The early bird catches the worm. The Taste the Difference worm. The magna cum laude worm. The Magnum PI worm. The ear worm and the warm worm. But, the question that one must inevitably ask is … is it the worm that turned?
Sadly the vermilingual answer (there really is such a word, which almost makes up for being the early worm, I mean, bird, with it’s associated hallucinastisis [not a real word, yet. Perhaps I will mark my days on earth by whether one of my frequently imaginated words ends up in the OED. I could perhaps begin my campaign of guerilla etymology on blackboards outside pubs. Sorry, I meant blackboard’s outside ‘garden at rears’] where one looks up the latin roots for words and discovers that you can, if you so wished, describe something as having a ‘worm-like tongue’) is that the common European Turning Worm — Vermes Drillbit Whee Whee Whee — cannot, indeed will not, be found consorting with the early bird.
Let me explain. The early bird — Tempus Fugit — survives almost exclusively on the thoughts that Middle England has between the hours of 3:30–4:30 (later on weekends but not on Bank Holidays because one wouldn’t want to waste one, would one, do they though?). The worm — or ‘Vulgar Cowell’ to give it’s common name — survives only on the vibrations in the soil caused by teenage girls soiling themselves at the sight of hair with the texture of your everyday industrial brick. The worm implants itself in the deepest, darkest part of the soil heap (stinking pile of manure, bullshit, bullcrap, allotment wee, ITV, call it what you will) and waits for the aforesaid soiling to create the ideal conditions for the modification of pre-canned shit into newly-oxygenated liquid shit, which it them bathes in, creating the distinctive colourations and odour of the typical Cowell.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that you can’t watch Britain’s Got Talent at 5am in the morning. I mean, obviously you could, but then you’re probably surviving on a diet of your own ear wax and skidmarks. Hmm. Gone a little Charlie on my imagery there. Sorry, mother.
So. Proof that the worm that turned is not caught by the early bird. But what benefit is there to waking up at 5am (and not immediately rolling back into the duvet and pretending you haven’t woken your wife up because you’ll pay for that one later)? Well, the early bird develops peculiar linguistic sensibilities over time, the most remarkablly un-polysyllabic of which is that it can talk fluent squirrel.
Now you may have been labouring under the apprehension that squirrels don’t talk. This is patently a nonsense. As any visitor to Nutbush or Richard Dreyfus’ house will testify (unless they’re speaking squirrel and you’re not an early bird, in which case it is probably best to stick with the standard squirrelese of ‘one twitch for yes and two twitches for dog’). Squirrel has been spoken by early birds (and squirrels, obviously, we’re not into bestiality or bizarre government sponsored squirrel-sparrow genetic splicing experiments here) for as long as there have been ‘earlys’. Which now that I think about it, must be since the invention of the Tiverton alarm clock, which was identified as the cause of the first ever recorded use of the word ‘early’ in a trade-union pamphlet ‘Comrades, thy time has come, but not before clocking-on time, mind’ written by the appropriately-named Herbert von Ballot, Chief Underwearer of the Llama Farmers’ Union (Coventry Branch).
Anyhoo. Squirrel is a jealously guarded heritage language, and is currently in the process of being ratified by the Arts Council. The Chief Arbiter (or Chief Nut in this case) is Secret Agent 000, which is a bloody stupid name for a member of the Sciuris family (the short-lived porn version of the Partridge family where everybody wanted to bury their nuts in Susan Dey. Again, apologies mother), as one thing squirrels can’t do is count. And in any case, the existence or otherwise of such a concept as zero will keep any number of Rorty’s in acorns until the final reckoning. Or infinite reckoning. Depending on whether you followed any of the ‘notions of life’ blog post.
Anyhoo. The Early Bird and Secret Squirrel, having bonded over a love of strawberries have reached an understanding over the precise interpretation of ‘leave my strawberry bush alone or I will be forced to disembowel you and feed you cheek by chubby cheek to the itinerant packs of foxes (or Tories, whichever are closer to hand)’ that are literally overrunning Chiswick. Tis true, the foxes like to organise drag races up and down the High Road and cause an awful mess. I mean, some of them aren’t even from outside the parish.
And now, suddenly, in that delightfully ironic way that the Gods like to mock me so, this early bird is tired. Exhausted. Knackered. Positively blue in the Norwegian duvet department. My mo-jo is on slow-mo. And it is only 6:15. I have wasted so much energy on explaining all about the birds and the worms (and the squirrels and the foxes) that there is nothing left for Chapter 7 of God’s Cobbler.
I think I need a lie down. How the worm turns, eh dear reader?
