Vanity publishing has much to recommend it. Not if you’re looking to eat regularly, or maintainthepretence that your output has any actual value other than virtual cat litter. But because it’s self centred and self censored, you can live off the occasional crumb of positivity, while entirely ignoring the somewhat larger biscuit of disinterest.

In a 1000 posts and 2000 comments, exactly nine people have had a whinge. Three of those were religious nut jobs who called down localised server smiting after a singlearticle poked fun at an outmoded belief system. Four – and I kid you not because that count made me go back to check – took side splitting umbrage afterI accidentally strayed into the fundermentalistuniverse where the plots of Star Trek apparently represent some people’s reality.

The final two were employees of Chiltern Railways whofelt my lampooning of a service failing to meet the twin objectives of ‘timetables ‘ and ‘value‘ should – in the Starzi state their uniforms suggests utopia might be – result in being tied to the line and evisceratedby a passing train. My response, suggesting they’d probably want to pick a competitors track to make sure a train actually turned up, failed to defuse their angst.

I let those comment run because a) I’m waving my hands in the vanguard of free speech wherever it takes us and b) well it’s another hit isn’t it? And us self publishers are whores for that. It’s not like anyone is going to notice*

Hit whorage can be the only explanation – other than a bit of walking about cash** – to why the armies of bloggers crave recognition by a proper publication. Of those 1000 articles, 20 or so have tested the grammatical integrity of the hair pulling sub editors beforepassing into print where us literary wanabees are desperate to see ourwords.

Somehow your crap on a page is not the pidgen deposit others may see – it feels special and important. Back in the day when commuting to London appeared to bea great way to waste my life, I dodgem’d back from the loo only to find the man seated next to me reading an actual article I’d written. As he wasn’t tutting, ripping the page out or self flagellating with the entire magazine, I was close to venturing a semi apologetic waft that I was in fact the very man who’d penned the piece.

But I bottled it. In case he didn’t like it. A bloke I’d never met, whose values I didn’t know and whose prejudices might disgust me. Which didn’t stop me fearing his criticism of something that’d clearly exercised me and – false modesty aside – had been deemed good enough to fill pages of something others paid money for.

Years ago I wrote an article about the joy of the evening ride unwinding the angst and conflict of a difficult day. Buried in too many words was athrowaway comment ondriving home in bare feet and a beer to the good. So it was surprising to receive a message, via the editor, from a very angry fathercastigating me because his mountain biking son had died in a drink driving accident. I wasn’t condoning it, I wasn’t even making a point either way, but that’s the thing when you throw stuff out there, you lose control of anarrative woven tight through pencil sucking blocksand much rewriting.

I had no idea how to respond so finallyI justdidn’t. Which makes the fact I can’t leavethisalone pretty fucking amusing. The standard response from the wronged author is ‘show me what you’ve written, so I can come back and tell you how shit your workis. Especially your spelling. And lack of verbconjugation. Hah that’s showed you‘

Which is stupidbecause thecritic doesn’t provide an alternative. It’d be nice if they offeredsomething other than ‘well that’s a load of shit, what were you thinking?” but you don’t get to control the crowd. You stick it out there and for everyone who silently has a little nod and a chortle, they’re are 10 guys*** who hate it. Even those whose didn’t actually read it.

I try to be ambivalent to criticism, and that’s fine untilsome smug arsewipe reads one sentence beforeinforming the world there’s no point reading any more. Do me a fucking favour and plough throughthe rest of it. I know there’s a lot of stuff out theremaking me cringe, but there’s also quite a bit less representing the best wordscoming from this side of this keyboard. I appreciateit’s not E.M. Forster but it’s the best I can do. At least read the bloody thing before tellingthe worldit’s killing innocent electrons.

In the stuff I do to pay the mortgage, no one behaves like this. We’ll have disagreements, conflicts and discussions on what good looks like. But in 30 years of actual paid work, no one has ever said ‘read the first line, shit, so that’s what you must be‘

I shouldn’t be so sensitive. Because I’m really not. People I’ve never met complaining my metaphorical constructs are too difficult to understand should make me feel quite a bit superior. But it doesn’t, I still feel the urge to explain why and – this is the heart of it – they are just wrong.

Many years ago the lessonof ‘every crowd is full of critics and there’s nothing you can do about that‘ was hard learned long before it was well understood. The stuff you write is part of you, sostrangers poking it with a stick does hurt a bit. It shouldn’t but it does and this is why – even if I had more than a modicum of talent – I could never try and make real money out of it.

I appreciate this is a self referential polemic on why life isn’t fair, and how the big boys keep picking on me. That’s the joy of self publishing. And if you don’t agree, I’ll just delete your comment. Self esteem doesn’thave much truck with democracy.

* except my mum. Who worries about my mental state, while at the same time expressing her disappointment that her 47 year old son still feels the urge to use the word ‘fuck‘ quite so often.

** and this wasn’t the case ‘back in the day‘. Getting your name in print and the odd random tyre turning up for review was more than enough for the crud, sweat and fears of lobbing semi literate stuff into the 4th estate.

*** It’s always blokes. Right and Wrong. Black and White. Shades of grey are for those who don’t understand the world. Pub Bores on the internet.

This blog stumbled, embarrassed, into the light from the darkness of my commuting angst. A working week sliced and diced by a thousand weary cuts splitting my happy home life from a somewhat less joyous vocational experience. Being alarm-turfed from bed at 6am/slice. Digging out the least stinky riding kit/slice. Suffering frostbite and trenchfoot six+ months of the year/slice. Pedalling the same old ground day after day/slice. Useless trains that were always packed/Slice. Rain bashing the window I’d soon be outside of/Slice. Grotty work changing rooms/Slice. Is the shower working anxiety/Slice. Repeat with no prospect of escape.

But these were mere nics and burrs when transposed against the ‘hack my head off with a blunt cleaver, it’d be a mercy‘ of doing this every day in what some people* proudly label as ‘the best city in the world‘. One could take a narrow view that this may well be true if your hobbies include killing cyclists, mainlining endless fuckwittery, pushing, shouting and shoving. Not for me though. Not even close.

There were odd days when the gladiatorial contest of staying alive ended with the Christians besting the Lions, but mainly it was a drudge full of danger and dirt under a cityscape of dazzling modern brashness silhouetting a thousand years of fascinating history. I’ve always maintained London can best be described as ten million idiots wrapped around a stunningly interesting core. As a ghost-town it’s hard to hate, but peopled with Londoners it was impossible for me to love.**

Five years ago I waved it goodbye with a pair of fingers and have missed it hardly at all. Occasional sallies into its mean streets and fetid tunnels reinforcedmy old prejudices, and the first train out cannot run soon enough. Although not quite- hidden in the boonies you vaguely remember that by scratching beyond London’s grimy surface, there’s all sorts of mouth-open-wide amazement for those of us who find crop identification mildly exhilarating.

That was me then; on a sunny winters day blinking my way out of St. James station. First order of the day breakfast, so ignore the main street franchise and instead duck into an alley partially blocked by builders’ vans.Behind which was hidden an authentic London Cafe with a blackboarded menu offering Bacon and Eggs. Tea or Coffee. No credit cards, don’t ask as a punch in the mouth often offends. Run by some cheerful Polish dudes who provided this mildly hungover traveller a pint of tea buttered up to a heart-stopping Bacon Roll for about four quid.

Sated, I had something else to spend; Time. An hour of it to invest under a winter warming sun in a now mostly deserted post-rush hour city. First stop, a circle of the lake in St James Park giggling at those paying thirteen quid for ‘breakfast in the park‘, stepping away smartly from hissing swans and misidentifying the Disney spires and endless crenelations of a shimmering palace.

My bet was the Kremlin, a local suggested the less interesting/more likely Queen’s residence now much photographed by Japanese tourists grouped by tour umbrella. Many of whom were adjusting focal length through the simple medium of stepping back into the traffic. Where amped up taxi drivers attempted to run them down. Gave the cyclists a bit more of a chance I suppose.

