Rebaser

Yesterday 61 Hudson Road became part of chronology, part of history, and no longer that dangling sword of Damocles over my head, or over my heart; even over the collarbone or shoulder - all would be equally painful I suppose. But no longer! Well, of course, stress is a feature that doesn't really go away - i can say instead that it has been dulled. I will also decide one day whether talking in metaphors is a good idea or not.

Yesterday I also found out two other things: people can be really nice + fame, even in teaspoon-sized doses, is very exciting...

nice: I was supposed to enter the Guardian Student Media Awards '09. Wait for it, 'supposed' is a key word here. About a month ago I was notified by my housemate (ex-housemate I guess now!): ENTER THE GUARDIAN STUDENT MEDIA AWARDS. Though not actually not relayed to me in capitals, I did react as if it had been the very essence of upper-case, and basically went to enter the competition. I say 'went to' because i didn't, though I tried, because it was so absolutely complicated. I was entering the Feature Writer of the Year category, as I had written quite a few nice features over last semester, for the University of Portsmouth newspaper&magazine combination, Pugwash. Overcomplicatedness of the entry forms and a lot of needless information required (how much does everyone earn in this student publication? can we have your signature? what is the print run? how tall are you?) led me to GUN HOUSE near Portsmouth Union, to ask questions about these mysteries. There a certain Mike told me that the uni was sending off a whole bundle of entries. HANG ON! I thought, surely I should have known about this? So I emailed Tom, who had organised all of this, and basically he quelled my rage/impatience with a "hold your horses" - so, I did.

In fact, I held them for so long that I forgot about the competition until yesterday - July 3rd. The deadline of the competition. I emailed Tom, funnily enough, before I found out it was in fact the deadline, saying "am I too late?! I'll post the entries to you as soon as possible"... imagine how disappointed I was! But then, imagine how pleased I was when Tom's reply came like a chorus of angels chanting something like 'REJOICE!' or, to be more widely denomenational, a procession of Tibetan monks ringing bells, banging drums & generally jangling: He had sent the entries off, which luckily I had mentioned in a previous email to him! How brilliant is that! YES! io! eheu! This also meant that he chose me over other entrants because there is a stringent one-entrant-per-category-per-uni enforcement. Overjoyed. This is the 'nice' bit, obviously; nice of him to send off for me!

FAME: Now fame is an interesting thing. I have this pipette thing going on. What do I mean by that? Well, imagine a pipette filled with diluted fame, which is occasionally squeezed onto me very inconspicuously. This is my relationship with fame. Hardly one at all. If fame was a woman, I would probably just be looking at her from afar a lot, and these rare moments of recognition are a returned glance from her, or a 'hello'. Nothing more... anyway, I think you get the idea. To continue: There is/was an annual anthology of poems, short stories & travel writing from students at University of Portsmouth, and people associated with it, called Borderlines. I missed out on Vol. 1; I narrowly scraped into Vol. 2 with a long and ramblingly incoherent Bob Dylan-esque polemic/romantic poem; Vol. 3 I almost forgot about, but sent a couple of poems anyway.

Bad luck then ploughs in from nowhere, made up of empty pockets and dust, there was a LACK OF FUNDING! No more Borderlines. Naturally, all involved are outraged, saddened, etc., and then an email starts to circulate, with plenty of Cc's and whatever - participants? - saying 'we can do it ourselves' and 'who will lead us?', and I got involved. Not leading of course, but I got in contact with one 'leader' I suppose, Tucker Lieberman, and one thing led to another -- I sent him a poem. His hard work, plus many other people's poems + stories, resulted in a NEW anthology, more broad in scope than Borderlines - being based not only in the UK, but over ther other side of the Atlantic as well, amongst other places - which was called Never Hit By Lightning. I'm not really much of an advertiser, but I heartily urge you to check it out, and don't be worried when you read "This collection of short stories and poems explores life's dark side" - it is great stuff. Have a look here, at http://www.lulu.com/content/7323299. That is 1tsp, fame.