Death

I was sitting in a toilet that was not my own - this opening sounds as if I had intruded into someone else's toilet unbeknownst to them, but this was not the case: I was perfectly within my rights to be there. The toilet, as all good toilets do, had a few books on the window ledge - it also had no lock. The books were an interesting mix: Christian theology, surfing and The Brothers Karamazov (a book I read a while back after Philip Yancey claimed that it was the greatest book ever written: I thought it was alright, but I wouldn't give it quite such elevated praise).

Knowing my time would be brief, I plucked a book of quotes from Welsh Protestant minister Martin Lloyd Jones. His is a name I am familiar with, but I actually know very little about him: it turns out he was a passionate evangelical Christian who ministered at Westminster Chapel during the Second World War. The collection of quotes was alphabetised around theme and so naturally I flicked through to the letter 'D' where I found one of the more challenging subjects I have been asked to write about: death. He said something along the lines that death of the body was not something to concern yourself about in comparison with the destiny of the soul.

I didn't go any further into his thoughts on other subjects and that proved to be fortunate because my aunt opened the door mere seconds after my trousers were back around my waist.

I rejoined my extended family for our Bank Holiday gathering and thought no more about Jones' words for the moment, but the subject of death was not over for the day. About an hour and a half later I stood looking at the blank eyes of my childhood cat, Chessie, under a bar of light with my dad. Moments earlier the decision had been made to put her out of her suffering (something was hypersomething in her throat, she had a dodgy leg, was deaf and she was 93 in cat years). I had been chosen to accompany my dad because I was the least likely to cry. My dad briefly discussed the destiny of Chessie's soul. I said that she'd be able to hang out with Bootylicious, my dead bottom-wiggling rabbit, Brian, my dead long-haired guinea pig and Charlie, my dead and rather vicious gerbil. I have no idea whether that's actually true and Martin's words don't really offer anything on the matter either. Perhaps she'll be able to listen to the man she was named after (Chesney Hawkes) for all eternity, although his egocentricity would surely start to grate after a while.

I shall conclude with the lyrics of another song, one my sister Susanna used to sing about our cat when she was too young to realise that she was only brown and not brown and white:

I'm so happy,

You're so happy,

We're so happy,

My cat is brown and white.

Donkeys

I like donkeys. They briefly sat proudly at the top of my favourite animal list, but their stay was short-lived and they have since slipped down into the category of animal I am quite fond of. They share that podium with the llama, the raccoon, the orangutan, the hedgehog and the dugong, but they fail to inspire enough awe to compete with the tiger or enough personality to compete with the current number one, the badger (the badger has sat proudly at the top of the rostrum for so long now, that my badger fondness, in some circles, precedes me).

People have many questions about donkeys that they sometimes feel a little nervous to ask, so I shall now attempt to answer the ten most commonly thought, but never uttered questions about the braying beast.

1. Do donkeys kill more people a year than planes?

One expert (expertise unknown) once said that he wouldn't be surprised if donkeys killed more people than planes, but there seem to be no statistics to back up his ponderous words. This claim was first put into print by the London Times in 1987 to help people to get over their fear of flying, but it wasn't intended to be taken literally and donkey-lovers have angrily refuted it ever since.

2. How do donkeys kill people? [This ignores the previous answer that suggests that perhaps they don't]

With no one claiming to be have been killed by a donkey, it is tricky to say. Rumours have it though that they get you in a headlock and suck your brain out of your ear.

3. What's the difference between a donkey and a mule?

They are spelt differently; donkeys have one extra chromosome; a donkey has a coarser tail; a mule can jump; a mule can bear a heavier load and donkeys can breed.

4. How and why did the 'Pin the tail on the donkey' game start?

It is an odd phenomenon amongst donkeys that they are occasionally born with no tail and this lack inspired the game. Some think that the pinning of the tail was also done as a symbol to ward off evil spirits for the coming year and that is why it became a birthday party game.

5. Who is better: Eeyore out of Winnie the Pooh or the Talking Donkey out of Shrek?

This is a tough one - both have severe social problems that would make them difficult to live with, but surely Eeyore - pre-Disneyfication - is the king of the Donks.

6. Why is a female donkey called a jenny?

They seem to have acquired this name in the 1640s, but quite why is an answer I do not have. I imagine that either a wonderful woman called Jenny who loved donkeys inspired the name or a big-eared woman with an odd laugh was nicknamed Jenny. We will never know.

7. Is the only difference between a donkey and a monkey the consonant that starts their name?

There are some other differences, but it is thought that the donkey's name was in fact influenced by the monkey. The 'don' syllable was from the archaic 'dun' which means dull greyish-brown and the final syllable was added to make it sound like monkey as some sort of insult to the wannabe horse. Donkey was originally slang with ass the official term. The first written use of the term donkey wasn't until 1785, long after the term jenny.

8. Because the sound a donkey makes it spelt onomatopoeically in English (as most animal sounds are), does that mean it is spelt the same in other languages?

No. There are actually two variants in English: hee-haw and eeyore. Other language spellings include i-a i-a in Albanina, chuuchuu in Bengali, hihan in French, eselet skryter in Norweigan and asnan skriar in Swedish.

9. If you call someone a donkey, what are you suggesting about them?

My experience of the donkey insult has either been football-related in that the donkeyish football player boots the ball thoughtlessly and has no finesse about their play or is to do with the size of the male genitalia. Urban Dictionary offers a few other alternatives on top of these: donkey could mean a girl with a large rear; a bad poker player who thinks they are good; a stupid person; someone who will carry stuff around for you; a person who takes pictures of themself in the mirror; a groovy rocking amazing person; a short man who wears all black, likes Slipknot and drives a truck or someone who carries a lot of drugs around. I think I shall avoid the term to avoid confusion.

10. What alliterative name could I give my donkey?

Donkeys 'R' Us website gives a whole host of options. My top five are Dreamweaver, Dudette, Dogzilla, Detonator and Darth Vadar.

Drowning

In the last book I finished, number9dream, the main character Eiji's twin sister Anju drowned when attempting to swim out to a large rock in the middle of the sea. In my last post I discussed The Decemberists' album The Hazards of Love which tells the story of Margaret and William who both end up drowning. It got me thinking that story constructors use drowning far more commonly than it actually occurs in real life. Ophelia's suicide-drowning in Hamlet; siblings Tom and Maggie's tragic drowning in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss; Compeyson's drowning at the hands of Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations and Harold Bishop's suspected drowning which turned out not to be a drowning because he returned seven years later in Neighbours all spring to mind.

Theorists differ on the matter. Some say that drowning is often used because it plugs into one of our deepest fears. Others say that is is symbolic of Christian baptism and that the character drowning is on their way to a new life in eternity. I think that perhaps it is because death by drowning ensures that the person dying can retain their beauty unlike the chainsaw victim. In all the examples above, other than Compeyson, the reader/viewer would want to ponder upon the dead warmly and the drowning scenario allows us to hold an idyllic image of the departed.

Other than the ugly villain Compeyson's drowning, Harold Bishop's drowning sits the most uncomfortably with the theorists, probably because it was far more weakly plotted than the other examples. In 1990 I had watched the Bish wander hand in hand with Madge down the aisle in my assembly hall - it wasn't a wedding, just a extra-exciting assembly. A girl had won a competition to have the famous duo attend as they were appearing in the local Brighton Pantomime. I was in charge of pressing the play button on their entrance music that day and I have to say I did a pretty flawless job of pressing the button at the appropriate moment and then fading it out as they stood at the front of the hall ready to address the young crowd. I felt warmth towards this chubby chap who brought about the first of my very few brushes with celebrities in my life. But, just one year on and Madge was standing staring at the waves with no big balding head piercing the shifting surface. Hazza had drowned, yet, oh joy of joys, of terrible plots twists of terrible plot twists, he had not. Seven years on, he was back in Ramsey Street with no recollection pre-immersion. He gradually regained his memory and was integrated back into the plot of the show. His reappearance means that I shouldn't have really have discussed him in this article at all, but I allowed myself to follow the tangents of my mind and here we are.

