Summer Holiday

My summer holiday comes to an end today. After a mere 5 weeks and two days, I am once again being expected to get up in the mornings, dress in smart trousers and shirt and do the job I’m paid to do. I know, I’m outraged too. 5 weeks and two days? Who can possibly be expected to return to top form after such a short break? Back in my good old public school days, I lazed around for a full 9 weeks and so, frankly, it beggars belief that I am supposed to be at my best after only just a little over a month’s rest. It’s almost like they want the children to fail…

To celebrate the end of the summer holiday, here are 5 things that are great and 5 things that are frustrating about summer holidays:

Great

1) We get to see the Mastercard advert with teachers leaping into the pool while Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ rings out.

2) When you make sandwiches for lunch, you get to put them on an actual plate and eat them within a few minutes of making them rather than squishing them out of shape so that they fit in an ice-cream tub that won’t get opened again for at least 4, perhaps 5, hours.

3) Lying in bed while your wife gets up early to go to work.

4) Being able to beat your record for ‘number of times I have refreshed the Facebook page today’.

5) Having the time to make two websites, complete a monologue collection and write regular blog entries (by the way, the websites are still alive and well and looking forward to being visited if you haven’t had the chance to do so yet…).

Frustrating

1) People expressing their horror that teachers get 6 weeks off (5 weeks, 2 days actually…), as if this is a new thing that has just started and that no-one knew anything about. We all went to school. We all lazed around for 6 weeks (well, 9 if you went to a school that had its assemblies in a 900-year-old Cathedral…). We all considered becoming teachers for a brief moment when we remembered that they too got the holidays we got – but, and it’s a big but, you decided to go and do something else…

2) Rain – we’ve spoken about it quite a few times but, really, what is going on with the clouds at the moment? I’m sure August used to be nice. What did we do to it to make it like this?

3) Children are on holiday too.

4) In a non-World Cup or European Championships year, there is simply not enough football to watch. Why stop the football season when we’re finally around to watch it all?

5) False hope – we begin the holiday feeling as though we’ve come to the end of work, as though we’ll never need to enter that office again, and yet within a few weeks you’re beginning to realise just how few days you have left before it begins all over again…

Well, I’m sitting here looking at the rain soaking the BBQ I forgot to put away last night, waiting for my co-screenwriter to turn up for a brainstorming session to come up with an Oscar-winning storyline for our future film. By the way, has anyone actually dumped the word ‘brainstorming’ like we were supposed to and begun using the term ‘thought shower’? Personally, I don’t really think that people in England need another reference to rain and isn’t there something a little contradictory about having a shower while doing some ‘blue sky thinking’?

Right, time to make the most of every minute of my last day of holiday. I can feel a Facebook and Twitter check coming up, followed by regular refreshing of the ‘stats’ page of my blog to see how many people have read this within the last 5 minutes…

Kiss your past good-bye

So, it was A-Level results day today. All those months of work come down to a few letters on a piece of paper that might well determine not only where you live for the next three years but where you end up getting up a job and settling down for the foreseeable future. It’s always a strange thought that – Southampton very much feels like home for me now and yet I’m only here because my wife went to university here. Just think, I could have been eulogising over Exeter instead. Hmm, come to think of it, they probably don’t have the issues with the bins that we’ve had…

Talking of the future – well, we weren’t really but I needed a link – I’ve now finished my monologue collection and am looking forward to thrusting that upon the nation shortly. I’m not sure if ‘thrusting’ is the correct verb but it does, at least, express my acknowledgement that people may not exactly be queuing up, Harry Potter-style, to pick up their copy. Nevertheless, the thing will exist, and that’s more than can be said for things that don’t exist…

Also, I’ve just had my first meeting about co-writing a screenplay for a proper movie. As in, those things that last 90 minutes and appear on screens rather than just those ones that only you and your sub-conscious have ever seen or been credited for. I’m sure you know the sort – you’ve seen films. Well, think of one of those and now think about me writing one. Can’t see it? No, neither can I really. Thankfully, I won’t be alone (as you may have deduced from the ‘co’ bit earlier) and so the potential existence and success of the project doesn’t entirely rest on my shoulders. Whatever happens, work begins on Tuesday and the plan is to come up with a story. What could be easier?

