Chris Page's Blog, page 11

Sweet dreams are made like this

Look! My super-cool daughter has been making super-cool dreamcatchers.

They are made with ivy from our garden, twine from the twine shop, stones mined from the more exotic moons of Jupiter or plucked from the rings of Saturn, and garnished with feathers harvested from the tails of griffins by our cat. Or some such.

Sweet dreams are made like this.

Nothing more horrible than a nice cup of tea, don’t you think?

Of all the stupid things people say, one of the most stupid is ‘Would you like a nice cup of tea?’ I mean, what is the word nice doing in that sentence? It’s the sort of thing daft old grannies like to say. ‘Ooh! Let’s have a nice cup of tea.’

So I went round to my Gran’s the other day and I said, ‘How’re you doing Gran?’ and she said, ‘All right, you know, considering.’

She’s dead, my Gran, but she takes great care of herself, you know what I mean?

So she says ‘Come in, sit down. Would you like a nice cup of tea?’

I thought to myself, God, if I hear that one more time … But I said, ‘No thanks, Gran I’m all right.’

Then she said, ‘Would you like a horrible cup of tea?’

I thought for a moment. ‘How horrible? Without sugar?’

‘Without sugar. And I’ll spit in it.’

‘Nah, I’m not too bothered, thanks, Gran.’

‘I’ll put some spiders in. No sugar, spit, and spiders. And I’ll make it with toilet water.’

‘Aye, all right then. Cheers.’

‘And how about some nuclear radiation?

‘Nuclear radiation?’

‘Nuclear radiation. I’m got some yellow cake.’

‘Now you’re talking, Gran. Champion!’

This nice cup of tea was brought to you by Chris Page’s collection of short fiction Un-Tall Tales. George Orwell was keen on a nice cup of tea, and you’ll find his brew here.

Low art?

A picture I did this week that may or may not say something about my current state of mind.

Miniwocky

Here’s a doodle I did the other day. I call it Miniwocky.

Winning gold in Olympic yawning

 

The Olympic Games is one of the most boring and futile spectacles yet invented by humans, so the approach of the last day will bring no dismay.

Every four years the best athletes in the world join together to compete in running, jumping, and falling over while their non-running, non-jumping, non-falling over compatriots ecstatically cheer them on.

My, what a fuss those compatriots kick up, painted and draped in the national colours, cheering, waving flags as if it were an Olympic sport of its own. The fans don’t seem to be celebrating that their athletes are the technical best at running, jumping, and falling over, but that they and their nation are innately, inherently the best in the most absolute and fundamental way possible; that they are racially, culturally, morally, naturally, spiritually, genetically superior to everyone because of their abilities at running, jumping, and falling over.

Each victory, near victory, or humiliating loss being greeted with such emotions, such screaming, cheering, crying, and raised arm salutes as to suggest that all this running, jumping, and falling over actually matters to the universe and everyone in it on a very fundamental level.

Never mind that the victors and losers are separated by microseconds, by millimetres, by quantities of time and distance that cannot be measured by humans alone, that require the most sophisticated of machines to calculate, the kinds of machines that normally would be employed measuring the amount of gravitational shift caused by a butterfly flapping its wings on a small planet orbiting a star the other side of the galaxy. In other words, amounts that normal people shouldn’t give a fuck about.

And never mind that the winners in four year’s time will be from totally different countries which makes the nationalistic hoopla look as silly as it is.

The Olympics are thought to have been first held in 776 (when, sensibly and mercifully, there was only one event) so you would have thought that in 2,792 years people would have noticed that the outcomes are a wee bit arbitrary.

Bill Murray tweeted that every event should include an ordinary person as a measure,

Every Olympic event should include one average person competing for reference.

— Bill Murray (@BiIIMurray) July 19, 2016

and that’s a very good idea because Michael Phelps just swam the equivalent of the distance from my house to the end of the street in the same time I could walk it; well, I just pulled a bogey the size of a rat out of my nose: where’s my medal?

And the Olympics are a very, very expensive exercise in futility indeed. The stadiums in this year’s games cost millions that could have been better spent on drugs in Rio’s favelas — which is entirely the Russian team’s approach to the games.

And what’s more, once the games are finished, the sites will go back to the jungle like Angkor Wat or Chernobyl.

For all the energetic running, jumping and falling over, let’s not forget that the games are celebration of obesity because each run, jump and fall is branded with the Coca Cola and McDonald’s logos, purveyors of fine sugar, fat, and heart attacks. Eat enough of this stuff and you too can run, jump and fall over — or at least fall over, and at this top-flight level, one out of three is pretty good.

