This journal is a fan of Brian Minter’s whimsical and at times inconsequential, yet strangely compelling, blog entitled ‘Bears Will Attack’. So much so that we have decided, for this paragraph only, to adopt his curious style of third person writing. If, as is sometimes asserted, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Mr Minter has indeed been sucked up to tonight. This journal has no pride, nor a safety harness – we delight in living on the edge here at “And then he said”.
One of Bears Will Attack’s attractions – alongside the campaign diary and the blog itself – is the Day 17 Project, in which people document what they did on the 17th of each month. The aim is to build up a picture of a day through a mosaic of different people’s experiences. There’s quite a few of you reading this who I consider to be talented writers – why not e-mail him a contribution?
Here is my entry for this month:
Today I:
- Spent the first hours paying my nightly homage to insomnia by doodling through an endless chain of self-obsessed blogs until 4am.
- Went to bed, finding that the lavalamp had been left on in the bedroom, bathing the walls in an ever-shifting red glow like being inside a bottle of cherryade, except with blobby bits not bubbles.
- Woke up at Noon feeling crap, ate copious amounts of breakfast cereal, but didn’t achieve any sort of fragile equilibrium until I’d been in the bath for half an hour.
- Went out at 3pm to a specialist car parts dealer to buy a pair of air filters for my Triumph Spitfire: was made to feel a complete idiot by the staff and walked out empty-handed, feeling crushed.
- Played an hour of Civilization III, enjoying once again the rich irony that is currently allowing me, playing as the Arabs, to ‘build’ King Richard’s Crusade and field an army of crusaders. Wished I could set them on a seek-and-destroy mission against the car parts salesman.
- Watched a strangely compelling documentary about a smug middle class couple in Cumbria who had an underground house built for them on (in?) a gorse-covered hillside.
- Developed (but failed to enjoy) a truly stinking migraine.
- Drove off in search of ibuprofen at 11.45pm, finding that fog had rolled in and everywhere was blanketed in grey navel-fluff. Two foxes ran through the pool of yellow from my headlights within the first hundred yards. At the 24-hour supermarket I also stocked up on ginger beer and lemonade shandy (six packs) and English muffins (eight pack) to go with the headache tablets (16 packs).
And that’s really about it. The cure for cancer, world peace and the secret of truly edible low-fat ice cream will have to wait for a day that’s not quite so grim.