THE TRUTH ABOUT STAIRS
The people you meet on a staircase when there is an escalator or lift available are the people who change your life.
OTHER PEOPLE WITH YOUR NAME
If they’re older, are you a fraud?
If they’re younger, should you sue?
If you’re the same age, were you separated at birth?
If they’re dead, would their grave give you the spooks?
If they’re in the same profession, should you take your middle name or change career?
If they’re famous, then aren’t you too?
If they met you, would you have anything else in common?
If you killed them, might the murder trial sound like suicide?
If they gave their child their name then befell a tragic accident, would you be able to foster their child?
If you were both gay, might you get it on?
If you had the same name, met up, fell head over heels and got married, would you keep your maiden name as a matter of karma?
If you met several people with your name, might you start your own private club?
If no-one else is ever born with your name, might you feel extinct?
If you’re called Peter Kirby and you’re reading this, am I you and are we us?
THE WEIGHT OF HAPPY
No, not the first of seven dwarfs. Sure, he was a lump.
I’m talking about Happy – the emotion, the state of being happy. The one that is immeasurable according to the pall bearers of joy. Their shoulders cannot lie.
Or can they? Happy is a complex condition. It is also rarely whole for more than a millisecond. Weighing happiness is akin to throwing a mercury dart at the treble twenty. Just as you think you’ve got it there in the palm of your soul, it evaporates into thin something or other.
As a remedial scientist, I think there may be another way to weigh happy. Not in weight, but in mass. And not in mass in the conventional sense as density, but mass in its radiant quality.
Still with me…because I’m not. Keep going into the blindness of hope.
Mass as atmosphere. Mass as aura. Mass as good times. Now, we’re talking mass language.
Happy can be measured in its contagiousness. As it passes from one person to another, it has two options. To fade or to build.
As my energy fades, I kneel before you all and wait to see if a post will arrive and take this Olympic flame somewhere new, somewhere happier.
Or whether, sadly, this is:
The Elegy Of Happy.
THEY THINK IT’S ALL OVER
It is now.
If John Motson had commentated on the election, we’ve just survived the penalty shootout and it’s still a draw.
And while we’re on the topic, if we win the World Cup, will the recession receed?
CAROLINE LUCAS IS THE NEW PRIME MINISTER
Chromatically speaking.
Tory Blue + Lib Dem Yellow = Green Government.
Water this omen, for the sake of the fossil fuel family.
MONGRELS RULE OK
So, our breath can be held no longer. Nave & Dick have got it on for the good of the country. Let us not castrate them just yet, despite their slightly irritable whines. Instead, let us hope that their combined genes can create hybrid policies to save the world by entertaining opposing thoughts in the head at the same time, as F Scott Fitzgerald once said was the barometer of a first rate intelligence. To that, we’ll swim.
FUNDAMENTAL-ISMS & -ISTS
Did you witness the 3 way debate last night? If you did and you really listened and examined them with the scrutiny Nicholas Parsons does on Just A Minute, the buzzer would have had a field day. Deviation (honk). Hesitation (honk, honk). Repetition (HOOOOONNNNKKKKKKK!). And the most repeated word of the night was not policy, or Britain, or vote, or expenses. It was fundamental. ‘Fundamental’ is the political equivalent of ‘to be honest’ and ‘know what I mean’. They use it to try and validate their flaky thoughts and empty policies. Fundamentally, they fibbed. Next time you hear one of them use the word fundamental (to; fill a gap, reveal a doubt, disown their true values, complicate a simple statement, etc) HONK.
ROONEY’S INJURED ANKLE
If it belonged to a rabbit, we’d all rub it better.
If it belonged to a horse, we’d hang the shoe the right way up.
If it belonged to a frog, we’d eat him.
NOTHING NEW IS HAPPENING
If you look really closely and unmask the events in your day and the world beyond, you’ll see that life is as cyclical as the moon. We like to think of ourselves as this advanced species but we’re little more than hamsters in a goldfish bowl – see, we even try to reconfigure the familiar. The sooner we all come to terms with our limited capabilities, the sooner we’ll evolve.
YOU KNOW YOU’RE OLD WHEN
You start each sentence with:
Now I might have already told you this but…