The Decemberists

I have happened upon an album of musical wonderment. I shall tell you the journey though before I discuss the album. Recently I posted a poll on this blog asking my readership which CD I should buy. The bands all began with the letter D and were: The Dandy Warhols: Odditorium; The Decemberists: Hazards of Love; Dirty Pretty Things: Romance at Short Notice and Dinosaur Jr.: Farm. I had selected these artists by flicking through the letter D section in a record shop in Leicester and they all met the criteria of appropriate starting letter, released in the last year or two and looking like they might be my sort of thing. You see, I have allowed myself to become one of those people that only listens to music they listened to when they were a teenager. My only recent musical purchases have been new releases from bands who have been around for over half of my lifetime: Oasis: Dig Out Your Soul and Delirious: Mission Bell, and my CD purchase rate had slipped to an annual 0.29 average over the last seven years. HMV and Virgin used to be my second home, but now I content myself with the same songs that were my nightclub anthems in the days when jogging home after an evening of extravagant dancing and bone-jarring moshing until 2am wasn't an unusual occurrence.

I imagine many people are similarly stuck in a musical time warp, but I regret the fact that recent years don't have the soundtrack that my teenage years had. Certain songs evoke powerful memories: Idlewild's When I Argue I See Shapes reminds me of playing darts-cricket in my friend John Golds' bedroom; Oasis' Cigarettes and Alcohol reminds me of 16 year-old disillusionment and my parents' staircase; Richard Ashcroft's Song for the Lovers reminds me of when my friend Jason Oatway stole a poster from a nightclub and Ben and Jason's Adam and Lorraine reminds of the time my flat got burgled. The past seven years have sadly been a musical void. I think this is partly because I no longer give myself a space to listen to music in. It used to accompany my playing of computer games, but I no longer do that and my current activities are generally not conducive to extra sound. I shun music for Radio 5 discussion when I drive: I like to get angry about people's intolerant attitudes to immigration, and car music rare, my life has become tuneless.

Back to the poll which would remedy this lack; it was a dead heat with a minute to go between The Decemberists and Dinosaur Jr. My only link with either band was that when we (my family of wife Helen, and twin boys Ned and Jarvis) swapped abodes with some friends' friends this summer; the friends' friends had a framed picture from a Decemberists' show. I've never met the people that own the flat we stayed in, but their retro interior design, red fridge and decision to categorise their books not by author or genre, but by spine colour led me to the shallow conclusion that these were cool people and that anything they appreciated must also fall into the category: cool. With this in mind, I (in a slightly cheaty way) added the last vote to The Decemberists causing the vote to swing 60%-40% in their favour. A few minutes later and £5.99 had been spent and all I had to do was await the album delivery.

The album arrived yesterday and I genuinely think that even if I had widened my poll beyond the alphabetical constraints I would not have found a better, more interesting and beautiful album. The musical style is a combination of twangy acoustic dominated revelry and more grindy aggressive rumbustiousness. How do music journalists manage to keep their writing fresh when essentially they have to describe very similar guitar sounds? Music is one of the hardest things to describe. I feel I have failed to recreate what their music actually sounded like with my eccentric choice of words. I will throw into the mix that the Wikipedia author says they are "indie folk" and perhaps that will add to your imaginative recreation of them.

Fortunately it is not their music that I want to focus on primarily though, as whilst the music is at times tantalising and at times simply lovely, it is the story of the album that gripped me. Unbeknownst to me on purchase, this album is a kind of folk rock opera with the the combination of songs telling one coherent, although challenging to decipher, story. There are three vocalists voicing four main characters: Margaret, William, the Queen and the Rake. The story, in brief, goes like this: Margaret finds an injured faun which turns out to be William who is a shape-shifter (a faun by day, a man by night). They fall in love, get jiggy, get pregnant. The Queen is William's adoptive mother and she rescued him after he was abandoned in a "reedy glen". She put the shape-shifting spell on Will and she is none too happy that he has found a lover, but she agrees to let him join her for one more night. But, disaster strikes and the Rake, who has killed his three children after his wife died, abducts Margaret and the Queen, seeing this as an opportunity carries the Rake and Margaret beyond the Annan water and far away from William, but he goes in search of his beloved and manages to rescue her from the Rake, who is driven mad after being haunted by his dead children. However, they cannot recross the water and both tragically drown. It is a complex narrative to weave into seventeen songs with some of the tracks lyricless such as The Queen's Approach, forcing the listener to read the music to figure out what is happening. I love the ambition though and the lyrics are poetic and poignant: "O Margaret, the lapping waves are licking quietly at our ankles / Another bow, another breath: this brilliant chill has come to shackle".

The album is masterful, adventurous and I feel fortunate to have begun the refreshment of my music with such a great uninterrupted flow of tunes that create a genuine experience rather than an aloof detachment. It this personal inside-your-guts interaction which makes this album so special. I guess part of the reason that music has passed me by in the last few years is that it hasn't offered me anything new (I confess that I haven't searched very hard), just a recapturing of previously articulated emotions, but this album gave me a whole new musical experience. If you fancy a listen, start with The Rake's Song on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULSKZ7IP930

Deal or No Deal

In my last blog I made an offhand criticism of Deal or No Deal and received a torrent of uproarious anger at my belittlement of the show from my readership: actually one person asked, "What's wrong with Deal or No Deal?" And so I find myself critiquing the show which actually persuaded me to linger at Channel 4 a while back, but now receives a quick channel flick if I ever happen to stumble across Noel Edmonds' beardy grinning face.

"What is wrong with it?" you ask (singular). Well, it's not so much the total lack of skill required to play the game that frustrates me, but the constant personification of chance which grates. Noel champions the abandonment of mathematical probabilities and acts as if a mystical force is dictating the events inside the television studio. I don't know why this should annoy me but it does. The silent smug banker also deserves a beating. I once played the Deal or No Deal board game and the lengthy dull procedure which resulted in defeat for me further hardened my distaste for the red box lottery. Another factor is that it follows the magical Countdown, which despite its new aquamarine garish blue set design and lack of the legends Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman, still manages to be watchable and wonderful in its simplicity. This is not Deal or No Deal's fault, but the contrast highlights its turdishness in comparison to Countdown's fragrant beauty. I once got to the point of filling in an application form for Countdown, but failed to go further. Perhaps I will revisit this ambition. Anyway, I hope the original question is somewhat answered.

Perhaps it is nostalgia, but quiz shows from my childhood seem masterfully superior compared to today's twaddlesome banality (Coundown is exempt, having been around for 28 of my 30 years on earth). Here are my top five from yesteryear:

1. Going for Gold - the multicultural quiz show which involved a lot of waving.

2. Blockbusters - the simple joy of waiting for someone to say, "I'll have a P please Bob".

3. Bullseye - the regularity of failure made this show beautiful: "Here's what you could have won."

4. Supermarket Sweep - riding a trolley is one of my favourite activities and SS featured trolley mayhem aplenty.

5. The Crystal Maze - pretty much Indiana Jones featuring a bald nutty bloke (Richard O'Brien) and occasionally a weird mystical relative of his.

