Red Eyes

Is it a kind of cold?

Or am I just slightly hung-over?

And slow to recover because I’m old?

Or is it a cold?

There’s a fog all through my brain,

A thumb print on my sinus

I feel pretty suspect and look quite low

Or so I am told

Oh-oh, is it a cold?

Red eyes

Burning like acid

Red eyes

How can you itch so much

How can the eyes that seemed so placid

Now seem so hot to touch

Red eyes.

Is it the pints that I drank

That’s causing this sense of distraction

Should I have eaten the food I was sold?

Or is it a cold?

There’s a dull throb in my temple

A perpetual sniff in my nose

And the bags under my eyes are as dark as holes

With creases and folds

Oh-oh,  is it a cold?

Red eyes

Burning like acid

Red eyes

How can you itch so much?

How can the eyes that seemed so placid

Now seem so hot to touch

Red eyes. 

Machinery

I learned that I was not made for engineering (or even engineered for making) at an early age. As a child I wasn't particularly adept at using pester power, but I deployed it on a few occasions to get what I thought I wanted. My most magnificent triumph was the Fantom Four Hovercraft, a toy that brought such befuddlingly long-winded yet fleeting pleasures that it was either going to teach children the very meaning of patience, or end up in the bin.

But my most shameful experience came after identifying a very exciting looking box of Meccano in the local toy store (now a PC repair shop that also specialises in fixing Sky remotes). I banged on about it for ages, inspired by the amazing things the TV advert suggested I would be able to make.

Of course, what the TV doesn't make clearly, is that making anything interesting out of Meccano when you have the technical abilities of a gerbil requires hard work. Lots of hard work. The kind of hard work you're not really looking for in a toy shop, but might expect to find in some sort of El Salvadoran copper mine. I probably spent all of half an hour trying to stick some perfectly basic metal struts together, before realising that they were more fun if you pretending they were swords and rushing off to slay some dragons in the garden shed. Of which it turned out there were fuck loads. Who'd have thought it?

To this day, me and machinery get on like an EDL organiser and a Kurdish shopkeeper.

Dole

Over at Speedyrants, my huffin' and puffin' alter ego asks can benefits claimants sue the Daily Express? The answer to which turns out to be "probably not" but getting there presumably makes him feel better, which was was in all honesty the only point.

I was unemployed at the tail end of John Major's 1990s recession, for about 9 months. It was soul destroying and deeply unpleasant. Though I did have a lot of time to play Civilization. But what I think people who might never have gone through this fail to perceive - mereckons -  is that being able to sit around doing nothing and playing shitty PC strategy games and watching daytime tv is only fun if that isn't all you have to do.

You can't skive if you have nothing to do. There is no glorious frisson of breaking the rules, or feeling that you have got out of doing something unpleasant. That's it. That's your life. Conquering Macedonia with your chariot force is all well and good,  but then you realise that your real life plunder consists of a tin of TESCO basics spaghetti hoops and sellotaping the wallpaper back on.

Well

I'm not. Well, that is. Which I suppose, when it comes to random words, gives me more to work with than if I was feeling dandy, tip-top, swell, on top of the world and peachy-keen, though if I was thinking all those phrases it would probably mean that I wasn't very well.

Despite having a major orange juice fetish (I lied in my last blog, I like orange coloured drinks that taste of orange as well as those that don't) I must be lacking in Vit C or something, because my body appears to be utterly incapable of fighting off colds. If the end of human evolution means that we will eventually all succumb to some sort of mutant virus, I might be the only survivor - a mutant virus would pass so quickly through my immune system it wouldn't have time to kill me.

On the plus side, having a cold gives me a chance to really stretch out when it comes to luminous drinks. Now, next to my trusty bottle of Irn Bru, I've got some water in a green plastic bottle, and (drumroll) a nuclear waste-shaded simmering pot of LemSip, its lurid yellowness hinting heavily to my brain that I SHOULD NOT DRINK IT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. It reminds me of the colour my wee turned when I used to take Quest Super Once-a-Day time released multi-vitamins and minerals (I was only 18, and for a short time thought aliens had been experimenting on me before I remembered the suspicious , baguette-sized pills I'd just started popping).

