Too Many Books....

Ever since I was very young I've loved reading. I'm quite good at it now and able to recognise most words I come across, occasionally even knowingwhat they mean.

I'm also a firm fan of the Kindle app on my ipad, something I blame squarely on divorce. You see I owned hundreds of books. Some were bog standard high street fiction, cheap in production and cheaper in quality, for I'm definitely no snob in my tastes either, and others were of the lovely coffee table variety, many about Sri Lanka.

When the divorce happened I was faced with book issues, amongst other far more serious matters too. I didn't have the space for all the books, didn't want to give away the nicer ones, but also knew that many of them I wouldn't read again.

And so I moved over to ebooks. I now have a sizeable library that is happily stored in the cloud. I can annotate them to my heart's content, carry the whole lot anywhere on any of my devices and don't have to worry about taking up many cubic metres of storage space at my office.

I'm not one of these evangelist types though. I like the Kindle app for most books; the coffee table ones are always (to me) better to read and feel as real books and I draw the line at sitting on the toilet with my ipad. A man must have standards. It's just me, if you like to read real books that's fine by me. I have no desire to convert anyone or get into some sort of argument over which is better. All reading is good I figure.
 
The thing is, I've realised that I'm currently reading too many books.

I used to be a one book at a time person, with very occasional forages (not to be confused with "Farage" - a British word for lying wanker) into two book territory. But that would be strictly one piece of fiction and one of non fiction at any time.

The trouble with ipads, tablets and probably computers in general is the whole switching thing. Chaps sell it as a feature; switching between tasks and functions easily and seamlessly, but I'm starting to think it's too easy.

And so I've drifted into an existence in which I read several books at the same time. I noticed it at first when I was reading two or three. No big deal I thought, I can handle it, I can give up any time.

But I glanced at my current being read books this morning and counted seven. Fortunately only one of them is fiction. I think my mind would struggle to keep track of more than one story at a time. But I'm not sure if six others is too many. Can I keep track of where I am in each one? Do I have to read a good chunk of words to get back into the swing of things every time I go to one?

Or is it good to be able to choose a different book according to my mood? To switch quickly if I'm not 'feeling it'?

Us oldies grew up listening to whole albums. We'd sit there for half an hour listening to a record, then turn it over for side two. We'd be familiar with the flow of an album, the sequence of tracks and how  one song led into the intro for another. I can't listen to the end of Breakout by the Foos now without expecting that snare hit and hearing Learn to Fly immediately afterwards.

But you kids can barely listen to a whole song, let alone an album, before you're looking for the next thing to treat your ears to. And I fear that I'm going that way with books.

Should I just focus on one at a time, digesting every word and chapter, or should I flick channels?

Hmmm...

Pick Me

You know those niggling desires you have in nether regions of your mind? Those thoughts that pop up now and again until you put them to bed by doing the thing or somehow exorcising it.

Well for a while I've had one such thought and it's been about picking locks. I wouldn't say I've been fascinated by the topic, more that I've had a medium level of interest, a bit like a Madras curry to most Brits.

It's not even that I've considered shifting my career into burglary, merely a rumbling of a thought that it would be a nice and mostly useless thing to be able to do.

So of course, a few weeks ago I bought myself a "learn how to pick locks" kit online. It wasn't very expensive and the blurb promised me an extensive easy to understand written guide, two real locks made from transparent plastic to practice on as well as a sexy little tool kit with all the things an aspiring lock picker might need.

The package arrived. Somewhat ironically I found it quite hard to open, but once I dealt with that hurdle I got on with reading the guide. I'm that rare breed; a man who likes to read instructions before I start to play with the hardware.

At this point I realised that the instructions were most likely a literal translation from Chinese. Not only was the language nigh on impossible to figure out but I suspect it was running from back to front pagewise. I'm not one to be beaten easily, except when I give up, so I got on with things, trying my best to decipher the text, flick from page to page quickly and then start on the practical side.

The first half hour or so was a painful struggle. I'd translated sufficiently to figure out roughly what I needed to do with one padlock, but the instructions gave me very little idea of which actual tools to use out of the quite large number supplied. After much trial and error, mostly the latter, I got to a stage where I could open the padlock within around 30 - 50 seconds. I was quite pleased with this, even though it involved two tools and a little bit of brute force occasionally. I resolved to practice a bit every day before trying it out in a bank on my front door lock.

And so I did. For the next week or so I spent a small chunk of time every day working on my skills and I'm happy to tell you that, should the need arise, I can comfortably break open a clear plastic padlock, as long as I have the toolkit and some reading glasses with me, within about 10 seconds.

My mind evolved to the inevitable and I reckoned I was ready to try a real lock; one that isn't transparent and that has a door or similar attached to it. I had already put some thought into which specific lock would be my first real world attempt and had realised the only two options were my own front door or my neighbour's.

I suppose I'm old fashioned, or perhaps my neighbour is, but I figured he wouldn't be too impressed if he caught me practicing on his front door. There are not many ways I could think of to explain this one away and the truth seemed the worst idea. So last Thursday, whilst doing that 'working from home' thing that you kids do all the time, I went for it on my own front door.

I got the lock picking kit out, lay everything out on the floor, opened my front door fully, so to any passer by it would hopefully look like I was doing work on my door, and set to work. Confidence was oozing out of all my pores. After all if I can pick a clear teaching padlock in a few seconds every time surely half an hour, perhaps an hour for the virgin flight, would be wholly achievable.

Like fuck was it.

I tried every combination of tools. There are usually two involved; one to twist the twisting bit and the other to wiggle and move the wiggling bits, and I tried them all. Nothing, I mean sweet FA, I mean absofuckinglutely nothing, would budge even a fraction of a millimeter.

I kept at it for some time, maybe half an hour,  but nothing made any difference. As I told you earlier, I'm not one to be beaten easily, except when I give up. So I gave up. I reckon that's the end of my lockpicking career. If I'm honest the signs were there right at the beginning when I had such a struggle opening the package in the first place.

I'm just unsure if the career is fully over or whether it's a mere hiatus while I gather my thoughts, perhaps retrain. Hmmm....

Blog, Post or Blog?

I stumbled on this blog post the other day, seemingly telling us that the New Yorker deems it ok to refer to a blog post as a "blog".

"Aaaaargh" I say. It's one of my pet hates and has been for a few years. A blog is a virtual place that contains a collection of blog posts, an abbreviation of the word "weblog".

When I see fellows, usually those eternal social networking sorts, saying on Twitter that they've just written or published a blog it really winds me up. I'd even got to the stage of thinking that I need to chill out a bit. These things:

a - aren't that important

b - are not really set in stone anyhow.

So reading the aforementioned blog post made me feel a bit vindicated. It's clearly not just me, other people evidently feel the same way, though not the New Yorker.

It's a blog post when we're talking about one "article". Calling it a blog is like saying that a random page from a fellow's diary is a diary. It's not, the diary is the collection of entries.

Anyone else feel strongly about this too?

Besides, since when have the old Septics been experts on the English language anyhow?

Pet Linguistic Hates

I'm quite fussy about my words I am. I'm not very good at them, nor do I proclaim myself to be some kind of authority on all things wordy (except in private of course), but there are things I like and things I abhor.

I like a good apostrophe, one thats' thrown in at the right place (did you see what I did their?), and proper and correct use of the words "there",  "their" and "they're". But, as Mr Wittekind, my rather inspiring old English teacher used to say, it's all communication and the point of it is to make people understand each other. So, as long as that happens, let's not get too anal about things.

