Displacement

[ladyofastolat]

I have a day off today, in lieu of Saturday 25th. While it's nice to have an unscheduled headstart on my next week's leave, I expect it won't seem quite so fun in two weeks' time, when I have to work a 6 day week. I had left Friday 24th free of storytimes, so I could have that day off, but the realised that I'd scheduled my Cowes and East Cowes storytimes for today, which wasn't at all clever, due to Cowes Week. (Most Cowes residents wisely run as far away from Cowes as they can during this week.) So those storytimes had to move to the 24th instead, and there went my planned day off.

Although I'm still in the first flush of New Fandom creativity, I'm currently having a bout of old-fashioned first-line-related procrastination. I'm all ready to start on a long story that I'm really looking forward to writing, but to do that, I actually need to open up a blank document, and type the first line. I find first lines really really hard. It takes me about as long to write the rest of a five page scene as it does to write the first line of it. I keep telling myself that it doesn't matter - all I need to do is write something, and I can change it later - but that makes no difference. It's not just the exact wording of the line, it's the tone, the outlook, the starting point, the mood etc.

So, in the interests of procrastination... Two things that caught my attention in the local paper today:

Apparently some people were injured when taking a boat out while drunk. However, the police don't actually say they were drunk in charge of a boat. Instead, "It was believed they had been "using the Cowes Week social scene quite heavily" yesterday." I like this as a euphemism for being blue-blind paralytic drunk.

It reminds me of the fascinating things that are my fanfic website statistics. I really love looking at the listing of the search terms people entered in order to find my site. Most of them are totally predictable, but every month throws up half a dozen really strange ones. Last month someone visited my site as a result of searching for "colourful ways to say you're drunk" and this month by searching for "dramatic you're drunk!" I have no idea why on earth a search ending came up with my site as an answer to this search (it doesn't when I do the search). I don't think I've ever written any story in which anyone was drunk, even in an uncolourful fashion. I also have no idea why the searcher, presented with my site in their list of results, actually chose to click on something that's clearly a fanfic site. Odd.

Secondly, from the paper, it seems that there is much controversy over the fact that there are police armed with machine guns patrolling the crowd, supposedly in response to the possibility of terrorist attack. Armed police are just not English, they say, and what can be more English than a regatta? Someone at work was telling me about these policemen yesterday. "They were dressed just like American policemen on the TV," she said. "Are you sure they weren't strippers?" I asked. "Well, I did wonder," she said.

I do wonder how many of the Cowes Week revellers (and potential bad guys) actually think that these macho guardians of our safety and our lives are actually strippers walking amongst us? "Coming soon to a cinema near you: Terror Strippers - the exciting story of a heroic band of strippers who travel the globe fighting terrorists, using their enormous..." *ahem*

And while we're in the mood for displacement: If someone wrote the story of the ballad "Childe Morris" nowadays, everyone would tear it to pieces for the stupid motivations of the characters. Basically the plot is this: Childe Morris is in the greenwood. He hears that Lord Bernard has gone out, so sends a message to Lady Bernard to come and visit him. However, Lord Bernard intercepts the message and disguises himself as his wife, and goes instead. Morris initially thinks this is the lady, then realises that "My lady was never so gross." Then, to the vengeful husband with the long sword, Morris says "I was your wife's bedfellow before ever you were." Rather unsurprisingly, Lord Bernard kills Morris and takes his head back to his wife. "Oh woe!" she cries. "He wasn't my lover! He was my son from the previous chap I had an affair with." "Oh, that's okay, then," says Lord B. "If only you'd told me, then I wouldn't have killed him. Stupid woman. It's all your fault."

Ah, they don't write them like they used to, do they?