ventriloquists

Some say talking to yourself is the first sign of madness, however ventriloquists say its family entertainment.

Tog Blogg

To the uninformed some may think 'Tog' to be neolithic companion of 'Stig', but to those familiar with the cold northern European winter then Tog is a measure of thermal insulation often associated with the duvet trade. According to British retailer 'John Lewis' a -

Lightweight summer duvet 4.5 tog

Spring/Autumn weight duvet 9.0 - 10.5 tog

Winter weight duvet 12.0 - 13.5 tog

Tog has in modern times become the ultimate status symbol. High togs command high prices and have become the preserve of the super-rich. Aristotle Onasis is said to have owned a duvet in the region of 400 tog. These experimental duvets killed several test-snoozers during their development due to the incredible pressure and heat generated beneath. Only through the development of advance pressure pyjamas (pictured) could the affluent sleeper indulge his penchant for extreme togs without perishing within its volcanic interior.

Zoo

A visit to the zoo can be an exasperating experience; you find yourself staring at a plastic plaque giving you the animal’s common name, then the ‘genus species’, then a short summary of where it’s from and its preferred habitat. Your eyes then scan the enclosure and find nothing on first pass. You then turn your attention to potential hiding zones - inside logs, beneath leaves or in some moss-encrusted concrete hidey-hole at the back of the enclosure. With luck you may see the tip of a tail protruding from the creature’s chosen retreat. The reptile house always seems to have at least 80% of its occupants out of sight and not to mention being highly camouflaged and completely immobile. They may as well be part of the scenery anyway. I have suspected that this is in part due to zoo staff messing with your head by leaving some enclosures empty while omitting to place a notice to say the animal is 'on holiday', but also that reptiles, in particular, are especially introverted and shun the limelight like some scaly version of Howard Hughes.

The problem is that introverted animals don’t make good viewing. You need extraverts in the zoo environment - monkeys or predators that don’t give a fuck who sees them, or animals too big to hide without looking stupid (ever seen an elephant quivering behind a bush?). The problem with being an extrovert in the animal kingdom is that you tend to stand out and all the camouflage in the world is not going to help. Extravert quarry need to be cocky agile bastards that can make a quick bolt when threatened. If you’re not fleet-footed then you get eaten and you can take time to ponder the Darwinian irony as some sharp-toothed predator chews your head off.

To compound matters those kill-joy zoo officials won’t even let you feed the animals these days, not even with things of no nutritional value such as chewing gum or sticks. If the zoo encouraged visitors to feed the animals they could cut their overheads through reduced food bills. The introverted animals would be forced out into the open to beg for scraps, the animals would be fed sweets and crisps by obese British children and would soon become overweight themselves, reduced to immobile amorphous lumps of fur, scales and claws for the paying public to view in voyeuristic unfettered access. Everybody wins.

Impressions

How does an impersonator know he's not doing an impression of himself when he's not working?

Amnesty national

The recent nationwide knife amnesty yielded over 12,000 assorted knives, axes and swords around the country. Although guns are becoming more popular, I am encouraged that uses of such traditional weapons suggest a return toward medieval warfare on housing estates across the land. I imagine 14 year olds jousting on BMXs, using lances fashioned from painting poles, duck tape and craft knifes. Siege towers and trebuchets will soon follow I’m sure, built from pigeon coups, shopping trolleys and elastic bands dropped by posties. I may be romanticising this a bit, but only slightly.

I don’t get amnesties, why would you bother handing anything in during an amnesty? Even if I had a stash of weapons, I would probably be too apathetic to hand them in on time. Supposing I did though, supposing I’d filled several bags full of kalishnikoffs, broad-swords and an assortment of World War II artillery shells that I just never got round to throwing out, a bit like the bag of stuff you intend to go to the charity shop that sits for months in some corner of your flat. You put it off and forget, until before you know it, it the last day of the amnesty and you’re rushing to get down to the designated weapons amnesty zone, you get stuck in traffic, so you get down two minutes late… do they let you off or do you face the jail? Better to put said items back in the arsenal to gather dust rather than risk it I think.

