It's Pointless Staying Up For Even Twenty Seconds More

The Twenty-First of February Two Thousand and Twelve. Tuesday.

My experiment in sleep deprivation is a success. My brain has now officially collapsed. I've conclusively proved that not going to bed causes the mother of all headaches. Now it's time for catch-up, so full on bloggage will be resumed on the morrow. For now, I leave you with this:

More soonliest.

Chapter 6 - The GB Olympic Queueing Team Part1 (Reposted)

The Twentieth of February Two Thousand and Twelve. Monday.

Chapter 6 The GB Olympic Queueing Team

The thing is Amber and I had been to Durham before. It was where our older sister, May, was at university. She's doing English and Criminology which I thought would be really cool but it's all to do with Social Science (whatever that is) and they don't study murders or anything interesting like that. That's what we used the railcard for – it's got both Mum and Amber's name on it so it's all right for just the two of us to go. We only usually go up for the day. Most times Amber and May end up going shopping but we'd go to the pictures too and May always picks something I'd like. We went to see X Men First Class last time which I thought was excellent but Amber got confused because I don't think she realised that it was a prequel. She'd only watched the other ones for Hugh Jackman and was disappointed that he wasn't in it (yes, I know he has a cameo in it, but that wasn't enough for Amber and I didn't want put down any spoilers. Only I have now, haven't I? Thanks).

So you might be thinking 'Oh, isn't that a coincidence that they're going to Durham and that's where their sister is.' Well, congratulations to you because that's what a coincidence is, when two things happen at the same time. You may find it hard to believe but what with there being a university and a passport office in Durham something like this happening is not altogether impossible. Yes, there's an office in Liverpool that's nearer, but the Durham one was on the way to the Isle of Beep. So stop worrying about it and let me get on with the story.

'Have you told May about what's happened,' I asked Amber. The five of us were sat across two tables on the train. Dan was enjoying a packet of crisps and a bottle of pop and Nina and Horatio were reading different sections of the Sunday paper. Amber was charging up her Blackberry and messaging her friends.

'Yeah, I emailed her when we set off. Told her what had happened. She said she's busy tonight, but she'll catch up with us tomorrow afternoon after lectures.'

'Wasn't she upset about Mum and Dad?'

'Didn't seem to be. She said a friend of hers had her parents abducted by aliens. It all turned out all right in the end. She said if we were on the case she wasn't worried.'

'She did believe what you were saying, didn't she?'

'How do I know? Look, Carl, I'm busy here. I don't need the third degree, ok?'

'Ok!'

'Thank you.' She then went on to ignore me for the next two hours.

The train journey was long and boring. I didn't have my PSP with me and I got fed up of Tetris on my phone really quickly. So I picked my moment carefully and I finally got the story out of Nina and Horatio.

It turns out Horatio was a Spanish sailor by the name of Horacio Morientes who was the only survivor of a shipwreck. Or he thought he was the only survivor – there was this other bloke who survived and became his evil nemesis but that's nothing to do with this story. Anyway, he found Nina, a genie, trapped in a bottle ('more like a jar,' said Nina, 'with a lid. But as soon as a genie's involved everyone says “bottle”, so “bottle” it is) and before you could say 'three wishes' he was magically rescued and home and dry.

All sorts of astonishing misadventures ensued and before you know it they fell in love. So far, so sixties sitcom. Except it is expressly forbidden for a master to fall in love with their genie. Yeah, slavery's okey-dokey, but the 'L' word? That's a definite no-no. The only way around it was for Nina to renounce her power and the two of them to commit to each other for the rest of their lives. Which in this case would be all eternity, because as a result of getting married Horatio would join Nina in immortality. It all sounded very romantic at the time. No-one mentioned to them that being deathless meant they were unable to pass life on. They would never, ever be able to have children.

