John Walker's Electronic House

Hopefully this is the last post from here.

Moving has been utterly hideous. So slow, drawn out, laboured. A tiny little Punto is no car for transfering large amounts of everything from one side of a valley to another, and having a week away from doing it, while somewhat welcome, has dragged the entire process out beyond anything reasonable. That I am still here terrifies me. That I still have to shift lots of heavy items scares me further. (A fat lot of use burglars turn out to be. An open invitation is ignored, while my friend’s flat is burgled in Uncivilised London. Sort yourselves out, theives. You’re acting like a bunch of ruffians who don’t care for people’s wellbeing – think of your reputation for goodness sakes).

If I can get some help today (ie. another, bigger, car) I might just make it by this evening. Of course, that only means that all my boxed and bagged Stuff is now in another place, and I have to entirely reverse the process, but fitting it all into half the space. I appear to have developed some sort of safety barrier preventing my acknowledging this properly, or I might just break down completely. And getting help won’t be easy, as all the hulking men I know were… I don’t know any hulking men. All the potential stuff carriers I know stayed up all last night playing computer games at Tim’s house. Without another vehicle, I’m stuffed.

I left for Soul Survivor a week ago with the statement, “I am still not sure about the answer to [why I’m going]. I hope that it will be revealed in my time there.”

I kind of knew that it would be. And it was.

I had the most extraordinary week – I went to something incredible, something that reminded me why I do my job (youth work), and something that reminded me why I’m a Christian. Soul Survivor deserves celebrating. Telling someone about the previous week’s Soul In The City project, it was remarked that it was terrible that such a thing got little publicitiy, when the plentiful ill-actions of Christians get widespread coverage. So I’ll let another fifty or so people hear about it…

Soul Survivor is a Christian festival for teenagers, with the intention of inspiring them to identify the injustice and problems in the world, and give them the support and means to do something about it. It encourages young people in their faith, or introduces them to one. It’s difficult, and it’s honest. Most of all, it’s not freaky or attempting to brainwash kids into becoming Good Little Christians who do their homework. Which was what I was scared it might be. It’s quite extraordinary, and I think the best thing I can do is suggest going along next year to see it. Sian, who has been going for years, was the very best company for the thing. If you can take one of her with you, I’d recommend that too.

But more excitingly, Soul Survivor has been more that talk. It’s been going for over a decade (this year including separate venues and seminars for 20 somethings who have grown up with the project), and in 2000 developed something called Soul In The City. That one was in Manchester, this year’s was in London.

So this year, 11,000 teenagers went to the poorest, most run-down estates in London, and worked. They cleaned parks, painted buildings, cleared people’s gardens, visited the elderly, litter-picked, tidied, helped whereever help was needed. Rather than standing outside the estates announcing how money would soon be invested in improving property prices in the area, they went in and got on with it. 11,000 of them, giving up a week of their summer holiday to do crappy jobs that no one else wants to. That deserves some attention.

It’s a lot to do with an incredible guy called Mike Pilavachi, big of belly and bad of shirt and hair, and one of the most extraordinarily caring men I’ve come across. In a world where I cannot turn my head for seeing people being hateful and cruel in the name of Christianity, he is a man who gives me hope. And best of all, he’s quite a big idiot too. The best sort.

For all my complaining, and despite the agony of the move, I’m very glad I went. I got to be reminded that God is actually real, and to stay up late eating potato wedges with way too much mayo every night. It just about gives me the strength to look at the pile of Stuff in the hallway, the Stuff I somehow have to magically transport to Jonty’s, without crying.

The Botherer Blog is on holiday for a week.

Moving house is officially a thoroughly miserable experience. Carload after carload of Stuff, day after day, and yet when I walk in the flat, it still looks full. It’s so depressing, so soul-tearingly disheartening, to have shifted out quite so much, to see a place still quite so full.

Still, the heroic Chrissy helped me empty the kitchen today – cupboards are bare. There’s still hideous things to move, like the freezer and an armchair. And yet more to be taken to the dump. And as it says at the top, I’m away for a week.

