappearing faster than ever before.

***

She was in the mechanical engineering department.  Spanners we called them.  Hate to think what they called us.

She would wander through the common room and use the coffee machine.  One morning it eats a coin and I help.  We sit down together and talk about our degrees.

I'm showing off, telling her about chaos theory.  I try to teach her about the double pendulum; that it exhibits chaotic behaviour. 

See - even though it's a simple mechanical system, it isn't predictable, isn't solvable.  So throw your engineering textbooks away.  No matter how carefully you build it, that one time in a million it'll take you by surprise.

Tiny deviations in the initial conditions can have massive effects on the system.  Butterfly flaps its wings and all that.

I take out a biro to explain.  Her eyes ignite. 

"Oh! So YOU collect them too!"

WHAT-THE

No shit - she had a pencil case full of them.  Full of *my* biros.

Turns out I had unwittingly seeded a biro-collecting cult.  She wasn't the only one, she confessed; a number of people round the University were following the trail of mysterious numbered biros, with the lowest-numbered pens being the most highly-prized.

She took some persuading to part with number four.  Talk about unintended consequences.  If it happened nowadays they'd have a Facebook group.

You might laugh.  But it gave me an in, and we ended up going out.  An instant, if strange attraction.

I stopped counting the biros shortly after that.  That's what having a girlfriend does to your research.

***

We broke up eventually, blazing row in the bathroom of a student party in Fulham.  I still remember the short black skirt she wore.  She'd begun avoiding me, avoiding my gaze.  Worse, she'd ignored me.  Which I couldn't forgive.

Should've known - she'd changed her hair.  Every boyfriend knows what that means.  Get the CDs back now.

After that we never saw each other.  I left and she went on to Oxford, joining up with some other post-graduate engineers to start a dangerous sports company.

I don't know what became of them, after the accident.

But she looks happy in her facebook photo.  In a relationship, it says.  Maybe if we'd met under different circumstances, the outcome would have been very different.

But anyways... that's where biros go.  It's no real surprise; other people pick them up.  The real lesson is that random doesn't just happen. 

Random can be *made*, on which more later.

You're not the only one

That's the title of an initiative by my dear blogfriend the fragrant Miss Peach, which aims to use the unholy power of blogging to raise a little money for Warchild, a largely UK-based charity for children affected by war. 

With vigorous nods to Troubled Diva's red nose day project of last year, Peach et al are collecting blog posts to compile for a book to sell via Lulu.com to raise money for Warchild.

See Peach's own post explaining the plan for more information.  Get involved, and think about submitting a post.  I think I will, although I'm not telling you which one - if all the contributors did that you'd have no reason to buy the book!

Labradoodle pike

This is the traditional recipe; there are other methods but they are largely tripe.

Having demyelinated the ladyboys the night before, rub a little garlic round the wheelrims of a Ford Mondeo.  Gurgle with Brent sweet crude and dress with a plomb.  If it becomes too turgid, strike it with the back of a cold steel spoon.

Using a fresh griddle, dig up the Cheddar your great-great-grandfather buried in the garden of the ancestral home, and interlace with 3.14159 grams of undetonated brassica, picking the scabs as you go.

Then simply plunge your head into the roiling chip fat until Gordon Brown.  Jizz liberally over the mixture.

Roll out the pastry with a bottle of 2037 Chateau De Balham, and rabbit-punch last night's cottaging cheese into a fine batter.  If the giraffe is not in heat, you can substitute with any good, seasonal, unmenstruated bleach. 

Tittilate the colloid with a little chopped tiger's whisker.  Remember to fluff for half an hour before putting the oven, 45 minutes at Zyklon B.  Leave overnight near a drain.

About an hour before your guests climax, par-felch each potating so that it resembles a Bishop's Stortford  (You can cheat and use grated rabbit bumbles for this).

Quickly take the lemon out of your arse and return it to the fruitbowl.  If you prefer your chorizo distended, you can use fine ground, hand-reared fingernails, but don't skimp on the organs, which must be organic. 

Creme.  Then obergoil the shrimplings in the fat leftover from shirtcocking the Kwyjibo.  Shake the dough like a polaroid, baby, sniffing the glove each time.  Beat firmly until it gets off. 

Finally, put the eggs on speakerphone while you scandalise the carrots.  At this stage add a pinch of salt, taking care to remove any charmed quarks from the chlorine atoms, else they ruin the flavour.  Stir in the coelacanth, marinated in pink fluid spat into a dentist's sink.

Divide into five strips and snort in case the Police raid the joint.  Season to fuck, and pork before bringing to the table.

Serves no-one.

Meet me at St. Pancras

Sorry I've not been posting.  I've developed a sideline.  A specialist market, and a way of putting my insomnia, and addiction to nocturnal photography, to some use.

