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Well.

That was unexpected.

Gosh, but it HAS been a while. Inbetween ageing to the point of twenty-one years, a few night drives and a truly wonderful and hideous shirt purchase there's very little that will make good reportage. Which wasn't unexpected in my sojourns all over Middle Earth England, since they got rather hectic without too much actually being DONE bar the purchase of many, many sunglasses.

York is over OVER. In two days, when my results come out, it will be over over OVER and in two weeks when I graduate (Orson Welles willing) it will be over over OVER over. After this, if it is any more "over", things will become too much like a police radio conversation. The mad dash of packing in an empty room was a tad confusing but I came back with a bag full of plates and rice and frozen bread, and a stomach full of pasta bake and rum. My last night, walking back to the house at dawn, the street lamps flickered off one by one as I walked past and I practically stood on a seemingly uninjured dead hedgehog. My last day, walking away from the house by the same decaying hedgehog, there was a brief eclipse caused by two hot air balloons specifically surrounding me and someone had spraypainted "Apres Blair" in blue on the police station gates.

So I pretty much left York as weird as I found it, then. Plus an extra bike and a pair of angel wings, donated to my favoured charity shop.

The train ride was a hellish tripartite clamber typical of British Rail, whereby at every station I ended up on the last train out. This made for an interesting journey, because I am actually a big fan of overnight travelling but the only way to prolong wakefulness to the utmost degree is through energy drinks (which now seem to turn my urine a violent shade of radioactive neon), periodic intakes of hard liquor and a constant barrage of schizophrenically clashing music (a shuffled mix of glitchcore, harsh electro and chamber-pop should be enough to give your average human nosebleeds). There was a delightful conversation in a Manchester bar between an ex-St. Helen's lad and a lady-probably-but-not-quite-certainly-of-the-night but whenever I have to get the last train out of any city I end up with colourful companieros so this was really par for the course.

Aside from the little bit of fluff up top, treat yourself to a few photos of a thoroughly swell day out, secure in the knowledge that while witnessing it, you never had to participate in the life shortening combination of seaside caff mouldy bread, UV scalding and belching exhaust fumes...

This is Mr. Feery


This is not me.

A truck being abandoned to the tide by another truck, eventually rescued by a rapidly-sinking tractor.

Album cover and a half, old bean.

Floating city and a half, able don.

Art Decko

And the following are merely proof and a curiosity, once again provided by the ever-Fortean York.

Mobile Eclipse Modules

This very well sums up the post-birthday sensation...

Today, I have exercised my awesome responsibility and diminishing power as a member of a collective organisation with about the influence of a sneeze in a nuclear blast and more money than I can imagine (and I can imagine a universe without lactose where limp-boned people fight hyper-evolved frog monsters for the last scraps of the white cliffs of Dover to lick, so that's saying something).

On the subject of Europe, two (or three things):

1) Labour's leafleting campaign on campus seemed to consist entirely of anti-BNP sentiment. While this is to be lauded, it did take the stance that your choice was essentially binary: "Vote Labour or Vote Hatred, Evil Scumfuck. There is no other option. Stand in the middle of this road and you'll be mown down." Which is a little sad.

2) As my motivations bear a good deal of resemblance to mutated anarchy, I typically have the urge in situations where my vote will be of no use to deface, burn or otherwise mutilate my precious little privilege. This time, however, after a good deal of research I decided to throw my vote away much more comprehensively and voted Green. Upon making my crabbed scrawl next to the candidates, I was accosted on my walk out by a bespectacled woman with a green rosette who nodded vigorously and proclaimed that I would need "No encouragement". Sitting down to indulge in brunner (breakfast-lunch-dinner), a young man cycled up to me and me alone from a crowd and handed me a fundraiser vinyl reggae leaflet for the Greens (which was entitled "Red, Gold and Green" but should have really been entitled "White-man dreads, ahoy!"). The oddity of this was only matched when I stood up and the wall behind me had been plastered with Green posters.

I think I've joined the environmental mafia entirely by accident. I'd quite like out, please, but I'm afraid that if I don't give willing support then they'll give me the wicker shoes and dispose of me in an entirely compostible manner...

3) Current endorsement must be given to Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson. More of a Concept EP (because a concept album would be so much more effort, n'est pas?), the first track sounds like The Jimi Hendrix Experience noodling with the London Symphony Orchestra every so often being interrupted by a convicted pervert out on day release who is glorying in being finally let off the leash.

Which is pretty much is.

It is the sound of summer and the sound of swagger. Steal it.




Also today, I failed to make an artist's portfolio twice, succeeded once and have begun to realise an entirely voluntary manic lifestyle that is in no little part aided by how wired hayfever medication seems to make me.

Also, I'm invited to attend a magazine event designed to reassure me that everything is, in fact, alright and that there are plenty of jobs for an English Literature graduate willing to degrade his very anima and at the very least scrape his knees (in grovelling or otherwise...). Ironically, the magazine is called "Pros(e)" as if the prefix weren't clue enough to the implied career choice.

The delicious dissolution of this particular part of my existence was marked by a somewhat confusing and terribly sentimental bit of nonsense that I have summarily shelved for somewhere approaching forever. Suffice to type, though, that I'm feeling the rather pleasant effects of doing nothing. Oh, and remembering to eat at least once a day.

