Category: Other

For the last couple of weeks I have felt as though I were in a bit of a slump. Those around me are very good on picking up on such things and try one of two things. They either tell me to ‘be happy’ which is possibly the worst thing you can say to someone in a downward spiral or they attempt to understand it. For the majority of my life I’ve struggled with the ebbs of flows of my moods. It goes beyond being stroppy and it wasn’t until I eventually got round to seeking professional help that I was advised that I had probably suffered a series of depressions, even at the age of ten. I therefore feel I am always on eggshells around myself.
The majority of occasions when this has occurred I’ve eventually managed to pull myself out of the nosedive after a couple of days or weeks. It doesn’t worry me anymore. I know it is part of the path. The struggle I have is in being able to identify what it is I am unhappy with.

I would like to share two of the best things people said to me during that time, one of whom at least was not even aware of how solid gold her words were.
I was explaining how I felt to a good friend, someone I look up to and always think of as being a very strong and driven man, and he explained that what I was feeling wasn’t unusual and that he had recently suffered a similar crisis of confidence. He worried about his legacy and whether this was all we were intended to do and achieve with our limited time on Earth. It really hit me. A lot of the time I like to imagine that I’m alone in my thought processes, that I’m this delicate flower that nobody will ever be able to understand but he crawled right under the skin of the problem. That is my concern. What if I’m not making the most of what was going on. As John Lennon said, “life is what happens when you’re busy making plans”.
What my friend helped me to realise is that there is nothing wrong with striving for more, but you have to carry on doing whatever it is you are doing because that, unfortunately, is the way it is. We have to pay the bills, have to put bread on the table and have to… any other hunter/gatherer type expressions you may choose to supplement in. He made me think about the fact that I’m not alone in my unhappiness, that deep down nobody is happy with the status quo but unless you’re going to do something about it then nothing is going to change. I went home that night and started work on a new book. I’ve spoken before about my fears of death, of dying and being forgotten and my realisation that my writing was my attempt to eventually stretch back from beyond the grave.
I honestly love what I do for a living, I love the people I work with but to know we are all striving for something better makes me feel less alienated.

The second conversation that helped me through was one conducted on Southend high street at 1am last Sunday morning. As you can imagine, it was both sobering and insightful.
I was explaining to someone how great it is that within our circle of friends everyone is very creative, that they strive to achieve these things. What I actually said was “everyone is trying to do something”.
She said “No Paul, everyone is doing something”.
I stopped dead. She was completely right.
John and George and Ali aren’t trying to be a sketch group, they are a sketch group.
Ross isn’t trying to be a comedian, he is a comedian.
Sam isn’t trying to create music, he is creating music.
I’m not trying to be a writer, I am a writer.
“There is no try” as Yoda said.

Once you eliminate the trying aspect, I realised I am doing things and I shouldn’t be so down in the mouth because everything I write is a progression, is something I am doing and one way or another I am going to get to where I want because that is where I will end up.

In the last couple of weeks I have been handed some pretty heavy reminders of exactly how time is escaping me. It is also escaping you. This occurs at the same rate. We have that in common. It may seem that it takes longer, especially when you are looking forward to something, or even when being dragged through the rigmarole of something you don’t want to be a part of. The important thing I am coming to realise is to brace the whole damn lot of it.

I read recently that if you were to consider the time the Earth has existed as a twenty-four hour clock then humans would have been around for one minute and seventeen seconds. I couldn’t even Google that information in that time. 

This week I ran into someone I was at university with. They reminded me that it has been close to a decade since we started university. I try to think back to who I was and who I was, what I was into and how bad my hair looked and it is hard to imagine it is even the same person. Similarly I caught up with a friend recently and we couldn’t even establish how long it had been since we had last seen one another. It felt recent because of our mutual adoration of social networking but in reality was something along the lines of six years.
I think of myself in years gone by as a character that I’ve grown out of, that I can pull material from, but not as someone who existed within the body I am now in, that assisted in me becoming who I am now. We may share an awful lot of history but we feel entirely removed from one another. Catching up with friends is very important to me. It seems that as time goes by the importance of maintaining contact is stretched further. What I once considered a long period of time to be alone is now never enough. Waiting on anything is never as drastic as it was as a child. The reason for this, and I’m sure I can’t stake a claim to the theory is that as you grow older your slice of life grows, fewer things become new, become adventures, become changes. You fall into a pattern because you have experienced a lot of what is to offer. 
I’m not trying to claim that I’m some kind of world-weary seen it all type but the day to day just ticks by because it is just that. This is why when you get an opportunity to go off somewhere, or you’re offered a gig, or you are invited out to the woods after midnight you pull on your longcoat and you start walking. 
I would hate to get to a point where I regretted the decisions I had made. 

