Mock Duck

Quiz - Sadomasochist or Accountant

To cheer up this bleak miserable winter days - I've compiled a little test for you. Let me know your results ;)

WHAT IS YOUR FETISH??

1. How would your friends describe your personality?

A   "Totally normal in every single way."

b    "Has his Feet on the ground"

C    "She Nose her own mind"

D    "So dull, could bore a corpse to death at its own funeral"

2. What qualities do you value in a partner:

A    Love, loyalty and trust, sense of humour, good looks etc...

B    Shoes, shoes, shoes and shoes

C    A fine flaring pair of nostrils

D    Their own calculator

3.  Who is your idea of the perfect couple?

A    Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie

B    Elton John and Imelda Marcos

C    Barbra Streisand and Cyrano de Bergerac

D    Ernest Saunders and Carole Vordermann

4.  You're at a party and spot Ms/Mr Drop Dead Gorgeous standing by the nibbles. Do you:

A    Wander over to them, strike up conversation and find out about them as a person?

B    Let your eyes wander downwards and find that they are wearing SOCKS AND SANDALS – ugh ugh ugh!

C    Wander over to them to find out who they are as a person – whilst casually inserting a forefinger up  their right nostril?

D    Lounge at the nibbles table beside them, dropping a few remarks about your prowess between the spreadsheets and suggest they might want to  come up and “liquidate your assets” sometime?

5.   You have a stressful time coming up at work and you can’t take time off. Your colleague announces they have flu – do you:

A    Cover yourself from head-to-toe with Dettol and put on a gas mask

B    Say nothing and quickly change the subject to the nice pair of Manolo Blahniks she is wearing

C    Shout “I don’t care!” and stick your tongue up her nostrils

D    Take advantage of their weakened state to deliver a lecture on the latest Inland Revenue Tax Codes


6.   In a staff meeting a colleague presents one of your ideas as her own. Do you:

A    Say nothing in front of your colleagues, but talk to her afterwards in a reasonable manner.

B    Start shouting at her, make her cry and then steal all her used tissues.

C    Stab her through the heart with your 9inch stiletto heel.

D    Draw up an excel spreadsheet to display the number of times she has taken the credit for your ideas and then take revenge by boring her to death with a 3 hour demonstration of the latest SAGE software.

7.  If your home was going up in flames what would you risk your life to save:

A     Your family: you’re a decent human being and know what’s important in life.

B     Your novelty designer wellington boot collection: there’s nothing like the smell of rubber

C    Your decongestant nasal spray and collection of vibrating nose-rings

D    Your company tie.

RESULTS

Mostly As

You are completely normal. (Yes, the gas mask and Dettol is a perfectly rational reaction to being faced by some inconsiderate bastard with a cold.) So normal in fact that I suggest you go back and take the test and try and answer the questions a little bit more imaginatively this time.

Mostly Bs

You are a shoe fetishist. Either that or you're a woman. Same thing really. The most important thing in your life is shoes – you are ashamed of how obsessed you are with shoes. You would secretly sacrifice your friends, family, partner – to save your one pair of gold sequinned Manolo Blahniks. You often sleep tucked in you bed surrounded by hundreds of unwrapped pairs - whilst your partner is left on the shoe rack in the wardrobe.

Mostly Cs

You are a nose fetishist. You love noses in all shapes and forms: aquiline, stubby, hairy, trunk-like. There is nothing sexier to you than a titillating sniff - or an orgasmic sneeze. As for a full-blown cold...even the boxes of tissues have you reaching for the box of tissues. You are filled with the unstoppable desire to caress the nose of shop keepers, strangers on the street, your boss...Red nose day is pure torture for you. Knowing no one will ever understand, you become a plastic surgeon simply to get closer to the object of your desires. You eventually cause a scandal by running off with one of your patients' noses to South America - where the two of you live blissfully ever after.

