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Well. I never. I thought that kind of behaviour had gone out with the ark. I mean? When was the last time you invited two giraffes to dinner? Dreadful scenes. Dreadful. Although strangely erotic. Amazing tongues, giraffes. They can lick their own ears. Apparently.

Funny how no animal can lick it’s own arse. Ah yes. The cat. Le humble chat. And yet, so much of a hold does it have over hooman kind that it can survive licking it’s OWN arse. I mean, we’ve spent tens of thousands of years perfecting the mechanisms by which we get other hoomans to lick our arse, or perhaps suffer the indignity of licking someone else’s. And yet. The cat. The humble mog. Has bewitched us into both caring for what is infinitely unsentimental. And also it licks its own arse. The more I think about this, the more disturbed I become.

So I won’t. I was having another thought then. But I was distracted. Possibly by a cat moth. Or maybe a Moth Cat.

I’ve been re-reading my favourite book. My reference book. The book by which I have always gauged that I can, in fact, as opposed to cat-lore, write. And I’ve come to the rather disturbing conclusion that it is a leetel beet juvenile.

Old farts and chats. Go out in the midday sun. And lick their own arse. Mainly because they can’t reach their ears…..

That’s what I should be made. And the chain of office should be made from refreshers. Or possibly the front claws of Siberian Church Mice, whichever is easier. And let’s face it, to my electorate’s taste. For after all, is it not the burden of those called to office but to serve?

If I could serve anything, it would probably be tea at the Ritz. Or more specifically, tea from the Ritz, but somewhere else. Ritzy’s in Tombland, Norwich, for one. Although I believe that shut down in 1994. Other things that shut down in ’94 include the Orinoco power station in North Orinoco, Orinocowa, and my belief in the UK’s political system. Although to be fair, the three things are not related.

My heart is currently gladdened by this story, although when I first read it, they hadn’t solved the mystery of who the guy was. Top man. There should be more anarchist sculptors in my experience. Although none of them should be allowed to put gargoyles on top of Orinoco power station, North Orinoco. Or carve political motifs on top of the lions that guarded the entrance to Ritzy’s. Or at least I think they did. Never went in the place myself. Too socio-political.

Anyhoo. Vote for me. Strike a blow for the corrugated man. I pledge to root out corruption and make it into tea bags, turn injustice into jam and allow mint humbugs the vote.

You know it makes sense. Emperor Big Poobah Chief Vizier Lizard. You heard it here first!

I appear to spend half my time on this blog writing as if I were a junk mail bot. Which may well be a more lucrative outlet than Monk Quixote. I should read a biography of Lewis Carroll, I guess. He more or less invented nonsense. Before Alice, there was only gruel and romans. Oh and Victorian fifteen part tomes on the sex life of a ping-pong ball (or was that the standard essay set by all prefects in catholic boys’ schools).

I have that nagging thoughtpecker in my head that is nag, nag, nagging away at me because I am pro, pro, procrastinating about pi. Ok. Not about a numerical constant. About literal non-constants. Badum-pi.

Of all the eggs I have known, this one took the biscuit. Covered in almond sugar and laced with caramel, it was the third egg that the Beaujolais Weaver bird had laid that week, each one accompanied by some light jazz. It favoured the earlier work of Fredi Feelgood Banana-Joe. The first egg had appeared shortly after an alto sax solo, shortly after a spectacular paradiddle on the Swiss cymbals.

I fried the egg, as is my custom. It tasted sweet, but the smell was off-putting. Sickly, with notes of burnt cherry. It put me off my soldiers.

In other news. I am annoyed. Really, rather spectacularly annoyed. A dimmer switch of my acquaintance – let’s call him Andrew – fizzed and spluttered earlier in the night and my reactions were to slow from preventing him from committing spectacular interior electrics suicide. Bastard. I mean, obviously, my inner catholic is delighted that some of the four gillion halogen lights in the house are out of action, but the way it happened – that little window of opportunity when I had the chance to react ‘perfectly’ and save the wiring – has made me very cross. With Andrew. Myself. Philips. And whichever idiot wired the house.

Minor rage. It’s a bit like a Morris Minor. But it has a smaller carburretor. I think Rhianna should write a song about her carburettor – maybe the Metro and Lite hacks would then write black and white sonnets, I mean gobbets, of wisdom about the correlation between increases in congestion charging and the presence of a song in the charts.

Pants. The grouch that laid the frayed-wire egg.

Don’t you just hate it when you wake up at 4am all excited about an idea, spend an hour working it up, decide to email people about it and then, at the last minute, you decide to google it and you discover that someone has stolen the name you want to use….