Being a genie and finding a genie are both types of a curse and there's rarely a happy ending where curses are involved. The conditions of the marriage were that they would have to be together forever. If ever one of them was out of earshot of the other then they would both crumble to dust. This was fine to begin with but as time went on it became apparent that the only thing they had truly had in common were their magical adventures. She began to find him boring and inattentive, he didn't like the way she examined the tiniest detail of everything she did. Little things, but the thought of an eternity of them weighed heavy on both their hearts. They began to spend less and less time together, but with the curse preventing either from having a life of their own they began to resent each other. Forced into each other's company they would say the most horrible and hurtful things, things that could never be taken back. The precious memories of the wonderful times they had spent together were soon forgotten.

I said that that was understandable after hundreds of years. Anybody would get irritated after that amount of time together. Horatio shook his head sadly. In the first five years of their marriage they had angrily screamed themselves hoarse dozens of times. Eventually, they had managed to come up with a working relationship, earning their keep all over Europe. Fortune Teller and stooge, or Magician and Assistant. They knew enough about the world of miracles in order to make a living as entertainers – circuses, theatres and fairs through the years, moving on before suspicions were formed about their ageless nature. But their wilful flouting of the rules of the supernatural meant they would never be respected or accepted by the world again. They had never been accepted by our world in the first place.

Things had got better in the last twenty years or so, though. The curse that kept them together was pedantically literal. With mobile phones coming into common usage it was possible for the two of them to be apart while still technically within earshot. Voice mail got around any problems with areas with no signal, but should either of them let their phone's battery fall dead then they would both soon follow it. Nevertheless, finally being able to live separate lives had helped them repair some of the damage done between them. And occasionally, when something adventurous or magical came along – like now – they'd find themselves almost getting along.

'Almost,' said Nina as Horatio finished off his can of Stella Artois with a burp.

Another night, another Holiday Lodge Express. Another fried breakfast. I hoped dad would be grateful enough with us for saving him and the world that he'd overlook his next credit card bill. We all met in the cafeteria to compare notes. Nina started the day with some unwelcome news.

'The passport office opened at eight-thirty. They're probably queueing out the door already. Come on we'd better get down there.'

I'd never really been one for fried bread but I resented being rushed away from my last slice then. At least I got to finish off my second cup of tea.

'Do we all have to go?' asked Amber.

'We're all getting passports, so yes,' replied Horatio. 'Have you all filled out the forms?'

Horatio had printed off online application forms using the small IT suite that belonged to the hotel. We all dutifully held up our completed forms as we stormed down the street. Somebody was going to lose one, I knew it.

'Has everybody got their photos?' asked Nina. We'd all taken turns in the photo booth at the railway station last night, so there was an unenthusiastic chorus of yesses in reply.

'Excellent. Nearly there...'

Millburngate House was a big blocky place that looked like it had been made out of concrete Lego. It took a while for us to find the entrance, but when we did there were plenty of signs to make sure we went in the right direction. It was Amber who spotted it first.

'Here we go: “Imaginary and Non-Realistic Applications”. This must be the way.'

There was a very helpful blue line running down the corridor to guide us on our way. Eventually, it came to a set of double doors. Dan and Horatio pulled them open between them revealing...

Three massively long queues. They were unavoidable, the first thing that struck you. The doors led into a huge hall, bigger than the one used for assembly at school. At the far end, at the front of each queue, we could just make out three tiny windows, each staffed by a distant blur of a person, each the goal of the hundreds of people waiting patiently in line.

'This is impossible,' I said. 'It's not even been open an hour.'

'Told you,' said Nina. 'We probably could have done with queueing even before the place opened.'

'But all these people can't be going to the Isle of Beep,' I said. 'Isn't this for emergency applications? Doesn't anyone get their passport well before they set off.'

'It's for anyone visiting somewhere that isn't real or isn't on a map,' explained Nina. 'And that's something you seldom plan for. There are very few people who plan to make this sort of a trip. These offices are always busy with people needing passports at the last minute. Join the club.'

As Nina was speaking, someone else entered the hall the same way that we had. Without hesitation they joined the middle one of the three queues.

'I think we'd better get in line,' said Horatio. 'This is going to take long enough as it is. If we keep letting others in we'll be here all day.'

