Tom Swifty

Phil: Great excitement! I’ve discovered a new type of pun!

I love a bit of wordplay and have wasted many hours at work over the years punning with colleagues. As I recall, any mention of fish usually resulted in five minutes of amusement. Partly at our sparkling wit but also at the groans of those people who think puns are the lowest form of humour.

Anyway, I was listening to the radio the other day and someone mentioned “Tom Swiftie” puns.

According to Wikipedia, A Tom Swifty (or Tom Swiftie) is a phrase in which a quoted sentence is linked by a pun to the manner in which it is attributed.

For example:

“That’s the last time I’ll stick my arm into a lion’s mouth,” the lion-tamer said off-handedly.

“I need a new pencil sharpener”, said Phil bluntly.

“I wonder if this radium is radioactive?” asked Marie curiously.

“Walk this way,” Tom said stridently.

“The exit is right there,” Candice pointed out.

I could go on, but have found a web page with 400 examples if you need more.

Just look out for those I manage to sneak into Book 2…

Waving a workhorse goodbye

Phil: Last week I said goodbye to a faithful companion. After years of service, it was time to upgrade my computer.

I’ve been putting this off for a long while. The old one worked OK and apart from a hard drive crash, did all I asked of it. I’m not exactly a demanding user, some wordy processing, photo editing and web browsing were all required. The operating system might have dated to the early part of this century, but at least it wasn’t the applaing, unusable Windows 8.

The silicon sands of computer time moved on of course. Gradually I found web browsers weren’t available and when even Firefox said they wouldn’t support Windows Vista any more, then I knew the game was up. To be honest, the camera card reading ports on the front were playing up too and for the work I do, this is serious.

A final nudge was a chunk of cash from work over Christmas arriving in my bank account. Off I strolled to the local computer shop I went to discuss some options. Mostly those that involved them, not me, transferring data between the two machines. Another barrier to upgrades was the anticipated “joy” of moving files and tidying up afterwards. Two days frustrating work normally.

Anyway, the day dawned and I dropped my old computer in. Our arrangement was that they would move the e-mail over (£10 well spent) and install the old hard drive in the new box in addition to a couple of others. On the experts advice, I have all my software on an SSD drive for whizzo performance and all the data on a conventional drive for easy backup. One of the benefits of using a trusted local store is that someone brighter than a sofa can advise me.

Leaving the old box behind, I couldn’t help feeling sorry. On this computer I have types millions of words. One and half novels, hundred of magazine articles and thousands of blog posts. There is no more important a tool available to me. Without it, I’m lost, unemployable and broke. With it, I can access the world and communicate. That old PC has served me well for years, day in, day out, and now it will be stripped for parts and recycled.

Yes, I know it’s only a machine. I just get a bit sentimental that’s all.

Now I have a new black box on the desk. It runs Windows 10, which I don’t hate but it’s not as good as Windows 3.11. The front ports work, boot-up doesn’t take 5 minutes and the desktop shows slides from past holidays. At the moment my life is like moving into a new house. I know everything is there, I just can’t always put my hand on the file I want straight away. Organisation is taking place and eventually things will be where I want them. Eventually old box will be forgotten.

For the moment though, thank you old friend.

So THAT’S what the song is all about.

Phil: Last week, Candice was blogging about one of her earliest favourite albums – Phil Collins “No Jacket Required” and by coincidence, I was listing to a show on the radio about one of mine.

1985 saw the release of Suzanne Vega’s eponymous first album and to promote it, the first single “Marlene on the Wall” enjoyed heavy rotation on Radio 1. What I should have done is rushed out and bought the album, but in those days, my local library loaned proper vinyl albums out so I simply borrowed it and made a tape using my sisters record player and the tape recorder I used for my ZX Spectrum. Obviously this is bad so don’t do it kids. As they said at the time, “Home taping is killing music” even if the phrase “It tapes tapes” appeared on every stereo system in my mum’s catalogues at the time.

Anyway, while I liked the songs and the imagery, the inspiration for the lyrics was always a bit of a mystery. Until I heard Johnnie Walker’s Long Players last week. The program covered the album track by track with explanations of each from Vega.

Much of it was slightly disappointing, stuff about songs being something to do with whoever she was dating at the time but for pure weirdness, the track “Small Blue Thing” wins.

