A few words on the subject
A few words on the subject
A few words on
August 2010
A few words on August 2009
A few words on September 2009
A few words on October 2009
A few words on November 2009
A few words on December 2009
A few words on January 2010
A few words on February 2010
A few words on March 2010
A few words on April 2010
A few words on May 2010
A few words on June 2010
A few words on tweets and tabloids
1st Aug 2010
A few words on July 2010
Good morning everybody
And a wonderful Sunday afternoon to you. It’s a little grey here in SW9 at 1.30pm as I bash this out but that should lift soon.

Quick and heartfelt thanks to all of you who sent congrats and good wishes about last weeks CWA Gold Dagger announcement. I have been posting self-promontory YouTube Clips up which have been forwarded about the globe willy-nilly. If you’ve managed to miss them then:

a. Bookshop staff click here
b. Every one else who wants to spend 4 mins seeing me in a grey Homburg smoking a toy pipe, click here.

My charming PR gal Stina Smemo has been working away like a working-awayer getting me flagged up where possible and trying to raise my profile, which has seen me Tweeting for the first time. Blimey, it’s tricky to say something interesting in 140 characters. For those who are tweet-fans, you can follow my particular brand of childish crappery here: RICHARD ASPLIN TWITTER
I’ve written an entertaining piece about Comic Crime for the Guardian Online which they said they’d try and get up for this weekend…and haven’t. So if that don’t appear, I’ll publish it here, so it hasn’t been 4 hours wasted trying to come up with illiterations like hilarious heists/comedy capers/roarcous robberies/amusing arson / chucklesome child abuse.

Nice.   

The announcement of the finalists comes Monday week, which gives me - by my reckoning - about 7 days more to hog the light of limes before I am discarded like an X-factor reject. Look forward to a moody adolescent pouting booo-not-fair grumpy post on the 10th.

But enough shameless self-promotion. Back to today.

As you can see, I’ve slept late after staying up to watch Insomnia (god the irony). I’ve made a pot of coffee - oooh like a grown up on a Halifax Cashcard advert (that’s why I’m easily like Sunday mor-or-nairnnnn) - and am toying with a walk to get the Sunday paper.
I don’t know why. 

I see settling in with the Sunday papers, like a pot of proper coffee instead of a dry spoon of Kenco - as one of those grown-up things. Something you wouldn’t dream of doing as an adolescent. Something that, if you tried to do 1 year before your friends, you’d get an “oooooh, get you Mr GrownUp” and you’d then have to endure a pint’s length of digs about slippers, pipes and pension schemes. As those who grew up with me know, I was always a sucker for a deliberate pose -  a touch of the young fogey - and even now, at 37 years of age, I still get the same feeling when I’m in the newsagent. Confidently expecting the be-turbaned chappie behind the counter to smirk and say “aren’t you a big boy then?” before pointing me in the direction of The Beano and a Sherbet Dip Dab.

Anyway, I thought I’d present A guide to the weekend papers to help those - like me - who find them a daunting millstone of responsibility.

1. Go to the newsagent.

2. Pass the rack slowly, reading all the bold headlines on all the tabloids about Jordan. Cheryl Cole, X Factor Judges, Premier League Football rapists and missing children.  

3. Be slightly dizzied and taken aback by the image on the front of The Sport, which will be a woman in her underwear, on all fours, with her thonged bottom shoved up in the lens and a headline about something being done “5 times a night.” (If it’s about Peter Stringfellow, then at his age, I’m guessing it’s “get up for a piss.”)

4. Pluck a broadsheet out, pay and trudge home.

5. Stick the kettle on.

6. Unwrap paper from cellophane and allow to slither with a thud onto dining table.

7. Fish out adverts from Boden and Dell and put aside into a “recycle” pile.

8. Fish out appeals from Oxfam and Amnesty International - pause for half a second for a guilty twinge - especially if they say something like “MOST SELFISH BASTARDS WILL IGNORE THIS LEAFLET” and then add them hurriedly to the recycle pile, under the Dell catalogue.

