Monk Quixote

I think, on reflec­tion, that I should sim­ply cut out the mid­dle man and change my name to Non­sense. Or pos­si­bly Non Sense.  Not my mid­dle name, obvi­ously, as that would be too obvi­ous. Plus the mid­dle man would think he’d still got me some­how, and come after his 15%. Which in this case, pleas­ingly would be ‘No’. After round­ing.  And there is no rounder fig­ure than zero.

Equally obvi­ously, I could not change my Chris­t­ian name — wouldn’t want to be done for pun­danameal­ism.  Plus it would be giv­ing in to extrem­ists. That which is not in the mid­dle, by def­i­n­i­tion, must be extreme. And is there any fur­ther extreme than the senses?  So sim­ply deny­ing one sense, or imply­ing there is only one, true, non-sense, then I would be putting myself up for some impromptu behead­ing action.

We could name our chil­dren Im Promptu and Im Plau­si­ble. Assum­ing they were boys. Or Van­ity and Ver­ity, should they be there­fore, of the flow­erier gender.

Our pets would be Project Exe­cu­tion Plan (dog) and Mass Digres­sion (cat). We’d also keep a swarm of pygymy (word of the day) but­ter­flies in a bell jar. I’d train them to use their wing­beats to cre­ate sound­waves that when attuned through the cor­rect ear trum­pet would trans­ceive as the rules of Monopoly.

As I typed this post a hol­low bell sounded in my ear. Most odd. Per­haps caused by the noisy plane fly­ing off course over­head. Off course because the mag­ne­tised pygymy ions from my Non­sense has trav­elled upwards in an Unlike­li­hood Vor­tex and tick­led the First Officer’s mous­tache. (Back to Movem­ber, I see).

Let’s hope no air­lin­ers on their way to Peru go astray over West­ern Lon­don. As I wouldn’t want to explain what had hap­pened to a Pig (these fea­ture in novel #2).

Reader, it’s going to be a long day. Let’s stop this non­sense and see what dragons/blaggards/name chang­ing dullards I can slay today. At once. (Aside: why must all non­sense be stopped ‘at once’ — why can’t it sim­ply be talked down from the ceil­ing like any old thought plane?  Or herded ten­derly, like a flock of sil­lies?  All very anti-nonsense, it would seem.  Espe­cially the Vic­to­ri­ans. And Thatcher.)

A.Ny. Way. The novel’s that way ==> (not you, dear reader. Pour moi. Amuse your­self among the increas­ingly accu­rate cat­e­gory cloud girdle-busters)