The Second Interview with the Postgraduate Kennie Pome (Part 1)

There now follows a transcript of the interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome. It is not verbatim, but where I have forgotten the exact wording I have done my best to invent something that looks like it fits.


Kennie Pome: Okay Steve, once again, thanks for agreeing to the interview. Can I start by asking what you thought of the exerpt from my thesis that I sent you?

Me: [having not the first clue what he is talking about] Did you send it by post? I'm afraid I have not seen it. I am sure it is tremendous though.

Pome: I posted it on your blog earlier. No matter, I have my laptop with me: I'll let you read it now.

[here he showed me the excerpt from the thesis, which you can view by clicking this weblink with your mouse cursor]

Pome: What d'you think? Obviously, it's still in the preliminary stages, but you can see where I'm going with it I trust?

Me: ... yes?

Pome: Basically, I'm touching upon Betsy Friedrich's work on blog fiction where she analyses your blog, but I'm really extending it. She's on the right lines, but doesn't quite push it far enough. Friedrich interviewed you too, didn't she?

Me: No. I have never heard of Betsy Friedrich.

Pome: Well, someone claiming to be you has certainly spoken to her. I can show you the website.

[Here I became cunning]

Me: Oh Friedrich? Betsy Friedrich? Of course! Oh yes, yes. She interviewed me. She gave me £10.00 per interview I should add.

Pome: Steve, I will give you £15.00 per interview in future if you agree never to speak to her again. I would like exclusivity on my research into Horton's Folly.

Me: [inwardly guffawing at my guile] Okay Kennie Pome. It is a deal.

Pome: Thank you. Okay, so do you agree with my basic point in that excerpt?

Me: [having, of course, no idea what his basic point was or, indeed, what any of his points were] I surely do.

Pome: I'm glad you're on board with the idea. I suspected that might be where your brain is at when you're writing the blog! You think my notion of metaheteroglossia is a sound one? Can you see it proving fruitful to further research into Horton' Folly? What I'm asking, essentially, is 'Is this going to be a sound theoretical framework for me to pursue, or are you going to be changing you style in the near future?'

Me: To that I would reply, 'Pursue away, my boy. Pursue away!'

Pome: Good. You don't have anything planned for future blog entries that will ruin my argument?

Me: Certainly not.

Pome: I would ask, if it's not too much trouble, that you keep up the same meandering style of writing and continue in much the same way for the next few years so that my argument regarding your blog remains accurate. It'd be really annoying to write up my thesis only for you to radically change your style immediately afterwards, or even go back and edit previous entries, and completely discredit my thesis.

[Here I became even more cunning]

Me: £20.00 per interview did you say?

Pome: That can be arranged. Honestly, blogs are so nebulous and malleable that it makes researching them difficult - it's not like people who research books. Books are fixed - if you're doing a thesis on Dickens, you don't have to worry about Great Expectations changing its content every bloody day! I wrote the best part of a chapter on Arabella Morte's vampire-based blog fiction, Sumptuous Agonies, only to find she'd gone back and edited all her previous entries and completely changed the storyline. I had to bin the lot! Can I rely upon you not to do the same?

Me: Of course you can Kennie. I consider you a friend now and am only too happy to help you out. After all, you are paying me £25.00 per interview. It would be churlish of me to mess you around.


Readers, here I will break off my account of the interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome because you will doubtless prefer to see it broken up into several smaller entries rather than one very long one, so vapid and attention-deficit are you.

A short post with a picture

As the last diary entry was lengthy, with the words unbroken by colourful images, I will slip in this short entry which includes an image, so that casual visitors to my electronic diary are not put off by a series of word-heavy entries.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's dentures

My improvisation skills are tested

The postgraduate Kennie Pome bought two Belgian beers from the downstairs bar of the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) and invited me to join him in a pre-interview drink. By way of small talk he asked if I had enjoyed the art exhibition currently running upstairs, a series of tartan wheelie-bins filled with garden gnomes painted blue, by the Edinburgh-based artist Farelly Rastapap. Of course, I had not seen any of this work, but I replied in character as Steve M. R. Tubbock and declared the exhibition a triumph. Pome suggested that my verdict vindicated his own, for he too had found the exhibition a resounding success on numerous levels. He claimed to follow the CA (Contemporary Art) scene in D (Dundee) closely and would review this exhibition favourably in the Stoodent Nyoos, Abertay University's student newspaper, of which he is the Arts correspondent.

"Did you get a chance to see the Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show?" he asked.

I should explain to those ignorants amongst you that Duncan of Jordanstone is Dundee's Art College and the Degree Show is the annual exhibition of graduating students' work. You could easily have worked that out from context. You are wasting everyone's time.

My alterego Steve M.R. Tubbock, the talented author of the fictional 'Horton's Folly', would certainly have gone to such an event, so I had to quickly draw upon all my skills of improvisation and rapid adaptability.

"Yes," I said.

"Did you like it?" he asked.

This deviation from the anticipated script forced me to ad lib wildly once again. I felt Tubbock was the sort of person who would enjoy the Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show, so I had to somehow indicate this, completely in-character, to the postgraduate Kennie Pome despite the fact that I, Horton Carew, had not actually been to the Degree Show at all.

"Yes," I said.

"Any favourite pieces?" he probed, infuriatingly.

Readers, when next you find yourselves in a situation where you are pretending to be an author of a fictional electronic diary in order to earn £5.00 and are obliged to present as true the claim that you have been to an exhibition of Contemporary Art (CA) showcasing the work of recent graduates of Art College (AC), when in fact you have not, and you are asked to comment upon your favourite piece, you might like to borrow my catch-all response because I found it worked quite convincingly.

"I forget the artist's name, but I particularly liked that dark series of paintings - the meditations on death. Very effective," I said. I waved my hands and nodded as I said this. I have seen the mentalist Derren Brown use such a technique to bamboozle proles so I thought I should mimic him.

"Oh yes! I agree," replied Pome. "Janet Peevie's work was well received. You're right though - very dark subject matter. Paintings of dismembered corpses are not for everyone! What else did you like?"

I was starting to become uncomfortable. All Degree Show exhibitions are bound to have some sort of thing about death in it, but what else might it include? My knowledge of the Contemporary Art (CA) scene is limited to three art galleries, a handful of exhibitions that I attended in order to procure free wine, and to seeing Tracy Emin once on Have I Got News For You. If Pome continued this line of questioning, I would doubtless be exposed as a fraud before long.

"I also liked that series of collages," I said, "I forget the artist's name I'm afraid, but his collages were a sort of dissection of popular trash culture. He made use of gaudy kitsch images from advertising to great effect."

"Oh yes! You're right," said Pome. "Dexter Sing's pop-culture collages really revel in the mire of tackiness, don't they? Loved his stuff with the retro Creamola Foam graphics. Anything else that you liked?"

Readers, if Pome had asked me to describe another piece of work at the Degree Show, all would have been lost. As it was, he stopped at just three and I was able to bluff my way through. Every Scottish art exhibition I have ever been to has always had a series of paintings or photographs of weather-beaten North East women who look like they've had a rough life of fishing or weaving or some such. The artist or photographer seems invariably to be called Mhairi something. I hoped that the work of such a Mhairi was similarly present at the Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show, because I said to Pome:

"I also liked the series of black and white photographs of aged weather-beaten North Eastern fishwives by Mhairi...someone. I forget her surname. Each photograph had a caption telling us a little about each woman. What rich yet melancholy lives they led, reflected in each portrait."

"Oh yes!" said Pome (thank goodness!) "Mhairi Luthermuir's photos were wonderfully evocative. Each wrinkle on each face told a story. Marvellous! Well, shall we start the interview proper now?"

"Do I still get £5.00?" I asked.

"Of course," he replied.

"Then let us begin," I said.

Readers, I have given too much preamble today, so will leave off my account of the interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome until a later date.

An interview conducted in the DCA

The second of my interviews with the postgraduate Kennie Pome was conducted in the DCA building. In this acronym, the letters 'D', 'C', and 'A' stand for 'Dundee', 'Contemporary', and 'Arts', which is lucky because the full name of the building is 'Dundee Contemporary Arts'. The building is in Dundee's fashionable West End, around the corner from Dundee Rep Theatre, where last week they were showing a production of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, the time traveller from Quantum Leap. I wonder who they got to play the Fonz. Further up the road is the University of Dundee, which is the better of the two universities in Dundee because it is more conveniently situated for buses, etc.