Disfigurement

Channel 4 at its worst shows Hollyoaks omnibuses sandwiched between Wogan's Perfect Recall and Deal or No Deal. But at its best it flits into subject matters that few dare to dabble their toe in, and they do it with a creative zest. Big Brother has for a while been tediously dull, but it started out as a fascinating social experiment. As Big Brother staggers to its death watched by a surprisingly substantial audience (4 million for Tuesday's final), Channel 4 have grabbed the headlines once more with a new show that has divided opinions. The programme under attack, due for airing around the end of this year, is Beauty and the Beast. In it two people, one with a physical disfigurement and one obsessed with beauty share a house while those who are uninterested in Holby City or Corrie watch on.

This week, on a drive to collect my trousers from the dry-cleaners (which were closed) I listened to two people fiercely debating the shows morality. The attack was that it was another 'freak show' and that it would only damage those involved. The defence was that it would challenge people's assumptions and attitudes towards those with physical disfigurements. As the arguments went back and forth I found myself frustrated with the critic who seemed to view the people with disfigurements as weak people who would never be able to handle seeing themselves in a mirror. I was already feeling that the show had potential merit when Adam Pearson's name was dropped as someone who is working on the show. Adam is a friend of friends, someone I know well enough to be his friend on Facebook, but not any more than that. Adam has a facial disfigurement and his involvement in the programme filled me with a faith that this show is not out to exploit people, but to help to create an alternative way of seeing beauty. The Five Live defendant argued that the show would make the viewer see our obsession with beauty as the real beast. I hope it does. It's got to be better than using disfigurement as a symbol for inner evil as Freddy Krueger and the James Bond films do - there didn't seem to be much criticism of those film-makers.

Dying Daffodil

There was a dying daffodil

Who whispered to me: "I have a will,

I want to leave my crinkly petals

To those pesky stinging nettles.

Then they won't cause a nasty itch

And cause poor stung ones to writhe and twitch.

My bequest will fill the world with glee,

But will ruin a brew of nettle tea."

I pondered as the daff ceased to live

And thought even stingers have something to give,

So I gave the petals to a big old oak tree

And I hope the daffodil would accept my elegy.

Dave Kitson

Dave Kitson is a frustrated man. His 5.5 million pound move to Stoke City two years ago should have been his platform into the England team, but he has struggled to score: his total of five goals in two seasons mean he has cost £1.1 million a goal discounting his wages. He now finds himself on the edge of the squad and hasn't even made the Stoke bench in the opening two games of this season, but it is not this that frustrates him - it is the iPod, or rather the effect it has on a dressing room. Of the smooth, curvy white music machines he says, "I find iPods one of the most anti-social things to have come into the changing room. Changing rooms should be buzzing with anticipation and energy before a game. But more and more I see players slumped around in their own world, generally looking miserable". It must be galling that these misery-guts trapped in a looping Radiohead (I doubt it's Radiohead) soundtrack are taking his place in the team.

It is Kitson's views that I wish to discuss rather than his football ability, for what he says perhaps shines a light on the effect of technology on culture in general. Many technologies encourage isolation rather than community: games consoles, computers and television in some ways. However, whilst some argue that they erode community, they also create a platform for a different kind of community. People play computer games across networks against each other, discuss the previous evening's television and the computer gives us chat-rooms, discussion forums and Facebook. Whilst Bookface has been accused of creating a place for unreal and inane communication rather than real and beautiful face to face stuff, it does provide people who can't get out and about with a view of the world, allows old friends to reconnect and lets me play Scrabble against people. Through Bookface I have gone to football games with two old school friends, won 60 games of Scrabble (lost 72) and been informed of various minutiae of people's lives. This weekend I met someone who I knew had spent the previous week with a sore throat that I felt far too acquainted with and this meant I didn't have to start the conversation with, "How's your week been?", but could leap straight to, "Are you feeling better?", squeezing valuable extra space for us to choose a matter to converse upon; I used it to inform him that I didn't want to see him using Bookface for any more of this self-pitying nonsense again.

I'm wandering away from the original argument I feel and straying into personal anecdotes from my weekend, so I'll stop and lurch to an inconclusive conclusion. Kitson is right, probably about the Stoke dressing room; I don't really know, but also about the wider world in many ways. Technology is crushing human interaction. Perhaps even my tapping away at the keyboard is part of this - aaaarrgghhh. However, technology gives us avenues for a new and worthwhile kind of interaction. Perhaps even my tapping away at the keyboard is part of this - oooooh. I shall leave it on that meaningful verbal ejaculation.

Dice

I was playing a board game (Settlers of Catan if you're interested) on Friday morning and I was in need of three consecutive rolls of the die to land with one dot pointed to the ceiling. They were long odds for sure. To do it once gives me the long odds of 6/1; to do it twice lengthens the odds to 36/1 and to do it thrice, well, the odds lurch to 216/1, yet I celebrated as a die roll of one was followed by a die roll of one and was then followed by a die roll of one. I proclaimed the skill of my dice-wielding hands while my Maths teacher opponent (Nathan Wriglesworth) almost exploded at the mathematical improbability of my success.

The precise origins of the little fellers who granted me such favour is unknown as many cultures independently created their own dice thousands of years ago and used them for a variety of purposes: dividing inheritances, choosing rulers and as a method of prediction. In ancient Roman religion it was believed that Zeus's daughter Fortuna was the controller of the dice - if that were the case, she clearly liked the way I did my hair on Friday morning.

The modern dice is a development from the use of fruit stones, sea shells and sheep ankle bones (the above picture is of children playing a game with sheep ankle bones) as providers of random progression in a game. Whilst I have often clutched dice in my sweaty paws (actually I generally demand that we use a plastic cup as a shaking implement), not everyone is a fan with some game-players scorning the random element dice bring to game, voicing the old English proverb: "The best throw of the dice is to throw them away", but I am a fan of cuboid chaps, especially when they contrive to bring me good fortune.

Distributism

Socialism or capitalism? It seems that few people are comfortable aligning themselves with either, although I have met a few people happy to wear a socialist badge. However, most seem to shun these terms, wary of the connotations and the checkered history that people baring these labels have done under these very labels. There is another label though, one that attempts to balance the practicalities of capitalism with the moral conscience of socialism: it is distributism.

Distributism doesn't deny ownership of property in the way socialism does, but at the same sees hugely wealthy individuals and monopolies controlling industry as a huge problem. Their middle-ground is that ownership of productive property (my understanding of this is that productive property includes anything that enables someone to be productive, whether it be tools, land or a computer) should be spread as widely as possible between the citizens of a nation.

In practice this would mean that people would be able to have ownership of their own company, business or simply way of providing an income without facing competition from mass corporations. I guess some sort of limiting law would have to be put into place to prevent companies expanding to non-competitive levels. The Middle Ages is seen as a time when distributism worked effectively with people earning a living through small ventures unopposed by corporate monopolies. If distributism returned to today's society, I guess huge supermarket chains would be replaced by small independent stores and companies offering computer support and services would be replaced by clever little men who understand the complexities of a motherboard - these would be amongst other shifts in our day-to-day working lives.

Distributism was formulated by Roman Catholic thinker G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and has rather unfortunately been highjacked by the British National Party which seems an unlikely desired direction for Chesterton and Belloc. Genuine distributism doesn't seem to fit comfortably with any of the mainstream parties. David Cameron's 'Big Society' chat is perhaps the closest anything comes, but so far the practical outworkings of this don't seem to be hitting the distributism mark, not that that is what he is aiming for necessarily.

I'm not sure what I think. It sounds good: it gives people an ownership and a motivation and introduces a leveller playing field, but it is difficult to imagine Britain going in this direction. Would it be a good thing for the people on the bottom rung of society, which is always the crucial question? The answer is perhaps which is the answer to any unknown hypothetical situation I guess. I can see its strengths, but I'm not about to wear the badge.

