Looking Back and Forward

I think there's a mouse under my bed. There's an occasional sound of something scrabbling around in rustling plastic - maybe it's trying to eat some packing material.

We have some mousetraps - "humane" ones that trap the mouse in a box instead of smashing it with a spring loaded mechanism. But I prefer to use the ultrasonic repellants - I've got one here somewhere.

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I learned to read before I went to school. At age 3 and 4 my parents sat me on their knees and read me stories, and I followed the words on the page. Sometimes we reversed the process, and I read to them.

The Mr Men stories of Roger Hargreaves, Norman Hunter's adventures of Professor Branestawn and the Kingdom of Incrediblania. And a bit later the comicbook adventures of Tintin (from where I later took my name) and Asterix the Gaul.

At around age 7 I took to staying up all night, hiding under the bedclothes with a lamp, reading novelisations of Dr Who adventures. This led to some occasionally singed bedclothes. I was constantly reprimanded for this, and told I should sleep at night so as not to fall asleep at school. But school was boring and pointless, so I didn't see that it mattered if I was half asleep in lessons.

At 12 I ploughed through all the novels published at the time by David Eddings and Piers Anthony.

Through the second half of puberty I presumably had other things than books on my mind - though my grandmother was horrified to find me reading Desmond Morris. It wasn't "suitable".

At 17 I read everything I could find about Greek philosophy - largely to live up to the expectations of a teacher who'd decided I was intelligent, and to have something to talk about with a frightfully clever boy who I thought was just gorgeous.

Ah well, after "doing" everything from the Milesians to the Stoics, I jumped to Empiricism and Positivism, taking detours into Kant, Augustine and Descartes. And to this day I've never managed to read a full page of Hegel.

At around 20 I discovered Samuel Beckett and the other absurdist playwrights. Then James Baldwin, Stanislaw Lem, John LeCarre and William Burroughs. In each case, I gorged myself on the entire back catalogue of each writer, before stumbling over a new one.

Unfortunately then I went to university so stopped reading much. Though I did go through the 10 volumes of Stephen Jay Gould's essays while supposedly studying art history.

So now, with the electronic miracles of OCR and quasi-legal ebook newsgroups, I can revisit my personal bibliograhy, and this time I can speedread it. Oh yes, there was a period when I read nothing but books on speedreading too.

I've re-read some Piers Anthony overnight, and have decided...

...that he can't do dialogue at all. All his characters speak in the same stilted patronising tone, all his women balance intelligence and self-sacrificing integrity with big boobs and the need for a strong man, and all his men make the journey from sensitive boy to confident adult, obsessing over the boobs all the way.

It's got buckets of imagination and skilled pacing - just rubbish characters and speech. Which I somehow didn't notice the first time around.

So what's on the menu for tonight? Another writer to re-evaluate or re-experience. But probably not Roger Hargreaves.

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Three days to go before the party/gig/performance art piece, and there's an extra speaker and another singer added to the bill, the running times and order is uncertain...and a certain member of Strict Machines is trying to turn the whole thing into a personal ego trip.

So I expect last minute revisions on the night, arguments, hissy fits, last minute re-revisions, frayed nerves and resentment.

I plan to turn up an hour early, set up the amplifiers, drums and recording equipment, then stay drunk until it's time for me to sing.