The god is happy!

He likes his new garden!

Some people have ducks on their wall...

... not me though.

Dragons are the new ducks.

Haunted land

This week I discovered this place, ten minutes from my house.

It's a huge community woodland. The paths go on and on for miles of fabulous walking...

The thing is, this is post-industrial landscape. This entire site used to be a colliery and those hills were its slag-heaps. Like so many of the pits in this country it was, despite huge opposition, mothballed. I'm old enough to remember the year-long Miners' Strike in 1984-5, with the incredible deprivation it caused and the pitched battles between police and protesters. The strikers were eventually starved back to work, the coal industry was privatised and one by one the pits were closed - this one in 1994. It must have torn the heart out of the community.



I think the place is beautiful, but I imagine many local people have very different feelings.

There's a brilliant article here about the long (and currently resurgent) British tradition of ghost stories rooted in the specific eerieness of the countryside: so-called Folk Horror. And it persuasively ascribes this feeling of unease to landscapes of social conflict, class oppression, and capitalist exploitation.

If that's true, then this park must be haunted as fuck.

No wonder there's a sign at the gate telling you:

My library brings all the boys to the yard

I have finally overcome the Box Mountain! All the books are on the shelves in our new library...

Well, except the three stacked boxes - which are all photo albums, and to shelve them I need to fit in another bookcase, which means getting that stupidly long radiator removed. It's a long-term project, that.

Do you like my car-boot-sale-rug of naked Greeks? 😍

There's even shelf-space for my collection of holiday gods:

NEXT: getting all the LARP kit sorted...

Dog in the snow

I love where we live now! I can just walk out the door and...

Fortress of books

This is the main stack of books we've just moved into the new house. It's quite big.

There's about 40 boxes here and another 15 scattered elsewhere... and I have to get them onto these waiting shelves:

If you find my crushed body beneath a fallen stack, let them know it's the way I would have wanted to go!

(Well, if I can't die during sex. That's the ideal, obviously...)

Some day I'll fly away

Octave Tassaert (1800-1874): La Femme Damnee

I'm taking a week off my blog to move house - see y'all on the other side!

Homebodies

New House Pics

We've got a new house! I am now the proud owner of this view from my flat-roof balcony!

 Also this thrilling crack in the aforesaid flat roof:

 This wallpaper:

This chandelier:

Argh... SO MANY chandeliers...

Several slightly unnerving statues:

A MYSTERIOUS LOCKED SAFE:

"Are you sure we're not in a horror scenario?"

And the bath canopy of your nightmares:

No kidding: I'm too scared to take a bath

We're going to take some considerable time decorating, it seems. Or else just vanish mysteriously, leaving nothing but a note saying "It's inside the wallpaper! It's coming for me! Ah! The angles! The Anaglypta! "

On my knees

"PLEASE approve my mortgage! Pleaaaaaaaase!!!"

This painting, Jupiter and Thetis, by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1811), is for kinky fans of big brooding men and supplicant women. In the original legend Thetis, the sea-nymph, goes to ex-boyf Zeus to beg him to intervene in the Trojan War on behalf of her mortal son, Achilles. 

It works, btw.

Things I have learned during the half-year house-moving process:

• Mr Ashbless must love me very very much.
• If you e-mail any British company with an offer of money for their advertised services, the chance of you getting any response whatsoever is about ... 40% tops.  If you really want them, phone.
• Banks are incompetent. Like, unbelievably incompetent. We've lost track of the number of times we've phoned or sent them information/money, only for them to fail to log it in the computer and deny any record that they've ever spoken to us. Repeatedly. HSBC actually sent us a crate of wine to apologise for arsing us around for months, but I still hate them.
• If you are trying to get a interest-only mortgage, when they ask you how you're going to pay it off, FFS do NOT regale them with talk of savings, investments, rental income, inheritances or any carefully-worked financial plan you have. That will just bring everything to crashing halt. The magic words are, "We will make regular overpayments." That is all they want to hear and all they will accept.
• There is NOTHING you can do to your old house to make people buy it. They either like it or they don't, and buyers are mostly crazy. Just Febreze the shit out of everything and cross your fingers.
• The whole chain system is bolloxed. How ANYONE ever manages to synchronise with half-a-dozen other buyers + lenders/solicitors/removal companies to move house on the same bloody day is absolutely beyond comprehension. We didn't even try, in the end.