Then what about the International Olympic Committee itself? Committed to building a better world through sport, or as the rest of us would call it, rampant bribery and corruption. Given the amount of money that’s being sloshed around on Rolexes and little girls, cheering the Olympic athletes is a lot like cheering the gunmen during the St Valentine’s Day massacre.

However, there is one mitigation of the games, and to be honest it’s a pretty big mitigation, one reason to actually feel a bit grateful, and that’s a prompt to go to YouTube and remind ourselves of Eddie Izzard’s vision of the stoned Olympics.

Now, do I get any kind of medal for this rant?

Bollocks to … summer

All right! Enough everybody! Enough! This summer has gone way beyond a joke now. Silly! Silly!
What is it now? About 30 consecutive days of 35 or 36C? I hear that Osaka scored 38C today. Thirty-eight! I mean, fuck off, OK?

The sun shooting blocks of ice at the Earth for climate change deniers to catch in their teeth

And this is not the cor-blimey-worra-lark dry heat of Spain or North Africa. This is wet heat. It is fetid heat. This is hot marmalade injected directly into your lungs heat.

I don’t know what the temperature peaked at here today, but my air conditioners couldn’t keep up. I’m not kidding. The inside temperature with the aircon set to 24 was pretty consistently 30C. The unit in my man cave actually gave up in the afternoon and just wheezed and groaned, which is exactly what I was doing, sprawled on the floor instead of doing all the things I was supposed to be doing. I had some simple email to write to some clients — not a lot, just a bit — and it was about 4pm by the time I had enough strength in my arms to put my hands on the keyboard to do that.


Had an uncharacteristically good sleep last night, then went outside about 9am to do a little heavy-ish lifting for Eiko. Wasn’t outside for more than 30 mins, came back in exhausted and covered in mosquito bites. And then that was that for my day. The end. I waved goodbye to my chips. May as well have put me in general anaesthetic and woken me up at sundown.


Talking of sundown, at 7pm it was still 31C in my room. Seven-effing-pm.


This was a day I will not get back again. And I lost it to the bloody weather. How ineffably asinine is that?


The story I’m working on has gone untouched. As has the picture I wanted to do. Marketing my stuff or looking for new work? Laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh till I pass out with heat. Not laugh laugh laugh till I piss myself, because my kidneys have completely dried out now.


And there are people, even people I know, people I know who read Brietbart and the Mail and the Express and the Telegraph and watch the BBC, who will tell me that climate change is not happening. The planet is boiling off its bedrock and these people are going ‘No, it isn’t! No such thing as man-made climate change. New ice age, that’s what it is. Caused by very cold sun spots. Look! There’s a polar bear!’


So that’s enough. No, not funny. Wasn’t funny to start with, even more not funny now. I want everyone to stay absolutely still and quiet until I find out who caused this bloody silly weather — or I will do when I extinguish these flames because I seem to have caught fire.

Spot the difference: Theresa may be a monster

Questions must be asked.

It’s international BoJo day!

It’s international BoJo day! I speculatively made this graphic a couple of weeks ago. Today it looks spookily prescient.

 

Fool Britannia!

Graphic by Page with apologies to Willy Stöwer

Lord of the Misgivings

Oh, what’s that sound? Oh, it’s you. Yes, it’s safe, you can come out of your hobbit hole, little hobbit.

Yes, Littleshire has been made safe.

The Sun is shining righteously. All the brown people are gone. There’s a pot of Elvish gold outside your door which fell by a fair-minded wind.

Best of all, all the Eurorcs have gone back to the smoky undemocratic wastes of Brussdor.

It is I, wizard Boris Faragedalf, and I confess I have made this land a utopia by magic. I waved my magic wand and made it so — fancy that! Fancy a fag and a pint?

Yes, come out … Oh, it’s you, Fraido Muggins. Yes, little hobbit, fear has been banished from the land and so have your other enemies: reason and humanity.

Oh look, the folk of Littleshire are having a fete to fete their fine victory. There’s morris dancing and dwarf tossing, and various wholesome activities to do with sheep and pigs and wellington boots.

That smell? That’s the smell of roasted fatty-eurocrat, you know, the animal that’s been eating all the food you’ve grown and traded to him for so many years — what a foul, greedy beast! And just desserts, don’t you think? We’ve got it turning on a spit.

Oh, yes, like I say, you are snug in your hole in the Shire. Why, I can see rose vines growing on your nose, even as I speak.