bee feast

Listen, I watched 'The Descent' last night, I fear nuttin'. Review of sorts coming up. In the meantime, here is a wonder of nature from my garden.

It's been a long, hard struggle. But now the light at the end of the tunnel has become a something something, can't find the quote on IMDB. And now at last, at long last, nothing will ever be the same again.

Yes, folks, I've finally attained the number one position for 'fuck feast'. Perhaps by the time you read this, Sludgefeast - sweary band who coincidentally were once managed by T - will have usurped me. But that's OK. I have sipped the cup of glory.

Driving three nights in a row is paying off. I'm now only moderately totally terrified - and anyway, so much of my thought is just pantomime, going through the motions of excessive self-deprecation; if I take off the thigh-high boots and dubious wig for a moment I know that in reality I'm doing alright. No more than that, though. That's as near as I get to Jonathan King, except for those moments where it is graven on the stone of my soul that I am a Fucking Genius with a capital Fucking.

Yeah.

Last night we managed to get to Kendal in one piece despite the roundabout from hell, which loomed murkily from the darkness like the prow of the Titanic, and discovered - despite the assurance of Joyce in KFC that it had gone bust - that the 1657 Chocolate House is still trading. It wasn't built in 1657 but it's old enough to be wonky and tiny with shit-yourself staircases, and it has a menu just for varieties of hot chocolate, all with names like The Nell Gwynne and The Slave Trader (that's the banana one, obviously - political correctness not having oozed quite that far north yet). And it sells proper, lovingly-made cakes that would make 'Dr' Gillian McKeith's disparaging moue turn into some sort of black hole of dietary disapproval sucking in and compacting all matter around it, except for all the calories in the cake which would start a new universe all their own. It is impossible to come out of there not feeling like you're observing a bloody fight to the death between guilt and pleasure, with a definite sense of sugary nausea refereeing.

Passengering on the way back, munching ersatz tortilla, I feel a slight breeze on the back of my neck. Knowing that there is a bit of a gap there where the removable roof panel isn't quite flush, I take little notice, but do idly start to imagine how terrible it would be if the panel flew off at this sort of speed (70-ish), flying into the windscreen of a meek and blameless Volvo brimming with Prescottian hard-working families. It is then pointed out to me, in as calm a voice as possible, that the panel is in fact no longer in situ. I look around and see a lot of velvety dark sky that shouldn't be there. As shocks go it's almost like - well, finding that a substantial part of your car has vanished. And it did vanish, soundlessly, as if we were in a plane.

We had to find somewhere to turn round and go back and hunt for it. I was told I should prepare for it to be in many, many little bits. I scoured the grass verge with head out of window in classic golden retriever pose only without the flying tongue, and thought I saw it several times. Then we happened upon it, smack in the middle of the right lane, like a small ice floe. Despite having flown off at speed and landed on tarmac, and having come out of the Suzuki factory somewhere around the time New Kids On The Block had their first number one, it was almost fully intact. Bit of crumbling at the corners, meringue-like - miraculous.

I allow myself a moment of smugness that this is the first thing to go at all wrong with the car I chose myself - it has feist, pluck and fortitude, and one particularly hormonal and frosty day I will certainly be moved to tears by its eagerness to start first time - but only a small one. I'm still preoccupied with being grateful there was no one behind us, and am not quite at the point of being able to laugh about it yet. I don't think the roof is going anywhere for a while now, the fixings having been screwdrivered to within an inch of their lives, but I'm going to get some surly sod in overalls to look at it anyway.

Next week involves several months' worth of social flittery in three days, it would seem. Better start taking the vitamins now. Which reminds me, last night some happy shameless soul invited McKeith to try a doughnut. She was brandishing the box as a badge of shame, and he reached in and took one, chewing on it as she lectured him on cholesterol. "Go on, try one," he insisted. "You'll like it." Tempted beyond rationale, the fraudulent nutrition-banshee bit into the sugared dough. A sweet eruption of raspberry jam burst upon her tongue. Her eyes rolled back into her malnourished head, forbidden ecstasy flooding her system, and she collapsed onto the lino. The camera lurched, spun and pointed at the ceiling. Crashes, shrieks, pandemonium. Blank screen. The startled, sombre tones of an announcer. "Er, we seem to be experiencing um, technical difficulties. . ."