Egg-straordinary

Richie Hawtin...


Unfortunately Anna ate Ricardo Villalobos before I could take a picture

1982

It was Christmas day 1982 and the remote control car you got took 16 size ‘D’ batteries (10 in the car, 6 in the handset). You got 20 minutes of low velocity entertainment, provided you had a surface completely devoid of imperfections, where even a large crumb on the kitchen linoleum was an insurmountable obstacle. Batteries in such quantity would require a years pocket money and thus your Christmas joy became a powerless ornament by Boxing Day…halcyon days.

The post with the most

Members of the postal service are stealing my mail. I can picture them in their sorting office; first, a gentle flex of anything that looks like it may contain a birthday card with the assumption that it contains a tenner from a distant anonymous gran.

Flex…their luck’s in this time…their eyes narrow and a sly smile cracks across their face which they quickly stifle while simultaneously glancing over each shoulder in case a colleague or superior has noticed their suspicious behaviour. They let this card casually fall to the floor where their nifty boot quickly sweeps it discreetly into a dark corner of the sorting machine. It can later be reclaimed at a more opportune moment to claim their booty and spoil someone’s birthday as a bonus.

To thwart their larcenous schemes, I have taken to posting mousetraps and anthrax inside birthday cards addressed to myself …try spending that down the pub, you fuckers.

Insect society

The societies formed by the industrious ants, bees, termites and other social insects to be found in nature comprise complex and beautiful empires free from dissent, where order is not a social construct but rather the innate program of co-dependence cascading through a millennia of evolution. The notion of an ant or bee acting independently for its own self-interest never enters our mind, yet how can we be sure that ‘lazy bees’ do not choose to sun themselves on a warm patch of moss skiving for the majority of the working day? Lying in meadows like Huckle’bee’ry Finn only to return at the end of the day with a theatrical weary yawn for the benefit of the stupid working bees. This bee might wipe the mock sweat from his toil-free countenance while trying to conceal the look of smug satisfaction from the foolish drones heading toward an early grave. The life of this insightful bee would be truly sweet and only a truly convincing charade would keep it that way. Likewise, the ‘lazy ant’ pretends to carry a piece of leaf into the labyrinthine interiors of its nest surrounded by the frantic activities of its multitudinous brethren. Only this ant slips down a side tunnel into the secret ant-e-chamber; he finds a cosy corner and puts his feet up to take a sneaky nap before supper, snoozing to the sound of the fevered scuttling of his stupid colleagues grinding themselves to dust on the mill of work.

But why? Why work yourself to an early grave in mound, hill or hive? For as far as I am aware, there appears to be no ant supervisors or gaffer-bees, no clocking-in, no monitoring of tea breaks (or rather bee breaks).

It might occur to just one bee that a republic might be fairer, especially when your career advisor can only offer you a purely vocational training at the pollen-technic, involving toil, toil, more toil and death for the sake of the divine monarch the ‘queen’. As may be apparent to some, the queen is the reproductive centre to their society; our Queen differs in this regard preferring a more ‘ceremonial’ role. Perhaps had Queen Elizabeth decided to become the reproductive font for her millions of subjects then the declining respect for the monarchy could have been abated. She would sit in Buckingham Palace laying millions of eggs, while a myriad of energetic subjects dressed as footmen complete with white powdered wigs would forage across the capital, ferrying cakes, sandwiches and comestibles in long lines from Marks & Spencers and expensive tea rooms and bakeries. Food would be fed continually via a silver spoon to Her Majesty to keep up with the edacious energy demands of producing millions of new subjects. Her huge grub-like body soon filling the commodious interiors of the palace, her crown reduced to a tiny glittering speck and her robes running to hundreds of feet to cover her great expanse.

With dwindling birth rates, it’s time for the royal family to get the finger out and start repopulating the country; we need subjects, mllions of them.