'Should we split up?' asked Dan. 'Would it be quicker if we all joined different queues?'

'I don't know,' said Amber. 'I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't think it's such a good idea.'

There was a quick conflab and it was decided that we would split up – Me with Nina in the middle queue, Amber with Horatio in the left hand one and Dan on the right hand side. He hadn't done anything like this before but he assured us he was a dab hand with forms and the like. We took our places and prepared for the long wait ahead.

Barely five minutes had gone by when Horatio statrted waving at us. None of the lines appeared to have gone down at all but a few more people had entered the hall and joined each of the three queues. There was enough of a gap between the queues that it was impossible to have a conversation between them without raising your voice. It seemed Horatio had elected not to attempt that was instead furiously miming something to me and Nina. It took a while to realise that he was gesturing toward someone a short way ahead of us in our queue. Mindful of not losing our place Nina and I peered past the people in front of us to see a woman in a black duffel coat carrying a cat. She had her hood up so it was difficult to see her face clearly. But her chin was visible, jutting out.

It was covered in stubble.

'I think we joined the wrong queue,' I said to Nina.

More soonliest.

Previously on 'My Idiot Sister is The Chosen One'

The Twentieth of February Two Thousand and Twelve. Monday.

It was my sister, May, that had it. My notebook, I mean. She'd written Dan's phone number in there and borrowed it, fully intending to copy it into her phone, but had never got round to doing it. Anyway, I didn't see my notebook again until May came home for Christmas.

Sorry. I've dived in without explaining stuff there. Some of you might remember that a bit ago I was telling you the story of how I discovered that my idiot sister was the chosen one in this quest thing to stop a couple of highly strung cat demon witch types from destroying (slash) remaking the world in their own image. Or something.

What's that? You don't remember? Hmm, sorry, that's my fault. It has been a while. Let's see if I can remember the important stuff.

My name's Carl Thorpe (yes, I remembered that bit. Ha-ha, didn't need any help with that) and I was making a record of all the weird things that happened to me, my sister Amber and a bunch of other people after a bloke from the Italian Renaissance turned up at our house one night (well, it was kind of one day – look, it's kind of complicated to explain. You might want to go back to the beginning of all this and start from there if you haven't come across my earlier scribblings on all this nonsense).

Basically, there's these two cat demons called Lucia and Lisa who are looking for something called the Tabula Rasa scrolls that will let them rewrite the whole of reality from scratch. They have evil minions called conataurs, which look like idiots with traffic cones on their heads, but the cones actually are their heads. Our mum and dad have been turned into conataurs, so as well as saving the world we're trying to figure out a way to get them back to normal.

We're trying to get to these scrolls before the demon sisters do. We found and item called the Chianti Lodestone that is like a geiger counter for magic stuff and we're using it to locate the whereabouts of these scrolls. We picked up the lodestone at one of those historical gift shops and along the way we also picked up Dan, a bloke who works there. He pretty much had to come with us as a tram smashed into the shop and almost killed everyone. That's not as important as the fact that he's one of our team now – don't go worrying too much about all the stuff that's gone before.

We've also picked up a couple called Horatio and Nina who have turned out to be and ex-genie and her ex-master. They've been around for hundreds of years and they're pretty clued up on all this magic stuff so they've been giving Amber and me a few pointers. They're the ones that pinpointed the location of the Lodestone as being somewhere in the North Sea in a place called the Isle of Beep. Yeah, beep, it's weird how that comes out even when you try and write it down – it's as if the real name has been censored somehow. But that's what it is actually called – The Isle of Beep.

Since this island is a mystical neverland of legend we've all had to get special new passports to visit. We've gone to the issuing office in Durham, which is handy because that's where, May, my other less idiotic sister is at university. We'll probably catch up with her later.

Right, well, the point is I'd got up to the point in the story where we'd reached the passport office and then I lost my notes! Or at least had them nicked like I said at the beginning of this little recap.

