The Award for Best Welcher Goes to ...

My colleague was pointing out that Easyjet are now doing tax-free flights to France. I asked if that meant anywhere and the reply was along the lines of if you ask the pilot nicely enough he will land outside your chosen gite. I said that this created a mental picture of some Bereted, rural type dropping his pipe and asking what the hell the big Orange thing was. My colleague's answer to that was short, to the point and, at the time extremely funny - Judith Chalmers. Not as funny when written down. Still makes me chuckle gently and wonder if my colleague had been using some Derren-Brown type trickery to make me set up the whole elaborate conversation.

I only paragraphed there so as not to have the punchline in a prominent position.

I have decided that you do not really want to know more about my mysterious, early girlfriend so we will pass on. I was thinking about how a comment I made yesterday about how there is a dichotomy between the people who write stuff just to sound extreme and those who are quite prepared to carry out some atrocity because they really are that full of hate. This led to think about how naff my whole comment sounded and that any intelligent reader would already be aware of this distinction. In turn, this made me think about how all of thought could be boiled down to a simple veracity just by 'cancelling out' and various simplifications. Bit like a complex set of mathematics which boils down to a relatively simple sum in the end. Or maybe like a large and complicated software development that because of undefined specifications becomes unmanageable until the analysts or the programmer take a step back and re-write the whole thing incorporating all the required elements and get a simple and elegant system. My thought process has raced ahead and realised that this very discussion has huge potential for self-reference. It is also beginning to sound like philosophy of a sort which reminds me that I have ordered Alain deBotton's The Consolations of Philosophy which should arrive before I finish Lucky Jim and start on Status Anxiety. The Premier Amis Senior novel is actually dragging me in - it is one of those books which needs persevering with until you reach a certain point after which reading it is a breath-taking coast to the finish. That point really needs a name - I want to say Point-of-no-return but point-of-trashing-passed seems better. What a paragraph! This was not intended to be a random Friday but I seem to jumping between topics without any real direction. Yeah! New Paragraph here I think.

That sounded like the statement made my Kenneth More in Doctor in The House about the baby he was changing "developing anti-social tendencies! - Yeah!" Should we return to the subject of the previous paragraph and start on metaphysics? I have poetry floating in and out of my head at the moment. I want to go and distill it all but it seems to be intensifying still and maybe I should wait until it is more intense before I try and sort it out. It is funny that I think of these thoughts in my head as poetry when they are plainly just images and smells and even weird feelings prompted by the memory of something. (Maybe I should have ordered this book as well.) My task as a poet is to take all this - imagery is the only word I can use but that sounds wrong - and turn it into a well ordered set of words. I know you can attempt an experimental structure for a poem, even try a mindmap I suppose, but the best invocation of a thought is still transferred from human to human by words and nicely structured words are best. I know that you would not think so from looking at this current random collection but it is still true. I am not going to turn into a concrete poet yet.

A final, completely random entry here. Many years ago, when I was still at college, I went to stay with a fellow student over at his house in Wiltshire. We came back to his house after a night at the pub and in our drunken state he handed me a book which he said I must read. It was implied that it was some sort of intellectual book and so I stuffed it in my bag and forgot about it until I got back to my digs when I discovered that the book was this though not in that binding. Well I found it buried in a box in the garage at the weekend, slightly musty and minus its (rather chaste) dust jacket. Well Roger B, if you want it back. then you are welcome to it. My wife said that she was going to add it to the pile to be taken to a charity shop which has me imagining some little old lady holding it up and asking which shelf they should put it one. The top one I would think. You better get back to me or it will go out for the dustmen before the kids are old enough to select books without pictures or conversations and believe me, there aren't many conversations in this book.