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I notice an awful lot of companies who are not advertising on my podcast. Expect a letter from my lawyers tomorrow morning you motherfuckers. All your brands are shit anyway. And I'd say that on my podcast if you DID advertise.
As we left Longleat yesterday there was a sign saying "Cats Eyes Removed" which seemed more like a warning of what might happen if you ventured down there than anything else. Imagine being a foreigner or just a child and seeing that and trying to make sense of it. Is it just a feline murderer on the loose or is this some kind of archaic toll. You'd never guess that it meant there were no longer tiny bits of reflective glass in the middle of the road.
But the return to Cheddar always makes me think of the Cats' Eyes on the bend of the road between my house and the schools, where over many days, after noticing a loose cats' eye my friend and I tried to remove it so we could keep it for ourselves. It makes me shudder to think of the risk we took for a piece of glass with a bit of metal casing, because it was on a blind bend and cars could have come hurtling towards me from either direction, not expecting a tiny school child (let alone the 28 year old man that I obviously was) to be crouching in the road, tugging at a safety feature. Cats' Eyes may have saved many lives and been the inspiration for a largely forgotten female detective TV series, but they very nearly caused my demise. In the end I got it free and the prize was mine. No idea what I did with it. I certainly didn't treasure it. Like an idiot breaking a stalactite from the roof of a cave, I discovered that once free from context, a cats' eye was quite a dull uninteresting object. Not worth me dying for, or risking Cheddar motorists straying into the wrong lane at night.
I often try to pinpoint the moment that I died and the fever dream of the rest of my life, played out by my dying brain, began. It may have been on that corner. Sorry I wasn't more careful mum and dad. I don't know how you coped with my pointless loss.
I was tired and giddy again today, annoying, so tried to take it easy, but did a bit of archaeology in the back garden with the kids. We found a few interesting objects, including a couple of segments from clay pipes. I loved the idea that some Victorian (or maybe Edwardian) Somerset yokel had been working on the orchard that once stood here, smoking a pipe and chucking it away (the archaeologist at Stonehenge told us that latterly the things became so cheap to produce that they were often single use) and then me and my boy digging it up a century or so later. Just like the 19th Century bottle we found on our last dig. Maybe the same smock wearing, cheese-smeared, smock wearing, rosy-cheeked, sideburns wearing old fella for both.
We also found a mysterious area with some big stones that had clearly been placed in the ground for some reason. We got a couple of them out, but the riddle of what lies beneath them will have to wait until tomorrow. And you thought Time Team was exciting.