The lepidopterist

An admiral butterfly, its ungainly grace it flutters its random path through the open meadow filled with dandelion seed, the long summer grass dances in the cooling air and the fading light of another summer evening. The creature comes to rest on a slender blade of grass; ts limbs fold round the slender stem and its wings close like the leaves of a book as though the day’ chapter is over...its proboscis unfurls and almost invisible at its tip, it clutches a small card. The butterfly scans the meadow, looks to his watch, sighs, tuts loudly, then shakes his head; 'late again' he grumbles. At that point a moth flutters into view, he is panting and red-faced and he lands with a thud next to the butterfly who is clearly annoyed at his colleague’s tardiness. 'Late again' says the butterfly smugly sighing. The moth concocts a set of hastily stuttered excuses as per usual. The Butterfly says nothing as he 'clocks out' for the dayshift and the moth, in turn, 'clocks in' with his own timecard as darkness begins to fall and the night shift begins.

Time

What if the 60s were just the early 80s and the 90s were the very late 50s? How does this thing called ‘time’ work and when is it suitable to break off a slice and call it a decade? Here a quick guide to time…
Tick, tick, tick, seconds may be small but these are the worker ants in the society of time, look after the seconds and the minutes look after themselves.
Minutes…these bruisers don’t like to be kept waiting, though more patient than their frenetic and tiny pal ‘Mr. Second’, get 60 of them together and the collective noun is an ‘hour’. Think of the big hand on a clock as the shepherd’s crook herding the 60 recalcitrant minutes into an hour, which, in turn, are packaged into groups of 24, known as days. ‘Days’ work best when ordered sequentially to avoid confusion. To aid this it was necessary to appellate the 7 days – Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful, Doc, Dopey and Sneezy (this was later revised due to the Dwarfs act (1924).
A question often asked is what is a ‘date’? A date is quite simply the ‘footprint’ left as we walk through the sands of time, only when enough time is packed into ‘days’ is the weight sufficient to produce a ‘print’. These can then be transferred onto calendars (a primitive type of paper watch). Calendars have a maximum of 12 pages (or months) and ‘dates’ are sprinkled more or less evenly over each page. When a suitable coverage is achieved the total should amount to exactly 1 year.
Today, calendars are stacked according to BS Safety Standards to a maximum of 10 units before becoming unstable. These stacks are known as decades, the word decade is derived from ‘decadent’ named after the individuals who first flouted the rules, stacking calendars ever higher in reckless abandon while cranked up on laudanum and absinthe. These 'decadents' soon realised that temporal probity is the only road to salvation and the decade was soon fixed at it wholesome present day value of 10 years.

House hunting

This time it was a big game hunt, he raised his rifle and settled its sights on the prey- a ex-council semi detached, with porch, garage and patio; fixed price.

Office maxims

You don’t have to be mad to work here, but if you’re not, its debatable whether you’re here at all.



To assume makes and ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’- therefore don’t assume I care; because I don’t.



A closed door is just a door that hasn’t opened yet.



Don’t be part of the problem, or the solution.



There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’; but there’s no ‘U’ either.

Monotone muse

The monotonous tone of her voice lulled me, an endless tide of bingo numbers spilling like the iridescent neon onto the street outside. I had just emerged from MacDonalds on Jamaica street and had slipped on a discarded gherkin, banging my head on a nearby litter bin, I lay for a moment within the greasy wrappings and half eaten burgers. I drifted off, her mellifluous voice mingled with bleeps and pings from within the amusement arcade; was that her vital statistics she was reading me?... 42…10…38….62…no, too many, she couldn’t be that curvaceous, or could she? Perhaps her form defied mathematics and our love could too- although shopping for clothing may require a rudimentary knowledge of calculus. As I climbed to my feet I stared with fresh eyes on the palace of amusement; all the time swathed in her dulcet stream of numbers. Stepping over the threshold I entered the deafening vestibule and was confronted with a sign simply stating ‘change given’. But how did they know that I sought change? Change from the humdrum, the tedium, and escape to the mesmerising world of fun and romance with my mathematically impossible muse. Some say change is good, but numismatists prefer doubloons every time.