Some things though just get on my fucking nerves. Simple. Here's a list of them, one that I reserve the right to change my mind about at any point in the future, or in the past, but only after, perhaps before, we've sorted out time travel:

"Can I get? / Can I ask?" - You know when someone says "Can I ask how old you are?" Well the only proper way to answer the question is to say yes or no. Perhaps "of course you can, go on then?" might also be used. And when you're in a coffee shop and say "Can I get a cappuccino, hold the tomatoes?" Well I'd just love the server to say "Yeah of course you can, it's over there, help yourself".

"It's a big ask" - The most frustrating thing about this phrase is that I've caught it creeping into my own language recently. Well I don't want it in my arsenal of phrases. It's not an "ask", it's a question, perhaps a request. As far as I'm concerned the word "ask" is a verb. Is it really that much more effort to say one more syllable and use "question"? I request you. And seriously, why is it that so many black people can't say "ask"?

"Is liking" - This is a dodgy one. Of course I blame that Justin Timberland and his McDonald's adverts, but that's another issue. I suppose, taken to extremes, if a person likes something but on an ongoing basis, like the weather at the moment or the pants I've been wearing for the last few days, then it's okay to use, as the act of liking has happened but is also continuing to happen. And, while I'm on the subject of the weather, it's bloody freezing here right now. But, if you "liked" something you saw yesterday, then just don't say that you're "liking" it. Why? Because it's wrong and we're not Americans around here now are we?

"International standard" - I reckon any Sri Lankan will understand why this fills me with strangely mixed feelings of frustration. It shouldn't be the case that some things made and / or sold in the motherland fall, or don't fall up to "international standard". The very use of the phrase implies that there is one standard for things sold within Sri Lanka and another for those sold outside Sri Lanka. Yet so often it's true and I wish it wasn't. I suppose it's entirely correct in terms of linguistics, I just wish it wasn't used, that's all.

"Safe haven" - A haven is a safe place. So why on earth is everyone's current favourite phase the aforementioned one?

"Overused cliche" - My dictionary tell me that a cliche is "a word or expression that has lost much of its force through overexposure." So, by definition a cliche is overused. Just say the word "cliche" then. The time you save in not using the word "overused" can actually be put to use when you start to use the word "question" instead of "ask". There's a thought.

What are your pet linguistic hates then?

On Self Publishing

Indi's post here reminded me of one I've been meaning to pen, or keyboard, for some months.

It's hardly a brilliant shaft of insight when I say this but the internet has revolutionised and totally transformed publishing as we knew it.

There used to be professionals and amateurs of every type of creative person;

writer, photographer, musician, journalist, film maker, documentary maker etc.

Then, this truly wonderful thing we know as the internet came along, took about twenty years or more to develop to what we now see as normal and spawned the platforms most of us have come to know so well. We've got flickr and facebook for photographers, youtube for film makers, myspace and soundcloud for the musos, blogs for journo types and epublishing, in all its guises, for authors.

Each of the respective platforms gives all of us the opportunity to write, take pictures, make music and make our contribution instantly available to everyone out there. No longer do we need to get ourselves a publishing deal or to spend years building up our reputation and learning things the hard way. All we need is to hit the publish or the share button and the job is done. As Pink Floyd would have said, had they been talking about a different thing altogether and in a different time, we don't need no publishing deal.

No, there are no such things as amateurs and professionals any more. Instead we have different people making different levels of income from their publishing.

This phenomenon has got massive positives and a significant amount of negatives. Come people, let's look at them. As a chap who (tries to) take(s) photographs, make music and also write I feel I'm reasonably well qualified, on a strictly amateur basis you understand, to talk about such things.

I started taking photographs when I was about fifteen and my Dad, in true Sri Lankan fashion, got me my first ever job working in a camera shop owned by a friend of his. I learnt how to take pictures the old way; developing films, bracketing exposures, struggling to understand hyperfocal focusing and using Kodachrome 64 and having to wait to see the slides to know how they actually came out.

I don't claim to be a good photographer now, but I do claim some degree of knowledge about the subject.

So I must admit it irks me somewhat when I see these people who wouldn't know a roll of 35mm film if they got attacked by a gang of, well, rolls of film, and they open a facebook account, stick the word "photographer" after their name and decide that that's what they are. Back in the good old days, when men were real men and wore dresses, it wasn't just anyone who could call themselves a photographer, you had to earn the moniker.

On the musical front, as a drummer who invests and has invested a lot of time trying to get better at that side of things, I also get a bit rankled when I see kids, some as young as thirty five, spend half an hour in their attic and then whack a song up on soundcloud or myspace (if it still exists), the likes of which I couldn't even hope to write.

Am I old fashioned in that I'm one of the sort who still gives credence to "experts"? I still rate the old school "professional" journalists, the "professional" photographers and the real musicians who've properly learned their craft.

But, despite my moanings and after much consideration, I've concluded that the positives far outweigh the negatives, most of which are related to my own pride anyway.

As a firm fan of the Kindle I now see that self publishing in terms of the written word is the way things are going to be. A quick glance at the Amazon book charts will show you what I mean. Yes, the world of the self published word gives us, the readers, some total tosh and utter piffle. But, us the readers are also us the writers and we're able to publish our own piffle too.

And much of that tosh and piffle isn't actually tosh and piffle, it's actually great quality writing. Writing that probably wouldn't otherwise have been published. Writing that, were it to be printed, edited, physically distributed, with all the extra cost involved, would almost definitely have never been accessible to us.

For every five people opening a facebook account and putting the word "photography" after their name, there's a few great talents getting exposure. Ha, "exposure", did you see what I did there?

Among all the idiots writing blogs and thrusting their stupid and idiotic opinions upon us, the innocent readers, there are some who show wisdom, intelligence and sound judgement that many simply would not have read if their only other outlet was "professional" journalism.

The technology that goes with all of this; garageband, photoshop and the like has raised the bar. There's no doubt in my mind that the levels at the top have got better, that people are now able to pick up and learn these things so much quicker than in those dark, pre internet years. In turn we've also seen the dramatic increase in people being involved at all. The digital age has seen more "photographers", "musicians", "writers" and "film makers". And more quotation marks too.

More volume means we have to accept the crap and dross at the bottom of the foodchain. We need to accept the negatives in order to take advantage of the positives. Overall the increase in activity gives us more good things.

A bit like life really.

Thoughts on a comment if you have the inclination.

Gadget Love

I don't know if you get a lot of these over in the motherland, but I bought a gadget mag the other day. Here, you can walk into any newsagent and take your pick from a plethora of the things lining up on the shelves. I can't even recall the actual name of the one I chose. But it's fantastic, particularly as toilet reading matter.

Gadgets are great. There's page after page of reviews of phones, tablets, satnavs, TVs and things that no man needs but every man wants. My choice of the word "man" is wholly deliberate, not that I lay any claim to the slightest bit of understanding about women, but even I know they're not into gadgets.

I noticed something that's new to me; the abundance of "advertorials" in this mag. That is, adverts for a product or a company that are pretty hard to distinguish from real articles in the magazine. I use the word "real" with some trepidation, as I'm never sure how genuine the actual articles are anyhow, with the power that advertisers yield these days. I'm sure, if I were a big advertising client of a magazine that wrote a scathing article about one of my products, I'd think twice about where to place my ad budget.