The Dong with a Luminous Nose

Anton Green is a man of exemplary taste. The selection of writers he has referenced on his Facebook page is testimony to this: the diverse list includes the likes of travel-writer Paul Theroux, down to earth theologian Phillip Yancey, the epic George Orwell and soldier-poet Wilfred Owen. The bookshelf in his front room is a bustling thing of beauty and he also sports a tasteful beard and is the father of my good friend Ed.

So, when AG suggested a oddly titled poem by Edward Lear as a subject matter to write about, I took the suggestion seriously and went in search of the said poem. If you want to read it before I ruin its plot, it is here: http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/dln.html

The poem tells the tragic tale of the Dong's infatuation for a Jumbly Girl who sailed to his shore in a sieve with a group of other Jumblies. The Dong romanced the Jumbly Girl with his pipe while the Jumblies danced, but the day came when the Jumblies boarded their sieve once more and the Jumbly Girl's absence drove the Dong mad: "What little sense I once possessed has quite gone out of my head". In a moment of nighttime madness he wove himself a nose "of vast proportions and painted red... with a luminous lamp within suspended". The poem ends with the Dong walking the plains every night in a vain search for the Jumbly Girl. I shouldn't have expected anything less from Mr Green.

Some people like to write essays about poems; some like to sit and let them soak into their soul; I prefer to use them as trampolines into poetic invention myself. I going to pick up the Jumbly Girl's story which is unexplored by Lear as she sails away from the admiring and devastated Dong:

What Happened Next to the Jumbly Girl

The Jumbly Girl felt quite morose;

She'd never see the Dong's luminous nose.

Tears dribbled down her sky-blue cheeks

As she sailed the ocean: Zincky Flink.

Karrash: the sieve started to sink;

Her tears were adding to the sieve's numerous leaks.

The clouds above were a violent pink.

The Jumbly Girl cupped her hands round her mouth

And sung a sweet tune in the direction: south.

The melody came from the tips of her toes;

It's hard to repeat, but it went a little like this:

Burbly crumb urgalee so polotix priss

And it summoned an army of indigo crows

Who each gave the Jumbly Girl a delicate kiss.

Then they lifted the sieve up into the air

And the Jumblies cheered loudly and let off a flair,

But their joy was short-lived I'm sorry to say:

The crows grew more weary towards the end of the day

And one by one the Jumblies took a sacrificial leap,

Landing in the mouth of a hungry Crocosheep

Until the Jumbly Girl was the only Jumbly alive

And the crows put her down in the Rumblechunks' hive.

It was true that the crows had delivered her from death,

But the Rumblechunks had cauliflower breath.

They'd been chomping on the cauli for many a year

And they thought they smelt fragrant, like a sweet summer rose

But the Jumbly Girl sat in the hive holding her nose.

The Rumblechunks looked at her, gave her quite a leer

And then Rumblechunk Six did unromantically propose.

The offer from this cauli-gobbler was a bed in their abode,

A smouldering tuft of knee hair and ride on his xchimode

If she decided that smelling his cauli-exhale 'twas wrong

She would be thrown from the hive into the hole of kroogwace.

She had little choice and the wedding took place

Jumbly Girl reminisced about the fabulous Dong,

But 'twas no use, her horrible fate she must face.

Years flew by and Jumbly Girl's diet was dreary:

Cauliflower followed by cauliflower made her stomach grow queery.

Her beautiful blue skin turned white and bobbly.

Her green hair became green leaves that were flimsy and wobbly.

She lost her ability to speak or to think

To breathe or to dance, to eat or to drink

And years later the Dong visited the hive wearing a nose glove

And ate cauliflower cheese and wept for his lost (and quite tasty) love.

Doughnuts

As Steve Morrow tumbled from Paul Merson's shoulders in a moment of calamitous celebration in the wake of Arsenal's Coca-Cola Cup triumph, resulting in a broken arm for the goal-scoring Morrow, I shovelled doughnut number seventeen into my mouth. My family were at Big Jenny's house, the host given the unfortunate adjective 'Big' to differentiate her from my little sister Jenny - she wasn't overweight, just an adult. I think it was a birthday party of some sort, but my obsession with Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday competing for the non-event of the Coca-Cola Cup had sent me scuttling to a bedroom where I found a tiny television that I could watch the event on.

Every eight minutes or so I made the short trip from bedroom to front room to pick up a tasty doughnut. Now, whilst the adjective 'big' was largely inaccurate in paragraph one, the adjective 'tasty' is entirely appropriate for these doughnuts. They were the type with sharp jagged sugar attached to the outer bun, not those deficient soggy articles that come in packs of ten and have had sugar sweated onto their outer shells. The jam within was lively and lurched from the doughnut on the first bite, far superior to the congealed tasteless injection of red nothingness that is commonly the filling. Their sublime tastiness meant my journey to the plate was repeated time and time again until I felt slightly queasy and wide-eyed from my afternoon's snacking which had gone unnoticed by my parents who surely would have issued an, "I think you've had enough" warning had they been aware of my excessive consumption.

As a child I seemed to be able to consume extraordinary amounts of food. Shredded Wheat's slogan in the early 80s was, "Bet You Can't Eat Three" with their advert showing a shocked hotel staff when Ian Botham ordered a bowl of three for his morning snack, yet as a young child, on one particularly ravenous morning, I chomped my way through eighteen full-size cardboardy wheat cocoons.

Something must have been wrong with me to have taken so much food into my infant belly. Did I have worms? If I did, it was never treated and the worms trundled away unnoticed at some point, because I would never be able to achieve such eating feats nowadays although I do have a custard doughnut sitting in the kitchen that I'm going to pay a visit to when my fingers have stopped tappety-tapping, but it will just be the one.

Deity

I was reading Tim Keller's book recently, The Reason for God, and in it he addresses what I think is a major problem in the communication of faith between people who believe in God and people that don't: respect. Because positions on faith are emotive, a common response for both people with faith and without is to laugh at the opposing viewpoint. There is of course a place for humour in any (perhaps not any, but most) discussions, but if the laughter comes from a position of ridicule, then it doesn't really aid effective communication. What is surely more helpful, regardless of what you believe, is a respectful listening of each other's ideas and beliefs. Since reading the book, I've tried to put that into practice a little bit more and have enjoyed coming to the common ground with atheists (I'm a theist by the way) that at least we've made up our mind unlike agnostics, but then I guess if you're unsure, then agnosticism is an honest position to be in although I would suggest that the existence of a God is a pretty important question and one worth pursuing to see if an answer is findable.

My theistic position came from a position of assumption that God existed as a young child (having been taken to church by my parents) to a place where I realised I needed to make my own mind up about it. I came to an independent conclusion that God did indeed exist when I was seven years old. It seems a young age to be making such a decision, 'tis true, but the validity of the decision has stood the test of time unlike my decision to become a tiger vet or my decision to only wear orange clothes. The decision came about after my Year 2 Infant School teacher Miss Pilgrim (a suitably religious name) told our class about Christianity. She explained that the reason Jesus died was to fulfil cosmic justice between God and man; Jesus death was him taking the punishment for the stuff we'd done wrong - our wrong stuff being offensive to God - and because he'd died we could have a relationship with God, and because he had risen again, he had beaten the power of death meaning that we could have eternal life in heaven with God after our bodies had died. Up to this point God had been a kind of mystical force that I had been aware of, but her simple explanation (a lot simpler my recreation of it) made me realise that the reality of God was about having a relationship with him. So, when the bell for break-time rung, I scampered to the toilet, locked myself in a cubicle and prayed, I guess, my first non-parrot prayer. I believe that this moment was a moment when I actually experienced God and it is this experiential nature of my faith that has meant that it has never been shaken off.

