This week, that part of the world for me has been ceilings.

Ceilings are almost the very definition of ‘things that I don’t think about’. As a general rule, I don’t look up. I expect most people are the same in this respect, which is why it’s so easy to capture them in net traps set up to fall in their hallways when they come home.

Anyway. This week the ceiling in my bedroom decided that it wanted a change of perspective of its own, and would rather be on the floor, which forced me to contemplate the concept of the ceiling properly for the first time.

Interestingly, it turns out that I have no idea how they work. Many people have asked me searching questions about water damage (there was none), joists (yep, some were there), plasterboard (not sure how that differs to plaster, I’m not convinced there even was any) and I have thus been forced to bluff my way through several conversations made up entirely of ceiling-based jargon in order not to appear an utterly incompetent failure of a human being.

“Can you imagine not even knowing how ceilings work?! I mean, how does one even fall off in the first place! What an idiot!”

I imagine people have been thinking things much along these lines. It would only be reasonable for them to do so, I’m sure.

So. I’ve been living on the floor of the lounge for nearly ten days, and becoming increasingly obsessed by the slow state of ceiling repair, and dreaming of those halcyon days when I didn’t think about ceilings at all.

My dreams have been haunted by falling masonry, and I was forced to give up a playthrough of the Legend of Zelda when the floor in the temple rose up and attacked me as I feared it would make my nightmares even worse.

Luckily I’ve discovered that my laptop works outdoors and so I’m writing this from the street. I think I can probably manage without going indoors anymore for a good few years, by which time I’m banking that ceiling technology will have improved to the point where this will never happen again.

Otherwise, I think I’ve taken the experience rather well.

I have to go now.

It’s starting to rain and I need the laptop for shelter.

Saints Alive!

It’s a dark and stormy night in Rome, and somewhere deep in the Vatican a religious experiment is going badly wrong…

The world awakes to find that The Pope has accidentally (?) unleashed the Saints… and this time, they’re out for revenge.

Only one man can stand between the Saints and their mad lust for carnage. And – over ninety action splattered minutes – he will.

Imagine epic battles with the biggest names in Saint-dom, each with their own special power and weakness. Picture the scene…

St. Francis of Assisi is commanding armies of birds as he mercilessly destroys all in his path. Our hero is brought to his knees by the constant violent pecking, but somehow finds power within himself at the last moment, and convinces the birds to turn on their former master and shred St. Francis where he stands.

Our hero looks up, shattered but ultimately triumphant as he surveys the many remains of St. Francis, and in his most badass voice delivers the immortal line:

“Make me a channel of your PIECES, Francis.”

Eminently quotable, fantastically merchandiseable and with potential to grow into a blockbuster franchise. Loved by the religous – for its educational value (“I never even knew who St. Therese of Avila was, let alone how incredibly agile she must have been to deliver blows like that”) – and the irreligious alike. It’s sure to be a hit.

Right?

Regardless, there are more interesting things to write about, and finishing writing about Edinburgh has become an albatross that has prevented me from writing anything at all. As I’m such a pedantic completionist the fact that I called the last post Part I must mean I need to write a whole load of posts on the subject. Right?!

Part of me actually wishes I had been harrassed by a literal albatross instead, as at least this would have given me something to write about.

So in the noble spirit of ‘just getting the bloody thing out of the way’ here are a list of things vaguely worth mentioning about Edinburgh. This will be interesting to almost no-one, but at least I’ll have done it and we can all move on with our lives.

Edinburgh 2010:

1. It was marvellous.
2. John Luke Roberts Distracts You From a Murder was a thoroughly superb show.
3. H Anthony Hildebrand made me laugh a lot, and was criminally underrated by the audience the evening I saw him. Hope the show got a better run on other nights.
4. Stalking is only cool when I do it.
5. Everyone I have ever met through Twitter is an excellent person that I wish I could spend infinitely more time with.
6. Getting back on the Tube after a fortnight of walking through a beautiful city is a sadly dehumanising experience.
7. I met several famous people in social situations and coped surprisingly well. I am cool.
8. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the dickishness of late night comedy show attendees, but I was.
9. Being made to sing under pressure and in public needn’t be as bad as imagined.
10. Daniel Kitson makes the world a better place.

I saw about 30 to 40 shows, spent time with some of my favourite people, was utterly entertained, shattered and relaxed. I completed the first Phoenix Wright. And I’ll be back next year.

