The first few days of sun are tentative. Nobody is sure what has happened. Nothing that Carol Kirkwood said on the news this morning seems to correlate with the pain we’re feeling. The Chelsea Flower Show is a delay not a departure. People in summer hats and maxi dresses are mocking us.

On the platforms everyone has just missed a train. Their legs are dangling out onto phantom carriages they’re hoping will open in front of them. The wise have already assembled exactly where they saw doors shut before. They’re still hopeful that the train will reverse and, seeing the brilliance that these souls are exhibiting, gobble them up and carry them off to be oven-baked waiting for the Gatwick Express at Victoria.

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When I was at school I was oh so very whimsical. Or so I wish. I think I was most definitely oddball. Sometimes I tried as hard as I could to kick a ball against a wall with the other kids in the rugby team, but I was, against my wishes almost, naturally selected to be an inbetweener. We weren’t cool but neither were we the kid with the greenish glow to his skin, if you could see it beneath the even greener smog that poisoned any within a ten foot radius.

I remember, back when girls were finally done carving up the male population, they chanced upon us. The raggedy bunch. We’d all just purchased American Idiot. Overnight we were political. We hated George Bush even if half of us didn’t really know why. 

My one mate decided that - for reasons unknown to all - a cap, not unlike a fisherman’s hat, was the best way to attract women. He offset the winter-season-carp-specialist with the not-near-a-school-please-mister raincoat that only revealed ankles barely covered with stubbled leg hair. I think he wore trainers. Remarkably, it seemed to work.

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This morning I finally noticed something; the extreme mistrust that anyone with a seat available next to them greets a newcomer to the upper deck of a bus. Everyone eyes up the options. They second guess the choice this invader will make and calculate the exact proportion of the seat to cover with their arse, their bag, their small dog, their shotgun and grenade belt. Nobody likes a newbie.

On the bus this morning, there was actually a dog. Not the sort of dogs that the old women bring on, slow and cumbersome like a weighty uncle, but a fighter. This dog wanted blood. It hunted seats, even those that were occupied.

When all seats were full up and I got off scot free with a small child next to me (only able to occupy about 40% of the whole chair), the dog’s chair was questioned. A woman wanted to sit down and she did not want to play second fiddle to a being with no opposable thumbs. The owner would not back down. This woman would not back down. The chair was Kashmir. It was owned by both, but occupied by neither.

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Sunstroke
A short story about a stroke victim at the end of the world, a postman on fire and a priest who is loving angels instead.

The pad of lined paper clattered off the metal framework of the chair as it tumbled. It took all of Gerald’s enthusiasm with it. He slipped down into the chair in the same way he had done for three years. He missed writing with his right hand.

He held the pencil weakly in his left, and prodded at his right. Nothing. It was slung limply across the arm rest, atrophied and motionless as he had got accustomed to. A bead of saliva trickled out of the right side of his mouth onto his collar to join more of it’s kind that had been making the jump since he woke up.

Gerald had finally admitted that the stroke had got the better of him. He would never write legibly again. At the chair’s base, the paper flirted with the idea of coming detached from the pad and flapped about the spine, spilling Gerald’s private attempts at writing his address into the sunrise. 

The sun was so much larger in the sky than it had been six months before. The news had said that that would happen. Temperatures had soared recently; 57 degrees celsius two weeks ago on Christmas Day. A new record. 

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If you are unlucky enough to surf through the Yahoo lifestyle & dating sections, you will find some truly laugh out loud ‘articles’. I often see them on the yahoo homepage and become intrigued by some of their claims. However much I enjoyed the article on how good sperm is as a face cream, I cannot get over the 10 deceptive ways of getting a bloke into the sack. Surely you need some sort of romance and spontaneity rather than extensive planning and clinical executive skills.

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I wonder how many people still watch Takeshi’s Castle? I want to meet them. I want to tell them that someone does win the prize money, that their water gun cuts a hole in Count Takeshi’s ring and then, triumphantly, they climb to the summit to claim TV’s most disputed prize. ‘Oh it’s only a million yen, that’s like £4.50’. 

My mom hated me watching it, I think. She’d get up and leave after just three minutes of searching for the remote that I’d skilfully disguised as a callous the length of my foot, stuffed into my sock.

There is genuine entertainment in watching people get hurt. It’s tried and tested. Takeshi’s Castle was just the 1989 reinvention of the stocks. Less rotten fruit and more Japanese pig swill. It was just a tame version of being hung, drawn and quartered, on a bridge, over a net, holding a football painted with gold.

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There is an emptiness about post exams. You feel like you’re so full up, about to burst, waiting for someone to tug your ring pull free and let your being fizz up from inside. 

But there’s nothing. Just a calmness, a sereneness, a hole where the work once was.

Today is the first day I haven’t seen 6.54am for over a week, it’s the first day I haven’t seen 7.25am for over two months and I miss them. Those numbers that I watched ebb away signposted my steps forward to a date I never wanted to encounter. As they left, I felt parts of me float off beside them.

I was contemplating earlier, after all these weeks of being so intimate with my notes, whether I shouldn’t dip into them again. One last hurrah, as it were. I spent so much time with them, learning from them, that life without them seems almost implausible. 

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As I age I become increasingly aware of my own shortcomings. I have not curled a free kick into the top right corner in the ninety third minute of a cup final. I have not choreographed the biggest dance craze since Thriller. I have not run away from a responsibility. And sometimes I doubt I ever will.

I realised earlier that I have not been to the beach for two years. That was the last time I felt young. Compared to the wrinkled skin of the ocean’s surface I am foetal; untainted, unbreathing. The ocean is a reassuring, parental limb. It thinks for me. It transmutes positive energy. It is the only thing that is cold to the touch, but warm to the memory.

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#1: If a bookend is called a bookend, what’s the one on the other side called?

#2: What is a wonderwall? Show your working.

#3: Who decided north was north and south was south? Who had the last word on world orientation?

#4.a: Why did it take so long to invent cookie crisp?
#4.b: Why did the wheel come before the cookie? The last thing I want to eat is a wheel. Although this would cause trouble for the Wagon Wheel…
#4.c: What would a Wagon Wheel be called if the discussed alternative chain of events had occurred?

#5: Does a bear shit in the woods only because the pope is catholic?

#6: Who cuts Liam Gallagher’s hair? Paul Weller or a squashed lemur?

#7: At what point does a puddle become a pool? Include units where possible.

#8: Snooker. Why?

#9.a: Why is a Big Mac called a Big Mac and not a Big Donald?
#9.b.i: Is there a market for a duck version of the Big Mac?
#9.b.ii: Could this be called a Big Donald?

#10: Is the right answer always the right answer or should it just be left blank?

I was an accident prone little boy; I was as likely to be hanging from the climbing frame as I was to be hurtling ground-bound from it, expecting yet another afternoon of hospital waiting room induced wall-scratching.

I have a scar on my left wrist that is nose shaped. Ever since it’s conception in the late nineties I have doodled and re-doodled faces around it, some human, some alien. I used to find it a comforting release because it was an outpouring of imagination, to let some part of the brainforest of undiscovered treats seep out into the real world. It may not have been a humanised otter in a pinstripe waistcoat but, for me, it was the next best thing.

I remember it’s birth into the world - the scar, not the otter - like it was yesterday. It coincided with the first time I ever ate a McCoys crisp. It was ready salted. It tasted like another important milestone. I gnawed on it ridge by ridge, leaning up against the bar of a country pub with my parents.

I think it was a Sunday, because there were other kids there, lots of them and under-protective parents letting them run feral in the pub garden. Along the back wall of the garden was a thickening of shrubbery; the most hirsute of pastures for miles around. The boys clambered about within it, hiding from the shrieking of the girls sliding down the lowest of the slides. They weren’t man enough to take the top one. That was boys territory. 

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Step #1: Take map in hand and embrace it with arms stretched and locked as if you are first to cross the finish line in the race of your life. Take your personal best and sweep the map off it’s feet until it looks up at your nose and inhales it to show you how it’s done. It knows the steps needed for victory. The map leads and you follow it.

Step #2: Left-right fidget and flick as you orientate yourself about the ballroom floor of concrete paving slabs and sashay around decade old chewing gum, glueing itself to the soles of your feet like the childhood friend you never quite got rid of. Line your N with the map’s N and let your eyes dart south to smoulder in the desert of your desertion. Convince them of the romance in your tango.

Step #3: Let the map slip to just the one hand and hold it at arm’s length as if you are willing it to leave. You are it’s father and it is the under-performing middle child that you loathe yourself for hating. This can’t go on, and even though you’ve blown it all out of proportion you must grasp the scale of life’s map to come to some semblance of togetherness.

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Humdrum Conundrums
This started life as a piece about an obsessional Countdown viewer and ended up that way too. Along the way some other stuff happened. If you actually read all of it, I will be impressed and award you three house points which are (probably not) refundable on Pottermore.

My hand was crushed under Aislinn’s side. It clutched at the pleated pillowcase in an attempt to break out of it’s memory foam tomb. It failed. Purple and senseless, it succumbed. I pondered life after amputation. I imagined what it would be like to have a claw.

I had to rouse her, although I didn’t want to. I was enjoying the sound of my internal voice as it whirred, clicking through cogs and pulling on chains, telling me everything I knew about a band my little brother had told me about. He said they were ace. I was determined that that would be the day that I finally looked them up.

I had to make a decision, my hand or my mind? It felt like it should be more complicated, as if it should have peculiar facets that I needed to take into consideration. I guess I wasn’t too fond of my right hand, so maybe I could live without it? It had a scar running from the ring finger to about a third of the way back down to my wrist. It was an old football injury. I’d shown a boot the back of my hand and, unsurprisingly, I’d come off worse. I remember the blood running down the grass blades into the stud divots. The nurse thought I would only need four stitches. I’d needed ten.

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As I reach that time of life where I desperately wish someone wanted to play sport with me, I often consider which sport I so dearly wish they would proposition me with. When I was at school I played football and rugby. Rugby is a bit like football, in that all participants are generally running after a ball. However, rugby is different to football in a number of respects.

First and foremost, in rugby there are no rugs or bees, but in football there is a foot and there is a ball. This would lead you, correctly, to believe that rugby is a far more complicated sport because the instruction manual is not just the name. Football is the process of kicking a ball with your foot, while rugby is not the process of making a carpet device out of an endangered species. For those of you interested, the sport of making carpets out of endangered species is called colonialism, and was last won by Great Britain. It is because of this and this alone, that we do not win the eurovision song contest. We were better at skinning their animals, and the Estonians despise us for it.

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My breathing is so short that it would be knee high to a Hobbit. Returning - like the titular king - to Middle Earth for another simile, my life is as sheltered as Bilbo’s had once been before he had that urge to go travelling.

I suffer from hayfever. I say suffer when maybe it seems like a rather trivial affliction. But it is no laughing matter, rather it is a coughing one. I am indeed allergic to tree-love. My particular version of hayfever is actually quite bad. You’ve seen the criers (merely part-timers), you’ve seen the sniffers (what a sham!) and you’ve seen the kids who sit inside fearful that the dreaded pollen will get them. I, however, seem to be quite reluctant to sniff, to cry, or to sit inside. I seem far more keen on total respiratory collapse.

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I’d like to say I’m Mr Popular. Sadly, I’m Mr Cleaver. You can’t change your parents but you can change your social fayre. However, of those people able to wander equally amongst all crowds that appeal to them - a bit like hi-tops (who doesn’t love a hi-top?) - there is not a space reserved for me in their ranks.

I’ve hosted impressive parties before, some permitted, some not, some involving sumo wrestler outfits and others involving my brother’s unconscious body, but there have been evenings I hosted that have fizzled out into nothing but a broken man, listening to a broken record that just breaks my heart over and over again.

These are the squibs, the failures, the relegated memories that no-one holds on to but me. I’m a bad-memory hoarder. They shuffle for prominence in the locked-shut closet of woe alongside a similarly forgotten wardrobe entitled financial ruin. I keep them behind a padlock in the safehouse in my head. I seldom visit, but when I do I laugh at the signs on the door to discourage eager entrees, only to be torn down and replaced by blu tac marked paint and regretful footfall through to the cable television by 10.30pm.

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