Have decided this blog shall be a place to make my mistakes in pubic.
On reflection, this is something I probably should have mentioned 3 years and 153 posts ago.
In other news: I have apparently been reflecting. I am a veritable disco ball. Yes. Woooo-hoooh! Watch... me... SPIN!*
*Or don't. That would be quite a lot of exercise. And a bit like dancing. In either case, quite improbable. Quite, quite improbable.
PERHAPS, IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE, IT MIGHT ALL HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT
Little Stan, who is of a literal and logical slant of mind, hits upon a plan. Swiftly adopted, it pans out thus:
"What day is it?"
"2-day."
"Yes, but what day is it?"
"2-day."
As children our days shall not be numbered and time shall last forever and eventually most of us will learn how to spell Wednesday. (Stan does so on a 5-day, with the help of a patient teacher, two months and a fortnight to the day when his dyslexia was at last diagnosed. Alas, time has begun to pass, Stan is no longer little, and always there will be a part of him now that is just counting down the days).
THE SURPRISING WORRIES OF CHILDREN
A barista, absently clearing an empty table, tuts, and lifts the left behind man up onto a spare picture hook. Above and to the right of him, a photo of another to whom the first bears curious resemblance may well be the source of the boy's mistake.
Look at him! Just look at the brute! This was my misfortune. Why must he always steal my thunder? – broods the man's wife, who, more alike than she will ever care to admit, was already to be found hanging opposite, in mounting fury.
(Nearby, a small birdlike woman twitters, sighs, twitters again, finally resorts to Facebook to publicly register her amusement. At the counter I order a double-shot of silence).
YOUR MEMORY CANNOT SPEAK FOR THE OTHERS
In this house someone once died. To have done so twice would have been careless. But people are quite careless in houses. I once left the gas on.
Die outdoors. Also live outdoors, though first become deeply and irreversibly famous (living your whole life outdoors should probably suffice). Bereft of a suitable wall, the blue plaque that shall doubtless mark your life and its passing will do so by wavering indecisively but impressively in mid-air (on the ground it would simply be stamped on, walked over, or perhaps even danced upon. This of course would be unseemly and would not do. Not for a national treasure. Not for a national treasure like you).
I hear that going outside helps. True, more people die indoors, but often they've been outside first and are desperate to get away from it. Even if it kills them. This is especially true of the ones in hospitals.
If I have words of advice for you, consider these four: Never share a house. When you are elsewhere and wondering whether the gas has been left on your memory cannot speak for the others. Soon, to leave home fills you with worry and trembling. Neither, however, are you unaware of what happens in houses... What to do?
On their return, your housemates, who have been on holiday all this time, find you frozen on the threshold. Rigor morits has set in, and the door frame, still in the petrified grip of your indecision, will have to be removed, and you with it, if they are ever to use this entrance again (or perhaps it is now just an exit). Didn't we tell him an electric one had been installed weeks ago, one of them says, meaning, instead, 'I'm damned if I'm paying for that doorframe.' (At the time you were of course upstairs sobbing uncontrollably, once again, and failed to notice – exactly the kind of trying behaviour, your housemates will say later, that drove them to sunny Spain to recover in the first place. People will nod sympathetically and reassure them – it wasn't their fault, these things happen, don't beat yourselves up about it – while all the time privately thinking, Clearly the signs were there, and surely the postman, if no-one else, should have done something. (So long as there was someone to accept the letters and sign his silly forms, though, he was happy, and anyway you died on a Sunday – surrounded by junk mail, and two parcels intended for nextdoor)).
On reflection, maybe, too, someone should have clipped the hedge.
Made using Xtranormal.com and a few hours that I'll never get back.
I really, really wasn't serious last night. Or at least I was fairly sure that I wasn't.
But then...
Well, I got some work to do, and you can probably guess the rest of the whole procrastinatory mess. Suffice it to say: the hummus blog lives!
That's what I'm going to call my new blog. Then I'm going to take a random subject and explain how it's relevant to hummus - every day. Except on the days where, instead, I explain how hummus is relevant to random subjects - which I'll probably call Mondays, because someone has to find a use for the dreadful things.
