Wednesday, 22 July 2015

#113 Chairs

I ain't chose blogging. Blogging chose me.

This weekend marked a turning point in history. As well as making it to thirty one, I also discovered that my speakers, which I picked up for about £50 fourteen years ago, were old enough to look and indeed be "retro" so they're now stacked on top of my chest of drawers, near to an old but sturdy metal chair that I got from a charity shop. Hey presto, part of my room looks cheap and crappy. Cheap and crappy is all the rage at the moment. If you like that sort of thing. I do. Because it's cheap.

In the war against humanity, Keira, one of the animal kingdom's few remaining combatants, today ordered herself to deploy a homemade biological weapon on seat of Liz's wheelie chair. The chair, which had become, from the usual cat hair and furballs, too gross to sit on many weeks ago, was now completely toxic. It's pretty normal for Keira to launch small scale attacks from time to time but rarely is it where she sleeps. Liz suggested that maybe she needed the bathroom but was too lazy to get up. Another of my housemates has been known to articulate such a feeling from time to time but has, at least so far, always gotten up in the end.

#112 The tube

"Please carry a bottle of water when travelling". Boris Johnson believes in staying healthy and hydrated when you're out and about. I believe that somewhere there's a person so incompetent that they've passed out because he hasn't added "and occasionally drink some" to the message.

What would be more helpful, is a sign that says "The edge of the doors to this carriage are filthy and if you try to squeeze in at the last second and they shut on you, the grease will never come off your shirt".

At one point in my life, I used to take the central line across the city from East to West two or three times a week, usually carrying some unusual cargo but that's another story. If the carriage was quiet, it was possible to stand the whole way without needing to hold on to anything. I wonder what the wobbliest railway line in the world is.

Saturday, 11 July 2015

#111 Books

Books seem to be ways of storing information externally so that it can be recalled and shared, a bit like memories. I'm not really that good at remembering information but I do enjoy writing it down. The last time I read a non-fiction book, I wrote down all of the key messages on one sheet of paper and grouped them into three categories. 

What I might do next is re-read another nine non-fiction books that I've read over the last few years and do the same with them. Without doing this, I might be able to say their titles but would really struggle to tell you what they were about.

Apparently there are about 130 million books in the world. So it's fair to say that nobody has read them all. Apparently there's also an old lady in Scotland that has read up to twelve books a week since 1945 and has read about 25,000 books in total. The article about her focussed on things like the town she lived in and the fact that she also likes to watch TV and read newspapers rather than how she felt about having read so much.