Some would also say that eighteen months doesn’t really count as two years, even if technically 1.5 years would round to 2.0 if you absolutely had to round them for some reason. Perhaps an integer obsessed gunman is on the loose and asking questions about how long it’s been since you’ve been on a proper holiday? But nevermind the reason. They’d also be right.

Some others would say that the Edinburgh Fringe is a ludicrous choice of destination for a first proper holiday in two years a long time. They are fools. But they’re also right.

Regardless of this completely manufactured debate I did indeed choose two weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe as an appropriate place to go to recharge my batteries after a tricky few months. Would it be a decision I’d come to regret? Only by reading this upcoming series of posts will you find out!

I broke up the journey by stopping twice – once for an adventure in deepest darkest Shropshire with my Sherlock-obsessed political fangirl friend Nat, and once at the old family home on the Wirral.

Both of these were excellent decisions.

I had only intended to stop at Nat’s for a meal (at the finest Indian restaurant in the whole village), but ended up preferring the option of a pub crawl and a night on the farm to driving into the rainy darkness for another few hours. The village has more pubs than people and is thus well set up for a superb night of conversation and mild debauchery. Highlights included the cheapest pool table since my days in the British Legion (honest), the best local newspaper letters page I’ve seen in years (one particularly fantastic letter genuinely complained about the effect Hitler had on the development of Plymouth town centre), watching the local youths ‘flirting’ with each other by stealing the girls bras and wearing them on their heads, and trekking back to the farm in the pitch blackness through fields of mud, cowpat and terror.

On arrival back at the farm I was presented with a small dilemma. I had taken against Sherlock out of spite after unknowingly missing the first episode and being blown away by a torrent of hype and squealing. Stubbornly I decided to avoid it unless it became strictly unavoidable. And since Nat had watched the first episode every day since it had been first aired it transpired that staying at her house made it strictly unavoidable.

Luckily it turned out I loved it.

I am nothing if not open-minded.

The Wirral also made for a delightful but sadly brief visit. The main feature was a marvellous dinner party with some friends, spending most of the night discussing a mutual friend’s bizarre lovelife and the equally bizarre proposed development of one of the tallest buildings in Britain on the Wirral. And an argument about politics which for once I stayed out of!

At one point I saw my chance to try out the Greatest Joke Ever again. It failed, but I think I’m just hanging around with the wrong people.

But as all good things must come to an end, so must my journey to Edinburgh. Luckily, however, after it finished I was due to have two weeks actually at the Fringe… introducing my flatmate Hope to the delights of the festival, seeing lots of shows, eating, drinking and meeting interesting people.

So I didn’t mind the journey ending. If anything… I was quite happy about it.

It went down like a very confused lead balloon, but I am sure there must be an audience for it somewhere. And so I am posting it here in the sincere hope that it will one day discover that audience.

We were in the pub.

[This isn't the joke, this is merely the context in which the joke was made. But do feel free to be amused by anything in this story that may warrant amusement. I expect there won't be anything though.]

My friend was relaying a funny incident that had happened to her earlier that day, in which someone she’d been talking to had misheard her talking about “G & T parties”, thinking she’d been talking about orgies.

Instantly I leapt in with a devastating witticism!

“Surely that’d be A, C, G & T parties, am I right?!”

[That was the joke. Bitter experience has told me this might not be obvious.]

As you read, you might be sympathising with the reaction of my friends to this comment. They looked at me with expressions of confusion, and possibly pity. I scanned their faces for a sign of recognition, that the cleverness and timing of my joke was hitting home.

“A, C, G and T? No? No-one getting this?!”

Increasingly desperate, I began to explain:

“A, C, G and T… come on! The four proteins that make up DNA, yeah?! DNA? So an ACG&T party would be a DNA party, which is like a witty way of saying orgy?”

A sea of blank faces.

“… because at an orgy DNA would be exchanged. So you could call it a DNA party. Or an ACG&T party if you were being cool…”

People started to nod. Perhaps out of desperation, or to make me stop talking. Or perhaps their brains had only just caught up to the genius of the joke.

“… which is a play on G&T party and orgy at the same time! You get it?!”

They didn’t.

The philistines.

errr just incase you are concerned, after being left on such a bizarre cliffhanger (sorry!), all is well.. he’s only a labrador and I don’t think it’s possible to be licked to death! xx

Oh. Good.

Well, that’s alright then.

According to the OBR the British economy is apparently down by £47,851 due to lost productivity spent chronicling the bizarre adventures of Cameron & Clegg. I think we are on to break the £100,000 mark by next week.