The week away is a Christian youth festival called Soul Survivor. It’s supposed to be very good, if you’re a teenager. I’m not. So my attendance is really in the form of ‘work’. Although I’m not entirely sure why. Everyone going appears to be a relative of my line manager, so it’s not official work anyway. I was talked into going months back, by the suggestion that I was slightly more necessary than I apparently am. Which leaves me screaming at anyone who comes near (sorry everyone) WHY AM I SPENDING A WEEK SLEEPING IN A TENT WHEN I COULD BE AT HOME, WHICHEVER ONE THAT IS?” I am still not sure about the answer to that question. I hope that it will be revealed in my time there.

However, I do intend to sneak off for an afternoon/evening at some point, in order to do a bit more sneaky moving. It turns out the place is only half hour away, which also brings me back to a familiar question, “WHY AM I SPENDING A WEEK SLEEPING IN A TENT WHEN I COULD BE AT HOME, WHICHEVER ONE THAT IS?” I doubt very much that this answer will be revealed in my time there.

Fortunately, the lovely Sian is coming too. This makes the prospect a little more fun-sounding, as at least there will be someone I know over the age of 20, and under the age of 45. We shall see. Also, I fully intend to meet the person who will eventually become known as Festival Girl. Hopefully also over the age of 20, and under the age of 45. Two decades under 45, ideally.

Of course, while I’m away, if anyone fancies breaking into my flat, cleaning it, and moving the rest of the stuff to Jonty’s, the kitchen window isn’t really locked properly. And if you’re a mean old burglar, who would think to break into my flat and not clean, then not move the rest of my stuff to Jonty’s, then don’t you bother you cheeky scamp. Unless you want to steal some armchairs and a freezer. If you do, could you take the brown armchairs in the lounge, as I don’t want those. And if your arm could be twisted, the fridge instead of the freezer, as we don’t need it. And clean. But don’t steal the hoover.

I don’t want to move house any more.

Friday was absolutely rubbish.

I got up at 9am in order to get on with packing first thing.

And enough with the spluttering. I went to bed at 2am, so 9am was a perfectly reasonable time to get up. Just because your silly job makes you get up at a time you find painful and difficult to awaken, don’t complain because I don’t deny my body’s natural, chemical desire to get up between 9 and 10. And of course, the reason I was up at 2am was because I was working, doing my job.

So up at the crack of mid-morning, I came into the study for the morning’s usual webtrawl, preparing before the attack against two years’ worth of the paper piles that make up the wobbly, slippery carpeting in my workspace. And then the weirdest noise comes from my computer.

CLICK CLOCK CLICK CLOCK CLICK CLOCK

I realised eventually it was one of the hard drives, at which point the computer locked up, and I rebooted. To no avail. More of the

CLICK CLOCK CLICK CLOCK CLICK CLOCK

and no boot. The terror began to set in. The question was, which of the three hard drives was it.

Unplugging and replugging revealed it was the brand new 160GB drive I bought a month ago, on which I had stored six years’ worth of mp3s, both music and comedy, as well as all my games and save files from previous games. If it had been the boot drive, it would have been fairly catestrophic – no Windows, no boot, no computer. If it had been the 80GB drive, it would have been similarly terrible – all my writing and applications. So I suppose, incredibly grudgingly, it was the right drive to go.

That didn’t take away the empty, sucking feeling in my stomach, as I sat in front of the screen so gutted as to not know how to react. It was the comedy files mostly, I think – years of collected radio comedy and stand up, some of it very rare and precious. The music could be replaced, either by re-ripping the CD, or… evaluating another copy of the albums. But the comedy had either been recorded from the radio (CRIME!) or sourced from various websites or downloaded via P2P. I’m talking about stuff going back as far as the 60s, and most of it unavailable for sale anywhere.

And then I remembered that the only way these files were on my new HD was because they’d been copied from the previous ones. I’ve heard that files can be recovered from hard drives, even after they’ve been formatted, but I’m not sure I ever took it seriously. But by the magics of a clever little application, GBs of comedy programmes magically reappeared from a formatted drive. In the end, I’ve recovered quite a lot of what was lost, for which I’m unbelieveably grateful. There is a lot lost altogether, and losts of bits are missing from here and there, but it’s all infinitely more than I thought I’d have 12 hours ago.

