Hammers are great – they’re one of those tools that only adults are allowed to use, yet requires skills no more complex than those of a toddler. Bash, bash, smash. So I’ve had a little hammer time, whacking nails into walls and moving pictures about. And trying not to leave holes everywhere.

The former owners of our house seemingly used our spare room to house Britain’s largest private collection of shelves. Sadly they took them with them when they left, leaving dozens of exposed rawl plugs up and down the walls. I fairly confident that if presented with any size or type of shelf or storage unit I could find a set of correctly spaced holes to screw it soundly and comprehensively to some vertical surface in that room.

I’ve even cleared out the loft, which was still packed full of the cardboard boxes we used when we moved into the house. Going through them all was a bit boring, but crushing and flattening them all for recycling was fun enough. We’d been collecting them as rigorously as the previous tenants had amassed shelves. During the actual process of moving into the house, all this packaging had been undeniably, reassuringly fantastic; each one complete with custom cuts chunks of protective polystyrene moulded to the contours of its contents.

So in the years since we moved in, we’ve continued to save the boxes from new purchases and gifts. However it was only when I went up to the loft this week that I realised that we’d kept one or two of them for significantly longer than we’d kept their original contents. A substantial proportion of the floorspace was being taken up by the box for a television which we no longer owned. One of the whacking-great fat-assed models that ruled the roost before wide-screen. You popped them in the corner, but they still jutted four feet into the centre of your living room. The TV is long gone, having been razed to the ground to make way for a shopping centre. But I’d neglected to eject the receptacle in which it had crept in our direction.

It was probably big enough for me to actually fit my entire body inside it. Although probably not.

Likewise, even in instances where we still had the appliances in question, some of the boxes were hardly worth keeping even if we did decide to move again. It’s debatable how bespokely snug and secure the packaging needs to be on a set of bathroom scales. If they can bear my weight of a morning I hardly think they’re going to need when we pack them up and ship them off to pastures new.

And even if we do want to protect them, that’s what old newspaper and bubblewrap is for. And bubblewrap’s always fun. Although popping it with a hammer tends to feel like overkill.

This is slightly difficult to write about. It’s not difficult to write down, but it’s certainly not a subject that lends itself to enjoyable turns of phrase. Calmness isn’t a state in itself, it’s a lack of something. You only notice that you’re calm when somebody asks you, or when you run through a list of other emotions and recognise that none of them apply: you’re not stressed about work, or coursing with adrenaline from exercise, or worrying about whether or not you can even trust this hypnotist.

There are innumerable songs about euphoria, happiness and appreciation of the little things in life. There are very few songs about how calm the writer feels. How steady their heart rate is. How easy they find it to sleep.

And while it’s at first an enjoyable observation of a weekday evening plopped on the couch in front of the television, I don’t know how long I want this sense of calm to last. Yes my sleep is coming more easily to me, but I’m missing the nights when my brain buzzes with thoughts and ideas. The opposite of calm isn’t necessarily panic. In fact I suspect it’s anything else at all: anything that drives your thoughts or emotions and stimulates your brain for better or for worse.

Yes, I’m getting to sleep quicker, but I’m also missing those moments of lying in bed and allowing my thoughts to fly about my head for a bit – not just processing the day that’s been but anticipating the one that’ll follow it, and the one after that, and all the diverting little projects I could undertake if those days just keep on comin’. Without the burden of having to worry about speech, or balance, or whether I’m supposed to be somewhere, my brains turns completely over to pottering about creatively. But not so much at the moment. Those enjoyable wee thoughts before sleep – those little crackles and snaps that indicate that your creativity isn’t quite ready for bed yet – have been a little thin on the ground.

I’ve recently completed a few big projects that for a time I couldn’t see beyond the end of, and so it’s natural that I might want to mentally take a bit of time off and let my head sit around in its dressing gown for a bit. But it better make the most of it while it lasts, because I’m finding this lack of crackle and snap frustrating. And all this calmness is really starting to piss me off.

I’ve had a tummy before. I’m informed by my better half that when we first met I had quite a pronounced pot belly. Lean everywhere else, but round in the middle as a result of a physical part-time job but too many pints on the days off.

