I just realised that I've written 100 of these things, counting the myspace days. I never knew I had that much to say to the world. And it still sort of confuses me that people read it.
But thanks. All of you. Or two of you, I don't exactly know how my reader base is distributed. I mean that.
The thanks bit, not the distribution bit. Although that's accurate enough.
Friday 28 November 2008
Monday 24 November 2008
On curds, but not so much whey
I'm fond of experimentation. I'm becoming more bold about it, now that I've moved out, but I was always kind of into trying new things. Ever since I hit the age of 20, really.
Now I think of "university experimentation" and I'll be honest, I think of ambiguity in gender preference and drugs. TV seems to have conditioned me that way. However, I've never felt the need to make out with guys and I've never inhaled anything more ambitious than a lungfull of exhaust fumes or a cup of tea, if I was too vigourously quaffing.
And you have to sometimes. If it's a good cuppa.
But nothing entertaining, no. Up until now. For my previous experimentation has formed itself into a noble and wonderful quest. A misguided, potentially dangerous but thoroughly wonderful quest.
I'm going to eat my way through the entire Monty Python cheese shop sketch.
See, I had 2 highlights to my week during my work placement year. I would have had 3, but I didn't think I had time for visiting HUGS (turns out that really, I probably would have with better organisation). I had Friday's bacon and cartoons night and I had shopping night. Shopping night involved going to the supermarket, picking up a few bits and pieces and a trip to the cheese counter.
The cheese counter at your local Morrison's is a magical place. A place where every race, colour and creed can proudly present its dairy goods without fear of discrimination, where every nation proudly represents itself. Except Scotland, because they are stupid and never provided a regional cheese. I mean I've nothing against Scotland, but they need to represent themselves a bit more in the world of cheeses.
Every week, I'd get a new cheese just to see what it was like. Some days brought great and unexpected joy, like the pickled onion cheddar cheese and other days, like the unforgettable mint chocolate chip cheese day, left me with a lingering sense of horror and utter confusion. I mean seriously, what the crap? But no matter what, there was always new cheese day and every week, some new and interesting experience was had until I realised that I perhaps wasn't in the mood for that much cheese and inevitably just threw it on some pasta and tried some noodle experiments instead.
I've noticed something about Tesco cheeses, though. For one thing, for the really exotic stuff you have to brave the Cheese Man. He's a nice enough bloke, for sure, but he's very slightly unusual in a way I can't quite pinpoint. Never seems to look directly at you. He is the first peril of Neo-cheese night. The second comes in the pronounciation, because trying to say Gruyere with the kind of accent I've got makes you sound like a pretentious git. The third comes in ignoring how I just paid £2.50 for a block of cheese...
But I take these home and eat them and they are good. Splendid. But then I look back at some of the names...
Jarlsberg
Gruyere
Wensleydale
Roquefort (this week's offering)
And so a plan is forming...
I reckon I can eat my way through the entire sketch, you see. Not the bouzouki, but the rest of it for sure. Perhaps along the way I will catalogue any interesting experiences, but for now I'm laying down my plans.
I hope to emerge from this a little more cultured, a little wiser, but overall thoroughly satisfied.
And Hanna, if you're reading this (and I'm sort of sure you are), I just realised as I was buying the Roquefort that it is indeed sheep cheese. Goddamn it. I should have known you'd win in the end, even the supermarket is being converted to your way of thinking...
Now I think of "university experimentation" and I'll be honest, I think of ambiguity in gender preference and drugs. TV seems to have conditioned me that way. However, I've never felt the need to make out with guys and I've never inhaled anything more ambitious than a lungfull of exhaust fumes or a cup of tea, if I was too vigourously quaffing.
And you have to sometimes. If it's a good cuppa.
But nothing entertaining, no. Up until now. For my previous experimentation has formed itself into a noble and wonderful quest. A misguided, potentially dangerous but thoroughly wonderful quest.
I'm going to eat my way through the entire Monty Python cheese shop sketch.
See, I had 2 highlights to my week during my work placement year. I would have had 3, but I didn't think I had time for visiting HUGS (turns out that really, I probably would have with better organisation). I had Friday's bacon and cartoons night and I had shopping night. Shopping night involved going to the supermarket, picking up a few bits and pieces and a trip to the cheese counter.
The cheese counter at your local Morrison's is a magical place. A place where every race, colour and creed can proudly present its dairy goods without fear of discrimination, where every nation proudly represents itself. Except Scotland, because they are stupid and never provided a regional cheese. I mean I've nothing against Scotland, but they need to represent themselves a bit more in the world of cheeses.
Every week, I'd get a new cheese just to see what it was like. Some days brought great and unexpected joy, like the pickled onion cheddar cheese and other days, like the unforgettable mint chocolate chip cheese day, left me with a lingering sense of horror and utter confusion. I mean seriously, what the crap? But no matter what, there was always new cheese day and every week, some new and interesting experience was had until I realised that I perhaps wasn't in the mood for that much cheese and inevitably just threw it on some pasta and tried some noodle experiments instead.
I've noticed something about Tesco cheeses, though. For one thing, for the really exotic stuff you have to brave the Cheese Man. He's a nice enough bloke, for sure, but he's very slightly unusual in a way I can't quite pinpoint. Never seems to look directly at you. He is the first peril of Neo-cheese night. The second comes in the pronounciation, because trying to say Gruyere with the kind of accent I've got makes you sound like a pretentious git. The third comes in ignoring how I just paid £2.50 for a block of cheese...
But I take these home and eat them and they are good. Splendid. But then I look back at some of the names...
Jarlsberg
Gruyere
Wensleydale
Roquefort (this week's offering)
And so a plan is forming...
I reckon I can eat my way through the entire sketch, you see. Not the bouzouki, but the rest of it for sure. Perhaps along the way I will catalogue any interesting experiences, but for now I'm laying down my plans.
I hope to emerge from this a little more cultured, a little wiser, but overall thoroughly satisfied.
And Hanna, if you're reading this (and I'm sort of sure you are), I just realised as I was buying the Roquefort that it is indeed sheep cheese. Goddamn it. I should have known you'd win in the end, even the supermarket is being converted to your way of thinking...
Thursday 20 November 2008
Innocence lost
I don't think people ever stop being children, deep down. I think perhaps the extent to which we're socially allowed to act like children changes, but you can get around that. The more you get comfortable with folk, the more you start to realise that you don't always need intellectual conversation. Sometimes all you need is to sit in a corner giggling at nothing much in particular.
I think alcohol helps. The way it knocks your inhibitions out of whack a little is sort of interesting at times. What's odd is that I find that caffeine works the same way, that it cranks your mental age down about a decade.
'cept that you're not as likely to wake up in the morning with a headache, a traffic cone and someone naked next to you after downing a relentless. Or at least I hope not, because I'd like to remember, should anyone appear in my apartment naked, how I ended up in that situation if only so that I could blog about it.
What was I saying?
We still play with toys, now we're adults. It's just that the toys change. When you're younger, you play with army men, dolls, toy cars, footballs and tranformers. When you're older, you play with guns, outfits, autotrader.com, footballs and transformers. And golf. I'm not sure that's something that has an analog in children's activities.
We still play games, too. They just involve less running around and chasing each other. Although I suppose you could argue that the whole idea of dating is one REALLY involved game of kiss chase or... whatever it's called. We never played that one, really. It's odd to me that we stop running so much when we get older, since our bodies have fully developed and running is both faster and easier, but I suppose you get a lot less energy as you get older. I'd like to know where that goes, y'know. It seems like as soon as half the people I know hit puberty, it was like a magic button with "lazy git" written on it was pushed.
I like that button.
It's a shame that we lose so many abilities that we have as children. They'd serve us so well as adults. Like the ability to learn things REALLY QUICKLY that people around you really would rather you didn't (things like annoying TV theme tunes, how to make rulers make that twanging noise on desks and the names of reproductive organs). We lose the ability to get away with anything because it's cute. We lose the ability to hold long, rambling conversations with complete strangers in the queue at supermarkets.
I don't want to grow up. I want to be mature, in that I know how to manage finances, cook, handle my time and still do a good job at work, but I never want to lose that childish mentality. Life is far, far more... ugh, I know it's a cliché, but life's far more magical if you can still see it as a kid would. If you can still get excited about mundane things, still appreciate stuff that other people become jaded to...
It occurs to me that in the future, if I ever have kids of my own, I'm either going to make a very entertaining kind of father or a horrifically embarassing one. And given that one of my life goals is to live long enough to become a senile old coot, I don't hold out much hope for little Andys. Or Andreas. Or whatever.
I think alcohol helps. The way it knocks your inhibitions out of whack a little is sort of interesting at times. What's odd is that I find that caffeine works the same way, that it cranks your mental age down about a decade.
'cept that you're not as likely to wake up in the morning with a headache, a traffic cone and someone naked next to you after downing a relentless. Or at least I hope not, because I'd like to remember, should anyone appear in my apartment naked, how I ended up in that situation if only so that I could blog about it.
What was I saying?
We still play with toys, now we're adults. It's just that the toys change. When you're younger, you play with army men, dolls, toy cars, footballs and tranformers. When you're older, you play with guns, outfits, autotrader.com, footballs and transformers. And golf. I'm not sure that's something that has an analog in children's activities.
We still play games, too. They just involve less running around and chasing each other. Although I suppose you could argue that the whole idea of dating is one REALLY involved game of kiss chase or... whatever it's called. We never played that one, really. It's odd to me that we stop running so much when we get older, since our bodies have fully developed and running is both faster and easier, but I suppose you get a lot less energy as you get older. I'd like to know where that goes, y'know. It seems like as soon as half the people I know hit puberty, it was like a magic button with "lazy git" written on it was pushed.
I like that button.
It's a shame that we lose so many abilities that we have as children. They'd serve us so well as adults. Like the ability to learn things REALLY QUICKLY that people around you really would rather you didn't (things like annoying TV theme tunes, how to make rulers make that twanging noise on desks and the names of reproductive organs). We lose the ability to get away with anything because it's cute. We lose the ability to hold long, rambling conversations with complete strangers in the queue at supermarkets.
I don't want to grow up. I want to be mature, in that I know how to manage finances, cook, handle my time and still do a good job at work, but I never want to lose that childish mentality. Life is far, far more... ugh, I know it's a cliché, but life's far more magical if you can still see it as a kid would. If you can still get excited about mundane things, still appreciate stuff that other people become jaded to...
It occurs to me that in the future, if I ever have kids of my own, I'm either going to make a very entertaining kind of father or a horrifically embarassing one. And given that one of my life goals is to live long enough to become a senile old coot, I don't hold out much hope for little Andys. Or Andreas. Or whatever.
Tuesday 11 November 2008
ABCB
As I sit here in my darkened flat,
My mind turns to the past.
Memories of journeys,
Of the day that I left Cas.
Though oft I've acted foolish,
I seldom bore regrets.
Even through embarassment
And things I ate on bets.
For truly are we blessed,
Those of us who know no fear.
Although, I must suspect
That future tales may start with beer. (Alright, that was a bit crappy. Run with it)
But perhaps the most mundane,
And yet, the most exciting,
Occur within these Internets
'pon which I am now writing.
An information superhighway.
A name no longer known.
Land of quite peculiar folk,
My home away from home.
I've travelled these dark waters,
This metaphoric sea.
I've braved the lolcats, trolls and lulz
And modern piracy.
And while I soldier cautiously,
Through nausea, fear and pain.
I know that in my hearts of hearts,
I'll Google once again.
For punishment is truly
That for which I am a glutton.
And even now I'm wonder what
Will spring from that search button.
It's strange, to me, that after all
The trash through which I've hiked,
That still I hold a special fear
Of stories told by Mike.
My mind turns to the past.
Memories of journeys,
Of the day that I left Cas.
Though oft I've acted foolish,
I seldom bore regrets.
Even through embarassment
And things I ate on bets.
For truly are we blessed,
Those of us who know no fear.
Although, I must suspect
That future tales may start with beer. (Alright, that was a bit crappy. Run with it)
But perhaps the most mundane,
And yet, the most exciting,
Occur within these Internets
'pon which I am now writing.
An information superhighway.
A name no longer known.
Land of quite peculiar folk,
My home away from home.
I've travelled these dark waters,
This metaphoric sea.
I've braved the lolcats, trolls and lulz
And modern piracy.
And while I soldier cautiously,
Through nausea, fear and pain.
I know that in my hearts of hearts,
I'll Google once again.
For punishment is truly
That for which I am a glutton.
And even now I'm wonder what
Will spring from that search button.
It's strange, to me, that after all
The trash through which I've hiked,
That still I hold a special fear
Of stories told by Mike.
Friday 7 November 2008
08/11/08
Well, back on the Internet again. Reunited and it feels so good.
So let's talk about time.
See, I've studied time. I mean REALLY studied time, I did a dissertation on it, read up on the subject of managing it for a solid 3 or 4 months, but I've also been paying attention to it. I'm coming to believe that time is a little like money or, to a lesser extent, tea bags. IT's a resource that you get a finite amount of. You need to manage it, ditribute it properly.
But I've found that the best thing to do is bend it to your will.
You can control time. It's rather easily done, too, depending on how prone you are to getting bored. Not control as in reverse the flow, as such, but I do genuinely believe that you can at least alter your own perception of it, to a limited extent. This might be better with an example.
So I'm at work. I start the day with a list of jobs to do, carried over from yesterday. I like to split them into two types: mindless busywork and difficult, large tasks. Busywork is things like replying to emails, doing 5 minute tasks, tidying my desk and such. Things I don't have to think about, that aren't urgent, but do kinda need doing. The big tasks are ones that I have to sit and think about, that require a lot of concentration and attention.
I'm going somewhere with this. It'll sort of skirt that time point I made, too.
So I've got this list of two kinds of tasks. Now time in the morning is different from time in the afternoon, in that I'm still sort of alert from having just woken up and that the morning is a 3 hour stretch, but the afternoon is 4.5 hours. I know I'm going to do better work in the morning, since I'm still quite fresh, so I get the tricky stuff done then, if I can. Plus, when people start having problems, they usually don't tell us as much until the afternoon. Perhaps it's to do with staggered starts to working days across departments, or to do with international folks waking up. I don't know.
But yeah, hard stuff in the morning. Then comes 10:30 and buying lunch, then 12 and eating it. Nice, pleasant tasks with immediate personal gain. Then the afternoon comes. Now 13:00 to 15:00 is far enough away from quitting time that it seems quite a distance. It's demoralising. So getting the mindless stuff done then is a good idea because I don't think so much about it and the act of just doing work takes my mind off the time. 15:00 to 16:30 is alright, and 16:30 to 17:30 doesn't count because it's the last hour and that never counts.
So the point...
If you're engrossed in a difficult task but not making much progress, you're becoming frustrated and you're tired, time slows down. Time, in a sense, feeds off of negativity. If you're feeling down, time can slow to a crawl, if you're not able to sleep and getting frustrated at that, I swear that time runs backwards. But if you're content, entertained and occupied, time whips past.
I reckon the way to control time is through milestones and tasks. If you have a list of nice things to be working on during times of the day you've identified as not being productive, they'll suddenly become productive as you're using that period of being unable to think much to do something useful anyway. And one productive hour of hard work is a lot better than an afternoon of staring at a problem and racking your brains for a solution that won't come. Milestones are important, too. I don't think that humans are equipped to cope with days as a whole. We have to split our time up to be able to manage it. At the highest level, you have years. Then months, weeks, days, AM/PM, morning/noon/evening/night, hours... we split it up so very much. We say a quarter to 12, half an hour to lunch, whatever. It's those little milestones that keep us going. Try it. When you next go to work or lectures or whatever, think of how much time you have until lunch, then compare it to how much time there's left in the entire working day. If you think of the time until lunch, half the day just doesn't count because you're not there yet and it's not important.
I reckon it's one of those little safety mechanisms in the human brain. Helps give us a little perspective, y'know?
Or keeps us from getting a true sense of perspective and realising exactly how long life actually is. Or short. Maybe that'd drive us all nuts or something.
But yeah, time slows down if you've a long day ahead of you with nothing to look forward to or if you're sad, scared, bored... yet it speeds up when you've things to keep you busy and content, or when you're just in a good mood.
It's like that Einstein quote. The one about being on a hot stove for a minute feeling like an hour and being with a pretty girl for an hour feeling like a minute. The relativity thing.
Eh, I dunno. Maybe writing a blog last thing on a Friday night isn't the best idea. It's not great for writing down my thoughts, but it's much better for having a really open, inquisitive sort of mind. It's like finding out how to harness my muse, but then finding out that once she's here, I can't string two words together. I feel there must be a happy medium somewhere.
Well, back on the Internet again. Reunited and it feels so good.
So let's talk about time.
See, I've studied time. I mean REALLY studied time, I did a dissertation on it, read up on the subject of managing it for a solid 3 or 4 months, but I've also been paying attention to it. I'm coming to believe that time is a little like money or, to a lesser extent, tea bags. IT's a resource that you get a finite amount of. You need to manage it, ditribute it properly.
But I've found that the best thing to do is bend it to your will.
You can control time. It's rather easily done, too, depending on how prone you are to getting bored. Not control as in reverse the flow, as such, but I do genuinely believe that you can at least alter your own perception of it, to a limited extent. This might be better with an example.
So I'm at work. I start the day with a list of jobs to do, carried over from yesterday. I like to split them into two types: mindless busywork and difficult, large tasks. Busywork is things like replying to emails, doing 5 minute tasks, tidying my desk and such. Things I don't have to think about, that aren't urgent, but do kinda need doing. The big tasks are ones that I have to sit and think about, that require a lot of concentration and attention.
I'm going somewhere with this. It'll sort of skirt that time point I made, too.
So I've got this list of two kinds of tasks. Now time in the morning is different from time in the afternoon, in that I'm still sort of alert from having just woken up and that the morning is a 3 hour stretch, but the afternoon is 4.5 hours. I know I'm going to do better work in the morning, since I'm still quite fresh, so I get the tricky stuff done then, if I can. Plus, when people start having problems, they usually don't tell us as much until the afternoon. Perhaps it's to do with staggered starts to working days across departments, or to do with international folks waking up. I don't know.
But yeah, hard stuff in the morning. Then comes 10:30 and buying lunch, then 12 and eating it. Nice, pleasant tasks with immediate personal gain. Then the afternoon comes. Now 13:00 to 15:00 is far enough away from quitting time that it seems quite a distance. It's demoralising. So getting the mindless stuff done then is a good idea because I don't think so much about it and the act of just doing work takes my mind off the time. 15:00 to 16:30 is alright, and 16:30 to 17:30 doesn't count because it's the last hour and that never counts.
So the point...
If you're engrossed in a difficult task but not making much progress, you're becoming frustrated and you're tired, time slows down. Time, in a sense, feeds off of negativity. If you're feeling down, time can slow to a crawl, if you're not able to sleep and getting frustrated at that, I swear that time runs backwards. But if you're content, entertained and occupied, time whips past.
I reckon the way to control time is through milestones and tasks. If you have a list of nice things to be working on during times of the day you've identified as not being productive, they'll suddenly become productive as you're using that period of being unable to think much to do something useful anyway. And one productive hour of hard work is a lot better than an afternoon of staring at a problem and racking your brains for a solution that won't come. Milestones are important, too. I don't think that humans are equipped to cope with days as a whole. We have to split our time up to be able to manage it. At the highest level, you have years. Then months, weeks, days, AM/PM, morning/noon/evening/night, hours... we split it up so very much. We say a quarter to 12, half an hour to lunch, whatever. It's those little milestones that keep us going. Try it. When you next go to work or lectures or whatever, think of how much time you have until lunch, then compare it to how much time there's left in the entire working day. If you think of the time until lunch, half the day just doesn't count because you're not there yet and it's not important.
I reckon it's one of those little safety mechanisms in the human brain. Helps give us a little perspective, y'know?
Or keeps us from getting a true sense of perspective and realising exactly how long life actually is. Or short. Maybe that'd drive us all nuts or something.
But yeah, time slows down if you've a long day ahead of you with nothing to look forward to or if you're sad, scared, bored... yet it speeds up when you've things to keep you busy and content, or when you're just in a good mood.
It's like that Einstein quote. The one about being on a hot stove for a minute feeling like an hour and being with a pretty girl for an hour feeling like a minute. The relativity thing.
Eh, I dunno. Maybe writing a blog last thing on a Friday night isn't the best idea. It's not great for writing down my thoughts, but it's much better for having a really open, inquisitive sort of mind. It's like finding out how to harness my muse, but then finding out that once she's here, I can't string two words together. I feel there must be a happy medium somewhere.
Elevation
Just as a side note, this was orignally going to have a stairway to Devon pun somewhere near the mention of the staircase, but it didn't feel right.
---
26/10/08
I'm not one for writing down my dreams, but I rather loved this idea.
A Morrisons supermarket. The location's not terribly important, but it may be in Wakefield's Ridings shopping centre. Towards the back, behind the checkouts is a single elevator. Nothing unusual about that, it takes shoppers to various levels of a multi storey car park.
All perfectly fine and good.
On a day like any other, a young boy (about 7 or so) decides to wander in and play with the buttons in the lift, being one of those kids that'll press every button in a lift in a skyscraper to see what happens. However, today the buttons are a little unusual. He's a short lad, so he can't normally reach any higher than floor three, but today the lift only has three buttons:
G
1
2
Which would be fine were it not for the fact that there isn't a basement level to the supermarket. Peculiar. He happily prods the button marked 1 and the lift slowly descends in that ponderous way that lifts do, as if they realise you're maybe in a hurry but they'll be damned if they're going to make any kind of effort on YOUR behalf.
20 seconds or so later, the doors open and the kid looks out to a small room, a little more than 2.5 metres on any side. The walls are painted dark brown and the floor is covered in a thin, dark brown carpet. A small, brown sofa sits in the centre and a fish tank is set in one wall, casting a slight blue glow over the sea of dreary brown. It's the only light source in the room and the only thing that's remotely entertaining. A man sat on the sofa looks up at the kid.
"Hey, you're not supposed to be here. You're far too young! I thought you skipped this part of the selection process if you were younger than 13? And where's your escort, anyway?"
The kid watches him for a while. The guy's not making any effort to get up or talk any more than he already has, but he has this wasted, hopeless look about him that suggests he's been here for a long, long time. He also looks like the kind of guy that the kid's mother warned him about talking to, so he goes back in the lift and presses number two.
The lift rumbles slowly down. The kid would be scared or at least nervous, but as a modern child he simply doesn't have the imagination to think of things that aren't highly marketable cartoons so the best he can manage is a vague sense of curiosity (which'll last about 5 minutes, thanks to his attention span). The lift eases to a halt, the doors swing open.
"Good afternoon applicant number 7431296472b. If you'll just hand me your two copies of form 27c, we'll have you on your way to... wait."
A man sat behind a fairly impressive leather topped mahogany desk looks at the kid over the top of a pair of half moon spectacles. His skin is bright red and he's sporting a short goatee beard and a business suit.
"How did you get down here, alone and at your age?"
"Played with the lift."
The man in the suit looks at the open lift doors, thinks for a moment then buries his face in his hands.
"The lift? Did Malice leave the safety catch off of the control panel again?! I told them, I TOLD them this is what would happen if they got cheap outsourced labour from Dis, but no, they wouldn't listen to me. No, only been doing this job for 15 blessed, sodding eons, haven't I..."
The kid isn't listening. He's stepped out of the lift and looking around at the small office, with its impressive desk, plush burgundy carpeting and blood red walls. A small hole next to the desk, about the size of a sheet of A4, flickers as if a fire's burning in it. A digital display on one wall shows a map of the world with a winking light over Denmark and a panel below reading "Now serving 7431296472b, Denmark, natural causes".
"... but you get what you pay for, that's what I always say.
Oh, are you still here? And now the doors have closed. Lovely. Look, just sit down, I'll get the service guys to come over, we'll have you back home shortly."
"What's this place, then?"
"Straight to the point, aren't you boy? This is the final step of the road for departed souls before they reach their eternal rest. You guys die and get escorted by... I think it's Gabriel doing collections this century, but they take you to the heavenly admin facility way upstairs. They check your files, run you through the system and tell you if you're eligible for access to heaven. Nice little place, too, I used to work the call centre next door, taking prayers back when I did my training."