My favourite statistic, however, is that while ten people have found their way to the site by googling “enhughesiasm”, one person found their way here by googling “the last airbender review”. I have no idea how that happened; as far as I can tell none of those words appear on the site except for “the”. Clearly the hole in the space-time continuum ripped by George Osborne has extended as far as Google!

Lastly, you can now start your own stories should the fancy take you. This can only help us all fight the war against productivity. Or procrastinate in the war against productivity, I’m not really sure.

Normal blog posts (ie those that are more about ‘stuff’ and less about this website) will resume shortly – and hopefully semi-regularly – so until then please find something amusing to do.

Which can be elsewhere on the site if you like, but also just elsewhere generally is good too.

Yours,

Neil

(I have no idea why I’ve started signing blog posts. But I’m so tired I can hardly see, which may explain if not excuse it.)

This spangly new site mixes together my blog and my past experimentation with happy things on the internet, all rewritten to be much slicker to use. And with pretty menu animations! (if you’re viewing this in a decent browser like Chrome or Firefox, I mean…)

There’s plenty for you to get involved in, from adding to the collaborative stories, complaining about the universe, making the world happier, all the way to adding to the fire engine gallery. And as time goes on I’ll probably add some more fun stuff too… when I recover from rewriting this whole thing from scratch!

Anyway, I’m delighted you’re here and hope you find reasons to come back. Have fun exploring around, and if you could at least pretend to admire it to me then I will feel that all these evenings sitting around working on this haven’t been entirely wasted.

Yours welcomingly,

Neil

PS If you’re reading this at wordpress, you should head over to enhughesiasm to see what I’m talking about..!

PPS If you had an account at the previous incarnation of enhughesiasm.com then your account still exists here. Pro, or what? :p

I am writing to thank you from the bottom of my heart for rejecting my appeal against the £100 fine you so justly served me with for picking up my friends from the train station on the morning of the 3rd May 2010.

As your CCTV cameras quite rightly spotted, I was indeed stopped outside the station between the hours of 11:14am and 11:15am on the morning in question. During this period a whole 60 seconds passed, an unacceptable length of time to be anywhere without the proper authorisation. Who knows what the consequences may have been if I had stayed for even a moment longer?

I’d like to thank you in particular for opening my eyes to the feebleness of my excuses. I now understand that the fact that the car park immediately outside the station was being dug up is no excuse whatsoever – in fact I am surprised and delighted to learn that it is in actuality a private car park!

I see now that the assumption that the car park right outside the station was some sort of pick-up/drop-off car park as exists at virtually every busy train station in the country is laughable, and I am embarrassed that I thought that this is what the car park was for.

Thank you also for pointing out that there is a designated pick-up/drop-off point elsewhere which I was similarly unaware of. Having only lived in Ealing for 18 months I must seem like quite a tourist to never have noticed this. How you must have laughed! In future I shall be sure to take advantage of this facility, or one of the many other convenient and affordable parking options in central Ealing. Or I’ll just tell my friends to walk.

I now know that when confronted with a closed car park (which I quite hilariously believed to be for the purpose of picking people up from the station) I should not have hovered, confused and unsure as to where to go, and should certainly not have paused and waved my friends over, allowed them into my car and continued on my way.

All of this is my way of saying that I thoroughly deserve my £100 fine for being unsure what to do for a whole 60 seconds. As a proud citizen of Ealing I should never be uncertain, and your fine is really a way of helping me to be a better person by teaching me this lesson.

Of course, I’m not just writing this letter to praise you for your excellent service (and I haven’t even yet mentioned the speedy turnaround time of 35 days between my submitting the appeal and you rejecting it!). As much as I’m sure you love your fanmail, I believe that every good deed deserves a return, and so I would like to inform you that I now intend to hold you to the same high standards as you do me.

As such I will now consider it my duty to inform Ealing Council whenever your service falls beneath your own high standards for 60 seconds. I have made a form to post to you – in this unlikely eventuality – which will explain exactly where you went wrong during that minute, along with payment details so you can send me the appropriate fine (though I believe we have established a precedent that a 60 second mistake is worth £100, which seems eminently fair to me).

So anytime you take more than sixty seconds to answer your phone (or even fail to answer it at all, as has happened so often this past few weeks as I have attempted to find out how the detectives working on my case are proceeding with the complex appeals process), or fail to collect the rubbish in a timely manner, or run over budget, or make some tiny administrative error, or indeed anything at all that falls short of the unbelievable service I have come to expect from you, I shall inform you of how much I am expecting you to pay in compensation.