9. Slide out the main magazine and see if the cover story is someone you’ve heard of.
9.a If it is, then slip it to the bottom so you can read it first before husbands/wives/partners/flatmates/slope in
with drooly bed hair and nick it.
9 b. If it isn’t, quickly scan the other smaller type on the cover looking for names of interest (popular searches
include Stephen Fry; Charlie Brooker; Mitchell and/or Webb; anyone who was a comedian in the 1980s;
Armando Ianucci; Chris Morris; Jo Brand; anyone with a radio show on BBC6; Joe Queenan or any Ex-Python).

10. Start to pull apart the rest of the paper, separating sections into News, Review, Home, Travel, Family, Sport, Money, Work, Kids etc.

11. These days, you can also expect to find flimsy extracts of other newspapers. New York Times, Le Monde, London
Review Of Books, etc. Recycle pile for those fellahs.

12. Stack the remaining neatly and go and flick the kettle back on.

13. Feel a bit guilty about boiling it twice and promise yourself you’ll listen out for the click this time.

14. Set aside the main “news” section - obviously you’ll read that. Even though it’s a fucking Sunday so you can be sure absolutely NOTHING new will have happened since you read the paper on Saturday. But it’s news, so best to keep abreast, y’know.

15. Set aside the Review section. Best to find out what’s going on, an’ that. Plus if you have any kind of media-ery sort of job then you’ll want to see if your firm gets a mention/review/scathing drubbing down from Robert McCrum.

16. Sport section, if you’re smart, will go straight onto the pile with the Dell catalogues and the plea for £2 a month to help the NSPCC put a full-stop to bad parenting. Which, while sex is fun and free and contraception is a pain in the ass, they’re never going to fucking do, for Chrissakes. If you’re a sports fan, then you’ll want to set this aside to read - I dunno - scores or something? Jesus who gives a fuck.

17. Travel can be recycled. Unless you wish to spend the afternoon reading about exotic private islands you can’t afford to go to and about how some twit-munch of a publishing popsy has rediscovered the retro joys of caravanning. Which, being lovely people, you won’t.

18 All other sections - Work, Money, Family, Kids will completely live and die on the fatuousness/fascination of their primary cover headline and illustration.

19. One of these sections will have something that sort of kind of maybe-ish piques your interest so you’ll look at it for an extra second. Then read down the page to see if any other part of that section has anything in it / someone you’ve heard of. It will - but only a little bit - so that, like all other sections - will now live in the no-mans-land between the lounge and the recycling all fucking week until it’s binned next weekend.

20. Go back to the kettle, click it back on and stand watching it and actually this time make a fucking cup of tea.

21. Bring tea back into the lounge, fetching remaining papers.

22. Note: Everything for recycling will now live on the table in a slithery shiny pile and never actually make it to the orange council bag in the kitchen. The most interesting of these (Eg. Boden catalogue, Boots Christmas Gift Ideas) might end up in the toilet when the man of the house grabs it as reading material on the way for a big poo.

23. Sit in the lounge with the paper and listlessly flick and wrestle with ONE, and ONLY ONE of the sections you’ve saved, for about 3 pages. Mainly looking for
a. Cartoons
b. The sorts of stories abut Jordan. Cheryl Cole, X Factor Judges, Premier League Football rapists and missing
children that the tabloids you didn’t buy are full of.  

24. Turn on the telly and fall asleep.

Well that’s my plan for the day anyway. So I’d better get on and do that.

Love to all, as always.

Richard x
A few words on poetry, amazon and the guardian...
7th August 2010
Good whatnot to you all, tremendous people the world over.
How the blazes are you all? Hoping, as always, the year's at the spring and day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in his Heaven and all's right with the world. As Robert Browning was tediously heard to fucking say every damned morning in the office.

Christ what a tedious bloke.