But it seemed as if every other page consisted of a multi page advertorial, in similar font and appearance to the pages of the magazine. I think the magazine industry here still has certain rules that dictate these things must have "ADVERT" or something similar stuck at the top of the page somewhere for all to see, so that does make it quite easy to spot. If not, the average Joe would have a tough task to figure these out.

There I was, reading watch adverts, perusing sexy satnavs and 3D TVs when something dawned on me. A large portion of this issue was devoted to talk of tablets. Not the paracetomol and aspirin type, but the iPad and Blackberry variety. Understandably so, as they are THE gadget that everyone's talking about.

These day everyone more or less needs a tablet, such has been their meteoric rise in fame, awareness and popularity.

I thought back to the dark ages, all those years, perhaps months ago; the pre tablet days. You know what occurred to me?

Well back then, if you can remember, we had smartphones and we had laptops and no one, I repeat no one, went around muttering that what this world was lacking was something that slotted nicely into the gap between the two.

We didn't meet random chaps in pubs who had their heads down and grabbed passers by to tell them how their life would be so much better if someone brought out a device that fitted in between their phone and their laptop.

Then someone came along, I believe it might have been Steve Apple, though I'm not positive on that one, and told us that they've got this brilliant new product called the iPad, to fill that gap, the one we weren't even aware of in the first place.

Did Apple rather brilliantly create a gap in the marketplace or did they find a gap that we weren't even aware of and launch a product to fill that need? Either way it's a slice of genius. My uncertainty here is because I know not whether Apple invented the concept of the tablet, I merely know that they made it what it is today.

So I've decided to take a leaf out of Apple's book. No publication that I've seen has even mentioned it yet, but this weekend, probably on Saturday afternoon if I don't go shopping, I'm going to invent something of my own.

It's a device that will fit nicely into a gap that no ones knows about yet; the gap between the smartphone and the tablet.

It will probably have lights and all sorts of things, including a battery life of more than a few hours.

Just you wait. You heard it here first.

A Post A Day

I've been watching Naz's image a day photoblog with interest and fascination and it's inspired me to try something similar, only with words. In recent months I've put off writing blog posts with the justification, to myself at least, of not having enough time.

It's one of those amusing ironies in the life of a blogger, or at least in the life of a blogger who mostly writes a "diary" type blog such as this; that the more that happens in life, the more interesting and chunky subject matter there is to write about, but the less time exists in which to do the writing.

So I'm going to take a week as a starting point and try to write a post a day. Without the usual time and effort that I put in to posts, which believe it or not is a fair amount when I do one.

I'm going to try and chuck out some random thoughts each day, some might be big, others small and inconsequential.

Today's is about the tragic tsunami in Japan and the contrast between the coverage of it compared to the Sri Lankan one.

I've been watching a lot of news over the weekend and it dawned on me from Friday how this Japanese one has seemed like a "live" event. Some, if not all of this, is clearly because of the wealth of Japan in contrast to the wealth of many of the areas affected in the Sri Lankan tsunami.

We've watched the nuclear power plant explosion, we've watched people being rescued and possessions being swept to oblivion. So far I haven't seen an onscreen death but I'm not sure if this is by design or accident and wonder if it's just a matter of time.

And this "publicity", if that's the word, is it good or bad or both?

Perhaps it has helped to make the rest of the world feel more sympathetic towards Japan's disaster, maybe by making us feel more involved we're more likely to help if we can, all else being equal.

Of course, for me and most other Sri Lankans, we're connected to Lanka so things aren't equal. But, from the view of many in the world who have watched things in the media as they unfold it really seems as if the Japanese tsunami has been more vivid and more real.

And I'm not sure if that's good, bad or just fact.

Passionate My Arse

You know when you look at a crowd of people, perhaps at a match or something, and you just see a load of random beings. Then, you decide to look for the ones wearing red tops and, the more you look, the more they seem to spring out at you. Then you change to looking for the ones in yellow shirts and suddenly the yellow shirted fellows are jumping out towards your eyes all over the show.

Or when you take notice of a particular car and within a few days you spot these cars on every road and it seems as if one in every three drivers owns one of these (obviously for women this

doesn't apply, perhaps recipes or a particular species of cat may suit). Well the fact is that usually these phenomenons are merely our mind seeking and making connections. It's pretty obvious really, just because I decide to look for red tops doesn't mean more people are wearing them. Or cats, I wouldn't want you to think of me as a cattist.

But I've noticed something recently, something that I think is not just me making a connection, something that I'm sure is real, that maybe you'll start to look at after reading this post, then send me messages praising my fantastic observational skills.

PASSIONATE. Read it, it's the new enemy, that's why I typed it in capitals. You know me, I rarely type a word in capitals, I'm not one to make a shouty statement at the best of times, but this needs one.

Everywhere I go, every way I turn I seem to come across a person or a company telling me how passionate they are about this or that. It's become a cheap and easy way of convincing your fellow man that you're good at something.

Want to make out that you're a great photographer? Simple, just say on your website or stationery that "we're passionate about photography". That'll do the job. And many people are passionate about photography. It's an arty thing, it's something that one can easily imagine a chap being passionate about.

But then we go to the mundane and non creative end of the spectrum and that's where it gets extremely muddy and cliched. When your cleaning company boasts of its passion for cleaning and your dog food manufacturer, your car hire company and your local cinema jump on the passion wagon too then there must be something going drastically wrong.

Of course I blame this mostly on the Americans, all of them, well except drummers. EQ, being in touch with our emotions and our creative side is all well and good. A few years ago when the first few companies used the passion idea as their USP (unique selling point) it sounded powerful and different. It sounded as if, not only was the company or person pretty good at what they do, but they also loved it, they lived and dreamed it.

These days we're led to believe that, unless someone says the dreaded P word, they're disinterested in their craft and not up to the level of the other passionate types. All the specialness and excitement that we used to associate with people who really were passionate about their vocations has diminished.

The musicians, the artistes, the writers and the inspirational leaders. The eccentric inventors, the mad scientists and the tireless nurses who genuinely worked with a passion have been replaced by regular people, not that there's anything wrong with them, who we're told do everything with passion. There are sandwich makers so we're told, who are passionate about what they do. Really?

Are they busily bunging egg and cress into a sandwich and dreaming of the next tasty recipe they can introduce to the marketplace? Is my office cleaner really thinking about the new innovative way he can clean my office? Not bloody likely, though the sandwich person might well be working on a new way of cleaning that he's come up with and the cleaner might just be dreaming of a dhal and rice sandwich and wondering if it would sell. (of course it would!)

Now I've mentioned this I'm hoping you'll be out there and will notice the "passionate" issue everywhere. Or you might spot red and yellow shirts on every other person and blame me for that.

Bring back the passion I say, the real and true passion, not that passion that the copywriters have decided we all need.

Let's start a movement, let's attempt to tell others how much we enjoy doing things, how good we are at them and how much we love them. Let's do all that and do it without using the word "passionate".

Obviously.

Who Wants To Live Forever?

Like most authors say at regular intervals, I started a new book the other day. The difference with me is that I'm not an author so I'm talking about the reading thing, not the writing part. It's called "Our Tragic Universe" by Scarlett Thomas and it captured me within the very first pages.

I think my reading, my appetite for all things literary and my sense of confidence in my own ability to appreciate books, has grown in recent times. So much that I find myself giving up on books that don't hold my attention. It feels like a reflection of my reader's maturity, gone are the days when I absolutely had to finish every book I began in order to judge whether I liked it.