The kid looks around. He sees no computer, he sees no telephones.
"But yeah, this place? This is where you drop off the last of your paperwork if you're found unworthy. 75000 forms signed in triplicate detailing the specific events of your life. They say that if anyone fills it all in correctly then they're deemed to have completed their required allowance of torture, but nobody ever does. Most people go insane and eat the forms at around 2300. So we drop the finished ones into the hole here for processing, then send them through a little door in the back for an eternity of fire, poking, rape and muzak. I think this place used to sell yoghurt and drinks until social services were invented a few years back. The higher ups thought it'd be more appropriate."
"Drinks?"
"Ha, yes. That was a joke, you see. You know how people say that you can't take it with you when you die? It's true. Give people a stand selling iced lemonade at the mouth of Hell, then watch them when they realise that they're wearing tattered robes with no money in their pockets. I wish we'd have had a camera, I really do."
The kid takes all this in. Last time he'd had a conversation like this was when he'd eaten 12 packets of Space Raiders before bed.
"What's on 1?"
"1? Oh, upstairs. That's Limbo. There's countless other rooms like that, but they're where you go when you're filling out your forms or when there's a bug in the heavenly system and they can't process you. I think there's a handful of people who they forgot about after fixing the servers, though. They do a quick check of the system every couple of millenia for stragglers..."
A door behind the kid opens up and the lift returns, only now there's a red skinned man stood inside with blue janitor overalls, a mop and a knowing grin.
"Come on lad, let's 'ave you out of 'ere."
The kid wanders back in. This place isn't too interesting, anyway.
The service demon hits the button for Limbo, waves at the infernal administrator (now talking heatedly ino his desk phone) and they ascend. As the doors are about to open, he hits a button with a horned finger and they stay jammed shut.
"'ey, lad. Want to see something fun?"
The kid nods. At least this guy seems more entertaining.
The janitor reaches out and holds down button 1, then presses 2. A third button, outlined in fire appears at the bottom of the row.
"Ever wondered if there's owt below Hell? That's the dark lord's pers'nal recreation room. Always wondered what 'e does to get 'is kicks, but he's got some fancy 'lectronic security locks or summat. I swear I can 'ear disco music from in there."
He lets go of the buttons and the door opens up at Limbo. With a cheery "'ey up Dave, just passin' through" to the figure on the sofa, he hits G on the panel then gives it a couple of thumps with some unidentifiable tool on his belt. The buttons melt into the panel and return to their normal, every day positions above G.
As they reach the floor where Morrisons is, he jams the doors shut again.
"Right lad, this is your floor. Don't ever tell nobody about this place, though, or we'll have the lift filled with satanist weirdos. 'tis the only lift downstairs that we've got, an' all, so there's a fair bit of traffic comes through 'ere, the only other option's the staircase in Moscow and the less said about the state of THAT bloody thing the better."
The kid looks at the lift for a moment.
"So if this is afterlife stuff, can't you just magic them down? Me RE teacher said God does stuff like that all the time. Or, like, shove 'em in a hole or something?"
"HA, magic? 'ere, lad, if you could only see how much paperwork needs to be done before you can pull off a miracle, you'd pee yer pants right 'ere. That's why they 'appen so much in t' old testament. We didn't 'ave auditors back then. We can't just build an 'ole, either, we need to get people back up 'ere sometimes. Like... reality TV, ever see that? That's one of ours, that is. Now go on you little bugger, I'll be seein' you soon."
The door opens, the kid steps out. A pot noodle and 4 hours of TV later, he remembers nothing.
---
26/10/08
I'm not one for writing down my dreams, but I rather loved this idea.
A Morrisons supermarket. The location's not terribly important, but it may be in Wakefield's Ridings shopping centre. Towards the back, behind the checkouts is a single elevator. Nothing unusual about that, it takes shoppers to various levels of a multi storey car park.
All perfectly fine and good.
On a day like any other, a young boy (about 7 or so) decides to wander in and play with the buttons in the lift, being one of those kids that'll press every button in a lift in a skyscraper to see what happens. However, today the buttons are a little unusual. He's a short lad, so he can't normally reach any higher than floor three, but today the lift only has three buttons:
G
1
2
Which would be fine were it not for the fact that there isn't a basement level to the supermarket. Peculiar. He happily prods the button marked 1 and the lift slowly descends in that ponderous way that lifts do, as if they realise you're maybe in a hurry but they'll be damned if they're going to make any kind of effort on YOUR behalf.
20 seconds or so later, the doors open and the kid looks out to a small room, a little more than 2.5 metres on any side. The walls are painted dark brown and the floor is covered in a thin, dark brown carpet. A small, brown sofa sits in the centre and a fish tank is set in one wall, casting a slight blue glow over the sea of dreary brown. It's the only light source in the room and the only thing that's remotely entertaining. A man sat on the sofa looks up at the kid.
