The next day, the boy was leading the flock to drink at the stream
when he saw him again, slowly creeping through the rushes at the far
side of the water. “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” he cried. This time the
townsfolk were ready, and streamed out of their homes, most wearing
giant foam hands and many wearing T-shirts with John Anderson the
referee's face on them. However, though the spent morning until night
searching and sounding their air horns, they saw nothing.

The next day, the boy was sitting in the shade of a solitary oak as
the sheep settled down on a new pasture, when he saw him quite
clearly, stalking the sheep from the bottom of the hill. “Wolf! Wolf!
Wolf!” he cried. The town had made great preparation this time and had
called Ulrika Johnson and John Fashanu to help the search. The Mayor
strode proudly at the front of the group, brandishing a photograph of
himself and his wife outside the Birmingham NEC. As the townsfolk
hurried up the mountain pass and came over the brow of the hill, they
saw the little boy being torn to pieces by a wolf.

“Oh I see” said the Mayor.

For Christmas, my sister gave my Mum a book that she'd got from the great Borders haul of legend (as mentioned in the previous post) and Mum read out the blurb. I was crying with laughter at the end of the first sentence. I don't know why, I found it peculiarly funny. It's just amazingly rubbish. Here is the blurb from Out Of A Clear Sky by Sally Hinchcliffe:

After her lover abandons her, Manda finds solace in birdwatching. The birds provide her with an escape from her troubled childhood - and from an uncertain future.

But then she falls prey to the ever more sinister attentions of another birdwatcher. As the harassment builds up and she is forced to flee, details of her complicated, dark past start to emerge.

Everything was 90% off at Borders yesterday - and they weren't kidding when they said everything - not just the books and calendars and magazines but also the chairs and the cabinets and an electric winch thing for picking up pallets (sadly beyond my means). The general mood was pretty strange; there was no doubt at all that the staff had all gone completely insane. They seemed to be playing 'That's Life' by Frank Sinatra slightly too loud and on repeat and when I walked past the bank of tills to get to the magazine section, one of the cashiers was shouting "I am ready to serve you!" over and over again in a scene reminiscent of a documentary I saw about evangelical Christians in South Korea. 

The z605 is no less revolutionary a printer, given that, in my house,
it has reversed the master-slave relationship between man and machine
and reduced me from a free man of the European Union to a serf, living
at the mercy of a grey printer made in Taiwan.

The Gutenberg press freed up monks' time and transformed them from
celibate book copiers to mead-swilling travelling conmen, tramping the
country cadging food, wronging wives and selling salvation. The
Lexmark has been getting its own back on history and eating my time. I
am atoning for the sins of medieval monks like a Jesus with massive
printing queue.

I do not mean to suggest that it is only the z605 that makes slaves
out of us: over the years I have prostrated myself at the tyrannical
feet of Canons, Epsons and other Lexmarks; pressing print when
"they're not looking" and trying everything short of sky writing to
convince them that I have installed a new ink cartridge despite them
not "recognising" it. I'm not expecting you to recognise it: you've
never met it before, you ink hungry bastard. I might start employing a
monk instead, or set up a monkey and a typewriter and hope it comes up
with what I want to print. I don't mind, as long as it doesn't involve
a USB cable.

When I finally tire of trying to talk my printer round and decide it's
time to give in, I'm not going to throw it out, I'm going to impale it
on a spike above the front door as a warning to the new one. I'll show
them who's in charge.

I should probably qualify that.

Tomorrow I'm going for my swine flu jab. And I'm going to faint.

Ever since a bad experience at the age of 15, needles have been my
sole phobia. I haven't fainted every time I've had an injection; a
couple of years ago I had a blood test taken by a massive West Indian
man with an amazing deep voice who told me about how he suspected that
Brian Lara is gay. I was too engrossed by that to notice that he'd
taken any blood. He also said that feeling the cold air on his face
when he arrived in Britain was nicer than all the sun in the
Caribbean, which I still think of when I complain about British
weather. Perhaps tomorrow I should implore the nurse to make his/her
case for Steve Backley's bisexuality. However, my record paints a
pretty clear picture: I'm a wuss.