For those of you who do not know, the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) is a building that has the following things in it: a cinema, an art gallery, a restaurant/bar, a gift shop, and toilets for male, female, and disabled patrons. Its cinema is not up to much because it can only afford films in foreign languages - if you want proper films in English, you are better off going to the Odeon. The DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) only has a bar downstairs, unlike Dundee Rep Theatre which has one bar downstairs and one bar upstairs, so if you are looking for a building with more than one bar, you would be far better served by going round the corner to Dundee Rep Theatre. The art gallery in the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) is quite nice, but by plumping for the 'Contemporary' part in the name 'Dundee Contemporary Arts' (DCA), they are obliged to only show art that is contemporary. They are missing a trick here because if they omitted the 'Contemporary' part and just called themselves 'DA' (Dundee Arts), they could also be showing old art too, which is better.

Here is a picture of the DCA ('Dundee Contemporary Arts' (DCA)):

As you will see from the image, immediately outside the Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) is a sculpture by Lochee artist Bilko Dervish entitled 'Man 'n' Cone', which is a photorealistic piece depicting a man and a traffic cone. It is universally hated.

I went into the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) and proceeded downstairs to the bar, because as you will remember, there is no bar upstairs. There I met with the postgraduate Kennie Pome who greeted me convivially and offered to buy me a fine Belgian lager to keep me refreshed during our interview

I will describe the interview in greater depth tomorrow, for this entry has already become overlong and I imagine your attention is beginning to wander.

A recap for the hard of thinking

Now readers, I will proceed to tell you about my second interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome. It has become increasingly obvious to me that the majority of my readers are what I might charitably describe as subnormal, which necessitates a certain amount of tiresome recapping in my narrative so that these readers do not become confused by the relatively simple chain of events I have thus far described.

Kennie Pome is a postgraduate student at The University of Abertay's English department and is researching fictional electronic diaries, or 'blogs' as he unpleasantly insists upon calling them. For some reason he has mistakenly come to believe that my electronic diary is fictional and that Horton Carew is a fictional character. To aid his research, he has requested a series of interviews with the author of this supposedly fictional 'blog'. Ordinarily, I would ignore such requests until the requester grew tired and left, but this requester has promised to pay me £5.00 per interview so I have done my utmost to accommodate this requester's requests. To this end, I have pretended to be one Steve M. R. Tubbock, the author of a piece of 'blog fiction' called 'Horton's Folly' and have maintained the pretence that I (Horton Carew) am (is) a fictional character. So far I have duped the postgraduate Kennie Pome twice and secured £10.00 altogether for myself. The first occasion in which I hoodwinked Pome was described earlier. I will now describe the second interview he conducted with me where I was once again successful in convincing him that I am an author by the name of Tubbock and that 'Horton's Folly' is a work of fiction.

That is the end of the recap. I am sure you will agree that it was scarcely necessary. Do not blame me, however - blame the dimwitted readers who cannot hold information in their heads for more than four minutes. Now that those lummoxes are suitably reminded of the salient facts, we can continue.

Readers, I must apologise. In my ire, I have now forgotten what I was going to write in this entry. I will continue tomorrow when I have had a chance to calm down and collect my thoughts.

An update on the past few weeks

Dearest readers, I suppose you will be curious as to what I have been doing with myself for the last few weeks while I have been unable to update my electronic diary. Alas, I fear I do not have the time or space to relate in full the many strange and upsetting situations in which I found myself.

The images below will explain the miserable and occasionally horizontal events of my last few weeks far better than screeds of detailed written explanations wherein I would describe precisely what happened to me, illustrating my anecdotes with numerous examples of my thoughts and reactions, using a variety of literary devices to engage and captivate the reader:

I am sure you can see what I am getting at. "A picture paints a thousand words," some people will tell you, if pressed. I have given you five pictures so you now have five thousand words' worth of explanation. I can do no more.

Aside from the terrible events fully explicated above, I had a further meeting with the postgraduate Kennie Pome a week ago, which I will tell you about in tomorrow's entry.

I make a triumphant return to my diary

Readers, I finally have access to my E-Blogger account again. The bigwigs at E-Blogger have allowed me to continue my career as an online diarist only on the understanding that I formally retract my denigrating comments about carob and agree to champion it in this diary whenever the subject comes up in future. To these demands I have reluctantly agreed. I must be humble and bite my tongue so that my readers do not suffer any longer from my absence. However, rest assured that this diary will not become a protracted advertisement for carob. I will not kowtow to these fatcats and betray my artistic integrity.

Apropos of nothing, I will take this opportunity to recommend some products that I have enjoyed recently and hope that some of my readers will likewise find pleasure in. They are delicious. Carob-based treats.

As a small reward to my patient readers who have endured a full month without my electronic diary to sustain them, I present a final image of a monkey. Cherish it for it will be the last. I feel that you can have too much of a good thing.

This monkey believes that pursing his lips and staring vacantly will draw

attention away from his ludicrously elongated arms.

He is incorrect.

Censored!

My dearest and plumpest of readers, please note: I will be unable to update this electronic diary for a number of weeks due to unforeseen circumstances that have resulted in my 'E-Blogger' account being suspended as from tomorrow.

Regular readers will remember that in my last few entries I elected to use my electronic diary as a soapbox to publically speak out against the evils of carob. I suggested that it was unpleasant and did not satisfy in its capacity as a substitute for chocolate. You will note that these entries have now been erased. The company that owns E-Blogger, I have since discovered, also owns the largest carob distribution company in the Northern hemisphere, and did not take kindly to me badmouthing their product. As a punitive measure, they have censored my carob-focussed entries and have frozen my E-Blogger account for a month. Readers, I am a victim of the bullying tactics of global capitalism!

Needless to say, I have become a communist. I rushed out at once and bought a t-shirt from River Island which has a picture of the Cubin Marxist revolutionary, Cheech Guevara, on it. It was only £14.99. I assume the money I spent on it will go towards funding a communist revolution somewhere and will not simply line the pockets of some fatcat t-shirt designer, otherwise I would end up looking like a buffoon rather than a renegade socialist, which would be terribly embarrassing.

Readers, I urge you to speak up against my situation. Rise up against the E-Blogger/Carob Distributor oppressors!

Ever thoughtful of my devoted readership of 14 people, I am aware that many of them will be appalled at the thought of having no 'Horton's Folly' to read for a whole month, and will at once begin tearing at their faces in a frenzied anguish. In an effort to assauge their despair, I will briefly return to my earlier practise of offering up a picture of a monkey. Readers, may this tide you over in the coming weeks.

A monkey momentarily fascinated by his own wrists.

"What power they wield," he seems to say.

Back to a Sensible Length

I must confess that although my new techniques to attract more readers to my diary has succeeded in that I now have an average of 14 readers each day instead of 10, I am unhappy with what I have become.

I have allowed myself to become seduced by the lure of possibily gaining more than 20 readers per day and entering into the big leagues. You start to think you can dip your toes into the modes of populist trash yet maintain your credibility and integrity. You start to think that you can get away with producing inferior products, and that your core fan base will indulge you such slips because they are convinced of your genius. You start to forget your true fans, and just write for the idiots. You start to think you can just post up pictures of Charlie Chalk and Martin Short for your readers to goggle at. Before you know it, your electronic diary is just a collection of links to other people's work. Before you know it, you are weeping into your lap, longing for the days when you were respected by the literary community and were berated on Late Review by Tom Paulin. Before you know it you are disgusted with yourself. Before you know it you are standing in the new Marks and Spencers in Broughty Ferry, drunk on fortified wine, your trousers on your head and your pain-contorted face slicked with aspic from three dozen purloined Melton Mowbrays.

When the police finally let me go with a caution, I returned home and vowed never again to cater to the lowest common denominator: from now on, my diary entries will revert to their usual level of intelligence. I am now going for a Radox herbal bath.

Short

This entry is the shortest yet.

Short Entry

Although my last entry was short, it was not quite as short as I had intended, so I will do my best to make this one shorter.

