Billygean.co.uk

Compulsive Reading

Jan 27

An open letter i hope he never reads

by billygean

Dear Nicholas Sparks,

I want to like your books. You wrote The Notebook and Nights in Rodanthe afterall, which are very good films. I’m currently reading the latter and have also read The Guardian and one whose title I can’t remember. Yes.

While it would make me want to wallow in the bath to have someone criticise my book on the Internet, it also makes me wallow in the bath that you can get published and I can’t.

Some points to note:

* I do not need to know every character’s backstory before I meet them. I don’t care if Paul had a nice house and used to enjoy playing in the sandpit. It actually has very little to do with who he is as an adult and if I wanted to read a book about children I would have bought a children’s book. Children, unless they are your own, are not interesting. Adults are.

* Therefore perhaps you would consider having childless adult protagonists if all the child does is play on their own, be told to go away when the adults want to discuss him, and create massive plot holes when the adults are both out of the house and nobody is apparently babysitting him.

* While I would much rather you SHOWED me that tom liked geography, if you have to tell me, please don’t hedge your bets. “While tom was good at all subjects, he especially enjoyed geography…” It’s okay Nicholas. I’m not going to judge tom for being bad at maths. Likewise, just say anna had a good relationship with her dad. DON’T say “while anna got on with both parents she was especially close to her dad” OR just show me ONE scene with her BEING CLOSE TO HER DAD.

As you can tell, I am far more judgmental of your writing than of your characters.

* no more fast talking lawyers with alliterative names please. Can you say cliche?

* All your men are cops who can’t control their tempers (and say things like “i sure hope youre happier here than me, kid” when potential buyers ask him why he is selling his house) and all your women are psychologists who bake and have babies.

* No more “from the moment he met her he knew…” very tedious and unrealistic. Are you psychic? Because most people aren’t.

* Things like “he only slept for four hours a night and, oddly, was never tired” irritate me. I KNOW it’s odd.

* Sentences such as “there were single men in whatever-small-town-this-one’s-set-in, but they weren’t necessarily the kind of men she wanted to be hanging around with” grates, too. Necessarily? Just say it! They’re drug addicts!

Also: please stop with the ‘he grumbled’ and ‘she laughed’ and ‘she asked’ (I know it’s a question, thanks), and he said sternly and she said meekly.

Thanks.

Billygean

Letters to people who annoy me

11 Comments »
Jan 26

I had to buy another

by billygean

After my enforced day working from home, so I do not Expend More Energy Than I Have, I decide to get the train into town to meet MindReader and to go to the library.

I get to the library and am informed I must pay my fines before I can get ANY books out. Now, I happen to think £5 a month on fines is just actually quite a low price subscription to a building full of books. MindReader doesn’t agree. Especially when, to avoid the fine, all I actually have to do is click a box on the internet.

I am very lazy.

“I’ll pay it now then,” I say, spraying spare change everywhere as I get my library card out. My bag hits me in the face as I bend down to pick it all up and I briefly curse my very full purse.

The man is tall and has blond hair that falls from his bald crown in a very straight curtain of hair all around his head. He keeps up a stream of commentary about pressing F1 and opening the till and closing the till and pressing enter and giving me my change and so on. The whole process takes so long that I decide to sort my purse out.

I take everything out and start a pile on the desk for debit cards, lip balm, coins and library cards and a pile for things I don’t want to keep, like old receipts and old train tickets and so on.

Stick with it.

I look up, and the man is staring very intently at the screen. “I have never known anyone get so many books out so often,” he says. “Do you read them all?”

I smile. “Yes,” I say.

“You must read for – what,” he says, looking at the screen again, “hours and hours a day?”

I think briefly back to last night, three in the morning and turning the light back on to read again before another attempt at sleep. “About right,” I say.

I leave the library with ten more books and meet MindReader in Starbucks where I asked for an almond latte and got a whole milk latte.

We dash for the train and I sit probably slightly too close to MindReader, hoping for cuddles.

“Tickets please,” the ticket-man says.

In my mind’s eye I see the self-righteous I-am-cleaning-my-purse-out pile of train tickets in the bin in the library.

“Oh, God,” I say.

blonde moments embarrassing

1 Comment »
Jan 25

Ah, Laurence Sterne

by billygean

I am on the train to work.

On the train. I pull my purse out ready to show my ticket and, salivating, get my lunch out. Now, your intestines probably work fine and there is therefore something you should know: every night we cook too much food and I eat the leftovers for lunch the next day, because my lunch options are limited in a world obsessed with sandwiches. So I have to heat up my lunch in the microwave and dash to the train station rather than BUY A SANDWICH like normal people.

Oh no, another illness digression, even if digressions are, incontestably, the sunshine (look it up).

So, pulling out my lunch (and when you have leftovers of whatever you ate the night before, sometimes they are a bit weird; today’s is a full roast. You know, a few potatoes, a few slabs of beef, a bit of gluten free stuffing and one gluten free yorkshire pudding which I will save until last and stuff into my mouth whole), I realise I have forgotten cutlery.

Now: I could wait until I get to work and use a knife and fork from the office. This would be all well and normal except it would involve TAKING A ROAST DINNER INTO THE OFFICE which, as discussed previously, would add to my list of office faux pas.