Inspiration struck when she saw the blue doorknob in a boyfriends apartment. In the centre of the knob (stop sniggering at the back) was the image of a blue eyeball. All of which inspired the opening lines:

Today I am
A small blue thing
Like a marble
Or an eye

Utter barking mad, but oddly, still sounds good today.

So, songwriter, get down to the ironmonger’s for your next hit. It just shows, ideas can come from anywhere.

Mind you, if you think this is oddball, I’m working out how to shoehorn a Lieutenant Pigeon joke into our latest book just to see if anyone spots it…

In the air tonight

Candice: I have just finished reading Phil Collins’ autobiography.  I actually bought it for the other half for Christmas but had finished my previous book and was looking for something else to dive in to.  It was collecting dust on his bed side table so I took the opportunity to steal it.

Well I’m glad it did.  I like bios – either self written or by someone else, though the autobiographies are always better as they are closer to the truth.  I like to know how celebrities ended up where they are as its often a strange collection of happy accidents as much as their planning to get famous.

Phil’s is a bit of both.  He was determined not to follow his father into insurance, a family tradition, but also had a wandering streak so when presented with a drum kit at an early age decided he wanted to do something really different from an office job.  It did help that his mother got involved with a talent agency and he ended up performing in ‘Oliver’ at an early age, whetting his acting chops.  But music was his real thing and by his mid teens he was a jobbing drummer looking for a band.

Though contacts and coincidence he ended up  auditioning for ‘Genesis’ an up and coming band with an already tight knit group of players.  Phil passed the audition but struggled to fit in.

There is a lot of talking in the book about his relationship with Peter Gabriel, the original lead singer in Genesis.  The rumour mill insists he was pushed out by Phil, Phil says it was all for Peter’s personal reasons and he was reluctantly made the new front man when no one else stepped up to the plate.  Reading the rest of the book you find out what a driven man he is so I think this is six of one and half and dozen of the other.  Phil’s Genesis explored a different musical route so I also think this would have been an influence.

The rest of the story takes me to the time of Genesis that I remember, and also Phil’s solo career.  He is one of the few people to have run concurrent careers, which meant a punishing schedule of touring and writing for both projects.  It made him a rich successful man, but also lost him three marriages in the process.

And then he decides to retire, and falls of a cliff.  With no focus for each day, alcohol takes over and he quickly becomes an alcoholic. The stubborn person he is it takes a few goes at rehab and arguments with family and friends before he realises it was give up the alcohol or life. Hence why the book is called ‘Not dead yet’!

I really enjoyed it, especially when it was at his peak as each record mentioned brought back memories of different part of my youth.  I can remember playing ‘No Jacket Required’ a lot, especially round at my friend Kathryn’s house for some reason.  I will be going out and buying the ‘best of’ album.

However, Phil is an interesting character.  He is focused and ruthless, there is no other way for him to have got where he was.  The book is quite open and I don’t think he would realise how some of the things he says or did would make some of  us wince. The music always came first, and pity his children, wives or even sleep if they got in the way.  I think his brush with death made him realise that there is more to life than this, but only just.

Research, research

Phil: I’ve never been in the navy. In fact most of my ideas about our senior service are planted by listening to many episodes of The Navy Lark.

When writing “Kate vs the Navy”, it occurs to me that I ought to do a little more research to try to, if not be wholly accurate (this is fiction after all) at least base some of the story in reality.

As it happens, last weekend was my dad’s birthday and so the family went to the Historic Dockyard in Portsmouth. Once there, your ticket allows access to all sorts of interesting places. Number one was the Mary Rose, which I remember watching emerge from the deep while I was at school. It’s now dried out and on display, although no progress has been made on restoring it so no chance of a trip around the bay…

Rather more use was a visit to HMS M.33, a Monitor, or small battleship with a flat bottom and big(ish) guns. While not exactly the sort of ship we have in our book, it’s better than nothing and certainly more relevant than any ferry I’ve been on.

Wandering through the steel corridors and rooms, it all looked exactly as I’ve seen in countless old war films. Not welcoming in any way and with some interesting, and from a narrative point of view, useful places for those not in the navy to come unstuck.

This wasn’t the main useful nugget of information that came out of the visit however. Did you know that Portsmouth dockyard used to be home to 300 cats? No, we didn’t either, but now we do, ideas are flowing…