It's kind of mad as well, the amount of time I, and you, must have wasted in reading books we didn't like. We spent those hours ploughing through only to get to the end and decide it was rubbish. If I could figure out a way of eliminating doing things in my life that I subsequently discover I don't like then I'll not only make some serious money but I'll also have total fun in spending it.

But would there be any joy without joylessness? Which came first, the chicken or the tree falling in the woods?

I digress, the thing is I had started another book a week ago. It was a book called "The Ask", in fact it still is a book called "The Ask", by a fellow called Sam Lipsyte. The reviews on Amazon led me to believe it's the funniest thing since The Inbetweeners or that story about no civilian casualties. I kid you not when I tell you that I wondered whether I'd feel uncomfortable reading it in public as I'd be laughing out loud so often. Sorry kids, laughing out loud means LOL, just so you know.

Halfway through this book I bailed. It just wasn't doing it for me. Yes, there were a few occasions when I'd lolled, albeit very quietly, but it seemed overcomplicated, as if the author wanted to come up with brilliantly wordy and sophisticated sentences the scholars would marvel at in years to come. The only snag being that old RD couldn't understand them.

I contemplated the abandonment for a few chapters, then did it when I was least expecting to. My sentiments, now at least, are that I might come back to the book at another time, one when I'm more intelligent and sophisticated, or I might just dip into it now and again to see if if grabs me. Such are some of the advantages of owning a Kindle.

Our Tragic Universe, which I've only just begun, isn't a ball grabbing tension filled fast paced page turner type. No, but it did get my attention, more in a gentle and sexy way, one that took a bit of effort then had me hooked.

The language is very British, the sense of self deprecating humour and understatement seems to be there and it's already flung several new and brilliant similes at me, ones I've forgotten straight away but may just be wallowing in my subconscious ready to spring out at a moment's notice. Like a thing, out of a whatsername.

I started this post because I wanted to share this one with you, it made me stop, gasp and think. It's really rather lovely and goes like this:

"Living forever would be like marrying yourself, with no possibility of divorce."

I'm off to the Motherland tonight.

Laters.

Too Many Books Spoil The ?

Sadly and much to my dismay I couldn't think of a witty and clever rhyming word to chuck in the title. If I was prone to dressing in dark clothes and listening to Joy Division a lot I could have used the word "goth" and you'd have no doubt chuckled at my wordy dexterity. Nor am I a moth. or a cloth even, so we're left with a question mark. Feel free to submit a suggestion if you have one.

Reading is one of my most enjoyed activities. I do it voraciously and have done for many years. I read all sorts of things; books, both fiction and that other boring type, magazines, blogs and just about anything else you can think of that displays the written or the virtual word. There's rarely a point in my life when I don't have at least one fictional book, one non fictional one and a couple of magazines on the go.

My Kindle has been one of the best presents I've ever received, enabling me to carry around a huge volume of books wherever I go. Currently it has forty one of the virtual books on board and, according to those nice Amazon people, that means it will hold another thousand or more before it gives up the ghost.

Yet lately, say in the last month or so, I've been struggling to find that enthusiasm to read. I've munched my way through a few decent novels, Juliet Naked by Nick Hornby and Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh are two that were particularly memorable, but am now failing to feel that attraction, that can't put it down because I NEED to find out what happens next feeling that a good book instills.

As well as the Kindle I've got more than twenty proper books, those ones made out of paper, wood and the environment, waiting patiently on the shelves for me. The Chinaman is firmly placed at number one in that group, yet all I've done so far is read a couple of pages and thought that it sounds as fantastic as all you lot say it is.

I've been wondering why I've failed to find the big motivation to read. I don't think that lack of time is a viable excuse as I often read in bed or in those in between moments and I do get quite a lot of time alone, when C or the girls aren't around.

Earlier today I discovered something on the Kindle that I didn't realise it could do; collections. Yes I can make a collection, give it a name and then chuck books into it. Until my discovery I thought that all the books had to be listed individually, though I knew that they could be sorted in several different ways.

I played around with the feature for a bit, making a Terry Pratchett collection and bunging the TP books in there. Then, getting a bit more confident and serious about things, I made two more collections. One is called "Fiction Read" and the other called "Currently Reading". Why I called it "Fiction Read" instead of "Read Fiction" I'm not sure about, but it made sense at the time.

As time marches on I reckon I'll categorise a bit more, perhaps making a management collection, though I might call it "Mgmt" or even "Mgmnt" and maybe a self help section. I might throw in a "Fiction not read" and might get rid of the Terry P section as the principle of filing by author runs in contradiction to that of filing by genre. It seems that each book can only go in one collection so the five TP books I have, though read, nay devoured, are in the TP collection rather than the "Fiction read" one. I'm a rebel like that.

The thing is though, the "Currently Reading" collection has eleven, yes eleven titles in it. Four of them I'd class as self help, three I consider "Mgmnt" and four are firmly in the fiction category.

As I look at them I realise that there are too many, that's the crux of my problem, I'm spreading myself too thinly, with the result that I can't focus on one book. Compounding the problem is the fact that I'm quite enjoying every single one of them and therefore reluctant to put any on the back burner.

Do I persevere with the magnificent eleven, knowing that I may well end up not remembering any of them that well, or do I choose a few to put on the back burner and come back to later?

Vut too doo?

The Sound Of A Drummer

"You could write a book" they all told him.

And "they" all seemed genuine and sincere when they said it. They figured he was being modest and bashful when he said he couldn't. They didn't understand him like he did, which was obvious really as they weren't in his head, listening to the voices.

He devoured the written word like a fat white tourist at a five star hotel buffet on the first night of his holiday, one with a yellow all inclusive wrist band and as much alcoholic drinks, though locally brewed only, as he could manage.

The more he read, the more he realised how hard it is to write. Paradoxically, the more he realised how hard it is, the more he thought he might someday be able to do it. He knew he had a hat, a funny one, not like a clown's one either. It was the hat he wore to look at life; quite shallow and with a tendency to make him laugh at the most inappropriate times.

He was never the sort of person who could see the funny side to a serious situation and then maintain an earnest and solemn face on the exterior while cracking up with laughter on the inside. Over the years he'd developed a half smirk, half lip biting, half I don't know much about fractions faraway look that only succeeded in convincing strangers that he was in deepest thought and fighting off a sneeze and the second coming of his lunch at the same time.

Everyone else, the people who knew him, would see that look and know there was a joke, sometimes even a funny one, on its way. Overall, was a bummer. He'd never make it as a spy, a drug smuggler, a conman or a politician.

He had friends who could write. The ex soldier friend could take a picture and paint it with words to make it more vivid and more poignant. The Gypsy could write with language so deep and full of feeling that the reader felt like they're swimming in a pool of words, immersed, bathing and splashing about in them, never drowning but often swallowing a mouthful or two of the delicious and refreshing water.

All writers are rich with inspiration and he had that by the bucketload. The passions were clear; his kids, Sri Lanka and music. He had C, who made him feel as though he could do anything. He'd be happy to spend all of his time with them, talking about them, talking to them, just being, just doing. Yet there was a problem, that spark of creativity, the one that all real writers had, was missing.

He knew he could take an average story from yesterday and turn it into something humorous, not because of any great talent, just because he always saw things in that light. The thing he couldn't do was to look at tomorrow and create a story out of nothing. Imagination, they called it.

After all the years of reading, admiring, envying and wishing it hit him, like a sledgehammer flying out of a cave in the dead of the night.

