The Lean London years

“Teaching? Sure. It’ll be a laugh. A doddle. A walk in the park.”

That was my logic in about July last year.

Then August hit, and I sat at my computer shouting at the terrifyingly blank word document, waiting for it to make lesson planning happen. Nothing did until I cut my losses and abandoned writing altogether on the reasoning that I could cope with being worried about being rubbish at one thing, but not two.

Then term rolled around, and everything suddenly needed to happen all at once. And now, in mid-May, I can confidently say this:

I’m knackered.

Much like an old horse, I am ready for the glue factory. I am barely coherent, cranky, about 20% ill and I have stopped going to the gym. Before Friday the 25th I’ll need to have produced two final exams, planned inspection lessons and gone over all my paperwork with a fine tooth comb – oh, and I’ll have to have edited Swords again. I currently have energy for none of this, and no matter how much I try to sleep well and feed myself, none seems to be forthcoming. It’s as if my brain has just stopped, and is refusing to start again.

It’ll work out somehow, though. It usually does.

On another note, I’ve modestly started using Twitter again. Should you wish to follow my occasional ramblings, it’s @SnorriKristjans.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I was just halfway through a particularly satisfying session of babbling,drooling and bashing my head into the occasional table.

I’ll tell you what year it is. It’s Do a Lot year.

I’m nearing the end of a school year where I have effectively worked 300% more than I’ve ever done before. Turns out that does take it out of you a little bit.

So I wander, moderately punch-drunk, between assignments: paperwork for work, paperwork for school, rewrites and concept work.

There is some stuff going on with the manuscripts, none of which I may mention. By casual estimate I’d put the chances at about two in a million, but that’s quite good.

The play is going into production – it’s called ‘Anyone for Tennis’ now. More on this and pretty much everything else later.

I just thought I’d drop by and say hello.

The heading itself has ‘sub-category potential’ written all over it – but that’s neither here nor there.

Who knew that studying to become a teacher was so draining? Who,I ask you? Who?

And before you start, answers like ‘..oh, idk, anyone with half a brain or three grots of common sense?’ are very uncivilized.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I am shattered. Not in an emotionally-and-physically-mangled, destroyed-and-broken sort of a way, but rather in a nice sort of exhausted-but-pleased way. I squeeze my brains at work and have started going to the gym again (good idea, that. Who knew that too?) so my general state is pretty close to vegetative. Which is kind of fine by me. There’s a football game on the telly tonight, and I intend to sneer at AC Milan for knocking out my beloved Arsenal with substandard spaghetti mafioso tactics (like ‘scoring more goals’ – what is that all about, then? Rotten cheats, the lot of’em) while eating very lazily home-made pizza. The plan, such as it is, is thus to do pretty much nothing at all.

Why, I (don’t really) hear you ask?

Because just now, I managed to tell my beloved on the phone that “I’d seen the envelope on the sofa tomorrow before I went to work”. Seeing as ‘work’ in my case does not involve time travel, it’s time to be chillin’ like a teacher trainin’ villain.

And no, it is neither Ed-related nor puerile.

As I may have mentioned, I am writing a play. It will be performed at the International Youth Arts Festival in Kingston, and is the brainchild of Matt and Smári, two lively young turks of the acting variety. My job in this whole malarkey is to translate their idea – “what if you put Andy Murray and Roger Federer in the same changing room before the Wimbledon Finals?” – into a play. So far, so something – a first draft of the thing is about 30% done. I recently hit the all-too-familiar place of readying the script for picking up another day, writing out the outline of what happens next, not being able to help myself and going on to the end, then going ‘…short. It’s too short, dag-nabit’. The time, it will tell, though. As usual. Work is casually planned for the easter break; script handoff is tentatively set for the 15th. Good times, good times. It feels nice to be making something again.

In other news university is going okay, work is good but exhausting. I will not – I repeat, not – turn this into a Wedding Blog, but I might mention that in exactly one year from now I will most likely be happily exhausted and most definitely be married. Which is delightful and strange and frightening in a good-scary sort of a way. This growing up malarkey is quite fun, as it happens.

I’ve signed on to write a short comedy for two young Turks (of non-Turkish descent). It’s about tennis, and the working title is ‘Balls’. That’s how mature I am.

In other news, I was derping around on Reddit when I found this. Enjoyable? Yes. Bad? Twice as. Read at your own peril.

