1) Jenny driving away.

2) Dark tower of Central Library.

3) St. Werburghs

4) Broken clock on Friargate.

5) Another clock, just before the bridge.

6) Window owl.
7) Faceless clock.

The Vinegar Stone (edge of quarantine zone during The Plague. This is as far as traders came, and collected money left soaked in vinegar to decontaminate.)

http://biff.muxtape.com

I got to work and started writing on the board on the wall with the pen that you can do that with. I like having the room to do this. I could never do this when I worked from home, and there was never a board on a wall at the office where I used to sometimes work when I wasn’t working from home. It’s better than notepads and .txt files. It’s better than recycled paper or post-it notes. So I wrote down a note about Friday and the eights all started rolling out.

I went and put the kettle on, and thought about it being ages before that date comes along again. 8/8/2108 it will be. The other lining up of eights will be in 8/8/2088 but, unless I live past one-hundred and six years old I won’t be around. If I am I either won’t be able to see, or will be more machine than man and have no feelings…unless the sight of all those eights together triggers a flood of emotions in my circuit board brain and sends waves of electrons to blow my flux capacitor heart to smithereens with the vastness of it all.

Either way, Friday is the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year in this century. And at eight minutes past the eighth hour on that day, I’m going to do something that involves eight things. I might write about it here, I might even have pictures, but I might not as, after all, they’re only numbers, but they’re my favourite ones…

(I might cycle up there today and take Oink a watermelon.)

Jenn Ashworth is running an MA in creative writing. I went to university for a bit and did most of a degree in English Literature with a few Creative Writing modules thrown in. It was alright, in hindsight, but I always wondered if it was really preparing me for the world outside. Arturo Bandini seemed to be having a hard time getting published, as did Buckowski.

It’s alright working in a post office and getting really drunk and getting into fights and beating your wife, or flim flamming around LA eating oranges and complaining all the time about everything other than your implied toilet difficulties. Those things are alright if it’s the fifties and if it’s America. What we need now, and here, is a good old school of Hard Knocks.

Enter Ashworth University. The criteria and learning modules are explained in no uncertain terms here.

I’m going for it. I’m going for the torture, the self doubt, the loneliness, the endless repetition in the hope that, in the very least, I’ll finish some stories. If I get published, that’ll be a bonus, for I’ll have Been Through It and Come Out The Other End a better writer, and a better person. Maybe.

Here is my ‘author photo’ what I took using the camera on my computer:

1. Black and white – CHECK
2. Arty – CHECK
3. Stroking of top lip – GETTING THERE
4. Glasses – CHECK
5. No smiling – CHECK
6. No teeth – CHECK

Apart from looking like I’m on my way to picking my nose, I think that’ll pass. I don’t wear glasses anymore. That must count for something.

I bought some Sunblest bread and it was less than a pound and that made me think of Dispatches and I walked out of the shop and there was a police helicopter overhead and the words “Wheat Crime” and “Grow Bag” flashed up in my head and I thought “Sunblest is only really any good for toast, I wonder what percentage of reconstituted cardboard there is in the average Sunblest loaf” so I went home and ate some toast and wrote a poem and now I’m going to read Joseph Heller to make myself feel better about ALL THE INSANITY IN THE WORLD TODAY.

It is called ‘Either/Or’ and, as Wikipedia will tell you, “a surreal 1999 television comedy game show, which was broadcast on the digital channel UK Play. The show takes its name from the book Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard. It starred Simon Munnery as his League Against Tedium character and was a precursor to his BBC series Attention Scum!. The show was largely a launchpad for Munnery’s unusual comic monologues.”

I couldn’t find a clip from it. However, while looking for it, I found this by Munnery: