Joyfeed

The theme for All The Rage this month is Age and Maturity. Here is more or less what I wrote:

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The inspiration for these pictures came from a number of things, but they were definitely influenced by Forced Entertainment: specifically Emanuelle Enchanted, and the Cardboard Sign Photographs they made with Hugo Glendinning, but there’s a little bit of Speak Bitterness in there too.

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Please, if you have not already done so, could you make your way to the site of my hitherto secret counting project. Thanks.

This piece originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of All The Rage. It is about “space”.

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We have accepted the terms and conditions

We have done the Maths

We have been woken by car alarms

We have allowed our membership to lapse

We have looked, but we have not touched

We have forgotten to buy milk

We have used milk that has gone past its sell by date

We have stopped opening our junk mail

We have sung in the shower

We have kept our receipts

We have opened joint bank accounts

We have lent books to friends we know we will never see again

We have eaten out on a Tuesday night

During some routine research into oral hygiene technology today, I stumbled upon this mutant toothbrush. Like something out of The Fly. You know, for kids!

I can also imagine the creative discussion that led to this rascular innovation.

A: Increasingly, consumers are becoming concerned with their tongues.

B: If only it were possible to in some way place a tiny bristle-based brushing-stroke-cleaning device on the end of a small plastic stick.

A: Hold on…

Here is another numerically ordered piece, originally published in the December edition of the hip, gunslingingly pdf magazine All The Rage.

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A few days ago, I dropped a newly-opened 500g tub of Flora margarine, and it landed, openside-down, on the kitchen floor. When I picked it up the entire polyunsaturated block decided that it quite liked it there, and came clean out of the tub.

1. I found that I was, in equal measure, irritated at the inconvenience, and intrigued by the unusual sight of half a kilo of raw yellow fat.

2. I used a fresh tea-towel (from the cupboard) to pick the block up, and placed it, rightside-up now, on a clean plate. I was surprised at how slippy and awkward it was to pick up. Given what it was that I was picking up, I find the fact that I was surprised in itself surprising.

3. I used some kitchen roll to carefully remove any margarine that might have come into contact with the floor. As the block was almost new I could afford to go for it a bit when removing any potentially unhygienic sections. I was in effect “margarine-rich” at the time of making the decision. A less abundant block of margarine would no doubt have precipitated more frugal estimate as to how much to remove. Thus our perception of reality is relative, and affected by environmental factors, including the mental state of the observer. Could this discovery lead philosophers to a sister theory to Occam’s Razor, known as “Occam’s Kitchen Roll”?

4. I was then able to de-invert the block of margarine back into the plastic tub and, with a minimum of cosmetic prodding, return it to at least a fleeting approximation of its previous state.

5. I was briefly entertained by the idea of returning it to the tub bottom-side-up, and the possibility of consuming the margarine backwards. I eventually concluded that the correct order should be restored, but I emerged from the experience a wiser and more complete person.

6. I have glimpsed the underside of the margarine.

Borderline humorous froth

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I’m getting to know the tree quite well now. Three* times running this week, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the train slowed, and finally stopped completely right alongside the tree. On one occasion for about ten minutes. I must have been sitting in the same place on the train, as each time I had the same identical view of the tree, which is small, and has a surprising number of leaves for this time of year.

On Thursday I finally managed to understand the muffled burbling that came out of the speakers as a message from the train man, saying that the delay was due to congestion at Tyseley Junction. This was therefore exactly like the part of the Reginald Perrin programme where he is always 11 minutes late due to one hold-up or another, which leads him, as he is eventually losing (or some might say finding again) his sanity, to write to the train company and suggest that they amend their timetables. I might write to the train company myself, in a sort of “fiction meets reality is stranger than fiction”.

It’s a good tree though, and now we are old friends. I’ll miss it if the train people get their act together and don’t keep stopping the train to let all the other trains, which presumably have timetables too, go first.

* In fact, it was four, as I was also on the train on Friday, when it slowed and stopped in the same place. But this time I was sitting on the other side of the carriage, and as it started to slow down, I embarked upon a difficult tissueless sneezing fit.