Hannah writes stuff

A few days ago, lets call it a week, my friend Daniel asked me to explain myself regarding my abject hatred for mushrooms.

His exact words were:

“…include a self-analysis on why you won’t allow yourself to like mushrooms.”

I am used to this type of provocative back chat from my friend Daniel, but his decision to lay this line of questioning down at me with the phrase:

“why you wont allow yourself to”

rather than the more friendly and simple enquiry of :

“why don’t you like mushrooms?”

riled me to the  point of  anger and resentment only felt by homosexuals who are asked “why won’t you allow yourself to fancy girl boobs”.

Daniel made these ignorant and hurtful comments in a public forum, so it is only right I make my retort in the same unerasable manner in which he choose.

I have never liked mushrooms.  To quote the Dean of Side-Lined Humanity University, Professor Lady Gaga, “I was born this way”. I didn’t wake up one morning, pull back the curtains on another  sun drenched Essex morning and remark flippantly to myself:

“I have decided to make my mother’s kitchen life a living nightmare by insisting she picks out any remotely suspicious grey looking food substance from the meals she slaves over for me.  I shall challenge her daily to come up with “parsnips are the same as chips” lines of imaginative misdirection when I question her regarding any remotely suspicious grey looking food she has overlooked. I will openly weep if I discover I have accidentally eaten anything remotely mushroom like, causing my mother the conflicting emotions of guilt, frustration and utter disappointment at the self-indulgent, overly-pandaed to child she has bought forth into the world, whose friends and lovers will have to take the heavy burden of the mushroom-free baton from her and take up the impossible plight of having to hold on to love in the face of daily rejection. I have decided I WONT ALLOW MYSELF to like mushrooms!”

If this had happened it would mean I was an utter wretch, which I am not.

I just do not like mushrooms and Daniel and everyone like him with these medieval attitudes to fungus shunning will just have to accept that.

As I just said, Mushrooms are a fungus and the only other forms  of fungus I have EVER heard of are athletes foot, which looks like this:

And fungus the bogeyman who looks like this:

I wouldn’t want to eat either of these two things.

It has been known for years that mushroom fungus can ONLY be grown from the remains of dead or dying people and animals. They thrive on weakness and turmoil and horror. The different corpses that are used create the distinct array of mushrooms that people like Daniel enjoy.  Fox corpses create puff-ball mushrooms, hobbling pigeons are “good” for growing chanterelle mushrooms and a hedgehog that has died from participation will, as you all know, turn fully into a hedgehog mushroom. So on and so forth, poison pain and death.

The fact people like Daniel will slice such produce up, cook it and then place it inside their own bodies for enjoyment is surely the perversion here.

Scientists in space (and on earth) have also concluded that the smell of mushrooms being cooked is ABSOLUTELY the worst smell that has ever existed.  Even worse than plague and old wheelbarrows full of leaves left out in a fortnight’s rain.

Mushrooms are the hoodies of the undergrowth, you see a bunch hanging off the rotten old log you need for your current art installation and you think you can brave it out, go over there with your head held up. Just say “excuse me”.  You rationalise it: under all that nausea-inducing texture there is a delightful Quiche ingredient trying to get out, (“I could have that for my lunch after I have finished my art installation” you think to yourself in brackets) if only someone would give them a chance.

But pick one up randomly to take home and no amount of egg, milk, onion and pastry will save you from dying.

They are also frilly.

Frilly, twee, fairy fiddling little whores of deception:

“Look at my sexy little underside, yeah you like that don’t you? It’s like a french maid’s outfit under there isn’t it?  Just run your fingers along it, yeah like that….ooooo, gives you shivers doesn’t it you dirty little bastard. I’m telling your wife.”

Nothing that goes into vegetarian food on such a regular basis should fill you with such sexual shame.

These are facts.  Facts Daniel appears to have overlooked. Do your research Payne. That’s what I say. Next time you want to bandy ridiculous statements at my face in public make sure you find out all the stuff  that really is shameful and perverted about my life.  Then we can talk.

It has oft been said by those that have been gifted by my friendship for many years, and noted by those just commencing their journey with me that I “think too much”.

“You think too much…” they will say, as the soggy end of the half dunked biscuit they have left neglected during my diatribe wriggles free and sploshes into the depths of their now chilled coffee. 

Sometimes they will say “you think WAY too much” like a character from The Big Bang Theory would, but this is usually only when I am laying prostrate on a leather coach and they are charging me money.