The LemSip has now melted the spoon with which I stirred it. I accept that it might have been the heat, but this is a teaspoon - made, I would guess, for boiling water. Look at it! How can this be good for me?

Then I remember - it isn't supposed to make me better, it's supposed to make me feel better, like other health foods, such as Heroin. Oh well.

Amber

I probably drink too much orange-coloured fizzy drink. We're talking a likely 2,409,000ml since I was 19, when a bout of glandular fever first sent me hunting pig-like for the truffles of artificial energy boosts. Obviously GF doesn't last 20 years, but frankly by the time it subsided completely I was 20, ergo an old man and in need of stimulants. I've drunk so much of it that I sometimes wonder if I should be like one of those classic fish-aliens of sci-fi cliche that get pushed around the world in their tanks having bubbly conversations with humans. Except, of course, my tank would be full of Irn Bru or Lucozade.

Orange coloured fizzy drinks that don't taste of orange, I should stress. No, I'm a slave to drinks that taste only of themselves. If it tastes even remotely like something that exists in the real, non-fizzy-drinks world, I'm not interested. Even if it's nice. Obviously I'm not interested in a drink that tastes like a hair brush, but then noone else is either. But someone out there would like a drink that tastes like a kumquat. It's not me. (while I'm at it, why are there not a wide range of tangerine-flavoured cordials? Did tangerines upset someone high up in the drinks industry? Maybe they're not very good at networking, or something.)

Lucozade - what does it taste of? Lucozade. It's a lucozade flavoured drink. Which is quite cleverly self-referential for a sugary liquid. It's practically post-modern. Or possibly even post-post-modern. Have we reached post-post-post-modern yet? Modernism was now so long ago that you feel we must have at least squared it by now. Otherwise how would we have Lucozade and Ant & Dec?

Sunday mornings are supposed to be for getting over hangovers. If you haven't got one it's almost as if you have to invent one. So I'm drinking Lucozade to get over the torpor of having done next to nothing yesterday. I feel so lethargic I'm thinking of applying for a job as a speed bump. It'll pass. Hand me my post-post-modern drink and I'll see you later.

What did you do during the war, daddy?

Tripping the light fantastic

It sums up the summer rather neatly when I wake up at 6am because my bedroom is filled with unmanageable quantities of sunlight. Why? Because it's the first time this has happened.

Admittedly I've only been there a week, hence my shying away from using the word "EVER" in large capitals at the end of that statement, but it's still fairly depressing that it's taken one 52nd of a year to get a sunny morning. I'm sure we'll get lots in January, except I'll have been in the office for an hour before they turn up.

Getting up at 6am because my brain has been infused with pure sunlight is a lovely way to start the day, but I'm fairly sure the darkness will have its revenge and I will be blearily bashing into bollards by 9pm. This could be awkward, since I'm off to watch a play at the Bridewell Theatre. The last time I did this I slept through 30% of the play (having recently arrived off a plane from Cambodia). If I'm not careful they'll ban me as a persistent snoring menace.

[they actually have these - my friends' enjoyment of Romeo & Juliet at the Bridewell was somewhat spoiled by someone (noone can confirm who) having a good old high decibel snooze in the lighting box throughout the final, emotionally traumatic half-hour of the show].

In fact, I may not have to wait until 9pm. The fluffy clouds of doom are already gathering around the watercooler and gossiping about how they plan to cover the sun and steal my light-filled soul. I'll be in a coma by lunchtime.

The Depths of the Swamp

This is not the best of days. It's half past seven at night, and I am probably less than halfway through the world's most depressing ambition: to clear a room known only as The Swamp.

I'm moving home - slightly involuntarily* - and gain access to the new property on Saturday morning, so obviously the sooner the various dampened fragments of my life are either boxed or disposed of the better. But many of them, the particularly damp ones, are hiding in a strange basement room - The Swamp. It is a desolation, a cube of cracks and flakes and drooping webs, of high rise slugs and a vague sensation of something tickling your neck. It is not a holiday destination, and as a day trip it sucks.

Still, I have a few hours to go, and if all that room is clear of the detritus of my existence by bedtime, I shall sleep soundly. As long as I haven't just moved it all onto my bed.

S.

* I decided to play hard-ball with my landlord over a 12% rent rise. Like killing Mandy Patinkin's father, beeg mistake.