Bliss

My brother sent me the file referred to here. Joy, joy, joy. It's a work of unutterable genius. It gets funnier each viewing. The whole rock-show delight is only increased when the birdoole, (who looks like this) dances and sings along the top of my powerbook in time with the music. Thank you, James. This has really made my christmas...

Dreamwork

Our local bookstore, Bullocks, was once a great and extraordinary emporium, a Colosseum of books. But now it has a coffee-bar franchise where the Classics department used to be, and a Business Centre where Polar Science used to be. (Question: what is a Business Centre? From the glances I've given it, I'm not sure: there's an assemblage of signs and notices and staff in uniform (uniform!) and some white, car-sized machines -- photocopiers? business card generators? I'm too scared to investigate more closely). The moving of the Classics department was particularly traumatic. Poor café staff. For months after opening they were harangued by tweedy, ired dons who found a coffee shop where they expected rows of red and green loeb hardbacks. I worked in the Literature Department of Bullocks one summer a long time ago. So long ago, it didn't even have machines that would take credit-cards. It was brilliant. We cultivated a mannered disdain for our customers (the correct English Bookseller manner) and we used to talk about Bullocks having an in-store café in the way people talk about nuclear apocalypse or a meteor strike. Just unthinkable. The end of the world. Our store was for books, not customers!

Anyway, I dreamt the other night that I was living in pre-café Bullocks. In the dream, I was living inside a bookshelf, downstairs. A nice, rather deep, empty wooden shelf. It must have been the Natural History section, because I remember reaching down to the next shelf and bringing up some books on bugs and birds and things. It was all very nice, living there, but even in the dream, I knew it meant something. Of course it did. I woke up, puzzled. It took a long time to realise that there was a clear, literal meaning to this dream: I’m on the shelf. How pathetic. But it gets worse:


Because last night I dreamt that a crowd of friends and colleagues and I were waiting on a station platform. I had an inordinate amount of baggage. No-one else did. And every time a train came in, my friends would all get on board. But the doors would shut before I could drag all my baggage through them. Hoot hoot. Off goes the train: and I'm left standing on the platform.

Missed the train! Oh no.
Too much baggage! Oh lordy lord. How lame.

Please, please, please could I have an optimistic dream tonight?
And if that’s not possible, can I have a less obvious one?

Thin end of the wedge

I grew up on an estate owned by The Theosophical Society. Most of our neighbours resembled Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers. Their houses were crammed with mementoes of Empire. They wore scarabs given to them by Howard Carter, kept great auk eggs in drawers and hinted at dark pasts of political intrigue in distant lands. One ex-resident sent his beard-trimmings back from Nepal to be burned on the estate bonfire. Younger, hippyier residents inhabited houses full of string sculptures and Blake prints and conducted interminably miserable affairs with each other. Memorably, the local vicar confessed to my mother that—as a vegetarian—he felt more guilty eating a prawn in a spring roll than cheating on his wife. Indeedy. I’d like to say that this mystical environment had no affect on me whatsover, but perhaps I was wrong. Both me and housemate C have discovered a strange reaction to a certain area of land in Upware/Wicken Fen. Walking along a particular stretch of fields produces a strange feeling. In my case, it’s a pressure in the sinuses, and a strong dizziness. And it’s highly directional. Shut my eyes, and whichever way I’m standing, I have a tendency to fall back or forward towards the same point. C and I, despite our rationality, have cross-correlated this phenomenon to the point that we can pretty much trace a line across a map. I’m loath to believe it’s entirely imagined, yet I’m loath to believe it’s real either. Over the past year I’ve had exactly the same experience at Weeting Castle and near Gloucester Cathedral. Ye gods, is this a ley line, or underground water, or something? Is this the thin end of the wedge? And am I going to end up dressing in floaty clothes, talking to dead people, wandering the streets with glassy eyes, festooned in amulets and beads? I'm terribly worried.

