The more you do, the more there is to do.

What is it about taking on the challenge of rebuilding something old? The more that I repair, the more that I find that needs repairing.

Yesterday was boat building day. I went down to the yard at 1:00pm so as to spend a full afternoon and evening. I started with the newly finished Bosun dinghy. It needed the algae scrubbing off, so a bit of elbow grease later and it looked positively new. I also had to search out its mast and associated fittings. That was interesting as ivy had grown over some of the storage area on top of the shipping containers and I ended up perched on the roof of an iso container with a pair of cutters and a saw trimming bushes that could almost be described as trees. There are something like seven masts up there, so I hope I brought down the right one. I also dug out of the bushes two canoes and a launching trolley which I never knew were up there.

The second Bosun was brought into the yard last week for repairs to begin. It's been lying upside down in bushes for a number of years, and it shows. It's right way up now on a trailer, but with all the rain we have been having there was rather a lot of water in it. No problem - tip it up and let it out of the bung at the back. Except that the bouyancy tanks leak, so what was a sizeable pool of water turned out to be a tsunami when the water reached the back. It's swilled out the bouyancy tanks though, bringing with it some nasties in the form of suspicious clusters of brown oval insect eggs. So I had to clean out the inside thoroughly, which took longer still.

I tried to tackle the second Bosun's rotten gunwhales, but the screw holding the wood were steel not brass. Bad move! That means that the heads were disintegrating as they had turned to rust. I therefore decided discretion was the better part of valour, and went off to tackle the ASC.

The large ASC is my pet project. I alone have done the work so far on this, and I am determined to do something that this boat has never had done to it in some twenty or more years, and rig it for sailing rather than pulling (rowing to you landlubbers!). However the more I do on it, the more I find that needs doing. I discovered some rot in the bottom boards. The tops were fine, but suspiciously the sides were a bit spongy in a couple of places on close inspection, and with a sinking feeling I decided there may be hidden rot underneath. So the boards had to come up - not an easy task by a very long way. Screws were tight because the wood had swelled, and the heads were recessed and the holes had slowly backfilled with layers of paint. Oh, and there were around forty screws for EACH board (with four being present plus a few small pieces to fit the gaps). It took hours and blistered hands to painstakingly clean out each screwhead with a small screwdriver, then carefully ease them out. When I was done, I discovered the problem as being that some of the boards had only been painted after fitting. That meant the undersides were bare wood, and rot had set in. Duh!

I've found down in the sail stores a nearly complete set of ASC bottom boards which although slatted instead of solid, are in excellent condition. They do not belong to a specific boat; at least not until now. I can use salvaged good timber from the old boards to fill the one missing bit. However, it means taking out some of the ribbing in the bottom of the boat and moving them around slightly for the new bottom boards to fit. That's even more work. *sigh* But I suppose it will be worth it in the end. On the plus side this is looking like being a very thorugh rebuild.

A few changes.

Upon Zoë's recommendation, the website has been altered so that the 'blog' page no longer whizzes you straight here, but instead has a page on it with links to here instead. That means that the blog page can be in a different style to the website, and we've taken this oppurtunity to make it all a bit brighter, happier and - above all - easier to read.

"Hey Grandma! Turn the choons down, okay?"

I spent a couple of hours chilling out to music I bought and loved at the peak of my interest in music. It's sad to realise that some of these records, bought new in the week of their release, are nudging 15 years old.

I feel old.

Bringing home the stars

Today's radio memories.

Today on my radio programme I was without Zoë for a change due to illness. So I felt a little lazy and just grabbed my seven library disks before I went out rather than sorting the spare bedroom record collection for hand-picked music to play.

I made the library disks back when working for Chorley FM (the real one, not the fake one - look it up). The idea was to have all the great tracks from hundreds of albums all in one convenient place. I spent hours sorting and chosing music for them, and they are quite useful for lazy DJing.

I found myself picking an odd assortment of records, and actually feeling a little bit down whilst I was doing it. I soon realised that part of this was because of the significance of the records I was picking. It turns out that most of them were records with a particular significance to memories I have of an old friend who sadly took her own life last year. We were very close, and back when we were at sixth form together we shared a passion for certain music together. So I found myself playing back to back a lot of these tracks from those days we spent together. Clannad's 'I see Red', Tori Amos's 'Cornflake Girl' and Kate Bush's 'This woman's work' amongst others. I even found time to play 'Careful with that axe Eugene' from Pink Floyd's ill-fated Umagumma LP. That's one you don't often hear on the radio! But it was a track with special significance as we used to sit outside of an evening in Hitchin smoking and listening to it together over and over again.

I have happy memories of her, and sad ones too. Sometimes though I do remember old people from my past, sadly departed. Heck - at least I do spare a thought for these people. It's still depressing at times though just how many people I knew who are dead now. The frailty of human life.

Editing, the bane of my life.

I've said before and I'll say again: editing is about the least desirable writing task for me that there is. Well, perhaps apart from the drudgery that is writing synopses. Unfortunately, there are times when a writer must go back over their own work and weed out the surplus words, correct the typos and forge the grammer into something that doesn't make an English teacher whince.

That task is one that has caught up with me. I feel these days that some of my earlier books were not as good as they could have been. This was, in part, down to my hatred of editing. I went back some time ago and re-edited 'Countdown to Extinction' and although I would probably give it another pass with the red pen, it's much better than it was. 'Daytrippers' too underwent a similar edit to its benefit. I still want to give another edit for a new edition to 'The Atlantic Connection' and 'Syndicate Dawn', but in being quite recent works I'm happier that my writing standard is a lot better than it was five or six years ago.

At the moment 'Orb of Arawaan' is the editor's task. And as I am that unlucky editor, I suppose I ought to just get on with it without whinging too much. Actually, aside from the first couple of thousand words, it wasn't as bad as I had feared. Those initial chapters were written originally, after all, way back in 1997 when the book was first conceived. The rest was written in 2004, and I guess I did rework that beginning then too, but obviously not well enough.

I'm about 33 pages in, out of a total of 294. Still, that's some progress - it's a long book I hear myself pleading. I'm afraid though that all the excuses under the sun don't hide the fact that I would rather do anything than edit. Still it has to be done, and I am rigidly attempting to avoid all work avoidance schemes. It isn't entirely successful though - I've already been spending a lot of the day conte4mplating model trains, playing with the cat and attempting to fix once and for all the curious smell of damp in one corner of the lounge.

And finally, why did my internal monalogue as I wrote this chose to take on the voice of Stephen Fry? It makes the mind boggle just at the thought.

Because I can.

Because everyone's looked at the carpet in their office and thought that what it really needed was a circle of toy track and a train squeaking around it.

I thought I would try my ancient state-of-the-ark digital camera and see if it still worked. It's a Fujifilm DX10 from circa 1998 and the dawn of digital photography. It still works, even if the picture quality is as questionable now as it was 11 years ago. Usually I just get Zoë to take pictures with her somewhat better camera.