Here is a picture that I like.

Another Short Entry providing Balance

As my last diary entry was another long one, I will now break up my web page by including another short entry here, so that casual browsers are not put off by too much text.

The postgraduate Kennie Pome told me that, as well as including more pictures to hook readers, I should include lots more web links in my entries, so that my diary is providing a tangible service to readers by furnishing them with interesting and educational content.

Therefore, here is a web site which specializes in the matching and supplying of reclaimed imperial bricks. It has a brick library that you may browse, and the front page features an animated man that talks aloud (about bricks), providing you turn up the volume on your computer. He will keep you right.

I have also been told that I must make greater effort to interact with my readers through such means as asking them questions within my diary entries, which they might reply to through the 'comments' function. Casual browsers will see that each entry has numerous comments, and will assume that the electronic diary is extremely popular and may thus revisit.

I will try this as an experiment to see if it works:

My favourite brick from the brick web site is brick DM0202. What is yours?

The Interview with the Postgraduate: Part 2

I will now continue with Part 2 of my interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome.


Kennie Pome: Now then, Steve...

Me: Who's Steve?

Kennie Pome: You are.

Me: Oh yes of course. And Horton Carew is a fictional character which I created.

Kennie Pome: Now then, Steve, perhaps you could say a little about some of the other characters that appear on the blog via the comments function (and occasionally in the narrative itself). Dr Gland, Professor Flitey, etc. What do they lend to the diegesis?

Me: [worried, because Dr Gland and Professor Flitey would not appreciate me saying they were fictional] I did not actually create them.

Kennie Pome: That's interesting. Do you collaborate with other writers then?

Me: [inelegantly improvising] Oh yes, I have a large network of writer chums. Dr Gland's creator is Bill Tutternosker, a schoolteacher from Kirkliston, and Professor Flitey was the brainchild of Angela Civetbrawn, a homemaker (housewife) from Norfolk, Connecticut (America). They both do a really good job with those characters. We do our best to confabulate online three or four times a week, just to touch base. We've only met up in person once. We organised a Writers of Horton's Folly Christmas Party last Christmas in Connecticut. It was nice. We all sat around on Angela's veranda swigging beers and discussing what direction we wanted to take for Horton's Folly. I have to say, Angela and myself tend to be on the same wavelength, but Bill often wants to be a lot more experimental than we're comfortable with. For instance, he wanted to have Dr. Gland speaking in untranslated Hebrew at one point. Another time, he came up with this idea that Dr Gland should give up being a medical doctor and become an eco-warrier. Angela and myself usually have to rein in those wild flights of fancy!

Kennie Pome: That's interesting...

Me: I can put you in touch with Bill and Angela if you like, provided you only interview them over the phone and just give their £5.00 fees directly to me. Funnily enough, Bill and Angela both have Dundee accents just like me because they both liked mine so much they decided to copy it whenever they spoke. In fact, we often joke about how similar we all sound over the phone. You would pay them £5.00 per interview I trust?

Kennie Pome: That's interesting, but I will stick to just interviewing you. I assume that your blog is sort of an arena in which you dramatise the work of postmodern literary theorists? Is that fair to say?

Me: It certainly is Kennie. I've said so myself many times.

Kennie Pome: That's interesting. Now, what authors influence you? We'll take the usual suspects - Calvino, Borges, Eco, Pynchon, etc. - as given.

Me: Of course. Well, I have to say that I am influenced mainly by the writers of Neighbours. I really love it.

Kennie Pome: That's interesting. You're being coy again. I can see you're not comfortable with that question. That's cool - I'll drop it.

Me: No, I love Neighbours. Have you seen that Max and Steph have split up? It's sad, but I suppose Toady and Steph are free to get together now.

Kennie Pome: Okay, okay. I get the point. I'll drop that line of questioning. Right. In many ways, your blog is metacritical: how aware are you of current academic research into blog fiction (my own included) and how much of that do you incorporate into your blog?

Me: ...

Kennie Pome: Would you like me to repeat the question?

Me: Do I still get the £5.00 if I don't get all the answers right?

Kennie Pome: Okay, we'll call it a day for now. Thank you for your time. That was very interesting. Perhaps we might arrange another interview later.

Me: Yes, that would be a pleasure. We authors relish the opportunity to talk at length about our work, and to earn £5.00.



And that readers, was the interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome. You have done very well in managing to read all the way down this diary entry without losing interest or being distracted by other electronic diaries that have more links to YouTube. I do not wish to tax you further with more text, so as a small reward for your patience, here is a picture of the president of the USA (United States of America), George W. Bush.





I hope that casual browsers might see it and assume this is a website full of stinging satirical commentary. By the time they realise it is not, they will already be hooked by the pictures of monkeys further down the page and by my deft and skillful prose.

A Shorter Diary Entry for Contrast

The postgraduate Kennie Pome has also indicated to me that if I have tried the patience of my readers with a very long diary entry (upwards of 100 words), then the next diary entry I create should be shorter to give a sense of contrast and variation. Readers, if faced with two lengthy diary entries in a row, will break down and give up in tears at the effort expected of them. Therefore, this diary entry will be very short and I will continue with the second part of my interview in tomorrow's diary entry.

I do not like to waste my readers' time however, so I will use this entry to direct your attention to this website which you may explore at your leisure. Once you've read that web site in its entirety, I advise you to follow the link given by that author on the 17th April, because he has also found a very good web site that you will certainly enjoy perusing.

Certain of my readers have indictated that my recent practice of including a picture with each entry has hooked them, so the advice of postgraduate Kennie Pome is evidently something I can trust. In particular, images of simians seem to draw the readers in, so I will now continue this trend by presenting a picture of a monkey taking home a juicy pear to his spouse:

The Interview with the Postgraduate: Part 1

I will split my account of the interview with the postgraduate Kennie Pome into two parts, which I will entitle Part 1 and Part 2 for ease of understanding ('Part 1' being the first part of the interview, and 'Part 2' being the second). Doing so will keep my diary entries shorter so that the reader will not be discouraged by reams of text. As I said yesterday, the postgraduate Kennie Pome informed me that electronic diaries, or 'blogs' as he insisted on calling them, are typically read by jaded and largely uninterested readers, who will not be persuaded to invest any time in reading unless they are 'hooked' by bite-sized chunklets of punchy text and attractive images. I have therefore endeavoured to adopt such a template in order to keep my readers interested. Thus, being studious of brevity, I will refrain from elaboration and continue with my account of the interview.

I cannot remember our conversation verbatim, but I will do my best to recount it exactly as I recall it. I believe I did a very convincing job of presenting myself as an author and hope you will agree.

Kennie Pome: First of all, thank you for agreeing to this interview. I have enjoyed reading your blog fiction. Let's start with a few basic questions about yourself and the nuts and bolts of your blog. What's your name?

Me: Horton Carew. Can I confirm that I will be getting £5.00 for this interview?

Kennie Pome: Yes, you'll get £5.00. But I'd prefer you to conduct this interview 'out of character'. This is serious academic research I'm doing, not a bit of fluff for the gutter press.

Me: [panicking, for I had forgotten that I was supposed to be playing a part, so distracted was I by the lemon muffin] Of course. My name is Steve M. R. Tubbock.

Kennie Pome: Thanks Steve. Do you feel comfortable sharing any personal information with me? Where are you from? What do you work as? That sort of thing?

Me: I live in Broughty Ferry where I own a small gallery that exhibits and sells the work of local artists. My wife creates sculptures of seabirds using hewn driftwood and oyster shells, which are very popular. This brings in enough money to put me in the fortunate position of devoting myself entirely to my writing.

Kennie Pome: That's interesting. What other writing projects are you working on at the moment?

Me: None. I spend all my time writing Horton's Folly, which is of course fictional. As is the handsome and erudite character 'Horton Carew'.

Kennie Pome: That's very interesting. So how long do you spend on each blog entry then?

Me: It varies. I never spend less than eight hours per entry, sometimes more if there's a lot of research required. I write my first draft by midday, then usually scrap it and start again. This abandoning is a valuable part of the creative process though: nothing is wasted. I typically write 20,000 words in total before I begin self-editing. I describe this stage as 'prose decocting' wherein I 'boil down' the 20,000 words and extract the essence of the narrative, which is what I present to the reader.