I'll stride in, the optimist in me forcing a weak smile onto my face.
"I'm not very good with needles", I'll say euphemistically, raising my
eyebrows in a way that I hope to mean "silly me, eh?". Medical
professionals seem to have zero compassion in these situations, which
is definitely for the best. Then I'll put my crash helmet on, strip to
the waist and shout "COME ON THEN!"

No.

I'll lie down on the slab and then in an effort to "take my mind off
it" the nurse will ask me what I do for a living: my only other source
of anxiety. Then before long it's curtains and the next thing, my
senses will kick back in one by one, always sight last, so that for a
few seconds my entire sensory universe will be my ears hearing the
unbearable whooshing of blood returning to my head and the pathetic
little noise I'll be making with my mouth.

On the upside, I could never be a heroin addict (unless you can take
it anally or something... bugger, if I'm ever to be a heroin addict
I'm going compound the misery by being the one who shoves it up his
arse.)

It's completely irrational, and that's what bothers me the most. My
concious self isn't at all scared of injections; my concious mind
would very much like to get on with it and be able to have injections
and give blood. But, the part of my brain that I don't seem to have
any control over won't stand for it. It's like my concious mind shares
a flat with this other bloke and he's a dick.

I like to believe, as I think many of us do, that I am a rational
person. But we're just not, are we? Falling in love, for example, be
it with a person or a pair of shoes, takes rationality, puts it in the
stocks and makes a mockery of it in front of the entire village. Even
if we know that falling in love (with the person or the shoes) is
ultimately for the worst (I'm currently "breaking in" a new pair of
leather shoes and in the interest of fairness and equality, they have
decided to break me in in return. My poor feet.) it's not our concious
mind that is in charge; it's the bastard in the other room. This myth
that we are rational beings is really us flattering ourselves.

Only robots are completely rational. We defy formulas and equations.
Imagine going about the process of love or friendship or buying shoes
in a completely rational way. Horrible. We shouldn't give in to it but
we should be proudly irrational.

As for the injection, if I want to keep having sex with pigs, I'm
going to have to go through with it.

In my first blogpost I wrote that I would try to write every day although I wouldn't promise to do so because it wouldn't be reasonable to post on my wedding day. You can therefore reasonably assume that I have been getting married for the past couple of days. You are correct. I'm not wed to a human being though, I'm in an awkward marriage with a lifestyle of inopportune unplanned lie-ins and trips to Derby (bleak; too proud of their statue of a ram*) with a friend only to be heckled by my friend's aunt and have the car's petrol cap tampered with so that we had to wait for the AA on a petrol station forecourt for an hour eating Doritos and chocolate buttons while a tramp who claimed to have fought in the Napoleonic Wars (unlikely) smoked and threw glowing cigarette ends at suspicious puddles. At the time I thought that it might make for an excellent blogpost but too many noteworthy things happened on that day to mention; the ludicrous length of the last sentence stands as testament to this. It deserves more than a blogpost; it deserves a tapestry. We went to a Roman village, for example. I didn't mention that.

Driving home was particularly grim but we kept our spirits high by giving ourselves a topic and then coming up with as many puns as we could about that topic. We weren't counting but I'm confident that we generated at least 80 puns about the police force between Birmingham and Gloucester. Unfortunately I can't remember any clean enough to publish. It really wasn't that bad; I have a startling ability to enjoy myself in almost any situation (aside from falling into a volcano, going to a shopping centre etc.) and ultimately “no one died”, as they say. That's not entirely true as we hit a barn owl on the way home (with the car, not out of frustration). I assume it died. If it's alive, it has the Rover crest stamped neatly into the front of its head. Combined with its heart-shaped face, it could plausibly be interpreted - by the right sort of person - as a divine indication that God loves British automotive engineering, and who can blame him, it got us to Derby and back.

* For other cities that are too proud of disappointing statues see Copenhagen and Brussels.

Like a sentimental or unimaginative tramp, I spend the majority of my
time sitting on a particular bench in Victoria station. If I added all
of this time together and worked out how much of my life I will spend
on that bench, it would no doubt be an entirely terrifying figure. But
whenever you hear those figures a) of course they are going to be
massive and b) I can never believe they are true. "Did you know that
you'll spend six years of your life yawning? Did you know that you
spend three years of your life changing channel on your television?
Did you know you'll spend fifteen years of your life thinking about
buying an atlas?"

