Not suitable for those of a delicate stomach

Wednesday 02nd December

If you're ever curious about what you might or might not have eaten in the past few days, I have a great solution for you.

Throw up into the bath.

I'm not talking dry heaves or anything wet like that, no small amounts of hangover sickness, no, I'm talking about full on, feeling everything hit the back of your teeth as it comes out in a dozen or more heaves.

Then as the fluid drains away you're left with just the solid detritus ready for study.

I could easily spot pieces of Sunday lunch there. And bits of Monday. And even some stuff that cannot be identified and probably wasn't food. There may even have been pieces of lung and spleen there.

Cleaning up afterwards was not fun.

And if you're curious about why I was sick into the bath suffice to say I was also using the toilet at the same time.

Yes, again I have given myself food poisoning.

The fun part is that I've cooked myself virtually nothing in the past 5 days and so it's someone else's fault this time. You'll know who if you keep watching the obituaries pages.

I've been awake since three o'clock this morning variously listening to my digestive system rumble, burble and squidge and visiting the toilet to relieve the pressure. It's amazing how much pressure can build up inside the average body with very little preparation.

If we're talking in terms of pounds per square inch, I could probably go toe to toe with a monster truck tyre.

I will admit to one thing, though.

There is a feeling of intense joy when you can sit on the toilet and achieve nothing but a fart.

All Manlified and Stuff

Thursday 3rd December

I've been shot.

Really. I got shot in the leg.

And the other leg.

And the arm, the belly, the shoulder, the foot, the arse, the face, the hands and the back of the head.

And it bloody stings.

I have bruises on my bruises on my bruises and they're now turning all the colours of the rainbow. I didn't know there was even a colour you could get with mixing brown and purple.

Yes, I've been painballing again.

Sorry, paintballing.

Saturday was meant to be spent wallpapering the spare room and turning it into an office, and as these things often happen I got a call on Friday offering me a free ticket to a day paintballing. The only catch was that I had to drive to the venue, the guys with the tickets had no transport and would have to spend hours and hours on trains.

It's good to be mobile at times.

Anyway, if you remember Saturday it was raining in the early morning, and if you were on the moors then you'll remember it was snowing.

This does not bode well for the splatter factor of the paintballs.

In fact, they should redesignate them to be small chunks of brightly coloured icy ball-bearings.

Anyway, there are a few drawbacks to being manly and stuff.

Mostly the drawbacks include being stuck in a cold damp field holding a gun that works one shot in three, wearing a mask you can barely see through and getting shot on the thigh.

If you want to know the top three places that sting on the human body when getting shot with a paintball, they're the thigh, neck and knuckles.

Just in case you're wondering.

So we split into two teams and hit the field and instantly started throwing money away with every shot.

Do you know how much paintballs cost? A bloody lot, that's how much.

I think the most manly portion of the day was when I was hunkered down in a small hut sat on a bomb with a ten-year old boy as my backup and the entire Bolivian army outside the window. There must have been five billion of them out there and we were holding them off just the two of us.

I know there was five billion of them out there from each time I raised my head above the window ledge I could see them all getting nearer and nearer. At least for the microsecond before they all shot at me.

Did you know that there's still gaps in the mask, apparently so that you can breathe.

Did you know that paint doesn't taste very nice?

The least fun part of the day? When the defenders in the home tower see you holding off the entire Bolivian army solo and mistake you for the enemy and shoot you in the back of the head.

It all works out in the end though, since I discovered the sniper responsible wasn't wearing a cup.

A lesson he will remember for all time.

Work, and the complete lack of it.

Monday 14th December

Distraction is the biggest killer in my line of non-work.

The whole point of the exercise was that I would have time to sit and write but the biggest killer has been all the distractions available.

Dave Gorman was right in saying that the internet is filled with everything in the universe ever, and there's nothing more distracting than having everything in the universe ever at the touch of your fingers, but he's wrong because there actually is worse than that.

See, the internet revolves around activity and interactivity so you actually have to click on things and more to the point you have to have some form of imagination to go out and seek that which you might want to look at.

I'll give you a clue, there's only so many funny cat videos out there, after that you're just repeating yourself.

No, the real killer is the TV.

That big black rectangle in the corner of the living room is a disgraceful waster of time, you don't even need to do anything with it, just point your eyeballs in its direction and you're away. Combine that with SKY+ and a DVD player and you never need to move until your body gives in to a sedentary lifestyle and bacteria start to evolve into sentient lifeforms on various parts of your body.