That is not to say that it has never been shaken; it has been vigorously battered back and forth by complicated (sometimes impossible to answer) questions and challenging circumstances. At every stage of my life I have had to reexamine my faith - as a teenager; as an immature adult; as a slightly less immature adult - and I have always found it to hold true; it has never been shaken off of me and it still clings close today. The world makes sense to me with a faith in God - difficult questions are important to ask because what is faith if you ignore things that challenge that faith? Challenging circumstances are confusing, but I have found that my faith has helped me to see them in an eternal context; if I could not seen them in that way then they may have defeated me. Intellectual arguments fascinate me, but it is my ongoing experience of God that gives me faith in an interactive deity.

Dugong

Steller's sea cow was hunted to extinction by the Georgians

And if it wasn't for the dugong we would could only ask historians

About the dugongidae family, a friendly bunch who live in the sea;

They invited me round to their home in Shark Bay for a mug of Earl Grey tea.

I couldn't refuse such an exciting invitation,

So I swam all the way to Australia in a state of exaltation.

They told me they used to be mistaken for mermaids which was hard to believe;

Between sips of tea and paragraphs, they visited the surface to breathe.

They said their grandmother was the red-headed Ariel from Hans Christian Anderson's tale.

Mistaken for a mermaid, I thought, She looks more like a whale.

I asked them all sorts of questions: What's your favourite colour? Your favourite dish?

They all agreed that pink was nice and they said: "We never eat fish.

We prefer to graze on the grass of the ocean for a full eight hours at a time.

We're herbivores. We think that munching on little fishies is a crime."

"Your life sounds so perfect: eating and chilling until it gets dark."

"Our existence would be without fault if wasn't for the tiger shark.

That stripy mean old razor-tooth likes to bite us on the bum

And once it's got the taste, it doesn't stop till it's eaten every last crumb.

We've lost so many siblings to this sixteen foot long menace:

Beryl, Trevor, Chloe, Matilda, Ralph and dear old Dennis."

"I'm sorry for your loss," I said, "and thank you for the tea,

But I'm afraid I'm must run now because I've a date with a mermaidy manatee".

Dungaree Memories

Dungarees have played a big part in my life - mainly stopping people seeing my underwear. I wore them as a young child and then between the ages of 17-23, they were my main trouser-type item of clothing, normally worn with the top half left free to dangle. Here are three memories of times I have been wearing dungarees.

1985

I'm guessing the year and I'm also slightly guessing the fact that I am wearing dungarees for this particular memory, but if you look closely at the picture, it looks like there is snow adorning the rooftops in the background and this small detail has sent my memory down this particular avenue. As a five-year old I lived a mere 29 houses away from Brighton sea-front and it was on a regular basis that I would clutch the hand of my mum or dad and wander seawards to gaze out at the watery expanse in front of me. I was always trying to see France, but never could and I grew doubtful whether it really was as close as the maps suggested. There was a playground next to a lagoon at the bottom of the road and I used to enjoy clambering into the tunnel on a climbing frame and sitting enclosed in the red plastic and imagining that I was living an adventure and not just sitting on a climbing frame waiting for the call to go home. There was an arcade next to the park where I used to watch the claw grabber attempting to snatch up a soft toy, but always fail - that has turned into Heather Mills-McCartney's vegan cafe now - I have a lot of sympathy for her; she seems to be hated for inconceivable reasons.

But back to the eighties: this dungaree day was a day when snow had turned the playground into an assortment of abandoned white shapes as everyone chose the hill leading down to the park to be the new place to play accompanied by sledges or bin-liners. Careering down the hill on a sledge was a thrilling moment of abandon. In my memory my dad carefully crafted the sledge in his workshop that very morning, but thinking back, he didn't have a workshop and my memory must have invented this detail. The hill seemed enormous - years later as I stroll down towards the park and choose against expensive vegan ice cream I can't quite believe that this tiny slope is the same hill that sent my stomach somersaulting with ecstatic terror. The picture you see, I imagine, is me with my rosey-cheeked sister, Jenny, standing by the radiator getting warm after one of the most exciting mornings of our lives.

1999

I was working for Newfrontiers, a worldwide group of churches, on a campsite near Coventry manning the Information Desk for a big conference church holiday type thing. I was into the third week and an early shift in the third week of camping is a painful one, but I had the previous night's leftover curry to keep me company and that made the world a better place by far. I pulled on my dungarees that were slowly ripping and shredding and were held together at the trouser seam and knee by gaffa tape and chose against waiting in a queue to have a shower and headed straight to the place where I would be dispensing information for the morning.

When I look back now I realise that an unwashed man with gaffa taped dungarees and mop of bleached hair munching his way through a cold curry is probably not a man you want information from, but if there was something you needed to know, you had little choice but to smell the combined fumes of curry-breath and stale sweat whilst receiving instruction. At least I was equipped with the correct information.

2003

My band was called Bungle and we specialised in a combination of thrashing our instruments with fierce energy and microphone growling. For this particular gig drummer Tim Gordon had decided that a drum solo would be an appropriate opening, so while he clattered away I performed some improvised dance so as not to look like a spare piece. I had the perfect dangling dungaree look going on, but whilst my appearance could not be faulted, it was not ideal for the kind of shapes I was throwing and as I attempted some kind of forward roll ending with a jerkish leap to my feet propelled by my shoulders, I found that my feet had become entangled with my dungaree straps and I was helplessly trapped in a sort of crab position; not wanting to look like foolish, I continued to dance whilst becoming disentangled. I finally achieved disentanglement and continued with the show, but I fear the rock star persona that I was attempting to create for myself had been replaced with a combination of Mr Bean and Frank Spencer.

Dunking

To dunk or not to dunk is a question that determines your outlook on life. A dunker is a grabber of pleasure, dipping the biscuit into the cup of tea to deliver an instant mouthful of warm mushy delightfulness, recklessly ignoring the fact that the last sip of tea will be a grim retching moment that spoils the whole relaxing tea-slurping process. A non-dunker is someone who is happy to play the long game, knowing that the last mouthful of tea will be as good as the first. The dunker might argue that you could simply leave the biscuit-infested last mouthful undrunk, but who remembers this in the heady moment of drinking? I, a self-confessed dunker, never do and have to accept that my pleasurable moment of dunking must be paid for as the tea-break concludes.

Fellow dunkers will be glad to hear that studies have been done into the world of dunking with issues such as the biscuit best to dunk, dunking technique and dunking etiquette covered. Physicist Len Fisher was the man behind this important scientific study. The first issue of which biscuit is best to be dunked needed a hi-tech Instron stress-tester to calculate the breaking point of each biscuit when plunged into a steaming mug. There is nothing worse than a biscuit breaking off mid-dunk and having to be retrieved by careful, but inevitably scorched, fingers. The winner of the dunkability test was the Chocolate Digestive which managed to withstand an impressive eight seconds submerged without breaking under the pressure, doubling the time that most of the competitors could handle. My personal favourite biscuit is the Chocolate Hobnob, but this can manage less than four seconds and was beaten into sixth by the likes of Rich Tea, the regular Hobnob, the regular Digestive and the Chocolate Bourbon.

Fisher had practical tips to offer on the practicalities of dunking also: "Dunking [Digestive] biscuits calls for a return to the wide-brimmed porcelain cup. The best strategy is a flat-on approach, biscuit-side down to minimise chocolate bleed into your tea or coffee and maintain the chocolate layer as a crack-stopper. For other biscuits I recommend a full, wide-brimmed cup of tea with a biscuit dunked at a shallow angle with the imprinted surface down. The art lies in the journey twixt cup and lip [that is a fine sentence]. The biscuit - held as you would a penny - should be removed in a smooth fluid motion with the dunked half swivelled, so that it is supported by the dry section of the biscuit, to reach your mouth first." I'm not sure about the flat-on approach - that doesn't sound very practical, but nevertheless, this bloke is a legend whose name should be honoured alongside Einstein, Newton and other scientific bigwigs.