My frequent response is “really?” all italically and nasally like the way a character from The Big Bang Theory would say it…

(I had to sit through an “evening” (or a period of time in my history that shall hence forth be referred to as The Big Torturous, Infinitely Expanding, Suffocating Black Hole of Inescapable Pain and Exhaustion Bang Theory Hour (or: That Big Bang Theory Thing) of this show and DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN IF ITS GAPING TEDIUM OF BORE HASN’T BURNT ITSELF INTO MY RETINA)

…which is a response reserved for those times when I’ve said something I expected would be greeted with instant empathy (“I think that way TOO!!!!”) but is instead introduced to looks of abject bemusement or disgust.

This happened this evening, whilst I was alone and, in leiu of another person, I met myself with my own scorn. 

Tonight, my flatmate had a shower, at roughly the same time I had pencilled one in for myself.  This shouldn’t have been a problem, seeing as we have in fact, our own bathrooms.  But rather than just GO AND HAVE A SHOWER I sat and waited for her to finish hers before I could comfortably take mine.

I wasn’t worried about clashing water temperatures or a fuse issue arising from too much extractor fan activity, I was ACTUALLY worried that she would ACTUALLY think the following: “She is taking a shower at the same time as me on purpose. She is standing there naked in her bathroom as warm water sloshes over her body because Im doing the exact same thing in my bathroom. She is having a shower NOW as she is getting a kick out of being naked and soapy at the same time as me. She probably has absolutely no need for one. She has almost certainly bored a hole through the walls, and even though there is a very spacoius cupboard between our bathrooms she will have fashioned some kind of telescopic device to watch me with. She has probably already sniffed my towels. SHE IS AN UTTER SCREECHING PERVERT AND HER FILTHY SAPPHIC MIND IS THE ONLY REASON, THE ONLY REASON, SHE IS STRIPPING DOWN TO HER NAKED SELF AT THIS PRECISE MOMENT AS SHE WANTS TO SHOWER AT THE SAME TIME AS ME! SEXUALLY!”

Just me?

So I sat on the edge of my bed, and waited.  Which is infinitely worse and weirder than just having a shower at the coincidental same time as a flatmate. And as I related this to twitter and actually thought about my behaviour I told myself “you think too much and the only conclusion we can make from this is, that yes, you probably are a bit of a perv as you are the one thinking your flatmate thinks you are some kind of strange shower fetishist.  Flatmate probably will just think…nothing…she couldn’t care the less.”

So yes, I guess I really do think too much sometimes. I concede.

Well, hello.

Been a while hasn’t it?

Again.

I can assure you that my absence from the internet has absolutely NOTHING to do with Sherlock marathons, book reading and “going out” and everything to do with not actually having access to the web.  At all.  I am currently in limbo land waiting to move house and as such all electricity based interactions with the outside world have been severed.

In these dark and unsettling  times I have had ample time to [watch Sherlock on loop, read books, "go out"] work on my book.  Again, I say “work on” when I actually mean “think about”, but us writers like to think that the time spent staring out of various Starbuck decaled windows as we dribble into our netbooks can be called “work”. ..

SO!…

….after many book-work sessions I am suddenly beginning to think that I may not be the generation defining novelist I thought I was and I may actually be a ground-breaking screen writer instead.

I don’t believe in fate; I just believe in people noticing and doing things they ordinarily wouldn’t and then reacting to them in a way that best suits their current situation.  So, having left a Starbucks yesterday on my way to Queen’s Street Station, cradling my lovingly prepared beef stew (this has nothing to do with anything. I’m just showing off) , my head was groaning with creative indecision: to screenplay or not to screenplay?

As I pictured myself gently deleting everything I have written and feeling a little bit erotic about it, I was thrust a Stylist Magazine.  The distributor must have been expecting me to lock my jaw around it as I had no free limb with which to relieve her of it.  But she seemed pretty adamant I was going to get one and seeing as I had a train ride in front of me, I asked her to shove a copy into the front of my tote bag.  I forgot all about it until this morning when a too hot bath rendered my usual reading material a little taxing and something a bit more visually stimulating was required to prevent me from slipping into a coma.

Half way through was a brilliant, bite-sized article by Jane Goldman about screenwriting and it reaffirmed that perhaps I shouldn’t drag myself through the novel-writing process to then wait 7 years for someone ELSE to think about turning it into a film (if any part of anything I ever do is actually ok and doesn’t make people vomit out of their fingernails).  This person would no doubt go on to probably win a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, as I, herded together with all the other writers into a sound-proofed lock down room,  yell “BUT I BLOODY WROTE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” as I chuck orange peel at the screen and sob into my shredded satin dress.  Goldman made me think that maybe I SHOULD just write it as a screenplay, and more importantly she made me realise I probably COULD write it as a screenplay (and win a bloody Oscar myself).

I “work on” my book a lot when I’m walking about, setting out scenes and characters.  It turns out I’m actually ok at coming up with whole scenes that work and are funny, but only when I’m visualising them actually happening.  When I get home and try to write them out into depthy paragraphs they fall flat.  This may just mean I need to hone my writing skills a bit before carrying on with the book, but it may also  mean I ALREADY have the skills to push out a screenplay.