Those authors he admired so much, the writers with the imagination and creativity. Well all they did was to write about themselves, their own experiences and the things they'd seen in their day to day lives. They invented characters, plots and adventures, heroes and villains but really they were the things and people they'd seen and lived through.

All he had to do was write about his own life, ideally in the third person.

Hmmm...... perhaps it just might work. Maybe he could try a short story as a start.

But what would he come up with, how would it begin and where would it go?

How about a little thing about what he was thinking, what the voices were saying?

No, that wouldn't work. Would it?

The 2009 Lankanosphere Awards - Best Written Blog

Until I started blogging I never dreamt I'd be able to write anything that might get read by anyone. Then, I began LLD and found out that writing really is a skill, one that's done by other people. Here in the Lankanosphere we're blessed with a big and healthy dollop of bloggers who write with the delicate yet powerful hands possessed by the most masterful Kandyan drummers. They weave words and manipulate sentences like only a Sri Lankan judge can.

I could go on, sounding arty and chucking our similes and metaphors like a bat out of Belgium, but I won't. Today we celebrate these proper writers, we salute the heroes of the virtual written word and we give one of these buggers the title of the Best Written Blog. Last year's worthy winner was the shy and reclusive David Blacker with the Blacklight Arrow. This year we hope the standard is going to be even better.

I welcome a very new and very special guest judge for this one as well. I first mentioned him in a post here and since then I've become of his most ardent fans. I bunged him an email recently asking if he'd like to be a guest judge and he kindly replied saying that he'd be delighted and all. Of course a large amount of money has had to change hands but I've told him he can pay in installments if he needs to. I'm kind like that.

Yes, Ladies and Gs, our very special guest judge for this award is none other than the best selling author himself; Mr Ashok Ferrey. And I mean it, really, not like Britney Spears, that was actually made up. I should stress that the nominees and the winner weren't chosen by him, I don't feel he's up to that level of responsibility yet, maybe next year.

Let's get this show on the road and introduce the nominees:

1. Brandix for The Black Lullaby - One of last year's nominees has come back for more. Everyone knows him and even more people know his blog. Like DB last year Brandon is a published author and he dishes out quality posts and writings quicker than a Sri Lankan mother dishing out emotional blackmail at a wedding. Last year I was particularly taken by Phlash Fotografy - Klic One and the follow up, cunningly called Phlash Fotografy - Klic Two. Check them out for examples of his best pieces of prose.

Guest Judge Ferrey had this to say of our Brandon:

" The writer with the strongest voice here, and no surprise therefore that he is also a published author. You can imagine this accomplished raconteur sitting across from you, regaling you with humorous stories in that slightly waspish tone!"

2. Portrait - by Electra. She's a bit of a legend is Electra. Hers was one of the very first Sri Lankan blogs I discovered and one that got me well and truly hooked. I was captivated by her infectious passion, her intelligence and very clear blend of love and frustration that she feels for the motherland. Take a peak at this post to see her at almost her best. Then read comment number 5 to witness her writing at its absolute best. You wouldn't want to come against wit and clarity of thought like that in a dark alley, particularly if your surname is "nut"

The Right Honourable Lord Ferrey said of Portrait:

"A painfully honest dissection of present happenings, all the more powerful for being presented, intentionally or not, in the voice of an ingénue. I am amazed at the amount of vituperation the author patiently puts up with. Is this normal in the world of blogs? It actually makes Rajpal sound like Mary’s little lamb. (Or do I mean Mary’s little mutton?)."

3. The Bohemian Gypsy - This isn't the sort of Gypsy who goes around selling clothes pegs and crapping in car parks. This is a girly one who writes rather heartwarming and heartwrenching pieces every now and again. One day I hope I get to meet this mysterious person, but pray that "she" doesn't turn out to be a bloke with a rice gut and BO. Take a peak at this Santa post to see what I'm enthusing about. Or try this one if you want a bit more. It's the detail and the levels of description that grab me every time.

My close friend Ashok, the guest judge said:

"Beautiful use of language, nicely judged balance between the immediacy of journalism and the fanciful imaginings of creative fiction. There is a wistful feeling that runs through the bass notes of the writing, like the subtext of a Chopin Nocturne."

It goes to show that even people like him can make mistakes and spell "shopping" wrong now and again.

4. Dance In A Triangle - Another well known, well read and much loved blog that's been floating around in the Lankanosphere longer than that musty smelling jar of something that smells a bit like Maldive fish but isn't but you're reluctant to throw it away just in case. T's blog has gone a bit private and confidential lately so I'm not sure if you'll be able to read it when this post comes out. If you can't, then take it from me, it's rather good. Actually, I'll tell you what, take it from our guest judge. He read it and said these nice things:

"This blogger is patently a poet in the guise of prose-writer. Her poem Still Here is hauntingly beautiful. Her prose may be a shade too purple for my taste, but please don’t take this comment to heart – it is only a prosaic old cynic speaking."

You know me, poems delude me, I just don't get them. Unless it's got a line about a man from Brazil whose balls shot over the hill it's about seven layers too deep for me. Once I got mugged by a gang of poets, I was so unaware that I didn't see them coming nor could I give even the briefest of descriptions afterwards. But, when the Ashok Ferreys of the world say things like that about T's poetrocity, then I know that it must be good.

Well there you have, those are the esteemed nominees, a set of blogs that continually remind me how much there is to learn.

I am very pleased.......to............announce...........the..............winner..............is.......................








.......................The Bohemian Gypsy.

Thank you to the Gypsy on behalf of all her fans.

And a mahooosive thank you to the special, albeit in a slightly too figure hugging T shirt, guest judge, Ashok Ferrey. I'm sincerely touched that he was so kind and gracious. I leave you with his words on all the candidates:

"I’ve been asked to make a few comments on these winning blogs, and first of all, let me say how very, very good the writing is. I’m amazed at the accuracy of the grammar, the beauty of the language, the poignancy of the content. Should I not be? Well if you had been at the receiving end of as many contest entries as I have, recently, you wouldn’t be surprised at my surprise! What strikes me most is the freshness of the prose, something we writers strive for, but usually fail miserably, for one very good reason: we tend to cook our words too long. Perhaps this is the beauty of blogs though it can also be their failing. When you shoot from the hip you are usually not too bothered about form and structure. This is where these particular blogs differ: there is definitely an underlying structure to most of these pieces that raises them above the ordinary."

I think we'll just leave it there.

RD

Three Wicked Things

They're different, but here are three random phrases that I've read in recent weeks that have stuck with me.

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." - Charles Mingus.

"It's sort of like the fort railway station suddenly becoming an exclusive members only club." - Cerno

"You wouldn't know subtlety if it punched you in the face." - Someone on Twitter who I can't recall.

Words can be very beautiful, particularly if they're put in the right order.

This World Wide Web Thing

It's a bit mad this.

So we've abbreviated the longish term of "world wide web" to www. This makes perfect sense, everyone likes a good acronym, or an a, as I like to call them.

www is three characters whereas world wide web is God knows how many. Typing www is far easier than world wide web, I should know, I've just done it a few times and got it wrong each time.

But, and it's a big but, when we're talking and we say the words "world wide web" there are three syllables involved. It's easy isn't it? You say the word "world", you follow it up with a "wide", then you chuck in a "web", even an American could do it without considering it as hard work and having to stop for a Big Mac in between two of the sounds. Probably.

