Day 508: I Finish My Christmas List

Good news. It is finished. If there is anything you would like to give me off of it, let me know (nonworkingmonkey@mac.com) and I will give you a safe PO Box Number (so you cannot disturb me in person).

My Christmas Present List, 2007

1. Sting's head on a stick

2. A puppy (alive)

3. Sheet music of Alan Parson's "Eye In The Sky" (adapted for Glockenspiel)

4. Ditto "Eye Of The Tiger", "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn"

5. The name of a good Canadian film*

6. A Glockenspiel and matching outfit (see Fig. 1)

Fig. 1



















7. A 1950s ViewMaster with the reel that's got the Brussels thing (not the pissing boy, the giant desk game) and the CN Tower

8. A FAIL-SAFE bread recipe for idiots with cold pastry-making hands, i.e. me

9. A Subaru Impreza WRX (i.e. this one, but not that colour). Apparently it breathes fire from its 2.5-liter turbocharged, 224-horsepower SUBARU BOXER engine , and is the ultimate street legal rally car; in fact, with added features like Vehicle Dynamics Control (VDC) and double wishbone rear suspension, the 2008 Impreza WRX 5-Door is ready for action. (I say!)

10. A new fez. My current one is crusted with something unmentionable and I dare not try to flake it off.

Pip pip!



* Not French-Canadian, Anglo-Canadian

Day 506: I Finish Putting Up The Christmas Decorations

A happy day for all of you: finally, a view of my beautiful Quebec home, via the medium of photography - in this case, two photographs of our house (front and back view), showing off our recently-completed Christmas decorations.

As far as I can see, the only thing that's missing is a fully articulated 6ft LED reindeer with antlers spelling out, on the left, the word "S.T.I.N.G." and, on the right, the word "C.O.C.K". If I had such a thing, my Christmas happiness would surely be complete!

Day 502: I Review Some Art

I am returned from Toronto, where I have spent the last three days building brands, differentiating parity products, identifying market conventions and distilling brands down to their very essence. It is great, like a job you make up to confuse people at parties so they say, "but what do you actually do?" . (It is not great when you are talking to for e.g. heart surgeons, doctors, inventors of life-improving gadgets, charity workers etc, but I have made sure I don't know any of those, just to avoid awkward social chitchat.)

Back home in Quebec there are three feet of snow outside the door. Happily, my cohort enjoys cutting perfectly symmetrical paths through it with the smaller of his two shovels, meaning that I am still able to wear the platform boots I bought from Noddy Holder in 1978.

In the garden, local birds (inc. golden eagles, hawks and pelicans) are chewing merrily on the 'nut sacs' suspended from the washing line, and at the end of the garden gambol small mountain bears, feasting on the slices of dried beaver we leave out once a week. It is a bucolic scene, improved only by the background murmur of Bryan Adams, who has taken to campaigning for chicken welfare on the Canadian television news.

As a result of all this distracting pastoral goodness, I cannot be bothered to do much today other than knit and lie about the place smoking my small clay pipe. I shall therefore put the 'onus' on you, my attractive (in a certain light!) readers. Here is some 'online graffiti' that I have seen recently. Which picture do you like best? (And can you spot the one made by a certain superstar illustrator who is very close to my monkey heart?

(Note: it is not my birthday.)

Day 500: I Am Away On "Business" Again

It is OK. I will not give up my blog. The reasons are:

1. If you are away on "business" and have nothing to do, you can write your web-blog in your hotel room whilst drinking gin. (If I am at home there are too many distractions, e.g. 1 litre bottles of gin, pathologists, knitting, sausages, cake etc.)

2. My adoring fans are begging me to continue, some via the medium of email. They are embarrassing both me and themselves, so I shall continue if it will make them stop.

3. Only the people who read this web-blog will be able to explain what the cock is going on in this picture; a picture I only just this minute noticed on the wall of my hotel room.* I think it is something to do with death and I am not at all sure about it.










* A hotel room with a kitchen in a hotel that soaked me with disappointment earlier this evening: seeing a small grey bag (with ribbon) on my pillow, I assumed it was a delicious low-class cheapchoc to rot my teeth whilst I slept.

But no. It was a fucking 'rose quartz' crystal, a thing that will apparently bring me love and harmony whilst purifying me in my sleep. What a thing! It has alarmed me into opening the 'larger size miniature' of Chivas Regal, whatever the cock that is.

Pip pip!

Day 495: I Am Off Trend

Yesterday, when someone asked me (in tones of wonderment), "How did you meet your CANADIAN boyfriend when you are FROM LONDON?" (expecting me to say 'on the internet loveline sites' or 'from a Desperate Canadian Man Shop' or 'at a cockring exchange party*'), I said "in Canterbury" then changed the subject.

I did not want to tell them that we had met through my blog. I didn't want to tell them that I had a blog at all. It has been like this for some months; if ever I admit to it, I talk about it in the same tones that you would use if you were admitting to labial plastic surgery.

It seems that people find it harder to receive the news that I have a blog than I do to give it. They make the sort of face they'd make if you were showing them the features on your new mobile phone or telling them about "Web 2.0" or "the long tail", or seriously recommending Blink by Mr Gladwell like it is the Bible.**

The people who sneer the most are the people who work in advertising and marketing, or 'trend hunters'; the sort of people who get money for talking about trends and consumers and strategies without ever leaving their office in Soho or watching commercial television.

They write about 'blogging' with as much authority as they write about people who live in council houses and drink Diamond White and like Daniel O'Donnell, which must be quite hard when you earn $150,000 a year and live in a nice apartment and can use words like "dissonance" accurately.

Some of them write blogs, too; blogs about marketing and advertising, or blogs about trends, or how to spot trends, or the impact of blogging on the dissonance of trends. But they don't read your blog, or my blog; they just write about the idea of them, and have many theories about what sort of person you are (they cannot imagine me, not even if they try).

I have had it with my blog. I want to give it up because having a blog isn't interesting at parties anymore, and I do not like caring that my stats are going down every day. But more to the point because I work in advertising and get paid money for talking about trends and consumers and people (without ever leaving my lovely office or lovely house and talking to actual people), I know that blogging is, like, over.

Everything now is Web 6.0 and dissonance and mashed up culture and Premiumisation; two years ago it was New Traditionalism and something to do with some bloke in Portland, and three years ago it was all about - well, I can't remember; it's about something else now, and I'm thinking about that instead.

But then there are the facts! I do not like facts, for they have a habit of reminding you who you actually are, and not who you are in your head (when at imaginary parties). I moved to Canada because of this blog. I have met nice people through it (and some bloke in Newcastle); been asked for my opinion about things I know nothing about by very clever people because of it; learnt weird things, been sent stuff and because of it been treated kindly and with great generosity by people I will probably never meet.

But all of that is sentimental claptrap (even if some of it has meant emigrating to another country). The sad truth is that even if no-one else is reading it, writing this web-blog still amuses me greatly, and long as I still find it funny (despite the fact that no-one else does), I shall carry on regardless. And if things get really desperate, I shall invent a trend about the dissonance of blogging and sell it to someone for $150,000.



* I do not recommend them!!!

** Summary of the book: "Often your instinct is right. Trust it!" (You may now send me $30 as you have not had to buy the book to find that out for yourself.)