So I decide to just tuck in. With my hands.

The man opposite looks at me like I am feral.

embarrassing

2 Comments »
Jan 19

If you can arrange this for my birthday…

by billygean

“Shall we watch a film?” I say, lighting a candle next to the TV.

“I was going to do some chores,” MindReader says, and before you think my dialogue is off today, this is exactly how he speaks.

“Chores!” I say.

“Dishwasher, washing machine, ironing…”

“Ah.”

“I was going to do what you didn’t want to do?” he says. He looks at me a moment. I rest my very tired head on a pillow. Working is TIRING.

“So… the dishwasher, washing machine and ironing?” he says with a smile.

“Sorry,” I say. “I do want to help.”

“Well, you don’t want to.”

“Yes I do.”

“Nobody wants to do chores,” he says, perching on the arm of the sofa next to me. I rest my head in his lap.

“I do,” I say. “I’d like to iron and not feel shit.”

“Yes but you wouldn’t pick ironing if you felt well and could do anything would you?”

“Yes I would.”

“Would you rather iron than have a bath with petals and candles and an orangutan washing your feet?”

“Well, no.”

MindReader suburbia

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Jan 12

Do they even do this, if they were birds?

by billygean

MindReader and I are at a pub quiz. It has been the perfect Sunday replete with roasts, crumbles and reading Glamour magazine under a duvet with MindReader while he watched the football.

“Which bird turns its head upside down to eat?” The Quizmaster’s voice booms.

“Ooh,” I say, puffing up. I lean close to MindReader. “It’s a bat.”

He looks at me for a moment, and leans back in his chair. “Billygean,” he says. “That’s a mammal.”

“Oh.”

I think for a moment. For some reason my brain doesn’t reregister that it’s supposed to be a bird. I raise my hands in the hair in a celebratory gesture. I have got it.

“Giraffe!” I say.

blonde moments embarrassing

3 Comments »
Jan 10

How to: please me

by billygean

“Phew,” I say, unwrapping a very woolly scarf from my neck. MindReader squeezes my waist as he moves past me and throws his gloves down on the bottom step our of stairs.

“The house is cold,” I say. “I might leave my hat on!”

MindReader touches the hall radiator which is really very hot, and shrugs.

I take off my hat, gloves and scarf and add them to the pile on the bottom step. There is already a pair of fluffy socks there for some reason.

We look at the stairs.

“Hmm,” MindReader says.

“Hm?”

“We appear to have a woollen step!”

MindReader

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Jan 6

On MindReader, well, MindReading

by billygean

“Oh, Christmas is over,” I say as MindReader carries our tree out into the snowy back garden (what do people DO with Christmas trees? Where is the Christmas Tree Bin? Why don’t I know anything?).

“It is,” he says, turning and patting my hand.

“It’s such a lovely time of year…” I say. “I miss Christmas!”

“Oh no,” MindReader says with a quite cute worried expression on his face. “Spring soon,” he says.

“Ooh, yes, spring!” I say. “Spring cleaning! And daffodils! And I will hang the washing out wearing a white -” I pause. I think I said this last year. MindReader probably doesn’t want to hear it all over again.

“I’m going to light my mango summer candles,” I say instead.

“I’m going to make dinner then,” he say, his form retreating down the hallway. “White linen dress optional.”

MindReader Seasons

2 Comments »
Jan 4

Can I have a new year’s resolution not to get flu?

by billygean

The 27th of December was my two year anniversary of being ill. In those however many hundreds of days, I have not had a single day where I felt perfect, not tired, or achey. I prefer not to think about this most of the time.

I don’t know if I would describe myself as fully better. When I was ill, in 2008, it was pretty obvious when I got well. I was dizzy all the time, and then I could sit up for one minute, and then two, and so on, until I could sit up all day or walk for a few hours which is pretty much all anyone ever needs to do. I went back to college and I found myself tired a lot, unless I got 11 hours’ sleep. This was a separate issue to the original illness, which very seldom comprised tiredness, and I looked upon it as a period of convalescence which was perfectly acceptable especially when juxtaposed with not being able to walk at all.

The second time, I did get dizzy, but what mostly prevented me doing things was tiredness. A sweeping tiredness where I felt as if my legs weighed 200 pounds each, where holding my head up didn’t make me dizzy but tired. Not sleepy: urgently, violently exhausted.

And now? I’m just about alright. If I don’t sleep enough every night (and I don’t, mostly because it’s important I think.), a lot of the symptoms come back. It’s a more impressive reaction than before, when I would feel shit when I didn’t sleep enough, overly tired. Now it’s as if my body slams its brakes on.

I can’t hoover without my hand cramping up and I can’t whisk eggs without having shaky hands for hours afterwards.

But, I am going into the office soon, so things are slowly getting back to normal. Some days I don’t lie down at all. Some days I lie down all day, but those days are getting less now.

Jay Jay reassured me in May 2008 that I would get better. And it is only now that I realise the word ‘better’ has two meanings. I am better than I was. But I am not better. But I am, like you all said I would be, better for it.

illness

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