Hitler Moustache looms and I am not looking forward to going back down to my toothbrush until the middle of April. But it's already there haunting me as I shaved today, but realised I couldn't shave off my moustache or I wouldn't be able to grow it in time for the first gig. So I now have a non-Hitler moustache for the rest of the holiday, but every time I look at it I see the toothbrush within and feel slightly sick.
Finished "Year of the Flood" by lunchtime and then moved on to "A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur" by Mark Twain, which I found a little bit dull and gave up on and then had a brief look at Jane Austen's Juvenilia, which was nowhere near as good as the "Men of Phise" or even "The Plant that never ghrow", although one of the early pieces is called "Love and Freindship" which shows that I wasn't the only one who couldn't spell as a youngster. I then started into my Christmas present from Andrew Collings, Peter Kay's "The Sound of Laughter", which to be honest is just one small step up from all the homeopathic medicine that he gave me last year. It's like Collings wants to infuriate and upset me. It is though the biggest selling British autobiography of all time, so that's got to make it good right? And certainly not lazily written in one sitting, full of stories that are at least partly phoney, which think that naming specific product names and TV shows is the same as making a joke and which revels in displaying its working class credentials. From the way it leaps around in narrative and from the self-consciousness of the asides I think it's fairly likely that Kay's 14 year old cousin actually wrote the thing.... but then maybe I am getting on to thin ice here. After all, you've all read this blog for a while now. Though at least I am not making you pay for the privilege.
I may try and get through it though. Even if I am fairly certain that the millions of people who bought it have been cynically exploited. Apart from Andrew Collings who knew exactly what he was doing.
As I sat and read a small bird landed on the flower bed next to us. It looked like a small thrush, except it was orange. Orange! Bright orange.
An orange bird. Would you believe it? What will they come up with next. A bluebird? A blackbird?
I never thought I would see an orange bird outside of a maybe a parrot cage. Travel certainly opens us up to new experiences. I knew Andrew Collings, an ornithologist of some note, would be excited about seeing something like this and might even know what this orange bird was called. But he would never see it.
And I thought that if Peter Kay had seen it, he would probably have said, "An orange bird? Had it been drinking Kiora? Remember that advert. It's too orangy for crows, but maybe this bird hadn't heard that warning. Me and R Julie used to love it when that ad came on at the Bolton Odeon. Then there'd be one for the local curry house, wouldn't there, just a picture with a voiceover, that would noticeably change to a different person when they named the restaurant round the corner. They've knocked the Odeon down now and replaced it with a Laser Quest that was opened by Norman Collier. And they call that progress. My mam's on the phone just now saying she had an unexpected item in the bagging area down at the Sainsbury's Local...Hold on while I wait for her to stop talking... I remember that time when I was out shopping with her in the town centre and I was caught short and she pulled down my trousers and pants and I had to go in the gutter... which would have been fine except I was 28 years old at the time (I am joking of course)... Is that enough for a book? Can I have my money now please?"
Do buy the book. It shits all over Emma Kennedy. And she has been shat over many, many times as you'll know if you read her work.