Yeah, I had notes written on paper. That's not fair – I really wanted to get an iPad. I could have had all this written out from the off instead of having to type it all up again just because my parents are convinced I'd break it if I had one. It would have been dead handy on the quest (well, for the parts of it that had good wi-fi which, now I think about it, there weren't many of). But there's no point moaning now, I've got my notebook back now and I can continue telling the rest of the story. I'm going to repost the beginning of the last chapter again as well – a bit like rewinding a recording a bit so you remember what just happened.

I haven't wasted my time while I didn't have my notes, though. I got the box set of all three series of The Inbetweeners and The Inbetweeners Movie and I've been watching them while waiting for my research to turn up.

Oh, and there was that time I was attacked by the leader of the conataur cavalry and barely escaped with my life, but that's another story.

For now, let's get back to the tale I like to call My Idiot Sister is The Chosen One.

Lost in the Falkirk Triangle

The Nineteenth of February Two Thousand and Twelve. Sunday.

I've just got back from a very pleasant short break in Scotland. Had a lovely time, but as often happens I didn't have time to pursue everything that I wanted to during my time away. Yes, I got to eat all the macaroni pies that I wanted, that goes without saying. But I didn't get in all the UFO-spotting that  I wanted to.

What's that you say, long term follower of this blog? (do such people exist? I'd imagine them to be rarer than actual Ufonauts). I pooh-poohed the existence of flying saucers in an earlier blog? Maybe I did but that doesn't mean that I don't think they're cool. And it seems a wasted opportunity not to at least look for some proof of extra-terrestrial life when I was so close to a global hub (if not hub-cap) of UFO activity.

My hotel was just on the outskirts of the shaded area. The skies were clear as I walked back from the bus last night but all I could see was Orion looking down at me as if to say 'move along, mate - nothing to see here.'

But something is going on, that much is certain. The guide on the Falkirk Wheel pointed out that not only is Bonnybridge a centre for UFO activity, but it also has a high percentage of lottery winners. You can't tell me the two things aren't connected.

Also, it's clear the Falkirk Wheel is based on an alien design, or at the very least has been constructed with the intention to contact life beyond the Earth.

Anyway, I feel a fool for not investigating further. After all, no less a leading light than Michael Aspel has deemed it worthy of study. I can't embed this extract from his in-depth examination of the phenomenon so follow this here link. The chap does stop it dead on ten minutes so if you want to watch the concluding 90 seconds follow the link to the next part at the end.

Actually, rather spookily it's all connected. In checking where the largest lottery wins have taken place, it turns out that the UK's biggest winners come from... Largs. It doesn't mention it here but as I understand it this couple are responsible for reinstating the cheeseboat. I'm glad to see they're using their money for worthy causes.

No more about cheese, I promise.

Okay, just this, then.

More soonliest.

The Battle of Largs

The Sixteenth of February Two Thousand and Twelve. Thursday.

And so my long winter hibernation comes to an end. Yes, the blog is back. Next week I'll set about finishing off the Nanowrimo novel that petered out last November, but for now it's the usual nonsense.

Mind you, I was enjoying a long bath last night (you can tell when you're enjoying it, you don't notice the water's gone cold until your toes go numb) when Twitter led me to the wit and wisdom of The Bloggess (haven't figured how to make links on the phone app, you'll have to copy and paste - it's worth it (am now at home and have edited it so it becomes a link - yay!)). I believe the term is 'she's won the Internet'. I thought I can't even come close to that level of aceness, I might as well go back into hibernation.

Then I had some Norwegian cheese and got on with it.

I'm enjoying a brief sojourn in Scotland at the mo. I'm staying near Falkirk at a Travelodge near the motorway. Bit of a walk to get there - don't mind that - but unfortunately it's at one point of a triangle formed by it, Polmont town centre and the railway station. No cheap fried breakfast en route on my daily trips and no nearby shops. I wasn't going to pay Travelodge's obscene prices for UHT and a croissant so a visit to the Co-op (checking where the chippy was as we went) was called for.

Stocked up on the essentials: variety pack of cereal (it was Honey Shreddies this morning), bottle of proper milk (put on window sill to keep cool - see photo), Irn Bru, crisps, juice, gimmicky tubes of Heinz instant soup and cheese.

