What are the moves to the funky chicken, anyway?

It's not that I'm embarrassed by my mother's dancing; it's her daughter's wedding, and she's enjoying herself, getting into the party mood. But there's something a little unsettling about seeing your dear old mum bopping away to House of Pain's Jump Around, and Blister in the Sun, a song by The Violent Femmes purported to be about masturbation. Maybe you disagree; maybe you've one of those trendy mothers, who helped design your obscene nun tattoo, and gave you your first heroin cigarette when you were sixteen. That's not my mum. My mum bakes apple tarts, and secretly regrets that none of her children, now all over thirty, still need her help to tie their laces. There she is though, giving it socks. Shine on you crazy diamond. And don't pay too much attention to the lyrics. That's not a conversation I want over breakfast tomorrow...

Fly Me to the Moon

Four thirty am. The airport is eerily quiet, most of its shops still closed. The stillness is enhanced by the sheer size of the place; it's all open and wide-screen and airy, like a stadium, or a cathedral. A cathedral to what though? Travel? Shopping? Modernity? It's hard to say.
Sleep would have been nice. Somewhere, from one of the few open shops perhaps, hip hop music is playing. It feels like I'm being kept awake by an unruly neighbor's house party. It feels like insomnia times ten.Achingly numb.

You Can Check Out Anytime You Like...

I’m sitting alone in a hotel room. As a Responsible Adult, who does Important Work, I stay in hotels now, instead of on people’s couches. People’s couches are where wastrels, and ne’er-do-wells and Ryan Reynolds characters stay. I’m in town to use a copyright library, dammit! I’m a Visiting Researcher! We merit hotels!

Hotel rooms are odd spaces. For one thing, they always seem to be poorly lit. Oh, there will be several lights in the room, but they’ll all be quite weak. They also all operate on different switches, all located at different points around the room, so it’s usually impossible to turn all the lights on or off without doing a lap of the room. It’s unclear to me why this is. It does mean that one has the option to light only one or two small areas of the room, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. I’m not sure why I’d want to have the area by the door of my room lit while the rest of the room remains unlit, but I have a few more days here to think about it.

The furniture in most hotel rooms (or most hotel rooms that I can afford to stay in. While I am a Visiting Researcher, I am not yet a Jet-Setting Billionaire Playboy, and so my hotels of choice tend to be what I think is commonly called “budget”) is generally quite distinctive; obviously not expensive, but also not dirt cheap, and always sturdy, and strong, and plain, to avoid, I suppose, as much breakage or damage as possible, and so the need to spend money on replacing it. This plain furniture style, along with the muted colour schemes of browns and creams, and perhaps the odd burgundy, on the walls and carpets and bed spreads, lends the typical hotel room a clean, sparse, aesthetic which, to some seems aseptic, to me has a simple elegance about it. I reckon if the ancient Spartans were alive today, they’d live in rooms like these.

The cleaning staff in hotels always unsettle me slightly. Despite my high social standing as a roaming academic, I am, and so far always have been, without the financial means to employ even a small domestic staff. But even this mild class discomfort aside, the way that they clean my room while I am out makes me feel somewhat... perturbed. It always seems that the cleaning staff tidy not just for the sake of tidying, but also to make it obvious to the guest on their return that the room has been tidied. So, books that had been stacked neatly on the dressing table, are now stacked on the other side of the dressing table. Little things. The kind of things you might not consciously notice, but which your unconscious picks up on, making it feel like you’re the protagonist in a horror movie, and the crazed stalker has been in your house while you were out, and you’re only now realising that he still might be here! Maybe in your bathroom! Of course, if this were a horror movie house, then the soap dispenser probably wouldn’t be nailed to the wall to prevent me stealing the soap (no doubt made from rose petals crushed between a young virgin maiden’s thighs, and so insanely expensive, and in need of protection from rampaging Spartans, lured in by the aesthetic of the room), so I’m probably safe from stalkers. Probably...

Halcyon Days

And so the festive season has come to a close. After weeks of complaining about how Christmas has become too commercialised, and how Christmas shopping is so deeply vexing and frustrating, and how spending time at home with our familys left us feeling claustrophobic and inevitably led to arguments, and how we dislike the enforced celebrations of New Year’s and how the pubs are always too busy and cramped and invidious, we can at last settle into a few weeks of telling each other how depressing it is that the festive period is over, and we have nothing to look forward to for months.
There is a wonderful phrase in this year’s Doctor Who special discussing the meaning of Christmas (but avoiding any silly religious mumbo-jumbo, this being a secular sci-fi show produced by the godless, liberal heathens at the BBC), which describes the mid-winter period as being a time to celebrate our having made it half way through the darkness of winter, and beginning our slow but steady progress back towards the light and warmth of summer. This time is, for me at least, one of the best of the year; a time to look, janus-like, both back and forward over the previous and coming twelve months, mourning losses and celebrating joys, and rueing mistakes and vowing to learn from them, and thinking of ways to improve and enhance and refine one’s life and mind and body and soul.

