Backtracking... Vinyl Nostalgia and stuff...

Getting the hang of this scarily quickly. Journalling like this is addictive, it seems...

Better start by getting the football related stuff out of the way... Xenophobia first: YES! The French are out! Bollocks! The Germans aren't. Xenophilia: Congrats to the Irish... I know the feelings are unlikely to be reciprocated if we qualify tomorrow but... well. Also find it excellent that Senegal have qualified from out of nowhere. With so many of the big teams in trouble it looks like being a very interesting tournament this time around.

I've just started hitting nostalgia in a big way. I mentioned the A-ha DVD yesterday - Alison and I were just watching some of it while having tea. The Sun Always Shines On TV, The Living Daylights, Hunting High And Low and of course Take On Me. Takes me back. Living Daylights in particular. I think that song marks where my liking A-ha came over all obsessive. My first 12" single, for starters, and the beginning of a more wide-ranging obsession with remixes. A-ha were the first band I called my favourite, the first band I saw live (at the height of their status as teen heart-throbs in the UK... how the din of girls screaming as the curtain went up didn't bust my eardrums I will never know), and, obviously, the first band that I had the piss taken out of me for liking... the beginning of a fine tradition :-)

Finally got my hands on the new A-ha album today too (I say 'finally', it only came out yesterday and none of the usual outlets - ie, Sainsburys - had it in). Haven't listened to all of it yet but seems promising. So far there's no obvious track that will gain Velvet/Slender Frame status in my eyes, but there are a few that promise to be definite growers.

Work improved today, although the blame culture continued to go on around me while I carried on fighting the mystery that is CA Opal (if you don't know, you don't wanna) in aid of the wonderfully ill-conceived 'EP' project (I'm not going to use its full name here, that could get me in trouble down the line). I finally seem to be winning, but every new problem finds me a little more weary and a little more dejected. I will be so glad to see the back of it and get rid of the pointless office politics that surrounds it. Then I can get back to trying to develop my career instead of developing skills that will be no use to me elsewhere (except maybe Computer Associates... and for someone with any mainframe background that's as bad as selling your soul to Microsoft). Oh, and get back to solving the billing problems that I unwittingly created. I'm currently winging it on solving them but I'm sure sooner or later I'll get a flash of inspiration on how to untangle the mess.

And then there's HBL. It'll be a wonderful achievement when I finish it, particular if it breaks the 100K word mark (which it looks like doing easily), but with every step closer to the end I get less convinced of my ability to deliver an ending that does justice to the build-up I've been writing for the past 14 months. I accept now that Rebecca had a resolution that was weak in comparison to the build-up, and I don't want to end up doing the same thing again. Hell Breaks Loose is to my own mind the best thing I've ever written, and I hate the idea of it ending with a whimper instead of a bang. It's always been a story about the characters with the plot in the background, but that doesn't mean the plot is unimportant. For most of this chapter the plot is at the forefront for the first time in the whole story and the characters are getting a chance to be proactive instead of reactive. I want there to be some kind of surprise in how it all turns out but I have a habit of thinking things through far too much to the point where I drop way too many clues into the mix. We shall see... it's only going to be a week or two now until it's done, and then I'll write the epilogue while people beta it with (hopefully) a merciless eye for any weak spots. George Lucas says he has trouble writing beginnings... I think I have trouble with endings. Bah.