Alright. Let us begin with:
The Siege of Pugglemunt, Chapter Seventeen: An Excerpt
They had crested the horizon: the view was clear from the Magic Tower. In one great, rippling, flesh-and-leather coloured mass, the dark horde was approaching from the west, moving fast across the fields surrounding Pugglemunt. Thin plumes of black smoke went up from every home and hovel they rode past. I was glad I’d given the order to summon all surrounding villagers to the keep. Actually, hang on a second—
“Quince, did I give the order to summon all surrounding villagers to the keep?”
“No, my liege.”
“Oh GOD. SHIT.”
“It’s okay, Sire. Sir Sleeves took care of it while you were kidnapped.”
“Oh thank the Heavens. What a relief. Remind me to reward him. I’ll buy him a great big – I don’t know — goose.”
I turned away from the window and gazed instead into the blue-hue imbued tomb-gloom of Pugglemunt’s ancient wizard-nest. Nobody knows who built the Magic Tower, truth be told. We know who built Pugglemunt, of course: its first modest homes sprang up from where fell the tears of the Goddess of Productivity, Kraqinon, when she stubbed her toe one summer afternoon a thousand years ago. But the history after that gets a little blurry. My ancestors (who had previously been a nomadic people whose primary diet consisted chiefly of wasps) were among the first to settle in the shiny new huts — but it was a long time before they decided to articulate their to-ings and fro-ings in any meaningful manner.
Beyond the initial founding of the city, the entirety of our knowledge of the first three hundred years of Pugglemuntian history is contained on a single surviving clay tablet. It reads thus:
Eggs
LoafRat rat RAT
Cheese (Cow) (Goat!)
Jam – Berries
Chiekcn
Chiken
Chickin
CHICKEN
Rat
Grandma round for dinner – don’t forget
Academics, of course, have puzzled over this tablet for centuries. The loudest school of thought says that it is a poem — that the staccato syllability of the lines make for an enjoyable chant; one that might have once been performed as an early pagan ritual. Academics in this camp – known as the Egg Poetics in bookish circles – to this day meet up in secret to chant the words and wonder at their meaning. The repetition of ‘rat’, they argue, is emblematic of humankind’s resilience in the face of adversity, while the multiple alternate spellings of ‘chicken’ show adaptability and evolution over time — with the final ‘rat’ reminding us never to forget our journey. The initial ‘egg’ of course is thought to represent birth, while ‘loaf’ indicates the potential of a wasted youth, and time spent on idle pleasures, here represented by the words ‘cheese’, ‘jam’ and ‘berries’, which of course are synonymous with insincerity, bawdy music and wine.
The struck-through cow indicates an animal that has been slaughtered – a calf, or rather, innocence – and is replaced by a goat, which connotes ugliness and unpredictability. If the reader – and the human, in their voyage of life – can make it to the end of the piece while maintaining their syllabic rhythm (vitality), they are rewarded with a final insight: the grandma, a solemn reminder of the passage of time and the folly of youthful hubris, sitting down to dinner (enduring family values). Thus, the piece takes us from the cradle to the grave, with ‘don’t forget’ its lasting great yawp of wisdom.
The other camp says it’s a shopping list by an illiterate couple who couldn’t agree on what to eat.
Who knows!
Anyway, what I’m getting at is: at some point during this three-hundred year period, when seemingly nobody bothered to write anything down, the Magic Tower was built. The first record we have of it comes from Pugglemunt’s fourth century, when the resident Royal Magician, Lilly the Witch, accidentally blew the roof off it during an alchemical endeavour that went, quite obviously, wrong.
Still, six hundred years is a long time to keep a bunch of wizards and witches in a tower, and sure enough, today the Magic Tower is a wondrous, cluttered, intriguing but also quite annoying place to be.
There you go, you lucky little sunbeam. A sliver more of book for you. That’s it! That’s all you’re getting for now! I’m still working on it: typing away in my house like a nutter. I love it, I loathe it, I cannot stop!
Athelstan’s been through the fuckin mill, my lads, let me tell you. I dragged him out into the desert and beat him up, and then I put him in a cloud for a while (clouds can talk in my world), and then I sent him back home with vigour renewed, just in time for the big showdown. The barbarians are at the gates as we speak, and the Royal Masseuse, Vamonos, is leading the goodly knights of Pugglemunt through a quick yoga class ahead of the imminent bloodbath.
Actually I should probably just say at this point: hello! If you’re new to WorldHangover, no, I have not lost my mind. I am writing a novel, a pulpy daft mixture of fantasy and… I don’t know what. It’s like, a book for people without the attention span to read books, you know? A book for people who hate reading because they’ve had their brains destroyed by the modern world (I include myself in this) (but I like reading) (sometimes) (when I can be bothered).
