Eat Your Heart Out Leslie Nielsen

Image: The Sports Hernia

Until last night I hadn’t shaved my hair for 11 consecutive days. For me, this is quite a record. I’m a skinhead, and normally shave back my hair to the bone every 4 or 5 days in order to feel fresh and whole again. I hate my hair being over a couple of millimetres. One week usually sees me itching to get short again, but to go 11 days is simply unheard of. The reasons: laziness and the appearance of my first ever grey hairs.

I noticed them on Saturday morning. I was toying with the idea of a shave, angling my head into the mirror to see if I could make it another day without having to get the clippers out, when there they were, three silver strands among the dark and shaded ginger, glinting in the early morning sun for all to see. It was an immensely exciting moment. I asked my wife to confirm, which she did, her face contorted as she was unable to fathom why I thought this was a good thing.

To me it doesn’t mean anything, it just means I’m a grown up kid that has three silver hairs (there could be more, but these three are my favourite). I started to imagine myself in twenty years time, having grown wise and distinguished like Christopher Lee or Leslie Nielsen, and I found myself in a mode of surreal excitement, gibbering nonsensically about the prospect of joining the legion of the silver fox. Of course it also means that because I’m a baldy and have been for ten years, I’m going grey and nobody will notice.

The workshop I was involve with last week at Savvy Authors came to a conclusion over the weekend. The League of Ordinary Gentlemen was opened up, examined, poked, prodded, snipped and put under the microscope for a full and thorough analysis. I greatly enjoyed the whole process and have learned a lot about the relationships between characters and the plot, and of “producing and directing” my stories in a vein similar to those that we discussed. A huge thanks to Devon Ellington for running the workshop.

I ran through all my imminent submission deadlines and have a couple of competition entries prepared to go off later today. I also have to turn around four or five submissions that came back over the last couple of weeks; get them back out there and earning their keep asap.

Other than that, last night was a technical night. I upgraded this blog to WordPress 3.0.1, though you won’t notice anything most of it is behind the scenes upgrades. And I spent the rest of my time work on my wife’s photography business site. The payments on her hosting account lapsed and the site was taken down. The email the company has for sending reminders wasn’t one she uses any more so it lapsed resulting in a lot of effort to get things back. Once it is, I’ll put through the updates that are needed to give it a freshen up.

I was gutted to see that the 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street is to close at the end of the year. I’ve had many legendary nights in that place, seen a lot of great bands and forgotten just as many through drunken hazes standing at the bar looking along the narrow venue at the bands. So sad that a major musical landmark in London will disappear into the history books.

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Until tomorrow, peeps!