One rule of writing is just to get the hell on with it and not muddy the waters with too many redrafts in the early stages. Goldman herself points out that anything that comes to her which she wishes to add (such as a character owning a cat or having a stammer) she will make a note of and add in during subsequent rewrites.  She highlights that GETTING IT ALL OUT OF YOU FIRST is of the utmost importance and endlessly rewriting the same section before moving on will take up your whole, miserable life.

So, with this in mind, trying to squeeze what I have already done into such a linear form may be a total waste of time and utterly frustrating but it also seems to make complete and utter sense.  This way I can write out everything I want to see happen, to who and in which order and get some semblance of writing done before my fingers fade away trying to drum out a novel I may not even have the skills to write.

I am very, very tempted…I’m also pretty sure it’s what Sherlock would do.

This blog is brought to you by many letters that you can all read that havent been spellchecked.

I havent blogged in ages. Some of you will not have noticed until I pointed it out.  Much like the people doing a wee right now because Waterstones have decided to drop the apostrophe from its name.

These people that are clamouring to have thier say about how it’s “dumbing down”, “just plain wrong”, “utter nonsense”, “as bad as the Holocaust” (I may have made that one up) and a crime against the very literature held hostage on the shelves inside waterstones HEATHEN WALLS probably have never EVER looked at the signage above thier heads as they enter the stores. its only now that it has been pointed out to them (much like every other band wagon led complaint to befall the BBC) that middle England thrusts forth its sodden tena lady to wring out at the feet of the DISBICABLE store and spell out everything that is “WRONG WITH THE COUNTRY” in its acrid puddle.

More fool Waterstones for pointing out the change as they must have KNOWN this would happen, but still….someone on twitter said to me that this change, this dropping of a flick from a sign, this complete and utter NON-EVENT (which is actually MORE accruate seeing as Tim Waterstones has had NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BRAND FOR YEARS) was “a sad indictment of our times”.  And it is this type of over-blown, moronic, education-riddled way of looking at writing and THE WORLD that makes me twist and convulse with rage and compete despair.

This tweeter and myself are from backgrounds privaledged enough to have contained enough education to read and write and all the fortune and experience such tools equip human beings with.  Our ability and WILLINGNESS to get SO riled by such trivia as a ‘ is an absolute fucking gift and one we should probably feel just a little bit ashamed about.

As I pointed out; Third World AIDs is a “a sad indictment of our times”, the rape and molestation of children by the Catholic CHURCH is a “a sad indictment of our times”, the oppression of women that STILL lingers like a festering corpse in streets up and down the land is a “a sad indictment of our times” gay teens hanging themselves in thier bedrooms because they would rather DIE than face another day at school being tormented for being something they simply ARE is a “a sad indictment of our times”. Slave labour, hidden genocide, starvation, treatable diseases ending in death, the neglect of the elderly are ”a sad indictment of our times”….

Are ablity to STILL understnd a sentance no matta how poorly ritten or spelt or whether someone has used “There” rather than “They’re” is a result of living in a society that provides us with enough education to do so.  The fact we would belittle this gift by slamming dictionaries onto the fingers of youngsters because what they have expressed in ink is “WRONG!!!” is like fucking the rest of the world and its issues in the eye, making it apologise and then shitting on its plate.  and it makes me deeply, deeply sad.

All the pedants out there who thought for one second this was something worth pissing thier pants about should look at some of the other headlines on the BBC website and count themselves lucky, that whilst flicking, sweaty-pawed, through dictionaries so as not to have any mistake they make in thier FURIOUS COMMENTS lambasted, they are safe in front of a computer, hooked up to Wifi, sipping on a Starbucks, listening to Coldplay, downloading podcasts, firing up the Aga, ordering a Graze box, setting up the Sky box, logging into Waitrose and have nothing…..else…..to worry about…..

I shall leave this blog with a quote from a bookshop worker, which pretty much sums it all up:

‎“look at how many books i’m buying, i buy so so many books, too many really, i shouldn’t even really be allowed in a bookshop, look at what i’m buying it’s all high quality isn’t it and aren’t you impressed that i read and what am i like and your poetry section isn’t very well stocked is it and where are your classics is that all you have and i’m suprised you don’t have that other one in i asked about it’s been reviewed in all the broadsheets and i’ll throw in one trashy crime book but it’s written by a scandinavian author so that’s okay and i watch danish crime dramas on BBC4 with subtitles and everything and i love reading subtitles because i love reading and don’t get me started on this whole you lot dropping the apostrophe from your name because i’m all for standards and good english and …..OW!! did you just strike me?”