Kennie Pome: That's interesting. Can you tell me what first drew you to use the blog genre for your fiction? Would you say that you understand that blogs and diaries are conventionally thought of as confessional discourses which present secrets and avowals to readers who consequently feel that they are privy to some naked and unvarnished truth, but that, in couching a fictional narrative in this genre, you chose to mock or subvert that notion to augment your overarching concerns, in common with other postmodernist writers of metafiction, with fracturing the atavistic concept of absolutes?

Me: Yes.

Kennie Pome: It's interesting you say that because that's exactly what I would have thought. Now, what about the character of Horton Carew? Where did he stem from? How did you develop him?

Me: Well, I think of Horton as a classical Hero figure. He is fiercely intelligent, knowledgable, strong, and brave. Throughout his everyday experiences, he always shines through as the perfect human being. Horton is a character that all women fall in love with and all men aspire to be.

Kennie Pome: [laughing, for some unknown reason] That's interesting. Typifies the biting sardonicism prevalent in your blog. But seriously, how did you develop Horton's character? He's a very strange individual I think it's fair to say!

Me: [confused, but deciding to play along so as not to jeopardize my £5.00] Oh yes, of course. Horton is a strange fellow. I wanted to create a strange character.

Kennie Pome: That's interesting.

Me: Is it?

Kennie Pome: I suppose not.

Here I will break off so that my readers do not feel overwhelmed with words. And as promised, here is a picture to attract the attention of new readers and casual browsers, so that I might hook them in:

Broughty Ferry beach

The Meeting with the Postgraduate Kennie Pome

The meeting with the postgraduate Kennie Pome was a success - I earned £5.00 for only 20 minutes worth of work. We met in a sophisticated coffee house called 'Starbucks', the interior design of which was perfectly suited to our great meeting of minds. If any of my readers is a member of the intelligentsia and is ever in Dundee and in need of coffee, I can recommend this 'Starbucks' place highly. It is a real shame that you should all be deprived of access to this delighful shop just because you do not live in Dundee. If only there was some way to duplicate it and place up to seven of them in every town in the world, then you would all be able to enjoy it like me.

The postgraduate Kennie Pome introduced himself to me as Kennie Pome, postgraduate. He bought a couple of coffees and two lemon muffins for the total cost of £12.40, which may sound expensive but when you consider that the coffee tastes marginally better than Nescafe Gold Blend, then you begin to understand that one is paying for quality. Pome had recognised me straight away because I look like the photograph of myself that I include on this web site. He expressed surprise, for he had thought that the photograph was just a random strange picture chosen to look 'totally random'.

Then began the interview, which I will relate to you in full later. You see, the postgraduate Kennie Pome has advised me to keep my electronic diary entries shorter and to include more images, because his research has shown that 'web logs' with briefer entries and more pictures are read by more people. Thus I will save my account of the interview for a subsequent entry so as not to overload the reader with excessive verbiage. Furthermore, here is an image of a monkey riding a man riding a horse.

Becoming a Sham-Author: Part 2

Because I must convince the postgraduate that I am a real author and that 'Horton Carew' is a fictional character, I must do my utmost to stay in character throughout the interview if I am to secure the £5. To this end, I have created a persona for myself that would convince anyone, even P. D. Harris, the number one reviewer on Amazon.com and hence the person most knowledgable about books and authors in the world.

As related yesterday, I have modelled my appearance on such literary greats as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Terry Pratchett, OBE, who are both so good at authoring that royalty gave them titles. I have thus eschewed that view of writers as louche alcoholics, surviving on laudanum in pokey garrets, and gone instead for more workmanlike, down-to-earth craftsmen types. Tomorrow I will wear a shirt and tie and attempt to remain business like. I have fluffed up my moustache a little, but that is my only concession to flamboyance.

It strikes me that I will require a suitable name to go by. What sort of name would the author of a fictional electronic diary have? I feel initials are key to success. J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Poppy Z. Brite, and Thomas R.D all recognised this truth. Yes, an initial will be essential. A simple first name, a couple of initials, and an unusual surname: this formula will see me right.

Some possiblities:

Ben R. R. Glush
Joe H. L. Askew
Bill M. C. Tutternosker
Lee P. D. Florescu
Dave F. T. Civetbrawn
Steve L. J. Hubshuft
Andy W. C. DeKelb-Rittenhouse
Mark C. F. Krzywinska

I must settle on a name by tomorrow, for it is then that I must meet the postgraduate.

Becoming a Sham-Author

I have arranged to meet the postgraduate on Friday in Dundee's Starbucks coffee house for the first of my interviews. If I am to convince him that I am an author and hence earn £5, I must look the part.

I have decided to model my appearance on a selection of famous and respected authors, whose senses of dress and general demeanour I will syncretize to create a whole new persona comprising the very essence of authorial class.

Here are the authors on which I have chosen to model myself (in some cases I was unable to find images of the actual author, so I have been obliged to use lookalikes):

Arfur Conan Doyle

Charles Dickens

Jules Verne

Robert Louis Stevenson

Terry Pratchett

A Postgraduate Plagues Me

Those of you who have been following the comments left by other readers will have noted that I am currently being hounded by a postgraduate who believes me to be fictional. He wishes to conduct a series of interviews with the author of this electronic diary whom he erroneously imagines to be someone other than myself.

Ordinarily I would not humour such forwardness and brazen cheek, but as he has promised to pay me £5 per interview, I have decided to accommodate the cove. Thus will I pretend to be a writer who has fabricated everything in this electronic diary. I will disguise myself as an author and tell this postgraduate exactly what he wants to hear, even if that involves maintaining the pretence that I, Horton Carew, am a fictional character.

This will not be easy, but I believe I am up to the challenge.

Easter Treats

As it is Easter Sunday, the day before Easter Monday, and as I am feeling light and gay after my recent triumph, I have given the day over to carefree pursuits such as eating chocolates and decorating hens' eggs.

Today is truly a wonderous one, for today we remember the day, many years ago, when Jesus H. Christ rose from the dead and escaped from his cave by turning into an egg and rolling down a hill or something.

To bring you joy, I will share with you a photograph of an egg which I have decorated in such a way that it looks like Scarlett Johansson in that film where she looks like a boiled egg.

I Triumph

Success, dear readers, success! I have, for the moment, defeated my dead mother. She is imprisoned with little to no chance of ever escaping.

You see, for the past few days I made a great show of apologising to my dead mother and repeatedly promising to return to my evil ways. I even pretended to slice off my right hand as she had requested (in reality, I merely hid it up my sleeve). Evidently my ruse succeeded because her manner eventually reverted to a collegial tone rather than that of an evil mother enraged at her morally good son.

Yesterday I asked her, in as casual a tone as I could muster, whether she fancied a game of Monopoly. Perhaps, I mused aloud, it would bolster my capacity for evil for it is a game in which players are blooded in the ruthless ways of capitalism and encouraged to take delight in the financial ruination of family and friends. She agreed at once. My heart skipped two to three beats with the excitement.

She stood upon the board in the intimidating form of the little scottie dog that I have grown to loathe these last months. I chose to play as the race car because I thought that it would make me look cool. I took a deep breath and rolled the dice.

It was clear from the off that she was the better player. Within only a few circuits of the board she had established hotels on the blue set and the red set. I had succeeded only in buying the Waterworks, Fenchurch Street Station, and Old Kent Road. My fiendishly clever plan was failing almost before it had begun.

Down to my last £14, it was obvious that I would be bankrupt within my next few rolls because my mother owned all the property on the board and had at least a house on each site. I had only to wait for her to take her turn then all would surely be over. Well readers, she rolled a ten! That took her to a Chance square. My very last opportunity to defeat her.

I picked up the top most Chance card from the pile and, with trembling hand, revealed the underside. Triumph! It said, "Go to Jail. Go Directly to Jail. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect £200". Oh frabjous day!

I moved my mother into the Jail square, my heart thumping so rapidly that I feared she would hear it.

"And now mother, I am afraid you lose," said I.

