I slept fitfully last night, and I lay the blame at the foot of the British Summer Time. The clocks popped forward to the tune of one hour on Sunday morning, and my body clock has been all to cock since.
When I lay down my weary noggin last night, the old BC looked askance at me and said "It's a bit early, isn't it?" As far as he was concerned of course it was twenty to eleven, not twenty to midnight. My body clock, for reasons I don't fully understand, as well as keeping time, has charge of the thermostat. When I drag him to bed early, he reaps his revenge by turning the heat up until it's impossible to drop off.
So I spent the next 3 or 4 hours sweating, scratching and getting zero nutritional value from my daily rest. Sleep gurus (you know the sort - impossibly optimistic life-coaches with no actual friends, only acquaintances who assuage their justified feelings of inadequacy by writing books with titles like "Grin your blubber-free in two weeks") suggest that in situations like this one should get up and creosote the budgie or something. To which I respectfully say "bollocks". I won't give in that easily. Is that what made Britain great? I shall dig my heels in and may the best man win.
So, anyway, I was catatonic this morning.
In other news, I'm a massive Vivian Stanshall fan. Yes, he was mental, but in a endearing and very rational way. Allow me to explain. Vivian was a precocious child and very quickly realised that that the society he had been born into was at best dull and at worst an asylum run by its inmates. Anyone who even for a moment take bourgeois mores seriously is not possessed of a rational mind.
It doesn't matter which particular metaphysic you hang your hat on either. If you're religious, why would you care about anything on a material plane? Money, position, the respect of one's peers: they mean nothing. And if you hold that the universe has no prime mover, and that life is merely a happy confluence of accident and chemical potential, why would you give a shite about the size of your back garden? You have, by chance, been deposited into a sentient form, and are clinging to the surface of a small planet for what is after all merely a cosmic heartbeat. You might as well enjoy yourself. God knows, it'll be over soon enough (no pun intended, Your Highness.)
So, anyways, it turns out that Vivian spent the first 10 years of his remarkable life in a house about 400 yards from my own. How could I not have know this? The council in my borough, a shameless and incompetent cabal of vaguely left-wing small businessmen on the make, haven't put a plaque up or thought to mention the fact in their abundant literature. What an outrageous oversight.
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