Well, it's been over six months but I've decided to start writing stuff on here again because I quit teaching and hence don't have to worry about kids looking up Mr. Bradshaw on Google. Also, I'm unemployed and somewhat directionless, career-wise, so I have a lot of time to fill.
In the two weeks since I realised that becoming a teacher was not one of my brighter ideas, I've watched a lot of Peep Show. I won't bother telling you how wonderful Peep Show is, because every self-respecting student will have already done so at some point. What I will point out is that David Mitchell, one of the stars of Peep Show (the little one), has a brilliant internet comedy series in which he spends four minutes per episode being funny and correct about a particular subject. Check it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV751g2FCWk&feature=channel
My only problem with this series (and it's really more of a comment than a problem) is that each episode is bookended by two adverts for male grooming products containing 'essential oils'. I don't know David Mitchell personally, but I do feel that he is the sort of person who, if freed from his sponsor's contractual constraints, might well lay into a phrase such as 'essential oils'.
"Essential oils?" his character might disbelievedly exclaim on an episode of Peep Show if Jez had just spent a lot of money on a product containing such oils. "How are they essential? What could possibly be essential about them? Is moisturising your face now considered to be a basic requirement for human life alongside food, water and oxygen? Are there cruel communist dictators who withold male grooming supplies from unwated ethnic groups, in the full knowledge that they contain essential oils?"
Putting aside the linguistic inflation that has caused words such as 'literally' and 'essential' to be deployed in such ridiculous settings, I can't help wondering at the wisdom of twinning a male grooming company's image with that of David Mitchell, a short, plump man who sports the same hairstyle in both real life and for the purpose of playing a sad, uncool, unfashionable sitcom character.
And now I've lost my thread.
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Saturday, 6 September 2008
This Blog Has Died
Just like the one before it, this incarnation of my blog appears to have bitten the dust. I'm not pulling the plug just yet, but I'm considering doing just that before I start teaching in secondary schools, where the kids might just be bored enough to find their teacher's blog on Google.
Anyway, even though I removed my last blog from the net, I downloaded it as a record of my life at uni and I find it pretty interesting to look back through the entries, so with that in mind this is a sort of summing-up entry of me right now.
Name: Matt Bradshaw
Age: 23.95 years
Residence: Balsall Heath, Birmingham
Marital Status: Single
Political Allegiance: Green Party
Religious Views: Agnostic
Applicable Social/Fashion Classifications: Geek, indie-boy, scruff
Occupation: Unemployed but soon to be trainee physics teacher
Would rather be: Rockstar/folkstar/novelist
Height: 6 foot exactly
Weight: 11 stone exactly
Hair: Dark brown, floppy/shaggy, have been growing for about nine months
Favourite music: Leonard Cohen
Favourite movie: The Shawshank Redemption
Favourite food: Doner meat and chips with mint and chilli sauces
Favourite beer: Hook Norton Double Stout
Guitars: 7 (Washburn Maverick, Squier P-Bass, Admira classical, Fleetwood steel-string, Yamaha EZ-AG, Mexican Fender Telecaster Custom, Ibanez 12-string acoustic)
Preferred England Starting 11: David James, Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, Ashley Cole, David Beckham, Owen Hargreaves, Steven Gerrard, Stuart Downing, Wayne Rooney, Michael Owen
Imagination Remaining For New Categories: Negligible
Anyway, even though I removed my last blog from the net, I downloaded it as a record of my life at uni and I find it pretty interesting to look back through the entries, so with that in mind this is a sort of summing-up entry of me right now.
Name: Matt Bradshaw
Age: 23.95 years
Residence: Balsall Heath, Birmingham
Marital Status: Single
Political Allegiance: Green Party
Religious Views: Agnostic
Applicable Social/Fashion Classifications: Geek, indie-boy, scruff
Occupation: Unemployed but soon to be trainee physics teacher
Would rather be: Rockstar/folkstar/novelist
Height: 6 foot exactly
Weight: 11 stone exactly
Hair: Dark brown, floppy/shaggy, have been growing for about nine months
Favourite music: Leonard Cohen
Favourite movie: The Shawshank Redemption
Favourite food: Doner meat and chips with mint and chilli sauces
Favourite beer: Hook Norton Double Stout
Guitars: 7 (Washburn Maverick, Squier P-Bass, Admira classical, Fleetwood steel-string, Yamaha EZ-AG, Mexican Fender Telecaster Custom, Ibanez 12-string acoustic)
Preferred England Starting 11: David James, Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, Ashley Cole, David Beckham, Owen Hargreaves, Steven Gerrard, Stuart Downing, Wayne Rooney, Michael Owen
Imagination Remaining For New Categories: Negligible
Sunday, 10 August 2008
What I've Been Doing
I haven't really been writing anything on this blog lately, but there is a reason: I've been writing a novel. This is something I've tried before, but I've never really got beyond a couple of chapters until now.