Mostly Ds

You ARE the ultimate accountant. Nothing turns you on doing the End of Year Returns. You talk about nothing but tax. Or Sage. Or Excel. You wonder why people instantly drop dead as soon as you walk into the room. You wonder why your friends tell you they can't see you because they have bird-flu and you never see them again. Life is lonely, unless you find another accountant to be with. In which case, you can lie in bed together, in an orgiastic exchange of bodily cashflows on a sea of damp spreadsheets...Or maybe not. Let's not go mad.  You are an accountant, after all.

Keeping a professional relationship with your characters

Spent an enjoyable evening watching "Stranger Than Fiction". A nice low-key film with some good performances. And it was good to hear the voice-over of the book that was being written too - usually considered a no-no in films. I thought it worked very well.

For those that don't know, the basic premise is that an author with writer's block, is writing a book, but the character she is writing about is real. He hears her voice, learns through the narrative in his head that he is about to be killed off and...

I don't think I've given too much away there. Interleaved with the story are some nice lines about story, genre, whether it is better to live now or live on forever through a work of art. But also, it seemed to me anyway, there was also a tongue-in-cheek exploration of the way that characters DO become real to writers.

Don't worry, I'm not about to go on about my characters as though they were my best friends. There is nothing more icky than when people say things "I tried to make him do such-and-such, but he simply wouldn't let me" or "I never tell my characters what to do, they let me know what they are going to do, when they are ready". Characters are characters for goodness sake! They are in your head, and you DICTATE TO THEM! Ok?

But, I have found that you can't always predict your own attitude to your characters. For example, I have a character called Alan. He represents everything I don't like in terms of values and character. He is weak and vain and self-serving. He values status and lords it over others. He treats people with selfishness and disdain. He only values that which impresses, nothing for it's own sake. Originally, he was a character ripe for punishment and ridicule. After all, isn't that one of the great pleasures in writing (spiky comic writing anyway) that you get to reward those you approve of and punish those you don't?

So what happens? I end up getting fond of him. Oh hell.  That wasn't supposed to happen. Yes, he has wormed his way into my affections and is now one of my favourite characters. And it's not just me. My sister, who had been reading my book recently said, "I know I'm not supposed to, but I really like Alan. Can't you make him win in the end?"

Let him win? Let him win? But that would destroy the whole point of the book, what I am trying to say, my world view, general take on life, values, the whole caboodle!

Dammit, I thought, how on earth have I allowed this to happen?

A friend of mine had a similar problem. She has two characters: one she related to and one who she had no sympathy with whatsoever. Part of the structure of her work demanded that the first character was sympathetic, the latter - not. When I met her she had her head in her hands. "I don't understand," she said, shaking her head. "I don't like this character, relate to him, approve of him, anything and yet I am just flowing whenever I write about him. But the other one - the one I really like, approve of, want people to feel sympathy for - I can't write about at all!"

Why does this happen? Do we set out to write about those we can't stand because there is something of us in them? (What an awful thought.) Or is it that when writing about those we don't actually like that we are forced to engage with them more than those characters with a closer view to our own? Or is it simply that baddies are more fun?

So what am I going to do with my wayward character? Can I bring myself to punish him as originally intended? My sister is rooting for him. But I can't just renege on my world view and let him win, can I?

What answer did I come up with? Obviously I'm not going to give away the answer here. But let's just say I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome...(hehehe).

Do different countries have different senses of humour?

Inspired by Leena's musing about comedy in other cultures, I was reminded of a story I wanted to post here. I was in the pub with some friends - two were German, one was Spanish and we got onto the subject of comparing our national senses of humour. The jokes from each country seemed to reveal certain themes.

Every joke my Spanish friend told us would start with something like, "There was this guy with a penis sticking out of his forehead, right?" or "There was this flying bum with wings, right?" I could see where they were coming from, although couldn't quite think of a British equivalent.

However, the German jokes made no sense to me at all.  There was one, which had both my German companions falling off their chairs and crying with laughter, which went: "The night is darker than outside". Now, I don't know what might have been lost in translation here (if anyone on the internet could illuminate me, I would be very grateful) but this, apparently, is the joke.

I asked a German woman about it and she said "Ba, it is a lad's joke" which deepened the mystery even further.

So, I said to my German friend, why don't we relate an example of something in real life that we found amusing. He agreed. So I began.