Last night I hosted the first Six Presents High Variety show at The Alex in Southend. It was an evening of stand up comedy, songs, juggling, escapology and improvisation. It was absolutely fantastic. I can’t think of a time when I enjoyed being on stage so much. It was made all the better by the performers so before I get into the nuts and bolts of the thing I would like to thank Sam, Cat, Ben, Ross, Justin, Adam, Lance, Jack, Jamie and Luke for the parts they played in it being a success.

I find it incredible that I am surrounded by such talent, that within our little corner town there is such skill and magic, and that there is obviously an audience for it. Those who joined us last night were patient and true. When I tried to tell jokes or play the piano they stuck by it and saw the whole thing through.

I feel truly blessed for being a part of the show and the success I feel it to be.

Last night the beautiful nun mums of Old Trunk hosted another of their brilliant Tales & Ales events at The Alex in Southend. They kindly asked if I would like to do a reading. The subject matter for this session was Tinkers, Scoundrels, Dunderheads & Pricks. Fortunately I had just the right piece, a section from my new novel The Stamp Collective.

The Stamp Collective is a tale of camaraderie, brotherhood, sex, death, Tom Jones and the Oedipus complex. In the following scene the Stamp brothers are at the wake of their mother who they lost to cancer.

Benny was stood at the buffet table. Despite his invested interest in the event, he had taken to the task of ‘putting on a good spread’ with professional aplomb and the delicate aperitifs had all been prepared by his hand. He had spent two days and nights up shaping, carving, scooping and seasoning in order to provide the kind of food his mother loved him for. Despite her constant claim she was on a diet, prior to the cancer of course, Mrs. Stamp had always been a fan of ‘picky bits’. This was in fact the exact phrase used in her will to describe her funeral arrangements.
Benny was also drunk. Nowhere near as far gone as either of his brothers but his constitution was legendary. He could drink an entire bottle of vodka before leaving the house for a night out. He did however have a tendency to get either a bit feely or a bit violent when the occasion and the drink took him.
‘This grub is a bit wanky’ said the gentleman to Benny’s left, throwing a stuffed plum tomato back onto the silver tray. ‘Where’s the fucking vol-au-vents?’
‘I’ll give you the fucking vol-au-vents!’ screamed Benny and grabbed the man’s head between his hands, twisting it until it was close to coming off before slamming it onto and through the table. Despite their pretty appearance, decorated with white lace table clothes, candles and flowers, the tables were essentially cheap chipboard affairs dressed up. The man hollered as he went through, the contents on either side of the split sliding in on him. Trays of profiteroles and filo pastry prawns collided as they met under gravity’s sweet gaze on and around him. The high pile of china plates intercut with red paper napkins flipped out across the floor.
Hearing the sound of smashing crockery acted like a summons for Frank and Rees. They knew straight away that there was only one person invited to the wake who had the capacity for such chaos if it were neither of them.
‘Benny!’
They ran to the scene of the crime, suddenly sobered by the materialisation of a family emergency. By this point the fallen man, Tony, had made it to his feet and was swinging a drumstick in their brother’s face. His cheek was already beginning to bruise from the impact with the falling trays, his shirt was soaked with fruit punch and chocolate fondant and the crotch of his trousers was splattered with a test batch of Benny’s homemade sauce.
‘Oi’ shouted Rees, ‘stop aiming that chicken leg at my brother!’
‘You!’ shouted Tony just as loudly, ‘you’re the one who has been hitting on my bird.’
‘Your bird?’
Rees automatically shot a look over to the table of women. One of them waved a monogrammed handkerchief at him in an act of confession.
‘She told me she was getting divorced.’
‘Yeah! And I’m her boyfriend.’
‘You’re not a boy though’ said Rees. ‘You’re a cunt!’
Before Tony could make any kind of move he let out a scream as Frank smashed a ramekin of Thousand Island sauce into the bridge of his nose. Frank watched as Tony fell to the floor, confused as to how his simple action could have had this equal and opposite reaction.
‘What did you do that for?’ asked Benny.
‘What?’ dribbled Frank, ‘I thought we were having a fight.’
‘Leg it!’ said Rees as they heard the approach of sirens.
The three brothers headed for the door but were caught by a sudden influx of policemen.
‘What the hell is going on in here!’ asked one of the uniformed constables. Nobody answered. The room was still. At the back of the long hall Tony let out a soft moan and blindly walked into the smashed half of a table before falling down once more.
‘Sorry, we were having a wake’ said Frank, sweeping his fringe which was soaked in gin back from his eyes. ‘Things got a little out of hand and we are sorry but we will be quieter. We buried Mother today you see.’
‘You’re just lucky we were passing. What happened to him?’
Frank, Benny and Rees turned to where the policeman was pointing. Tony was attempting to wipe his eyes clean of pink dressing and blood with the sleeve of his white shirt. He looked dizzy, even in his seated position and may well have been suffering from a concussion.
‘Oh don’t worry about him officer, he’s just had a little too much of the sauce.’

