Category: It’s Actually Quite Nice Being Me

In recent months there have been a number of changes in my life. I find myself drawn to taking advice from other people as if it is gospel. What I really wanted was some advice for myself that I can turn to and so I created the below list. It is by no means complete but I can’t imagine that any list of its ilk ever should be. Here is my advice for my life.

1. Write about what you know but remember you know your own imagination.
2. There is nothing that can’t be solved by listening to The Beatles or a strong dose of antibiotics.
3. Wear all the black you can.
4. You don’t owe or own other people.
5. Cold hands, warm heart.
6. A weekend wasted is not a wasted weekend.
7. Floss.
8. You will never get today back.
9. Cut out poisonous situations and relationship for your own good.
10. Never regret. It got you where you are.
11. Imagine a string emerging from the top of your head and keeping you up straight.
12. When wearing headphones it is best to imagine you are in a music video.
13. Season to taste.
14. Layers are important.
15. If it doesn’t bring you joy or serve a purpose then let it go.
16. Make mixed tapes for specific journeys. They deserve the attention of a soundtrack.
17. Always tell people you love them, especially as you leave.
18. Dog-ear the pages of your books to track down quotes you loved later. There is nothing a book appreciates more than being physically assaulted.
19. Take the time to appreciate both architecture and nature.
20. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need
21. It’s okay to be scared.
22. It’s very hard to get a good bagel in an airport.
23. Just remember, that body of yours is on loan.

Today represents four weeks since I moved into my flat. It turns out that living alone has done some strange things to me, taught me some lessons and made me appreciate just what happens when I get stir crazy.

I treat myself like a cat.
You know how cat people like to leave a radio on so their cat doesn’t get lonely. I now leave the radio on so I don’t get lonely.

I have a lot of stuff.
I’ve blogged before about minimising possessions and being content, now I have an ironing board.

It takes a long time to get things sorted.
I’ve only got a washing machine and the Internet this week.
Paul, that’s disgusting you must be thinking, how could you go over three weeks without the Internet. I’ll tell you. I struggled.
Also, I don’t have a sofa, or a dining table, or a freezer.

Drinking alone is mandatory.
If I am ever going to pull this genius recluse thing off, I need to be drunk a lot of the time.

I’m really scared of oversleeping.
I keep finding myself waking up at 4am, worried that I have overslept. So far I’ve been really good, and I treat myself to some Cheerios.

I now say adult things.
I keep catching myself talking to people about property. Everyone has advice which is fantastic but yesterday I legitimately asked someone who did their windows. Who the fuck am I?

People who say moving house is the most stressful thing you can do clearly aren’t me
At the time of buying my flat and all the issues surrounding it I also found myself putting together the final touches on my first novel, editing the arts & cultures section for What’s Up, What’s On magazine and maintaining a full time job. I nearly fell apart like bread in a duck pond during the month.

Nobody steals my stuff.
When I lived with my family, nothing was sacred. Money, food and DVDs wandered off. Now they stay just where I left them.

I am weird.
It turns out that I will do the strangest things to entertain myself. One night while getting ready for bed I tucked my plaid shirt into my jeans, undid all of the buttons and danced for myself in front of the mirror.

I am very fucking lucky.
I don’t want any of you to think that I don’t appreciate everything that I have and everything that is going on for me at the moment. I feel very privileged. I was on my way home the other night and just thought of getting in and having dinner and watching Homeland with Kate and everything felt good. I could never imagine being in this position.

You are not being treated to a post right now because my Kindle is out of batteries and it’s a long commute to just sit and twiddle my thumbs.
I hope you’re wondering why there wasn’t the usual update this week. I’m sure you were refreshing and pondering what gold I was going to spray at you.
You didn’t miss it. There wasn’t one. I have finally been absorbed into my so called work. I can’t explain it all because neither of us have the time. I do however have a new title.

As of this moment I am the Arts & Culture editor for What’s Up What’s On magazine. It’s a massive opportunity at a brilliant up and comer and I can’t wait to get completely absorbed in the work.
My boss (Steve (why are they always called Steve)) is a cool cat and is giving me a lot of room to choose what I write about while being sure I turn over something of quality and stick to the ever threatening deadlines. There’s a lot of room for development. The discussions we have had are exciting and we will see what becomes of it all.

