Words are my favourite noises

Tim meets Ann

2009-11-03T02:50:00.000-08:00

On a fine summer day when I was dead I used my head to knock a door down. At the time I didn't think I'd ever have to use my head again for everyday purposes like making women say 'What are you looking at?', but I was wrong about that. I was wrong about a lot of things. I was right about one thing, but I can't remember what it is.

Everything in life has a purpose, even cats who draw dots on things. My purpose is to draw dots on cats. The bees buzz until their trousers fall down. Ann makes bee-trousers, and some people say she's evil but I think they mean to say 'oval'.

Tim met Ann on the street one day. He was taking his new hair style out for a walk. She was transfixed by the hair. She wanted to spend more time looking at it, so she invited him on a picnic.

They went to a mountainside for their picnic. She enjoyed it more than he did. Her penguin sandwiches tasted funny. He was looking for an excuse to get away, so he wasn't disappointed when the wolf arrived.

They ran up the mountainside to get away from the wolf. They kept running until they came to Hugh's house.

Hugh farms icicles on his house during the winter. He grew some extraordinary icicles last winter. He won a prize at an icicle competition. He sells them at a market stall and he gives some to his neighbours. They often give him things in return. The woman with hexagonal feet gave him hexagonal shoes. A film-maker lives further up the mountain. He didn't have anything to give in return, so he offered to make a film of Hugh working on his icicle farm. Hugh said there would be very little to film, but the director told him that his last film was about a man who was trying to teach a salmon what a gun was. Nothing much happened in this, but it was one of his best films. By the end, the man had come to some sort of understanding with the salmon.

Ann and Tim asked Hugh if they could wait in his house until the wolf went away. He told them they could stay for as long as they wanted. He made them some tea, and he showed them the film made about his work. At the start of the film, he was shown putting on his coat, his scarf and his gloves before going out to check on his icicles. Hugh tried to drag this out for as long as possible. He spoke about his uncle Phil who never left the house without putting on his gloves. This was because of his fear of leaving finger prints on things. After going outside, Hugh inspected each one of his icicles. He added drops of water to some, but for most of them he just offered words of encouragement.

Ann and Tim had been watching the film for an hour before they saw Hugh complete his inspection. They weren't expecting the next hour to be any more interesting, but before Hugh went back into his house the camera turned around and they saw an angel who'd shake every few seconds. Every time the angel shook, dozens of rubber ducks fell out of her. These ducks slid away down the mountainside on the snow. Many of them ended up in the river.

As they watched the closing credits of the film, Ann asked Hugh about the angel. He took them out to his shed, where he had a box full of rubber ducks. He gave them one of the ducks. They went back to their picnic rug, and they used the duck to frighten the wolf away. Tim was disappointed to find that the wolf hadn't touched the penguin sandwiches.

Harold

2009-08-08T06:27:00.000-07:00

Drunk teddy bears make plans to start hamster farms. Somebody shook this fact out of a teacher. The last time I was shaken, hundreds of things fell out, things like buttons, paper clips, coins, newspaper clippings. A deck of cards sounded like a tennis ball when it hit the ground. The people who shook me knew that the tennis ball must be in me somewhere, so they shook me even harder. Eventually they got tired and they had to take a break. They sat down to have a smoke. They used the cigarette lighter that had fallen out of me. We were near Harold's house at the time, and they asked me who lived there.

I told them about Harold.

He often smokes his pipe in bed,
and he thinks about reading some of the book
he's been reading for the past eight years.

One night, just as he was lighting his pipe, he was visited by a ghost. The ghost kept talking for hours. He went away at four o' clock in the morning, but before he left he said, "I'll see you again tomorrow night."

The ghost arrived back on the following night. When he appeared in Harold's room he said, "Have you ever tried using time? Someone once said to me I should try using time, so I said I'd give it a go. I found a fortune in my trousers. Someone said to me that this had nothing to do with time. I'm not so sure myself. I remember I was in Berlin once..."

He kept talking for hours again, and again he said he'd see Harold on the following night. Harold needed a good night's sleep. He thought of Luke, his brother. Luke used to spend a lot of time watching TV, but he got bored with that because the TV kept showing the same image.

So he started looking at the wallpaper instead.