One evening, not long after moving to Birmingham, I was cooking pasta and sauce for about the fourth night running in an empty house, when I had an idea for a book. I can't claim it was a particularly brilliant idea, since the idea was essentially to write about my current life with a few subtle changes and a bunch of invented characters. But it was an idea nonetheless, and I set about planning a story around it.
After a couple of days' planning, I began to write, and was stunned at how fast the words poured out. The dissertation I wrote for my degree took me a long time; possibly, months I can't remember. However long it took me, it was certainly longer than a day-and-a-half, which is how long it took me to write the same number of words for this book.
Three-and-a-half weeks later, my productivity has gone up and down, but I've been trying to write a decent quantity every day and somehow I've ended up with 39,000 words. Wikipedia says that a novel is at least 50,000 words long. I know that my book won't magically be complete when I hit that marker, but being lazy as hell, I've pretty much planned it that way. I have 28 chapters planned, of which 18 are finished, 4 are incomplete and just 6 are completely blank. The whole thing should clock in around 55,000-60,000 words, which makes it nearly three-quarters finished.
Of course, even when I type the 'final' word and head to Lidl for a cheap celebratory Carlsberg, that's far from the end. Proof-reading 60,000 words is not a quick task if you're just looking for grammatical errors, but if you looking for plot holes and stylistic mis-steps or whatever...that's going to be a boring few days. And even once that's done, I'm not at all convinced the book is any good.
I'm not sure it's possible to assess your own writing, but I do worry that my story is just not interesting enough for people to want to read. I'm also not convinced I know enough words to be a writer. I'm constantly looking in the thesaurus so I don't have to write 'nice' or 'good'. Still, I'm over the main hurdle I've had with writing novels in the past, which is running out of steam. Until today I had been writing nearly 3,000 words a day recently. Today is a zero so far, but that's because I have the internet in my house at last so I've allowed myself a day of being sad and pissing about on YouTube and Facebook.
And now, just as I did when I was writing my dissertation and my blog simultaneously, I feel like I've wasted a good quantity of words that could have gone somewhere else.
One evening, not long after moving to Birmingham, I was cooking pasta and sauce for about the fourth night running in an empty house, when I had an idea for a book. I can't claim it was a particularly brilliant idea, since the idea was essentially to write about my current life with a few subtle changes and a bunch of invented characters. But it was an idea nonetheless, and I set about planning a story around it.
After a couple of days' planning, I began to write, and was stunned at how fast the words poured out. The dissertation I wrote for my degree took me a long time; possibly, months I can't remember. However long it took me, it was certainly longer than a day-and-a-half, which is how long it took me to write the same number of words for this book.
Three-and-a-half weeks later, my productivity has gone up and down, but I've been trying to write a decent quantity every day and somehow I've ended up with 39,000 words. Wikipedia says that a novel is at least 50,000 words long. I know that my book won't magically be complete when I hit that marker, but being lazy as hell, I've pretty much planned it that way. I have 28 chapters planned, of which 18 are finished, 4 are incomplete and just 6 are completely blank. The whole thing should clock in around 55,000-60,000 words, which makes it nearly three-quarters finished.
Of course, even when I type the 'final' word and head to Lidl for a cheap celebratory Carlsberg, that's far from the end. Proof-reading 60,000 words is not a quick task if you're just looking for grammatical errors, but if you looking for plot holes and stylistic mis-steps or whatever...that's going to be a boring few days. And even once that's done, I'm not at all convinced the book is any good.
I'm not sure it's possible to assess your own writing, but I do worry that my story is just not interesting enough for people to want to read. I'm also not convinced I know enough words to be a writer. I'm constantly looking in the thesaurus so I don't have to write 'nice' or 'good'. Still, I'm over the main hurdle I've had with writing novels in the past, which is running out of steam. Until today I had been writing nearly 3,000 words a day recently. Today is a zero so far, but that's because I have the internet in my house at last so I've allowed myself a day of being sad and pissing about on YouTube and Facebook.