"Not so, halfwit," she replied. "I need only roll a double within my next three shots and, if I fail to do so, I must pay only £50 to secure my release. That is a paltry sum for me because I have many thousands of pounds. Besides which, you will be made bankrupt in your next few moves, and I will de victorious, you chump. Bwah haa haa haah... Now roll the dice and take your turn."

Have you guessed my plan yet readers? I expect two or three of you have, but no more than that because it really is terribly clever. You see, because my dead mother's wicked soul is trapped inside the little scottie dog from Monopoly, she is bound by the rules of that venerable board game. She is obliged to abide by its rules as you or I are bound to the rules of gravity.

Readers, I refused to take my turn. Until I do so, she must remain in Jail. And you know as well as I do, and as well as my evil mother knows, that I will never take my turn in that game of Monopoly. Bwah haa haa haaah.

Being careful not to shift any of the pieces, I gingerly carried the board and accompanying paraphernalia up to the back of my loft where I have laid it in a large chest and locked it tight. Never will I hear from that wicked soul again.

I suppose it's a bit like Jumanji starring Robin Williams.

A Secret Plan is Concocted

Readers, I am afraid I allowed myself to become distracted by numerous animated programmes these last few days, which meant I forgot about my resolve to rid my home of my dead mother's soul.

No matter, for I have hit upon a brilliant scheme. Readers, the solution is in the game of Monopoly itself! I have been blind. The answer is obvious: I must challenge my mother to a game of Monopoly...and win. Her soul being anchored to the little scottie dog from Monopoly, she will of course play as the little scottie dog, and I will play as something sexy like the racecar or the boat...

But I am saying too much. She is crafty and suspicious and may yet read my electronic diary. If so, all will be lost. I will report back to you after my plan has come to fruition.

Pray for me.

The Dog Came Back The Very Next Day

Fact 1: My dead mother's wicked soul is anchored to the little scottie dog from Monopoly.

Fact 2: If I can get rid of the little pewter dog then I can surely be rid of my dead mother's wicked soul.

This was the sort of reasoning I employed when first I hurled the little dog from out my bedroom window onto the street, where it struck the ear of a passing Mormon who understandably evinced chagrin. Alas, the next day the dog stood atop my mantelpiece as though it had never been flung away in disgust.

Next I took the dog to the top of the Law Hill and left it there, exposed to the elements. The next day, however, it had returned to its spot on the mantel.

Law Hill, Dundee

Next I packaged it up securely in a padded envelope, addressed it to Kirk Douglas in the US (America), and paid the relevant postage costs. The next day, however...well, you can undoubtedly guess the rest for you are not a buffoon.

The whole sorry affair reminded me of a cartoon I once saw on Rolf's Cartoon Time about a cat that kept returning to the home of a man who desperately wanted to be rid of the creature. It was a good cartoon. I must go and see if it is available for viewing on YouTube.

I Make a Brave Decision

Readers, I must be quick for I fear my dead mother may be eavesdropping. I have made a firm decision not to kowtow to her any longer. I will not cut off my right hand. Of that I am sure.


Last night I dreamt that Lion-O visited me. He told me that my innate goodness and reluctance to sin was not the debilitating condition I took it for. No, he told me that I should consider it a strength because all heroes everywhere, up to and including Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon, are good. Goodness is a defining characteristic of all the most admired men (and some women) throughout history. This wisdom imparted, Lion-O faded from my ken.



But readers, his words rang true. Readers, I am good. I will be rid of my evil mother's influence. I will do it. I will surely do it.

Mother's Punishment

My dead mother demands that I sever my right hand from my right arm as penance for my lack of sins. Only then will she be satisfied that fealty has been served.

Readers, I must admit reluctance on my part to cleave my right hand from my right arm. As I am right-handed, I asked if she might reconsider and allow me to cut off my left hand instead, which I currently only use for novelty value and for maintaining a sense of symmetry, but my mother is adamant that it be my right hand.

I expect she will eventually persuade or cajole me into going through with this grim task, but I will be very sorry to see my right hand go - it has served me well these last few years and has been instrumental in many of my happiest moments on this earth.

I turn now to Microsoft's comprehensive collection of cliparts to provide illustrations of common uses of one's right hand, to convey to you exactly what everyday activities I will be missing out on when I sacrifice my hand.

Use 1: Cradling a russet apple

Use 2: Depressing buttons

Use 3: Rehearsing for an imagined day when golf courses shrink

Use 4: Shooting things (specifically guns)

Use 5: Mimicking arthritis

A Heartfelt Apology

Readers - if readers ye be, and not illiterates who have stumbled upon this page by chance and cannot understand the strange hieroglyphs you see before you - I owe each of you an apology. In the past few entries I was convinced by some delirium or wicked hex that I was monstrously evil and capable of terrible deeds. I have insulted you by refering to you as "halfwits" when I know that most of you are actually "fullwits". I have mocked you and tried your patience innumerable times and relished so doing. I have forced you to read about my various horrible acts, up to and including maiming a ladybird and trussing up a Pole.

For this I am sorry. If I could send each and every one of you a gift by way of an apology, I would, but I know that a great many of you dwell in the US (America), so postage and packaging costs would be prohibitive. If it is any consolation to you, you must know that my dead mother, in the form of the little scottie dog from Monopoly, is even now formulating my punishment, which will no doubt consist of prolonged torture culminating in a low and ignominious death. She remains wholly evil and can no longer tolerate a good and moral son such as I.

Do not weep for me. It is no more than I deserve.

Shamefaced

My late mother is furious with me. As you have no doubt ascertained through reading between the lines of my recent entries, I have been living a lie.

I am not evil and do not think I will ever be able to live a normal evil life. There is a perverse streak of goodness in me that quite prevents me from going through with evil acts. When push came to shove, I was unable to skin the Polish fellow. Moral repugnance and guilt stayed my hand. There is unfortunately no doubt that I am good. I apologised to the Polish man for letting him down, and allowed him to go free, unskinned.

"You worthless piece of ****!!" my dead mother bawled, "You're such a disappointment, Horton! You're useless! You're beyond useless! You've let me down! Why do you always shame me? You *******! That's it! I don't want you around me! Get out of my sight, you ****. I must concoct a suitable punishment. If you cannot be evil, I must harm you. I will thrash the goodness out of you! You stupid, worthless ****!! You've let me down!"

I cannot help but feel that I have let my mother down.

I Skin a Leg

Readers, I am beginning to doubt the extent of my evilness and fear that the life of a dark lord is not to be my destiny. I cannot deny that the Pole's constant weeping has aroused my sympathy. Furthermore, I have suffered the occasional pang of guilt throughout the day as I went about the grisly business of skinning the man.

My dead mother jeered and questioned my manhood when I expressed doubts, then likened me to a 'Soho Fruit'. Such mockery spurred me on to swallow my indecision and make a start on removing the Pole's skin. How the man wept! I told him not to take it personally, but he seemed determined to do so and kept asking, "Why me? Why do you do this thing to me?" Another favourite refrain of his was, "Please stop. Please let me live. I will give you money. Please, I have a family. I don't want to die. Please." Honestly, they're a talkative lot those Poles! His pleading, irritating though it was, caused me to feel pity for the man, which was most inconvenient.

I spent the entire afternoon hacking away at the man's left leg with a breadknife and a saw. The man's skin was shiny and hard and quite impossible to penetrate - my scissors and Stanley knife proved useless in this endeavour. Try as I might, I simply could not remove the skin from the Pole's leg. The man squealed and moaned the whole time too, which only served to make the process more annoying.

When Newsround came on, I gave up, utterly exhausted.

"Dear god, man! Are you protected by some voodoo and/or hoodoo?" I asked the Pole. "Try as I might, I simply cannot remove the skin from your Polish leg."

Well, readers, between heaving sobs, the Pole admitted to me that he had lost his left leg in a threshing accident as a child. Ever since then, he had been forced to wear a prosthetic.

I thought it was most rude of him not to make this known earlier, for he could easily have saved me the embarrassment of spending four and a half hours trying to skin an artficial leg. How humiliating. What must he think of me? I have promised him that I will do better next time.

As punishment for his cheek, I have confiscated his leg and have forbidden him from watching Jonathan Ross tonight.

The Skinning Begins in Earnest

Greetings halfwits!! I have made some headway in skinning the Polish fellow that lies bound and gagged in my bedroom. I believe this initial success has proved that I am evil beyond reckoning.

