Buddy Can You Spare a Paradigm?

Mark is in search of himself.  That much should be clear to all of you followers of this blog (incidentally welcome to new follower llamacroft aka Sarah Eaton whose bike I ride daily and whose blog is here:

http://saraheatonwriter.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/what-are-you-wearing-to-britmums-live-erm-clothes/

and that the rest of us are in search of a way to make sense of what Mark is doing.  Even referring to Mark is problematic these days as Mark prefers to be known as Someone Else and wishes to have an ‘s’ in front of the pronoun ‘he’, both of which I decline to do.  This can lead to some rather asymmetrical conversations, like this:

Caller:  Is Amanda there?

Me:  Sorry, no.  Mark isn’t here.

Caller:  When will she be back?

Me:  He’ll be back in an hour.

Alternatively I could say, he’ll be back in a few years or possibly not at all.  Who can say?  Oo, look – I’ve just found a purple button?  I wonder if that’ll make this post any easier to write?

People often (oo, that’s a different shade!) ask me how I’m doing, to which my standard response is ‘How long have you got?’  The unfair thing about these situations is that it’s the one doing the changing (Mark has just pointed out that I am now writing purple prose) who gets all the attention.  People queue up to fling scarves and dresses at him; they come round on purpose to give him nail polish and advise him on jewellery, and I start to think ‘Where’s my dress?  Why does no-one give me any stuff?’  To do Mark justice (he is now asking me to mention how great it is that he doesn’t wear tracksuits any more.  OK.  It’s great that he doesn’t wear tracksuits any more.)  As I said, to do him justice he is concerned on my behalf that I don’t get enough support or attention.  It’s just that I feel I’m living in this asymmetrical world where nothing matches up, and I need a metaphor to describe it.  I’m not happy unless I have a metaphor – whereas Mark isn’t happy unless he has a paradigm.  Buddy, can you spare a paradigm?

Kirk out

Argh, it’s gone all black again…

And What Am I Doing?

Well, my dears – you may have spotted that whereas I used to blog every day like clockwork, since I moved I am not doing so.  This is not just because of Sorting Everything Out, it is because I have decided to blog only when I have something I really waant to say.  Hence the stuff about Mark last week.  This is still going on, of course, but since I have nothing really new to say about it I have not blogged any more.  I’m sure I will come back to it, but at the moment things are sluggishly moving on and slowly digesting so there’s nothing new to report.

But! in other news, I have had an acceptance!  This is the thing I wrote about twenty years ago which has been sent back, redacted, resubmitted, sent back again, buried in soft peat, reconfigured, cut, pasted, cut, cut and cut again – and submitted once more with the swearing of an oath that if they didn’t accept it THIS time it would be burnt.  (And burning a pen-drive is not pretty, let me tell you that.)

But they accepted it, thank god – although they’re going to do a little pruning of their own because apparently readers can’t cope with quotes of more than a line and a half from the original text (FFS) and so it will be appearing on the Thresholds blog at some point in the near future.  Thresholds is a group of writers who focus exclusively on the short story, and my piece was about a collection of stories entitled ‘Ideas above our Station’, of which, by the time I’d finished, I was heartily sick, as was the library of my continually renewing and re-requesting it.

And that’s all the news that’s fit to print – except that I found out that some of the original limericks (ie pre-dating Edward Lear) were utterly disgusting.  No, I’m not going to reproduce them.  I couldn’t possibly…

Kirk out

PS  Oh, and all our furniture has now gone – to a lovely and very appreciative couple who might be interested in buying our old house.  How weird would that be?