Author: pete

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Uncategorized

I remembered what winter is like this morning.

I remembered what winter is like this morning.

I have a tendency to get very comfortable in a season, and by the end of summer I have usually forgotten what winter feels like.

But it came to me this morning in one go. It wasn’t the fact that it was a little chilly, and it didn’t even come to me when I was staring absent-mindedly out of the kitchen window, but when I opened my bedroom curtains to see the condensation on the windows and the frozen blue sky, it all came back in one big parcel.

I remembered how many clothes you have to put on, and yet you are still cold. The temperature gradient between being in bed and being out of bed. The deathly and emotionless, yet oft-lauded appearance of a frosted lawn. The demisting of car windscreens.

But first we have the leaves turning golden and falling off of the trees to go, and it has begun already. The skeletal, yet still living, forms of the bare trees. That’s reassuring at least.

Life goes on. Give it up for DNA.

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Food Photos

A little lesson

Don’t take photos of food, no matter how inviting it looks. Your brain says “Mmmm, that’s one good pizza, lovingly crafted, and though cooked a little past perfection, that is going to taste gorgeous.”

a delicious spicy pizza

But the world says “That’s what you think. In twenty seconds that plate is going to be flipped over. Though you will catch it, you will be slightly too slow to prevent three of those slices landing on your beautiful carpet, two of them face down.”

This is why you keep your carpet clean, people.

Categories
Meander

We smiled together for a while

*Craig*: made a friend today
*Pete*: Oh yes?
*Craig*: Took a book across the road to that grassy area, and a baby grass hopper came and sat on my knee
*Craig*: i smiled, he smiled
*Craig*: we sat and smiled for a while
*Pete*: You killed him
*Pete*: Didn’t you?
*Craig*: yes… but…
*Pete*: Nooo
*Craig*: after we smiled
*Craig*: for ages
*Craig*: kind of inevitable the death though, I wanted him to get off my page so I could turn it but he wouldnt…
*Pete*: Did you not give him a little shake?
*Pete*: Gentle one
*Craig*: several
*Craig*: then… thump
*Pete*: Please stop
*Craig*: sorry

Categories
Fiction Peril

Screeching

So I was awoken at 5am this morning by an almighty screeching sound. At first, my mind tried to pretend that it was all part of the dream, but slowly I was roused into consciousness.

Then I opened my eyes, and instead of being in my bedroom, my entire bed was floating on a sea of molten lava, and there were all these weird twelve foot eagles circling around with flames dancing over their feathers. And in the middle there was this huge red beast with a face like a smacked arse – it must have been standing about four stories high – bellowing in this deep rumbling tone. The whole thing was really noisy, what with the bellowing beast and the screeching eagles.

Anyway, I punched them all in the face for waking me up and went back to bed, but I couldn’t get back to sleep.

I feel really rough this morning as a result.

Categories
Meander

About a haircut

Well, that was probably the second most notable haircut of my life, the most notable one being when I was attended to by a horny hairdresser who didn’t break bodily contact with me for the entire duration of half an hour, and drew my attention to this fact. That was great.

But no, just now.

I took an instant dislike to this guy. I don’t know whether it was his snug lime green t-shirt, his surly demeanour, or the fact that instead of inviting me into the chair from the waiting area he just looked at me with disdain in his eyes and waited for me to do the necessary deduction required to come to the conclusion that he was going to be cutting my hair.

So I sat down, and it was then his turn to take a dislike to me. I told him roughly how I wanted to look, but to feel free to express his artistic tendenciesI didn’t use those words. He looked at me like I had just slapped his mother, and demanded numbers. Uh, I suppose a 6 on top and a 2 on the back and sides?

He was partially satiated. “Oh gosh,” I thought, “this may have been a bad move.”

Then he assaulted me with the clippers. I wasn’t sure whether I needed to clarify that the hairs that I wanted cutting were not actually on the inside of my head, and he didn’t have to bash my skull through to get to them.

“He’s one of them,” I thought, “he’s going to attack me for five minutes and then take my money. He’s not a hairdresser.”

I looked around to check the faces of the other hairdressers in the shop, just to confirm that they had acknowledged his presence and had recognised him as actually working there. I seriously thought that he may have just walked in off the street.

His contempt for me grew with every light-hearted sentence that I attempted to offer. I soon learnt.

I also have a tiny mole on the back of my neck – I swear that he was running the clippers over it repeatedly just to try and dig it out.

And then it all went strange. As time went on, he became more and more meticulous, pulling out all sorts of strange contraptions. He pored over the back of my neck for quite a while, targeting specific stray hairs, and refining the shape of my sideburns. Could I have been wrong? It was looking increasingly like he was one of those hairdressers who is so damn good that they give the impression of being haphazard when in fact their skills are, as the prophet says, mad.

He finished up, battered my face in with those big fluffy brushes, and then ran a little electric shaver thing over my ears, which I nearly gave him a smack for. I think he may have been taking the piss with that one.

