Another extension

Another meeting today, supposedly the final one before the big off.

Instead we ended up going over plans for the San Fran office, and now I’ve got to get a business plan together. On one level it’s a real pain, since I’m champing at the bit to get going. On the other it’s a vote of confidence that my publisher is wanting my input on where we’re going, and we’ve come up with some interesting ideas.

The delay also lets me finish some of the books I'm really going to miss before they go into storage. I'm currently half way through the Neville Shute series. He's a mid century British author, best known for 'A Town Like Alice' and 'On the Beach'. His early stuff isn't great but he really came into his own in the Second World War and writes alternately rollicking good adventure tales and surprisingly deep philosophical stuff eg 'Round the Bend'.

While he has a typical old fashioned view of the role of women (saint or slut) and uses language that rightly wouldn't be allowed these days on racial grounds, he's well worth a read. After I've finished his oeuvre it'll be onto the Iain (M) Banks...

BSOD

There are many nice ways to start the day. Waking up next to Tina Fey would rank high on the list, failing that high thread count sheets on a balmy summer’s morning are nice, or even being stirred from slumber by the opening of the Archers Omnibus.

But this morning was one of the bad ones. No, nothing as major as arising to the sound of the anti-terrorism squad kicking in the door or waking up next to Anne Widdecombe wearing a wedding ring but pretty bad nevertheless.

The cause of the morning’s ire was the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD). The standard morning routine if I’m without company is to slip out of bed, make a cup of tea (and Marmite toast if I’m hungover) and then fire up the laptop to see what news has broken overnight. This allows the wake up process to be fairly useful, letting you deal with any urgent problems and clear the email backlog before heading into the office.

This morning started well. Hearing Charlotte Green collapse into giggles on the Today programme (around 8:47) was a good start to be sure. But then the laptop died. BSOD no matter what I tried – safe mode, boot disk, whatever. After spending 45 minutes trying to sort it out I admitted defeat, headed in and handed it over to the office IT problem to sort out.

It’s amazing how crippling a laptop loss can be. I keep the important stuff on a small USB key ring but passwords and login details are too sensitive and you miss all those little tweaks that make using the machine easy rather than a chore.

Thankfully the problem was sorted, and S from IT is getting a bottle of organic lager to show my appreciation. Three groups you should always stay on the good side of in work; IT, reception and HR. It’s a good rule of work.

Back to work

It’s always fun to come back to work after a break. The Chinese apparently have a saying that if you find a job you love you’ll never work a day again in your life. It’s true in this job – well almost at least.

On the moving front things should be sorted out by the end of next week. There’s some final contract negotiations to be sorted out but that shouldn’t take too long. Dealing with an employer is a tricky business; even if you’re getting something you want you need to negotiate hard, because next time you might not be in that position.

Anyway, the current state of play is I have a meeting with the bosses on Monday to hammer out the last details and then the 30 day clock starts. Personally, I can’t wait.

Beware the black dog

An oddish sort of a day. Very nice Sunday lunch with V, hubby Mr. P (short for Perfect – the way she first described him) and family. But the walk back was full of the realisation that I’ll probably not see them again until Christmas. What will have changed in that time, and will their little CJ even remember me as she gets a year older I wonder?

It’s a difficult feeling, something like pre-homesickness. This wasn’t helped by the weekend’s packing and the knowledge that the family are all overseas at the moment. We usually spend Easter together but schedules didn’t allow it this time. Maybe I should have gone to Portugal with some of them after all.

Anyway, all things pass, and my bedroom currently makes Tracy Emin’s ‘Bed’ look like the work of an obsessive neat freak.

WTF!

In the last 48 hours I've seen four hailstorms hit (one with ice the size of your fingernail), snow, sleet and tropical-style rain. This is just not right, and a poor way to spend the 'nail a troublemaker to a tree' long weekend. Bring on the fog of San Francisco say I.

Anyway, enough of my whinging. I spent most of the morning at Borough Market food shopping and eating bratwurst with sauerkraut. Picked up some lovely venison that's going to go into a massive stew on Monday, with lashings of bacon, onions, red wine and mushrooms, as well as getting two of the best chocolate brownies in the world - one of which was promptly inhaled.