The Stamp Collective will be independently published in Spring 2014.

Edit: I wanted to thank the guy who bought a copy of my short stories. Very cool of you. Hope you enjoy it.

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Last night I headed out on the utter fool’s errand of shopping at Westfield Shopping Centre, Stratford City. A place so devoid of any of the warmth capable of a city that I feel it should be stripped of at least part of its name.
My issue isn’t wholly with Westfield Shopping Centre, Stratford City, it is partly with retail, partly with our consumerism and mostly within myself. There’s something terribly unnerving about Westfield Shopping Centre, Stratford City and I got thrown into the Sarlacc pit.

I don’t like shopping, in fact I would go further to say I don’t generally like large groups of people. Don’t get me wrong, people can do weird and wonderful things en masse, they can dance, they can riot, they can change the world. My issue is with the strip light nudity with which people choose to expose themselves in the eternal search for fulfilment.
This may all be getting a bit heavy from my starting point.

I struggle to understand what my issue is with the false-eyelashed, tangerine skinned who seem to frequent not just the stores as customers but also represent them behind the counters. I don’t know why I hate guys with douchey pencil beards and pseudo-ironic baseball caps on backwards. There is a part of me that is concerned it comes with my growing age. I’m getting ever distant from the coming of age tales I find myself exploring. I don’t like the overuse of the abbreviation, the selfie, the hashtag. I don’t even know what a Macklemore is. I find myself telling people music is not the same as was it in 2003. A Google search reveals the biggest songs of 2003 were The Ketchup Song (Las Ketchup), Dilemma (Nelly featuring Kelly Roland) and If You’re Not The One (Daniel Beddingfield) so what the fuck am I actually on about. I have to admit it. I am getting older.
This week I have been reading the brilliant and I am hoping post-modern novel Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis. In it he discusses his own heyday of the 1980’s when he was running around LA having sex with everyone and doing all the drugs. Now the eighties are viewed with the kind of nostalgic disdain that Student Union theme nights are built upon. It’s seen as being kitsch. Will there be an emerging theme of 00’s nights where Linkin Park, Papa Roach and Limp Bizkit are pumped into bleeding ear canals while everyone pretends they don’t still have Hybrid Theory, Infest and Chocolate Starfish on their iPod. Oh wait, that’s the Brush as it is now.

Back to shopping and I found myself in Primark, eager to step up my inward hatred. Stepping into that store is like falling into the primordial ooze, but the prices are good.
I found myself dodging around trolleys, dollies and buggies in search of the bargains of the day. It was only when I found myself staring down my own grey-faced reflection in the changing room mirror, a popper buttoned denim shirt clad over my skin that I realised something had gone horribly wrong.
In the queue for the tills (once I had picked up my uniform plain v-neck t-shirts (like a wayward, talented, thin, handsome Simon Cowell)) I watched the man in front of me feel his way through each upturned bucket of impulse buys stationed along the railed off holding pens. He kept going for hair scrunchies, placing two fingers into the coil before shaking his head and returning them to the box. I assumed he was looking for stylish discount cock rings.

In H&M I tried to indulge the till droog in conversation. There was a song playing in the store, a song he must have heard on a loop so many times that it had lost any kind of meaning it could have ever held.
Me: Do you know what song this is?
Till Droog: This particular song?
Me: Well yes.
Till Droog: No, but if you go on our Facebook page there is a link to our music we play in stores.
Me:Oh okay, so it isn’t from a particular album or anything?
Till Droog: This particular song?
Me: Yes, this particular song.
Till Droog: No.

I think my issues with the world are really that I don’t feel a part of it. I watch the eternally midday sun lit emporium of squalor and I don’t feel what any of the other people seen to be expressing. I’m not excited about it. It’s a thing I have to do, as quickly as possible, and then I want to get out.
I see the queues of girls getting French pedicures, the gangs of boys checking out said girls with their JD Sports bags swung in front of them. I see parents struggling with children and children struggling with parents and I wonder what the fuck it can all possibly mean, and if this is our intended purpose and why I can’t help but feel removed from it, as though I’m watching myself be disgusted by it all.

This week has been absolutely crazy. I don’t really know where my head is at. This is the first time I’ve been able to sit down and chill for a moment. There is a lot going on. 

