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Wednesday 30th April
Alas, it is time to say goodbye.
I've had enough, my road has run out of smooth surfaces and the cobblestones of my sanity are now bouncing around the track and fucking up the suspension.
I'm getting away from the whining and the needs of other people.
That means you.
I just need some alone time.
Away from the nationals, conventions, vikings, work, stress, women and worries.
Away from people who make my eyeballs pop from too high a blood pressure.
It has been pointed out to me that murder is frowned upon around here and if I put any more bodies under the rosebushes then the flowers will be taller than my house.
So I'm going away and I don't know when I'll be back.
Where to? I hear you ask?
I'm going to go west, life is peaceful there. Go west, in the open air. Go west, baby you and me*, go west, that is our destiny.
(* you = large bottle of rum)
Yes, I'm going to Liberty City. The ticket arrived in the post this morning.
I'll be able to relive the good old days in San Andreas, where life was simpler.
Where guns, money and drugs were delivered hourly to your front door.
Where classical music played and time slowed down when you did something impressive.
Where spitfires would randomly drop from the sky onto the car I just parked for no reason whatsoever.
Where the mountain would call for me to leap from it's summit on a motorcycle.
Ahh, good times.
Point being, GTA:IV is sat waiting for me to crack it open and savour the tasty juices contained within.
I may be gone some time.
Friday 25th April
I eat babies.
I would like to make that very clear. I eat babies.
I punch small cute and fluffy animals. I have been known to visit pet shops and not leave until I have punched everything in the mouth, especially the fish. Ugly bastard things.
I kick hobos. Sometimes two or three at a time.
I have a big stick at home that I use for beating people. It has no name. I just beat people with it indiscriminately.
I molest nuns and other workers of a religious persuasion.
There are girl's schools where the porters have been told to keep an eye out for people matching my description.
I lie, cheat, steal, patronise, degrade, burn, insult, break and bribe. I have even been known, on occasion, to exaggerate.
Sometimes I've even missed lunch due to all the sins I've been committing.
But that doesn't matter because I eat babies.
I have done a great many horrible things, some unpronounceable, some illegal and a great many that you wouldn't want to be caught doing in the presence of a grandparent.
Anybody's grandparent.
I am not a likeable character.
In fact, it's fairly safe to say that I'm an absolute horrible bastard.
So telling me that I offended someone with an off-hand remark is not news. Useful to know, but not news.
I do that sort of thing … once again, I'm a horrible bastard.
You could not possibly hate me more than I hate myself.
I know this because that's what my last psychologist told me.
Just before I closed the lid and started shovelling the earth onto it.
But I get by … I have a control mechanism to keep me sane.
I eat babies.
Thursday 17th April
Oh God, it's good to have power.
I have a friend. I'm not talking to him. And he's not talking to me.
Well, he can't. I banned him. And it's amusing. He's now lurking about and he can't do shit cos he's been banned.
I laughed.
You see, he's got a bit of a mental trauma thing going on. I don't mean tourette's or asbergers or anything, I'm thinking more along the lines of 'bag of hammers', you get me?
See, the M word came up nearly three weeks ago.
And it was funny.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy laughing at things even if they don't involve pain.
But it's been over two weeks now and he's still saying it at every opportunity.
It's like …
… you know when you're teaching obscenities to a four-year old? And you hit one they like? From that point on you've got a toddler running round the house shouting 'DONKEY COCK' over and over and over and over again.
And obviously it's hilarious.
For about an hour or two. Then you regret the lesson and start looking up animal testing laboratories to ship the child off to.
Well this morning he said it again. Yes, back to the M word story, keep up.
Now, I'm not a very tolerant person, by now I'm plotting gene warfare on Honolulu just to keep my sanity. So I tell the world at large that the next person to mention the M word gets banned.
I should have known better.
It's like making a huge red button with the words 'Do not push on pain of castration' on it and attaching it to the wall of the local ADHD drop-in centre just to watch their faces.
I should do that more often.
To be fair, he did wait a full five minutes. And he didn't even use the M word. He used the D word instead.
Banned.
Banned like a motherfucker.
Cheered me right up did that.
I can picture him now, looking like a basset hound that's travelled from Devon to Blackpool only to be told there's no candyfloss, but there is gooseberry jam.
Something else I need to do more often.
- BBJ out
Thursday 13th March
Manchester to Hartshead Moor
Hartshead Moor to Luton
Luton to Kings Cross
Kings Cross to Euston
Euston to Mornington Crescent
Wednesday 12th March
I read.
I know, it's shocking isn't it?
