Welcome, adventurer! You’re about to embark on the most difficult challenge known to any creative artist – ACTUALLY STARTING WORK.

Millions have tried, and millions have failed!

Will you be one of them?

BEGIN!

……….

1.

During the night someone stole into your room, hung you upside down and lived out their Rocky Balboa fantasies on your face. It’s the only explanation for what you can see in the mirror – not that you can currently see much through that face. You need coffee before you can even think – hell, before you can even BE. And you’ve only got 3 minutes until you start your writing shift for the morning. Do you:

(a) get writing, and never mind the coffee? (Go to 6).
(b) go downstairs and make a pot of truly violent bean-juice, taking as long as it takes?(Go to 8).
(c) stand under the shower for 20 minutes, drinking Red Bull? (Go to 12)

……….

2.

It was an age of dragons, and heroes, and mouse-related repetitive stress injury. You lose yourself in it. You need gold and experience points. Do you:
(a) look for gold? (Go to 16)
(b) look for experience points? (Go to 16)

……….

3.

There is no such thing as a “single episode of Battlestar Galactica“. The afternoon and evening pass in a blur of Cylons. Pretty soon it’s time to go to bed.

But you still have another season to watch, so you stay up all night.

So that’s tomorrow’s writing schedule hosed as well, then.

Oh man, you could have been somebody.

THE END

……….

4.

OMG OMG OMG! @NASA has retweeted your tweet about space kittens! And now 1,737,763 people will want to know more about the peep behind the tweet! You HAVE to follow up while the social media spotlight is shining down on little ole’ you. Do you:

(a) immediately log onto Twitter and tweet out the good news, carefully phrasing it so it sounds like you and NASA hang out all the time, hey no big deal? (Go to 17)
(b) stiffen your upper lip, straighten your back and resist the temptation to fly your own flag online? (Go to 10)

……….

5.

You knock back a couple of stiff ones, and as the alcohol slams into your bloodstream you gradually un-knurd. Unfortunately your nervous system is so disgusted with you that it shuts down in protest, and you fall asleep, hugging your whisky bottle. When you wake up, it’s growing dark. It’s like being a student again – in the sense that you got absolutely nothing done today.

Aw, bless – you’re utterly pathetic.

THE END

……….

6.

Your lizard-brain is imploring you to do anything but sit down. You ignore it, sweat bursting from your forehead, and sulkily stab the Power button on your computer. It’s going to take a few minutes to finish booting up. Do you:

(a) get down on the floor and do a few stomach-crunches, like the very, very worst kind of asshole? (Go to 13)
(b) throw yourself down the stairs in a wild attempt to boil the kettle before boot-up is finished? (Go to 8 )
(c) shout at the screen for being so slow, curse computers, curse technology itself, curse Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Charles Babbage and that ape with the thigh-bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey, then go back to bed? (Go to 15)

……….

7.

You work.

Congratulations.

Against the odds, against the formidable obstacles you threw in your own way, laughing in the very teeth of distraction itself, you did your work.

There’s hope for you yet.

(Well, until tomorrow morning).

THE END

……….

8.

Blessed is the evil bean of waking, for it sets your mind in motion. Coffee fumes fill the kitchen like smoke from a tire fire. As usual, in your uncontrollable lust to caffeinate yourself, you’ve made way too much coffee for one person. You drink one cup. Ohhhhhh it’s so GOOD – at the same time, you realise you can’t feel your lips anymore. Probably a good time to stop, then. Do you:

(a) knock the cup back and go upstairs to work? (Go to 11)
(b) knock back the remainder of the pot, however many cups are left? (Go to 9)

……….

9.

Two cups later, you can only see in black & white – worse, you’re going KNURD, the state of super-sobriety that hides nothing of the tedious awfulness of your daily life from your screeching, cowering mind. Why? WHY? You don’t know, but you wish it would all just stop. Hell, what’s the point in anything? Do you:

(a) lay in the hallway, screaming yourself hoarse? (Go to 14)
(b) attempt to drink yourself back into a productive state using single malt whisky? (Go to 5)

……….

10.

