… CONTINUED FROM DIARY No 35 …
SUNDAY 20th SEPTEMBER
Donna Daniels-Moss tells me that Paul Eccentric aka The AntiPoet is punting another book The Periwinkle Perspective: The Giant Step, the synopsis of which is:
Is there amateur taxidermy in space…??
June 1897, and as part of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, her expanding Empire lays claim to another new territory: The Moon!
Space Captain Gordon Periwinkle; the much vaunted Gentleman Adventurer (and amateur taxidermist), becomes the first man to set foot on Earth’s only natural satellite; bravely sacrificing his life on a one way trip into the history books.
The world is changed in an instant; the balance of power shifting in Victoria’s favour. War breaks out between Germany and America: the two world powers that had previously been the closest to achieving such a feat…
This is the story of the good captain’s attempt to get home, dodging an array of government assassins and foreign agents along the way; keen to use him for the own nefarious propaganda purposes.
MONDAY 21st SEPTEMBER
Writer/performer Ariane Sherine who has her latest book How To Live To 100 out next week is, like me, is trying to lose weight. She suggested we should have a competition and the person who loses least weight has to buy both of us a slap-up Christmas dinner. I have been losing weight in the last week or so, but I have a sense of impending doom.
Chris Dangerfield live from Cambodia, home of Colonel Kurtz
Eternal contrarian Chris Dangerfield got in touch from Cambodia to tell me he has a novel coming out “at Christmas”, which turns out to be 15th November. He tells me no more. I feel it may be controversial. Perhaps something along the lines of an autobiographical novel about his time quitting heroin while living in a brothel in Thailand.
Never one to make things easy for himself, a brothel in Thailand is possibly the least likely place I can think of to get rid of his addictions… He now seems to be addicted to posting two-hour interactive YouTube videos from his home in South East Asia.
After reading Chris Dangerfield’s email, I checked my Gmail InBox.
The number of messages it said I had was 666.
This did not fill me with untramelled optimism.
TUESDAY 22nd SEPTEMBER
In my last diary blog, I mentioned a local man – local to where I live – who wears bright clothes, has an over-enthusiastic moustache and, according to the Evening Standard, was once convicted of killing his brother.
(Photograph by Fusion Medical Animation, via UnSplash)
Today, he was in the local Sainsbury’s with two acquaintances, none of them wearing masks (as the government’s COVID regulations decree). They were discussing with theatrical bravado how ridiculous it was to wear masks when (the three of them knew for certain) the virus doesn’t come out and become active until after 8.00pm in the evening and how other, lesser mortals than they – the ones who mindlessly followed the government’s mask-wearing rules – were just ‘sheeple’.
After reaching enlightenment at Sainsbury’s, I went to Elstree station where similar surrealism is standard. The time was 8.39pm. One of the train indicator boards said the next train would arrive in 1,082 minutes, at 1440 tomorrow afternoon, with the second train due at 1446, in 1,087 minutes. True to their eternal incompetence – even if these due times were true – Thameslink’s minutes didn’t add up.
WEDNESDAY 23rd SEPTEMBER
First World problems only seem heavy…
Losing weight is not easy.
My scales told me I had added 8lbs overnight.
But it turned out one corner of the scales was resting on a piece of lino resulting in the scales over the course of the last week telling me I was 8lbs lighter than I actually was.
First world problems.
THURSDAY 24th SEPTEMBER
My cousin Muriel told me she doesn’t enjoy the months of November and December.
I rather like November/December because the weather gets worse. I don’t like hot weather and rather like dreich days – a result I suspect of impressionable childhood days living in a council estate on a hill in Aberdeen. If there ain’t a wind in yer face and rain coming down, it ain’t proper weather.
The best days in Edinburgh, my favourite city, are late winter days just after dusk with a sea mist drifting in and the air feeling wet.
I fear California is not for me.
FRIDAY 25th SEPTEMBER
At lunchtime, I passed the local McDonald’s – local to where I live.
Their cheap ice creams may have influenced my feet.
Crying McTear (Photo by Aliyah Jamous via UnSplash)
Sitting next to each other, outside on a wooden bench, were a young couple – male and female – maybe aged in their early twenties. Both were crying silently.
They sat next to each other, not opposite each other. They both looked ahead, not at each other, their heads tilted slightly downwards.
I will never know why they were crying.
Glimpses of other people’s lives.
SATURDAY 26th SEPTEMBER
I posted a new blog: a chat I had with promoter/constantly inventive ideas man Adam Wilder. As always, I had to cut out chunks to make it a readable length. This bit got chopped and dropped:
“Death of the world if we become humourless.”
ADAM: Comedy is something that unites the audience together, it can help people to relax.
We tend to take ourselves so seriously and it can be really hard to live when we do that.
We are not living in the most easy-going of times and I think it’s important to have a bit of playfulness. It’s the death of the world if we become humourless. And there are some movements to become humourless now.
I think comedians are like modern shamens, weaving a spell with the audience, taking us in with a ritual experience.
… CONTINUED HERE …
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 