Today has been a day of progress. My next book, The Stamp Collective, has been returned to me by the proof reader I hired to check it before I independently publish it.
I’ve received confirmation that the contract on my flat is good to go and I could be moving in two weeks.
I’m still getting a steady number of rejection letters for my latest manuscript, Yours Sincerely, Southend but it’s hard to be down about anything when everywhere else is blooming so nicely.
Something is happening and I’m in orbit.

This week in the life of being me I became aware that something very wrong was occurring. As covered in my blog post where I went climbing and couldn’t stop thinking about Cyndi Lauper my friends seem to be on some kind of ridiculous loving life 2k14 health kick at the moment. I’m hoping it will subside in the very near future and we can just carry on being disgusting slobs. 

Their wild decisions have chosen to manifest themselves this week in signing up for a 10k Marine Commando Challenge. I know what you’re thinking, live and let live. Well, I tell you what, I used to say live and let live (you know I did, you know I did, you know I did) but then I discovered I was expected to be a part of this whole debacle. Somehow this team of insaniacs (which I think was coined by Peter Andre) need me along for the ride, and not even to hold their coats as they disappear into the clay pit. This is actually insane. We aren’t marines, we aren’t commandos. Perhaps on occasion we have gone commando but that won’t save you across six miles of liquid shit. 

The truth of the matter is this is going to be an amazing experience for all of us. Although we are all built like twiglets with googly eyes stuck on we have promised to take the threat of the 10K MARINE COMMANDO CHALLENGE as being real and threatening, because it is both of those things. We are all very competitive around each other, and in our own lives and I’m hoping that is reflected in our training in the coming months. I’ve already started following Craig David on Instagram so you know I’m taking this shit seriously. #eatcleantraindirty

It also means we get to do some good by raising money for charity.

This week I have become very popular. On Saturday I celebrated my birthday with cake and Dexter Season 5. This meant that everyone felt obliged to let me know how well they wished me. This was of course lovely but the popularity is yet to wane. Every day I receive calls and emails from people who just want a bit of my attention and a bit of my time.
Of course they are not here to wish me a joyeux anniversaire but instead they are asking me for details;
What’s your take home salary after tax?
Where is the best place to send you some documents?
What colour would you like me to dye the towels?

The reason I have become so inundated with bizarre requests this week is that the offer I put in on a flat I instantly fell in love with was accepted, and only a matter of days later further confirmation was received to say the vendors of said property had found themselves a property meaning the chain is now complete and I can start eye-assaulting the pages of an Ikea catalogue and querying why there is a Chinese family in the bathroom.

I know more than anyone what a giant leap for Paulkind this represents. I think I never have any money now, and the idea of being responsible for ensuring I eat and sleep when I should baffles me completely let alone the idea of borrowing cups of sugar from neighbours and reading electric meters over the phone. I keep wondering when it will kick in that I am an adult. By the time my dear sweet mother was my age she had two children. That’s mental. I can’t be trusted with a Rubik’s Cube let alone a baby person. What I am slowly coming to realise is that all of the brilliant and infallible people I grew up around, the giant tree trunks of men and the brilliant matronly and world-wise women, they didn’t know what they were doing either. They were completely winging it. I just didn’t have the audacity to call them out over it as a child. Really, nobody knows what they are doing. The whole thing is just carried out on a wing and a prayer.
As a perfect example of how unprepared I am for life I just had to look up the history of the phrase ‘a wing and a prayer’ to better understand if I had used it in the correct context. As an aside it dates back to the Second World War, and was notably used in the 1942 film The Flying Tigers by John Wayne’s character to describe the condition of a dogfight damaged plane returning to base. Now where was I and what was I talking about?

Yes, I am very excited about this new chapter. I might even get ITV3 to commission a series on my movements in the coming months – Paul Schiernecker: The Next Chapter.

Photo: Nerf bullet in blinds (I will never grow up)

I was death-obsessed as a teenager. I thought there was something cool and poetic about leaving a beautiful corpse. I was sure I had to leave the earth at 27 like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain.
When Amy Winehouse joined their numbers I started to think differently. She was someone I had witnessed through both her genius and her struggles and there was nothing cool or beautiful or poetic about it. It was just really sad. It was a tragedy.