Anyway, it's all signed, sealed and hopefully soon will be delivered. We've even accepted an offer on our old place!

2018 FTW!

Checklist

My Myers-Briggs profile is INTJ, which apparently means I need to write lists...

Yeah yeah, my handwriting is shitty. I'm a leftie.

Yes, the move is on!

Alma mater

My recently published story In Appreciation of their Cox is set in the city and university of Durham, in the north of England, though you won't see the name of the university anywhere in the text.

It was an amazing place to live as a student, sort of like Hogwarts - a "city" only in name, because it has a magnificent cathedral, but smaller than most towns, and centred around a wooded historical peninsula.

It has a castle too - which is one of the colleges that make up the university.

Yeah, we we're a privileged bunch in EVERY sense...

Durham was where I did my degree, and though I never rowed, the rowing teams were a very visible part of college life. I certainly knew where the college boat house was.

Durham was where I first discovered that I liked Indian food. It was where I first got drunk (I was a slow starter with a sheltered childhood, okay...). It was where I found LOADS OF FRIENDS who I felt I really had things in common with for the first time in my life. I joined the Games Society, ran my own Call of Cthulhu games, and I started LARPing.

I got laid at last (TOLD you I was a slow starter!). I lost my religion.

Oh the relief

I've still got many of those friends. I'm married to one of them right now. And I still LARP ...

... which is quite frankly one of the reasons I need a bigger house

As I prepare to move house now, in 2018, I'm aware that I don't really attach to places I live. I won't feel sad about moving home - I'm excited by the change. Durham was an exception to that rule, perhaps the only one in my adult life. Leaving in 1989 was difficult and unpleasant, and I don't think I got over it or properly detached for years.

In Appreciation of their Cox is mostly a joyous gangbang story about fit young people - no, I did NOT do that at university, sorry to disappoint y'all - but it's also a nostalgic elegy to a place I will always love and a meditation on letting go.

BUY-LINK

Running away!

John Duncan: Heptu Bidding Farewell to the City of Obb, 1909

Things are reaaaaaally busy at the moment, so I'm taking a few days off the blog to ride away naked and side-saddle on my unpleasant-looking griffinish thingie. Back soon ... hopefully having beaten HSBC into some semblance of co-operation.

HSBC hates me and I hate it back.

End of an era

Today we sold our vinyl at last...

Farewell, both copies of Queen's Greatest Hits

Took all the annuals to Oxfam...

No one has heard of "Project Sword"

And boxed up the *ahem* "toys" so the removal guys wouldn't find them...

It required a larger box than I expected 3:)

We're getting there.

Quick - hide the porn

BEHOLD MY DESK! It has never before looked this tidy!

It took a week to clear down to visible desk-top, let me tell you

Because we're selling the house and the guy is turning up to take photos for Rightmove first thing on Monday morning (*muffled Ashbless sobs*) , I have been doing a WHOLE lot of tidying up. Mostly it has involved hiding shit in the loft, and throwing out computer games we have never played and can't even run on the PC now. In fact I was advised by a Facebook friend to hide "anything that might be off-putting - really stupid stuff like a candle with a pentacle on it, books with "offensive" covers (specifically erotica), even a scruffy dog bed".

Since 90% of our household goods consists of weird shit/books, erotica and dog-beds, this may not be possible...

 But we did chisel the Green Man off from next to the front door...

I just can't do anything about the 6ft god in the back garden!

And the Hammer Horror Library is a lost cause, dudes...

 I think our marketing strategy has to be "semi-detached house, would suit weirdos", lol