His final comments come on the subject of etiquette, warning the dunker that in some circles dunking is seen as somewhat uncouth - wise words from Fisher; he doesn't want his fellow dunker to be looked down upon by the non-dunking snobs of this world. He also reveals that dunking a biscuit releases ten times more of its flavour than if the biscuit is munched dry - that's a stat to throw in the face of the nonnies. I, for one, will use his scientific endeavour to better my life.

Druids

Apparently, modern druids who dress up in white and hold hands at Stonehenge are unrelated to ancient Celtic druids of the Iron Age that were suppressed by the Romans - Getafix, the beardy druid from the Asterix series, encounters this suppression from the Romans as he hands out his magic potion to the Gaulish villagers. However, it seems we know very little about ancient druidism because they never wrote anything down and all reports about them are from people who didn't approve of what they did.

One thing we do perhaps know though about druidism is that our esteemed war time leader Winston Churchill was initiated into the modern druid society as a 33-year old, two years before he became Home Secretary. Pictorial evidence shows Churchill standing with a bunch of druids at Blenheim Palace on August 15th 1908 and it is a common belief that this was his ceremony. However, this photo seems to be the only thing that people base his druidism on and it could potentially be an example of a photo not really telling the whole story. He never spoke of druidism and the modern media has taught us the important and accidental lesson that we shouldn't trust them. Truth and newspapers are not a happy couple that wander through the park whispering sweet nothings to each other, but an ideological position that editors struggle to contort themselves into. Perhaps Churchill was a druid, but I don't think he brewed any magical potions for the British troops and when he became Prime Minister as a 65-year old, I'm pretty sure he'd left any hocus-pokery behind him.

Dannii Minogue

I have been thinking about the double i in Dannii Minogue's name and wondering why it is there and what statement it is trying to make. She was christened Danielle Jane Minogue, but at some point in her life she decided or it was decided for her that Danielle needed to be shortened - Danielle is a variant of Daniel, meaning God is my judge, and has 36 potential variants including Danette, Danyell and Danitza, but the unusually spelt Dannii is not one of them. Minogue, with her two men throwing top hats into the air on a far horizon at the end of her name, was perhaps seeking uniqueness and individuality in her choice of name alteration.

Few words go for the tricky double i combo - my research has only yielded ten and skiing, taxiing, shanghaiing and alibiing all feel a little bit dishonest because the 'ing' has made their leap into the double i hall of fame a little too easy for them. The other six words are denarii (plural of the ancient roman coin), radii (plural of radius), torii (the gateway of a Shinto shrine), genii (plural of genie), gastrocnemii (the chief muscle of the calf of the leg) and shiitake (a big old mushroom). Perhaps Dannii was attempting to align herself with these words when she changed her name: the denarii, a symbol of her wealth; radii, a symbol of her curvaceousness; torii, some sort of statement about indigenous Japanese religion; genii, symbolic of her magical ability to light up a stage; gastrocnemii, a symbol of her athletic ability and shiitake, a nod to her favourite type of mushroom. Hawaii and Wii, whilst not being words in the dictionary and not admissible in a game of Scrabble, also boast a double i.

Whatever her reasons, I hope Dannii puts her double ii to good use and bashes Louis Walsh over the head with them next time he utters nonsense (the next time he opens his mouth) on X-Factor.

Dog Poo

My experiences with dog poo have been entirely negative. I have regularly been inconvenienced by someone else's negligence and been forced to go through the process of extracting dog poo from the sole of my trainer with a thin stick. Why do trainers always have such intricate patterns on the sole, making this task infinitely more difficult than it needs to be? By far my worst experience of dog poo I have endured is when my hand plunged into a warm sticky mound of the stuff after a hefty tackle on a football pitch. With no water to cleanse my hand I had to do my best with a grassy hand rub before trying to keep my hand as far away from my nose as possible for the rest of the game.

I wonder what percentage of dog owners relieve the rest of us of their pet's waste. The percentage in my road is surely pretty low - I pretty much have to perform a hopscotch down the road to escape faeces-free and when I am pushing a bulky three-wheel buggy down the street my odds of completely the obstacle course of poo decrease dramatically.

Poole Council have had enough of this scourge on their streets - they no longer want the nickname Pooey Poole (they haven't really got that, I just made it up) and they have come up with an odd and quite likely ineffective way of battling the polythene bagless brutes. They have decided to spray-paint dog poo bright green. Shaun Robson, head of environmental services says, "We hope the paint will help highlight the size of the problem [it will literally do that] and change people's behaviour." The painted poo will sit there as a statement for a week before being removed. Poole Council assure the public that pavement poo will be dealt with and their experiment will be limited to poo on grass verges and the like which makes their choice of green paint a slightly odd one. Surely a lemon yellow or ocean blue would stand out better against the green grass.

This council policy has created political discussion through their actions in Poole with the Conservatives, who have long been the most popular party in the area, receiving criticism from the Liberal Democrats for their "bizarre" way of dealing with the problem. Poole residents have also had their say about the issue on the Bournemouth Echo website. Bourne Free says, "I hope the seagulls don't think they are large caterpillars" while EGHH, in response to the fact that this is a waste of people's council tax, says, "They could sell it to the Tate Modern". Hmm... I just hope I don't have a repeat of the hand-to-poo scenario this football season.

Dan Reeves

It was an ordinary summers day in the middle of a six-week holiday. I'd read a couple of chapters of some book or another, cooked myself a sausage sandwich and now I was off out to play Dan Reeves at squash. Little did I know that this would be my last time on a squash court, perhaps ever. A few days earlier Reeves had beaten me by the embarrassing scoreline of nine games to nil. His unfair playing of other opponents in preparation of our match meant that my playing partner who was fairly equal in a talent to me had accelerated far beyond my feeble skill level. I seethed as I walked sweatily from the court. His puppyish bounding excitement infuriated me and when he rubbed my nostrils in the pungent stench of his victory by phoning someone to boast my temper boiled over and I emptied my water bottle into his groinal region. The leisure centre manager walked in seconds later and I had to explain that I had been beaten by the gangly wet one and apologise for causing a dangerous dampness to the floor.

This game would not be a repeat of the former embarrassment: I had a teeth-clenching determination that his superior skill would struggle to overcome my tireless determination. The match started well enough. I won a game, which already meant that I had done better than the recent encounter, and then I had lost a game. The scores stood even as we entered game three at one game apiece - we proceeded to match in this game and the score stood at 3-3. My hand was dripping with sweat and my desire for victory in a sporting arena had rarely been higher as drew my racket sharply back to send a backhand crashing into the wall. As my racket went back I knew I made contact with more than just air, but I completed my shot to ensure that the point was won.

I turned to find Reeves having some kind of fit on the floor. I was pretty scared as he gyrated like gerbil who'd stumbled into an electric fence. He finally lay still and started to groan and I saw that blood was pouring from his nose. I went to grab him some tissues (and my camera - this moment needed recording) and returned. Once I made sure he wasn't going to spasm again and had taken a quick photo I went to get help. The manager came to our assistance and I couldn't resist the wisecrack, "He was beating me again" even though this wasn't actually true - I had just taken the lead. The floor was mopped up and Reeves seen to and I picked up my racket ready to resume, but reluctant Reeves resigned from the match and handed me a hollow (although I grabbed it with both hands) victory.