Of course, as it’s Saturday afternoon, the line might be better put:
The year's not too year Christmas yet,
a decent Metro headline is at the morn,
Morning's not for another five minutes (hit the snooze button);
The hill-side's not over-run with killer urban foxes;
The jumbo jet engine is on the wing, rather than badly welded and plummeting to earth;
The snail's not in the back bedroom leaving slimy spermy shine trails all over the carpet
God's still a comfort to the addled masses but not to the point of inspiring suicide bombing
And “all right” is Alan Freeman’s much missed catchphrase.

While we’re being all iambic and pentametery and flowery and whatnot, here‘s summink you might not know about the above poem, which I learned oh so recently. (That is to say, about 4 minutes ago when I googled it).

Towards the end of the poem there is a rather - shall we say - foul bit of imagery. So odd and, frankly, unpleasant, is this line of the poem, the editors of the OED actually approached Browning and asked him what on earth it meant.

(I’m not making this up).

Browning apparently pointed out he’d got the word from 17th Century rhyme. The rhyme goes: “They talk’ of his having a Cardinall’s Hat/They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat."

Not being a reader of Viz or a schoolboy in the 1970s, Browning assumed the old nun’s…ahem - thingy - was part of her habit. Like her wimple or some such. As apposed to being…exactly what you think it is. (Slang in 1660 was pretty much the same as it is now). Which is why Browning’s poem ends, rather surprisingly, like this:
“But at night, brother Howlet, far over the woods,
Toll the world to thy chantry;
Sing to the bats’ sleek sisterhoods
Full complines with gallantry:
Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!”

Hmn. Cowls and twats. Lovely.

Anyhap, English lesson aside, that‘s that. Hoping your cowls are on the thorn and your twats are dew-pearled.

Nice.

It’s been one of the most bizarre weeks of my life this week, as you might imagine. Far far too many things are going on in the life of your author and my head is a crowded, crushing, southbound peak-hours Northern Line train of plans and thoughts. Smart fellows tell me that listing one’s woes is a good way to get them a-sorted out. So here we go. (Only 4, won’t take long):

1. CWA Gold Dagger Awards
Yeahhhh, this one has sort of taken over my every waking moment. As you can’t of possibly avoided due to my incessant self-promotion, you will know that “CONMAN”s nomination for the CWA Gold Dagger lasts for exactly 2 weeks. Come Monday 9th, the fine panel of judges will whittle down the list of 8 to a more manageable, marketable and respectable list of 4. So essentially, any hoo-ha or trumpeting of CONMAN only lasts until Monday when - inevitably - I’ll drop off the list, leaving room for “proper” crime writers and I’ll be forever known as someone who didn’t quite make it. As a consequence I have been slowly counting down the days (I make it we have about 43 hours left) and pacing and worrying about what the hell I should be doing while the sun shines.

I’ve tried making hay. It’s tiring to do in a 1 bed flat in Oval.

2. The Guardian
As I mentioned last week, my ever capable PR gal Stina did manage to get me a slot writing for The Guardian’s online book blog. Which I did, and they were lovely enough to post up on Tuesday last. An unnerving experience, frankly. You get all excited to see it there. Then you read it to check they haven’t edited beyond recognition. And then you spend the rest of the day

a. frantically emailing the links to everyone you ever ever ever met. Cue dozens of phone inbox mail responses like “blimey, hello! Long time no hear! How are you! What a surprise! Thanks for the link! Well done!” All  very kind, even though they should probably have read: “Oh it’s you. Back pestering me to big yourself up. Idiot.”

b. Clicking back onto the page over and over and over to see what comments the grating British public have left. 47 charming folk / addled twerps were bored / kind enough to leave comments about the article, ranging from the supportive: “good luck with your dagger nomination”; to the blinkered: “Mr. Asplin, go away immediately and read 'The Sacred Art of Stealing' by Christopher Brookmyre, and don't come back until you have.”; to the, uhm, grammatical: “'Frankly' is one of those words which, frankly, is superfluous and should, frankly, not be used at all, let alone twice in a - let's be frank here - short article.”

To which I frankly say, predictably, oh fuck off. Frankly.

