My China Journal
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It's been a long time / now I'm / coming back home...

Some memorable crossword clues, for no reason other than that they're memorable:

Gegs (9, 4)
Scrambled eggs

Play Ankoolger (4, 4, 2, 5)
Look Back In Anger

Yogdaws (3, 5, 2, 10, 4)
God moves in mysterious ways

If you don't get them, you're probably a fan of the puerile American style quick crossword rather than the infinitely superior British cryptic one.

 
Entirely by the way, I have changed my anagrammed psuedonym from the wimpy "Albert Wire" to the enigmatic "Warble Rite" on medical advice. I reserve the right to make future changes.

 
I've been busy with not writing, but I have managed to put in some words on my China Journal blog. This writing thingummy is fun, but I need more discipline. Lots more discipline.

I had a bizarre experience the other day (Tuesday). My wife and I are getting some new life insurance and we have to undergo a battery of tests for that. In this convenient age, the doctor comes to you, rather than the other way around, and a doctor had visited me on Monday night to poke and probe my chest and stomach and tut-tut over my blood pressure and my weight. For my wife, a lady doctor was scheduled to visit us at 7:45 a.m. on Tuesday.

I was sitting comfortably in my living room, reading the morning newspaper when the lady doctor was announced. She came bounding into the room and without so much as a "Good morning," she cast a jovial eye in my direction and addressed me by my childhood nickname, which is a source of reasonable embarassment, like most childhood nicknames. As far as I was aware, I had never met the lady in my life, so I did the only possible thing: I gaped.

She gave me her name, which enlightened me not at all, and then proceeded to explain to my wife that I had been the absolutely cutest baby she had ever encountered in her life and that I continued to hold the title of cutest baby ever, as far as she was concerned. She gushed that she used to make it a point to visit our house each evening so that she could "pet me" - her words. Apparently she had grown up next door to us, and being a decade or so older, had been enamoured of my cuteness as a baby, and need a daily fix of "petting" yours truly.

Well, when you're middle-aged, balding and tending to flab, to be told that you were cute by a complete stranger and that neighborhood girls would fight to pet you on a daily basis is a tremendous boost. When the neighborhood girl is now a lady doctor and still remembers your sex appeal with wistful nostalgia... I now scoff at movie stars and rock musicians: their fan clubs have nothing on mine!

 
I was regaled with a delicious tautology this morning. A colleague, when discussing the Iraq war, informed me in all earnestness that the human shields who went over to Baghdad were in "serious danger of being fatally killed!"

 
My first Rolling Stones concert last night. Geriatric. Dinosaurs. Call 'em what you will, they can still rock the house down. Mindblowing. Superb. Visceral.

These sixty-plus grandfathers prance about the stage like twenty-year olds giving forty-year olds like me a complex. I think I wasted my youth being studious, abstinent and celibate. Should have dropped out of school, mainlined, chain-smoked and orgied away the nights. That way I might have been in half as good shape today at forty-three as Mick Jagger is at sixty-two.

Oh, well. Just Honky Tonk Women was worth the price of admission and when you throw in Brown Sugar, Satisfaction, Jumpin' Jack Flash and about sixteen others for two solid non-stop hours - and let's not forget Keith's amazing turn as solo singer and bluesy guitarist on Slidin' Away - then you've got a night to remember. I hope my daughter remembers this, her first concert, with as much delight when she's forty-three and can tell her children she was there when the legends rocked and rolled.

 
Okay, let's get this "able writer" thing out of the way. Is my choice of pseudonym dictated by my estimation of my abilities? Well, I'd like to think so, but it's actually just an acronym of the "about" statement on the top left of my page. I can't think of co-o-ol webnames the way all those chatters do: "funkydude" and "jetsinblack" kind of names leave me cold. So, the easiest way to choose a nickname was to go the acronym route.

Since I'm a cryptic crossword fan, it wasn't enough to get the acronym out of my system, No, I also had to worm an anagram in there. Hence, my name, Albert Wire, anagram of able writer. Okay, if you're not a cryptic crossword fan or even a lowly quick crossword fan, I don't expect you to be turning cartwheels of delight at that exercise. Take it from me, though, word play is the next best thing to fore play.

If words and their etymology and usage fascinate you, you might check out this site: Wordsmith. It's run by an amazingly knowledgeable wordsmith by the unlikely moniker of Anu Garg, which anagrams to anagrug, which doesn't mean anything, as far as I can tell, but sounds like something or someone out of Tolkien.

There! I've got in two pitches for some of my favourites into one sentence. Not that Anu and his garg rank in my pantheon of luminaries with say, Lennon, Dylan or Wodehouse, but it's a start. (You noticed, I've got three more into this blog in that sentence? Enough, Albert, stop it!)

This anagramming thing can be carried too far. I now realise that while Albert Wire is a nice enough anagram as it goes, it has one unfortunate drawback: my blog entries are credited to a wimpy looking "Albert". Hmmm, must look into this. Not half as interesting as Anagorn, son of Arathorn, or Arachnid, Golden Spider of Doom.

Entirely by the way, "Anagorn" is what all tennis commentators probably remark after the beautiful Kournikova bows out in the first round of every tournament she enters. Smashing is an adjective one can apply to Awesome Anna but not to her game, more's the pity.

 
Well! A small sentence for bloggers, a momentous one for me. My first post, in fact, the first time I've ever attempted anything like a journal in the last 43 years.

I don't intend this to be a daily journal or personal diary though. More a place for me to test whether I enjoy writing as much as I enjoy thinking about enjoying writing. A bonus will be if others out there enjoy reading what I write.

What am I going to post here? Maybe reviews of movies, books, music, people, not necessarily in that order. Certainly a stab at "creative writing", although that sounds dreadfully like Sophomore 101. We'll see how the muse amuses me. Some personal aspects are undoubtedly going to seep through, and it remains to be seen how I'm going to cope with that. How you're going to cope with it is your problem, of course.