I am a bit concerned about where to find game in the US. I've found one place in the city that sells venison, but it's sourced from New Zealand so hardly low in food miles. But there's nowhere that sells rabbit and a year without its tender flesh would be a misery, or at least a decided embuggerance. Of course you can get A rabbit, but I feel the Saveabunny folks might get suspicious after the second or third visit.

Then again, thanks to the 2nd amendment I should have to right to bear arms and go and hunt my own. Although thinking about it didn't they bring that amendment in to stop limeys shooting up the country in the first place?

Spoilsports

Honestly, first day of spring, the start of Easter and it's freezing cold and raining. Mother Nature is not playing fair.

And my podcast at work got cut. More specifically the line "We'll be back after the break, and remember, without a death penalty we'd have no Easter."

Let's hope for a better weekend.

Hiatus, imagined and ultimate

I’m still waiting for the final go, and it looks like no progress for a week. It’s getting so every time asks me when I’m going I clench a little inside. At this rate I’ll be stuck over for a major birthday and that’s not going to happen.

So Easter will be a hiatus, and time to do some ruthless pruning, in the garden and the wardrobe. Some charity shop is going to do very well this weekend, if their category of success is a few suits and two bin bags of vendor branded clothing.

Ten years of press conferences have led to an astonishing assortment of t-shirts, baseball caps, sweatshirts and even a pair of fingerless leather gloves. I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that marketing meeting.

The other real problem is the books. I’ve around 2,000 of the little tyrants hanging around and the move was supposed to be a winnowing, but there’s precious little I really want to get rid of. I’m certainly dumping a box of juvenilia; I doubt there’s really a market for 70s schlock horror and books about 'humorous' graffiti.

There’s a fair few duplications too. There’s a web site V told me about called Bookcrossing where you can print out a form, stick it in the back of the book and then leave it in a public place. They then log onto the site and tell you where it is and what they thought of it, repeat as necessary. The only problem I can see is that in these paranoid times leaving a hardback at an airport might be construed as a security hazard.

The morning’s rather grim task was to write the obit for Arthur C Clarke* . The man was a visionary, and a very humble one. He once said that but for Jules Verne man wouldn’t have stepped onto the moon. But thanks to him we’ve made massive strides and will make many more with any luck.

Clarke’s work opened up science and space to a generation of us, and hopefully more in the future. I can still remember sitting under the blankets in my Scots uncle’s home reading one of his short stories, ‘Summertime in Icarus’ and getting lost in the story and the mechanism behind it. He told cracking yarns, packed with detail and loved the occasional verbal fun, such and ending a story with the punch line “All that is left of the ship is a star-mangled hammer.”

He had his flaws, notably the lack of strong female characters and putting his name to a lot of co-written rubbish in later years. Devoting pages of Imperial Earth to how the rotary dialler for phones would last for millennia must also have made him wince, if a guest had been so rude as to bring it up.

But he spoke of a dream of making space exploration "the moral equivalent of war", a stunning concept. Clarke flowered in the Second World War, helping invent the radar that guides planes to land in bad weather. He knew what could be achieved if a country, or a planet, buckled down and really concentrated, and considered it a far better use of money than, for example, the $300bn Iraq has cost.

When it became clear that the end was nigh he recorded a final goodbye to family and fans in a video message. It is characteristically self-effacing and included three wishes, one of which was for peace in his beloved Sri Lanka.

If you haven’t sampled his stuff I’d recommend Childhood’s End, 2001 (helps finally understand the film), 3001 for closure and The Fountains of Paradise. The latter may prove the most important, since a space elevator is the only way to move equipment into orbit at a profit.

But the job wasn’t all bad, I had a keyboard cleaning moment after logging onto the Popbitch message board that made me love the site again. Clarke was a humanist but it would have been nice for him to chuckle as I did when the news had been posted thus:

“Arthur C Clarke Dead. Suffering breathing problems, apparently. Pretty extreme problems by the sound of it.”

*It stands for Charles – no I didn’t know and neither did anyone else in the office. This sparked one of those search-engine hunting sessions where you find the middle names of other authors. Hunter S Thompson has the improbable Stockton, where as Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald makes me wonder if his parents were deranged.