I have just discovered that I cannot actually write at all. My judgment on this matter is absolute, accurate and in no way connected to the fact that I have a rather nasty, sinusy cold.

It may have something to do with the fact that I am revisiting for the first time something I jotted down in Paris and wrote about a week ago; it is not fantastic. I may need to forcibly remind myself that editing is a discipline that improves with time spent doing it and does not necessarily improve if one is releasing one’s body weight in nose juice every 3-4 minutes.

There may be some hope for me yet – ‘nose juice’ is a spectacularly disgusting term, and will now be added to my vocabulary/arsenal.

And speaking of which, Arsenal are playing Manchester United tomorrow. My Blessed Brother suggested sagely that they should call the match off and instead settle the matter with a Fifa 12-showdown on the XBox between the injured players of the respective clubs. That sounds about right to me.

I’d write more but I fear that my nose is not so much running as sprinting and preparing to do the hurdles.

(Editor’s note: This post was written just before the Arsenal-Man U game, which Arsenal lost, and should have been posted on or about the 22nd of January. I simply forgot – but decided to put it back in because of nose juice.)

come to those who wait. Beer, steak, my dear brother and an unlikely Icelandic victory against Norway at the European Handball championships, have seen fit to find their way to me tonight.

In other news, a recent trip to Paris has sparked an idea for a new story. As soon as I can develop my time extendor and get to the magical 27 hours a day I will finish it. The good Lady has deemed it ‘quite creepy’.

And they’d be kind of right, as it happens.

I’m thirty-seven, apparently. And no, I must say I don’t quite know how that happened.

That being said, life at 37 is pretty darn good. Here’s a couple of things I’ve got:

- A place to live.

- A lovely Lady who lives in the place where I live.

- A place where I go a lot of the time to work. This place is more or less filled with people that range from the Tolerably Annoying (very few) to the Awesome (way over the allocated quota, surely).

- Health. While not likely to make waves by winning a triathlon any time soon or solving Arsenal’s secondary striker and fox-in-the-box problem, I’m still more or less healthy; I can climb stairs, walk where I need to, sleep when I need to and run for very limited distances. My swimming trunks modelling career is probably over, but I’m healthy enough to do something about the, ahem, winter padding as well, should I so wish.

- Schroedinger’s writing career. Nothing might happen – but something might also happen. Swords is now with about 10 publishers, according to my agent, and being deliberated over incredibly carefully in various corners of the world. Harold will also start moving soon(ish) – possibly into its first editing cycle. Time will tell.

- Time. I’ve got it, I’m using it more or less wisely, and the time I’m having is good.

And here’s a non-exhaustive list of what I don’t have:

- Scurvy. I’m very pleased about this.

- A Nemesis. While I’m intrigued about the possibility of a proper, eye-narrowing, throat-growly Nemesis, I think actually having one would be very annoying and distracting.

- A World of Warcraft account. This has improved my life significantly and been the foundation of productive time-spending. I got a lot of fun out of that game for many years, but may have stopped playing approximately a year too late.

- A sense of modesty regarding The Lady’s Work. I am very proud indeed of this – so much so that I turn into a show-and-tell marketing rep with her work whenever we have visitors. This is sometimes frowned upon,  but the general positive reception tends to save my bacon.

- Much of any serious problems at all. Basically, as the English would say, I’m a jammy bastard and I know it.

On the whole I’d say year number thirty-seven has been up there with the best ones so far.

Bring on  year number thirty-eight!

The comedy hamster has been stirring of late. I am of course wise to his siren song and in no hurry to give him the keys to the wheel just yet, but that does not prevent him from scribbling and scratching.

I fully intended to follow this up with a spoof of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, only with a comedy hamster, but reading is a creative endeavour and I figure it would be rude of me to deprive you of the pleasure of imagining it yourselves.

Right now I’m simultaneously too healthy and not quite healthy enough.

This is actually quite annoying; I am about 12% ill. Not enough to stay home, but enough to make mornings awful and sinus-y and give headaches in the evenings. Considering the fact that I spend about 2 hours a day on the London Tube (apparently ‘Germ Cylinder’ was taken) to go to a school (apparently ‘Fresh Germ Storage Space was taken’) it’s actually quite remarkable that I’ve kept my health for this long. Now I just need to hang on past tomorrow so I can be poorly over the weekend, gaze into space and catch up on the eternal and never-ending paperwork.

And on that note, it’s time for my current absolutely favourite television show – Masterchef:The Professionals.