After staring at the wallpaper for hours, a blue ghost emerged from it. The ghost brought havoc to the house for a few weeks, but he started to calm down eventually, and Luke was able to tame him.

On the day after Harold was visited by the ghost, he went to see his brother to get his advice, but Luke didn't know which 'know' was which and which 'which' he stole from from. He talked his tongue off, and then he used some worms instead. Harold listened carefully and tried to make sense of his advice, or the worms' advice. He thought he heard something about Shane.

Shane lives in the grass. He only comes out at night.

He'll grant you three wishes if you give him a can of beer. These wishes are never fulfilled, but it's fun waiting around for nothing to happen.

Harold went to see him that night. He gave Shane a can of beer, and he said he didn't need three wishes. He just wanted one: for the ghost to leave him in peace so he could get some sleep. Shane said his wish would come true, and they spent the next hour drinking beer. Harold asked Shane how he passed the time during the night. Shane said, "I listen to the conversations going on inside my mouth. Do you want to listen in?"

"No thanks," Harold said. "Maybe I should be going home now."

They both went back to Harold's house. Shane wanted to see if the ghost would appear. The ghost was waiting for them when they got to the house. Shane and the ghost realised that they'd met before. While they were talking downstairs, Harold went upstairs to bed. He could hear them reading their poetry and crying. Harold likes the sound of other people crying. He finds it relaxing. He finds poetry relaxing as well. He's always distracted by the sound of it and he can never comprehend the words. He was asleep after the first two lines of Shane's poem 'Fat astronauts fall out of the sky'. Shane and the ghost meet in Harold's house every night, and they always put him to sleep.

The tennis ball fell out of me eventually. The people who had been shaking me put out their cigarettes and picked up their tennis rackets. One of them hit the ball into a field and then they went to look for it. This is how they play tennis.

Songs dig holes

2009-07-22T06:51:00.000-07:00

Songs dig holes in the air and sometimes I fall into those holes. I got trapped in a hole made by a song about badgers.

The countryside is full of holes. Many of them are the result of Melanie's songs. When she was young she used to share an ear with her sister. They started singing together. When they sing everyone joins in. People for miles around will sing and they can't stop until they get to the end of a song.

Sometimes strange creatures emerge from the holes. The singers have to keep singing and hope that these creatures don't have sharp claws.

No one pays any attention to the lyrics because they're wondering what's going to swoop down out of the sky and attack them. One of those creatures terrorised everyone in the area for weeks. He came out of a huge hole made by a song about making servants wash themselves at least once a week. This creature used to sniff people. They found this more terrifying than having their hair cut by a monkey (in fairness, the monkey is getting better at cutting hair). We were working on a plan to shoot him down, but his reign of terror came to an end when he started sniffing the fire on top of Maurice's chocolate factory. Maurice keeps it burning to stop helicopters from landing on it. The fumes from the fire would make the monkey faint, but the creature in the sky loved the smell. He's still there, hovering over the factory. Maurice charges tourists who want to see him.

Bertie: If Louise told him to jump off a cliff, would he do that?
Roy: Probably. She told him to become Batman, and he did his best. He came very close to succeeding. He modified his car to make it into a bat mobile, and it nearly killed a swan. He found a nemesis in a Norwegian man, but the Norwegian man was too strong. Bob kept losing their battles. The real Batman wouldn't have done that.

Bertie: Did you really invent it, or did you find it pecking at your head when you woke?
Bob: I invented it.
Bertie: What raw materials did you use?
Bob: Some of the raw materials were things I found pecking my head when I woke, but I also used some glue, some paper and a few raisons.
Roy: My uncle Willie invented something similar a few years ago. Because of the frequency with which his head ends up on the ground, it was only a matter of time before his invention started pecking his head. If you're going to invent something whose only reason for being is to peck things, make sure that its beak isn't sharp enough to make a hole in your head.
Bertie: I've often said so.

Roy: I know. If it makes another hole in your head, something even worse could come out of that. In fact, that creature could have come from a hole you made by singing a song in your sleep.
Bob: No, I invented it.