Huge thanks to Jonty, for keeping me calm as it all fell apart, and reminding me that the files were still recoverable. Also to Richard Cobbett and Kieron for helping out with recovery tips. And massive thanks to Stuart Campbell for being right about everything, again. I’d also like to thank my mother and father, without whom I wouldn’t have achieved any of this. And my producer, director, and co-stars. You’re all [sniiiiiff] beautiful people.

The moral of the story is: back up your files, kids. Don’t put it off. The empty sucking feeling says NOW!

But this all meant little packing got done, and my sister and her husband are visiting tomorrow, so time is getting thin. I’m away all next week, so I really need to be out of here by Sunday. Blimey.

I have so much stuff.

Just stupid amounts of stuff. My completely wonderful mum came down today to help shift a couple of giant middle class people carrier loads of stuff to Jonty’s flat. (I’m not ready to say “my flat” yet. I think it will take my computer being located there before I can say that). And finally I appear to have made some sort of dent into the stuff volumes.

It was mightily depressing, shifting across about 900 boxes of DVDs, CDs and books with Jonty the other day, to come home and find it didn’t look any different. At least the removal of some serious furniture gives me some visual victory. Of course, it also causes my lounge to look mortally wounded, gutted, weirdly barren. A lived in space has a sense of life, and I’m taking that away, bit by bit… Oh no, I’m murdering my flat.

Of course, I’m also creating some life at the same time – but it isn’t the same. Moving into an already alive flat, it’s not the same as creating a new life from scratch. It’s not unworthy work, however. Chrissy gave the place a near-lethal garrotting as she left, ripping out vital items of furniture and electrical equipment, leaving it bleeding and weak. Jonty can only do so much, his patching of the wounds holding the place together, but it’s no long-term solution. The life stolen from my current home can go towards saving the new place. Wow, it’s kinda beautiful. Sniff. I think, somehow, it’s all going to be ok.

If only I could stop procrastinating, faffing around, and actually get on with this packing. At least now, while I’m piddling around reloading websites that I know won’t have changed their contents since the last time I reloaded four seconds ago, I can allow myself the thought that for, at that time at least, I’m not murdering anything.

Oh no, but that means I’m instead like some sort of sicko crazy serial killer, who likes to draw out the murder of his victim, finding solace in ensuring that the grizzly destruction of life lasts as long as possible. I don’t want to be him! Make it all go away, I don’t want this any more!

[clicks heels]

There’s no place like home! There’s no place like h…

Oh no. Sinister new interpretation of the phrase.

Spiralling downwards.

Or if we’re more honest, writing lots and lots of complete rubbish instead of sorting out the mountain of rubbish all around me.

I had a photoshoot for PC Format today.

Because I don’t often do photoshoots, that’s not a phrase I can say very often. But because I hang around with people who do such things much more frequently, they are spoken of commonly and quite dismissively. “I had to go to the photo studio this afternoon,” is the casual beginning of a tale about some event related to or happening nearby. And hence the expressions have entered my vocabularly as purely descriptive terms.

Which means anyone not in the Future Circle gives me a horrible look when I put it into a sentence, no matter how innocently. And then I hear myself, and realise what a tosspot I sound like. But it’s not fair! It’s just the term. Poor, poor me. Poor maligned, hard-suffering, me, struggling through each day with the weight of work pressing down upon me. But do you care?! No! You just tsk at my insufferable verbiage. Well, I hope you feel sorry now.

Anyway, so I did a photoshoot for Format today. It’s for a feature that’s been bubbling away for a while now, and involved my standing on a specific “don’t move!” spot for twenty minutes, while looking cross at an imaginary foe. At one point I was stood with my ‘dukes’ up, eyebrows furrowed, being told, “Snarl more. A bigger snarl… Show more teeth.” And for a moment the thought rushed through my head, “this is part of your job”.

