Friday 12 September 2008

God Gave Me A Banana

God gave me a banana. Of course, I don’t mean that he gave me bananas, per se, though if you swing your hips to that whole creationist rap, you might well believe it. In which case, he gave us bees, birds, bananas, and that Billy Blanks character who’s to blame for Judy’s slipped disk. Today, however, God was also the reason why I found myself possessing a banana. I emerged from Picadilly Station to find a member of His lot doling out free fruit to commuters. You might wonder why they were giving them to people in full time employment, rather than the poor, but as they say: God works in mysterious ways, which is this case also involved a little brown paper bag containing an apple and cranberry Fusseli bar (didn't he paint 'The Nightmare'?), a teabag, a sachet of sugar, and a badly written pamphlet which asked me, among other things, for ‘an indication of age’. Judy said that I should list my liking for Johnny Mathis and the general state of my teeth.

I don’t know why I’m telling you all this except I’m falling asleep at my keyboard tonight. The truth is that there’s nobody out there reading this. In the past four days, I’ve recieved one hundred and ninety two emails. Of those, one hundred and eighty eight were SPAM. Bigger testicles, more efficient shafts, things to do with ping pong balls: the usual quality communications from the heart of Russia. Two messages were from two separate people expressing their hope that I die because of some joke I once made about Harry Potter. One more email was a more general insult concerning my masculinity because of something I’d once written about Frank Lampard. How my masculinity and Lampard are linked I’m really not sure but there you have the way of the web. Nothing makes sense. The final email was a note from a casual blogging acquaintance, which made up for the one hundred and eighty eight SPAM emails, two death threats, and the more general insult about my masculinity.

All of which explains why, tonight, I’m in no mood to do my usual. Ratting on about showbiz is such a long way from where I am at the moment; worn down by commuting to Manchester. I didn’t get a seat on the train all week, suffered mild claustrophobia (or, let’s be honest, they were really panic attacks) wedged among commuters in the end of the two coach special, packed to the luggage racks with passengers normally cramped in three. This morning, the nausea was particularly strong. My headphones ran out of juice half way through Serge Gainbourg’s ‘Melody Nelson’ album and I ended up listening to the guard chatting to the guy who waves the trains off from the platform. I was still a stop two away from Piccadilly. I had no way to escape.

Perhaps somebody out there can explain duties of the chap with the paddle who waves trains away from the platform. Perhaps you are one of those souls blessed with a paddle whose job it is to wave away trains and you can explain the following snippet of conversation.

Guard: Working this weekend?

Chap With Paddle Who Waves Away The Trains: No, had a good month. £1200 after tax... Then I’ve been promoted to RO4. That’s an extra £300 quid, and it’s been backdated six months. Then there’s our usual 5.4% coming in, so I’m doing alright.

I forget the rest. I was dizzy and sweating like a fat man’s armpit. Depending on your point of view, I either have millions in the bank or £14 to last me to the end of the month. I need to get myself a better job. I need to abandon this futile idea of writing for a living (you know I'm not funny but, bless, you haven't the heart to tell me), change careers, perhaps fleece the uninformed working as a computer programmer. I build blogs. I know code. I know my SQL and PHP. I could earn a fortune in that spiritually vacant life where you fool those people that don’t understand computers by making them think you’re working some kind of tonic. That’s my fault. I don’t see it as magic. I always give my knowledge away for nothing. I’m an utter fool.

I’m rambling again because I’m tired. So tired. No structure to my thought. I’m talking to myself tonight. Nobody’s out there. Not even Nige whose owls I’ve been missing this week, Selena whose legs I think of when I’m lonely on the train, or Elberry whose brain scares me with the thought that it might get bigger and destroy the universe. I've not even been reading Bryan's blog. Much too tired for that. Much too busy eating bad food; 79p cheese and onion pasties from Greggs the Bakers.

And then there's this post. Such a sad, limp way to the end the week. I’ve not written enough, though I launched another blog earlier this week. It gives me a break, something to do. You know where it is or, if you don’t, email me and I’ll tell you where to find it. It might not last – they never do – but I’m not advertising it here. It’s somewhere where I wear a different pair of pants and don’t comb my hair.

God gave me a banana tonight. Judy says I shouldn’t eat it. She says it might be injected with something.

Comes to something when you can’t trust free fresh fruit given to you by God...

7 comments:

Nige said...

I'm here, Dick - and Judy was probably right about that banana. Hope you left the Nightmare bar too...

Lola said...

I'm here too, although you didn't think I was... I admit I've been a bit absent for a while, put it down to bloody Rotherham.

I do think you're funny. Very peculiar indeed. Does that help at all? No?

Anonymous said...

I'm here too... although I cannot offer you a banana :)

Selena Dreamy said...

Here, writ plainly, is the banana of God. Brilliant, sublimely affecting.

In the past four days, I’ve recieved one hundred and ninety two emails. Of those, one hundred and eighty eight were SPAM.

And that is not the half of it. Did you know that 70% of blog visitors stay less than a second. Or that some 15%, on average, remain longer than an hour - presumably because they keep falling asleep. That leaves a potential 15% of your readers - or mine, for that matter - roughly one in seven, who actually stop to read the entire post. Now, I know all about the euphoria inducing power of endorphins, but you cannot redeem 150.000 words of blogging by 15% alone.

It is all very theoretical, as it turns out, and of little use. So there’s only one thing to do, I would suggest. We must howl with the wolves - plainly, it’s that, or not another word...

Anonymous said...

Sadly, 99% of the Elberry brain is devoted to totally useless and often self-sabotaging pursuits...

Michael Dunbar said...

I thought when you said God Gave You A Banana, you'd say, "And I made a Banana Split."

But you didn't.

Uncle Dick Madeley said...

Nige, how could I ever doubt you? Well, I didn't doubt you but you've been away with your cravats and owls lately. I've called around at your shed three times but you weren't even there.

Lola, I know the feeling. Don't know much about Rotherham but I bet it's much like Manchester but with fewer midgets.

Bertas, I'm still wondering what to do with this banana. Do you think it's safe to eat? Such a shame to throw it away.

Selena, I didn't know those facts but they don't surprise me. The British simply aren't a blogging nation. I think it requires too much effort. SPAM on the other hand seems to be our forte. We seem to be masters at setting up a machine to churn out crap all day. I wish HMV would just leave me alone and as for Tesco...

Elberry, my own brain works at about the same rate but with less brain to begin with, I'm at a great disadvantage.

Michael, I can say it if you like. 'And then I made a banana split.' Unfortunately, Judy won't let me eat the banana for fear that it's be dosed with religion. She wants me to say agnostic.