And don’t you just hate sentences with lots of ‘ands’ in them? I mean, it’s not like they are ampersands or something posh. Simple, plain old conjunctions. You don’t see many of them nowadays. It’s all fields of commas and parentheses where I live nowadays.

Sigh. I never thought I’d see the day. I was attempting to make a joke about punctuation. Oh how the mighty (colons) have fallen. I also caught myself earlier today laughing at a math-geek flame-war on Slashdot. Which probably means it’s time for a holiday. Or at least an ellipsis.

There has been an influx of readers lately from Fetcheveryone, and I can’t figure out why. And the can’t being able to figure out why actually outweighs the small satisfaction of more people reading this bilge. Which again, probably says something about me.

And that something is that it is 5.20 am and I can have another 70 mins sleep if I stop typi

So the wheels have started turning again. I feel the itch to connect with my fictional chums who sit waiting like old toys in boxes for me to re-discover my inner chiddler. I put part of the blame down to Martin O’Brien and his Jacquot novels, plus An Interpretation of Murder, by Jed Rubenfeld. And part down to stuff going on at work that I really don’t want to blog about.

I’ve been having really strange dreams. I’m used to having ultra-realistic dreams, whereas recently I’ve been having ‘odd’ dreams that are directly related to day to day stuff going on. A new member of staff, naked except for tiger tattoos; exploring a new house – discovering water damage everywhere a la Dark Water, mitigated by discovering a cinema screen and horror pinball arcade; dreams in cartoon, a la Family Guy; escaping the Nazis; the list goes on. Thinking about it, I frequently dream of my youngest brother when exploring new houses. Although the reference point is a building site, and gorillas. Hmm. Curiouser and curiouser.

It is just beginning to feel like the time. You know. After all, Jonathan Ross won’t be around to interview me forever. One has to update the Commitments every now and again.

Been quiet. Apologies to my reader.

A very odd week. Involved in filming, reporting, attending, criticising and reviewing things around mass collaboration, web technologies, ex-somethings, people, philosophies, running and cava. I have perhaps been an island too long and too often, yet some behaviours simply can’t be unlearnt overnight, no matter how much of a super-social ape one may be, and no matter how much of a shit-eating grin one may have (I don’t, for the record. I have the grump that keeps on giving, instead). And I ain’t no ape. I’m a badger.

Anyhoo. Funny how scale affects everyone. I’ve been running to and from work recently – not every day, but often enough for it to become a ‘thing’. It feels strangely liberating to be exercising for a purpose other than rote, for once. I even like the fact that I have yet to run past anyone else with a rucksack (I get passed at least once per trip) and that I’m constantly on the verge of pavement rage in the more populated parts of my run. It feels a bit like belonging to a different species. I run for a little over an hour. Some people think this is admirable – mad even – but I am acutely aware, thanks to Fetcheveryone, how puny my efforts really are. Which naturally, appeals to the side of me addicted to futility.

Which brings me to belonging. There are some social constructs that I now see as vital to my happiness, and to an indeterminate effect, my future ‘success’ in life. But increasingly I find myself at odds with what I perceive to be the philosophy of many aspects of my ‘work’. Or more accurately I guess, the application of that philosopy. Inherently, I like the idea of connectivity, networks, meta-spheres and any number of social aspects of the digital age. And to a lesser extent, innovation. But I find it difficult to engage with the relative importance placed on them.

No man is an island. I like the idea that bridges can be built between my island and your island. Or the world. Or a world. Or Mars. But I don’t like the idea that building them should be any sort of focus. Perhaps I’m being Cnutian. Or, I don’t know, Mohammedan. But I’ve always been at ease with my own company. I may be missing out on endless riches or opportunities (emotional or otherwise) but….

But.

My isolation, in some regards, keeps me innocent. And I really value innocence. I measure importance in very specific ways. I’m as naive as I am arrogant. Wistfully, he recognises they may be related. But. You see. I look at things and I am Yosser Hughes. I can do that. Or, occasionally, Eyeore. Or Marvin.

I will always be an outsider. Not in a bad way. Or a good way. Just in an ‘is’ way. The world will always be as I see it. And, thankfully, that will change on an almost daily basis. Which helps me in some ways and makes other (achievement) things more troublesome.

It’s a question of scale. And my very own, characteristic, idealistic, non-virtual, bona-fide island.

Making faces at the bus-stop.  I like to burble at the sparrows and tell jokes to the neighbourhood cats.  They feign disinterest but I know they’re cracking up inside.  Poker-faces.  That’s what cats have.  Yet they’re no good at cards as they’re too easily distracted by making your hand into a tunnel, or spinning your chips so they shine in the light.