This week I turned 27. Suddenly the idea of checking out has lost it’s appeal. I have far too much to do. I could never put myself on that path.
I have realised that I am not a rock star and never really had the attitude for it. It’s a pipe dream. I’m just not that mean. I appreciate now that not everyone is as one-dimensional as I assumed them to be. While Morrison might be seen as Mr Mojo Risin, the Lizard King poet and symbol of all that is true and holy to some, he could be a conceited and drunken arsehole. I put him on a pedestal. I thought of him solely as the former and ignored the latter.

The sad thing about those people is that their abilities were cut short. While there’s something poignant about appreciating a finite amount of work being available it is much better to see an entire journey through. It’s not better to burn out, Neil Young has disproved his own lyrics in that way.

My countdown has stopped. Now I count up.

Andy Warhol famously said that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.
In the last couple of weeks I genuinely came to believe that at long last my chance had come, my 900 seconds in the spotlight, my perfect moment (as Martin McCutcheon would put it before she went off peddling yoghurt with made up science in it).
What happened is Carl Barat, beloved ragamuffin and songwriter to The Libertines, Dirty Pretty Things and indeed Carl Barat put an open invite on Twitter, Facebook etc to join his band. I was of course excited at such a prospect but similarly didn’t hold out much hope as I attempted to pen a mirth-spunked email which I could only assume would be scanned and discarded by one of Mr Barat’s many underlings.
I included two songs as attachments (She Calls The Shots and Comin’ Down for those of you interested in my discography) along with my standard Interwebisphere avatar where I’m tastefully greyscaled and beautiful. And then I played the waiting game, which is one of my least favourite games (after I Spy and The Generation Game).

Last week I received an email from actual Carl himself, or at least someone who used his name to sign off an email, asking me to come for an audition at a pub in South East London. I was told to learn Gin & Milk by Dirty Pretty Things and Death On The Stairs by The Libertines. My heart leaped. What if this thing I had put to the back of my mind actually came to fruition? What if I actually met him? I get starstruck at the best of times. At a book signing for Simon Pegg’s Nerd Do Well I told him I wanted to keep my brother in a shed.

I got myself together. I learnt both the songs (even if I had to write the structure to Gin and Milk on my wrist for reference), I booked a half day from work and then I was off.
Now the odd thing about auditions is that I had never had one. In my line of ‘work’ they are rare. You don’t audition to be a writer. You don’t audition to be a songwriter/guitarist/muso/journalist or any of the other things I could put a backslash between and claim to have turned my hand to. It’s just not the done thing. Auditions are for actors.
What happened when I turned up at the supercool Amersham Arms in New Cross was I found guitarists spread about the place like hulking figures on Greek pottery. There were PR/A&R types bouncing between everyone trying to collect details and arrange timings and get permissions while each of us tried to be as erstwhile and cool as possible. As you know, this isn’t my natural form. Instead I’m more of the death-obsessed anxious faux-intellect than the belching, leather and denim-clad rock god .My USP, I had decided was that it didn’t actually look like I belonged there, as though I had wandered in whilst searching for the Liechtenstein exhibit which closed six months ago at the Tate Modern.
I got a pint of Kronenbourg and waited.
I was told to ensure my guitar was tuned.
Then I was told I was next.
Then I was collected and taken through the back doors of the pub. There was another bar and a small stage where a session bassist and drummer awaited. One man sat in a chair with a camcorder while select members of bar staff watched on. I was reminded of the scene in Hook where Peter sends a colleague to film his son’s baseball game because he’s so consumed with office work. It was hardly the eagle-eyed talent scout panel I had been expecting. In my panic I couldn’t get the overdrive pedal to work so connected straight into the Marshall stack provided, and then shook hands with the bassist and drummer who said they would follow my lead and asked which of the two songs I wanted to perform. Looking down at the smudged Sharpie of Gin & Milk deconstructed on my wrist I went with Death On The Stairs and began frantically jigging about after playing the opening chords and as the drums kicked in. The band were fried gold. I don’t think I’ve ever played with anyone so attentive (sorry NPS and Willows). They knew exactly where I was going for the next three minutes and matched my grins and nods as I bounced and sweated my way through, scraping the solo in a manner befitting what I considered to be the imperfect style of the spirit of the intended band and the punk attitude in general. It certainly covers for not being the most dexterous or apt musician.
I licked my way through the outro and stopped. There was polite applause. I thanked the band and got down, feeling slightly sparked from the adrenaline. Like it or not, those few minutes had made a decision for me. I hate anything being out of my control and as I returned to the pub, to the sanity of the room of awaiting guitarists I felt a crushing dread. I was told to wait for a callback if any callback was necessary. I got chatting to some of the other guitarists, one of whom had flown down from Inverness just for the day. I couldn’t help but tweak my accent to include his, calling the session drummer a ‘wee lassie’ whenever he did so. I am such a fraud.
After two more hours and three more pints I was informed by text that I would not be required for a callback. I had tried to prepare myself for it but there is little more damning to a heart than a break up by text message.