Emily's Sister

2009-07-11T06:28:00.000-07:00

I see all these insects and I wonder where they're coming from and they probably wonder the same thing about me. I was a cartoon pig when I said that. Picture a cartoon pig and read the first sentence again. Picture a German diplomat and read the previous sentence again. Picture a French chanteuse and read the previous sentence again. Picture a red dot and look up at the ceiling/roof/sky/person-looking-down/void/floor-if-you're-hanging-upside-down. I wouldn't hang upside down if I were you. Picture your doctor and read the previous sentence again.

My doctor:

Billy is a part-time superhero.

He fights villains and aliens with the other local superheroes. Sometimes their missions are more mundane, like getting cats down from trees or squeezing the water out of birds who get wet in the rain. Sometimes they have to stop the aliens from conducting experiments to answer stupid questions.

Emily was angry with him
because he told everyone
that she made a wedding dress
for her cat.

He wanted to get back in her good books by doing something superhero-like for her. He asked her if there were any villains bothering her, or aliens annoying her cat. She said that if he wanted to do a favour for her he could find out what her sister is up to. She's hardly ever at home in the evenings, and she always changes the subject when you ask her where she's been.

Spying on women is the sort of thing villains would normally do. He got the advice of some villains who owed him a favour after he rescued them from the aliens. They gave him classes in spying on women. He got beaten up many times before he became good at it. After two weeks training he was ready to spy on Emily's sister.

He saw her leaving the house wearing a hat and sunglasses, even though the sun had gone down. He followed her to a house about a mile away. When he looked in the window he saw her playing the flute with a band. They performed the songs written by the man who played the xylophone. He used to play with a wedding band who wore top hats. They let the bees in their hats make most of the music. The only reason they played their instruments was to ease the stress of having bees in their top hats.

Emily was hoping for something more scandalous than this, but she appreciated all the effort Billy had put in. "It wasn't a wedding dress," she said. "It was her costume for a Renaissance Fair."

Joan's House

2009-06-25T06:12:00.000-07:00

Dan wondered how he'd spend the evening. He could listen to his friend Neil say 'I'm a coward and a frog' over and over again.

When she spoke about the witches who come out after dark he seemed nervous, so she changed the subject. She told him about the time her father proposed to her mother.

A monkey stole the engagement ring shortly after the proposal. The monkey went into a shed, and he threw nuts and bolts at anyone who tried to come in. They had to negotiate with him to get the ring back. He turned down an offer of two-thousand pounds, but he accepted an offer of a bottle of washing-up liquid.

Dan felt uncomfortable when she spoke about proposals. He thought she was trying to drop a hint, so he changed the subject. He asked her about the witches. She said they'd turn you into a strange creature if you crossed them. She could see that he was nervous, so she suggested they go into the house because she wanted his opinion on a mouse.

The mouse said, "I love what you've done with the dining room." They realised that he used to be a man, until a witch turned him into a mouse. He said his name was Oliver, and the witch had turned him into a mouse because he asked her if the spiders on her head had caught anything interesting that day. He was just trying to make small talk.

The witch suddenly appeared in the room. Dan tried to remember the advice his grandfather gave him about witches.

When his grandfather gave up on the witches he tried to make his fortune by making sheep. People would buy his sheep to count them at night. He said they were better than any sleeping pill.

Dan started playing the piano to make the witch dance, but instead of dancing she started singing. It was a sad song about the sweets and liquorice she used to eat when she was young. There were tears in her eyes.

At the end of the song she disappeared in a puff of smoke. After she had gone they realised that Oliver was a man again. He went over to Joan's cat and said, "Not so big now, are you?" But the cat just fell asleep. Oliver found this humiliating. He wished he was a mouse again, especially seeing as there was a mouse wrestling tournament in Joan's attic that night.

The witch re-appeared in the room. "Sorry," she said. "I forgot my handbag." Before she left she looked over at Oliver and said, "Y' know, you wouldn't keep saying stupid things if you didn't keep putting your finger in your ear."

Bertie: Maybe we should go to Karen's house for shelter.