Where are all the Sugar Puffs gone?

Between the university and my apartment there are four convenience stores. This evening, none of them had Sugar Puffs. This includes the brand spanking new Tesco Express, which has four different types of vinegar in stock. Four different types of vinegar, but not one type of Sugar Puffs. The petrol station shop just the far side of my apartment also has no Sugar Puffs. Nor does the regular Tesco supermarket. The brand new super giant hyper Tesco-saurus had them at the weekend, but that’s a good 12 kilometers away. Is that your game Tesco? Buy up all the Sugar Puffs, and use them to lure me out to your new meganormous store, in the hope that while there, and high on the relief of finding Sugar Puffs, that I’ll buy a giant 80inch HDTV, and some cheap t-shirts, and a food blender? Well it won’t work!! Bastards!

I had only just last week rediscovered the joys of Sugar Puffs. Winter has set in, I’m back at college, and expected to work, and I decided to break a months long stint of Alpen puritanism and bring a bit of sugary joy to my breakfast. Sugar Puffs were perfect; like Rice Krispies, they’re mostly made up of air, but they have just enough sugary deliciousness, without slipping into sickening over-sweet territory. I had to buy Crunchie Nut Corn Flakes this evening as a replacement. Now, don’t get me wrong, Crunchie Nut Corn Flakes are grand; even nice, but they are no Sugar Puffs. They’re too damned heavy, for one thing. You’d only ever manage to eat at least two bowls in a sitting; possibly three, if you were working on an empty stomach. You’d certainly not manage four. Sugar Puffs though? You could eat a box if you wanted! And frankly, right now, I would want. Kelloggs, when they made their version of Sugar Puffs. called them Smacks, and I really can’t believe that the similarity with the slang name for a popular addictive drug is a coincidence. I want my Sugar Puffs and somebody, probably Tesco, is stopping me. It’s time to shit things up...

I'm not even good at basketball...

I’m a tall man; not excessively tall, but nicely tall. I’m the kind of tall Goldilocks would want, if she was looking for tall; tall enough to reach things from high shelves, but not so tall that a circus owner is going to try to dress me in a leopard skin loin cloth and call me Gigantosaur, The World’s Tallest Man from the Jungles of Darkest Africa (which is a relief not least because I think the phrase “Darkest Africa” may well be quite quite racist). “Wow!” you’re no doubt thinking to yourself right now, “how lucky Silas is! I wish I were nicely tall! It’d make going to gigs far more enjoyable, not being stuck standing behind some burly fellow I can’t see around or over!” Ah, my dear diminutive reader, if only things were always so rosy in the land of the over sized. For one thing, we of above average height can almost never fit comfortably in bus seats. Also, the bitterness of the wee folk at their unlucky genetics is often directed unfairly at those of us who tower above them. On more than one occasion, I have been angrily berated, kicked in the shin, and even bitten on the knees by a wee folk, simply because they couldn’t be bothered to arrive early enough at a concert to get a spot at the front, and felt that I had somehow personally wronged them. Good grief, wee folk! If you will insist on being tardy to a concert, bring a step ladder! To fail to prepare is to prepare to fail!

A thought occurs though, and be warned that if you continue to read this paragraph, your mind may be completely blown, and you may find yourself trippin’ balls: Ok, people come in different sizes, fairly obvious and simple. Clothes and shoes also come in different sizes, so as to fit the different sized people; still all making sense? But garments of different sizes are all sold at the same price, even though the bigger sizes require more material, and so should be more expensive to make. Smaller sized garments are so more expensive per unit of material. Thus, when the wee folk buy clothes, they are, to a degree, subsidising myself and my tall brethren’s clothes buying! If I were to buy a shirt, and a wee fellow were to buy a matching shirt (as trend setter and style icon, I have this happen more often than you might think), his comparatively higher purchase price is helping to subsidise my comparatively lower price! He’s buying some of my shirt for me! HOLY CRAP! Remember my warning at the start of this paragraph? Yeah! I told you!

Now, no doubt some wee folk are going to get all up in my shins about how this is just proof that us brobdingnagians do indeed have it easier, but think about it; this isn’t just some accident of fate or genetics. This is something that’s put into practice by businesses right across society, with zero complaint. Obviously, this is society’s way of recognising the inherent hardships being tall and the inherent easiness of life for the wee folk, and attempting, in some small way, to compensate for this hideous imbalance. The system may not be perfect, but sometimes it does work. 

I wonder...

...who first said that if you steal from one author it's plagiarism. If you steal from many, it's research. I'd like to properly credit and reference them.