My word – it seems you CAN do this. Incredibly, you’re on the verge of starting actual work. Do you:

(a) celebrate by a quick session on the epic roleplaying game “Cloudlip” you bought on Steam just yesterday? (Go to 2)
(b) destroy the world, turn off your phone notifications, block social media sites and lean into the work? (Go to 7)

……….

11.

You’re ready for this. You are READY. What are you? Yes – READY! Crowd roars! Your computer has booted up – oh, wait, it’s still not done, you need to type your password in. Another wait. La dee daa. This is wasted time, and hey, if you used your phone to check the internet, it’s not technically a distraction, is it? Do you:

(a) resist the siren-like call of e-mail and social media? (Go to 10)
(b) grab your phone and check your e-mail, Facebook and Twitter accounts? (Go to 4)

……….

12.

This is delicious. You’re loving this the way cats love cat-nip. Who cares about deadlines? I mean, everyone has to give themself a little slack, yeah? And once you emerge from the bathroom, you’re going to be on fire, chile’. You daydream for a while of Pulitzer Prizes and shiny red sports cars.

Two cans of Red Bull and an appalling, environment-slaying 40 minutes of showering later, you realise you’re running late. But that’s okay – you can make up the time later. Do you:

(a) step out the shower, towel yourself briskly and get to the writing as soon as possible? (Go to 11)
(b) take your time purrtying yourself up in front of the mirror, then go downstairs for a coffee? (Go to 8 )

……….

13.

Early to rise, late to bed, makes you healthy, wealthy and dead. You’re feeling super-virtuous, so you flip over and start a few chin-ups. Unfortunately without any caffeine in your system there’s nothing propping up your feeble writer’s frame, and your bones, muscles and sinews are immediately stretched beyond breaking point.

You suffer a series of wildly unpleasant sensations, and then you pass out.

When you wake up, it’s after lunch. Your working day is over.

Also, you’re going to be in traction for the next month.

Way to go, GI Joe.

THE END

……….

14.

You lay there, resting your head on the welcome mat, shrieking. Frankly, it’s rather relaxing. Yoga for the throat. It’s a little worrying the way you initially can’t stop, but after an hour you get yourself under control, just in time to be hit in the face by the snail-mail as it’s thrust through the letterbox at a speed suggesting a postman in the throes of mortal terror over what he can hear.

You’re feeling much more alert, but it’s well past mid-morning. Do you:

(a) immediately go upstairs and sit down in front of your computer, ready to salvage your working day? (Go to 11)
(b) Decide the morning is written off, and since you’ve got an hour before your afternoon writing schedule kicks in, watch a single episode of Battlestar Galactica? (Go to 3)

……….

15.

You instantly fall into the deep sleep of successful denial. When you wake later, you’ll hate yourself. But while hard work pays off over time, laziness pays off right now. And hey, you never wanted your dreams to come true anyway – after all, what would you have to dream about when you sleep in every day? Exactly.

THE END

……….

16.

With the whole of the bountiful land of Cloudlip to play with, you quickly find what you’re looking for. But you need more! Do you:

(a) look for gold? (Go to 16)
(b) look for experience points? (Go to 16)

……….

17.

Once on Twitter, you discover an amazingly unmissable conversation about how long pieces of string should be, and you end up telling strangers they are complete idiots, which is enormously satisfying. The morning passes briskly until you realise you haven’t even checked Facebook yet, or updated Pinterest. You do this, taking your time as of course you should (because you’re an artist, not a hack).

Then, since you once heard of someone whose friend lived next door to a person whose brother got a job through LinkedIn, you spend 2 hours cropping yourself a new profile picture from the least worst Christmas party you recently attended.

After that SmugMug, Stumbleupon, Flickr and Klout all need your input. (Or you need theirs. Same difference!).

Then someone pings you on Skype.

You are now so far down the rabbit hole that not even the soles of your feet are showing. There’s no escape for today.

Game over.

THE END

Image: _Zeta_.

Here’s a story about how archaeology ruined me as an Englishman.