But which cheese?

Turns out the best offer was on Jarlsberg Norwegian cheese which is made to a secret recipe which is telepathed to a head cheesemaker ((insert Life of Brian joke here) they daren't write it down!) at fromageries around the world from the mind of of a preternaturally old Viking woman kept alive, lo, this past milennium by the cheese's life-giving properties.

At least I think that's what it said on the label. Tastes very nice, anyway.

This led me to investigate the links between Norway and Scotland. Famously, there's a strong Viking influence here. Also, the two nations went to war from 1262-1266 - over the Hebrides or cheese I can't remember which (I got all this off Wikipedia). There was a series of skirmishes, the most significant of which was The Battle of Largs, the conclusion of which was indecisive (although it favoured the Scots). This is commemorated in Largs by the daubing of Scots pickle on a life size cheese longboat every year, although a rise in lactose intolerance has seen this practice diminish in recent times.

Anyway, I'm off to Brodick on the Isle of Arran today. I'll be sailing from Ardrossan, not too far from Largs, but unfortunately I won't have time to pay a visit so further research is impossible.

On a happier note today's third photo is of a small leaflet left by some religious nut while I was eating my Quorn chilli the other night.

More soonliest (no, honestly (as sung by Lynsey de Paul, the theme to the sitcom with John Alderton (but not the sequel 'Yes, Honestly' starring Liza Goddard)))

Hard Cheese

The Seventeenth of February Two Thousand and Twelve. Friday.

A couple of days ago the Arran ferry crashed into the pier at Ardrossan. All sailings were cancelled on Wednesday while they were awaiting a replacement vessel from Campbeltown (good name). The new boat was called the Isle of Arran - strange that this wasn't the route it was being used on.

Typical of my recent slack attitude that I didn't check if it was running today. Of course it was, but the initial backlog from yesterday and the fact that it was a smaller boat meant it was running late all day. The gangways didn't fit, so we had to enter and exit through the car deck. It was all a bit hit and miss. Still, we got to the island, albeit a little late.

I'd planned to get a cake and some coffee and write my postcards - that part of the plan went fine. I even made the post - I heard they for there the next day. The drizzle lifted somewhat and I had a quick walk and took in the sight of Goat Fell revealed across the bay. But it was becoming clear I was going to get back later than planned. The return ferry was looking like it was going to be more than an hour late. Ok, I was going to miss City v Porto, but that wasn't the end of the world.

There was a chippy nearby so I opted for cheesy chips for tea - I still had an emergency can of Irn Bru. There was even an abandoned copy of the Scottish Daily Mail - the only time I'll read that hate-filled rag. Besides, it's the writers not the readers who give the paper a bad name.

Er, no. Take a look at Exhibit A reproduced at the foot of this entry.

My only real prob was that the trains back to Glasgow from the harbour were so infrequent. We were going to be late enough that I wouldn't have much of a wait for the next one but it would miss the connection back to Polmont where I was staying. A quick look at the timetable showed that there was an earlier train from the town centre. If I got a move on I could make that.

I disembarked and jogged to town, getting there in plenty of time. Or so I thought. I checked the timetable again and discovered that it was an earlier one that started on town - I wanted the one from South Beach, the next stop. 3 minutes - I couldn't possibly make it.

And that's what I thought all the while I was jogging to the next station, setting myself up to fail. Even when I saw a train moving as I turned the corner I convinced myself it was departing rather than arriving. By the time I realised my mistake it definitely was too late. If I had just kept running I would have made it. I was being taunted by a train-shaped metaphor for my life so far.

But then I did what I always do and moped for a while and then came up with s creative solution. I had time to kill so why not go to nearby Largs and look for evidence of the cheeseboat?

Well, that's exactly what I did and I found it! There's a photo below. I had to look through the railings at the station so I'm afraid it's not very clear, what with it being covered in pickle and it being dark. But if you squint you can just make it out.

And the moral of this story is: always have cheese on your chips.

More soonliest.