Actually, I find it shocking that I work with people who have a book they take on holiday year after year and read 2 pages of. And that's all the reading they do for the entire year. Shocking.
So anyway, enough about those I'll educated oiks, back to the important stuff, namely me. 8 months ago, on my birthday (the 10th of July, make a note) I started on another dumb challenge.
To be precise, the 50 book challenge.
The rules were simple, to read 50 books I had never read before inside of a year. No re-reading, no graphic novels, no audio books.
Of course, you know I had to leave myself a loophole just in case it got difficult, and of course someone spotted it in seconds. I never said anything about picture books, so in theory I could have finished it in a day at any bookshop that sold Mr Men books.
But I digress.
Exactly 8 months later on the 10th of March 2008, I finished book 50.
Proud was I, very much so. And slightly relieved.
Do you know how much you want to go back and re-read an old book when you're not allowed to? To be able to snuggle down with an old loved one or just re-live that bit where harry gets punched in the face… ahh, great times.
But you do appreciate a lot when you're forced to bounce from one new book to another. You see, I also restricted myself by not reading any two books by the same author in sequence. I had to switch authors with every book, so although I read six of the Ian Ranking Rebus books, they're spread widely throughout the 50.
I found some wonderful stuff in while doing this, that otherwise I probably wouldn't ever touch. The aforementioned Ian Rankin stuff, "Varjak Paw" is fantastic, as is John O'Farrell's "May Contain Nuts". That one had me literally laughing out loud.
Robert Harris and James Rollins are two authors I'll be looking out for from now on and I've discovered that I love books peeking into real people's secret private lives like "I lick my cheese" and "Found".
Bouncing between these has been great and I've covered a much wider scope than I would ever get around to reading myself in a year, kids books, fact, fantasy, office politics, alternate histories, murders, politics and surrealism.
A lot of the credit has to go to my friends of course, because a fair few were donated, suggested or even given by good friends.
Although I'm still confused as to why you decided that a book called "I lick my cheese" would be a good present for me.
But then again I have trolled my way through monumental amounts of crap before I got to the 50 books that I actually finished.
The lord of the rings trilogy is just as dull and unreadable as the last time I tried to read it. The illuminatus trilogy is so complex that I needed a scorecard before the end of chapter one and Andrew Harman's books are so obsessed with trying to be funny that they forget what an actual joke is.
But the very worst book I attempted to read, I actually finished and is book 13 on my list. "A long trip to tea-time" was written by a vicar in the early 80's about a teenager called Gaz who invents a time machine with his sinclair spectrum and visits periods in time to view Christian persecution. That is, Christians getting persecuted.
I'm now trying to think of one single thing to recommend it and I'm coming up short. It's like the man that wrote it not only had to concept of technology or programming, but also no concept of history, teenagers or even Christianity itself.
The only reason that I finished reading it after finding out how bad it was, was that it was only 117 pages long. Every couple of minutes I adjusted the countdown… only another 60 pages to go, 50 pages to go … and so on.
It really is that god awful.
Anyway, the full list, in the order that I read them…
Monday 10th March
I had the most normal Sunday that it is possible to have yesterday.
Nobody in the world did anything like what I did yesterday, and for that I decree that you're all just strange.
What did I do yesterday? Well I give you fair warning you'll be jealous of how stunningly normal it was… I spent the morning with The Bible, played golf in the afternoon, had tea afterwards and then went home and started a jigsaw before bedtime. And none of that is euphemism.
Of course, it does have to be said that the bible that I was spending time with was the one I was writing myself. The older one just didn't have any message that spoke to me personally, so I thought I'd write one myself.
There's even the book of Big Bad Jon.
It's amazing what a deadline will do for you though because I managed over six thousand words in three days alone. It'll look right good when it's finished.
Of course, even geniuses, genii, very intelligent people like me have to take a break every now and then for a light amount of sporting activity. So with horrible weather on Saturday and then more today, when the sun broke through the clouds briefly on Sunday I jumped at it and went to play golf.
I wore my most hideous shirt, large voluminous trousers and grabbed my club. Of course I did look a little out of place at the pitch and putt with all the teenage boys knackering their £120 reeboks in the squishy mud.
But admittedly they couldn't play for toffee anyway, so obviously the trousers helped. And they add an extra bit of firmament to the sand trap on hole 14.
The tea was lovely, by the way.
And the jigsaw… well balls to you, I like jigsaws.
And I know there are some people that wouldn't approve of my re-writing of the bible, or of viciously murdering people on a golf course.
But then there are always people that say that introducing a casket of angry bees onto a bus full of nuns as it drives along a mountain pass is wrong.
And I've not done that in ages.