3. Twitter
Stina suggested I attempt to get myself out into the world using “Twitter” which is something I dabbled with once, couldn’t really see the point of, and have ignored until this week. But like a good boy, I went on and began to tweet away like a twerp, add friends, follow people, read their comments and generally splash about in the shallow end of cyber-commentary.
Blimey, what a world. I never knew it was so… what’s the word…haphazard.
There appear to be 5 types of tweets.
1. Tedious minutae. “Making tea. Yumm! Biscuits.” Don’t know what these are for.

2. Links. “Weird news story about something here: http://bit.ly.somebollocksorother.” Who follows these?

3. Look at me, look at me! Type stuff. “come to my party, visit my link, read my blog, watch my video.” Pretty much what I’ve lowered myself to.

4. Bitching. “Lindsay Lohan may escape jail, but she can - and I think we can all enjoy the suffering involved - never escape being Lindsay fuckin Lohan.” Mean.

5. Jokes. “Tough job. Am trying to think of an advertising tag line for "Karate Kid" branded ear cleaning cotton buds. Nothing springing to mind.”

To be fair, the last 2 were mine, so…ahem, y’know, you can see how tough it is. In order to get my “hits” up, I have taken to reading the list of most popular subjects on the right hand side of the screen and commenting on those 10 subjects in 140 characters. Easy enough to do if they’re, say, Lisa Simpson:
A 22 year old in a 6 year old girl's body. And there's nothing wrong with that. (My 22 yr old cousin Frank says). (From jail)

Absolutely impossible if they’re comments about football signings.

4. Amazon
Yes, I’ve become one of those people. (Become? Yeah right. Ed.) Since the award announcement there has been a smattering of renewed interest in CONMAN. Which has meant, rather excitingly, it’s been a-slowly creeping up the amazon.co.uk charts. So I have now become the sort of utter git face who logs on to amazon to see my numbers rise and gets all giddy every time I jump a place. A revolting habit that peaked on Thursday when I edged into the number #2 Amazon humour spot, between The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (eat my dust, Adams! [deceased]) and something called “Jam & Jeopardy” by Doris Davidson. So there was a low-formatted screen-print that hit the inboxes of the undeserving. (As I type, I have dropped to #62. Arse).

On top of this, I am trying to move house in Cardiff with the no-help-at-all from dimwitted solicitors and naïve buyers. So that’s maddening. And I’m waiting to hear if I have an interview for my new manager job (anxiety, anxiety. I lie awake trying to think of smart answers to tedious competency based questions. Do I have an example of I time I was in charge of a team and relied on a colleague and was let down, and what would I have done differently? Sigh.)

Plus a party last night (still tired, despite getting up at 11.30am and having a 2 hour nap), another party tonight (boozy martini themed housewarming) and have kindly been invited out tomorrow to the home of the owner of Hot Stuff - the finest curry house in South London - for a family barbeque. And on Monday I start 12 8-hour days of sales training with a new bunch of Sony staff. Jeez, I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

Anyhow, enuff about me. A shout out to my elder brother Paul who saw his name in print in Private Eye this week with a letter they printed. Nice work. And now, a bus and too-many-espresso-martinis are a-callin’. So I’ll see you soon.

Love to all, as ever,
Rx

A few words on greetings, dinosaurs, awards, houses, mistletoe and brick walls
18th August 2010
Well wotcha.
That, if I recall, was the standard greeting when I was a little boy. In fact, I’ll go further. A full “wotcha” would seem quite tweedy and upperclass and all together rather too Audrey Forbes-Hamilton. In order to demonstrate street coolness - vital when you’re 10 years old - it was de rigeur to drop the “wot” and replace this with a nonchalant small, chin-up nod, as if one was loosening one’s neck against a tight collar. This uber trendy move was then combined with the shorter and more street-wise “’cha”.
Now I think about it, which I haven’t done for about 27 years, “wotcha” must be an abbreviation of “what-are-ya”, which in turn is a shortened version of “what are you doing?”
Which means, rather bizarrely, that “cha” (plus chin-up manouvre) essentially was a ten year old boy greeting another ten year old boy (always a boy, one didn’t risk humiliation by greeting a “girl”. Urgh) by saying “are ya?”
Drivel, of course. But then we were the generation who were entranced by Return Of the Jedi, so that says everything you need to know by now.

