kick ass

I had the bath running and I was kneeling on the end of my bed, leaning over my laptop, sunk in Facebook. As we all know, time dilates on the internet and I kept meaning to check on the bath. Eventually, I heard something that sounded ominously like water hitting the floor. It was at this point that I realised that I'd been kneeling too long and I had no sensation in my feet. They were more than numb, my ankles were floppy. I urgently needed to get to the bathroom but I couldn't balance, never mind walk or run (like I needed to right now).

And so I crawled whimpering down the hallway, pulled myself grimly across the hot puddle, shut off the water and lay there hanging from the tap, panting.

Who needs action movies when you can experience terror, panic and pain in your own home?

wish list: (1) Calanque d'En Vau, near Cassis, Provence

I would want it all to myself, of course.

some days I just feel like bacon

my favourite places in the world: (1) Vernazza

post-human

A group of us, post-40 and bearded, stand in the dark yard to the side of the pub.

On the other side of a waist-high fence, a long queue has formed for a popular gay disco night next door. Everyone in the queue is oh-so-carefully coiffed and styled just-so. They look elfin and delicate and no-one is over 22.

Not for the first time I think of H.G.Wells' "Time Machine". Here before me are the Eloi.

And I have become a Morlock.

Bugger.

death wish

I've always wanted to live a VERY long life, preferably long enough to see out the end of this Solar System, to travel the galaxy in my own spaceship, to never stop learning and making connections.

I'd still be pissed-off if you told me for certain I wasn't going to get this wish.

I'm such a material boy, though...

Seeing this new concept gravestone from Ivanka, a Hungarian design couple, has helped me come to terms with my death. In fact, I'm now going to be pissed-off that I won't get to see my VERY cool grave slowly weather and gather moss.

Hmm... suddenly that shallow water seems a very apt memorial for me.

beyond deep throat to peristalsis

A man can dream, can't he?

reading the city

After some years away, work brought me back to the city.

For all my mixed emotions on returning, my eyes gorged themselves on the cityscape.

I realised that I was like one re-reading a favourite novel, scanning familiar pages for landmarks recalled, and celebrating at once both my recall and the city's persistence. My eyes were frantic for detail. I couldn't open them wide enough.

Every street was a page indented by paragraphed turnings into side-streets. Parades of shops like stanzas in poetry.

The city was a vast Victorian novel with a cast of individually realised architectural characters all interconnected, the story arcs and plot twists mapped by these roads and junctions. Looking along just one street I could read the melodrama of the ten years I had been away: the relative fortunes of shops I remembered, the small grief where a business had disappeared, the fading of once upstart new architecture into a slightly shabby middle-age, the shock slide of some buildings into a neglected architectural dementia.

The city I loved had continued without me. It was naturally, and rightfully, oblivious to me. Others had far more claim to ownership. And yet... and yet I carried within me my personal version of this town, my own narrative of these streets.

faith = hope + trust

"Hope" and "Trust", by definition, depend on the real likelihood of being let down, of there being no basis for either.

The meaning of these words imply the possibility that the hoped-for or trusted-in may not be the case.

These are compromised words, compromised states.

As a society we elevate them to the highest echelon of honour - to hope or to trust is to exhibit the noblest behaviour.

We venerate fallibility. We celebrate the attempt that could fail.

What does that say about us?