In the early hours of this morning (11:15am, after BBC 1's Don't Get Done, Get Dom), I stepped into my bedroom, which I have now come to think of as 'The Flensing Room' because it sounds a little more evil, and announced my intentions. The Pole at once began to weep, which I found somewhat tiresome and unmanly. Ungagging him, he told me in faltering English that his name was Franciszka and that he had a wife and three children to support. Evidently, he hoped that I would see him as a human being and let him off with the skinning, but he did not take into account that I am now very evil and immune to such emotional blackmail. A little cheeky of him too, I thought.

With a large pair of scissors and a Stanley knife, I set to work on my wicked project. His howls of terror were very distracting, but I managed to ignore them and ran the blade slowly up each arm, tenderly peeling back the top layer sufficiently to slide the scissors in and begin cutting. Snip, snip, snip. How the man wept!

The arms were the trickiest part, but once I'd managed those, I used the knife upon the back and was able to remove a huge layer in one fell swoop. It was like peeling an orange. All this took about an hour, during which time the Pole cried and pleaded like a man undergoing some sort of horrible torture. How he wept!

I laid down my tools and surveyed all that I had achieved during my hour of slicing and snipping. I had succeeded in completely removing the man's denim jacket.

At one point though, my scissors had jabbed the flesh on the man's elbow, which probably hurt him a little. I apologized, but he would not cease his caterwauling. Goodness only knows what he'll be like when I actually start removing the skin from his miserable body.

I Attempt to Garrote a Hound

Once again I have failed. Initially, all proceeded as intended: I successfully abducted a dog using every ounce of guile and evil at my disposal, by creeping stealthily into Dundee's Animal Rescue Centre and offering to adopt a dog so that I might take it home and care for it by taking it out for regular walks and treating it to tin after tin of Pedigree Chum. The well-meaning fools were duped and gladly gave me one of the many mangy brutes that had been cruelly abandoned or abused by the evil folk of Dundee.

When I got the dog home, I prepared to test my mettle by garroting the cur with a length of wire. However, as I tautened the cord around the wretched creature's neck, my dead mother's voice could be heard.

"Horton Carew! What on earth do you think you are doing?!" she ejaculated.

"Why, mother," I replied, somewhat confused by her unanticipated ejaculation, "I am preparing to garrote this hound. I assumed that this would please you, evil as you are."

"No!" she ejaculated again, "I am horrified by what I see!"

This latest ejaculation perplexed me no end, for of course, it was my evil mother who egged me on and persuaded me of the value of killing a dog in the first place. Now it was my turn to ejaculate.

"What horrifies you mother?" I ejaculated furiously, "Surely it pleases you to see a dog murdered?"

"Of course!" she ejaculated, "But not that breed! You have selected a scottie dog, you halfwit!"

She went on to explain that because her soul is currently housed inside the little scottie dog from Monopoly, she could not bear to witness me strangulating a dog of that breed. It felt like a personal attack, she claimed. She regarded it as highly symbolic and an eerie reminder of my rejection of her some 13 years earlier, and could not suffer it.

So, dear readers, I have had to abandon my scheme of garroting that hound. At my mother's insistence, I released the brute onto the streets of Dundee, where it scampered freely in the fresh March air. My mother did not see what followed, but a large lorry mowed the creature down under its collosal wheels, which caused me to laugh uproariously and brought a feeling of warmth to my heart. From this unusual reaction to a splattered dog, I think I may safely deduce that I am truly evil. Either that, or my reaction to the death of that particular breed of dog is symbolic in some way, and is therefore too specific a case to extrapolate that I would act similarly evilly towards all dogs.

Who knows? Whatever the case, I will get started on skinning the Pole tomorrow, as I feel it's only fair to the man. I have, after all, been promising to skin him for several days now, and, evil though I am, I do not wish to gain a reputation for being unpunctual.

I Fail to Establish my Immorality

Today I precipitated the demise of a cat through ghastly methodology and felt no concomitant guilt. From this success I deduced that I was indeed truly evil. Boasting to my dead mother of my feat, I was surprised to hear that this was by no means sufficient proof of wickedness, because more than half the world's population hates cats and would kill them themselves given half a chance. My dead mother, who is knowledgable about such things, informs me that cats are creatures of evil anyway, so technically I have committed a good act by ending its miserable life.

This is a step backwards. My dead mother suggests that a better project to test my evil nature would be a dog. All dogs are innocent and wholly good, with the exception of Zoltan (hound of Dracula). My mother proposes, and I have taken her up on the challenge, that tomorrow I find a dog and garrote it. This I will do, and monitor the levels of guilt I feel consequently. If no guilt is felt, I am undoubtedly evil.

I hope I can do my wicked mother proud, or else that poor Pole will never get skinned!

I Perform a Hobbling

Hello halfwits!! In order to regain my wickedness I have eaten the crystals of evil in their entirety. I am certain that it has succeeded for reasons I will explain below.

Yesterday, to test the strength of my evilness, I crushed the leg of a ladybird (it was innocent of any wrongdoing and deserved no such torture). It was exactly like that scene in the film Misery where the fat woman cripples the writer with a sledgehammer, except that I merely used my finger to destroy the ladybird's leg and, of course, the ladybird was not a romantic novelist. I am confident that I am imbued with the evilness of ten devils for I felt practically no guilt after performing this nefarious act. In point of fact, at seeing the ladybird hobble away, I laughed aloud.

I remain wary of skinning the Pole until I am absolutely assured that I am 100% evil because I do not want to be bothered with pangs of guilt midway through administering the skinning and be forced to stop, for that would be embarrassing and would be most unpleasant for the Pole.

Tomorrow I will take the life of some creature. If I suffer no guilt and I delight in the creature's death, then it is certain that I am evil and I can safely graduate to skinning the Pole. However, if I feel sorrow at my actions then it will be painfully apparent that I am not evil enough to flay another human being and I will be forced to abandon my ambitions of becoming a world-renowned Dark Lord.

Keep your fingers crossed for me you halfwits!!

An Uncomfortable Avenue of Thought

Today my dead mother said something which gave me cause to worry. As is her wont, she had been expounding at length upon the nature of evil and had been tutoring me in the most efficient methods of bewitching the good people of the world.

"It is quite simple to hex the Godly," she said. "With the power of evil, we can make good people believe practically anything. The mentalist Derren Brown, for example, is adept at such mesmerism, for he is one of us - a being of pure evil."

This factoid concerning Derren Brown was not the thing that gave me cause to worry. After all, why should it? A man's moral tilt does not affect his ability to entertain and Brown is a showman of no small talent. No, the thing that worried me was this:

"Did you see how easy it was for me to bewitch that ass Gland and the two policemen?" she asked. "I merely twisted reality so that any good person in the immediate vicinity of our victim would perceive the victim as a pillow effigy. Of course, you and I saw the truth of the matter for we are each of us completely evil and have no trace of good in us, but the good doctor and the two lawmen saw a pillow effigy. Now Horton, fetch a blade at once! That Pole won't skin himself you know!"

You understand why this gave me cause to worry? I too had seen the Pole transformed into a pillow effigy when my mother cast her spell. Does this fact mean that I still have good in me? I hope not!

I have managed to put off skinning the Pole for the time being whilst I consider my options. I have fobbed my mother off by saying that because I am so evil, I wish to savour the Pole's terror for as long as possible before skinning him and she seems satisfied with this for the moment.

I do hope I am still evil otherwise I won't enjoy skinning the Polish man at all.

Dr Anthony Gland Pays a Visit

Hello halfwits!! On Wednesday evening I received a visit from an overwrought Dr Anthony Gland who was accompanied by two policemen. Before I had time to invite them in, the policemen stormed through the hall to my bedroom where the weeping Pole was bound and gagged, awaiting a skinning. As they did so, Dr Anthony Gland talked slowly and gently to me and reassured me that everything was okay now. He explained in measured tones, as though talking to a child or a simpleton, that he had read of my recent actions on my blog and was deeply concerned about my welfare and the welfare of the unnamed Pole.

"Tell him you made it up," my dead mother hissed. Evidently she communicated telepathically for Gland heard none of it.