I think I can safely say it’s the first time my ‘dukes’ have been necessary for anything. I’ve never been in a fight. Apart from when Simon Somethingorother pushed me over in the playground and I hit my head on the wall, and then that doesn’t really count as a fight as I hardly responded. Unless hitting my head on the wall was my clever satire of his attempt to damage me with his boy-hulk fists. Yes, that’s it. But I didn’t even get a chance to find out if my fists would automatically raise to defend myself in a conflict situation. Although I doubt this very much. The only self defense I ever learned was judo, when I was 11. I’m not convinced an attacker is going to be prepared to change into those white jackets, or even just start the fight by gripping my clothing in the correct positions so that my evasive manoeuvres can be carried out. “Use their own weight against them,” we were told. Does that work? “Oi, mugger. You’re a bit fat, and it makes your arse look ridiculous in those trousers.”

We also did lots of being photographed for Negativeland tonight, going all over Bath for various scenes. If you’ve not read it, I highly recommend it. The link above takes you to Big Robot’s main image page. Click on “GILLEN” on the left for the archive of episodes. There are only four or five more episodes to come, so now’s the time to catch up.

But doing that, waving our arms around at each other, crawling around on my hands and knees in the populated streets of Bath, endlessly walking in and out of Kieron’s flat – that’s for fun and giggles. Clearly Negativeland is bigger than that, but as for our participation in its creation, we’re some mates having fun with a camera. The proper work comes in when Kieron puts it all together, and writes the scripts.

But doing both in one day only highlighted the weirdness of this lunchtime’s… I want to say “shoot”, because that’s the word, but then it’s all that tosspottery again. It’s a genuine, bonafide part of my real paying job to be told, “show more teeth when you snarl”. So weird.

I have begun the process of moving house.

It’s a lot harder than I had realised. I knew that attempting to pack all my stuff up into boxes was going to be long and arduous. I knew that I have accumulated a lot more stuff over the last two years than I had when I moved in here, and that this was going to make things more difficult. And I knew that moving into a smaller space meant that the process would involve working out what I don’t need, and what should go.

What I hadn’t realised was that moving out of a flat is very different from moving out of your parents’ house. The first time I did that was university, where I moved straight into a house in my first year, and then to another, bigger house for my second year. I wouldn’t give a single thing to be back at university in Stoke on Trent. To start with, it’s in Stoke on Trent, and I don’t think there’s anything that would convince me to ever live there again, and secondly, I’d have to go to that useless university again. But that house – if I could somehow transport it to Bath, that would be a beautiful, if not weird and dangerous thing. I digress. Moving into those houses didn’t count at all, as I left most my stuff behind. Moving back into my parents’ place after was an effort, but I was moving back into my room, just going back to ‘normal’. The move to Winsley was a lot bigger – this was actually moving out, taking all my stuff with me (albeit as slowly as I could get away with. I thought I’d sneakily managed to leave behind lots of stuff I didn’t want, and didn’t want the job of sorting out. How delighted I was when my parents visited, bringing with them about six black binbags of that stuff, and dumped it in my hallway. How they must have laughed as they drove home. Apparently they needed the stuff out of ‘my room’ because otherwise there wouldn’t be enough room in there for them to dump all their random junk and unwanted exercise equipment).

But what I hadn’t realised about a proper, actual grown up house moving, is that you have to take everything with you. I’m sure it’s stupidly obvious to all but myself (as I always do at this point, I remind or inform that I am the person who believed cinema curtains to be transparent for the first 17 or so years of my life – I mean, come on, you can see the film through them!) but every time I’ve left a house before, I’ve not needed to strip the place down like some sort of fanatic burglar. The moment it hit me was while filling box after box after box with books I’m absolutely intending to read soon, and stopped for a moment to get a drink. I walked into the kitchen, looked at the table covered in stuff that would need sorting, and then like a wave crashing in my face, realised that every single thing in this room was going to have to come too. Including the table.

The first wave of boxes has left the flat, thanks to the help of my soon to be fake-wife, Jonty. It turns out that the flat we’ll be sharing is for married couples only, so expect tales of some sort of gay version of Spaced in the coming weeks. So far we have shifted a full carload of CDs, DVDs, and the first box of books. This is going to take a thousand million trillion years.

I went to the dentist today.

Which in my case doubles up with going to see my dad at work. From close up. Far too close up. Where he’s inserting seventeen different whirring, drilling, hating machines into my mouth.