Karen:

Roy: Shelter. Yes.
Bertie: And of course she always pours a glass of something for her visitors.
Roy: Something. Yes. She lost count of the amount of people who called to congratulate her when her garden won a prize. I heard she got so drunk that she floated to the ground like a sheet of paper and she slid right under her front door. One of her neighbours had to fold her up and push her through the letter box. Ever since then she's been afraid of being folded up into a paper plane and then blowing away on the wind. This is why she always carries an anchor. This anchor is disguised as a handbag. It's full of phones, books, various odds and ends and a pineapple.
Bertie: The last time I met her she said something about... I'm not really sure what it was about.

What Karen said:

Bertie: I think it was something about bags.

My Travels, part one

2009-06-12T06:38:00.000-07:00

I went for a walk one summer day. I came across a narrow road, and I decided to follow it through the countryside. I looked at all the insects, the buzzing beings, the minor Boeings emerging from the hedgerows. I met a man who was studying the insects. I asked him if he'd seen anything interesting and he said, "Everything is interesting. So yes, I've seen something interesting because I've seen some things. That tree is interesting. That cloud is interesting. That rabbit is interesting."

"I didn't know rabbits had wings," I said.

"That's what makes him so interesting."

"Yes. He's an extremely interesting rabbit. Of course, the other possibility is that he's a perfectly ordinary bird."

"I'd have to examine him more closely to determine that. And if he is a bird, he can't be perfectly ordinary if he's easily mistaken for a rabbit."

"That's true."

"Insects are my area of expertise. Sometimes they respond when I talk to them. But then again, sometimes my hands respond when I talk to them."

Some of the insects he had seen:

The road went on without me when I stopped to talk to the man. I said goodbye to him, and I tried to catch up with the road. After half a mile it ended in a field, where it had found a woman. She was looking up at God, who was above the hills, she said.

She told me about the angels who protect people's houses. One of them protects her house when she's out during the day and when she's asleep at night. "They can communicate with the birds," she said. "My aunt can communicate with the birds too. She used to sing in a band called 'Jeremy and the Dentists'. She discovered her ability to communicate with birds when the band were playing in a village hall one summer evening. It was warm outside, and even warmer inside, so all the doors were open. The sun was setting when a bird flew in through an open door. They were singing a song about cycling a yellow bike through the countryside. There was a line in it about listening to the twittering of the birds. As soon as she sang it, the bird twittered something in response, and she understood that response. The bird said he enjoyed listening to the music of bicycles, especially yellow bicycles. Ever since then she's been talking to them and listening to what they have to say. Talking to birds, that is, not yellow bicycles. I've been able to communicate with the angel outside my house by getting my aunt to talk to the birds and asking them to pass on the message to the angel, and then they translate the angel's response for my aunt, who translates it for me. I think some things get lost in translation. I doubt very much that the angel's favourite food is honeysuckle jam made by Street Fighter II."

She also told me that she talks to God and he tells her who she is when she forgets. He tells her the time too. I asked her if she'd ask God to get the road moving again. She did, and the road took off very quickly. I couldn't keep up with it, so I walked at my own pace. I set off on the road to God knows where.

When the road came to a lake it went all around the water's edge. I followed the road until I came to a vegetable garden. Most of the vegetables had gone and cats had taken their places, pretending to be the vegetables through a judicious use of mime. One of the cats, through an injudicious use of mime, was pretending to be a mouse. A gardener was watering the cats, but they didn't like it. I got the impression that the cats were busking, so I suggested giving the cats some coins instead of water. He said it was worth trying. I had some coins in my pocket. I gave them to some of the cats and we could see them growing.

Shortly after leaving the garden I came across a well. There was a hole in the ground near the well. I put my head into the hole and I was surprised to find that my head emerged from the well. I saw myself kneeling next to the hole, with my head concealed in it. I put my hand into the hole and it came out through the well. I tapped myself on the back and my body seemed to get a shock. It moved suddenly, causing my head to hit off the side of the well. I withdrew my head from the hole.

I realised that I had given all my money away to the cats, but I had an idea to make some more. I stood next to the hole, and I told passers-by that the well was a wishing well. They'd throw coins into it and make a wish, but the coins would come up through the hole. I'd catch the coins and put them into my pocket without being seen. If their wish was to enrich me, then the wishing well worked.

When my pockets were full I walked down the road again. It led me all the way around the lake and back to the place where the road first met the lake. I began my second circuit. When I got to the vegetable garden the cats were huge. I gave them some of my coins, and the cats grew even bigger.