"My dear man," I said, "Forgive me for the confusion caused, but I simply made all that business up. It is mere fiction. Dark subject matter of course, and certainly not to everyone's tastes, but fictional nonetheless. You did not seriously believe that I had abducted a Pole and meant to skin him? Why, it's palpably absurd!"

At this point, the policemen reappeared and urged Gland to accompany them to the room where the bruised and bloody Pole lay quivering on the floor. Well, I was certain then that the game was up and my indiscretion would be uncovered - there was no denying I had a bound Pole in my room. I followed them and was alarmed to see that in place of the weeping Pole, there was a collection of pillows tightly restrained by a length of stout rope.

"I have bewitched them Horton," my mother whispered, "They believe that the man is a mere pillow effigy crudely decked out to look like a Pole. Go with it Horton and all will be well."

"Is this the Polish man you wrote about on your weblog Horton?" asked Gland, indicating the pillows.

"Of course!" I said, "You see? The whole thing was a mere fabrication! This collection of pillows is no more a Pole than you are a jar of tartare sauce. Now that this is settled, would you care for some Um Bongo?"

The policemen, peeved at having their time wasted, gave the house a cursory once over then left. Gland spent some time talking quietly to me about any worries I might have and any strange ideas I might be having. He told me to phone him if ever I felt angry or glum, to which I agreed.

As soon as he left, the sound of weeping could once again be heard. Checking my bedroom, the pillow effigy had returned to its true state as a trussed up Pole. He knew he had been naughty, that Pole, and sensed that his punishment would be swift and sharp.

The Pole in his form as a pillow effigy

Further Wickedness

The itinerant Pole eventually regained consciousness. Currently he is tied up in the living room. It was I who trussed him up in such a way, because it seems that I am irredeemably evil. How he weeps! If I wasn't evil, I would certainly be wracked with guilt and fear over my inhuman actions to this Pole, but I am evil and hence feel no such guilt or fear.

I have not yet done anything to physically harm him (apart from the initial bludgeoning), though my dead mother berates me constantly and urges me to do so. She calls for the Pole to be skinned. She is fixated upon this point and will not accept anything less. How the man weeps! It is difficult to concentrate with such a din.

In an attempt to placate my dead mother, I made some effort to torture the Pole by making a hot cocoa for him but I wilfully omitted the sugar so that he visibly winced at the bitterness of that drink. My dead mother was unimpressed by my barbarity and continued demanding that I skin the Pole at once.

How he weeps! Because I am evil, I suppose I must ultimately skin the man, yet something stays my hand. It cannot be guilt or pity because I am terribly evil and unaffected by such whimsies. I must take a while to strengthen my courage and remind myself that I am a being of pure evil.

Must go now - Dragons' Den is on.

An evil act is committed

Today I received a visit from an itinerant Pole. He was shabbily attired and asked in broken English whether he could sell me one of his drawings for £8.00. Doing so, he intimated, would allow him to support his family as well as leaving me with a drawing I could display in my home. I had no need of a picture of a daffodil, so prepared to send the cove on his merry way.

At once, my dead mother's voice could be heard urging me to accost the Pole. I gathered that the Pole was oblivious to these cries, for he did not react in any way to my dead mother's shrieking.

"This is your chance Horton," she said. "Capture this man and do evil unto him. You must hone your skills. Do it. Do it now!"

Because I am now evil, I invited him into the house. Swiftly, I struck him a heavy blow on the back of the head with the blunt end of an umbrella stand. He remains unconscious on the floor of my hall as I type this.

Dear readers, although I am terribly evil and revel in treachery and violence, I must admit to being shaken by my actions and confess that I rather hope my evilness wears off before tomorrow when my dead mother, whose maniacal laughter still echoes through my Dundee home, will surely force me to do awful things.

Some Drawbacks to Evilness

My dead mother has continued to persuade me to increase my efforts to be evil. Apparently the evil acts I have thus far committed are simply insufficient. Readers, to be candid for a moment, I feel I must admit that, evil though I am, and pleasurable though evil is, I am growing somewhat weary of the evil way of life. It is not without its drawbacks.

Today, for example, I sat down with a mug of miso soup and an egg mayonnaise sandwich (two of the most evil foodstuffs I could think of) and prepared to watch Diagnosis Murder with Dick Van Dyke. No sooner had I switched the television on than my dead mother screeched at me to switch it off. She explained that, because I was now evil I could only watch a pirated copy of the programme. If an opportunity to harm someone exists, regardless of how minimal that harm may be, the evil man must seize that chance. Thus I had to scroll through fan webpages on the internet to identify what episode I should be watching.

Satisfied that I had found the correct episode (Season 2, Episode 2: 'A Very Fatal Funeral'), I was then obliged to download it illegally on YouTube, though someone, in an ignorant effort to be helpful, had broken up that episode into several smaller parts but had named each file inconsistently. It took many hours to piece together the episode and the final result was unsatisfying. Tiny picture, tinny sound, and Dr. Sloan's moustache was far too pixelly to be appreciated as Van Dyke intended.

I found myself wishing, just then, that I could turn off my evilness for just the shortest amount of time, so that I could enjoy the legal showing of Diagnosis Murder on BBC 1. That feeling was fleeting however! I am properly evil again. I hate you all, you halfwits!

Wickedness and Stan Brakhage

Hello halfwits!! In this blog entry, I'm not going to use any paragraph breaks and I'm going to write in a small font and use multiple different colours. In case you have forgotten, I am now evil so I am allowed to do this kind of thing. I derive an almost indecent amount of glee at the thought of you halfwits screwing your eyes up in a foolhardy effort to read this entry - because I am evil, I disrespect you so much that I want it to be an unholy chore for you to plough through this blog. You might be beginning to hate me now...GOOD!!! I am evil and thrive on hatred. My dead mother, in the form of the little scottie dog from Monopoly, keeps urging me to be more evil. She says my previous efforts have fallen short of the level of evilness she had hoped for when first she tempted me to eat the crystals of evil. To this end, I paid a trip to Dundee's Art House cinema this afternoon and sat through a Stan Brakhage festival (that man is also evil and does not wish to bring his audience any pleasure). Throughout the various screenings, I ate noisily from a large bag of TORTILLA CHIPS! CruNcHy! lol. The three other people in the audience were thoroughly irked. You might note that I just used the acronym 'lol'. This also derives from my newfound evil nature. I just love to think of my readers being momentarily annoyed because of me. L8R halfwits!!

I Explore my Evil Nature

Greetings halfwits!! I have continued my life of evilness with a great deal of pleasure. Yesterday I put potato peelings and banana skins into my general waste wheelie bin and failed to put them into my organic waste wheelie bin. Dundee City Council will no doubt be furious when they learn of this, because it is as though I am completely belittling their efforts to encourage us to be more environmentally friendly. Because I am so dreadfully evil, this thought amuses me greatly. My laugh, which has heretofore been a modest 'ha ha ha' has now aquired the prefix 'bw-' and the suffix '-aaaaaaah!!" in deference to my new evil status. Hence, when now I chuckle, my laugh is as follows: 'Bwah ha ha haaaaaaah!!'.

The day before yesterday, I stole a copy of Sliding Doors from HMV. That is correct - I did not give the cashier the £2.99 cost of the DVD - I simply took it for my own without any money changing hands, so evil am I. The film stars Gwyneth Paltrow as a women with two different hairstyles, and the man from Four Weddings and a Funeral as an ingratiating Scot. There's also something about alternative universes but not done very well because there are no evil twins involved.

The day before the day before yesterday I snuck into the Wellgate library and folded over the page corners of selected books by Kathy Reichs. Untraceable to me of course, but it gives me a certain amount of malevolent glee to think of various future readers being irked by the folded pages. Bwah ha ha haaaaaaaaaah!!

Today I saw a child dressed as Peter Pan collecting money for Comic Relief. I gave her nothing save a sneer of contempt. The look of disappointment on her crestfallen face warmed my black heart for the rest of the day. I do so love being evil. You halfwits!

Evil!!!

