Life is Healthy

As a writer (a statement which, eight years on, still feels weird to make) I have a lot of notebooks. People often buy them for me, perhaps in the same way that if all I know about a cousin-in-law is that he likes motorbikes, then he is guaranteed to always get motorbike-related things up to the value of £10 for Christmas. Also I once even bought a notebook for myself, so I've probably got six or seven now.

But despite owning all these notebooks, I don't use them to write down every half-formed idea that I have, because I often don't think that the poor half-formed idea is good enough for the pristine white pages. This is pretty silly, as lots of seemingly rubbish half-formed ideas I've had have gone on to become a bit less rubbish when fully-formed. Of course, many more have turned out to be a lot more rubbish, but it's hard to tell at the initial stage. The best strategy is surely to keep the creative floodgates as open as possible, and quality control can easily come later - like John West's salmon, it's the ones you throw away that make the ones you keep the best. (Note to self: check I'm not mixing him up with Fred West.)

Who knows what gems my subconscious has come up with that I have rejected because I don't think they're good enough to be recorded in a notebook which only I will ever read? It's not like I'm trying to save paper as I already have enough notebooks to keep me going for several more years even if I write down every single thought that I ever have (note to cousins-in-law: I also like Lindt Chilli Chocolate, Leffe Blonde beer and Viz). I am, however, happy enough to jot things down on backs of envelopes, which then inevitably get lost or thrown away, so I may as well not have written them down at all.

I reckon I'm not the only person who thinks like this, so my idea is to make and sell notebooks where all the pages are pre-printed to look like the backs of envelopes. That way I'd be more likely to jot down more half-formed ideas and hopefully keep this rather odd career going for another eight years. To corner the green market, the pages could actually just be old envelopes bound together - a great business opportunity as the raw materials are delivered straight to my door every day. The business is even scalable - every time I got a big new order from Ryman I would just need to tick a few more "Please send me offers from carefully selected third parties" boxes.

But I'm a bit busy.

I have a good friend called Simon, who moved back to Australia in 2002. He has a very distinctive square-ish shaped face, a thick dark crew cut with a precisely demarcated hairline, and rectangular glasses. Soon after he’d left, something strange started happening: I kept seeing people who looked like him. London seemed to be full of Caucasian men in their early 30s with distinctive square-ish shaped faces, thick dark crew cuts with precisely demarcated hairlines and rectangular glasses. It was like he’d died, and my poor bereaved brain kept seeing him everywhere. It was amazing how many people looked like him – even my girlfriend agreed when we saw one of them when we were out together, so I am not mental or anything. There is a possibility that I was just seeing the same man over and over again, who was probably getting quite annoyed with me staring at him and nearly saying “Simon, what are you... oh” every time I saw him, but I was pretty sure that Simon had multiple doppelgangers, perhaps all over the world.

So my idea was to set up a website called DoILookLikeSimonOrNot.com, along the same lines as AmIHotOrNot etc, where people (preferably Caucasian men in their early 30s with distinctive square-ish shaped faces, thick dark crew cuts with precisely demarcated hairlines and rectangular glasses) would send in photos of themselves, and other people would judge, against a pre-loaded photo of Simon, how much they looked liked Simon. Then, when I had enough ranked photos I would make Simon a big framed picture, with his photo in the middle, then the eight people who looked most like him arranged around him, then the next 16 people who looked most like him arranged around that in a 5x5 square.

But I’m a bit busy.

The stones on Brighton beach are predominantly of three colours – red, white and blue. What I want to do is to separate out whole skipfuls of the white stones, then at the lowest spring tide to dig a trench perpendicular to the sea, all the way from the lowest wave ebb up to the road, and then fill it up with all the white stones.

On a continuation of this line, a camera would be mounted high up on a building looking out to sea over the beach. Then I would take a long time-lapse series of photos over many days, charting the increasing entropy of the stones as the combination of wave action and people walking on them mixed them all back up again until all traces of the white line were gone.

This film would then be called White Line, and it would represent our powerlessness to control nature and impose order on the world.

But I’m a bit busy.