Alder hill and back - the 'Odyssey' in bite-size

I've been ordering a lot of books of Amazon recently to the point that it's almost become some form of addiction. I can find almost any book I want on there and they all look so very cheap as well. You can get books for £3.50 or even cheaper sometimes. But you soon realise that the prices almost fool you because you end up paying a couple of quid for postage and packaging, but it still works out cheaper than buying it from a shop. Play.com has free delievery but it doesn't quite have the range Amazon does, and the books themselves tend to be slightly more expensive, so again the amount you spend wouldn't be much different if you went Amazon or play anyway.

One book I ordered was James Joyce's Ulysses. It's always ranked high in the top 100 works of modern fiction so i've been thinking of giving it a read for some time. It's been a while since I've read any challenging kind of prose writing - most sci-fi or thriller writers aren't particularly skilled in that area. They're good on plot and action - a style of writing much better suited to screenwriting than novels. Dan Brown is a prime example of a writer who can plot well and come up with interesting and exciting situations but he can't write for shit. Not that I can either, that's why I'm doing screenwriting.

So the book was supposed to come through the post yesterday, but given the girth of the thing, it couldn't fit through my letter box so the postman left one of those cards to come pick it up. In itself the story I'm about to tell isn't particularly exciting, humourous, or full of action, but it is kind of ironic, so I think it's worth writing down here (with the rest of the often mundane and trivial crap you find in blogs).

I had to walk to the nearby post office with the card to collect my book, but when I got there they told me the book isn't there. I have to collect it from another post office in Alder Hill. This doesn't usually happen if we miss the postman in the morning. He would usually have the sense to leave it at our nearest post office.

The alder hill post office was about a mile away, at the top of a very big and steep hill, and after a long and arduous journey (not really, but I'm putting that here for "dramatic effect" *yawn*) I finally reach the post office. They tell me my post isn't there yet. The postman hadn't returned from his rounds. It was now a quarter past twelve, the office shuts at one-thirty (why am i writing the time out with letters instead of numbers? It just means more typing (why am i typing "why am I writing the time out with letters instead of numbers?, i'm giving myself more writing to do just by pointing this out! and when i write my blog directly into my blog like this there isn't even an option to copy and paste so I had to type out virtually the same sentence twice giving me even more writing to do)). Back to the story - the postman should be back within the next forty minutes, but the place would be closing shortly after that so I didn't feel it was worth me going home only to have to walk all the way back again. Instead I decided to go for a wonder.

The delightful irony of what was happening dawned on me. Like Ulysses is James Joyce's modern reworking of Homers Odyssey, my efforts to track down and pick up a book that was supposed to be delivered to my front door had turned into a sort of bite-sized version of Homer's greek epic. I was in some far off land far away from home and a journey that should have taken me 5 minutes to complete was now going to take me an hour and a half (oh the horror!).

I decided I would see what was on the other side of the hill and it was then I was lured by a sirens call, (for those of you not familiar with the Odyssey, it's a reference to that but i'm not going to explain it here - just means more typing for me, look it up on wikipedia if you can be bothered). Not far off in the distance I saw a big yellow M. It was calling me to it, and I knew that i should resist it but I couldn't. The Alder Hill McDonalds drive thru had me under its spell and it pulled me in. Shamefully I sat down and had my fill of burgers and chips. (quite an amusing little side note to my visit to this McDonalds: I saw a kid of about seven run up to what he thought was a drive thru speaker, stick his head right in it, and start shouting food orders - it was an outside astray).
Not much happened in my "adventure" after this. Unfortunately this was as far as my story of getting the book would parallel the journey of Odysseus in Homer's poem. I didn't meet any men with one eye, or offered some modern drug equivalent of the lotus leaf. I just waited around a bit, did a bit more exploring of some of the shops nearby, laughed childishly at the name of the pub next door to the McDonalds (it was called "The Dorset Knob), and went back up the hill to collect my book.