Readers, I am evil. Doubtless you will scarcely recognise my new mode of narration because I am now so unconscionably iniquitous, but I care not!! You will observe that I made use of two exclamation marks at the end of the last sentence. This is not in keeping with accepted rules of punctuation, but I am free of such tyranny now that I am evil. My dead mother was dead right - I have greatly enjoyed my albeit brief daliance with the world of wickedness - all my doubts and fears about embracing evilness now seem immature and misguided - I revel in my sins, and derive inestimable pleasure from committing atrocities, and not just atrocities of punctuation!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;-)

You will see that I made use of multiple exclamation marks and a 'smilie' at the end of the previous sentence. Had I not informed you that I was evil, most of you would have guessed by now - no person possessing any degree of morality would deliberately choose to so offend their readers by utilizing such tortuous effects. My decent into the maelstrom of evilness is so assured that I can even leave glaring spelling errors uncorrected in my writing, as in this sentence!! I care nothing for my readers' enjoyment, so evil am I. Horton Carew? You must now call me Hellrton Scare-ew, because I am so evil. And bow when you do so.

You will see that I am late in updating this blog (it cannot escape your notice that I now use the unpleasant-sounding word 'blog' to refer to my electronic diary - this is because I am evil and no longer wish to protect my readers from the vagaries of irritating modern-day nonce words). The erratic approach to the updating of blogs shows severe disrespect for one's readers. Thus, because I am evil, I will continue to annoy you by not updating regularly.

From now on, I will refer to my readers as 'halfwits' because I am evil. Any photos I choose to post will be offensive in nature and will cause you distress. But who cares?!! Not me, I'm evil!! You halfwits.

My Resolve Is Finally Defeated

The final steps towards losing myself completely to the diabolical word of evilness have almost been taken. I feel unable to withstand temptation any longer.

Is denying responsibility for my weakness merely proof that I have already in some way succumbed to evil? I do not know. I will say that few men could withstand the temptations I have been compelled to endure and survive unscathed and untainted. Well do I remember the harrowing day in which my dead mother, in the form of the little scottie dog from Monopoly, turned evil. From that day forth, this mysterious associate has contrived to wind herself into my affairs, both spiritual and temporal, and break me. Surely no man is strong enough to resist the myriad benefits of evilness? Whether it behoves me to curse God for forsaking me these last days, or to curse myself for failing to be stronger in resolution, is hid from my discernment and will remain so hidden until that day when my accounts are to make up and reckon for in another world.

I will go, weeping now, to the fridge. There I will take out a crystal of pure evil and devour it. I hope it doesn't taste like horseradish - I can't abide the stuff.

Giving in...

Readers, I am in turmoil. These last days, I have done my utmost to withstand the temptation to eat the forbidden crystals of evil and join my dead mother in a life of wickedness, but feel I am losing this battle of wills. I have descended into a paranoid swither.

"Go on, Horton - be a spawn of Satan," my dead mother said. "You'll love being evil. You can eat foie gras and veal and any variety of succulent but unethical foods. No more overpriced free-range eggs! If you become evil, you can save money by buying the cheap, battery-farmed eggs. They taste the same anyway - you know they do!"

Foie Gras: a delight

"You will no longer have to buy Fairtrade coffee," she went on, "And you can stop using public transport and start driving an environmentally-unfriendly SUV. It'll make you look like a big man. And you can make sexist jokes. Give in to temptation, Horton."

And so it went on. Day after day, I was reminded of the many benefits of embracing evilness. In a vain effort to provide myself with some form of counterpoint to these views, I turned to Songs of Praise but found only a boyish Welshman who singularly failed to make goodness seem cool or hip.

I do not think I will last much longer. The pewter scottie dog which houses my mother's soul seems to be smiling as I type this - it surely knows that my resolve is weakening. Alas, I fear I am not strong enough to get through the week without eating one of those crystals...

Dear god - if god ye be - come to the aid of a poor lost sheep.

Tempted by Evilness

I have spent the last few days fretting over a moral conundrum. My dead mother, through the vessel of the little scottie dog from Monopoly, has beleaguered me with constant glorification of the evil way of life. She never stops telling me of the benefits of being evil and embracing the dark side of one's nature. She urges me to eat of the evil crystals in the fridge and join her in being wicked.

"Give in to your evil side," she says. "It is a lovely life. You can laugh at cripples without any guilt."

You see how she tempts me? She promises we can be evil together and embark on a reign of terror, which sounds nice. Intuitively, I know I should not give in to this, no matter how enticing my mother makes evil out to be.

I hope I am strong enough to resist. Won't somebody help me?

The Evilness Must Stop!

So bad was today's taunting that I briefly toyed with the notion of exorcising the malevolent soul of my late mother, but quickly abandoned the scheme when I realised I possessed neither the wherewithal nor gumption to perform such an act. Perhaps foolishly, I still hope that the evilness will go away of its own accord and leave me with the sweet, good, and untarnished soul of my cold, dead mother, so that we might resume our relationship that ended 13 years ago in unfortunate circumstances. We could go on picnics and such.

The photograph of my dead mother has melted so that she now looks like Andrew Lloyd Webber or one of those saggy-jowled fellows.

Webber, Andy Lloyd

Today I caught the scottie dog doing something unpleasant to a crucifix, so decided that enough was enough - I would have to establish exactly how and why evilness has been permitted to gain control. The game is afoot! This will take every ounce of my deductive ability and will likely take months and months of painstaking research before I uncover the mystery.


Edited to add: It turns out the scottie dog has mistakenly eaten some of the raw evil in the fridge (see entry at January 14th). That's probably it!

The Dog Continues its Evilness

Today the evilness continues unabated. The glowing red eyes and the harsh voice persist, but have now been augmented by copious swearing which I cannot reproduce here for fear of offending my female readership. I have no doubt that if I had a tiny leather jacket, the little scottie dog would instantly don it, and that if I provided a miniature packet of smokes, it would instantly smoke them, so unassailably evil is that dog.

Oh mother - if mother ye be - what have I done to turn thee so evil? Do you hold me responsible for the terrible events 13 years ago? Tell me, what must I do to make things right?

Evilness in Pewter Form

Readers, I have endured a sweat-slicked and sleepless night. Given previous grim events that I have recounted to you in this electronic diary, you will perhaps be unsurprised to hear that my sweat-slicked and sleepless night was not occassioned through a passionate encounter with a nude lady, but rather through terrifying and discommodious thoughts. I fear it is now certain that the little scottie dog from Monopoly, which houses the soul of my dead mother, is evil.

Whether my mother's soul has been spirited away to some dark realm and been replaced by some demonic entity or whether her soul has actually become evil, I cannot say. However, that the scottie dog is evil is indubitable because its eyes glow red. There is no surer sign of evil, save for torture and murder on an epic scale, than glowing red eyes. And to confirm its evilness, it now speaks in a crackly, hoarse voice, which is the mode of speech favoured by the irredeemably wicked.

All last night the evil voice taunted me by saying things about my late mother. Evil things. The evil voice had perhaps gone a bit overboard with the gravelly, rasping business because I could not really hear what it was saying. I think I caught it saying, "Your mother knits socks in Hell" but I could have misheard.

Its eyes continue to glow red. Readers, I do not know what to do.

The Photograph Mutates

Since I went public with my hypothesis yesterday, the photograph of my dead mother has visibly altered. Here is an image of what the photograph looks like today:

I can only assume that this bodes well.

The Truth about the Dog

I feel confident now in revealing my suspicious suspicions regarding the little scottie dog from Monopoly and my dear late mother...

They are one and the same. The soul of my dead mother has somehow found its way into the tiny pewter likeness of a dog. Of that there can now be no doubt.

That is all.

Testing my Theory

I am almost ready to go public with my theory regarding the little scottie dog from Monopoly and my dear late mother. It is a crazy theory and one that will never be accepted by today's scientists or even by my own devoted readership which consists principally of gypsies and dwarves. It will shock you to the very core of your being.

Today saw me placing a rubber quoit adjacent to the dog and recording the results in a jotter. Those results augment my theory nicely, but I will refrain from sharing them.

I also took the dog to Debenham's hosiery section and observed its reactions, which fell pat as I assumed. Again though, I will not report the nature of my findings.

Finally, I briefly opened the hatch to my basement and held the dog above it. After clearing up the ensuing mess and arranging to have my perforated eardrum fixed, I am satisfied that my conclusions concerning this strange little dog are correct.

The implications are terrifying.