Next week at 8.30 on Channel 4, as a change to the advertised programme, Jamie Oliver presents 'Stuff Yerself'.

This is the Garment, by the way. Isn't she lovely.

A postcard from Sensible in Sydney! Sweet Sensible. He assures me Australia does have culture, they just hide it very well in spectacular spiky buildings covered in mirror-glass panels. Sounds like he's having yer actual traveller epiphany. I'm not sure I'd want to learn that much about myself, which may be why I've never had the urge to venture further than the places I've been hauled to.

The tunes fairy brought a copy of 'Howl' (the most inappropriately-named album since 'Tweety Bird Reads Nice Stories To Her Chicks' by Napalm Death), for which I proceeded to show my gratitude by being the worst learner driver ever. I've successfully convinced myself that I can't do it, in spite of being able to, like, drive now when I couldn't a year ago. The trouble is that most of my achievements are done in Etch-a-Sketch - the new ones overwrite the old ones, only lasting for a second themselves before what I assume is my chronic ADD-sufferer of an inner toddler picks it up and shakes it out of existence.

Still, I made a rat once years ago and I still think it has a great expression of worry on its rat face.

More London next week, I think. Begone with the fucking perpetual mental nausea, please.

Cure for 'oh hell I've got someone else's head on' syndrome:

1) Half-arsedly open an email from the mailing list from your former favourite band that you half-arsedly re-signed yourself to.

2) Half-arsedly notice that their new album is out, and available to listen to for limited time here blah blah. Half-arsedly open site and lend half a half-arsed ear as it starts up.

3) Start smiling.

4) Discern influence of Johnny Cash, divestment of fuzz, the odd knowing smirk and outlandish sillybuggery. Feel a bit more full-arsed.

5) Shake arse.

6) Get to know songs. Extrapolate harmonies. Warble. Marvel at lashings of harmonica in this day and age.

7) Refute internal voices that bleat "But it's hopelessly derivative and laughably Dylan-lite and why would you listen to this ersatz shit when you could be immersing yourself in the back catalogue of (insert hallowed name of wearyingly sacred cow with guitar and hair here)", by saying "Shut up, you arse".

8) Repeat till faith restored in mood-altering power of music, and in favourite band, who after all did partly show the way to being bouncy music fan again rather than slowly rotting dead-eyed critic. Cos really, why should you have to constantly justify the stuff you love to maintain some illusory credibility?

9) Remember that you turned down the opportunity to go to Reading at the weekend and interview them.

10) Arse.

I challenge you not to read every last entry of this.

The moth-shadow was a cranefly (which insect I loathe most in the world - see that post which I can't be bothered to look up to link to right now, oh and this one which I can). It dithered across the wall by the desk and paused upon my camera printer dock, where I performed with the chunky first issue of BANG an act describable in American English as 'smushing'. I smushed him good. A clean shot. No twitching or anything.

After saying a brief prayer and smirking I went downstairs to get some loo roll with which to remove the corpse and wipe the stray leg from the back cover of the magazine, and NOW IT IS NOT THERE. The dog was fast asleep on the bed (which he thinks is his now - oh well) so it wasn't him. It's just like one of those thrillers where the hero is lying gasping in a pile of his own limbs, and when the rotten terrorist scum comes trolling back to finish him off - ahaaaaa, nothing there but a tiny drip of blood as from minor collision with drawing pin, mocking him from the concrete. Terrorist cast about in astonishment, WHUH? flashing across his knotted terrorist brow, whereupon robustly intact hero leg with boot smash him in back of head. Terrorist go down without murmur.

Consequently, tonight each time my hair brushes the back of my neck I will leap out of bed thinking it's dancing vengeful cranefly zombie legs. (I exaggerate, but not very much.) The thing was mangled, two of its legs went - they are sent from Satan to defy God's natural ways and make Him get all wrathy. 'No, no, I made certain that all things must die when (insert the actual physics of it here) bears down upon them in such a manner and with such precision and gusto. How dare this creature defy me - I shall rain down a plague of something on somewhere. Perhaps for the poetic justice of it, a plague of cranefly on north-west England.'

