Spring Club Offers

I'm defending the house against furniture. The place I once ordered some from now seems to think I won't last a week without buying some more. Like it's bread. To entice me into another purchase of a lifetime they send me pictures of rooms it looks like no-one lives in. Small fluorescent paragraphs outline the tragedies associated with failure to spend. I didn't buy this sturdy and fragrant end table and now I have tuberculosis. / There's nothing made of oak in my kitchen, I have completely lost my mind.

Something At Least

The underpass has been turned into a bath, with cement soup for water and just enough room between its surface and the tunnel ceilings for a human head to gasp and remember its swimming lessons, when Mrs Fuck Knows kicked it into the leisure centre swimming pool on primary school afternoons, for it to do spluttering widths in the shallow end while at the bottom of the other end the kids with gills were having underwater conversations before wrapping their mouths around black bricks and shooting into the air like buttered dolphins, and landing, on their hands, on the edge of the diving board.
Fill the pool with cement, Mrs Fuck Knows, I used to think, and we'll see who can follow your strict incomprehensible instructions.
So far nobody's surfaced in this particular bath. The lack of fanfare surrounding the project makes me doubt that it's art. But it follows on from all that fog that hovered around one end of a footbridge a couple of weeks ago, which I didn't see but was certainly a big fan of. I'd go as far as saying that that was the best thing I haven't seen all year. Its only flaw, which no-one seems to be willing to talk about, is that it didn't appear on any of my ways to and from work. Unlike Giant Public Bath of Wet Cement. Also unlike Never Open Bagels and The Pickled Athlete, though neither of these are really works of art, which isn't to say they're not putting any effort in.

But Does It Float

I found a desk on the street. The pavement. In the rain. It had a few dozen eye-sized puddles on top, but smelled of lasting relationships. There's a small space in our house that's had the absence of a desk in it for months. But the ones in the local furniture shops wouldn't fit and Ikea is a disappointment factory disguised as an agitation encouragement playground. So I've been walking round thinking: I'll wait til I find one on the street. Or the pavement. I don't lack ambition. I got help to get it back and got it back and wiped it down and cleared the soggy leaves off the bottom shelf and slapped it around a bit to see if it'd confess anything. It didn't. What if it'd caught a disease that wooden things get when they spend who knows how long in the rain on the corner in full view of the post office or someone'd say it's theirs and in the rain on the corner in full view of the post office is where they keep it or it'd been gushed against by a police horse. But the internet bellowed concern yourself with something else or put up a sign that says found: desk.

Ill Bill It Isn't

Could you do us a thing they said, and I did them a thing and they put it up in English and Greek and you can go here and look at it and the other words and photos they've got all having a go at each other in capsules politely. It's only two lines. Afterwards I pasted the Greek version into Google and made it go into English and it was arguably better than the entire output of James Joyce, but too late for that now it's been chiselled into the internet. Cheap shortcut to a snazzy ha-ha though.

Abundance Somehow Crikey Furtado

The phone won. In the shop I'd gone for the cheapest but in the queue I looked at the shelves again and saw, for not much more, something-something free music and something-something touchscreen. And I thought I like music and I like touching screens. And who's next please and I pointed at it and said that sounds good, hurry up.
But the free music was like you call up your friend and she puts her phone next to the stereo of a deaf horse that doesn't have the internet.
And the touchscreen was like you try to make an omelette and end up snapping your thumbs.
And I can't destroy it because of the Congo in that documentary.
So there's a lesson there in making things do no more than they should.

A Five and Five Ones

Bad Liebenzell is a valley village full of flowers, where walkers carry a spear in each hand and pairs of pumpkins live on benches with no explanations, a large one next to a tiny one, all down the street and no-one sits down next to them.
Halloween enthusiasm stretched out to the border, where just inside the first service station entrance stood sixty witches, all with the same mouth-agape gleeface, some three feet tall and some three inches small, rubber or plastic and welcome to Germany. Oktoberfest was nowhere in sight, but Lidl is rife and cheap beer cheaper than in France, and if you take the bottles back you can put them in the whirring laser-tunnel that eats empties and kerchings a voucher into your shaking hand, which, if you can hold onto it, can be spent exactly like money, on delicious seasonal goods like beer and wine. Why isn't there one of these in every supermarket in England?