Tactical Largesse Disfigurement

You'll see it from the train, they said. But not if you're not looking, or looking out the wrong side, or looking at the crossword trying to think of the port in Norway you know you don't know but maybe if you stare at the gaps they'll fill themselves in and you can declare a pre-nine a.m. triumph, to the crossword authorities, who do exist, but haven't so far been located.
It was found, it was a training hub, we were trained in it in the art of customer service peacekeeping. We had acronyms installed in us. We answered a survey and discovered our conflict profiles. We stood round a masking tape triangle with passive, assertive, and aggressive as its three points, and its interior halved horizontally into emotional and rational, with the rational half being the one next to the assertive tip and the emotional half, is everyone getting this, next to the passive-aggressive bottom line. Now stand in it to indicate how you are at work. Now stand in it to indicate how you are at home. So we each stood in it twice and were nodded at. The urges to roll around howling in the emotional half, to indicate at work, and to chew up the A4 rational sign, spit it out and kick it through the window, for at home, were entirely resisted.

Bit Steep For An Afternoon

An astonished man tractored a trailer full of shredded umbrellas through the park. I thought about asking him where they were all going to end up, and thought about him replying fuck knows or the bin, and not a rickety and hazardous public art installation that really delves into the bonce-envelope shared by climate change and futility. I watched him trundle through the trees, hopping off the tractor every twelve seconds to throw another bunch of knackered metal twigs in the trailer, and turn the corner into somewhere I had no interest in imagining.
The cinema showed a grubby and redemptionless frolic through a popular holiday destination. I saw it, didn't fathom it, and didn't mind not fathoming it.
The sun couldn't stop itself, and the thick socks necessary yesterday were by lunchtime moist and foolish.

Up Sticks

In the West Wing episode called Shibboleth, the word shibboleth is introduced by the president, explained by the president, and spoken at the president by a man who's been dragged from a river of screaming cheese into the big office, so they can check whether he's the type of man who'd know about and be able to pronounce the word shibboleth, and therefore be worthy of receiving help, by hearing him almost not say it, but then, after a kind of bollock-churningly inevitable hesitation, say it. Rumour has it this episode was written by a man being hassled into agony on deadline day by the chuckling ghost of his English teacher. And your trust in the until-then much-better-than-good-enough quality of the writing is replaced by a worry, with fifteen and a half more seasons to go, that the whole thing might end in a gutter of songs and hugs and star-spangled handshakes. But it improves.