I paid my money and left. I daren’t look in the mirror. I don’t want to know.

Categories
Displeasure Meander

Fish

Our Sales and Marketing department have fish. Four fish. Not the most beautiful fish in the world, but every fish is a fish. Two are black, two are gold, and they have huge beady eyes which intimidate me.

Well, they used to have four fish. One day last week, there was a population drop of one. That’s the nature of things, I thought. Fish come, and fish go. I remember when I was really young my family had a fish. Really really young. Its name was “Fish”. Clever, that.

I remember when Fish died, no-one noticed. Feeding it was a chore, and nobody noticed that the amount of uneaten food in the filthy water was rising. It finally came to light about a week later, by which time Fish was fossilised into the walls of the tank. None of my family seemed to care, so that was that.

Back to the present – so here I was, tussling with Nature and all the big Questions, and how Golden Fish #1 had gone off to a better place when I was informed that there is actually a perfectly unnatural reason why Golden Fish #1 is now in 5 Second Heaven. A trained eye would probably have noticed the absence of fish food anywhere in the office.

At this point I excused myself and went to the supermarket, silently cursing the laziness of my peers, and how they would work a 13 hour day if it meant more money, but picking up some fish food while they were getting two pints of milk for the coffees was just too much thought.

Why don’t people notice when a job needs doing, and do it?

Categories
Meander

The evening that culminated in an airborne plant

So the night started with my guitarist and myself compiling a cassette of our current demos for an old friend, which got us listening to some of our old material and musing over how good the old times were.

Then, at five minutes to 10pm we decided that our bag of Doritos needed accompaniment, in the guise of a tub of dip. Our arrival at the supermarket at one minute to closing was dramatic, as I parked the car diagonally across two mother-and-child car parking spaces and we rushed in. We pleaded with the security guard, who succumbed to my immense charm and duly allowed us through, but some woman was being a bitch.

*”We’re closed!”*

“Just one tub of dip, please!”

*”We’re closed!”*

“We’ll be really quick!”

*”Closed!”*

Fuck you. I’m done being polite. Stop being so selfish. Twenty seconds will make no difference to you, but that tub of dip matters to us. And while we are having this discussionwhich, incidentally, was only actually occurring inside my head I could have bought the dip anyway.

plantSo we went to the crisps aisle and grabbed the dip anyway, banking on the knowledge that we could just harry one of of the checkout girls. And we did. We put it down on the conveyor insistently. Had the stroppy woman come over and made a fuss, I would have laughed in her face at her ability to waste everyone’s time including her own, but I didn’t get the opportunity.

It was the perfect plan.

So five and a half hours later it was, of course, time to start moving furniture. And to perform the required transition would necessitate the disposal of an old, dying pot plant (pictured in the half-light).

We put the plant in the car and drove two miles south, until we were out of town and the streetlights were but a memory on the back-facing horizon.

And threw the tainted thing over a gate.

And came home and went to bed.

Categories
Displeasure Meander

Humour

I was in a card shop yesterday being served by a couple of incompetents. Yes, you read me right, a couple. It took two of them to be totally useless. That’s impressive. One was a young blonde stupid girl, and one was an old wrinkly ((If truth be told, she wasn’t wrinkly at all. She was middle-aged-ish.)) woman who seemed to be excited by everything.

But I digress – it was one of those occasions when over the course of five minutes you think of approximately eight really funny things to say, but you don’t say any of them. Why? Because you have been in the situation too many times before, and you find the blank stares of incomprehension too painful to bear.

It hurts me – yes, it hurts – that I have to keep my sense of humour inside.

Where is this going?

It is important – nay, paramount – to spend time around those of a similar nature to yourself, otherwise it is inevitable that you will censor yourself, and your demise will commence.

I propose a promised land – a place where all those with a truly arse-about-face sense of humour will one day be led, by the chosen one (let’s call him Pete, for the sake of argument) to live out a life of great edification. A place where “funny” tales of drunkeness actually have to be funny for a good reason, and person X doesn’t feel the need to insult / beat up / slaughter person Y just because they choose to live their life in a different way, even though it doesn’t affect person X at all. You get the picture.

And we shall call this promised land “PeteLand”, and the chosen one (we’re still calling him Pete, right?) will lead as your King. And you shall bow down and worship him. Hell, worship me as your God. Him. Worship Him.

Sorry.

Categories
Meander

The Funniest Thing In The World

So our marketing department have sent out a mailshot – piece of A4 paper with our sales pitch on it and a Love Heart (sweet) attached to each one – don’t ask me what it is supposed to mean. Anyway, apparently we have caused some argy bargy at Heathrow airport. One of them got crushed, and for some reason the police have opened it to be greeted by a piece of paper saying “We’d love to do business with you”, all our office details, and some fine white powder.

I love my life.

Categories
TITGIG

The Creation

Records go back as far as 2:28pm on July 25th 2002. The actual post that I wrote is (a) inconsequential and (b) mind-numbingly dull. But for future reference, that’s the exact date and time when it happened.