"Hey, you're not supposed to be here. You're far too young! I thought you skipped this part of the selection process if you were younger than 13? And where's your escort, anyway?"
The kid watches him for a while. The guy's not making any effort to get up or talk any more than he already has, but he has this wasted, hopeless look about him that suggests he's been here for a long, long time. He also looks like the kind of guy that the kid's mother warned him about talking to, so he goes back in the lift and presses number two.
The lift rumbles slowly down. The kid would be scared or at least nervous, but as a modern child he simply doesn't have the imagination to think of things that aren't highly marketable cartoons so the best he can manage is a vague sense of curiosity (which'll last about 5 minutes, thanks to his attention span). The lift eases to a halt, the doors swing open.
"Good afternoon applicant number 7431296472b. If you'll just hand me your two copies of form 27c, we'll have you on your way to... wait."
A man sat behind a fairly impressive leather topped mahogany desk looks at the kid over the top of a pair of half moon spectacles. His skin is bright red and he's sporting a short goatee beard and a business suit.
"How did you get down here, alone and at your age?"
"Played with the lift."
The man in the suit looks at the open lift doors, thinks for a moment then buries his face in his hands.
"The lift? Did Malice leave the safety catch off of the control panel again?! I told them, I TOLD them this is what would happen if they got cheap outsourced labour from Dis, but no, they wouldn't listen to me. No, only been doing this job for 15 blessed, sodding eons, haven't I..."
The kid isn't listening. He's stepped out of the lift and looking around at the small office, with its impressive desk, plush burgundy carpeting and blood red walls. A small hole next to the desk, about the size of a sheet of A4, flickers as if a fire's burning in it. A digital display on one wall shows a map of the world with a winking light over Denmark and a panel below reading "Now serving 7431296472b, Denmark, natural causes".
"... but you get what you pay for, that's what I always say.
Oh, are you still here? And now the doors have closed. Lovely. Look, just sit down, I'll get the service guys to come over, we'll have you back home shortly."
"What's this place, then?"
"Straight to the point, aren't you boy? This is the final step of the road for departed souls before they reach their eternal rest. You guys die and get escorted by... I think it's Gabriel doing collections this century, but they take you to the heavenly admin facility way upstairs. They check your files, run you through the system and tell you if you're eligible for access to heaven. Nice little place, too, I used to work the call centre next door, taking prayers back when I did my training."
The kid looks around. He sees no computer, he sees no telephones.
"But yeah, this place? This is where you drop off the last of your paperwork if you're found unworthy. 75000 forms signed in triplicate detailing the specific events of your life. They say that if anyone fills it all in correctly then they're deemed to have completed their required allowance of torture, but nobody ever does. Most people go insane and eat the forms at around 2300. So we drop the finished ones into the hole here for processing, then send them through a little door in the back for an eternity of fire, poking, rape and muzak. I think this place used to sell yoghurt and drinks until social services were invented a few years back. The higher ups thought it'd be more appropriate."
"Drinks?"
"Ha, yes. That was a joke, you see. You know how people say that you can't take it with you when you die? It's true. Give people a stand selling iced lemonade at the mouth of Hell, then watch them when they realise that they're wearing tattered robes with no money in their pockets. I wish we'd have had a camera, I really do."
The kid takes all this in. Last time he'd had a conversation like this was when he'd eaten 12 packets of Space Raiders before bed.
"What's on 1?"
"1? Oh, upstairs. That's Limbo. There's countless other rooms like that, but they're where you go when you're filling out your forms or when there's a bug in the heavenly system and they can't process you. I think there's a handful of people who they forgot about after fixing the servers, though. They do a quick check of the system every couple of millenia for stragglers..."
A door behind the kid opens up and the lift returns, only now there's a red skinned man stood inside with blue janitor overalls, a mop and a knowing grin.
"Come on lad, let's 'ave you out of 'ere."
The kid wanders back in. This place isn't too interesting, anyway.
The service demon hits the button for Limbo, waves at the infernal administrator (now talking heatedly ino his desk phone) and they ascend. As the doors are about to open, he hits a button with a horned finger and they stay jammed shut.
"'ey, lad. Want to see something fun?"
The kid nods. At least this guy seems more entertaining.
The janitor reaches out and holds down button 1, then presses 2. A third button, outlined in fire appears at the bottom of the row.
"Ever wondered if there's owt below Hell? That's the dark lord's pers'nal recreation room. Always wondered what 'e does to get 'is kicks, but he's got some fancy 'lectronic security locks or summat. I swear I can 'ear disco music from in there."
He lets go of the buttons and the door opens up at Limbo. With a cheery "'ey up Dave, just passin' through" to the figure on the sofa, he hits G on the panel then gives it a couple of thumps with some unidentifiable tool on his belt. The buttons melt into the panel and return to their normal, every day positions above G.
As they reach the floor where Morrisons is, he jams the doors shut again.