So I am forced to admit that so far over the past few weeks, while I was supposedly working on the greatest novel since Winnie the Pooh went Dogging, I have seen every episode of House, Monk, CSI Vegas, Chuck, Big Bang Theory, Burn Notice, Fringe and many many more.

Well, no more.

My brain rebelled.

Actually, my brain was fine with it, it was my body that put it's metaphorical foot down this time. After the third bout of being violently ill which I put down to food poisoning, more likely now to be abject laziness I had to do something, and more to the point I had to get away from the big neon square and get down to some work.

After two hours in Starbucks waiting for somebody to notice that I was writing a novel on my laptop I realised that nobody gave a toss because everybody else was waiting for a similar audience. That and the fact that I had similarly lost a few billion quid on coffee made me realise that this might not be the best idea in the world ever.

So I migrated to Café Nero. Same problem.

So I migrated to MacDonalds. Though I was hungry the regular custom in MacDonalds is so unused to seeing somebody working or even capable of reading, never mind independent thought I thought it might be best to get out of there before one of the denizens got any funny ideas and before I was in danger.

So I migrated to a library. They were fine with me working on my laptop for huge chunks of time, though they did object to me watching hardcore pornography in between bouts of creativity. They also were not receptive to the idea that it was purely research.

So I migrated to B&Q. This was a happy medium, there was a café that was virtually empty, nobody bothered me but at the same time nobody took an order from me, no matter how patiently I waited. On the third day I discovered that there was no café in B&Q and I had been sat in the lighting section for two days.

They were also not impressed by my using of the bathroom aisle every couple of hours.

However on the way out of B&Q I was virtually tackled by another member of the sales force who wouldn't actually let me out of the door until I had explained my entire home renovating needs to him. It did take me a while to explain to him that I had no actual need to renovate my house and was just looking for a way to escape Hugh Laurie's face.

After chaining me to a fence in the outdoors section he did beat out of me the concept that Hugh Laurie's face was only scowling at me from one corner of one room of my house. I had at least three more corners to stare at, and that was just in that single room.

I had an idea.

People generally run scared when they hear that line.

Home Improvement, with extra swearing

Tuesday 15th December

So there's a plan afoot.

I have a few rooms in my house that serve virtually no purpose. I have a Library that's virtually impossible to get in the door for all the stuff that's piled around waiting to go up into the attic and has been for the better part of the year, plus everything in the spare room.

The spare room itself used once or twice a month by people foolish enough to want to sleep overnight. Little do they suspect the mountain of bodies in the back yard.

No, the spare room was the target of the latest plan to convert a boxy little room with a ratty single bed and a mountain of crap into a new and efficient office for my writing.

So, taking it in order the first thing that had to be done was to magic the room empty. Which is easily enough done with an army to help carry and a warehouse to put everything into.

I, however, had neither of these things. I had a couple of invalids and an already-full room to squeeze things into. And apparently boxes do not move by swearing at them. It only took a couple of centuries to move everything out of the room, but by god it was finally done.

Then a quick trip to the insanitarium, and onto step two, removing the wallpaper that was apparently put up in the age before the steam-turbine and was apparently fashioned from some primitive form of asbestos.

It was fascinating to discover all the different wallpapers that the room had been decorated with before the current one, each of which was suitably horrible and all of which had only been partially removed before the decorator gave up and just papered over the lot. I think I might have gained a few inches to the room by getting rid of most of it.

I eventually gave up and decided to paper over what was left, especially since what was left had apparently been welded to the wall. That only took another couple of centuries.

Let's not forget the cleaning up at this point. Mountains of dirty and used wallpaper all over the place can be seen as a hindrance and doesn't move itself by swearing at it, my hoover will testify to that too.

Now for the trip to B&Q. Alright, so the timeline is a little squiffy, but you'll just have to accept that I was in the place wandering round the wallpaper aisles looking for divine inspiration. Fortune favours the brave and I discovered that the second best way of getting help is to walk up to a member of staff and admitting that you're clueless as to what you're doing.

The very best way of getting help is to grasp a member of staff firmly by the throat and admit that you're clueless as to what you're doing. Clueless about wallpapering that is, I'm quite good at throttling people. We used both methods while I was there.

A quick tour of the site, a large trolley and some crying later I found myself in possession of a billion rolls of paper, some coloured, some lining paper, a fifty billion gallon drum of ready mixed paste, some tools, a new folding table and a couple of bits for some shelves and I headed to the tills.