That news was potentially so massive that this news simply pales into insignificance in comparison – I bought my first aubergine today. At least, I think it was my first. You’d have thought I’d have remembered my first aubergine, wouldn’t you, so I am assuming that today is my debut aubergine today. I enjoy the word aubergine (pronounced oh! – ber – jean) and am rather partial to the word moussaka too (which I misspelt twice before finally getting it right), so hopefully the two will come together in glorious harmony later this evening. This blog is beginning to resemble Julia and Julia more every day (which isn’t a bad thing if it secures me that movie deal we spoke about many months ago).

Verdict on the moussaka and further references to Aerosmith coming up soon…

Jewel Box

Maybe I’m just becoming a very paranoid and suspicious young man but there is certainly something slightly disconcerting about a man turning up at your door clutching a messy pile of yellow fliers saying that he is going around the neighbourhood asking whether anyone’s got any jewellery (‘such as gold or silver’, he says, clearly unconvinced I know what jewellery is) that he could valuate. More concerning would be if anyone then followed his request by presenting him with a box full of diamond necklaces and gold rings, eagerly determined to find out whether they might be able to get a couple of quid after all. I mean, how’s anyone supposed to sell anything these days unless someone turns up at their door anyway?

Needless to say, I insisted in an overly-assertive tone (which probably sounded a little suspicious, come to think of it) that we in fact have very little jewellery in the house. So little jewellery that I’m actually waiting for the guy who buys paper clips and elastic bands to come round later that morning so that I can afford to buy a couple of necklaces for my poor, deprived wife.

In other news, I came across an interesting article by Sam Leith earlier (which Nick Page pointed people to on Twitter) and so I wanted to show you a paragraph from it here as it touches upon some of the things I’ve mentioned from time to time and sums up my general approach to my days recently…

A large number of literate westerners spend most of their waking hours at computers, and those computers are connected to the web. The characteristic activity on such a computer has been given the pleasing name "wilfing", adapted from the acronym WWILF, or "What was I looking for?" You work a bit. You check if it's your move in Facebook Scrabble. You get an email. You answer it. You get a text. You answer it. Since your phone's in your hand, you play Angry Birds for five minutes. You work a bit. You go online to check something, get distracted by a link, forget what you were looking for, stumble on a picture of a duck that looks like Hitler, share it on Twitter, rinse and repeat.

The debate he then gets into is whether this proliferation of activities reflects the fact that we are cleverer than we used to be, since we can balance so many things at once, or whether we’re less capable then we used to be because we can’t maintain our focus on any one thing for that long at all. Since I’m a pretty big wilfer, I’m going to support the ‘we are cleverer’ argument…

In writing news, I’m now just one monologue away from having the collection ready to go and so my main focus is now on trying to find someone who can draw me a front cover. So, blog readers, is there anyone out there who would be up for drawing a few cartoon people, a cartoon snake and a cartoon tree? This is a genuine offer of stardom – well, the opportunity to appear on Amazon at least. Any takers?

I hope you’ve enjoyed having a browse of my websites. Lots keeps getting added and so do check back if you haven’t seen them for a few days – particularly the Contemporary Christian Drama one. Recently, I’ve been recording audio versions of the monologues, which has been good fun – if only for making me feel like I’m having a brief stint as a recording artist, seeing my name come up on Windows Media Player, fulfilling in a very roundabout and not really accurate way my long-held ambition to be a rock-star. OK, so there may be no guitars, drums or singing, but it’s a start at least.