And what cyclists! All shapes and sizes, some astride the latest race tuned technology, more wheezing slowly on Halfords specials with knackered everything and brown chains. Even a few intrepid Boris-Bikers weaving unsteadily between rows of gunning cars. I have absolutely no idea how I survived five years of this, it’s absolutely bloody mental and yet somehow survival rates are slightly better than sticking ones head into a melting nuclear reactor. Bonkers.

Refreshed by a second artisan beverage, I was amazed that such a small square of real estate could contain three ministries of state, Scotland Yard, a big bit of the treasury and the headquarters of a dozen major corporations. Squeezed between these corporate behemoths were proud, regency houses blue-plaqued with eighteen century prime ministers and philosophers.

My aimless peramble gave rise to a grudging respect for London. The juxtaposition of stuff older than most nation states mingling with high tech/high rise thrusting corporations. The identikit high streets sharing custom with esoteric cafe’s in winding back alleys. The suited and booted worker ants jostling with finger pointing tourists. Maybe familiarity had bred contempt. Sure, I still would never want to live here, but it’s not entirely terrible either.

And then it was. Buzzing overhead like an irritated mutant wasp was a bright yellow police helicopter festooned with massive lights, camera and – possibly – machine gun action. It swept over the high rise buildings, rotating this way and that clearly searching for bomb-carrying lunatics, escaping bank robbers or any individual not associated with the Masons.

This was amazing and a bit scary. I fully expected black-clad MET Ninja’s to throw out ropes and descend into the mean streets. My expectations were not met as, after a couple more minutes of the orange snout sniffing out trouble, engines whinged, rotors sped and the Helicopter became a fading dot in the sky. But that’s not the terrible thing. No, when I looked around me to see what your average Londoner would make of our little vignette of Patriot Games, there was a real shock waiting.

NOBODY looked. Not even a glance. Just me and the tourists excitedly waving their middle digits. Really? I mean really? What passes for normal around here? Do Transformers have to rampage through the city and rip out buildings before anyone feigns interest? And only then because it’ll just give the bloody tube a reason to be delayed. I wanted to grab the nearest too-cool-for-school sharp suited nutter and demand ‘Am I hallucinating or did some sodding great helicopter just swoop between those buildings?‘

But I didn’t. Because I’m English and it’s this kind of quiet reserve that’s served us so well in Love and War. Sort of. Anyway I couldn’t get away fast enough, and it was only as the train put some distance between me and that massive edifice of insanity could I give it some more thought. And that thought was this – whatever the reason, whatever the prize, whatever they tell you, stay well away from London – it’s stacked full of loonies and aliens.

Honestly I’d rather spend time in Birmingham. And on that bombshell, the defence rests.

* but not people who you’d trust with matches. Boris Johnson for example.

** Whoever said ‘if you win the rat race, it’s important to remember you are still a rat’ made the point somewhat better.

There is a point in your life when one must take a stand. Even if this is from a sitting position. In a league table of misquotation Edmond Burke’s* “The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing” is second only to Marie Antoinette never saying ‘let them eat cake‘. But I like it anyway because it’s justslightlyless pretentious than Voltaire’s “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it“**. Both are which are far less pretentious than pseudo intellectual quote derivation pretending to be clever. Ahem.

I like to think of myself as well balanced – directly resulting from a chip on both shoulders; the first a bonafide working class upbringing terraced between steeply clustered houses each with a coal cellar, and the second a hand-ringing liberalism, mostly a Pavlovian response to the horror of my Dad casting off those credentials and voting Conservative of his own free will.

The fallout has left me with a healthy disrespect for authority, a delusional belief in meritocracy and a worldview mostly baselined by the assumption the world would be a far happier place if 1{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the population didn’t own about 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of it. It’s also given me a passive hatred of those born into entitlement who fail ever test I’d ever set; Cost versus Value, Altruism versus Self-interest, Friends versus Possessions. And yet there’s a little bit of me than envies a life kickstarted by a silver spoon projecting young Henry/Henrietta into the cultural stratosphere without ever passing any test that wasn’t audaciously skewed in their favour.