Oh, a side note about tills in B&Q, if you're running a shop the size of a few barns stuck together you really should have more than one till open at once, no matter what time or on what day. I decided to save time by using the self service tills. This is a mistake since the ones at B&Q were designed by Bobcat Goldthwaite's speech therapist on L.S.D. Scan first item, check. Place first item into large hopper, check. Wait for assistance, che….what? The point of using this till is because there's no bloody staff here in the first place. Nice going, B&Q, way to make the customer feel loved.

What you might have realised at this point is that I have spent a lot of time, money, effort, swearing, my house looks like a bombsite, my feet hurt and I have yet to actually start decorating. There is something very wrong here.

Oh yes, I forget to tell you about the spare bed. Well that had to go. We've got a foldout futon for guests to sleep on, so the big ratty single bed had to go, same as the red sofa in the living room. So how do you get rid of old furniture? Well the most obvious answer is to call friends with vans, all of which have since sold or crashed them, inconsiderate sods.

We eventually called the magic pixie hotline branch of the local government, who for a one-off fee would gladly come round to the house and magic things away. A maximum of five items to be magicked away. Well, a bed and a sofa is two items, yes? No. That would be one sofa, a bed and a mattress. No, that would be a sofa, a bed, a mattress, and a headboard. I seriously expected them to start counting the cushions on the sofa and charge us double.

But these they would magic away from the house on a Wednesday, providing they were outside between seven in the morning and five in the afternoon. They aren't insured to come inside, these magic pixies. So they had to be outside at the latest of 7am. And you can't put them out the night before because this is rainy season and if they get waterlogged then the pixies can't touch them. They probably explode.

Hence the scene at my house a couple of weeks ago of me and my darling manhandling large furniture through small doorways at six in the morning trying to be extra quiet to not disturb the neighbours and setting up an art installation in the driveway. Then back to bed.

I got up to relieve pressure at 8am that morning to discover that pixies like driveway art so much that they had stolen mine without waking us. I wonder where it is now, but when they say they start at 7am, for once I believe them.

Anyway, back to the plot, I'm standing in an empty room with a bucket of paste and a flimsy table and enough paper to kill a civil servant.

I nearly wept when I realised that I had yet to start.

Paperwork, it's always bloody paperwork

Wednesday 16th December

There's something you should know about this project.

I haven't got the faintest clue what I'm doing.

Seriously.

It's not like painting and decorating was ever part of my family life or a class at school or anything silly like that, I mean really, when do people learn this sort of thing?

I'm thirty three years old and although I understand the concept of wallpaper I've yet to come to grasp with the actual mechanics of it. I'm assuming that somewhere there's involved a brush, some glop and at some point a goblin pops out of a hole in the ether and just does the job for you.

Like magic, if you will.

That was an entire morning wasted waiting for that magic goblin to show up, I even had doughnuts waiting for it. Maybe I should have invested in some whisky instead.

Anyway, there I was, in a bare room with a flimsy table, some paper, a ten bajillion gallon of glop and no fricking clue as to what I was doing. My memory was telling me something about getting a ballon and old newspaper but I'm not sure how making papier-mache heads was going to help at this point so I put that on the to-do list for later.

I listened to Fred at this point and had a cup of tea and consulted the idiots guide to DIY I had stashed in the library and occasionally drag out for manly tasks like this. It covers everything in detail with full colour photographs throughout and so it's completely foolproof and in no way to be challenged.

The writers were obviously not ready for the level of simplicity that my brain was in need of since it fell into the utterly-bloody-useless category within an hour of starting.

Now, one thing I am absolutely sure of since completing the job is that I never want to hear another person ask me why I used lining paper. Nobody in the world other than me seems to have used it, with it being a wasted resource but my reasons are simple, it says to do it in the book, the woman at the hardware place said it wasn't a bad idea and I liked the idea of having an extra bit of insulation in the room. It was my first job and it was my office so I was going to do it right, ok?

Yes, I did come to regret that decision within a couple of hours. You want to know why? Well let's start with a long and tedious job having to be done twice now because of my stupid need to get things done correctly. More fool me. But that's nowhere near as bad as the first instruction when having to put up lining paper. How many of you know what that first instruction is?

I can hear you laughing at the back there. Let me share it with the rest of the class.