Prima facia

Don’t judge a book by its cover. I attempted this recently by asking a nearby assistant for a ‘blue book’, she gave a quizzical glance and then asked ‘which hue’, I said I wasn’t certain but I knew geometrically that it was ‘round’. I thought this would narrow the range significantly; she turned and began rummaging through a large box and finally produced a blue ball. I guess I may have to stick to judging books superficially for the moment.

The magic of Christmas

I, as some may know, am the son of the son of a magician. I remember my grandfather would never see us go without- simply conjuring something from beneath a large handkerchief or producing a new shiny coin from behind your ear when required for a trip to the cinema or an impromtu request for confectionary. Christmas was an extravagant affair, a time of plenty; my grandfather would stand at the head of the dinner table and with a tap of his wand produce a Christmas feast from his cornucopian top hat. Brussel sprouts would leap in a green arc from the topper, rolling onto the respective plates, next the carrots would march in sombre procession from the hat and along the table past the hungry guests; eventually lying themselves carefully down beside the sprouts- all the other vegetables would quickly follow, sometimes jostling on the plates till they lay in rank awaiting their leader. Their leader was of course ‘the turkey’ and it’s magical manifestation required an especially extravagant and complicated series of strokes from my grandfathers wand, combined with some whispered secret magic words. His brow would furrow, the lights dim and the hat would start to tremble; this was quickly followed by a volcanic swelling at the hats base. my father in panic, shouts ‘she’s gonna blow’ and several guests take refuge beneath the table. My grandfather, never losing his composure; like the conductor of an orchestra he would tease the turkey from the turgid topper his hands magically sweeping the air, wave after wave; suddenly with a loud ‘pop’ the already cooked and succulent turkey is torpedoed from the hat; it circles the room several times swooping dangerously close to the terrified guests. With a snap of his fingers the bird halts in mid air over the center of the dinner table and under the control of some invisible magic beam emanating from my grandfathers undulating fingers it is coxed down slowly onto the carving platter to rapturous applause from the entire family.

The eremite who might

I was surprised by the sight of an eremite,

Where one should not have been,

For hermits are a shy lot,

Almost never seen,

Hiding in their cabins,

Miles away from everyone,

Shunning others company,

Eating meals for one.

Leekage

Leeks sold in packs of six- even in Wales they don't eat them in this quantity; unless you're Shirley Bassey. I couldn't bear the fact so many leeks would spoil, I would have to watch them wilt and discolour as I strained to combine them in a variety of meals to ensure their timely consumption- leeks with cereal, on toast, dipped in tea, soup, leek biscuits, I would be brushing my teeth with leeks, leeks, leeks, leeks; the possibilities were clearly endless. It would have been simpler had there been single leeks for sale- however they are naturally herd vegetables in the wild so I suppose solitary leeks are rare, unless its a rutting male, excluded from the herd they often 'shack up' with a shallot (who prefer their partners large); I looked for some shallots in the hope of catching it in flagrante delicto with a robust single leek; but to no avail. This really was taking the piss, spending a penny, taking a leek...yes, taking a leek...mmm...but that would be shoplifting... No! it would be emancipation, freed from it’s cellophane shackles, it’s transparent jail, cramped inhumane conditions... I mean in-leekane; packed like sardines...no that’s a small oily fish...crammed in like a pack…I mean herd of leeks. I decided there and then I would 'spring' a leek. I succeeded by slipping one inside a vase I keep with me for just such emergencies and when finally I brought his slender green body into the brilliant sunshine outside It became more than a mere comestible. He seemed to stare up at me coyly and thank me silently in humble leek fashion. I cradled him for a moment since it is rare to be so close to a wild and noble vegetable- then in a moment he was off, darting majestically into some nearby bushes, he glanced back at me briefly as tears of pride welled up in my eyes. It may have been the wind but just before he disapeared from sight I thought I heard the words 'thank you' in a falsetto welsh voice. I never saw him again.