I had a bit of a writing-crisis that lasted, oh I don’t know, a month, because I got really obsessed with the idea of the book being good and having value and being publishable. I had dollar signs in my eyes, bruv. But then I decided: fuck it! Who gives a rat’s tit if it ever gets made into a proper paper book. I just want to be whimsical and silly. So that’s what you get: a big wordy mess.
It feels good to be slapdash with art. Discipline is important, obviously — it’s what keeps you going through the shit times, the am-I-any-good times, the how-dare-I-try-to-say-anything times, the fuck-I’m-deluded times — but when it comes to actually sitting down and making shit, you can switch off the discipline, or at least shove it out of the way for a while. Let joy take the stage.
~
In other, wildly unrelated news, I’ve started getting slightly beefier! I’ve noticed it – mostly around the shoulders. I don’t know if I’m any heavier, because our house scales ran out of battery and replacing them is one of those tasks that’s so low-priority it just never gets done. I mean: are you really going to get up, put your shoes on, grab your keys and wallet, leave the house and walk the 1.5 kilometres to the shop and back just to get a tiny circular battery for scales? No you’re not, and neither am I.
But yeah – bit beefier. I’ve been going to the gym around four times a week, which is good. Guess how many pull-ups I can do. Wrong. Fifteen! Fifteen. And yes I only weigh like 70kg so I suppose it’s not as impressive as it would be if I were a Larger Man, but whatever. I’ve noticed a slow change and it’s satisfying. I don’t know if I’ll ever have wicked abs, because I do still rather love eating shit and lying down for outrageously long spans, but yeah — steps in the right direction.
I’m still on my theatrical hype too. Went to see Richard III with Liv at the Globe a couple of weeks ago. It was good — not as good as Much Ado, but good. Today I’m going to see a play over in Twickenham with Rob. It’s called Cyrano de Bergerac, and we only know of its existence because we went out on a jaunt a fortnight ago to visit a day-fair thing at a place called Eel Pie Island, which is an island on the Thames where the Rolling Stones played in the 60s. It’s inhabited by lots of weird hippies who make art that makes my caffeinated ramblings look so comprehensible as to be drab. Imagine.
The play is being held in a little garden by the river, with trimmed hedges and a fountain that looks a bit like the Trevi Fountain in Rome except obviously nowhere near as good. We wandered through there on our Eel Pie visit, seeking only to look at the pretty fountain, and found instead a square of grass with three angry men fighting with rapiers. They were going at it, I tell you, thrusting at one another and dodging and slapping and spinning and riposting, all while yelling ‘A-HA!’ and ‘HAVE AT YOU!’ and things like that.
I don’t know why this keeps happening to me: ever since I started writing the Athelstan story, my life has gotten weirdly mediaeval. Everywhere I go it seems people are wearing armour and fighting with swords. First I got given a Henry VIII costume for my birthday, then there was the joust, then there were the multiple Shakespeare plays (seen three now, off to see Antony and Cleopatra next week, woo!), and then I got invited to a Midsummer Night’s Dream themed party thrown by a friend I met in India and had to dress up as a fairy prince or whatever. And then I walk into a park and stumble upon lots of men swordfighting! You know what that is?
That’s God.
Telling me to write my fuckin book. Legend.
Anyway, as I stood gawping at these men hollering and trying to stab each other, a woman walked up to Rob and I. She had a pretty face and was wearing a green jumpsuit and had a sword sheathed at her thigh.
“Hello,” she said. “I thought you seemed interested, so I’d like to give you this flyer.”
“What is it?” I said.
“We’re out here today practising for a play called Cyrano De Bergerac. It’s going to be held in these gardens by candlelight, and you can sit on the grass and bring your own food and wine and put a blanket down.”
“Can I touch your sword,” I said.
“Sure,” she said.
I touched it.
“Okay bye,” she said.
And I folded up the flyer and kept it and: there you go. Rob and I are going to see the play tonight. More fisticuffs! More swashbuckling! YES.
I’m also attending a salsa class tomorrow over at Elephant and Castle. I’m going alone because all my flatmates are away on holiday and I can’t afford to go on holiday because… well I just can’t. So I have to have micro-adventures instead. Like dancing gaily with strangers! I’m obviously quite scared, but I’m doing it regardless because I know I’ll be glad I gave it a go. I also might join this climbing society I’ve found; it’s a little pricey, buuut I have a feeling it’ll be a good investment as opposed to, you know, just boozing all the time and expecting life to magically get more interesting.
And there you have it! That’s all my news. We’re all caught up. Now get out.