When I got to the well I met a man who said he was bird-watching.

Some of the birds he had seen:

I asked him if he'd seen any interesting birds lately and he said, "I'm not really interested in seeing anything interesting. I'm looking for signs of warfare. As long as the barn owls are on my side I should be okay."

"Don't the barn owls only come out at night?"

"That's just what they want you to think. They're masters of disguise. I once met a man on the road who tried to sell me a kettle. It was only as I was walking away that I said to myself, 'Wait a minute, that man could turn his head right around.' And then I realised it wasn't a man at all. It was an owl."

"They sound like the sort of creatures you'd want on your side alright."

As the sun began to set he started telling me his life story. I took little notice of what he was saying until he started talking about the years he spent working in the city. City life came as a shock after growing up in the country.

"I got a job in a pet shop," he said. "There was a huge aquarium that went around all four walls of the shop. Some of the fish could go from one end of the tank to the other. The two ends were at either side of the front door. You could look at a fish at one side of the door, then blink and see that fish at the other side. Everything was like that in the city. The fish were only copying the cars on the street outside. Country fish were much more relaxed. My life was speeding up as well. Conversations that used to last two hours would be over in two seconds. I missed the days when it would take two hours to inquire about the price of potatoes in a shop. I decided to move back to the country and commute to work in the city. The owner of the pet shop showed me how to catch a wild road and train it to go where I wanted it to go. I've been able to control the roads ever since by tapping them with my feet. I've turned it into a dance."

The man did a tap dance on the road, and he showed me how to control the road with some simple commands. I got it to stop running around the lake and move off in a different direction. I thanked the man for his help and I followed the road again.

It was dark soon. I was going to camp out, but it started raining, so I knocked on the door of a farmhouse and I asked if I could stay in a shed. They insisted that I stay in the house. They took me to a spare bedroom upstairs. Not long after I switched off the light I saw a flash of lightning and it split the sky in two. I looked out the window. Hundreds of people emerged from holes and from behind bushes. They put up scaffolding and they started work on repairing the sky. They had it finished before dawn. You couldn't even see a crack in the blue dome on the following day. After having breakfast in the farmhouse I set off on the road again.

This

2009-06-01T05:21:00.000-07:00

This is a recipe for that, and that has been described as 'a disaster' by him, and he has been awarded the 'Man most likely to recognise a disaster' prize by a committee headed by her, and she is trying to piece together the bits of broken timber she found in my garden.

Man most likely
to recognise a disaster:

When she first found the broken timber in my garden she asked me if I'd been playing with Crunchy again.

I told her that I hadn't been playing with Crunchy in over a year. I still had the scars. The timber used to be stilts. It's easier to make new stilts than it is to make new legs. I think my neighbours broke them. They were showing me their new scarecrow and I said he'd make an excellent scarecrow but my comment angered them because they were showing me their new grandmother. I had to hijack a tree to make my getaway. I ended up in a garden I'd never seen before.

I spent half an hour exploring the garden. When I heard footsteps at the other side of a hedge I remembered that I was trespassing, so I climbed a tree to hide. The feet that made the sound of footsteps belonged to two gardeners. I would have remained invisible to them if the branch I was holding onto hadn't broken. As it broke I tried to remember what the Health and Safety man said about falling: when you land on the ground you should roll into a ball and use it to kill a whale. When I hit the ground I forgot to roll because I saw the familiar faces I hadn't seen in years. They used to appear in my bedroom at night when I was young and they'd try to sing me to sleep, but they normally kept me awake.

The faces were more helpful this time. They told me to run away, and they gave me directions home. The gardeners ran after me. They're still chasing me but they're slowing down now and and and I'm saying 'and'. What's this again?

Sweden

2009-05-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

We were watching a storm made by an airplane for another airplane. These two airplanes were in love. Melanie said she had to go to meet someone in let's-say-Sweden.

Let's go to Sweden.

[Driving in a car,
making car noises
as we go to Sweden].