Someone should spend some money researching exactly what composes a cranefly, and then set about making planes out of it, and cars and anything else that you'd like to be able to drop from a great height or crash at high speed and walk out of whistling.

Still, you've got to love the mythology. Or not. I just wish they would all die, even if it means the extinction of several small breeds of songbird (which would only get shot for fun by the French anyway, the fucks). In fact, they only live for two days. Two days. That's if they die of natural causes. Presumably, if you try and kill them, it only makes them stronger and they go on to live for many years and write weepy autobiographies about their struggle to overcome being hit with a copy of BANG, get standing ovations on Letterman, etc.

I'm sure, somehow, this is all my own fault.

My 100th post to this blog. Are you going to be treated to an in-depth consideration of what I've learned over these last few months, from the most profound and gloriously contradictory and entirely inconclusive personal insights to the little trinkets of knowledge in HTML and digital photography? A little apropos-of-naff-all rhapsodise about Pulp's 'My Legendary Girlfriend' (quite the rudest record ever recorded, makes 'Je T'aime (Moi Non Plus)' sound like 'All Things Bright And Beautiful')?

(For some reason known only to God and Sean Bean, the Sheffield accent - specifically - is capable of making anything sound filthy. It's all in the delivery, I suppose. Unbearable tension strung over 6 1/2 mins in patented Cocker dirty-phone-call whisper. 'And as I stand there I wonder how many more times I'm gonna come here. I wonder how many more times I'm gonna lie here. But most of all...most of all I wonder. I wonder what it means. DUNDUNDUN, DUNDUN. I just wanna know what it means.' Etc.)

Or something about the giant moth-shadow that keeps passing over me like doom, or the stuff I forgot to mention about L planning to take her kids and cat and dog to live in a yurt in a field with a lot of other yurts? The general unbearable Beeness of being?

No. You shall have a picture of a pigeon, and like it.

The trouble with having an overdeveloped, hurts-your-mind's-eye vivid imagination is that it leads you to believe you know exactly how things are going to be, because you've seen them so clearly. The brain isn't really equipped to deal with the end products of a lot of the things it's actually capable of doing; the traditional mechanisms of it can't keep up with the precocious stretching twattery of the human mind. And it is precocious twattery - so much of it is useless at best and damaging at worst. What's the use of being able to envisage things you can't do, things you can't have - or worse, being able to see perfectly clearly how things are going to go wrong, and how people are going to curse your miserable hide? It's like having a hundred unused rooms, all of them well-stocked with instruments of mental torture.

(Watched most of 'As Good As It Gets' again tonight, several satisfactory moments of sniffle. Sadly, I missed the part where Jack says 'People who talk in metaphors ought to shampoo my crotch'.)

(But I did get to look at Skeet Ulrich and not hear any of his lines due to boggling afresh at his astonishing resemblance to my first lover [although more to do with mannerisms than the amusing hustler facial hair in this instance]. Who is now either a hugely successful swank with a foxy car, or lying in a gutter bleeding from the nose. Or reading this. Hi, D. You owe me money.)

I am nifty, though, and I am crafty, and I will outwit it. My brain will not get the better of me. I shall have at it. I will whip it into shape. I will tell it when it can have the night off, and shoo it back to bed when it toddles in at 3am whining that it's thirsty.

While I'm at it, I should do something about the chemicals that seem to ignite said thinky-organ once every four weeks or so. It really is like school chemistry, pissing about with test tubes until something goes WHUMPH and oh with the smoke and the screaming and the crying and mayhem. There is no reason why, with various counteractive synthetic chemicals available to act as heroic little firemen damping down the blaze, I should turn into a mad shadow of myself on a predictable basis. Nein!

Things are never exactly as you foresee them - couldn't be more fucking obvious but I evidently need reminding - and a lot of the time they're not even reminiscent of what they were when they acted themselves out in your head. Since I trust and am very fond of my imagination, which has comforted me at least as much as it has gleefully shafted me, it bewilders me slightly that events do not act according to the maps it scrawls. But I'm also pleased that life is so much more inventive. My imagination really only knows three chords in comparison.