Bauble

With my favourite random word generator looking like it's been eaten by the Worm of the World's End, I'm left waiting for my Dictionary app to spit a random word at me. Today it spat a bauble at me, which could have been dangerous if it had been one of those delicate glass Christmas decorations. In a world become very conscious of health & safety (rightly, for the most part) it does seem out of keeping that we celebrate a great festival to be enjoyed by children by surrounding them with fragile glass and putting electric lights on damp pine trees.

I have a box full of the most delightful, timorously fragile Christmas baubles. Alas they've remained wrapped in cotton wool (or possible bubble wrap) since they were bought, because they're far too fragile to actually do anything with. Instead my Christmas decorations of choice are £4 fairy lights from Chapel Market and a load of tinsel. Interestingly (to me) although I never take the baubles out of the box, I never put the tinsel and fairy lights away, and they've been decorating my north London garret for months now.

I had tinsel wrapped round Easter eggs, tinsel glinting in the midsummer sun, soon I'll have fairy lights shining through the eyes of pumpkins. There is something eternal about tinsel, not least because it's made of plastic and probably takes about 50 billion years to biodegrade. I look forward to being reincarnated as a sentient crustacean in the year 34,005,455,343 and digging up the preserved remains of the Selfridges Santa's Grotto from 2073, the year human civilization was finally destroyed by an invasion of strange pink blobs descended from David Cameron's face.

And all the while, tucked away somewhere in a cave at the centre of the Earth, will be a small, never opened, shoebox full of shell-like baubles, marked 'fragile' in long dead marker pen.  

Snip

I had an ex-girlfriend - my first one, in fact - who refered to me by an inexplicable (to me) nickname. The relationship was short lived, so short lived in fact that I never got a straight answer to why she decided to call me "Cheese Snip*". And of course never will.

Being named after some sort of proto-Mini Cheddar has probably not scarred me for life, but I do seem to have attracted an enormous number of nicknames over the years. Not generally from girlfriends, I hasten to add - if they always had something mysterious and slightly unflattering to call me I'd probably worry. 

So I've been The Professor, Strider, Bob-a-long, Triffid, The Master Plaster, Potto, The Hustler, Marti, Rubbish, Naked Steve and, of course, Speedy. I'm fairly certain there are lots of others, but being of advancing years bits of my past are being erased as my former selves are taken out of time, so several of my identities are lost to me forever. Also, I'm unlikely ever to get called Marti ever again. Thankfully. And as for Naked Steve, my days of appearing on stage in nowt but a breech-clout are hopefully gone forever, like my ponytail.

* whatever it was, I assure you it had nothing to do with the entry on Urban Dictionary. Eww.

Frenzied

I've been awake for 6 hours today. It's 10:15am

This, in short, is a prelude to a less than happy posting, wherein I try to make myself feel better about the shitness of the world by phrasing it in imperishable text and spreading my misery around on the web. And speaking of web...

I awoke (presumably from some sort of dream, but subsequent events rather scattered my recollections) in the darkness of night. I say darkness: the glow of the half a centimetre-across light on my wireless router, so dim in the minutes after the lamps are turned off, by 4am glows like the sickly green ghost-light of Minas Morgul, chucking ghoulish shadows around the room like dirty socks (some of them may be the ghoulish shadows of actual dirty socks). My head was buzzing, but not with any particularly issues, so 45 minutes later I was a little puzzled not to have dropped off back to sleep. I gave up trying to curl into a pre-sleep foetal position and stretched out on my back, easing tension in my back and shoulders.

Perhaps one of the reasons I can never sleep when I'm on my back is the simple fact of being able to see the ceiling. The ceiling is a terrifying canvass for an over-active imagination, even in a garret where the canvass metaphor is stretched out of shape by the angle of the roof, bringing parts of the ceiling within inches of a sleeping head. Tiny imperfections in the wallpaper (ceiling paper?) create a pebble-dash of tiny shadows, any one of which could turn out to be some tiny lurking terror, but - normally - don't.

This morning I found myself gazing at a piece of ceiling a foot above my face and spotting one of these nefarious dark spots. I squinted, expecting it to turn out to be some errant flake of paper or mysterious bit of fluff.

Instead, I was more than a little dispirited - it being 5am and myself in a state of nigh-hallucinatory sleep-deprivation - to discover a large spider sat inches from me, illuminated in the sickly green router glow, in a prime position to flop lazily onto my head.

Yes, dear reader, I am ashamed to say that I shrieked like a child and leapt out of bed. I can deal with my mild arachnophobia at 2pm on a sunny afternoon, when I will happily catch the spider in a cup and usher it outside. At 5am in the morning, thoroughly exhausted, my only post-screaming action was to grab a towel and flick the thing as far away from the bed as possible. I may well have overdone it, as I heard, distinctly, a little cracking sound as it bounced off the far wall. Of course, with a spider that size the sound was just as likely to be the plaster giving way as it was to be a fatal blow to the arthropod.

I feel slightly guilty about this. I'm a vegetarian. I'm kind to wasps. Why should I be so mean to a spider? But I console myself with this rationalisation: It was above my face! If Mahatma Gandhi was sitting there looking down at me from 8 inches away at 5am, I'd flick him off the wall with a towel.

My frenzied attack over, there was no hope of getting back to sleep, even if I'd dared turn the light out. Somewhere, in the garrety gloom, a spider with four legs in plaster is plotting a dastardly revenge.