It's not just telly that's gone downhill

It appears I did some dreaming last night.

Dream 1: Sit in a very large pub; get slightly bored.

Dream 2: Murder someone; on the way home, realise it was probably all a bit of a misunderstanding; feel slightly embarrassed.

Dream 3. Suspect that I may have some paper cuts; look at finger; see lots of paper cuts; mutter something along the lines of "Cuh! Those'll annoy me later..."

Sometimes I worry about my unconscious... No sense of drama. It barely even manages nightmares.

Case in point: it once dreamt about being chased by zombies - three very, very slow zombies. Basically the dream consisted of me sitting around having a nice read, but every so often having to go outside and sit somewhere else, before I could return to the more comfortable seat indoors, until the zombies eventually and inevitably shambled back into view again and I had to move again. Repeat ad nauseum.

At some point in this tedium I think it hit me that "Oh. This is going to make for an interrupted night's sleep...", but even that low level of dramatic tension was instantly dispersed: "Actually, never mind. If I just go far enough, and perhaps by bike, not only will I buy myself a good few hours kip, but after a few weeks of this nonsense I'll probably have lost weight."

And then back to the near-endless game of non-musical chairs.

Apparently my unconscious, at some point in my past, must have mistaken zombies for some form of book-averse personal trainer; which, if this confusion is also occuring in reverse, would at least explain my attitude to exercise...

But then again, it probably isn't; so it doesn't.

I don't know. Maybe I should just start watching more horror movies?

More nonsense from the notebook

A CONVERSATION

- Your mobile phone has been disconnected, sir. It has been bothering people.

- How has it-

- Been bothering people?

- Yes.

- We hoped you wouldn't ask.

- But I have.

- And you will not retract?

- No. Why should I?

- Because your question is bothersome. We don't like bother. Surely you have realised?

- But what has this phone of mine been doing?

- It has been bothering people, sir. We have covered this.

- But that isn't my phone. It has arms and two legs and a tiny crying head.

- But it is bothering people, yes?

- Oh yes. Myself included.

- Then in that case, sir, we apologise. It is not your phone that has been disconnected.

- It's...

- Yes?

- Why do you call me 'sir'?

Something about nothing

ON THE GENESIS OF J_____ K___

In town there is a shape... No, it's more of an outline – somewhere a shape once was.

Within the outline is nothing.

_____What should we do with the nothing? – the men ask.

_____Why must we do anything? – the women ask.

_____I'm bored – say the children.

The nothing is taken away.

_____What did you see? – says the Judge.

And later:

_____Can you offer anything in your defence?

Witness and defendant answer nothing - it is an open and shut case. Sentenced to life, and having none of its own, the nothing swiftly becomes host of a popular daytime talk-show.

_____After the break – says the host – we'll see who the real father is.

_____You're scum! – says the host. Beneath contempt.

_____Blimey, this is the best thing since bear baiting! – says a Judge.

In the host is a shape... No, it's more of an outline. Within the outline is nothing.

I am, however, increasingly spherical

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.

More prose pottery

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).

And in a similar vein...

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).

At dusk, setting the alarm, the barista leaves. Draped in aprons as one might darken the cage of a canary, and to equal effect, the bickering couple snores gently on its hooks while below them the day's lost children, all neatly swept up and bagged by the door, shiver in dread at the breaking of universal laws on argument, sleeping and sundown.

I helpfully pen a note that will benefit no-one, slide it beneath the door, then leave.

Morbid whimsy

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 Heritage plaque that shall doubtless come to mark your life and its passing will have to 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 cooker 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, that man 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.

A small gloomy movie about unrequited love in an apparently abandoned swimming pool

Made using Xtranormal.com and a few hours that I'll never get back.

A new analytical model for the dissection of the modern British sitcom: hummus

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!

What it has to do with hummus...

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).