We're in a room. Someone comes in and says, "Saturday is coming today." And then someone else comes in and says, "I don't want to say that." So they kick him until he reads what's on the card and then a panda dressed entirely in black comes in with his wife. At times like these you need a good brain. If you have a good brain you'll feel more coloured-in than someone with a bad brain, but there's still no guarantee that you'll know who coloured you in. My brain made me try to tie my ears in knots to keep out the sound of a song sung by the panda's wife.

Bertie: He doesn't know her name. He thinks he saw her somewhere before. He's seen her clothes and he's fairly sure she was in her clothes at the time.
Roy: When I was in a band I saw a lot of women's clothes. Sometimes the women would be in them.
Bertie: I didn't know you were in a band.
Roy: We toured the whole country, eating phones everywhere we went until there were no phones left, and people went out to play snow when they didn't have their phones, even in the middle of summer. But now there are too many phones for an average band to eat.
Bertie: They can be a curse. Phones. And average bands.
Roy: I remember once we played in a small seaside town in the west of Ireland. A giant was washed up on the beach. He was unconscious. The locals were worried. Their mayor addressed them and he tried to calm their nerves. He said to them, "The giant is no bigger than any of us. His size is an optical illusion. It's because he's lying down." Someone pointed out that people wake up on the beach every morning and they don't look big. If anything they look smaller because most of them would have left their heads behind in the pub. But the mayor insisted it wasn't a giant...

...They tried to ignore the 'man' on the beach. They had to wait another two weeks before he woke. He got to his feet and they realised that he really was a giant. They vowed never to vote for the mayor again. But the giant turned out to be friendly. When he saw the terrified locals he reached into his pocket and took out a handful of potatoes, which was like a cart-load of potatoes to the locals. He gave the potatoes to them, and he spent another two weeks removing all the food and drink from his pockets and nooks and crannies. When we went back to the town a year later everyone was fatter.

Mrs. Murmelarden

2009-04-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

Louis took offence when I suggested that his dog enjoyed ironing clothes.

He has shovels for fingernails and wives for fingers. His fingers ran after me, threatening me with his fingernails. I went to Mrs. Murmelarden's house and I got her to pretend to be my wife. She has an ear for melody and an eye for people tied to train tracks but don't call her a witch in front of her front.

It turned out that Mrs. Murmelarden and Louis were married years ago. They started fighting when they met again. While they were busy with their altercation, I went to the pub with his wives. We had a great time after they stopped hitting me with shovels. Even before they stopped, we had some fun.

My Kite

2009-04-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

I used to fly a kite when I was young.

The kite would fight with clouds. Ever since then I've suspected that the clouds are out to get me. Sometimes they crash into my house and wake me up at night. A cloud shaped like a man with a top hat broke a window one evening and came into my living room. He doffed the hat and he apologised, but as he did so he morphed into a rat. The rat withdrew the apology. The clouds of my breath formed themselves into mice and they attacked the rat. The rat ran out the window and disappeared into a cloud shaped like a wedding cake. The mice tried to get back into my head, but I wouldn't let them.

Bertie: I know a man who could have been an animal.
Roy: My grandfather used to could-have-been-an-animal every day until someone stole his wig.
Bertie: You have to be very careful of someone stealing your wig.
Roy: Or your nurse.
Bertie: Or your nurse's wig.
Roy: Or your wig's nurse. My grandfather's wig died when its nurse was saying 'hoppity' for a man who was holding his eyes in his head in case they fell out. He was supposed to be guarding her, but he wouldn't have seen her getting away. She liked saying 'hoppity'.
Bertie: If it's a bird, it must have fallen asleep in the air.
Roy: I used to fly a cat when I was young. My brother flew a brick wall for the cat to sit on, but it preferred to hover above the wall.

Darren's House

2009-03-10T09:08:00.000-07:00

Darren lost his house.

He can't remember where he left it. He's been living under an umbrella. He stuck a pipe through the umbrella, and this serves as a chimney. He cooks his dinner over the fire. He hammered a door frame into the ground near the umbrella, and he attached a door to the frame just to give himself some privacy. He has a doorbell as well, and a letter box for the postman to put letters through. Every time the neighbours ring the doorbell he pretends he's not at home.

People love visiting Darren's house when the weather is fine. Some friends will call around and a party will inevitably follow. This used to happen almost every evening. His house was becoming more like a nightclub, so he hired a bouncer called Craig to stand at the door.