Anyhoo, “wotcha.” How the devil are you all? Hoping you’re both terrific and splendid. I have quite a mixed bag of readers and statistically it’s quite likely one or more of you are 31 years old. Perhaps you are? Were you born on or about 1979? The year Pink Floyd rather strangely had a Christmas UK Number One hit with “Another Brick In The Wall Pt 2.” What a curiously not-very-seasonal number 1 hit that was.
Which now, sat here with red wine in ma glass, a camel in the ashtray and Bach Cello suites on the JVC, makes me wonder when Christmas no.1 hits stopped being generic pop songs and started being…well…chrismassy? There have been, by my reckoning, 30 Xmas number ones since Pink Floyd. At the end of this blog, I will tell you how many have been in no way Christmas/seasonally themed. Before then, take a guess.
Go on, guess. Out of the last 30? How many had cock-all to do with Christmas?
Got a number?
Good. I’ll tell you in a minute.

The reason I mention the 31-years-old-ness, is a frightful survey I read in some piece of shit newspaper said that 31 was the age at which most people (by “most people” it obviously means most twits who can be bothered to fill in fatuous surveys) feel at their most attractive at the age of 31. Something to do with confidence. So what about you? Feeling good about y’self? Men of course have to comfort themselves that they are rapidly escaping their sexual peak, which came at the precious and utterly useless (for me at least) age of 17. Got that guys? Everyday you wake up after your 18th birthday you are less sexually vigorous than you were the day before. What a thought.
Women luckily can blossom and combine their confidence, income and independence with their 30-something sexual peak. Jammy bastards. Plus they get the vote. Jeez Louise.

So what else has been troubling me?
Well as you won’t have failed not to stop un-caring about, I sadly missed the final 4 of the CWA Gold Dagger Awards for “CONMAN.” Boo. I had told myself, of course, that it didn’t matter one whit if I got into the final, that it was a priveledge and a feather in the quiff to have even been nominated. But, me being the contemptible arsewit I am, it didn’t stop me descending into a moody funk when the final list was published, sans Asplin. So I moped about and kicked skirting boards and was unnecessarily grumpy to loved ones, compadres, confreres and colleagues. I apologise for that.
I am, however, rejuvenated a little bit about the whole “comic fiction” thing. Prior to the nom’ there was some question about whether the UK audience had any appetite for “thrillers with jokes” (hence my Guardian blog piece”). To the extent that I got very close to abandoning my new novel. However, a nod from the CWA has given me a bit of an old kick in the plus-fours so any day now I expect myself to sit down with a coffee and a 2002 Sony VAIO and start adding even more jokes to the new book. Not easy to do, being it’s a character based thriller about a psychiatrist, her husband and the psychotic patient who very nearly destroys their lives. But I’m working on it.
Thank you to ALL who sent support and read my tweets and bought the book and were generally lovely during the 2 weeks of hoo-haa. I don’t deserve you.

In other news, I sold my house. Who-hoo.
My then girlfriend and I bought the 3 bedroom semi about 9 years ago down in Cardiff and, after we split ooh way back in whenever-the-hell-it-was, it’s sort of been an unaffordable luxury, what with me living here in old smokey and Helen living alone in South Wales. But after far far far too much fannying about with solicitors and deeds and barrage reports and whathaveyou, last weekend I finally trained it down to Cardiff and we spent a busy, back-breaking, slightly tearful three days packing it up, cleaning it and saying cheerio to the street. A loft’s worth of possessions of mine (blimey I’ve got a lot of Ben Elton hardbacks and Superman figurines) are now in storage until my lovely wife and I decide to move into a bigger place, probably next year. And my arms hurt a lot from excess humping (stop it) so I had to miss my dance class this week. Grrrr.