Archaeology ruins many things. It often ruins ruins, for starters (by destroying them completely in the name of Knowing Stuff). It ruins knees. It ruins mugs. No, really. Take a tin mug, fill it full of paintstrippingly-strong tea three times a day and then clean it in a perfunctory, “that’ll do” sort of way for around 8 weeks, and you get this:

*Not* my mug. Thx.

In my many years of almost-but-not-quite being an archaeologist, I ate and drank a lot of truly dreadful things. Although I’ve blotted a lot of it out, some things were just so colossally vile that now they rise, Golden-Gate-like, out the mists of my mind.

There was the time of the Baked Pancakes, where A., a man so Gollum-like that the memory of him almost ruined Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings for me, attempted to prove his mastery of pancake-making in the following fashion: apply a low heat to a pan, slop in too much batter, cook each side for 20 minutes until your wrist aches with the weight of holding the pan up, then attempt to extricate the thick, blubbery lens of semi-firmed mixture from the previously non-stick surface, flop it wobblily onto a plate (although not from too high up, in fear of cracking said crockery), and then, while you spend the next hour or so cooking a couple more, keep the finished “pancake” warm by placing it in the oven on a low heat. The result is a kind of rubbery plate-mail substance, as if chicken skin had been blended with kevlar – the kind of thing you’d expect to read about over at Wired.

There was the diet based almost entirely on potatoes while I was on an excavation in Wales. Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. Potato curry, for example, was potatoes with curry powder. (I’d entirely forgotten that until I forced my mind to recall it). I still flinch when I see a potato. Something in me still screams, deep down, rocking back and forth with its thumb in its mouth and a blanket clutched around it.

But that’s nothing compared with how I feel when I see an English breakfast.

Cut to an excavation in Orkney, in 2002. I’m bragging.

“What? You’ve never had a fried breakfast? Are you kidding me?”

I stared incredulously at E. (You can see her in the above photo, second from left). She appeared to be telling me that she’d never had a fried breakfast. I kept staring at her, my brain struggling to comprehend. I knew what the words meant – but I couldn’t understand the sentence. Not ever having had a fried breakfast, as in ever? She was Foreign, so obviously certain allowances had to be made.

More than that, she was Swedish.

But for pity’s sake – she’d never had a fry-up? Really? Well. There was only one thing to be done. And I was the man to do it.

“Tomorrow you’re going to have the best breakfast of your life, love.”

Here’s what I did:

• I picked the least worst frying pan available to us (something that looked like it had been lifted straight from Gears Of War), drizzled a little vegetable oil into it and rubbed it firmly into the scratched steel surface. Then I cooked the oil on a low heat in an attempt to season the pan with a non-stick (or at least less-stick) surface.

• I went shopping. This being Westray, one of the remoter islands in the relatively remote island archipelago of Orkney, there wasn’t an enormous amount of variety on offer. I managed to forage a package of sausages (“may contain meat”), a few strips of off-white bacon, a dented tin of tomatoes and a dozen eggs that looked like they’d been laid as a kind of protest against inadequate feeding methods. I also had some mushrooms. It wasn’t clear where these mushrooms had come from, nobody really seemed to know, but – there they were.

The next morning, all was set. The pan had been seasoning for hours and hours and was as ready as it would ever be. The audience was assembled. With everyone agog with anticipation, I turned to Swedish E. and told her she was about to learn something new about food – all too accurately, as it turned out.

I turned up the heat and broke an egg into the pan – and it instantly became one with the stainless steel surface at a molecular level, forming a new material that I like to call “eggpan“. For anyone looking for a suitable topic for their PhD in Molecular Science, here are the properties of eggpan: it’s incredibly strong; it’s water-resistant; it’s wooden spoon resistant; it cannot be removed with a brillo pad; shouting at it wildly actually makes it bond harder to a surface; and it’s utterly inedible.

For the next ten minutes, the entrepreneurial physicist in me blossomed, bringing a host of new substances to light including eggspoon, baconpan, eggbrillo and the formidably durable supermaterial baconeggtomatobrillo which would, I believe, have played a major role in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider if my e-mails to CERN hadn’t been replied to by narrow-minded fools.