Lining paper has to be hung perpendicular to the real wallpaper. That means horizontally.

I'll let that sink in for a second so you can visualise it.

Yes, on my own I was pasting seven foot stretches of paper and then trying to figure out how to hold up one end to the wall and press it on, in the right place, without air pockets, and then trace my way across the wall rather than down without it catching on anything, picking up fluff from the carpet or dribbling glop all over myself. Repeatedly. Over and over and over again round and round and round the room and around the windows (of which there are two in this room, going behind the radiator, not trapping the cats (who only want to help) and then finding the light switch and power sockets without them getting all sticky and horrible.

Oh yes, that's fun.

Now I am covered in drying glop, my hands are crusted together, the carpet is smeared with all the detritus of the fun and games, and I am the proud possessor of a room so white I could house a psychiatric patient happily for a year providing I threw in fresh crayons every month or so.

Now we get the biggest hidden drawback to using lining paper. See, I wanted to get the job done so I could move in and start using it as an office. But if you've not wallpapered before you might not know one fairly important detail. I know I didn't know this.

You have to leave the room for a couple of days to dry out before you can touch it.

This is a good thing in one respect because a lot of the small bubbles and bumps just vanish overnight as the paper fits and stretches and so on, but for me it was just another few days with all my toolboxes and bits lying around the rest of the house.

Which sucks.

Anyway, cut forward another couple of days and we get on with the main job of the piece, putting up the wallpaper. The cunning wallpaper with a pattern that has to match. The coloured wallpaper that I specially chose because of the colour, the lack of flowers and the price. Yes, it was cheap. Leave me alone.

So you have to pick a spot to start with and draw a vertical line. With a plumb line and a spirit level. I don't have a seven foot spirit level. I do however have a bit of string with a kinder egg on the end that I use to torment the cats.

It all looked quite good until I took a step back. That didn't work so I stepped closer again. Matching wet paper on a nearly flat surface isn't as difficult as you might think. What is difficult however is the simple things.

Trying not to crease the paper? Impossible.

Hanging wet paper in line with other paper while matching patterns and not catching air bubbles? Impossible.

Corners? Forget it.

When I reached my first corner I was in good spirits. I might not have been doing a perfect job, but for my first effort I wasn't doing bad and was actually thinking I might finish within a couple of years of starting. Then I reached the corner.

The house nearly wasn't standing at the end of the furious attack I launched at it at that point, both verbally and physically. I think there are wild animals living in the nearby park who have given up on ever venturing near my street ever again and one of the cats is now on valium for its nerves.

This was the first corner of six in this one small room and already I was ready for the rubber sheeting and the hugging coat.

It's probably best if we skip forward a few hours now.

Suffice it to say that wallpaper does not go up by swearing at it.

So it's up now. It's not perfect and there's quite a lot of wrinkles here and there, you don't even have to look for them to see them but they're there. A few wrinkles. The top and bottom of most of the hangs can be a little bit raggy in places until I got the hang of how to do those, but I am quite proud of the job. You can see out of the windows, the pattern matches up all around the room, even over the door and around the radiator, the plug sockets and the light switch are usable and all in all it's a nice clean room to use.

What surprised me more than anything was after the wallpaper went up the last job that needed doing before moving in was a couple of shelves, and I'm quite good at shelves now. After the library which I decorated (painted) a couple of years ago I had no fear of putting up shelves after the dozen or so ten foot jobbies I managed for that. In fact I still had one 10' shelf left over from that which had been lurking around getting in the way ever since.

Measure the wall, mark on the shelving places, level it out with a spirit level, mark up the holes, grab the drill, bung the holes in, rawlplugs, brackets, sand and shape the shelves and screw them into place, even going so far as to use spacers behind the shelves and bang, you're done. All in less than an hour.

Funny how these things turn out, isn't it.

Now I have no fear.

Between me and my darling we manhandled the stupid bloody desk upstairs and through the doorways. Oh yes, let's not forget having to take off one of the doors to get it into the room. Swearing alone didn't achieve that either, you'll be amazed to learn.

And so now I've been writing in this very office since Monday and bloody proud I am too.

The one eyed monster is no longer hypnotising me, and all I have to worry about is the internet, but there's virtually nothing on that, is there?

It's not like it's got everything in the world ever on it.

Snow Day

Monday 21st December

Sorry about this, but it's been years since i saw the snow and wasn't cooped up in the office, so i'm going to go and frolic in the snow.

Peace out.