The physical manifestation of this unjust hegemony tends to drive me to deeds beyond any normal bravery and quite some way further outside of decorum and good manners. I feel a representative example would be instructive. Travelling to London on Birmingham’s finest express service sandwiched me between two estate agents, and a multiple of that from the legal profession. When I am elected world dictator there shall be no draconian policies regarding trains or mobile communication except when the two intersect. At which point, the scorpion pits awaits.

Some of this is my fault. Okay, let’s get it out there, all of this was my fault as a middle-aged inventory malfunction had me awash with a thousand songs but no way to play them to myself. This English reserve not to bother my fellow man was clearly unfelt by my carriage companions. The brillcream boys behind me were trilling their latest deal at high volume to an audience who were clearly as uninterested as I. An assertion validated by the short call duration and a desperate ‘who shall we tell next?’

But for all their shallow look-at-me fuckwittery, they barely register on the ‘I am going to kill you now‘ meter which the lawyer-clan boosted beyond ten, beyond a Spinal Tap 11 and off the fucking scale. My upper-class-arsehole bingo was already mostly populated with ‘braying voice‘, ‘pain barrier volume‘, ‘snorting laugh‘ and ‘pompous self satisfied smugness‘ crayoned in at about a thousand PSI. First tosspot#1 led out with his hackyned ‘How I saved Roy Keane from Bankcrupcy‘ story before he was trumped by dickhead#2 giving it the big one about some ‘a-list celebrity‘ who’d retained his tosspotness by denying the cheap seats access to what coke-snorting looks like when filmed from a dodgy mobile phone***

And then as my head was one millimetre from smashing into the seat in front, dickweasel#3 launched into a story of his six year old daughter, pausing only to remind the smug collective that his family had been in the vanguard of grammatical correctness for 400 years, who had returned from school excited to tell ‘DaDa‘ – a term of endearment for which murder feels appropriate – that the new teacher was quite nice but *forced laugh, shark smile* failed to ascertain the difference between ‘fewer‘ and ‘Less‘. ‘That’s my girl‘ he triumphed. Poor bloody kid.

Readers, I cracked. Maybe you had to be there. Maybe you had to be me. Maybe this stuff isn’t important and it’s absolutely okay to acquiesce to a race where money and power means you get a head start. Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, I shovelled work papers into my rucksack, stood up and made that stand. Venturing out into the corridor, two steps had me level with the table of cleverly amused laughter at the lower races. I stared them down and met their silence with ‘If you used fewer words, you’d be a lot less fucking annoying‘.

The silence extended awkwardly so I filled it with ‘you know, if you were so bloody important, surely you shouldn’t be sharing the carriage with the standard classproletarians‘. I probably could have done quite a whole lot better had more thought been given to my repartee. As it was, the unnatural quietness passed beyond anything I felt comfortable with, so I haughtily headed off to a seat not peopled by those who paint a grand vision but see nobody in it.

That seat was part of a four filled with the crumple suited ordinary Joe’s who pretended to be centered in an informational tornado aggregated on their phones, but were really just playing candy crush. My kind of people.

Come journey’s end, weary bodies levered themselves from uncomfortable seats to try again with public transport on our capitals finest mass transit underground system. I failed to move because the white heat of righteousness was still burning strongly. Let those who believe the class system holds strong cross me now and offer rebuttal, insult or possible court papers for slander.

They passed alright, but failed to reward my bravery with even a glance. Not because I had bested them, but because I was beneath their contempt. I still felt this was about a draw though – the industrious and clever will one day oust the privileged and inbred. That I lived in a country where what you did was more important than where you started. And the currency of experience has infinite value whereas that of exchange is merely transitory.

So then I walked into a bar, wall-to-wall filled with normal looking people happy to pay£5.50 for a pint of beer. At which point, it cost me quite a lot of money to forget that you must deal with the world as it is, not the way you want it to be.