While all this was going on, of course, everyone else was lying on the ground, unable to stand, unable to breathe – partly from laughter, partly because of the clouds of acrid black smoke billowing past me. They’re still laughing, 9 years on. When we meet up, they still laugh at me, in my face, punishing me for daring to dream harder than they did, for attempting the impossible with inadequate tools and a misplaced belief in my own cooking skills…
But worst of all, I can’t enjoy fry-ups anymore.

That magic is gone. I killed it, that day – turning it to ash (baconeggtomatobrillo ash) in my frying pan, watching it vaporise and fill the room, pouring out the open doors and windows, smoke-signalling into the Orkney sky – trying ineffectually to scrape it into the sink for an hour afterwards.

That was the day I drove a wedge between myself and England – and maybe the day I decided to see the world. I psychologically deported myself with a failed attempt at breakfast. Clearly the excavation had addled my mind. Clearly I was at a low ebb, ripe for social disaster. And all it took was a bemused Swede and a frying pan for me to ruin myself forever as an Englishman.

That’s what archaeology does to you.

Images: Martin Cathrae and Mike Sowden.

If you live near Los Angeles, it’s Carmageddon Weekend. For a while I thought this was a celebration of the joy of running over zombies, but alas, it’s because Interstate 405 (oh you know, the one featured in CHiPs), is closing for refurbishment for a whopping 53 hours. For anyone commuting through the region, it’s apparently going to be unimaginably awful – and I’m sure residents of the L.A. area can imagine some pretty awful things. As warnings go, this one has weight. Airline ticket sales are booming. Even Erik Estrada has chipped in. It’s officially serious.

If you think you’re going to bypass the closure by some secret canyon route, you and a million other people have the same idea.

- L.A. Police Lt. Andrew Neiman (via USA Today)

Here’s the thing. I’m writing this before the parts of America that actually sleep have woken up, and yet I’m sure that out there, right now, are hundreds or even thousands of drivers hunched over Google Maps or TomToms, desperately working out workable alternatives from A to B. And the men among them…will be enjoying it.

(Kinda).

If you’re a bloke and you drive, you are a recognised world authority on local road maps. Hell, you don’t even need local road maps – they’re there to make the other passengers feel like they have a role beyond complimenting your driving skills, unwrapping sweets and providing ballast in the event of high winds or exciting cornering maneuvers. Men would rather die than admit their road-knowledge is flawed – which explains this statistic. And men, bless us, love passing that knowledge along (accompanied by a conspiratorial “don’t tell anyone else”).  I work with someone who drives for a living, and he will happily talk himself to the brink of starvation on this topic. In Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson was forced to flee an English pub because by asking for directions he triggered the map-reading equivalent of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch. This is what we do. It’s genetic (in my case dormant, because I don’t drive).

The thing about such advice is that it’s frequently only useful to someone with a dictaphone or a photographic memory.

“Oh, I have the best route right here. Listen up, you take the B2646812-351 left for a while, not too long, and then you’ll see a house, turn left there and go up the track past the barn with the sign that says “Warning: Otters”, and be sure to go left and then right and dogleg left-right-left again, over the jump, don’t cut the ditch, left 3 into right 2 and then a long straight which is tarmac, that’s new that is, I remember when it was straw, my Dad used to walk 80 miles a week up that very road with his hod and 20 stone of bricks, but I digress, so anyway, you’ll be in Nettled Buttock by this point, there’s a church but you don’t take that turning, it’s a dead end and you don’t take the other turning either, you need to drive into the entrance where it says “Firewood and Pig Trotters”, unlock the gate, go anticlockwise, oh, sorry, you’re American, counter-clockwise round the field until you see where the vicar has robbed the dry-stone walling to repair the East Wing, he’s been told off for doing that, so anyway, through there and left at the cow and between the two oak trees and back onto the M-254371 which you need to stay with until you hit the A-1 and from there it’s a straight run all the way to Scotch Corner. Got that?”

