Update...

It has been a long time since I, the least diligent blogger in the world, directly addressed you, the casually interested blog consumer. I got very sick of that style of blog and vowed never to fall victim to it again.

"It's lazy James, who cares what we're doing?" I'd say.

But my recent output of stories has been pathetic, so I thought I would post the following list of things by way of explanation, in an attempt to mollify you, if indeed you required mollifying.

1. I have been unemployed. Not the good kind either. The kind that puts you in debt to your friends and family in such a fashion as to make it impossible to keep track of who you owe what and when. (If I owe you money, speak now. For some reason I've decided it's your responsibility).

2. I have got a new job. It is very busy. There is no time to blog at this job. It would be considered extremely churlish to knock out 700-odd words of childish narrative while billable hours went to waste (I'm worth $90!).

3. I have moved house. James and I have moved from Glebe to Surry Hills, with our special new friend Kym. He is a Caucasian male of average height and skinny jeans. Junkies have been all over the glove box of my car like Phil Waugh on a Gilbert pigskin ever since I started parking near Central Station. Fools, don't they realise I possess nothing of value? The next step: mousetraps! (Thanks to the old bloke who eavesdropped on the train for providing this suggestion.)

4. I have been reading Clive James. My girlfriend gave me James' book Cultural Amnesia for Christmas. After reading the short essays that make up this book, it is difficult to have enough faith in myself to write my shopping list. In each short essay he makes reference to at least four three-volume works, in languages other than English, that he appears to be intimately familiar with. I'm pretty sure he's a wanker (and the book was riddled with terrible spelling errors), but still, I feel like a little boy with a crayon scrawling on the Gyprock(tm) walls of my parents' one bedroom council flat.


5. I have contracted a comical disease more commonly associated with less-affluent characters in Charles Dickens' novels.
Me: I can't wait for the start of next week. Uni, work, tutoring, work, it's gonna be amazing. I'll love having my routine back.
Family: You look terrible. See a doctor.
Doctor (interrupting from the other table): You have X.
Me: X? What the hell is that?!
Doctor: You might have heard of it as Y.
Me: Y? I thought the last reported case of that was seen in a French soldier with a particularly weak constitution in the trenches on the Somme, who had been eating trench rats raw?
Doctor: Don't go to work, university or the bank for at least a week.
Me: What about my girlfriend? Could I have infected her?
Doctor: She should probably burn her house down.
Me: Bummer.