There is no need to thank me for helping you to improve yourselves in this way – after all, you’ve done it for me and others so many times.

Naturally, as a mere private citizen I don’t expect you to actually pay me any money. What kind of world would we be living in if people could just slap fines on each other willy-nilly for any tiny mistake?! And as a mere private citizen I understand it is my duty to lie back and take whatever corrective punishment you see fit for my misdemeanours, and that this is not at all a two-way arrangement. As I have made clear in this letter I am very grateful for this, and feel lucky to live in Ealing. After all, I could have been born in communist East Germany, with faceless bureaucrats using cameras to spy on my every move. Imagine how awful that would be!

Lastly, this whole episode has given me an idea for a slogan you might wish to adopt. I have no idea if you are looking for one at the moment, but in case you are I shall offer it to you free of charge:

“Ealing Council: Technically Correct But Morally Wrong”.

Thank you so much again. I am sure there are wrongdoers attempting to innocently go about their everyday lives even as we speak, so I’ll use up no more of your precious time.

Yours, in everlasting gratitude,
Neil Hughes

PS Your website timed out on me this morning when I was looking for your address. There’s a form in the post – that’ll be £100 please. Though if you pay by next week we’ll call it £50. Thanks.

I have so far resisted blogging on the election, or the post-election negotiations. And even now that it looks like it’s about to be settled with the Lib Dems getting behind Cameron as PM I’m not going to comment on that. Or on the failures of our voting system and the obvious need for reform.

But I have been moved to comment more fully on the constant stream of morons selectively interpret the markets to validate their every opinion.

Examples abound, but fearmongering over a hung parliament reached feverish levels over the weekend, with the Sun’s Monday morning edition proclaiming castastrophe in the City as Gordon Brown clung on to power.

Strangely on Tuesday after the markets had risen 5% they didn’t retract, apologise for or even mention their previous bleating on the subject.

No, when interpreting the markets you can feel free to ignore any evidence that contradicts your assertion. In fact it’s encouraged!

Even worse, following Gordon Brown’s pre-resignation announcement last night the markets have dropped today. Has anyone come out and said that Brown should have stayed on and that the markets clearly wanted a progressive ‘Rainbow’ coalition? No, of course not; for some reason this selective tea-leaf reading of the markets appears to be a peculiarly right-wing condition.

Impressively, some people have today claimed that this market drop is some kind of punishment for voting liberal! Why the markets took five days to notice, or how they tell what is specifically due to liberal voting wasn’t made entirely clear. But they know, make no mistake.

Do what we tell you or the market will get you!

I’m reminded of the various arms of the US Republicans immediately following Obama’s election, who at various times predicted market chaos or reacted with glee whenever the market dropped in the months between his election and his inauguration: each time someone proclaimed it was due to something Obama had said or done or was planning to do. Eighteen months into his presidency the markets are way up (even taking into account last week’s computer glitch weirdness). Are those same pundits apologising and promising to vote Obama next time?

No, because they were being disingenuous in the first place when linking the – partly random – market movements with their own political agenda.

Let’s finish with a quick hint for anyone looking to get into the armchair market punditry business. When interpreting markets to your own ends it’s important to remember that markets only care about what you care about. If you think the markets want David Cameron then they do want David Cameron!

Some of my more international readers may be feeling a little left out here. The real beauty of the system is that you can substitute John McCain, Kevin Rudd, or your world politican of choice – as a selective market interpreteer [sic] you are encouraged to forget about all the world events and just view them with your local country filter on.

Everyone knows markets don’t care about financial meltdown in Greece, massive oil spills off the coast of the US, wars, or even business conditions. They simply care about the local political issues that YOU care about (except when things are going contrary to your prediction when something else is happening, probably those nasty liberal voters!)

Anyway, now that Cameron is nearly in place we can probably forget about all of this. I’m reliably assured by our national media that the markets absolutely love him and just can’t wait for this nasty hung parliament business to be over with. So that’s alright then.

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A note on the partisanship of this post:

This isn’t intended as an attack on Cameron as he stands poised to take power. Let’s see what he does before judging!

It’s simply a plea for people to stop cherry-picking market based evidence in an effort to support your their views.

Markets are inherently complex, chaotic systems, and are almost never governed by simple explanations or predictions. A little understanding of chaos theory goes a long way: small inputs can have big effects and big inputs can have small effects.

So please. Wrap. Up.

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