At this point I want to make some joke about how it’s a good job my dad isn’t an X, where Y would happen if I went to see him at work. But I realise that I’m already the punchline. Um, it’s a good job my dad isn’t a murderer for a living…

People often comment that it must be incredibly weird to have your dad be your dentist. But what they don’t realise is that my dad has always been my dentist. As far as my childhood was concerned, fixing your teeth was something a dad did. So in fact it’s weird that your dads don’t. What are you saying, you let some complete stranger put electric drills in your mouth? What are you, an idiot?

It’s important (to me) to point out that my dad is an exceptionally good dentist. Obviously, I’m not likely to say otherwise, but I feel I can say it with some amount of evidence on my side. I’ve had quite a few friends tell me that they’re not happy with their dentist, then see my dad, and report back that they hadn’t realised how bad their previous dentist had been comparatively. It also stops people from saying, “So does your dad treat your teeth at home?” and other peculiar questions.

Unfortunately, I have evolved beyond most humans. My bottom teeth (the lower teeth in my mouth – I don’t have freakish teeth in my bottom) have nerves that are invulnerable to even the most powerful of anaesthetics, in quantities great enough to put down a horse. My gum can be so numbed that I have no feeling down one entire side of my body, and yet still the nerves beneath my teeth are capable of detecting every moment of the drill, every poke of the double-ended metal pokey thing, even a squirt from the water-spraying squirty thing (it should be becoming clear that I have learned a great deal about dentistry throughout my life. Actually, I can do a really good impression of the drill. Ask me to do it whenever you see me) and report this sensory information back as the sort of pain that one might ordinarily associate with having your arm ripped out of your shoulder in a tug-of-war contest. It’s an otherworldly, deep, hollowing pain, tearing away at my very soul, cold, hideous and felt in every part of my body from the centre of the tooth spreading outwards in pulsing waves of torment. I wish I were exaggerating.

Today, by great fortune and the astonishing skill of my father, there was only one second of that pain. Previously when I had a problem on the other side, my dad ended up removing the nerve from the tooth, just so he could do a single thing without my curling up into a ball and sobbing on his plasticy chair. After that, it was great. He could have taken to it with a hammer and chisel, and I wouldn’t have flinched.

My nerves are better than yours. For my greatness I suffer.

I now have a better functioning mouth, and best of all, I get to hug my dentist goodbye.

New They’re Back in the archive

I like the silly Throne of Darkness review.

There’s a thought in my head, still taking shape. As the parts begin to slot together, it reveals more of itself, as I get closer to realising what it’s about.

I saw Before Sunset tonight at the Little Theatre in Bath, with the same group as Monday night when watching the original. It’s a very clever film, delicate and honest. Incredibly honest. Deceitful at first, because people so often are. And so even in this, honest.

During both films I have reached for a pen to write down ideas. In the first, I couldn’t find paper, so covered my left hand in notes. During tonight’s, I couldn’t get to my pen without my cinema chair making a terrible creaking sound for too long. The first film’s thoughts were a metaphor I will crowbar into something at some point, and an idea for a film that I think might actually be quite good. Although ridiculously hard to write well. Tonight’s was more of this lingering unformed thought beginning to make some more sense.

As with all jumbled thoughts, it’s not quite in English, but it goes something like this: I’ve realised that I’ve stopped noticing the texture of things.

It’s almost literal. As I watched Linklater’s careful photography of Paris, I was excited by the intricate pattern of flaked paint from the rustic walls of the stairwell the two characters climb. Or the lighting every time the tourist boat they ride on passes under a bridge (also, how if I were in that peddalo, this boat would have been the enemy, but that’s not so relevant). And her flat… oh, that flat. So beautifully detailed, so much to look at and take in. And yet a large, one room flat with a wooden floor and white walls. But noticing all this, loving how careful Linklater had been to show me all this, I realised that I only ever seem to notice these things on film.

Which is terrible! I think I’ve become lazy in my routine. I’m watching, rather than looking. Just scanning the surface details, rather than absorbing. That’s no way to go through life.

I get some strange search engine referals, but this is too brilliant.

Search Google for:

nazi cyclists