In a world where gadgets can (theoretically) furnish us with the fastest and cheapest routes between two points, will we see the end of the Road Directions Bore? Will GPS kill the short-cut star? And will we men-folk stop pretending we know the way without looking?

Happy Carmageddon, Los Angeles.

Don’t forget to turn left at the cow.

Image: Omar Omar.

Here’s a nice-looking, yet entirely unrelated picture from when I was on Naxos in 2007.

Focus on how pretty it is, not how random it is. Thx.

**********

I promised myself – myself and others – that I wouldn’t do this again. I said to myself (and to them) “no no no, never again, I promise. Cross my heart and disable my internet connection. Never again.”

Well – maybe just the once.

Fact is, I’ve been too busy to update my blog. That’s a thing I used to say when I was feeling too disorganised and/or apathetic to update my blog, or when I felt the pressure to post something but there was nothing inside my head that was of any use. This time, I’ve actually been too busy. (Of course, I could just be saying that). I’ve been tackling some very exciting lumps of work that you’ll hear more about in a wee while, and freelancing like the clappers so I have spending-money for when I’m in Austria at the end of the month.

I’m still finishing these things off. Or this would be a real post.

Tell you what.

This post? It’s your shout. Your call. It’s like a “submit your own guest post”. If you want to pick a topic to rant about (preferably travel or geekery, to fit the kind of people who stop by), bung a couple of paragraphs together about something you seriously want to get off your chest,  and send it in to maximusowden AT yahoo.co.uk. No thinly-disguised advertising or right-wing propaganda, please – my blog has too much of that kind of thing already.

I’ll put it below, just under the world “Go”.

Hijack my blog. I dare you.

Go.

**********

Not all of these may be entirely genuine.

**********

From “D. Vader”:

I always wanted to paint. That’s all I ever really wanted. Pastels. The movement of a field of corn, wrought in soft sweeps of a pallete knife. An apple. Rosy cheeks on a young urchin. Rocks in a stream.

Instead, I’m the most powerful man in the Universe and I can choke people to death with my mind.

But I’m not happy. You know?

I’ve tried to change my life, I’ve set goals and made lists and I’ve read Chris Guillebeau’s book seven times, but I still lapse back into laying waste to entire planets and building Death Stars. It’s a problem.

I just want to paint.

**********

From “C. Sheen”:

You can’t handle my truth, it’s out of sight, out of mind, and believe me when it’s out of my mind you haven’t a hope in the world. That’s the way the world rolls, around me, it’s like I’m the wet towel and the world is the mangle, and what’s squeezed out of me is hot, dripping win. I’ve quite literally exploded a number of times. Get too close, and my warlock brain will voodoo your ass. I’ve had everything replaced in Beverley Hills clinics, including my head, and when I look at lightweights like Pete Burns I think “duh winning, give up now, bam, lightbulb, right turn, TomTom, reverse, indicate, shopping, dinner, bath”, well, I’m thinking of other stuff now but look, that’s the way I am, tigers live their day in one mode – Tiger Mode! I’ve banged back 7 pints of Harpic and I didn’t feel a thing. Feeling a thing is for losers. I get paid for this, right?

**********

From “Jimbo”:

Travel is something most of us take for granted. A trip on a ‘plane, or a journey on a train are commonplace – nothing more than a means to an end. Their delay or cancellation an inconvenience that sometimes has driven me to incoherent ranting Basil Fawlty style.

About 1600 years ago a man was buried near Gloucester. The objects buried with the man and scientific analysis of his bones show that he grew up in what is today Romania. I wonder about his journey. Was he fleeing from the Huns, desperately seeking refuge in the Roman Empire? Did he cross the frigid Danube on a raft one dark night? Was his family so hungry they sold their siblings to Roman slave traders for the flesh of a dog to eat? Did he battle with the Gothic host against the Roman army at Adrianople, where an emperor was slain? Did he go on to loot and raid through the Balkans, only to eventually be recruited into the Roman army? Posted, perhaps, to the Rhine frontier where he fought against people who spoke his language and finally sent across the narrow Ocean to Britain, where he met his fate in a West Country town on the banks of the Severn.

That’s a journey and a story few of us can compete with.