Thursday 16 November 2006

The Height of Average

I am in the office of the advertising agency for which I work trying to think of some ideas for Citroen. Also some for Peugeot, and some for Weight Watchers and also more for Citroen. I am still hungover from last night even though it is now 18.43. This is now turning into the dead timeI referred to in previous post, and ideal for attending to my blog. A baleful expectoration into the universal pond.

I have been watching a sequence of brain candy DVDs, bearing short films and animations, in the hope that they charge my memory with some useful pap for future regurtation. If I was a stand up comedian I would be encouraged to take my most obvious unique asset to make it the basis of my stage personality. For example if I was short I would do jokes about how small I was. If I were Asian I'd do some jokes about what it's like being Asian. Unless of course I was an Asian comic working exclusively in Asia, when the uniqueness would be lost on the audience. I think I would choose the fact that my height is exactly the average height of a human male. 5'81/2".

Monday 13 November 2006

Afternoon Mumps

Imagine you are a wildebeeste. Every year you trundle with several thousands of your mates across a scrubby tundral landscape, your hooves pounding a steady rhythm, causing the phrase "scrubby tundral landscape" to repeat through your mind for mile after scrubby tundral mile. Yet one day up on a hill is David Attenborough with a film crew. Today is the day, the first day in many millenia, when you do not migrate unnoticed. OK, so the light isn't good, so you don't quite have the numbers to make a true spectacle, but there is that chance that this is the footage that makes it to be shown to the world. "Do we migrate in vain?" you think to yourself over the pumping rhythm and amid the steaming rumps of your running mates. "Not today".

That's why I've never done blogs before.  I always valued my dead time.  Like those sorry afternoons when you are a child and sit with a puffed out face in bed, off sick from  no school, no playtime, nothing to mark out time. Only the prospect of a banana in half an hour and the rest of the time just pure, empty, wasteful, vile, still wasteful, still vile passing time, not even the throb of a toothache to keep you company.

Empty time is, though, creative time. It is why writers work as night watchmen or take long train journeys. they need the dead stuff, the futile expanse of life's tundra in which they can't help but germinate some seed of thought into, ooh, I don't know, a little poem, or a list of famous Grahams.