Andy Warhol famously said that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.
I guess I’ll have to shine mine on for a little longer.

There was a time when my friends and I would collect and head to the nearest watering hole to exchange our thoughts on the world, women and the latest indie releases. They were good times of making plans, of it being fancy to order anything besides draft lager and of talking about women. Last night however, we went rock climbing.
I know. I was as miffed about it as you no doubt are. The truth of it is my friend Ben got a set of climbing holds for Christmas which he has affixed to the inside wall of his stable and he has been bounding across them ever since. In pursuit of our ‘most outdoorsy’ of chums, we have apparently decided to follow suit. I like climbing things as much as the next man, who was my friend Luke, who really likes climbing things, so we were set to have a good time. The issue in it for me is why people would take time out of their lives in order to climb things. We live in an age where if you need to reach a higher level, be it physical or metaphorical there are much easier ways of achieving that; either meditation or taking the stairs. There was however a part of me that couldn’t remove the opening credits of Mission Impossible 2 from my head, so I begrudgingly folded myself into the back of Luke’s Mini Cooper amidst the mass of a quarter-consumed bottles of water and takeaway wrappers.

When we got inside the fairly newly built ‘Basildon Sporting Village’, which mildly interesting fact my brother helped to mastic, we were told we had to sign a disclosure form. Nothing good has ever come from signing a disclosure form. We were asked what our level of climbing experience was. I admitted mine was climbing into bed with beautiful women while Luke and Ben fudged their way through an explanation to limit the amount of outside observation our ascents would be given.
We were then given harnesses, carabiners and a belay device. There is no getting around the fact that wearing a harness will make your genitals more obvious than Bowie’s in Labyrinth. The instructor checked Luke and Ben knew how to ‘tie on’, which is a cover for how Cub Scout etiquette the knot required to climb is before we were just left completely on our own in front of a thirty-two foot climbing wall with no crash mats in sight.
Fuck, I thought, this is how I’m going to die, In Basildon.

One after the other my friends climbed, checking each other’s knots and belay devices. It should be mentioned that belaying sounds a lot more like a form of decorative cake making than it is in actual genuine life. It’s the act of pulling in the slack in the line while your partner climbs and ensuring that if they fall, you hold their weight and stop them plunging to a gruesome but supported-crotched death. In addition once they reach the top you have to slowly give out the rope so they can repel themselves down the wall like an A-Team reboot.
Against his better judgment Ben let me hold him as he climbed. I had the incredible sensation of holding my best friend’s life in my hands. In my head the lyrics to Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time would not stop playing as I fed the rope in and pretended that if he were to slip I wouldn’t be thrown into the wall like a poor man’s Buster Keaton.
If you fall I will catch you I’ll be waiting, time after time.

Then it was my turn to climb. I flipped out at Luke twice for trying to explain to me how to tie off a line, because his instructions were like the Swedish side of an Ikea flat pack, and then I was up. Suddenly all of my qualms about why anyone would waste their time going up and down a wall were resolved. It’s actually brilliant. For people who are built like pipe cleaner replications of real humans it can give you an experience akin to being an action movie star. I was John McClane and Ethan Hunt and Lara Croft and the Spy Kids all rolled into one. I felt awesome. Aside from the fact as soon as I got over ten feet I started to shake through a fear of heights and a case of altitude sickness it was a lot of fun. I feel I should explain, as I did when I returned to Earth that I am not scared of heights, but I do have a fear of them. They are very different. I don’t know what that difference is, but it is there, and it is very real.
The issue comes when you look down and see that the person with your life in the balance is one of your friends, who no doubt probably wants you dead anyway.

I guess the lesson in all of this is to go out and try things, to embrace the things that you have a fear of, and to never forget the immortal words of Cyndi Lauper.