March of the Penguins

Continuing the military theme (and with thanks to fatrobot) look at these! Good grief, times have changed. I think. What To Do Aboard The Transport was written 'by a group of scientists'. By far the most trustworthy type of author, yes. Regarding the title, answers on a postcard, please. Certainly I'd spend a lot of my time aboard that transport freaking the hell out thinking about the massive cross-section through the ocean on the cover.


This one is just really horrible. Not only are the grim and dirty realities of guerrilla warfare brutally depicted on the cover, but the people involved upset me too. Why would anyone want to kill Terry Thomas?


This one marks an important episode in the history of island biogeography: we came, we saw, we conquered, we brought snakes.


And finally — Eleanor "Bumpy" Stevenson? They have to be joking.

Demonic Mice and the Not Quite Dead

So this morning, I'm sitting in Starbucks listening with mild horror to the "please promote me" — "why should I?" meeting between white-shirted, stripy-tie employee and boss, two tables away. Even without hearing a word, you know the employee's on a losing streak. His shoulders are tense and bowed, and he's fiddling obsessively with a pen lid and staring at the tabletop between his arms as the boss speaks. Boss is fair haired and sitting with his legs apart and just hasn't stopped talking for — no kidding — about an hour. Employee is sinking lower in his chair. Lower and lower. It's like watching a wildlife documentary, really. If they had antlers it would be SO much easier.

Then two students come to the next table, sip their mint whizz thingumbys and talk about...ghosts! Wooooooo! Trying hard not to look as if I'm listening, I listen harder. Cool! Was it our local fenland favourite, the Black Shuck? The giant black, demonic dog that stalks the reeds and fields at night, portending the death of those who see it within the year? No. It was a slightly cold feeling in an upstairs room of their shared house. I am disgusted! A slightly cold feeling is a totally rubbish paranormal experience. I get it all the time. When I sit by the window; when I eat ice-cream; when I watch daytime television. But I needed, of course, to do some immediate research on Cambridgeshire ghosts. These, according to the Paranormal Database, are our local manifestations of the supernatural. Never has ghost-hunting seemed such an attractive alternative career.

• Etheldreda's Blue Hand
• A Little Old Lady Attracted to Wives
• A Creature with One Yellow Eye
• Green Lady Removes Bedcovers
• A Pale Yellow Head without Ears
• A Nun, and A Brown Dog Thing
• Large Furry Penguin-Like Creature
• A Womaniser
• Car
• Sounds of a Motorbike
• A Black Chrysler hit by Express
• Terrible Smell
• A Voice Asks for a Spade
• Stabbed Bulldog
• Party with Ugly Young Man
• Murdered Elizabeth Pateman Wringing her Hands
• Small White Dog
• Jospeth Hannath's Wife
• Giant Saxon Warriors
• Snowy the Cat
• Animals Feel 'It' at 20:20 Each Evening
• Charlie Presence
• The Not Quite Dead
• Skeleton
• Victorian Road Crossers
• Monk
• Demonic Mice

Pro Patria Mori

"The GI of the future, as U.S. Army planners see him, will look so weird he may scare the enemy to death without firing a shot. The Army believes that in the event of a nuclear war, each soldier must be fully equipped to fight on his own. To illustrate its point, the Army trotted out Sgt. 1/C Ben Sawicki encased in a camouflage suit, a bulletproof vest, mask and gloves for protection against nuclear blasts and a light, plastic helmet with a built-in radio. Perched on the helmet is a pair of infrared glasses which he can use to spot the enemy at night or in a storm. Stuck in his vest are new high velocity bullets for his M-14 rifle. And tied to his back is a rocket device (not shown) to help him jump across 50-foot chasms or up hills. Says the sergeant. "With this outfit I could take on 10 soldiers with ordinary equipment and kill 'em all."

Cheery, eh? This is from a 1959 photo-story in LIFE magazine. Soooo heartrending, in a kind of gung-ho pre-Vietnam "erm...shouldn't this bloke be spraying sidewalks with Roundup in that outfit?" kind of way. Poor old Ben Sawicki in his nuclear blast-proof gloves. And I bet they replaced his M14, too. So creepy...