Darren invited Alan to a party just so Craig could refuse to let him in. Jenny was with Alan at the time. She told Craig to tell Darren that they were only calling around to say they couldn't stay because they were going to a party beneath a parasol. The people at Darren's house heard this and most of them followed Jenny and Alan.

Bertie: Them.

Roy: When I was in Austria I saw some people and a tour guide told me they were them.

Bertie: I saw some people who were them in Clonmel.

Roy: I was in Clonmel once. I bought a scarf there. I had to go home to put my neck on before I could try on the scarf. I bought a neck for my goldfish. He only uses it to wear gold medallions because he thinks it impresses the other goldfish, but there are no other goldfish. He keeps forgetting that. And my robot still keeps looking at his hands...

...I should never have given him hands. I should have listened to Uncle Willie's advice and given him parsnips instead. No one wants to look at parsnips.

Tourists

2009-02-17T02:56:00.000-08:00

I think it was my old English teacher (this sentence will self-destruct in three words) who once said 'hobbitpling'. I was reminded of this one day when I was saying the word 'cat' for some tourists.

I gave the tourists a tour of the town. We went to the park where a never-ending play was being performed. The actors can be shaped like putty. When I was there with the tourists one of the actors was eight foot tall, and he'd only been half that height on the previous day. Someone must have been rolling him.

We watched the play until late in the afternoon and then it was 'was' when it should have been 'is'. The sense of time passing made me want to show them as much of the town as possible before the end of the day, but there wasn't much else to see. I took them to the street where the self-proclaimed king was counting his bears. The number of bears was still zero. He had everything he needed to give his bears a bath, should the numbers increase. There was also the possibility that he'd have to cull them if there were too many, or any. His bear-culling equipment was the town's biggest tourist attraction.

We ended the day at the edge of town, looking out over the fields. Dan and the rest of his motorbike gang sped past us on the road.

They looked as if they were trying to escape from something. They had been terrorising all of the local farmers for months. Earlier that evening they went to Freddie and Eoin's farm. They're brothers.

Freddie will fight anyone or anything, but Eoin always tries to avoid any sort of conflict. Freddie would have taken on Dan and his gang, but they were frightened off by Freddie and Eoin's grandfather, who was using his false tooth to eat a kiwi.

A song in the pub

2009-02-03T04:21:00.000-08:00

My days have no night. I lost my night last week, and I've got nowhere to sleep now. I accumulate questions by day and I find the answers in dreams. The questions are building up. How many 'B's does it take to screw in a 'C'? Why does Vincent take photos of cows?

...Jack and Tommy were there as well. They sang a song together, or at least they started together, but by the end they were singing two different songs. These two songs merged at the ceiling and formed a sheep...

...The sheep started fighting with Len's pink elephant. The elephant lost its courage very quickly and the sheep chased it all around the pub, much to Len's embarrassment. He had been proud of the elephant. He'd taught it how to roll over and play dead. It would stay floating above his head until he was ready to leave the pub. I've never seen a better behaved pink elephant. The sheep kept chasing it over our heads. We got tired of looking up after a few minutes and we looked down into our glasses again.

Aliens

2009-01-22T04:47:00.000-08:00

Aliens have invaded. They've disguised their spaceship as an artist's palette. It's hovering over Ted's garden. Ted hasn't noticed because he has other distractions.

They spent a fortune on fake eyebrows to disguise themselves as humans, but then they realised that they'd be better off disguising themselves as balloons.

They're convinced that Joey is the leader of the world because of all the attention he gets. He's only ten months old. They noticed that there's always someone there to attend to his every need. He's fed by underlings, and he doesn't even have to walk. People worship him.

The aliens communicate telepathically.

Unwrapping Birds

2009-01-13T03:38:00.000-08:00

Jenny often spends her evenings unwrapping birds from bird wrappers and watching them fly away. Some of them perch on the branches of the trees in her back garden.