The Cortina doors are rusty and creak when they’re opened.  I think Elvis should have oiled them when he did his first post-humous tour of Basildon in ’78.  Cortinas were big then.  As were the neighbourhood cats.  It was tougher in the seventies.  There hadn’t been years of Garfield to acclimitase people to obese pets.

There’s an old tape machine that likes to chew up tapes.  Some people say it’s because it’s an old heap of junk.  I like to think it’s exercising its musical conscience.  Supertramp and Dana are chewed,  the funny compilation tape my uncle made of Polynesian folk music for my christmas present once is not.

The Cortina has a body in the trunk.  It is not mine.  I do not know how it got there.  But it has made a new home inside the spare tyre, and talks to me on long trips.  It talks about highways it could have been on.  And fishing.  And where ghosts go when they’re tired.

I’m sitting alone in a Ford Cortina.  Waiting for my mojo to turn up.

The Susan Hill book turned out ok, even if there was a sudden ‘oh shit, I better introduce who the murderer is’ a bit too soon for my liking (I’m a big fan of the old Scooby Doo / Agatha Christie style of un-masking). It was also one of those annoying thrillers that the publisher pads at the end with the first chapter(s) of their next installment. It’s something I hate more than celery and as any fule should already know from this blog, celery is not so much the devil’s own vegetable, as a vegetable designed to perform oral torture on oneself. In. Oh. So. Many. Ways.

Life is in a bit of a holding pattern, prior to all kinds of mentalism. Change has been a near constant for the past decade. Which brings its ups and its downs. And its ramaladingdongs. I don’t think denial figures greatly in the catholic ouevre. In terms of being explained. Not experienced.

Anyhoo. One of my last Saturdays in Cambridge. For who knows how long. And my abiding memory will be of change. Of Eastern Europeans – one of the girls from AMT coffee riding around on her bike, two russian Hiltons arguing over a swiss roll in Marks and Spanks; kids playing football in the playground outside, screaming and swearing at each other; CB4 ‘tourists’ fighting each other on the late night train home to Bury/Newmarket; an Asian guy watching telly through an open window; Spanish girl on a bike gibbering away on her mobile; one of the neighbours vacuuming his car for over an hour; a new block of flats on my route to my local gym; kids on mopeds racing each other; Co-ops; organic butchers selling frozen rainbow trout; gay couple trying to get the other to wear the sunglasses; brutalist hairdresser.

Work is…. well. One of the beauties of t’internet is I can’t really talk about work. It’s like Fight Club. But with more salty snacks.

Needless to say, Monk Quixote is buried at the moment. I feel confident that some interesting stuff is ahead, perhaps once my ‘home’ ‘working’ environment is finally sorted. When all is said and done, there are a lot of Reasons and Stuff as to why Shit Happens. And more often, why Not a Lot Really Happens.

I started reading a Susan Hill novel today. Now. She may be a lovely human bean. And talented. And kind to animals. And possibly, just possibly, a fan of 1930s motorcycle goatboy fanfic. But. There is simply no excuse for the words ‘ectoplasmic fog’ and ‘dreicht night’ in the opening three paragraphs. Not enough to make me burn the book. But oh so close.

The last few days have been weird. I keep persuading myself I have no focus, which is my main excuse for never finishing a . Sentence. I mean, novel. Writing, that is. Not reading. I’ve read an appalling number of novels I should have stopped. But what I forget is that I’m stubborn. You don’t run marathons unless you’ve got a mule gene. And yet I’m easily bored. All the running paraphenalia (kit, logs, spreadsheets) induce a state of hypnosis / euphoria / disengagement. Which combine to create small periods of OCD-intensity activity. Sadly (well, for my literary career) most of this energy is currently entwined in lycra. Well, not mine, but I digress.

Running. To run. To gambol. To pootle. To sprint until one is sick. It’s just glorious. As are my legs. Shame about the rest of me. But anyway. Running. It’s brilliant. And despite all appearances to the contrary, easier to do than writing. For me, at least.

And yet. When it goes well. It’s better than running. Putting words together is the best high. Words put a grin on my face. Running hurts shins at my pace. Sigh, that was a reach. I even enjoy the corporate writing I do. It’s like acting – putting on a voice. Obviously I don’t get to swear, or do the. Short. Sharp. Self-reflexive difficult to read shit that I do on here. With or without puns. But it’s just fun. The flow of words. Feeling them whistle past your ears. The an-a-to-mical source of the sound (to quote my favourite lyric ever. Although the irony is I can’t remember it properly).

Which leads me to the conclusion that Marks and Spencers Vintage Cava is the new absinthe. I can’t account for the short sentences otherwise.