Between family stuff, flat-purchasing stuff, music, writing and performance stuff including hosting a variety show at The Alex in two weeks I haven’t had much time to process all of the crazy things that go on in my little life. It’s quite overwhelming. 

I thought I would take this opportunity to drop a quick update on all of the things that are currently pending:

I have found a proof-reader for The Stamp Collective who is currently working her way through it with the finest of toothcombs to spot any accidental transatlanticals that may have snuck their way up in there. 
I have also confirmed with the great Adam Gardner (who designed the cover for Where Did All The Money Go? and co-curates Charlie’s Hand Movements) that I want him to design the cover of The Stamp Collective. 
I will then look to set a date to have a launch night for the book with some wine and some performances.
I’m really excited about getting it out to people. It will be my first novel and it means an awful lot to me. Things that have occurred in my personal life this week have amplified and magnified my thoughts on it and within it and I want people to get to grips with that. 
I’ve also got some great ideas for promotional materials. It’s one of the few books I can think of that has its own soundtrack (High Fidelity and Nick & Norah spring to mind though).
I’ve agreed to perform at the next Tales & Ales night for Old Trunk, and will be reading an extract from The Stamp Collective. 

In addition I have been hard at work for my performance for High Variety. There’s a mix of different things put on including music, comedy, juggling and escapology and I can’t wait to be a part of it. I’ve been working on some comedy songs which I’m trying to segue into the night as part of my hosting patter. I’m genuinely excited and nervous about it. 

I’ve also been redrafting my Sahara journal – Yallah! Again, I may have to bend Adam’s arm to design something for the cover and plan to then self-publish that even if it is solely for the reference of those I trekked the desert with. It was an incredible experience and one I am glad to have taken the time to document. 

Things are still going to plan with the flat, or as far as I know they are. I’m in a strange no-man’s-land where I am being promised things are being done and we are moving forwards but there is nothing specific in sight yet. 

Be safe.

In October 2013 I wrote up a piece originally written by my grandfather Friedrich Wilhelm Schiernecker about his experiences in Nazi occupied Amsterdam. It helped me to understand a man I had never really felt an affinity with. Unfortunately Wim was recently moved into a residential care home because he is unable to look after himself due to his dementia. I found out on Friday that a house clearance team are due to clear his flat out next weekend, hired to remove every trace of his ninety-one years. While I appreciate this is something that needs to be done it still made me incredibly sad. 

On Saturday morning I drove over to his flat to collect his typewriter which had kindly been set aside for me by my aunt and uncle. I have written on any number of occasions about the wonders of minimalism, of keeping only those things that serve a purpose or provide enjoyment but once I was in that flat I realised what a shame it would be for someone to not hold onto more of what he had left behind. I thought about my childhood and how I had been naturally drawn to my grandparents, how they provided me with the love and attention I have craved ever since and how it was entirely unconditional. This was a time before I was side-swiped by reality, before I took into account others opinions and just loved without boundaries or prejudice. I realised that I did have a relationship with my grandfather, and while it seemed strained as I entered my teenage years I was incredibly lucky to have him there in the first place. The pressure to have a relationship only became so once I was aware of it. When I lost my grandmother (or Nan as I called her) I was devastated. It was the first time I had experienced such personal tragedy. It was hard. I feel as though I had lost touch with something just by how jaded I have become.

That’s why I didn’t just step out with the Imperial Good Companion 201 portable typewriter but also a watch and desk calendar to help remind me how precious our time truly is, photographs of my grandparents when they were young, thin, in love, happy, to ensure they stay that way in some capacity and my grandfather’s leather suitcase because family is baggage but one I will happily carry.

It’s Christmas Day. I’m sat alone watching Doctor Who and wondering when the call will come for me to take on the lead role. I’ve been hard at work on the present I am making for a number of my closest friends.
Last year because none of us had any money we decided we would all make one another gifts instead of just buying things for the sake of them. I obviously can’t say what it is I am doing in case they happen to read this post before I get a chance to deliver on it but it’s pretty cool and I’m quite excited.

That being said, I have made a little Christmas video featuring the poem I performed at the Old Trunk Winter Tales & Ales reading earlier this month. Regardez:

Today I have started work on another book. I’ve already completed NaNoWriMo so if I manage to get any of this new project done I will be over the moon.
It’s the first of a three-part fantasy series I have had in my head for five years. It’s inspired by the great adventure and fantasy books I read as a child – Carroll, Tolkein, Lewis. It’s a complete departure from my NaNoWriMo project and different to anything I have ever written before. I’m very excited about it all. It’s a real race against time now.