But, and it's another biggish one, we don't talk and say "world wide web" do we? We say "www". But, and I shan't labour the big but thing, in order to say "www" we actually say "doubleyou, doubleyou, doubleyou," which is nine syllables. So, to say the a takes us nine times as long as saying the actual full length phrase.

I know it's not a huge amount of time here, it's not as if saving the time would enable the average man to have an extra day off each week or something.

It is a little bit mad though isn't it?

They say Dolphins and Elephants are stupid!

Oh, no they don't.

A merry weekend to you all out there.

Letter To A Friend

One of the features about being a Sri Lankan Brit in Britain is that I'm surrounded by a vast and varied assortment of people and nationalities. As cosmopolitan cities go London is definitely up there, possibly in the top fifty in the whole world.

Through my life I've witnessed an increasing sense of awareness of Sri Lanka by the average Brit. I recall when I was a young kid and most English people would be vaguely aware that Sri Lanka was the place that used to be called Ceylon and was somewhere in Asia.

As things progressed and the huge world developed into this tiny global village linked by the internet, cricket, cheap air travel, mobile phones and MTV, Sri Lanka became the place that every British person's next door neighbour went to on holiday last year. During the eighties it became law that every third Britisher had to befriend a Lankan beach boy and send money to him on a regular basis.

These days, after events of the last few decades, everyone in Blighty knows of Sri Lanka, where it is and of course, how all Tamils are terrorists and everyone there loves cricket. A few people don't know these basics, but they're Americans.

I meander through the RD life having pretty much two different levels of conversation with what are pretty much the two different groups of people I mix with.

The first group is what I think I'll call the Lankans. You're probably in this group. It's not necessarily Lankan people, more people who have a real interest and knowledge of Sri Lanka. People who have lived there, worked there, whose parents are Lankan or who speak with a West London accent but write a blog that somehow showed up on Kottu and became a bit popular.

The second group I shall cleverly call Brits. These are the people who know of Lanka but have that limited level of knowledge. They don't have that day to day interest that others have. I spend a lot of time mixing with them, talking about things in Sri Lanka on a very different level to the way we tend to chat and write in the Lankanosphere.

A conversation with one of these types will inevitably involve details about which hotels they stayed in on their Lankan holiday, how they'd love to return and how much they loved going to "that Elephant orphanage place, can't remember the name though". Oh, and the people were so friendly.

And conversations with these Brits about the Lankan conflict are held at a much more superficial and general level than they are with Lankans. Sometimes it's like pushing a jelly up a hill or, as it's called these days, talking politics with M.I.A and Joey Tribbiani.

I thought, just for the hell of it really, I'd give you an example of one of these interractions. I was asked by someone, a Brit type, what the current situation in Lanka is, whether things are

"really looking good/hopeful is SL, or just another temporary "peak"...?"

The asker is someone with a very genuine and heartfelt interst in Sri Lanka, just that they are relatively uninformed about things. I was pleasantly surprised by the interest and keen to try to answer as accurately and informatively as I could. Here's what I said:

"This is a billion dollar question, so I shall try to give you my(reasonably) informed opinion on the matter.

The military defeat of the LTTE is real and massive. Even the LTTE themselves appear to be admitting defeat and admitting the Prabakharan is dead. Last week, in the first few days when the Government of Sri Lanka(GoSL) announced that Prabakharan was killed, the LTTE and its supporters refused to believe this, saying instead that he had fled into the jungles and was still alive.

Then later last week these LTTE supporters started to say that he had been killed, that they really were surrendering. This, in many ways was actually a bigger landmark than the GoSL saying they'd killed him.

So now I believe that the military conflict is more or less over. There is the possibility that the LTTE will have gone away and will regroup in years to come, to resume their fight. I think this is now unlikely.

The rebuilding and the like is now what needs to be done, both short term and longer term.

In the short term there are thousands and thousands of Internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the North East of Sri Lanka who have to be housed, fed and looked after. There is a lot of debate and argument about whether these (mostly Tamil) people ended up in their current situation because of the conduct of the LTTE or of the armed forces.

One side says that the armed forces went hell for leather to obliterate the remainder of the LTTE in the area in the final weeks of the conflict and showed scant regard for the civilian casualities. The other side says that the LTTE used these people, the people they claimed to represent, as a"Human shield", held hostage against their will so that the forces wouldn't be able to attack the areas.

No one seems to know the real truth, I suspect it's a mixture of both. To some extent the cause of the problem now is irrelevant as the important issue is helping the IDPs. If you're so inclined there's an organisation called ACT for Sri Lanka that's heavily involved in aid and you can donate money from here. I've given a bit and will hope to continue to do so.

In the medium term there are some serious international relations type questions over the conduct of the Sri Lankan authorities in the final stages of the war. Many countries are asking for investigations into alleged serious breaches of Human rights and there is talk of embargos and withholding financial aid, monies and loans.

This is a precarious issue. There are people who are quite rightly saying that withholding money and aid will only serve to harm the IDPs even more,that instead of helping Lanka this will hinder it. It's true, on a very short term level. It's also (in my opinion) true that these human rights issues need to be investigated. For me the worrying thing I see is many"local" Sri Lankans with a serious "the whole world is against us"mentality.

I see one of the possible extrapolations of this as a situation in which Sri Lanka ends up in very severe international isolation with only China and a few others as allies.

Also, in the medium and longer term, there is the issue of addressing the original problems that made the LTTE form and take up arms in the first place. The feelings of the Tamil people and the issues they face will hopefully be addressed and dealt with. Mahinda Rajapaksa has made lots of positive noise that suggests these things really will be addressed with what most people think is the right attitude and mindset. Only time will tell.

So, my summary answer is that the potential is there like it hasn't been for 30 odd years. It's definitely more than one of the "peaks" we've had in the past. What will happen in the coming months and years will be the telling thing.

We'll see.

Sorry for the extra long reply, I expect you just wanted a yes or no.

R"


There you have it, with my apologies for some of the gross simplifications. It was an email that I wrote, then thought it might be of interest as a blog post. My attempt to give a rounded but not too detailed view of things to someone who genuinely wanted to hear it. As A + K say; JMHO.

Inheriting, Blogs, Cerno, Death And The Internet

Cerno is one of my favourite bloggers of all time.

I've frequently wondered why and have never come to a firm conclusion. There's the variety of flavours on his blog, from google Earth related posts to photographs of the graphics on Lankan buses and tri shaws. There's a sense of innovation about him that shines through his writing as well as the general feel and look of the Cernoblog.

He's funny too. Obviously not as funny as me, but he's up there with witticisms and little idiosyncratic lines that make me chuckle on a regular basis.

Perhaps the thing that's his biggest strength, is the way he so often inspires me. Not that he turns up at RD Towers and slaps me on the back in an American film sort of way and spurs me on when I'm feeling down and demotivated. To be honest Cerno's pretty crap at that sort of thing, he's never done it. Maybe if I gave him the address that might help him. I suspect not.

However, he does inspire me through his writing, as Cyndi Lauper said "girls just wanna have fun" "time after time".

His recent post here, about who will inherit our blogs when we die is one of the aforementioned inspirational ones. Oftentimes I have half formulated thoughts bouncing around in my head, but I only become consciously aware of them when I get the impetus from an outside source. That's what took place this time.

This blogging / Facebook / email age has created a vastly different backdrop compared to that which existed for people of my parents' generation and everyone before that, going back to when man was invented.