The bench area is unlike any other place on earth because the air
composition isn't the usual nitrogen/oxygen mix that earth dwelling
plants and animals are used to - it's predominantly a gaseous form of
Cornish pasty that only occurs naturally to the side of Cornish pasty
stalls in British railway stations (the atmosphere is basically the
same within a 5 metre radius of all of these outlets, be they West
Cornwall Pasty, West Cornwall Pasty Company, West Cornish Pasty & Co,
The Pasty Shop, The Pasty Company, Cornish Bakehouse or West Cornish
Bakehouse. Cornish Olympians sleep in tents full of it.)

The bench is a four person outfit. It is a little silver number with a
filthy table bolted to one end. The astonishing thing about it is that
I always share the bench with the same people. They are not the same
individuals but the same kind of person. I imagine that when I'm not
there another bearded man with glasses and a duffle coat sits there. I
have no idea why this occurs; it may be that only very certain types
of people can survive in the pastry laced atmosphere.

Sitting on one of the seats, there is always one woman who is
impossibly glamorous. I like people like this. I think if I was
retired and had an entire wardrobe full of costume jewellery, I'd
probably put it all on at once too. Yesterday's example of the genre
was wearing a fascinator, which gave her the appearance of an angler
fish in make up. Another thing about the glamorous woman is that she
never ever gets up and leaves before I do. Don't worry, I've walked
past during the day and she is never there so I've made sure she
doesn't sit there all day every day, occasionally subbing out as
another woman in pearls punches in for her shift.

The other seat on the bench is usually filled by a man in a suit with
a moustache. Yesterday's man in a suit with a moustache was doing a
pencil drawing of a postcard of a castle, which I thought was a good
thing to do to kill time. It certainly beats noodling around on your
mobile phone (me) or waiting for a perhaps non-existent man in a top
hat (glamour granny).

The other seat is always a wild card and yesterday it was occupied by
a man with his young daughter sitting on his lap. Fathers and young
daughters at train stations always seem to be having a really nice
time. The daughter noticed that one of the pigeons (the only bird that
can survive in the pastmosphere) only had one foot and they laughed at
its funny limp. I've never laughed at a disabled animal before but
before long the entire bench, including glamourpuss and pencil
moustache were chuckling at the shuffling little pigeon. The girl
started asking brilliant questions, as children tend to. How did it
lose its foot? Did it fall off when he landed too quickly? (a theory
that I would publicly like to back) Why doesn't it just fly
everywhere? How can it still walk? Her father adjusted his walking stick against his knee and replied, "It's amazing how quickly you get used to it".

Also, although I am a comedian of sorts, I'm not promising that this
will be funny. It really is mainly for my own good and I have no
respect for you whatsoever.

As long as my wi-fi works long enough to post, I'll try and do it most
days. I toyed with making a pledge to blog every day but that would
lead to farcical situations in which, for example, I'd be looking for
a internet cafe on the day of my own wedding. I'd probably take the
honeymoon off too. Depending on how it was working out. It may be that
I only married her because her father got me a plum role in his
company, like how it happens in films. I'd probably also then be doing
my blog posts on company time. Ha! I've married your daughter and I'm
using work time to update my blog! I don't even understand what this
company is! I just completely bluffed my way through that meeting with
Mr Yakamoto and the rest of the important delegation from Japan! And
I'm stealing stationery! And I mean big stationery, like hole punches.
I'm not even sure if that's stationery, but I stole it!

I'm pretty sure that this blog won't be very good but my hope is that
it may become good over time. I think this will be a bit like the
process when they turn on a new water pump in an African village.
Everyone turns up. The mayor is beaming. The gap year student from
Bristol turns the tap and.... brown.

"I never liked that gap year student", thinks the mayor, "I don't feel
so bad about stealing his camera".

However, after a few minutes beautiful cholera-free water starts
gushing through and the rickety children all dance in it.

Don't worry children, you'll be dancing soon enough.