Rescue

My girlfriend had a strange dream last night.

That is not, in itself, newsworthy. My girlfriend has some of the strangest dreams I've ever heard, which she can recall with alarming clarity. This particularly one involved a cat getting stuck in some quicksand. Apparently, after some distress and trying to rescue it, the cat sank completely, only to appear a few minutes later in another location completely unharmed.

I think this dream has meaning. Well, I don't really, but I mean I can pretend that it does and twist it to make a point, like all dream 'experts'. And it's this. Animals can look after themselves. If I hear of another drowned human who jumped into a freezing lake to save a dog which subsequently got out, I'll scream. The dog is laughing at you. It's dog murder. They discuss it in advance, and afterwards they go and howl about it down the dog pub. A dog who tricks his owner into dying a cold and watery death gets a lot of kudos and even more bitches. Don't fall for their big eyed adoration look, it's all a sham. They'll have you in the deep freeze before you can throw a stick.

I'm not saying cats have got it in for you in the same way, it's just they'd eat your face if they could get away with it. Just sayin'.

Consensus

Very hard not to write an entry that belongs more in Speedy Rants than this. The word "consensus" is becoming a bit of a pejorative word since it has become a way of representing horrible ideas and abandoning principle on the basis of doing what everyone wants. This seems to result in doing things that no one wants but no one quite knows who to blame anymore.

Once you've got the word "consensus" into your head as a rather grim one that involves people grudgingly accepting compromise rather than gleefully participating its use in relation to sex suddenly becomes oddly depressing. "Consenting Adults" goes from a phrase representing mutual trust leading to the abandonment of physical inhibitions and the pursuit of ecstasy, to "oh all right, suck it if you must but hurry up, Nick Clegg's on Question Time in a minute."

Menu

Ah, falling further behind....

A menu for a vegetarian is an odd beast. It is not (generally) an array of options, but rather a puzzle, a bit of mental stimulation that lies between you and digestive happiness. The Find the Vegetarian Meal replaces the no doubt far more tricky but enjoyable "what do I feel like eating" experience that most diners get.

There's almost certain to be a starter with Goat's Cheese in it. However, this may not actually be marked with a "V", leaving you in a state of uncertainty as to exactly how the Goat's Cheese was made. So you may just have to have some sort of spinach and pastry composition on the basis that if either of those things have dead animal you've probably accidentally wandered into Sweeney Todd's Delicatessen.

For the mains I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you will probably be offered Risotto. In all likelihood mushroom, though in these enlightened times you might be offered Butternut Squash. Things have come a long way since you were given mushrooms with melted cheese on them, and lightly flayed by the Chef and your skin served to the Duke of Cambridge as a dessert if you complained.

All of which makes vegetarian restaurants a complete nightmare. I have lost (or never developed) all the necessary skills of actually making a proper choice from a menu. It's horrible, and makes me want to hide in a corner with a pillow over my head gently murmuring a nursery rhyme about cats. Too much choice! Bring me a salad. And maybe a pastry with spinach. It's fine, really. Now go away.

Correlate

There's a piece in the media Guardian today saying that there's no correlation between a newspaper's online circulation and any falls in it's print readership. It's fairly interesting and a bit surprising, but not as surprising as finding out that The Daily Mail's online readership is growing by 60% a year.

I truly don't understand. I can imagine the 2m Mail readers pouring over it's racist cancer scare stories and wiping the ink from their fingers on the face of a passing
immigrant child. What I don't expect them to do is be surfing away and choosing the Daily Mail when they could looking for porn footage of someone in a Winston Churchill mask buggering someone dressed up as Jacques Delors.

In short I have a default expectation of Internet users to be young trendy liberal types. In other news Narnia is real and the Government truly believes in fairness. Yup, I'm as naive as a Disney character.

It's not like there's a single sane person commenting at the bottom of BBC articles. These angry drooling maniacs have clearly found a perfect bosom to nestle in with Mail Online. If we could hack into it and, at a peak traffic moment, transmit a deadly ray that pierces their living brains and turns them into smoking husks we might just make the world a better place. Though mass murder probably causes cancer, so I'd better not.

Shedding

When a reptile sheds its skin, does it hang it up next to the lawnmower? Not if it's a snake. Given what happens to a hose pipe when it gets put in the shed, I reckon no snake would be safe to go in there.

Bad jokes, I know. But I wonder how long it will be before the word "shedding" morphs into some sort equivalent of "housing" but with more wood and a tendency to house families of robins? Words change all the time, and since so do human habits (I know some who started a business in their shed) and people need words for them they might just save time and borrow this one.

When I was a kid my parents had an asbestos shed. That's reassuring, isn't it? An entire shed made of one of earth's most poisonous naturally occurring substances. A bit like building a shed out of nuclear waste, or making a chicken coop by tying a load of foxes together in a hoop. We only got rid of it becuase while we were on holiday one of the neighbours' kids climbed on it and fell through the roof. The asbestos roof. She's still alive. So far. I'll wait another decade before I breathe a sigh of relief. With a hankie over my mouth.

Still, the shed never burned down, eh? That's a relief. Almost worth it.

Decay

There's definitely something going on with my teeth. They've come over all sensitive after a lifetime of being fine, like a 35 year old ballet-dancer suddenly thinking "shit, you can basically see my cock in this outfit! Get me some trousers!"

It's most disconcerting.

Of course, my 2 bottles of Irn Bru-a-day habit probably isn't really making positive contribution to my dental health, so it was always a matter of time. It's a miracle that I have anything sticking out of my gums other than blackened stumps. Maybe I should just think "stuff it" and have them all removed. After all, they're all going to fall out in the end anyway (unless I'm beaten to death by members of the Bullingdon Club on a day trip to Cambridge, thus sparing me the pain of ageing). At least I wouldn't have to chew anything anymore. I could have all my hair lasered out to get used to being bald husk, and have tiny brown spots tattooed all over my hands. Genius. Age will hold no fears.

But what to do about my decent skin? I could spend hours a week deliberately exposing myself to harmful radiation in order to accelerate the decay of my skin cells. I hear it has the unfortunate side effect of making you look - very briefly - healthy and good looking, but don't worry, that wears off pretty fucking quickly.

Disguise

There's a tradition in drama and comedy of a lead character disguising himself (or possibly herself) and hearing truths about themselves that they would never normally discover (think Henry V walking amongst his troops). This may be the cause of the old expression that eavesdroppers never heard anything good about themselves.

That's fairly harsh. Are they suggesting that the kind of person who would eavesdrop is clearly a cunt, and therefore all their friends will be saying: "Geoff, he's such a fuckface. And he's an eavesdropper, the weaselly shit, I hacked into his emails and read him talking about it.What a misshapen cock."? Or is it just supposed to be bad luck, so that if you eavesdrop it will be the one moment when someone is saying "... and he fucks badgers..." and then you run away screaming and miss the bit where they add "...but no one minds cos he's so nice the rest of the time and who doesn't occasionally want to violate a medium sized omnivorous mammal anyway, I say fair enough."?

It's a fucking minefield.