mostly david ephgrave

Writing a blog is a bit of an up-down procedure, or to put it differently, a frequent teeter around the edge of a rut. Right now, I’m not so much teetering as standing dead-centre, clawing at the edge with my weak fingers, desperate to pull myself out (like a spider who’d escape his bath prison if he could just get purchase on the enamel). Put simply, I’ve written little of worth for weeks, with no hope of a positive spike in my day-to-day life to give me something good to talk about. This is partly due to with a few family issues that are taking up more time than usual, and partly to do with the fact I frequently don’t start writing until bedtime, when I’m too tired to get down anything coherent; more often than no, I'll struggle to extract a few paragraphs from my subconscious to look them over the next day to find I’ve written a load of shit; I then do my best to edit them to little improvement This is what comes from writing so freq...

If there's one thing a quick flick through my blogs from the last few days reveals it's that I need to stop writing just before bed, as that's when the gibberish bug bites me most often and I end up writing a load of nonsense. It's embarrassing to see the rubbish I've written while attempting to work through my tiredness. I don't know why I insist on doing it as it seldom results in anything good, and it's also not an enjoyable process; if I start writing after a certain point I'll just end up chasing the clock and that's not fun for anyone, be they the reader or the writer.  I find this blog goes through cycles; flitting from being a useful place to vent my frustrations or make positive observations, to just being a weight around my neck. When I was up in Edinburgh, for example, it was surprisingly easy to write every day despite the inevitable monotony of the festival, but since I've been home it's not been fun at all; it's become a...

Day thirty-one in the Ephgrave household and Recycling Mountain has reached crisis point. What was once a non-threatening testament to the gluttony of Christmas is now structurally unsound, with no word as to when the bin men will take it away. Contributing to it is like a cross between dry-stone-walling and an outsized game of Jenga: every piece of packaging that’s added must surely be the last, and yet it never is, as there’s always something else to be slotted into a fortuitous gap or carefully balanced at the summit. It’s daunting to be confronted by how much a two-person, two-budgie and one-cat household can consume in just a week; I don’t know whether to be proud of or depressed by it. On one hand, it feels good to be giving something back to the planet, and yet I can’t help but be reminded of just how much other people will throw away; God forbid anyone should be expected to put in a little effort. It wouldn’t be so bad if I knew whe...

Today was one of those glorious days when you (I) go (went) to the tip. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for ages. For a long time I’ve had a lots of things stored in my outside cupboard that I needed to get rid of, to create space for me to get further into the cupboard so I can sort out more junk and take that to the tip too. Today only saw the first stage of this master plan, but it was still good to make a small dent on the reorganizing of my flat I'd like to do. It was perfect going-to-the-tip weather, being suitably drizzly and overcast. We also weren’t the only people with the same destination on our minds, as the slow-moving queue into the recycling centre was testament to. More the one car in front decided to bail out instead of wait, which seemed silly really, as (1) we weren’t stuck there for very long, and (2) it’s counter-intuitive to load your car up rubbish to have to take it home again; rather them than me. It was ...

Some of the people who live on my estate need to be taught how to use a bin.  (By estate I mean housing development. I don’t own vast tracts of land.) You’re looking at a rubbish disposal classic. It’s quite a talent to both put something in a bin and miss it entirely. Until I’d seen it I would have deemed it impossible. It has the complexity of artwork by Escher. I need some paper and a pencil to work it out. How busy was the culprit that they couldn’t throw it away properly? I bet they thought they had. They probably think it’s someone else’s job to clean up after them. Litterers have a similar mindset. Maybe I’m being unfair. Perhaps their wheelie bin has the properties of a Jack-in-the-box. Either that, or their duvet was extra-bouncy. Actually, no. They're just dicks.