Right, time to get the washing in before it rains and I have an awkward conversation with my wife on her return from work. It does mean I’ll be away from the front door for a few minutes – hope I don’t miss anyone coming round to buy any spare dust from our hoover (unluckily for them, if so, I managed to spill most of it on the kitchen floor yesterday)…

Video killed the radio star

It finally happened – I made it on to YouTube. Surprisingly, it wasn’t in a video of me slipping on the ice and falling on my backside in front of hundreds of students. Nor was it me holding up a baby and trying to get it to say ‘pizza’ so that millions of people around the world would comment on how cute my son/daughter was. (Please note: I do not have a son/daughter and do not have one in ‘the oven’, as it were, either…)

In fact, my YouTube debut comes in the form of a 6 minute clip of my Christmas play, ‘Who’s the Baby?’, and to be fair I’m not actually in the clip apart from my name appearing in the credits at the end along with a link to my website, but it’s a start nonetheless.

In an act of remarkable technical boldness (remarkable being a slight overstatement), I’m going to try and post the video link here:

Here it is–the world’s first chance to slate/praise my play…

It may not be the greatest piece of art ever created – in fact, I wouldn’t even begin to suggest that it might be – but it’s out there at least. And, as people sometimes rudely say when they burp, ‘better out than in’…

I’ve been quite a geek today, playing around with my websites and adding things like audio previews and this video clip to try and make everything look a little more jazzy. I suppose I should probably have included some actual jazz too, but it didn’t seem to fit the mood.

My mother-in-law has also posted on YouTube today and this one is a video of her granddaughter bending her toes (no, I’m not going to post the link here – but you can search for ‘bend your big toe if you like milk’ if you really want to…). Shall we take a vote on which video is likely to get the most hits?

Aside from website creation, I’ve been enjoying pretending to be other people again, writing monologues from the perspectives of teenage girls, men who almost got killed by their own fathers, and much more. Looking forward to getting my monologue collection out there soon!

Slightly self-indulgent of me I know but I’m just going to post my links one more time and then scamper off behind the settee before anyone shouts at me…

http://samlentonwriter.webs.com/

http://www.contemporarychristiandrama.com/

Sorry. I’ll be good next time and spend a few paragraphs complaining about pavements or something equally outrageous. Talking of outrageous, I’m pleased to see London was a little calmer last night, although less pleased to see Manchester getting in on the act. I know this blog has done some great things in the past (well, when I say ‘done’ I do of course mean, ‘failed to do but gave it a jolly good go’) trying to sort out our issues with rain and rubbish, but there would surely be nothing greater we could do than help in some way to put an end to this rioting. And so, if you know a rioter or someone who looks like a rioter (that’s right, we’re thinking of you) then why not send them to this web address for a good old read? Nothing stops people from mindless acts of violence like a good old read of a blog. Or so I assume anyway…

Alternatively (or, I should probably say, ‘additionally’), we could all start praying. Prayer’s always a good idea. Arguably, even better than reading this blog.

Panic

Listening to The Smiths this afternoon might not have been my wisest move. Hot on the heels from singing along to the words ‘Panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham’, two songs later I was on to ‘London’ and now I’m about to listen to ‘Shoplifters of the world unite’. It is perhaps the most inappropriate playlist I could have chosen given the events of the last couple of days and yet it was, I promise you, entirely unintentional.

I certainly don’t want to make light of any of the events we’ve witnessed in London, Birmingham and elsewhere, particularly last night when Sky News stopped being a repetitive flourish of 15 minute headlines and became the gripping movie you just can’t stop watching. Unfortunately, the truth that hits you is that this simply isn’t a movie and, in fact, the building burning down on live TV is not some exciting explosion from a Bruce Willis film but rather the building from which five generations of a family have sold furniture to the community. Everything gone in a few moments of mindless violence. It is, quite frankly, heart-breaking and I pray that somehow we have seen the end of this or, at the very least, the worst of it.