And now, just as I did when I was writing my dissertation and my blog simultaneously, I feel like I've wasted a good quantity of words that could have gone somewhere else.
Wednesday, 9 July 2008
Music
Outside Yeovil Junction railway station, on my way to Glastonbury festival, I met a Hungarian hippie. She was friendly and interesting and had cool hippie hair, but she also talked about crystals and earth dances and other such hippie things. Later, on the bus, I couldn't help noticing that despite talking a lot of bollocks, she seemed a lot happier than most people ever seem to be. I wondered if this was because she didn't seem to have anything negative to say about anything. I wondered what would happen if somebody attempted to literally never be negative about anything. Would it be possible never to use the words 'not', 'no', or 'never', or even comparative words such as 'better', 'nicer' or 'happier', since these would imply something being more negative than something else? To some extent, this seemed to be what this hippie had done, and she seemed to be very happy. Being a scientifically-minded cynic, I could never stop being negative completely, but I have, since meeting her, made a conscious to emphasise the positive when speaking or thinking. As an exercise in this, I now present you with some unusually positive thoughts on a favourite song of mine.
At Glastonbury, on Sunday night, I saw Leonard Cohen play on the Pyramid Stage. Having turned up for the start of Neil Diamond, then having edged forward both before and after Goldfrapp's set, I was within touching distance of the barrier and had a clear line of sight to one of the greatest ever singer-songwriters. I won't bore you with how wonderful the set was, but...wow. And of course, 'Hallelujah' was a sensational highlight.
Now, coming back to this positive thinking, I am not going to moan about my dislike of Jeff Buckley's much-lauded cover version, which was the original purpose of this post. What would that achieve? Instead, I am going to put forward something positive; here, in no particular order, are five wonderful versions of 'Hallelujah'.
At Glastonbury, on Sunday night, I saw Leonard Cohen play on the Pyramid Stage. Having turned up for the start of Neil Diamond, then having edged forward both before and after Goldfrapp's set, I was within touching distance of the barrier and had a clear line of sight to one of the greatest ever singer-songwriters. I won't bore you with how wonderful the set was, but...wow. And of course, 'Hallelujah' was a sensational highlight.
Now, coming back to this positive thinking, I am not going to moan about my dislike of Jeff Buckley's much-lauded cover version, which was the original purpose of this post. What would that achieve? Instead, I am going to put forward something positive; here, in no particular order, are five wonderful versions of 'Hallelujah'.
Thursday, 12 June 2008
Reading List
I'm avoiding the full-on "back from travelling" entry. I'll tackle the travels soon; it was fun. Very fun. Instead, this is my list of books I read whilst abroad:
New Zealand:
jPod by Douglas Coupland
Australia:
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
1984 by George Orwell
Brother Nature by Robert Llewellyn
Indonesia:
The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis and Larry Sloman
Thailand:
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
The Stars' Tennis Balls by Stephen Fry
The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland
The best was Flowers For Algernon, followed by 1984. The worst, or at least the one I couldn't get to grips with, was The God Of Small Things.
New Zealand:
jPod by Douglas Coupland
Australia:
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
1984 by George Orwell
Brother Nature by Robert Llewellyn
Indonesia:
The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis and Larry Sloman
Thailand:
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
The Stars' Tennis Balls by Stephen Fry
The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland
The best was Flowers For Algernon, followed by 1984. The worst, or at least the one I couldn't get to grips with, was The God Of Small Things.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
The Game
I am playing a game in which I see how long it takes me to reacquire the stone I lost whilst travelling. Since my Thai lifestyle featured regular swimming, hiking and healthy food in sensible quantities, while my English lifestyle consists of crisps and sitting, I wager it won't take too long.
Friday, 22 February 2008
Goodbye England
Time: The middle of the night.
Location: My sister's living room, Oxford.
Mode of blogging: My sister's laptop.
Already I'm regretting packing the ukelele. It doesn't stay in tune and just because it's a lot smaller than a guitar doesn't mean it fits easily in my rucksack. I spent years pronouncing 'rucksack' like a German or a northerner, with a 'rook' sound for the first syllable. I think it's because that's how my dad says it and of all the people I regularly to talk to, he is probably the most prolific user of the word 'rucksack'. Some mates pointed out a few years back that I said it 'wrong', and for a while I started pronouncing it poshly, but now I've switched back. In case you're wondering, I'm not going anywhere with this ramble, I'm just bored waiting for a 4am bus to Heathrow Airport and I'm scared that if I go to sleep I'll miss said bus and wake up five minutes before check-in, in the wrong city.