A tiny, laser-cut aperture plate that enables ultra-long exposures; down to barely a handful of photons at a time.  Couple that with ultra-slow wet-film processing and a large format camera, and I can take exposures at high detail lasting over a fortnight or more.

In an exposure that long, people and moving vehicles lose their edges, becoming just a flow, a stain, capilliaries and arteries picked out in shadow.  Only buildings are sharp.  Once developed, the pictures can be scanned in at high-resolution and analysed.  They give information about traffic, footfall densities, pinch-points and blockages, like an x-ray after a barium meal.

I take commissions from urban planners, retail developers and Transport for London.

To avoid theft, or tampering, the camera has to be incognito - I've settled on mounting the kit inside those fake security camera housings you can buy - rendering it invisible to the casual London observer.  And within that, the lens and film themselves are suspended in an elasticated harness that dampens any vibration.  That's the biggest problem - over such long exposures, the smallest movement, the slightest knock - even from the slow unwinding of a screw - produces a blurred image that's next to useless.

I have them screwed them against walls all over the capital, me collecting the negatives at night, like a beekeeper doing his rounds.  This one, for example, from St Pancras Railway station.

***
That's where I suggested she and I meet; St Pancras.  St Pancras International they call it, now the Eurostar stops there.  The huge, bluepainted span of the roof like an iron sky. 

The station concourse was cold and blowy, adding to the impression of being under cover but not quite inside. 

We met by txt and walked together through the newly-finished station.  The central statue of Betjeman - holding one hand to the back of his head - had an unshakeable flavour of Morecambe and Wise about it.  The undercroft, built the Victorians to raise the level of the platforms, had been opened up and given over to retail.  The effect was of trains and platforms hanging disapprovingly above what is now, essentially, a shopping mall.  Plenty of room; this one cold hold everything.

She looked lovely, christmas scarf and wool coat with giant, Paddington buttons. 

But there was a problem - I'd already turned her down. 

We got drunk after work a few months ago, ended with her begging me to get into the cab back to hers.  Idiotically, I said no.  No.  Stupid reasons that made sense at the time - we work together, I'm the senior partner, it could get complicated.  Flattered but let's not. 

She didn't forgive me.  Frosty mornings.  Found out that, while I was off over Christmas, she'd left the firm.  Better offer elsewhere.  No leaving party - wound her goodbyes into the Christmas do.
***

I don't have a darkroom.  I have a bathroom and wait.  Dark costs money; night is free.

Developing my most recent batch, A4 mono prints ready for the scanner.  The air aches with the smell of fixer fluid.  Batch of new stuff from China.  Been getting headaches during the day recently, but I've found that a quick sniff of the fixer tends to clear them up.

The ultra-long exposure I've collected from my camera at St Pancras is slowly fading into view - looking down the corridor of shops along the undercroft.   After fixing I take it out in the light and check it.  Now here's an interesting effect - where the columns have forced the flow of people through two slits, they've coalesced into not two, but three patches of footfall on the other side.

***
The much-hyped champagne bar was a long row of people sat facing each other in fours, lampshades in between, like a cutaway train. 

There was a queue, so we headed over to the gastro pub in the corner. 

Here was the thing; we didn't work together anymore.  I think, now she's moved, I'll tell her.  Tell her I was stupid.  Tell how I've been waiting for her, Tell her I want to start again. 

We order, and she goes to the toilet. 

When she safely is out of sight I take a surrepticious sniff of fixer.  In my lap, blotting the end of the small plastic bottle onto a tissue, then pretending to blow my nose.  Perhaps I should choose - be in a relationship, or not, rather than trying to maintain this complex superposition of states.  Can't have it both ways.
***

This next photograph was taken from north east of the city, looking south over the 2012 Olympics site at Stratford, with the skyline of the square mile in the distance. 

I rather like the idea of the London Limpics.  It just seems like such a *blag* - London didn't really win the olympics, it stole them from Paris at the last minute.  And that was what made it so delicious.  Better still, London would now rub in it, by deliberately putting on a really shoddy games.   

And St Pancras's enormous lazy arch the final, most direct insult; a great stale yawn right in Gare Du Nord's face. 

I check the print using my cheap lupe.  Damn - clearly visible, some small blurring along the edges of the building they call the Gherkin.

The camera must have moved, smearing away the fine detail in the image.  Two week's worth of exposure wasted. 

***
We talk.  There's a theory that all the electrons in the Universe are in fact the same, single electron, whizzing backwards and forward in time and space so it appears in many places at once.  Like the way the picture on a television is drawn by a single travelling point of light.   

I've a similar theory - there is, in fact, only one woman.  All the women a man encounters in his life - mother, lovers, daughters - are just different aspects of the same, eternal female, manifesting herself at different times, in different ways.

You better understand one, you better understand them all.  Maybe I should make a start.