I’m sorry for the slight break between the previous blog and this one. I’ve been creating two websites that I am ready for you to have a look at now and so I hope that you will enjoy having a browse and will feel free to offer me your honest thoughts once you’ve taken a look. You’ll notice that the blog has been doubled up on the personal site and that there are some other materials to check out. There is still a lot to be added though and so do check back when you can to see more!

Here we go…

Firstly, my personal site to provide news of my writing and to showcase some of my work: http://samlentonwriter.webs.com

(This will, hopefully, have a better web address in the future but this will do for now!)

Secondly, I’ve created a website to host and distribute the writing I do for churches: www.contemporarychristiandrama.com

As I said, there’s a lot more to add but at least it gives you an idea at the moment of what I’m putting out there.

OK, now this is much better – I’m listening to a song about a boy having a thorn in his side. Should be safe there. Saying that, the next one (which has just begun as I type this) is ‘Money changes everything’…

Cold Turkey

Right, time to put an end to this blog break and relieve the heart palpitations threatening the lives of my readers. 21 days is simply far too long to go without an entry. I suppose I should have realised that before I went away and set up a guest-blogger (like the supply teacher everyone prefers) to continue the merriment while I lay on the sunbed in Turkey.

Talking of Turkey, you probably don’t want to hear about just how beautiful the weather was, just how relaxing it was to spend 11 days lying around doing nothing, just how enjoyable it was to have the chance to read for hours on end, just how pleasurable it was to eat out at restaurants every meal or just how good the local lager was. So, I guess I won’t say anything about that then…

If it makes you feel any better, I did have to go through the experience of a 5 hour delay at the airport, which also gave me a taster of what it might be like to be homeless as I tried to sleep on a bench or on the cold floor outside the toilets. 12 hours after I’d been resting on a sunbed and here I was with not even the slightest bit of padding for my poor little head. I know many people have had far worse airport experiences, so I won’t allow this to become a ‘woe is me’ moment but it was tiring and frustrating nonetheless and did give me a slight glimpse of what many people have to go through on a daily basis. Not good.

I have to admit that I did check my own blog a couple of times while away (which, on the plus side, has now added Turkey to the list of countries from which someone has viewed my page – give it a few weeks and I’ll forget that it was me and will assume I have a new follower), just to check that everything was OK and that no-one had left me an urgent message saying that they couldn’t cope without an update. In fact, I found it quite difficult to detach myself entirely from this new ‘I’m a writer!’ persona I’m nurturing at the moment, and I scribbled down the opening chapter of novel number 2 one day mid-way through the holiday, along with a sketchy plan for the novel as a whole, which included features such as arrows, half-finished numbered lists, question marks and squiggly lines crossing out ideas. Desperate to read it yet? Strangely, it already has a title (and a far better title than novel number 1 to boot). Even stranger, the word ‘boot’ in the previous sentence gives you a massive clue as to what the novel is about. I mean, I’ve effectively given it all away if you think about it. Just play a little game of word association and it won’t take long to end up at the key word of the title. One clue: it rhymes with flu. Hopefully it’ll turn out to be just as contagious…

I also met a lovely family who spoke to me as if I were undoubtedly the next great author, for which I am very grateful, and so I do hope that if they have ended up reading this blog and if they come across the novel on its imminent launch that they won’t end up being too disappointed!

The next few weeks are big weeks in the life of Sam Lenton. They’re still 7 days long, in case you think I’ve struck a deal with God for a bit extra, but they’re days in which various writing projects are coming to a head and so I am hopeful that there will be news to share in the forthcoming blogs. If these entries become a little more self-centred than usual (I know, I struggle to see how that’s possible either) then I do apologise and I ask you to put it down to youthful exuberance and innocence rather than arrogant triumphalism or whatever else might spring to mind. Besides, there’s always the return to work at the end of August to bring me back down to earth anyway.

It’s good to be back.