We, as part of our everyday lives, continually create records, diaries and logs of the way we live our lives. As a kid I remember watching Blue Peter, a childrens' magazine type of twice weekly TV programme that is still running.

Every once in a while they'd bury a time capsule. The idea was that it would contain examples of and information about the way we currently live. In hundreds of years time someone would dig it up and make amazing discoveries about 20th century man. Like those ologists do these days when they dig up Roman stuff and learn knowledge and stuff.

These days it's all different. In hundreds of years time I don't think there'll even be people seeking to find out about how we lived, they'll know it all already. It's a total paradigm shift but I reckon the subject of history will cease to exist, except in terms of looking back beyond our current era.

Our histories will be there for all to see, unless we've opted out. We blog, we Facebook and we email and it's all out there. Perhaps we exist in a Utopic mindset in which we reckon that because everything's password protected we'll be secure. Well that's got to be rubbish hasn't it?

Our lives are an open blog, our thoughts are there on Facebook and Twitter and our, whatever the opposite of ancestors is, will have total access to it all. I like the thought of this.

Back in the day there were famous old diarists like Java Jones Samuel Pepys and Darwin (the scientist not the scientist). They were fellows who chose to write diaries compared with the rest of the populace who didn't, well many couldn't read or write let alone choose to diarise. They opted in.

They chose to record events in a structured way. Today we take a far less structured, and far more comprehensive approach but a huge proportion of the population does it. Of course many people, particularly in parts of Wales, don't have internet access or a computer, but again, give it a couple of hundred years and that will all change.

I rather like the somewhat egotistical thought that in hundreds of years there might be some very great granchildren of mine who'll be writing in this very blog. I hope that they'll have more structure to their posts and that Blogger will have added the sexy moving tag cloud into its options. But I do think it will be cool to have generations of RDs writing here. Maybe there'll be future generations of DDs writing too, saying GM2U and all.

Often I look at blogs, particularly those of the much younger bloggers, and wonder if they'll regret publishing what they have done when they're older. I think I'm quite safe in the knowledge that I won't regret publishing the posts I've written as I only came to blogging so late in life. All that angsty and angry change the world and shout at people stuff that I had in my twenties has been replaced by a desire to still change the world, just by having a beer and talking, by intelligent debate and mutual respect.

Maybe you'll find me (del) e(a)ting my words but I think I'll be quite proud of my blog when I get old (er). Even now I'm embarrassed when I look at my early posts and see how I've sort of developed a style of writing. I make no claims for my writing abilities now but I look back at those humble beginnings and they seem like the scribblings of a ten year old child writing about what he did on his weekend compared with one of today's posts.

I'm quite proud though. I hope that someone reading these scribblings from start to finish might get a picture of me and the things I've been through and will go through. I hope that they'll get a picture of me and be a little bit proud, farts and all.

One of my less formulated thoughts is about wills. I've had fleeting ideas about letting Academic Bro know my current passwords just in case, but he can't be trusted really. He'd probably ruin LLD within a few hours.

It's a cert though.

Our blogs, our Facebook accounts, our emails and anything else to do with our online presence will be there for all to see in time to come.

What legacy will you leave?

Word Weirdness

For many years I'd thought that it was just me who suffered from this quite stupid thing. Recent research indicates that I'm not alone. But I'd like to find out more, whether it's just weird people or if everyone goes through the turmoil.

It's a phenomenon I think I might call word weirdness, as that sums it up in an all encompassing way, and it happens to me exactly once every once in a while, or so.

I steam my way through life, as most of us do, reading, writing and rithmeticking and often do all of them without paying any attention to the processes involved. I drive into work in the morning and notice that driving has become one of those tasks that I can do without paying any attention to.

I'm at the level that a wise man told me once is called "unconscious competence", which simply means that I'm competent at it, so much so that I don't have to think about it. I'm at that level in driving, not everything by any means.

The art of writing is something that's relatively new to me and, as many would say, I'm trying. But I can claim to be good at spelling, shit like that. I always was, just without knowing what on earth to do with the vast vocabulary I was building up in my head.

Yet, every once in a while I get this word weirdness. It's when I start to focus on an everyday word, maybe because of a momentary glitch during which I wonder how to spell it, and the word springs out on me and starts to look different.

Last week it happened with "because". I wrote it down somewhere, stared at it and it sprung to life and began to look as if it was a word in a foreign language, as if it was alien to me and spelt weirdly. Now "because" is a nice everyday word that looks warm and friendly, there's nothing strange to it at all.

I was chatting to a friend about the phenomenon recently and she said that exactly the same thing happens to her. This was a reassuring discovery for both of us. We now exist with the knowledge that we're not alone as we battle through life struggling with word weirdness.

Does does anyone else out there experience this as well?

More On Writing Versus Blogging

One of the blogs I read often is Cerno's and I often talk about it, about how his writing inspires me and makes my mind go off in tangents, frequently resulting in a post or two.

His recent scribble about how he writes and thinks of things to write was yet another one of these. It got me thinking.

The thing is, as I've started to I suppose fall in love with the written word, which is the appropriate but frankly a bit too poncey for my liking, way of putting it, I find an increasing fondness in writing purely for myself. I'm lucky in that I've got my journal and add pages and words to it on a frequent basis, I'm not faced with a new desire that requires me to get a ball rolling each time the urge to write something grabs me.

But it's like that tree in the forest and the question of whether it makes a noise if it falls down. If I write bits and pieces in a journal and said journal is only ever intended for my own eyes, what exactly is it? Is it writing? If it fell on someone's head in the forest would anyone hear it?

A blog post like this is read by some people. In the back, or middle if I'm honest, of my mind, as I write these very words, I'm aware of you, the reader. I'm conscious of what your reaction might be to this post. Will it make you think or will you dismiss it and move on to a post about sex?

It's similar to something that plays on my mind in music too. I'm a firm believer that playing and learning an instrument is all well and good but one must play with other people. In a band, an orchestra or even solo in front of an audience it doesn't matter, but there must be more than just playing in a bedroom.

But I enjoy playing to myself too. Whenever I practice drums, which is often but not often enough, I stick on my headphones and get in the zone. I'll work on purely self indulgent things, solos and little seedlings of ideas that I have that may turn into fundamental building blocks of my playing in the future or might get thrown out with the rubbish. The trick for me is to figure out which is which.

As my love (uuurgh) for the written word grows I find that it's the scrawls in my journal that represent the truest and most honest me. There's not so much of that great wit I'm renowned for in my journal either, which is probably unsurprising. I guess Eddie Murphy doesn't wander around his house alone and naked cracking jokes to himself, even in the days when he was funny. Not that I write my blog naked. Or my journal for that matter.

Lately I've been looking at the details about the Galle Literary Festival with eyes and feelings that I've only had for things like drum magazines and Sri Lankan restaurants before. This is a sure sign that I'm beginning to enjoy writing in a way that can't be good for me. It would be alright if I'd got the bug for swimming or jogging, but writing isn't going to help me to look good. Though I sometimes get a tinge of cramp in my right wrist when I've written in my journal a lot.

I have a good friend who is quite at ease meeting Prime Ministers and Queens, Presidents and Sri Lankan Mothers. The concept of meeting these superior people doesn't phase her at all. I'm different though. The first time I met Java Jones I was drooling quite a bit and shaking with excitement. Java acted normally and put me at ease but it wasn't easy for me.