* or possibly someone else. Or different words. This is what viral looked like in the 18th century.

** He didn’t say it. I’m trying to make a point here. If you can work out what it is, please let me know.

*** Which had me despairing about the shit we think is important. Followed closely by the thought I probably need to get out more.

Reminds me of a vaguely amusing anecdote. An author was being all a bit luvvie and woe-is-me on writing her new book so announcing ‘well I’ve had to move to Cannes to try and get this book finished, it’s been three months now‘ which was superbly riposted by ‘Yes, it takes me a while to read a book as well‘

I’ve been talking about writing a book for multiple decades now. Ideas are not short but actual chapters are. On earlier efforts, the only comment is to congratulate my pretentious younger self on password protecting the terribly self indulgent pap, so thereby saving innocent browsers from extended therapy. Even as a man with dignity long stripped by endless pratfalls, there’s nothing here I’m prepared to share other than the THIRD sentence which included the ohgod-please-remove-my-spleen-with-a-blunt-spoon phrase ‘my world was ill tuned to the discordant harmony of others‘.

And I’ve never touched hard drugs. Really, there’s no excuse.

Then there was a rather slick plot device which I felt very clever about right up until the point of someone far more capable actually turning into a proper book, and making a shitload of cash. Pass the matches, might as well create a bit of warmth in the funeral pyre of that idea.

Clearly actually creating something other than a few lines and a vague direction of travel was not going to make a book make. So instead I looked at a million* words on this blog chronologically sequenced from 2006 and honestly believed there might be 100,000 which’d make people laugh. And more to the point, pay. This was not so much an idea more of a total rip off from my mate Dave Barter who had successfully e-published something similar albeit it with proper grammar and better jokes.

Desultory would be the honest way to describe my efforts to mirror Dave’s success. I wrote a great intro, chopped a million words by a thousand and sweated over linking paragraphs. But while the stuff made me smile, it wasn’t a book about cycling. It wasn’t a book at all if we’re being honest. I do think a few people would have bought it** but it failed to actually answer a rather more simple question.

Not is it going to make me any money, but is it the book I wanted to write? Ah well. Here’s the thing. It’s easy to take stuff you know that makes the odd person laugh and throw it out there apologetically. Live off a few favourable reviews and worry not the elephant is still in the room. And sat squatting over fading manuscripts all terribly worthy and failing to answer the question that does really quite matter to me. Can I write something for an audience other than a bunch of bike geeks who will buy MBUK so clearly are right in the slot for the shit I produce. Courage of convictions and all that.

Comfort zone is now a bed of nails. Stop being narrow and try being wide. if it’s not about making money – which it absolutely isn’t, however self obsessed I am even I can see this isn’t a career change, it’s an indulgencey – so don’t bloody well die wondering. I have these conversations with myself all the time. Mainly because – quite rightly – no one else gives even the tiniest micro-gramme of a shit. But suddenly it’s important because a spark lit some paper talk and I lost hours writing stuff that made me laugh and made me realise there’s a whole book there desperate to get out.

For the first time in many, many months I started writing stuff because I wanted to, not because the blog felt lonely. It could still be total shit of course. But it’s going to get done. And done in less than twenty years. Mainly because each spare minute is spent desperately tapping to capture the giggling insanity of what passes for real life. I am blessed by intersections of awesome comedic merit almost every single day. Once you tap into into the reach narrative seam, this stuff writes itself. In my head anyway.

I’ll be asking for a few kind souls to gently remind me that not everyone sees the world as I do. Especially when it comes to apostrophe’s. But before anyone assumes proofreading duties, I can at least share the title: “Shooting Horses“. Which is at least the one laugh out loud idea in the book. I stole it from somewhat at work. Some things never change.

*really. there is. Thank God for the Internet. Not a single tree died in the making of this production. I may have lost a liver tho.

** because i have pictures of them doing stuff with goats that really isn’t appropriate for polite society.