I had recently been flat-hunting and viewed a succession of bachelor-pads where the owners had fancied their skills in the old DIY and contemporary design department. The most extreme example of this was one flat - beautifully minimal, inbuilt sound system, even some decorative pebbles and a piece of driftwood laid out in the bathroom - which was owned by this very swaggering flash individual in his twenties.

"Yes," he said. "I think you'll find this flat boasts many stylish contemporary design features. The surround-sound, the underfloor heating" and then he revealed his piece de resistance: he opened the door of his bedroom with a flourish and said, "Behold - the sunken bed."

I walked in to be greeted by the sight of a small tenement bedroom with a large hole about 5 foot square in the middle of the floor that had been cut right through the floorboards. Out of this hole poked a double bed - two legs in, two legs out. As I stood there, aghast, he swaggered into the room and leant rakishly on the bedhead.

"Yes," he said smoothly, "I miscalculated slightly, but if you got a smaller bed, you could probably get it in. I like to think it is a unique selling feature."

I chuckled away at this whilst my German friend shook his head and said, "I don't find that funny - but this is".

He told me that one day he was having his breakfast in his flat when his landlord arrived and mysteriously cut a small square out of the living room carpet. He rolled it up, put it in a bag and left. My friend chuckled away to himself.

I said, "why? What was he doing?"

He said, "who knows - isn't it hilarious?"

I found the man with the sunken bed funny because he was trying to do something - create a cool design feature that would increase the value of his flat - and getting it so hopelessly wrong that it achieved the exact opposite result. It was the link between the intent and the result that was funny to me. Whereas my German friend found something strange, with no meaning and no explanation, hilarious. We wondered together if there was something cultural in our responses.

My example seemed to fit with a lot of archetypal British humour: Fawlty in Fawlty Towers trying to impress someone with status and, through mistaken identity, achieving the exact opposite by impressing the wrong person and being nasty to the one he wanted to impress; Del Boy trying to make a million and losing everything. And I thought - oh no - is my story, like so much British humour, essentially about class? About knowing one's place, about laughing at someone's pretensions and aspirations? With the message essentially becoming: know your place, don't try and better yourself, you're just going to look a fool?

Whereas my German friend, who is very obsessed with rules (he has been trying to figure out the "rules" for which side of the street British people walk down for seven years now and his idea of fun is to dart across the road on the red man in front of German tourists saying "that'll give them a thrill, eh?") is tickled by the notion of bizarre behaviour with apparently no rules or explanation.

Does this mean, I thought in a wave of paranoia, that the message of my humour - a product of class-obsessed Britain - is "know your place", whether I like it or not? How depressing. Does this mean I am a terrible and horrible human being?

Obviously you can't generalise from a few anecdotes and this post is now so riddled with generalisations it is getting ridiculous, but the question of how much culture plays on our sense of humour is fascinating to me. I'm just not sure that I like what that seems to imply about me.

So, I've decided to stick to safer territory from now on...

"There was a man, right, with this penis coming out of his forehead, ok...?"

Comedy or Tragedy: can people choose the way they write?

Can people choose whether they write in the tragic or comic vein?

I was thinking about this in relation to that article as it seems to imply that people make a choice to write in the tragic vein, because it is more respected. Which set me to wondering - how much can people choose the way they write?

I write serious articles or whatever, can be horribly serious and fall into depressions at the drop of a hat, but when it comes to fiction my tendency is always comic. It is something I can't help. It is just natural to me. It seems to be the way I look at things and I somehow feel false - like a charlatan - writing straight fiction, as it were. I don't know if this will change and suddenly I'll be churning out spare bleak prose in my 70s or something. But thus far, that just seems to be the way it is.

Don't get me wrong, I love to read bleak tragic books: they can be wonderful and I can be carried away and get emotionally wrapped up in them, as a reader. But I know, as far as writing is concerned, it isn't what I do or how I think.

So: question of the day - can people choose whether they write in a tragic or a comic vein or is it inherent to your sensibility? (And I am expecting replies from Leena, Lisa, Sarah and Gnardak at least to this question.)