Lughole Input Highlights Fri-Sun

Wind, mainly, like truckfuls of gravel being poured into the ears. But also a football stadium, either angry or delighted, roaring half a mile away into a next-door garden playlist that threatened Hotel California but didn't deliver. And a man whose brewery we invaded using the full phrase "the new north american-style hoppy beers" every time he compared his own (delicious) drinks to those (domineering) others. He had a wardbrode nailed to the wall three feet off the floor. And closed doors opened and banged themselves into splinters.

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.

Fat Together

This didn’t quite happen: I was the café’s only customer, sat at the counter seducing a bacon sandwich looking out the window and reading a book while the waitress sat beside me tutting at the Times quick crossword. My book was an old Russian novel and I was hoping the waitress would notice the fuss I wasn’t making about my impeccable taste, so I could then tell her it only cost fifty pence and establish that along with my heroic lack of look-at-me I also know about how far money can go. She exhaled through her nostrils and looked up from the crossword and said I’m not good at these things. I smiled and said sometimes they’re a bastard. I didn’t ask her whereabouts in Australia she was from. 

We stared out the window and I conquered the sandwich and watched legs and shoulderblades go past outside and time stand still in the cold and cockroachy prison in the book. She said moustaches in the summer must be bothersome. I thought about telling her how I used to have a moustache but it was joined to a beard because everyone had a hairy face because we were in the mountains near enough and if you shave in the mountains your priorities are reckless, you’re not going to be able to wrestle any goats or worry any snakes with a soft bald mouth, are you, mate, but I just said yeah. 

Something two foot tall fell from above the window and shattered on the pavement. It was a potted house plant. Soil rolled into the gutter. The waitress tsked and said it’s the flat upstairs, they’re really spacey. It probably frightened one of them and they kicked it out. We watched legs avoid tripping over it. Or maybe, she said, it just got sick of its owners.

Or Ignore It

I went south on a train recently. I wanted to see the sun. I hear it's nice. I spotted it after the train left Stoke. It was in the sky, doing what I believe is called "shining down". The journey was from then on very agreeable, except that every train station displayed pictures of Iggy Pop, selling insurance against a purple background, everywhere. And they made me wish for a national insurance policy that prevents your icons appearing on TV and on poster and in paper to sell you something. It could be called The National Whip-Round For Pioneers, or something snappier, and nobody would object, because we can now use The Iggies as an example of the preventable horrors.
Written next to his face in yellow is a slogan, different depending on the poster. I've forgotten what they are and am unwilling to look them up. But I was disappointed to not see one that'd been corrected with things he actually said in a good year, like 1977. I'm pretty sure most Iggy fans don't own cans of spray paint. I don't but it might be worth getting one to write the following next to his face:

I'm not sorry I was ill. Everyone gets ill sometimes and I was ill one evening and as I felt I was going to vomit anyway I thought I may as well do it with some style.

What sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius...myself.

Have you ever felt like that? When you just couldn't feel anything and you didn't want to either?

I feel very strongly about what I do...and it's not all that good.

What did Christ really do? He hung out with hard-drinking fishermen.

What do we do with a life of work? Face it in the morning.

Dimly Remembered Kitchens

It's a new thing in the Sunday fluff-and-horror supplements. Always feel disgusted after reading a Sunday paper but still do it once or twice a month.

one:
It had a hard wooden bench and the back door had a seven-foot drop outside it, probably, and I rode my trike off it once and that's my first memory. I peeled potatoes for the first time ever and sliced into my thumb but instead of going to hospital I had a Barney Rubble yoghurt.

two or three:
Peanut butter on toast with extra salt, why not, let's go nuts. Dry spaghetti from a jar on top of the fridge-freezer.

six or seven:
One hand in my pocket and cooking pancakes with the other, spectators deemed it a bit casual. Can't remember if they were any good.

four or five years later:
It had two ovens and twelve cupboards and one morning it was entirely covered in flour.

twenty something:
The ceiling fell in and it was appropriate. A bit of sweeping and carry on. Once and once only a poker night. A lot of drunken afternoons with whatever's left for lunch.

nearly thirty:
Freezing and narrow with the toilet at one end and a fridge full of guidelines. Separate vegetarian cutlery, fags on the back step, cheese on toast.

largest:
In work fifteen minutes early because the bastard never behaved. Very long matches and ninety nine for breakfast and on a Sunday they all turn up at eight fifty five expecting two sausages each.

bedsit:
Impossible to sleep while there's an oven in the same room. I was only visiting.

tennis tournament:
Sky sports eat heartily. We should've given them a trough. Washing up and a skin condition.

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Other one-page features to look out for in the coming months (not the ones that've just passed) include: My Marmite Face, Tragedies That Didn't Bother Me, What I Think About The Moon, The Longest I Have Gone Without Washing, and My Favourite Grey Things.