Anyhow, I’d shaken off the quaky bits and was reasonably happy with myself towards the end of 2009. I wasn’t an olympic diver or anything, but I’d slipped down a jeans size, and was fairly confident buying Medium sized tops without trying them on first. So when it came back at Christmas time, I wasn’t too concerned – I figured I could shake it off again fairly easily.

But this one’s apparently not for shifting. As a result, I’ve stepped up my efforts, and am now trying to lessen my snack intake. Meals are fine, but I’m trying to be more aware of the treats that come in between.

All this has done is to leave my hungry in the evenings, just at about the time that all the cookery shows come on. Thankfully Gordon Ramsay doesn’t feature a lot of crisps or choc-ices – his show leaves you wanted to slap a steak under the grill. This still leaves me feeling hungry, but at least the craving is for something less convenient.

I’m also noticing how many non-edible items in our house seem to have been unnecessarily flavoured. Our washing up liquid certainly smells of apples, although I’ve not been tempted to taste it yet. More appetizing is my other half’s dressing table, which I realised the other day includes a cornucopia of fruity treats. Cranberry shimmer lotion. Blackberry hand cream. Strawberry lip balm. I suspect the cocoa butter body lotion isn’t as nice as it sounds, even if spread on a crumpet (There’s incidentally a shade of eyeshadow here called ‘Burnt toast’). But I could still probably make up a decent proportion of my five-a-day just by grazing on make-up.

On a day off, with all this stuff within arms reach, it’s debatable whether I’d even get out of bed – my only exercise being trying to frisbee new box sets into the DVD player.

For thems who’ve never been (and understandably so, It’s not really much of an afternoon out. Huge queues AND the picnic area’s tiny) you drive your car into a slim car park with an entrance at one end, and an exit down t’other. Down one side is a series of vast open topped metal trailers. One is for metal goods, one for small electrical appliances, one for stone and concrete (but NOT plasterboard) and so on.

Televisions have an area of the car park off to the other side. You’re not encouraged to toss them carelessly onto the pile as you are with the items bound for the metal trailers. Spoilsports. Throwing a broken strimmer from a lofty height doesn’t feel anything like as rock ‘n’ roll.

Anyway, I ain’t grumbling about the sorting, I can see the benefit to the recycling process of distinguishing your office chairs from your timber from your televisions. But in having it all laid out seperately in front of you as you add to its volume, rather than a landfill of disparate items, it does make it all look quite appealing.

I’m not treading the old road of saying that I wanted to start retrieving bits and bobs for the living room, sterilising old dog blankets and gaffer taping up the cracks in discarded lava lamps. But all that junk does seem to look a lot more like a resource rather than waste.

The two containers for wood (‘natural’ and ‘man made’) were the best example of this – erratic planks and offcuts of different lengths, strewn criss-crossed in a shallow pile.

There wasn’t even that much of it. But having seen it, I’d bet that the kids of those who worked at the tip must have the greatest tree houses known to man.

That was supposed to be it. A quick jaunt to get rid of some stuff we no longer needed, wanted, or could find use of. What was more telling, was quite how enjoyable I’d found it. Earlier this afternoon – a full 24 hours after the tip trip – while we were both folding sheets or something, I suddenly said to my partner: ‘It was good at the tip yesterday, wasn’t it?’

I really meant it. And rightly so, she laughed at me.

I do say ‘currently’, however, as I recognise that in such a dynamic and ever changing environment like the internet, another young pup will no doubt soon be along to claim the prize as their own.

Now, while it’s tempting to just bask in the enjoyment of this potentially fleeting moment of worldwide fame, I do feel that if someone has come across my site looking for pictures and information about the European Wasp, then it’s probably going to be pretty frustrating for them if all they get is my witless ramblings.

So in an attempt to live up to the great responsibilities that come with the great power of being the number one destination for an admittedly obscure image search, I’ve decided to collect below some information on the mighty European Wasp (Vespula gemanica).

And yes, I recognise that the search was for pictures and not facts, but hopefully it’ll go some way to making you feel like all this wasn’t a wasted journey.

A few fun facts about (European) Wasps:

1. The European Wasp (Vespula gemanica) shares a nest with others in its species, however they do not form a hive mentality with soldier wasps, or drones, like ants and bees do. Instead, each one cohabits with equal status and rank. Like snowflakes, the markings on every wasp are unique, allowing them to recognise one another as individuals.