According to the Blogger account login control panel thingy, this will be my 100th post. I imagine that includes all the ones that I start writing but don't finish. Still, I suppose it's a landmark of sorts. Still half an hour before I have to leave for the bus station. I just used the word 'still' to begin two consecutive sentences. I'm also not too sure about my spelling of 'syllable' in the first paragraph. This is as close as you can get to just reading my thoughts as they happen. I'm just typing whatever comes into my head. I've got two creme eggs in my rucksack. I've spent the last three or four weeks attempting to grow a beard, and it hasn't worked. I'm starting to wish I'd got rid of it when I had a shower this morning. I've loaded up my MP3 player with 8GB of music and 10 episodes of Scrubs. I doubt I'm going to watch any Scrubs on my 2-inch screen - it seems like a sad thing to do whilst exploring the world - but I like knowing that I could if I wanted to. Here's my prediction for what will be the soundtrack to my holiday:
Radiohead - Pablo Honey
Sigur Ros - Afaskljhfakjsh Bdfajkfhdlkjsfh (can't spell it, it's Icelandic)
Bright Eyes - Fevers and Mirrors
Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Leonard Cohen - Songs of Love and Hate
Kanye West - Late Registration
Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump (that's how it's spelt, promise)
Bjork - Homogenic
Ekkeko - The Canal Boat Sessions (yes, my band is a lot shitter than everyone else on the list but I want to see what we sound like in various settings, like on a plane or on a beach)
I think that's enough typing. I'm not sure how much I'll update this for the next few months. Probably not much. Right, nearly time to walk to the bus station. I prefer trains. You know where you are with trains. Buses rely on some knowledge of the local geography, instead of a clear and calm robot voice, supplemented by a clear, decisive LED display, telling you when you're at your stop. I wonder where San Francisco airport is. I hope it's near San Francisco.
Location: My sister's living room, Oxford.
Mode of blogging: My sister's laptop.
Already I'm regretting packing the ukelele. It doesn't stay in tune and just because it's a lot smaller than a guitar doesn't mean it fits easily in my rucksack. I spent years pronouncing 'rucksack' like a German or a northerner, with a 'rook' sound for the first syllable. I think it's because that's how my dad says it and of all the people I regularly to talk to, he is probably the most prolific user of the word 'rucksack'. Some mates pointed out a few years back that I said it 'wrong', and for a while I started pronouncing it poshly, but now I've switched back. In case you're wondering, I'm not going anywhere with this ramble, I'm just bored waiting for a 4am bus to Heathrow Airport and I'm scared that if I go to sleep I'll miss said bus and wake up five minutes before check-in, in the wrong city.
According to the Blogger account login control panel thingy, this will be my 100th post. I imagine that includes all the ones that I start writing but don't finish. Still, I suppose it's a landmark of sorts. Still half an hour before I have to leave for the bus station. I just used the word 'still' to begin two consecutive sentences. I'm also not too sure about my spelling of 'syllable' in the first paragraph. This is as close as you can get to just reading my thoughts as they happen. I'm just typing whatever comes into my head. I've got two creme eggs in my rucksack. I've spent the last three or four weeks attempting to grow a beard, and it hasn't worked. I'm starting to wish I'd got rid of it when I had a shower this morning. I've loaded up my MP3 player with 8GB of music and 10 episodes of Scrubs. I doubt I'm going to watch any Scrubs on my 2-inch screen - it seems like a sad thing to do whilst exploring the world - but I like knowing that I could if I wanted to. Here's my prediction for what will be the soundtrack to my holiday:
Radiohead - Pablo Honey
Sigur Ros - Afaskljhfakjsh Bdfajkfhdlkjsfh (can't spell it, it's Icelandic)
Bright Eyes - Fevers and Mirrors
Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Leonard Cohen - Songs of Love and Hate
Kanye West - Late Registration
Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump (that's how it's spelt, promise)
Bjork - Homogenic
Ekkeko - The Canal Boat Sessions (yes, my band is a lot shitter than everyone else on the list but I want to see what we sound like in various settings, like on a plane or on a beach)
I think that's enough typing. I'm not sure how much I'll update this for the next few months. Probably not much. Right, nearly time to walk to the bus station. I prefer trains. You know where you are with trains. Buses rely on some knowledge of the local geography, instead of a clear and calm robot voice, supplemented by a clear, decisive LED display, telling you when you're at your stop. I wonder where San Francisco airport is. I hope it's near San Francisco.
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