Except, I don't seem to be able to stop with the whole learning thing. I attended an art lecture yesterday, concerning the creation of communal focus points in order to make Morcambe (no, really) more culturally enriching. And I'm dodging around Lancaster University, trying to look distracted so as not to be asked question by visiting potential students. I shouldn't, should I? I should absolutely answer authoritatively about any and all queries they might have...

"Why, you'll never guess it but this is an incredibly scientifically pioneering university. The Vice-Chancellor, for instance, has been the recipient of the world's first head transplant."

"Over there you can see the towering might of the spire: it used to house students but, much like the skyscraper from Ghostbusters, was subject to certain arcane architectural quirks that culminated in a series of cultists committing ritual suicide and opening a blood portal to the realms of the elder gods. And that's where Les Dennis came from."


And in my spare time? Wilde and Voltaire. And comic books, because I need some rest. There is also the delicious pretension (that will no doubt bite me in ther future) of adding a subliminal "with a degree!" to everything I do.

"I'm washing up, with a degree!"

"I'm walking to the shops, with a degree!"

"I'm washing gravy off my lemons, with a degree!"


(All actual events)

Uni. It's over, and to mark the occasion I thought I'd mix things up and really change myself.

Turns out, though, I still don't like sushi.

If life's a game of chess, I'm the ace of spades

What am I DOING?

In a fit of cheat codes, whereupon I am able to go behind the workings of that MMO game we call life, the universe has spat a selection of errata at me. All of which match up with truly unsettling synchronicity.

Under the pressure of my own awesome intellect (i.e. picking my course modules at random), I had to write in earnest. Tuesday being the deadline for an ENTIRE YEAR of work, my house-hold compatriots had to contend with a total word count of about 8,000. I, on the other hand, had to labour under the trickling terror of thirteen thousand. In fact, I think I'm one of two or three people on the whole course with this acculmulation.

The result? I'm done. Sort of. And everyone I meet is drafting, dying or yet to commence writing. Naturally, this is not normal and I don't trust anything I've written, despite having spent the last three weeks working like a maniac and gradually forgetting what sunlight looked like (except that time I got drunk enough to stumble around town during the day. It was an educational experience, the lesson being that getting slaughtered before 2PM is a bad idea and one should avoid going out if one is). So I go to see the tutors, press-ganging them into helping me much like they press-ganged me into their modules: this is an unfortunately necessary obligation they must fulfill for all those juicy little perks university provides. Like an office, and an audience, and a title and probably even free food.

And they both look askance at some scrawlings and question with the methodical and slightly disbelieving tone of a GP, taking the health of my head-spawn. And my ideas are sound, though the presentation is dodgy. For one of them, it is too late or impossible to salvage beyond what I've done. For the other, I'm padding out revolutionary but solid reinterpretations of how we perceive cinema.

And Norse is...well, Norse is Norse. My essay need not do anything but reconfirm that.

So I'm done, understand? This bit was preamble. Now onto the meat of the matter. Or the matter of meat.

Anime Society offered a trip to London for Saturday, to go to an expo. Gosh, I thought, all expenses paid? Pity it is so close to the deadline. And so I forgot about it, until I noticed three or four of the all time innovators in the realm of the graphic novel were attending. Gee, I thought, I REALLY wish I could go now. And get all steampunk, as the situation would no doubt demand.

Then, upon getting back from meeting the tutors and assuring myself that it was all over, bar the crying, I notice that I've got an e-mail over some competition or other I scribbled my handle onto a few months back. Some kind of event, £22.50 a ticket. And I've won two. In La Scala. Swing, hip-hop, chainsaws, nostalgia, Dr. Livingstone, H.G. Wells etc. And...well...the work is done. Attending would be pricy normally, and impossible if one were to factor in a train ticket (now ranking on a par with my weekly budget). But if only there was an all expenses paid way to get there?

The combination slammed home as I was watching yet another news report on MPs second homes. Where was I to stay for free? Why, one of those self-same controversy boxes. And to get reimbursed by the university for representing a society I slip in and out of like a no-longer-mute Banquo. To a party that seems to have been crafted and fashioned from sections of my very soul (i.e. wardrobe)? As a VIP?

Sum total? Zero pounds, zero pence, zero words. Plus, if I am to submit to the future, submit to the doom of my degree mark and submit the horrid, HORRID hatefulness of my essays, then I may as well go out on someone else's song. Now, if only I could find some way to sing for my supper, I'd not even have to pay to eat this weekend...

For weeks at a time, I forget that this is actually pretty much what my life is like. Probably better that way, because it is always such a pleasant surprise when I remember.

But, yet again, still no answer to the question: What am I DOING?

Why, winning. Of course.

The laptop is now repaired with expensive and gaudy "official" parts. Pah.

I was getting quite used to staggering onto campus, snaffling my way through a fistful of caffeine pills (fistful being an antiquated form of Imperial measurement meaning a numerical value equal to "many", "plenty" or "slightly more than is in a tube of smarties"), and then snarling at anyone who came within seven feet of me.

Sure, I was forgetting to eat. Sure, my essays alternated in bi-polar fashion between thekindofscrawlwrittenbysomeonefastapproachingthesoundbarrier and that other state I like to type angrily in (inebriated). Sure, I could actually feel the years being shaved off my life. But it was a system, goddammit.

Anyway, yes. Only Norse to bulk out now, then the process of editing my scrawl re-commences in earnest. 1,500 word-pounds to pile on. Making the sentences even vaguely legible and comprehensible is the real challenge.

Actually, that's a lie. CARING is the real challenge. Must. Defeat. Last. Hurdle. Of. Apathy...