2. In European Wasps (Vespula gemanica), as in other Hymenoptera, sexes are significantly genetically different. Females have a diploid (2n) number of chromosomes and come about from fertilized eggs. Males, in contrast, have a haploid (n) number of chromosomes and develop from an unfertilized egg.

3. In contrast to larger flying creatures who famously favour the ‘V’ formation – like the Duck (Anas anatidae) or the Goose (Anser anser) – The European Wasp (Vespula agaonidae), has no flight pattern. Instead it zips around wildly, and when leaving the nest it is common for two or more wasps to collide painfully with one another. In the face.

4. The European Wasp (Vespula maculata) is one of the only insects in all of the animal kingdom that deliberately parts its hair. It does this not just to the hair on its head, but also that down the length of its torso (consisting of the metasoma and mesosoma). It is also the only insect to be able to read newsprint.

5. While it doesn’t produce honey like its half brother the bee, (Bombus terrestris), the European Wasp (Vespula Crabro) can make its own paper pulp from trees, a technique it uses in the construction of its nest. If you believe a nest to have been abandoned by the majority of a colony, it can be burned as an attrative and hypnotic lantern, or innocently given to the neighbours’ children to play with.

6. The European Wasp (Vespula Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner) differs from other species of wasp in that it smells of poppies. Of all the other members of the wasp family, the South Latin (Vespula et cetera) and the American Yellow Jacket (Vespula magnus magnusson) are the only others to have any discernable scent. The first smells of sweet potato, the second of wet concrete.

Feel free to use any of this information in your next school report.

Which is a source of much embarrassment. There’s bits and pieces of writing on here that I’m quite chuffed with, but the dedication to regular writing seems to be beyond me. Hell, even the dedication to spell checking is beyond me (is it two ‘r’s and two ‘s’s in ‘embarrassment’? Yes? Maybe?)

The problem I’ve had here is that this blog is essentially about nothing, which was a conscious decision when I began – the point was just to write, and stick it out in public swiftly. I was always rubbish at showing people things I’d created, never accepting that they were finished. And I always feel that things aren’t finished until someone else has read/heard/seen them. So the point of this blog was just to put myself out there without fretting about it too much.

So I did that, and every so often someone online mentions something that I’ve previously written about, and I consider sending them a link to the piece I wrote, because they might like it. But I don’t because I’m aware that I’ve not written anything new since May.

However, I’d rather write well than write often, and I’d ideally not like to write another post about writing itself. So I’m just going to accept that having a blog that hasn’t been updated for a while isn’t the end of the world, as long as what is on there has some value. And I’ll stop for a bit. Until next time.

For when I forget:

1. The big bunch of fobless keys are for the folks’ houses. The ones on the egyptian keyring let you into the back garden and as far as the back loo. Think the one on the bottle opener keyring opened an old office. At the time of writing, dunno for sure though. Best keep it in a drawer somewhere.

2. When going on holiday abroad for a week, packing nine books is overkill. Remembering to bring the keys to the wee padlocks on the suitcases would be time better spent.

3. N.

4. If you need more hoover bags, there’s a repeat order form in the folder that contains all of the instructions for things. That’s right, the folder you never look in. Admittedly, this isn’t something that I’ve so far needed to know, but maybe one day I will need new hoover bags, and I’ll have no idea where to get them. And by then, I’ll probably have forgetten I’ve written myself a note here too. I blame the hoover bags for the whole damn fiasco.

5. The spare speakers are in the cupboard in the decks room. All the wires and things are in there. None of it went up to the attic so don’t waste any time rooting about up there.

6. Philip Seymour Hoffman.

7. you never knew how the pond pump works.

Where previously I might have submitted to my own idle curiosity and tried to test the stamina of a CDR in a microwave, or ridden a BMX bike through a flaming piece of trellis, now I can view such activities on-line, and find out just how a) painful, or more often b) anti-climactic the results would have been.

Consider the blender. Those who have them may also like to turn their thoughts to their garbage disposals.

Bill Bryson once wrote of the unfettered glee that he derived from testing the capabilities of a garbage disposal (‘How to have fun at home’), throwing various household goods and assorted items down it until it conked out, spat back or exploded. Notable entries on his list of past subjects included coffee grounds and chopsticks.