I could offer her a sniff of the fixer - maybe she'd start seeing things the way I do.  Better not.  These days I tend to travel alone on my chemical adventures.  No more calculated risks with our health in return for a good time, like that night a girlfriend and I didn't have enough money to get pissed, so took eight paracetamol each before we went out drinking.  Drowsy-drunk stomach-stumbling and screwed against a wall.
***

Wait; the foregound - Stratford station and the olympic site buildings - were still sharp.  Likewise the other buildings.  How could only the Gherkin be blurred?  That's as if the Gherkin, not the camera, had moved. 

Whoah.  I dash from the bathroom with the sudden urge to check to check I'm still in the right London, London 020.

A tip:  Here's a quick and easy way of working out which of the thousand Londons you are in.  Find a landline.  Dial 17070.  The automated female voice will say "This circuit is defined as..." and then a number.  If the first three digits she reads out are zero, two, zero, then congratulations - you are in the same London as me.

I know two other ways; one involving pigeons which is simple, but approximate and takes weeks.  Another is more definitive but uses a lot of Noctilukre.  If you find any more let me know.

But 020 it is.  I know London's built environment is constantly shifting and changing... I suppose with the development of the docklands, and now the Olympics, the city's centre of gravity has been slowly moving east these past few years.  But I didn't realise the buildings themselves could move.

***
The food arrives and she returns.

"Did I tell you my Facebook story?"  She beams.

"No.  Didn't know you were into it."

"Well, I went on Facebook for the first time, yeah, and got in touch with an old boyfriend, and then..."

She continues.  A few years ago, before social networking really took off, I spent an evening tracking a girl who dumped me.  Following her trail of breadcrumbs across the web.  From university, post-grad student credits in scientific papers; then a PhD elsewhere.  The attendance list for a conference in her subject at UCLA.  A press release from a UK-based technology company - a photo, smiling and different hair, from about three years ago. 

Then the trail went dead.  Perhaps she got married - a change of surname severing the Googlestrand.  I think wider: birth records might give me her parents' names, then I could look for "...are pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter..."  No.  I stopped, let that one go.  Gone.  Now, stop being a twat and tell this one how you feel about her.
***

Image after image shows the same.  Don't ask me how, but London's buildings are moving, migrating - sliding and slotting like tiles in a plastic puzzle. 

Here, some new flats in Brixton quietly inching north, hoping for that "Clapham Borders" label.  Three-bedroom townhouses grinding slowly towards the better schools.  Over to the west,  multimillion mansions gathering at the river's edge, as if to drink. 

Legal firms fighting for space at the bar, hospitals and other public buildings jostled rudely to the edges.  Antiquarian bookshops clustering at the British Museum, like piglets crowding round a sow. 

And everywhere, the inexorable march of the coffeeshops.

This information could be worth money; property developers, estate agents.  Why did I never see this before?  Might it be something to do with the new fixer?

***
I wasn't really listening.  I thought, when she finishes her story, I'll say my piece.

"...And well - cutting it short, he and I are now going out."

Bewilderblur of the pub around me, every surface suddenly treacleslick with a caramel-coat of cockroaches.  The walls boiled briefly with frantic, gnawing rats stripping everything bonewhite.  The food in my mouth turned to steel wool and soap.  I looked down - my clam and bacon linguine now tapeworm and smear-scrapings.  Reflected on my fork, all the girls I've ever felt for, hadover backwards by my enemies.  And loving it.  And turning their heads to smile at me.

Oh, that's great, I choked.  I'm really happy for you.

"My Mum's really pleased." she said.  And turned her head to smile at me.

We parted friendly.  I glanced at the arse I'm never going to grab, and felt for the male half of the giant bronze behind us.

An idea - I asked her to pose for a snap, holding my trusty 35mm at arm's length to get the pair of us in.
***

With all my ultra-long exposures done, but before tipping away the fluid trays, I decide to quickly develop the roll from my Nikon.  The final frame is the snap of her and I, looking down at the camera with stiff smiles against the blue of the station roof.  My face a funeral for a dream.

Everything in the picture is sharp, except for her.  She is blurred, as if moving away from me.

That's the last of the fixer.  Perhaps, I think.  Perhaps I should go digital.

Catch Up

Various dull circumstances including work, illness and being away from a computer have conspired to make me late in starting 2008.  But here, at last, I am.  Hello.

Being away has caused me to completely miss the competition for "Post of the Year" over at Post of the Week - congratulations to all the shortlisted and the two winners!  I hope this worthy effort manages another year of excellent posts. 

POTW now has a "Hall of Fame" of bloggers who are ineligible for further shortlistings - an elegant solution to the problem of the same old hands going up each week, which should encourage people to nominate fresh writing. 

Oh yeah - and I'm in it.  Not that I have self-esteem issues.  Certainly not the sort of person who has, tucked away, a text file of all the nice things people have said about them.  Not me.

The other excellent news I have only just caught up on concerns Natalie Imbruglia.   I'm here for you dearest N.

More to come, as ever.  I'll write you all under the table.