I've met many very famous drummers and it's an ongoing struggle for me to speak normally and not hyperventilate, dribble and spit as I talk. Looking at the GLF website I lick my lips at the prospect of chatting with Aravind Adiga, of asking him where he got the idea to write his book in the way it's written. I have to say that my jury is out, I'm not sure if I loved or hated the book. It's one of the two though. My mind convinces me that I'll meet these authors and chat happily and gaily about their influences and motivations, their ambitions and regrets. But I know that the reality will be me staring at them with huge big eyes and being too excited to get a word out.

While I'm thinking aloud does anyone know if there'll be any blogging related workshops or seminars at the GLF? I'd love to find out before I book my ticket and choose which pants to bring.

I sometimes go off on a daydream and think that my journals might get discovered in hundreds of years' time. By then they'd be the journals of a chap who was a prize winning author, not just plain old RD, the blogger. I probably would have won the Odel Booker prize several times and my first book "Colombo Revealed" would have been made into a film that had starred people like Brad Pitt and Nimmi Harasgama.

So there you have it, just some emptying of thoughts really. It's an unusual post as it's one I normally would have written in my journal.

Without the slightly witty bits of course.

PS - I lied about the pants, I already know which ones I'll bring.

Absofuckinglutely!

Swearing isn't good is it?

Oh yes it is, when used in the right context and with the right people it can be a wonderful way to add some emotion or depth into a sentence or phrase. I think I probably swear too much in conversation. I throw in a "fuck" or "fucking" a bit too often for comfort, even my own. I'm okay chatting to a vicar though or a Sri Lankan Aunt, it's not that I swear as though I know no better and need to be kept away from posh people or something.

And since I've started blogging my use of swear words in conversation has reduced too, a natural result of my mind's continual search for new words as I scribble posts. I write, think about nouns, adjectives and those other word types; prochems or something, and I try to think of which ones to use instead of a swear word. Sometimes it's really fucking hard, I tell you.

Occasionally the insertion of a little touch of profanity is justified and essential. A bit like watching Kill Bill or just about any other Tarantino film. The violence, though graphic and strong, is always a big and vital part of the film, it's never gratuitous or unnecessary. Let's face it, we expect Uma Thurman to call someone a "cocksucking bitch" but Harry Potter would get a month of detentions at Hogwarts if he uttered similar things, no matter what evil he was facing at the time.

The other day I was reminded of a word that is quite probably my favourite one of the moment. It rings in my head, I use it when I can and it has a hint of dichotomy about itself. It's that beauty above, and below now;

"Absofuckinglutely".

As Stevie Wonder would say, though he probably won't be reading this post, isn't she lovely.

I like the pure sound of it, the way the vowels and consonants blend feels like a little drum groove to me. I like the way, as you say it in your head, that the emphasis falls automatically on the "fuck" and all the other syllables are that bit flatter. It's as if you're listening to a radio and the volume's suddenly turned up just for that one syllable.

The bit I like most is its extremeness, or perhaps that should be extremity. If something is absolute then it's an extreme in its own right. Absolute zero is the lowest temperature possible, absolute black is total lack of light and a Sri Lankan mother who's absolutely livid is the most dangerous thing in all existence.

Absofuckinglutely adds a little bit of sugar and spice, of drama and tension to an already strong word. The addition of the f word in the middle of it is like telling Peter Sellers as Clousseau to ham up the French accent a bit, to make it a bit more French sounding, perhaps a little bit funnier. I suppose if we used the English language correctly there'd be little need for the word, as using "absolutely" on its own would suffice.

Complaining about its use is about as effective as moaning about those people who talk about "giving 110%", which is possible in many ways, particularly if you're talking about money or something, but absofuckinglutely impossible in terms of giving effort. Who cares though?

As far as I'm concerned a swear word or two is a little bundle of joy if it's used in the right context and with the right degree of sparsity. And of course, there's nothing sexier than a slightly posh woman chucking in an unexpected "fuck" at the appropriate time.

I think I'm going to give my award for word of the month to the aforementioned combination of vowels and consonants. I won't type it again for fear of overuse, but you know what it is.

Now go out there on the streets and use it as much as possible.

But sparsely.

The Freedom Of The Backspace Key

Actually I write quite a lot, in different bits and pieces and different formats.

To start with I have a blog, I'm not sure if you know about it. It's an ongoing little bit of me that I update whenever I feel in the mood. I have no real aspirations for my blog, no goals for it to become the biggest thing since instant string hoppers, no dreams of getting so many readers that I can retire from "normal" work and live off the six figure income that I get from ads. The only stipulation that I have ever, well stipulated, for my blog is that I keep it positive.

Then I have a journal that is on my PC, a boring and long word document that I update whenever the mood has taken me. For many months the mood hasn't taken me. The thing sits there dormant on my hard drive like an ancient ceasefire agreement, fading into historic obscurity.

I also have a paper journal. I write in this when the mood takes me, this happens quite often. It's a total unedited and unabridged outpouring of my mind. I used to call it a diary but it's become more than "just" a diary. To me a diary is either one of those things in which you write your forthcoming appointments or it's a factual record of what you did yesterday. Samuel Pepys would probably disagree with me. My diary became a journal when I noticed that I was writing just anything in it without a real format or plan. It ceased to be record of events and thoughts and became just that bit more flowery.

Some days ago I thought about the act of writing, of the physical sensations one feels when actually doing it. It dawned on me that writing on paper with a pen makes a chap, well me at least, feel very different to typing onto a screen via a keyboard. In my case I have two quite contrasting outlets. London, Lanka and drums is usually written with the reader largely in my mind.

As I write a post I often wonder if you'll find it interesting or funny or intelligent. I go back over paragraphs and sentences and change things to try and improve them. The backspace key is almost worn out and the delete key is just about to be deleted because of high usage. Most of the content and the editing happens because of my own standards and judgement. Usually I figure that if I like something or laugh then others will.

But when I write in my journal, things are very different. It's for me, no one else. I pour stuff out, sometimes miserable bits, sometimes dark things, often things that I'd never want to tell anyone. As I do it I get mesmerised by the feel and the look of the pen and paper. I get into a flow and really feel the words flowing out of my cheap Bic ballpoint pen. I'm not a pen snob but I find it a struggle to write with anything other than a transparent medium Bic pen with black ink.

Writing on paper is so much more permanent too. I can cross out, even tear out. I can draw a line through something or so many lines over it that it's illegible, but it's always there isn't it. Pressing backspace or delete on the keyboard obliterates words and sentences and in time it's as if they were never there in the first place. By the time I finish this post and hit the publish button I'll have more or less forgotten which bits I edited and which were my original thoughts and words.

Sometimes I start to write things on either format; paper or monitor, and my mind gallops off at a tangent, forgetting where I had intended to go in the first place. But the galloping is more free form on a computer than it is on paper. The freedom of the backspace key.

Before I started my blog I would always write a letter on paper before typing it up. I felt that I couldn't think into a computer, that I had to do that into a piece of paper, then copy to the screen. Times change and I'm comfortable with whacking something straight into an email, word document or whatever these days.

As time marches on with the inevitability it carries on its back I realise that I juggle my two formats with the ease of a multi tasking man. I keep up the journal, revealing my innermost thoughts and feelings to no one in particular and revelling in the act of writing with a cheap pen on a part of a tree. I also type happily into this blog and float bits of myself out into the blogosphere when the mood takes me.

They're so different in so many ways yet they're both writing.

How about you? Do you write and do you have different approaches or mindsets?