Day 68: I Am Nearly Producing, And May Be Going To Florida With A New World Cooker

I think the spirals are coming. I just coughed a bit and heard a distant rattling. Still want to smoke though, even cigarettes like this with red paint and batteries in.














No 'good luck, keep going!' comments if you please. I'd like stuff about what comes out of your lungs when you stop smoking, and how you can detect delicate aromas in a cup of Nescaff after three days. The more mucous the better, to be frank.

On a more positive note, and in order to pass time, I have decided to start entering competitions and getting free stuff out of magazines. I have Take A Break, That's Life! and Pick Me Up (which I picked up because it said "60p TRY ME!" on the front, and I was in Woolworths and confused).

But let me be clear: I'm not being like the spastics I was at university with (you know, the ones who wished they'd gone to Oxford). They reckoned that doing a degree meant they were clever. I remember them very clearly going to play Bingo in York and cocking on about how it couldn't be that hard to beat a load of 'old ladies'. To my eternal joy, they came home empty handed*, crying a bit. (Bingo is fucking difficult and I am rubbish at it. It requires a kind of intelligence that I don't have, at all: it's the same as the kind of intelligence you need to be able to read maps and remember things.)

Anyway, I'm not reckoning my chances much, but you never know. I can get £500 for "My Story" in Pick Me Up; as it happens they offer a very good structure for your submission that many modern novelists would do well to pay attention to:

It started like this ...
Then this major event happened ...
It ended like this ...

I could also win a holiday to Florida with Panda Soft Drinks, M&S vouchers, £1,000 for answering a question that goes "in which country did a woman find a bear eating oatmeal in her kitchen?", a New World electric cooker for putting the words "stoat", "gerbil" and "buffalo" in the right place and £20 for picking out a picture of myself from a page of reader photographs. It can't be that hard, can it. Can it?



* One of their number was a man who once asked me if I liked the novels of "Martin Amee". Who? Who? I said over and over, a hundred times. He talked at me as if I were differently abled and finally shouted: "You know, MARTIN AMEE - wrote The Rachel Papers". To my eternal discredit, I replied: "What, and Argent?". Who was the biggest cunt in that exchange?, I ask myself. Sadly, I think I know the answer.