Nowadays, we have willitblend.com, which puts most things through a similarly rigorous process of testing. This of course isn’t much fun and experimenting in your own kitchen, but I still don’t bother trying it myself. It sucks the sense of the unknown out of a reckless act when you know someone’s already done and documented it.

So, I am the safer for it. Rather than spur me on to acts of further foolishness, the internet actively pre-empts my own childish curiosity by offering up examples of people doing far more idiotic things than I could ever conceive of.

At least I like to think so. No doubt one day, without even a shred of premeditation, I’ll surprise even myself.

I’m not sure how to feel about the fact that on reading this story, my initial thoughts were that a) We hadn’t had a decent one of these incidents for a while, and b) Good that the polar bears get a look in on this sort of action. Most folk tend to unimaginatively go for the lion enclosure, so good for this week’s nutter recognising the fearsomely destructive power of the polar bear. If in fact enterting the polar bear pit was indeed an intentionally self-destructive act, as these folk always seem shocked and terrified when the massive bloody predators whose territory they’re invading come and attack them.

I’m not really ashamed that I feel no concern whatsoever for the jumper, as it does strike me that once you’ve jumped into a tiger’s cage, no one on the planet’s going to sympathise with you.

Throw yourself off a bridge, and people’ll pity your wretched circumstances. Toss yourself under a train and people are horrified at the thought of what could have driven you to do it. Leap into the lion’s den, however, and everyone will roll their eyes and call you a bloody idiot forever.

I think maybe because these people never seem like they’re trying to kill themselves. Especially judging by the aforementioned shock they display when Simba turns out to be not so cuddly after all.

Anyway, in conclusion, well done to the lady in question for letting the polar bears have a slice of nutter-attracting action. Idiot.

With the books it’s not so much of an issue – Each one made a solid impression, and it’s fairly clear which ones I’m going to read again.

With CDs however, I’m finding it more difficult, as each one isn’t so much an overall product, but the sum of many individual moments each with their own musical merits. Which is a poncey way of saying ten tracks on an album may be rubbish, but I’ve kept it for that one killer moment that I can’t bring myself to part with.

But lent alone keeping it for maybe 10% of the content, the very idea of keeping all this music on CD is archaic and unnecessary anyway. I could quite easily just copy the individual tracks I like onto my computer and be done with the shiny, space-invading slabs of plastic that currently adorn three walls of the room. But I like them too much.

I like the packaging, the artwork, the booklets, the casing. Plastic, cardboard, foam and paper, individual little moments of design. Love ‘em. Lots of other folk have written gloriously exhaustive and eloquent notes on the subject so I won’t go into it all here, but do check out the sleevage blog if you’re interested in the topic. Or even in fact if you’re not, because sleevage is unquestionably ace.

Anyhow, I’ve never seen the appeal of buying MP3s when you sacrifice all of the additional creativity that’s gone into making the music into a package. There’s no artwork, no notes, and that’s a real shame.

More to the point, it’s the packaging that makes an impression and allows me to find the album when I want to play it.

I long ago gave up ordering my CDs alphabetically – you end up with your Beastie Boys stuck up in the top corner and your Frank Zappa back-crunchingly close to the floor – instead choosing to just slap them in the shelves and allow the ones I’ve listened to most recently to slowly gravitate to the spots closest to the computer and the stereo. There are a few areas where I tend to stick compilations rather than artist albums, and the skinny little singles cases tend to huddle together for warmth, but the only subdividing I’ve consciously done is to group my albums by packaging.

Those in plastic jewel cases are in one rack, those in thin cardboard sleeves are in another and those in more ‘boxy’ cardboard packaging are in another. And this works fine for me.

And yes, I know that if they were MP3s on my hard drive I could just let the computer search for them, but often I can’t remember the name of a song, or the artist, just that it’s probably on that blue compilation CD in the cardboard sleeve that got free with the big issue a few years back, now what the hell was that called? Or that promo disc with the cow on the front, pastic box, red spine I think, maybe black letters, gawd knows what it was called… ah yes, spotted it, lovely.

all of which is to say… that I’m blatantly looking for something to distract me from having a huge clearout of my CD collection. So I’ll stop there and get back to it.