"Right lad, this is your floor. Don't ever tell nobody about this place, though, or we'll have the lift filled with satanist weirdos. 'tis the only lift downstairs that we've got, an' all, so there's a fair bit of traffic comes through 'ere, the only other option's the staircase in Moscow and the less said about the state of THAT bloody thing the better."
The kid looks at the lift for a moment.
"So if this is afterlife stuff, can't you just magic them down? Me RE teacher said God does stuff like that all the time. Or, like, shove 'em in a hole or something?"
"HA, magic? 'ere, lad, if you could only see how much paperwork needs to be done before you can pull off a miracle, you'd pee yer pants right 'ere. That's why they 'appen so much in t' old testament. We didn't 'ave auditors back then. We can't just build an 'ole, either, we need to get people back up 'ere sometimes. Like... reality TV, ever see that? That's one of ours, that is. Now go on you little bugger, I'll be seein' you soon."
The door opens, the kid steps out. A pot noodle and 4 hours of TV later, he remembers nothing.
From farewell to a new beginning
17/10/08
One hour before the world as I knew it was due to end, things were astonishingly quiet in Batley. All my worldly possessions filled a room you can walk across in 15 paces and all the most important, life enhancing elements of my furniture lay half assembled and arranged in a haphazard manner. With my dad fetching the last few items from home and my mum stocking the wardrobe, things were curiously subdued. I don't suppose there was very much to say, or
rather there was plenty to say, but it wasn't the time to be saying it.
Saying goodbye never gets any easier. Or maybe it does and I just don't do it too often. It's a really strange thing, leaving behind everyone that you've seen on a daily basis for 21 years, but as I sit here, despite having no TV and no Internet connection, I'm experiencing a feeling of contentment that I haven't felt in a good long while. It is peculiar, though. As my parents went down the stairs for the last time and I shut the door, it was kind of like someone flipped a switch from "student" to "adulthood".
'course, there's little evidence for that having happened, considering I've built a small bunker out of bookcases for my computer area, I've filled a 7ft tall bookcase with video games and especially considering that, as I type this, St Barnabus of Lagentium and Gizmo the Mogwai are sizing each other up from opposite ends of the room.
I think it's a territory thing. Gizmo used to look after my room in Cleckheaton, he made sure my alarm clock kept working and generally kept watch at night. Barnabus, however, has experience in protection. He looked after my car for a good 12 months. The room's in 4 quadrants: bed, living, sentimental and the computer warren. Barnabus currently occupies the computer warren while Gizmo is the lord and master of bed. This fight could easily go either way, I reckon. Barnabus isn't very fast, but he does have a knife, while Gizo is much faster but will have to improvise to get a weapon (which he has shown he can do (see Gremlins 2)). However, Gizmo is close to the kitchen and the knife block. I figure that Barnabus can gain a tactical advantage by securing sentimental, but then Gizmo will retaliate with superior firepower.
Alls I know is that if Barnabus ultimately wins, he's going back in the car, because I'm not going to let Cap'n Stabby stand over me all night.
One hour before the world as I knew it was due to end, things were astonishingly quiet in Batley. All my worldly possessions filled a room you can walk across in 15 paces and all the most important, life enhancing elements of my furniture lay half assembled and arranged in a haphazard manner. With my dad fetching the last few items from home and my mum stocking the wardrobe, things were curiously subdued. I don't suppose there was very much to say, or
rather there was plenty to say, but it wasn't the time to be saying it.
Saying goodbye never gets any easier. Or maybe it does and I just don't do it too often. It's a really strange thing, leaving behind everyone that you've seen on a daily basis for 21 years, but as I sit here, despite having no TV and no Internet connection, I'm experiencing a feeling of contentment that I haven't felt in a good long while. It is peculiar, though. As my parents went down the stairs for the last time and I shut the door, it was kind of like someone flipped a switch from "student" to "adulthood".
'course, there's little evidence for that having happened, considering I've built a small bunker out of bookcases for my computer area, I've filled a 7ft tall bookcase with video games and especially considering that, as I type this, St Barnabus of Lagentium and Gizmo the Mogwai are sizing each other up from opposite ends of the room.
I think it's a territory thing. Gizmo used to look after my room in Cleckheaton, he made sure my alarm clock kept working and generally kept watch at night. Barnabus, however, has experience in protection. He looked after my car for a good 12 months. The room's in 4 quadrants: bed, living, sentimental and the computer warren. Barnabus currently occupies the computer warren while Gizmo is the lord and master of bed. This fight could easily go either way, I reckon. Barnabus isn't very fast, but he does have a knife, while Gizo is much faster but will have to improvise to get a weapon (which he has shown he can do (see Gremlins 2)). However, Gizmo is close to the kitchen and the knife block. I figure that Barnabus can gain a tactical advantage by securing sentimental, but then Gizmo will retaliate with superior firepower.
Alls I know is that if Barnabus ultimately wins, he's going back in the car, because I'm not going to let Cap'n Stabby stand over me all night.
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