It turned out I had hit him so hard that I'd collapsed the middle bit of his nose - the septal cartilage (the bit that separates the two nostrils). It was now lying in one of his nostrils and stopping oxygen flow; he had to have surgery to have it reconstructed and take quite a bit of time off work. We both agreed that whilst this was inconvenient, at least it made a good story to tell and here it is: told. What was he doing so close to me anyway?

Dorothy Height

I have realised that my bloggeration has been somewhat male-centred so far. Fourteen of my 63 posts so far have had the name of a man (or a couple of men) at the top whilst only one has had the name of a woman: Gillian Duffy (you remember, the lady that Gordon Brown labeled a bigot before a quick retraction). I have had ignored the Danielles, the Dianas, the Denises, the Delias, the Deidres, the Dawns, the Daisys, the Delilahs, the Daphnes and the Dorothys. This post is a shift from the male-dominated direction that my blog has been driving in as I pause to take notice of a woman worthy of notice.

Dorothy Height was born in 1912, an African-American woman born into a racist American society that wouldn't see the Civil Rights Act for another 52 years. As a child her colour was used to prevent her using a swimming pool; as a young adult she was refused admittance to Barnard College because they had already used up their two token places for black students. Frustrated and angered by injustice, she didn't let this stand in the way of her achieving academic success. In her early 30s she met a 15-year old Martin Luther King. At the time she had no idea what King would become and what his name would come to stand for, but as the years passed and as she worked tirelessly alongside him barriers of inequality towards African-Americans and women were slowly broken down.

Unlike King she lived to see America turn from a place that treated African-Americans as second class citizens to a nation led by an African-American man. In April this year, at the age of 98, Height died. At her funeral Barrack Obama stood and paid tribute to a woman he said "deserves a place [in the history books]. She never cared about who got the credit. What she cared about was the cause: the cause of justice; the cause of equality; the cause of opportunity: freedom's cause."

A selfless woman who fights for equality against the odds is truly a great woman. Her own words attest to this: "Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has overcome to reach their goals". Her words on the progress we have made and the battles still to fight held true in 1964 and still hold true in 2010: "We have come a long way, but too many are not better off". Men and women like Dorothy are all too scarce.

Dangerous Dampness

The word dampness holds certain negative connotations, but when combined with the word dangerous, it takes on a far more sinister tone. Here is my top ten of dampnesses that are unpleasant, annoying and occasionally dangerous.

1. Wet Door Handles

When you reach for a door handle and find that it has unknown moisture attached to it, this is extremely distressing. This is often the case with bathroom doors and whilst you could return back into the bathroom to rewash your hands, you would then have to manipulate yourself back out without using the damp door handle to make this a worthwhile exercise.

2. Falling Asleep with a Guinea Pig on Your Lap

My guinea pig Brian is now dead, but he regularly used to join me to read a bit of Dickens while reclining on the sofa. Inevitably I would slip into slumber and Brian's warning squeals that a toilet break was needed would go unheard to my sleepy ears and a nasty yellow stain would result.

3. Gutter Puddles

It is one of life's great joys to drive fast through a puddle and soak a pedestrian, but if you are the pavement stroller, it is not such a joyous occasion.

4. Socks on Damp Grass

It is a gamble never worth taking to venture into the garden with just a pair of socks in the false hope that the grass will be dry. It never is.

5. Spilt and Invisible Water on the Floor

My stride around the school corridors in term-time is often a quick one, but on a couple of occasions I have slid one-footed inelegantly across the floor to chuckles of glee from watching teenagers. I have, so far, always stayed on my feet unlike some of my colleagues, but my day will come if I persist in speedy strolling.

6. Overfull Nappies

A story being read to one of my twins is a pleasant experience on the whole even if the literature leaves a little to be desired, but if I have been negligent in my nappy watchfulness, then the pressure of full nappy on knee can produce a slightly smelly damp circle.

7. Inaccuracy

I will not go into detail with this one, but a visit to the toilet, a momentarily lapse of attention, damp trousers - you get the idea.

8. Drink Spillage

I am a serial drink spiller and it always seems to be a full container across an inappropriate surface. Just this week I have spilled a glass of wine, poured just a minute before, all over the in-law's tablecloth. My worst spillage was a pint of Ribena over our new cream carpet which didn't make me particularly popular.

9. Over-eager Clothes Collection from the Washing Line Resulting in Damp Pockets

When you're desperate to wear a certain pair of trousers for a particular occasion, they always seem to demand a time-bending washing process before they are ready to adorn your legs. My impatience has often lead to the horrible feeling of damp undried pockets.

10. Damp Glasses

When you're young, you think nothing of getting wet. As an adult it seems a threat that prevents even leaving the house and perhaps my feelings have something to do with the blindness incurred by windscreen-wiperless glasses that I didn't have to wear as a child.

David Ngog

Growing up I always had a favourite footballer. When I got my Panini sticker album in the spring of 1989, the beaming smile of John Barnes shone out of one of my first packets and Liverpool and Barnes were adopted as my team and player of choice. Barnes' brilliance seems to be forgotten thing with his portly belly, inability to be a lucid pundit and even greater inability to manage a football team now being what he is known for. But, in the late 80s when Liverpool were the greatest team in Britain, Barnes was the greatest player in Britain. Everything Liverpool did went through Barnes in the same way everything Manchester United did went for Ronaldo a couple of seasons back.

After injury, weight-gain and retirement Robbie Fowler became my new favourite. His five goal haul against Fulham early in his career grabbed my attention and imagination. This was followed by an incredible four and half minute hat-trick against Arsenal; I was listening to the game on my personal stereo on a family car journey to Devon and my dad refused to believe my repeated claims that Robbie had scored again. Sadly, Robbie went much the same way as Barnes with injury and weight-gain hampering his ability to thrill the crowds. I still follow his progress: he made his debut for Australian A-League side Perth Glory on Friday, but he failed to find the net in a 3-3 draw and I fear the magic of Fowler is something that rarely flickers any longer.

Last season was the first season I didn't have a favourite player playing in England. I had to rely on early Saturday morning internet sessions following Fowler's progress and that is no way to your life. So, this season I have chosen a new favourite player: David Ngog. He fits the bill perfectly: his first name begins with D - in fact he shares my first name; he plays for Liverpool, and he's a striker, so the glory days are sure to come. On Sunday 23rd of May I wrote 'Davids: An Ode to England Internationals Called David in the Last Twenty Years'. There were many greats: Beckham, Seaman, Platt, James and er... Batty. The poem ended with a line questioning whether he (David James) could, "be the second David to grasp the Jules Rimet in his paws". The World Cup ended horribly and sourly for England and the giant-haired stopper got his fingers nowhere near the World Cup, but whilst it was a disaster for this David, it was actually a triumph for Davids in general as rather than one David joining Trezeguet in the list of Davids to have won the World Cup, two did: David Villa and David Silva. If this is not proof that it is the year for Davids to walk onto football pitches with their heads held high, then what is? David Villa outshone his striking partner Fernando Torres by a considerable margin and it is my belief that Ngog will do exactly that for Liverpool this season. Would anyone like a wager that Ngog will outscore the once-mighty El Nino? Beware, Ngog is already 3-0 up having scored three in two games against Europa opponents Rabotnicki.

