Noisily

[Due to general incompetence, I'm publishing this two years late. That's right. Two years. Actually, two and bit. Sorry about that.]

The world does not fit nicely into our plans. Things that seem a good idea at the time are often revealed as wildly optimistic hopes. In hoping for a lie in on my holiday, I have been made to feel that I was counting on a golden swan to deliver my shopping or firmly believing that one of my legs is actually getting younger while the rest of me ages.

Though I'm pretty sure that one of my legs *is* ageing faster than the other one.

I'm in Edinburgh performing in a play called The War of the Waleses, in which I play Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair. It's enormous fun to act in (and hopefully to watch), but it does have the slight draw back of going up at 10:05pm every night. We finish at 11:30ish, and we're at least 30 mins walk from our digs in leafy surburbia, so the earliest I could get to bed would be midnight, and that's ignoring the residual adrenaline rush of performing in front of more than 6 people and the siren voices of whisky bars. In addition to that, go to bed at 12 and my body will assume that 10:50 is the top of the gentle slope to unconsciousness, just when I need to be bouncing on as Blair and dishing out the 1996 conference speech.

So, the simple solution is just to play fast and loose with the old body clock and shift everything onto my own personal time zone.   Jet laggedly zigzagging my hours into a new format should be simple - we all do it at least twice a year. I'll put my own clocks back a couple of hours. What could be more simple?

Me, it seems.  If it wasn't awkward enough sharing a double bed with Alistair Campbell, who seems to have shifted *his* personal time zone enough to have him hanging around in the Caribbean, the good burghers of Edin have decided that the paving slabs on our said leafy crescent need replacing. For some reason, paving slabs need urgent attention at about 8:30 each morning, though you have to be nice to those precious grey squares, and you mustn't tire them out by replacing them after 2pm in the afternoon.

So, thanks to my zone shift, I now have workman digging up the road outside my room from 6:30 till noon. And then they fuck off home.

The most delightful aspect of this is that according to one of my cast mates, at least half the workmen are actually performing community service.  Probably for anti-social behaviour.

Bastards.

Reason & Sanity

Cheating, me? It's just that my random word generator, Watch Out for Snakes, is back! And oddly, the last word before it died was Reason, and the first it's provided now it's back is Sanity. They seem all bedfellowy together, so I thought I'd do both.

I don't have very much reason to doubt my sanity. I might have a blog called The Trampling of Small Pigs, and my girlfriend would point out that I talk to our foster cat by mewing so much that I sometimes meow at other people by 'mistake', but other than that I'm boringly shorn of the signs of madness. Or even the CDs of Madness. Frankly I'm beginning to worry that middle age is making me sane. I haven't had the urge to write a novel about a giant, orange, shape-changing peanut that fights crime for years.

I realise that, rather facetiously, I'm confusing "reason & sanity" with "having an active imagination", though the link between the two has long been a source of conjecture. Or, y'know, something that people go on about. I think it's using phrases like "a source of conjecture" that is probably eating away at my playful imagination like acid. Or worms. Formal phraseology is like some like of parasite that takes over your brain and makes you spout more formal phraseology, like that fungus that rides ants to the top of grass stems and makes them explode all over their ant friends to spread its fungal evil. Just like that.

If I were to make that analogy in a meeting about learning materials or corporate social responsibility, perhaps I'd get that satisfying look of fear from some stiff looking individual with sad eyes and a bluetooth keyboard; instead I'd probably just mutter about 'developing appropriate linguistic cues to establish societal norms' and look stiff and sad-eyed while tapping at my wireless keyboard.

But it's lovely to have the snakes back. Maybe they can eat the worms.