Every evening there are places to go, people to meet, faces to switch on and watch the eyes light up. I know where the switches are. One evening I went around to all the places but there was no one there, no switches to switch on, so I used my index finger to get something out of my head and that thing I got out of my head won a prize in an essay contest. I wrote about birds. I'd often seen Jenny unwrap them, and watched the birds perch in the trees. The birds' pilots twitter when they fly. I listen to them, and sometimes I can make out words. One of the trees in her garden is called Giles and he has over fifty years experience as a tree. The sad, lonely birds perch on him and he listens to their tales of woe, like a bar man listening to drunks.

Bertie: Isn't that dangerous?
Roy: It would be if there was any snow.
Bertie: Mrs. Swarmleaf's dog ate a snowman.

Roy: My dog once ate a shoe. It was very embarrassing for me. The woman who owned the shoe was there at the time. I couldn't look her in the eye.
Bertie: I struggle to look in Janet's eye.
Roy: Which one?
Bertie: The one she keeps throwing up and down in the air like a ball.
Roy: You'd hurt your neck if you tried to look at that one for too long.

Bertie's Decorations

2008-12-23T03:33:00.000-08:00

Tumbleweed blows by.

You can hear the sound of church bells
and dogs barking in the distance.

Bertie: I've had to use nuclear power for the lights.
Roy: Have you never heard of Marie Curie?
Bertie: Who's she?
Roy: She was born in...

Tumbleweed blows by.

...She became a...

You can hear the sound of church bells
and dogs barking in the distance.

...The important point is that she died and became a ghost...

...She haunted my uncle Willie's house for years.
She was always complaining to him about his nuclear reactor.
The dog kept scratching at it.
She said it would be the death of him.
Bertie: And was it?
Roy: No. The cigarettes got him in the end.

Snails

2008-12-17T05:58:00.000-08:00

My eye has gone to sleep and my other eye is a snail and it's crying.

It's your snail versus mine.

Alan and Jenny

2008-12-03T03:10:00.000-08:00

Jenny recently split up with Darren.
Alan has been in love with Jenny for years,
and I convinced him to ask her out.
She said yes.
When he arrived at her house to collect her he gave her a bunch of crows.

He took her to a restaurant where a jazz band played.

Darren couldn't care less about Jenny and Alan. This is his official position.

What did Darren do while Jenny was with Alan?
"I shot the f**k out of the clouds until the clouds were f**kless, and then I started kicking a car. I saw Mathilda. She entered the evening like a letter pushed through a letter box by an arsonist. She beckoned me towards her with her poking finger, the one she'd just been using on a dead cat. We're in love now. She's much better than Jenny. Jenny is a blister on a cut on a half-cat or a dead calf."

My letter of complaint

2008-11-10T03:31:00.000-08:00

Melanie pointed at something, but I didn't know what she was pointing at.

She waited and then (I played a sad song on the piano) she crossed out everything after 'and then'.

A head once fell on my apple. I wanted to write a letter of complaint, but I didn't know who I should address it to. Melanie makes letter cakes with the words written in icing. 'Dear John, your sandwich is getting wet'. She was right about that. I got her to write the complaint letter on a cake, and then we ate the cake ourselves. I no longer felt a need to complain about the head falling on my apple.

My Suit

2008-10-10T04:36:00.000-07:00

We, or they, or them versus us (I'm backing them) which one am I again? My memory isn't what it was when I remembered what it was. Many archaeologists are working in my garden. This is where they found me. They gave me a bath and a clean set of clothes: a dark grey suit from a second-hand shop and a bright red tie. I'm still spitting out dirt.

I went on a cruise to test my suit.

It proved to be extremely effective. I met a woman whose ears weren't big enough to fit big words into her head, but she was able to squeeze them in through her nose. I like a woman with a good vocabulary.

Always tip your tap man

2008-09-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

You should always try to tip your tap man when he taps you on the shoulder and says there's something on your face. I know. I grew it myself. I bought it a hat.

My tap man thinks of himself as a guardian-angel/super-hero.

I've got Mrs. Tumble on my back. I don't know who put her there. I think Mr. Tumble might have done it while I was looking at a duck. It was my tap man who pointed out the duck to me, and he was probably paying too much attention to the duck to notice when Mr. Tumble put Mrs. Tumble on my back. Now he taps her on the shoulder and asks her to pass messages on to me, but she just pokes me with a stick.

Grey

2008-09-26T08:11:00.001-07:00