uu-va-voo

A new day, a new blog. Having failed to keep a real proper written diary beyond mid-February this year (probably because my hand-writing ability has been diminished by square-pushing all day) I thought I'd start a blog. I fancy the idea, as there is something existentially appealing about broadcasting my thoughts to a world that, frankly, isn't listening. Oh sure, Gwyn will have a look because he does a blog. Annie also, just to make sure I'm not revealing things I shouldn't or getting into trouble. Maybe the odd crank too. But on the whole I can witter (if only they'd called it Witter not Twitter I might've joined) away safe in the knowledge that my thoughts of the day are pretty private. Also, safe in the knowledge that I'm not really sure what a blog is for. Another good existential reason for doing it (I like the word 'existential', it doesn't really mean anything but sounds clever and pretentious, a bit like 'post-modern').
Where was I?
Ah yes, thoughts and what's happened and so on.
So I've called this blog Inquivoo as that's a made-up anthropological term used by my favourite sesquipedilian Will Self in his novel The Butt which I'm reading at the moment. It means to have been assigned by a shaman a passivity or impotence to act. So what I'm saying really is I'm impotent. Maybe I'll change the title, it doesn't really work. But I mean impotent in an existential way, of course, not in reference to my willy or anything. Not sure this is going how I intended it...

Today I was determined to actually get some work done on my PhD, and not do the usual thing of finding hundreds of distractions over the course of the day. I even wrote myself a list of instructions yesterday about the sorts of things I shouldn’t do: don’t check emails every 5 minutes, don’t read every article in every online newspaper, that sort of thing. But somehow – somehow – despite my best intentions, I found myself in a bookshop at around midday reading a graphic novel (alright, comic) called The Walking Dead, with all zombies in it and everything. I have in fact grown quite keen on zombies though do not have an encyclopaedic knowledge of George Romero’s works or anything. I do stand with those traditionalists however who maintain that zombies are shuffling, waddling, damaged creatures. As Simon Pegg argued in an excellent article on the subject, “death is a disability, not a superpower”. Well said. He also said, which I never knew, that zombie comes from the Haitian term tsambi, which was of course the state in which one could be put by witch doctors of a particularly amoral sort. One might even say they rendered a person fully inquivoo.

Following on from this, today was budget day in Britain, a very exciting time when the chancellor of the exchequer tries to sugar coat a 220 billion pound deficit with a £2000 car-scrapping scheme (you scrap your car and buy a new one, you get £2000 – what kind of a twat’s idea is that?) Really, it wasn’t that exciting. I watched the live rolling live on-the-minute coverage and David Cameron being all oily about it for a while but gave up and went back to my comic after a while. Sadly, gone are the days when Tony Blair would wow everyone with his wars and cocaine parties for rock stars in Downing Street. All we’ve got left is tired old bastards giving money to bankers being sneered at by old Etonian used car salesmen. Anyway, you (who?) know all that anyway.

I have recently discovered Spotify which is the mutt’s knees and lets you listen to anything – with the one tiny fly in the ointment being that every 15 minutes you have to be subjected to an advert for Swift cover car insurance by Iggy Pop. He tries to sound all cool, like probably most of the time he really drives around without any car insurance and without a shirt on, even if it’s not that warm outside, but really I bet he loves insurance and the whole area of actuary more generally. Got a doctorate in pure mathematics you know, Iggy Pop. No, really. Actually, no, he hasn’t.

Well, I think I’ve done well for a first effort. Feel free to say hello, whoever you are, if you exist. Or don’t. I don’t care. In fact, I’ve written all this in Word and might as well just save it, but why buck the post-modern existential trend to broadcast one’s thoughts to the world. Away, words!