On the subject of possessions and guy-type ownership, let me ask you this:
How are your movies arranged?
I’m guessing most of you will have some sort of video/DVD/Blu-ray collection on the lounge shelves? Now this might be a very basic collection:
Spider-Man 2
Pretty Woman
Mamma Mia
Blackadder II
Or you might be, like me, more of a collector of assorted crapola and have 300+ discs ranging from The Complete “Cracker” boxed set to Eddie Izzard’s collection, via the little seen “Public Access” (Brian Singer’s first movie) and Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (I know, fuck off, it was part of a set).
Either way, you have them in some kind of order, I expect. Alphabetical, chronological, genre, director. Hell, I once knew a chap who filed them under the distributing studio, which meant to find a flick you had to know if it was Universal, 20th Century Fox, Mirimax or Columbia etc. Jeez.
Looked neat on the shelf, mind, with all the matching logos on the spines.

Sorry, geeked out there a bit.

Anyhoo, in order to help myself and my wife choose a movie of a Saturday night (being in our mid/late 30s, that’s what a rock n roll fun night for us is), I compiled a list of the movies on 4 sheets of stapled A4. Now originally they were listed in alphabetical order, from Affliction to Zelig.
But the trouble with this is, you have to wade through the whole fucking list to choose something.
So being a thoughtful bloke, and a dab hand with an Excel spreadsheet and a printer, I arranged the movies in genre. So, if one fancies, say, a thriller, one turns to the “thriller” section and there ALL the thrillers are listed alphabetically. Perfect, right? Stops one having to wade through a load of Disney animation if one is looking for a bit of Hitchcock.
Right, got it?
So here’s the rub.
My wife was examining this list oh so recently - looking in the family adventure section - when she piped up, in that adorable way of hers, “why don’t you have Jurassic Park 2?”
What she had done, y’see, was made her way down the list and found Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park 3 listed next to each other.
Now being a maddening bastard, I took perverse pleasure in pointing out the following:
“Of course I have Jurassic Park 2. It does, after all, have dinosaurs and Jeff Goldblum in it, which as you know dearest one, is pretty much everything I desire from a motion picture. You will find it on the list, alphabetically, under L.”
She then scanned the list and, lo and behold, found it under L as “The Lost World - Jurassic Park” which was it’s cinema release title.
It was then pointed out that this was a ridiculous way to list it, and it would make more sense to have it listed betwixt JP and JP3 as Jurassic Park 2. Or at an anal push (mmm, lovely image) as “Jurassic Park 2 - The Lost World.”

To this, it was my turn to sigh and roll an eye in her direction. Why the goddamn hell would I do that? The movie was called “The Lost World - Jurassic Park” and therefore, ease of location aside, it belongs under L.
So where do you stand on this, dear reader?
If it was your list, would you put Raiders Of The Lost Ark on the list under “I” so it sat next to Indianas “Temple of Doom”, “Last Crusade” and “Kingdom of the stupid crystal skull thing”? Or would you, like me, file it separately at the other end of the list under “R” where it FUCKING BELONGS?
Exactly. You’d put it under R.
Wouldn’t you?
Hmn?
Oh.
Oh right, suit yourself. Twerp.

And before you say it, all the Star Wars movies are under “S”. Eg. “Star Wars Episode 3 - Revenge Of The Sith.” Which are their official titles. (Well, I say “all.” Obviously I don’t own the atrocious first 2 episodes. Not enough Ewoks).

Well I’ve kept you long enough. You are interesting, colourful, charming and delightful people and have better things to be doing with your time. “So I’ll let you go.”
(A very useful phrase to use to get someone off the phone, by the way. Sounds like you‘re doing them a favour).
But not before I tell you the answer to my conundrum.
Xmas number ones. Out of the 30 since Pink Floyd in 1979, how many have had no seasonal relevance?
Any ideas?

Well, the answer lovelies is 23. Blimey. You’d have thought they all been “Don’t they know it’s Merry Christmas Everyone kissing Santa Clause and Wine.” But apparently not.
There ya go. A dull fact to bore people with.

Take it easy munchkins
Rx