You see that's where I've been going wrong here, you need a worldview, something through which to filter everything, an overarching concern to which you can relate it all. Then writing blog posts becomes almost as easy as not writing them, which is almost the easiest thing in the world.
Other bloggers simply take some random phenomenon, ask what it has to do with philosophy / sociology / psychology / communication / the continuing evolution of human (mass) consciousness / or whatever other tantalising niche or abstraction they've chosen for themselves, and - bang! - blog post written. Sometimes they're even experts on these things, which hardly seems fair.
(Such appalling laziness, and yet I'd never thought of it. It hardly seems likely...)
So that's why, from now on, everything I read and write will be filtered through hummus:
a) Because I'm lazy.
b) Because it's tastier.
c) Because "everything I read and write will now be filtered through hummus" is a fun sentence to write.
d) Because there are fewer flavours of tzatziki.
And, more than anything, because:
e) God help me, but I've just never got the hang of taramasalata. Imagine! It'd be a bloody disaster!
Secret hidden link to non-secret, non-hidden website. (Even I'm not sure whether I'm joking now).
I have in my mind an image of a quite short person, seething with indignation, almost fit to burst with anger, one more tiny annoyance likely to send them right over the edge, to make them literally pop with fury, like an over-inflated and especially red balloon - an especially red balloon full of fury.
Their much taller antagonist looks down at them. With a maddeningly indulgent smile he or she perkily intones: "Oh, don't be such a Grumpa-Loompa!"
The short person explodes.
My brain came up with that word earlier today, 'Grumpa-Loompa', apropos of nothing. I think it may be trying to kill me. It knows I won't be able to resist using it, should I ever be in that situation - it'll be the one urging me on. It knows it will. My brain is not a good person.
Another pun probably best left unsaid: As a mother, you're 'fair to meddling.'
[Mother-in-law?]
Might be good in the right short story, though.
DISCLAIMER: Happily, I've never had to use that pun, and doubt I ever will :) So don't worry, if you're reading.
DISCLAIMER THE SECOND: My brain probably isn't trying to kill me. It's perfectly aware that I'm so short that the height differential between myself and virtually any other adult human will never be inappropriately comic enough to get me murdered by a Grumpa-Loompa. But I can daydream (and sometimes talk to the cat).
Make up a clever title for a SEQUEL to a famous movie (e.g. "Reforrest Gump"), it said on Twitter. It seemed like a good idea at the time...
Monsters vs. Aliens vs. Predator
Aging Bull
The Man Who Wasn't There (But Came Back Again)
The Universe According to Garp
The Princess Memoirs
Pride & Diversity Training
What's Eating Gilbert Raisin?
Attack Of The Killer Passata
Million Dollar Toddler
Paris - When It Drizzles
Gosford Park: The Lost World
Scarfacelift
Deconstructing Harry (& The Hendersons)
April Of The Penguins
The Huge Lebowski
A Nightmare On Wall Street
American History XI
Brief Encounters Of The Third Kind
Fitzcarraldone
A Solar-Powered Orange
The Lion, The Witch, And The Strongly Worded Letter To Ikea
And that's more than enough of that.
Today, I bought baking potatoes with a blank Best Before Date. It wasn't so much the potatoes I wanted as a little unpredictability. (But only a little).
Is it safe to put unpredictability in a microwave?
Lately, I've been reading a lot of webpages written by people with a positive "can do" attitude. It's very inspiring.
Lately, I've been reading a lot of webpages written by people with a positive "can do" attitude. It's very annoying.
The web's very polarising like that.
So are people, though.
And mood swings.
It's long been a mystery to me - and to anyone else who's ever been optimistic enough to ask - what exactly it is that I do all day. I'm still not 100% sure what the answer is, but I'm starting to narrow it down.
I think it involves a sort of metaphorical gardening.
Metaphorical gardening and coffee.
(Come back when the flowers are starting to bloom - I'll be the one trying not to sneeze. But at least I should have a better answer by then).
MATCH OF THE DAY. POST-MATCH INTERVIEW.
JAMIE CARRAGHER: "We were a bit like a daisy today... [LONG PAUSE]... Lackadaisical."