This wonderful news for footballing Davids will gladden the hearts of the other eleven Davids plying their trade in the Premiership: Dunn and Hoilett (Blackburn Rovers), Elm and Stockdale (Fulham), Kitson (Stoke), Healy and Meyler (Sunderland), Bentley (Spurs), Edwards and Jones (Wolves) and Silva (Man City), but more than that it gladdens my heart as I too will return to regular footballing action this year. My team CCK (Church of Christ King) have only rarely called on my services of late for the main reason that I'm not really as good as most of the other players, but this year a second team has been launched and I anticipate far more action. In fact I would go as far as to say that I anticipate scoring more goals than Fernando Torres myself this season. You might think that sounds like a foolish boast from someone who has never scored more than six goals in a season and you would probably be right, but my fierce fervour for success of Davids taking the field of play knows nothing of the bounds of realism. Let's bring back the days when a team of Davids would have Beckham and Ginola supplying wonderful balls onto the head of Hirst; when a moustachioed Seaman would keep the goal safe from players with inferior names; when the Everton trio of Watson, Unsworth and Weir would crush opponents' hearts between their bare teeth. David Ngog, Davids everywhere, your time has come.

Dr Zeuss

My wife Helen went to a car boot sale this morning and returned with a miniature table and chair set, a toy aeroplane, a plastic wheelbarrow and a fistful of books including Dr Zeuss' debut work, The Cat in the Hat, released an incredible 53 years ago. Reading it to a book-hungry Jarvis has inspired me to imitate his work and create my own fast-paced rhyming narrative about an animal in an item of clothing. Protagonist options include the Macaque in the Anorak, the Fly in the Tie, the Rat in the Cravat, but I have settled for the Goat in the Coat.

Here goes:

The evening arrived and

The sun said goodbye.

"It's bedtime," was heard as

The moon rose in the sky.

The news was unwelcome;

Wide-eyed Ned wore a frown.

Jarvis hid his dismay

But he still felt quite down.

Once tucked up in bed,

The lights were turned out.

Misery flooded the room;

Fun was no longer about.

A dull night of nothing

Was all that lay ahead.

As the boys lay there

Sleepless bored and in bed.

Then rat-a-tat-tat

Was heard at the door.

Were they dreaming?

No, this was real, for sure.

Then in burst a goat

Wearing a crimson fur coat;

Clearing his voice

He uttered from his throat,

"I'm fantastically brilliant

I'm the Goat in the Coat,

I'm the best in the business,

Though I don't like to gloat.

I'm here to take you

For a night on a boat

Battling sea monsters

While bobbing along afloat."

Ned looked at Jarvis

And Jarvis looked at Ned.

Indecision was brief;

They jumped out of bed.

The Goat in the Coat

Had a strong notion

That nights weren't for sleep -

He led them to the ocean

Where they jumped in the boat

And sailed out to sea.

This was probably wreckless

I'm sure you'll agree.

No health and safety would let

Two toddlers in a boat

In the middle of the channel,

Their guardian, a goat.

The Goat in a Coat said,

"There's a battle to fight"

Ned looked a bit nervous.

The words gave Jar a fright.

Then out of the water

A scaly green monster rose.

It had deadly sharp claws

And shot bullets from its nose.

The twins were shocked

And momentarily froze.

The Goat in the Coat

Gave Jarvis an spear.

And Ned got an axe

He said, "There's nothing to fear".

Ned hacked at the monster's

Gargantuan neck.

Jarvis threw the spear skywards

From the tiny deck.

While the monster's flailing limbs

Threatened a wreck.

The spear hurtled up

Then hung in the sky

Then rushed downwards

Into the monster's eye.

Ned spotted his chance

And sent the axe through

The last few neck tendons.

The blood that spurted was blue.

Victory was theirs.

The Goat gave a cheer

And then said, "Oh no,

Morning is near".

He grabbed the oars

And paddled like crazy.

The sky was lightening,

Turning greyish and hazy.

The Goat in the Coat

Rushed the boys home

And said, "I'll be back

After my holiday in Rome."

And as the goat fled

With a clickety-clack

Mum and Dad arose

From their slumbersome sack.

"Good morning," Mum said

"Have you boys slept well?"

They looked at each other

And knew they never would tell.

Destiny

Destiny, hold my hand, protect me from this world

And fly me to a past not far away

Where fireflies and the stars in the sky

Coax the shadows back to let

You concentrate on your neverthought.

Funny what you find in your mixed up mind

At two o'clock by the fountain down the road.

Today it all feels fine, but

Today will always be tomorrow

And I love you all the same.

I complied this poem from ten lines from ten songs from ten of my favourite bands. I am partially happy with it. Being constricted to other people's words is both freeing and inhibiting at the same time. If I had limitless time, this could make for an interesting project, but I will leave it at that for now. How many bands and songs do you recognise? They are all from songs released between 1993-2003, the era when CDs sponged by wallet dry.

Dinner

I was struggling to see what direction I could take the subject of dinner in. My dinner times are made up of stuffing food quickly into my face while saying: "Ned/Jarvis, throwing spaghetti at the windows is not a good way to show appreciation to the chef". My helpful advice is giggled at and I am forced into confiscating bowls until the game of spaghetti lasso has quelled.

This repetitive dinner time one-way conversation is not everyone's dinner time experience, so tonight I texted ten of my friends asking them the simple question, "What did you have for dinner?" Some of my friends I hadn't seen or spoken to in quite a while (over a year in some cases) and they may have been perplexed by the question. The text was sent an hour ago and so far six have responded. This is how:

Person One:

Them: Tomato soup. Watching the Norwich game? Me and Molly are there.

Me: I'm watching Question of Sport at the moment, but I might flick over later. I'm at Leicester vs Macclesfield on Wednesday.

Person Two:

Them: Diced donkey and doughnuts. Not really, curry I believe, but we haven't had it yet.

Person Three:

Them: A carvery roast........ [that is an excessive amount of dottage; you should really stick to three dots] Why?

Me: Tasty. Just a little survey I am doing for the purpose of writing a blog entry. I'm back on Thursday if you still have the balls [some footballs that he has offered to donate to my football team].

Them: Cool, yes mate I do still have the balls. Gimme a shout when ya free.

Person Four:

Them: Hmmm, I'm guessing you didn't mean to send that to me, but if you're interested I had pizza :)

Them [again]: Ah no, I get it, things beginning with d :) how's things anyway.

Me: Tres good Signor John. We should have a beer soon. I'm away at the moment, but return on Thursday.

Them: Sounds like a plan, it's been a year since our last one. Maybe you guys could come round one night for curry.

Me: Give us a date when you're up for it and we'll see if we can get a sitter.

Them: Ok cool, will have a chat with the missus and get back to you :)

Person Five:

Them: Erm... [much more appropriate dottage] Spaghetti and meatballs. You?

Me: Pasta carbonara

Them: Am I missing something?

Me: No

Them: That's alright then.

Person Six:

Them: Why do you want 2 know buddy? Pizza! What did you have?

Me: Pasta carbonara. I'm just taking an interest in your life.

Them: Thx bro. I just sat on da loo and past da pizza if you want 2 know more about my life! Hope you having a good time.

Me: My real reason is for a blog entry. I'm going to include your text if that is okay but I'll keep you anonymous.

Them: Weird!

A range of meals were had and pizza was the only replica. Meals came from a range of cultures: three Italian, one Indian, one British and one Peruvian (apparently that's where tomato soup originated). What was more interesting though was the range of ways in which people responded. Two guessed at my intentions and three questioned my intentions. Only one person could just take the question at face value and leave it at that and that should be commended. Do we have to have a reason to ask each other fairly meaningless questions? I also enjoyed the opportunity people took to give me extra information such as what they were doing that evening although I didn't really need to know about someone's toileting. The invitation to dinner was also a rather pleasant by-product of the initial text. This sharing of information with each other is, in my opinion, a beautiful and wonderful thing. Details, seemingly irrelevant, help me to feel slightly closer to people and this moment on digital text exchange has been a mildly enriching experience.