Eight Random Facts

I've been "tagged" by Reading The Signs and Mellifluous Dark. (thank you, both, that was nice of you.)

Here are the "Rules":

(Note from Signs: Please adapt or ignore as you see fit).

1. Let others know who tagged you.

2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.

3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.

4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them.

Right.

1) My (maternal) grandfather worked in counter espionage during WW2. He was a very good man.

2) My (paternal) grandmother was an actress and staggeringly efficient at being a hypochondriac. She would often talk in tongues, sometimes to the family dog. (why not?)

3) My mum (before she retired) was a clinical psychologist.

4) My dad (before he went to jail) was a criminal.

5) I honestly believe that my dog is more attractive than most people's children..........

and she certainly has better table manners. That isn’t a joke, she really does. She will sit on the chair, even after she has finished her food, and happily wait for me to finish mine. No, this is not something to be encouraged, obviously, and I only let her do it occasionally.

6) My younger sister has written for The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily Mail (for shame) and all the usual suspects. Now she does something with slebs, though. She is an astonishingly gifted little creep, and I feel like telling people that fact. Even strangers.

7) When I was fourteen, I got picked up on a bus by a woman who was thirty-eight. She took me to her flat and totally devoured me, wild, like her life depended on it, completely and loopily crazed. She really just sort of used me dementedly for a three week spell of weirdness - angry, I think, in her own destabilising lusts. I know what she did was wrong, but I don’t care, because I liked it and thought she was lovely as well as being a total ride. I was still exchanging Christmas cards with her right up until a couple of years ago.

8) I used to have a guinea pig called Grassy.

These are the eight people I'm going to tag. Two of them don't have blogs, but we'll see how it goes:

Nicola - blogger profile/00112821049194722614

Political Umpire (still the very best - I love him and want to have his children)

Danielle De Barbarac - profile/03238002356465013397

stacy68.blogspot.com

Benticore - aeshemafury.blogspot.com

Claud (you know who you are - come back, come back)

And 2 others, of course.

She may worry her tongue smells of lemon .....who knows?

My dog has started to lick my legs as I take a shower in the morning. I don't really mind too much, I suppose, but I have to shoo her away at the end so that I can properly clean myself. She just stands there getting drookit and laps away like a loon. Happy as a bastard, really. And I just stand there getting drookit, not so happy, worrying if my legs smell like dog. They don't. I know this, because I asked my girlfriend to check.

My dog is A Very Good Thing and that's just a fact. My girlfriend is also A Very Good Thing because she will sniff my legs to see if they smell like dog. Who actually does that?

"I don't like this, I don't like this....."

Damn. I seem to have fallen behind. It’s pretty brilliant the way that time just ticks on, though, thrillingly aloof to its frozen inhabitants. You may fondly believe that you’ve come to a standstill - but you’ve not, because you can’t. Result.

You know how sometimes you just sort of slip into a trance and find yourself talking to the colour green, say, in a fantastically complex language that sounds a lot like music, but isn’t? And you know how this language is lost to you just the minute you start to hear the distressed voices of others asking you if you are okay? Well, time doesn't care about this at all. 

Or if you’ve been doing happy stuff with the outdoors and the wind and dogs and then suddenly things just start to change? Weird, isn’t it? Such a short step from frisbee to a nameless distress and a dreamlike retreat up the stairs. Two hours later and it sort of feels like a good idea to start asking yourself what the fuck you are doing curled in a ball saying the same thing over and over again. 

That sort of thing, you know? Anyway, time doesn't give two hoots about any of that - and nor should it. All attempts to temporarily opt out of time are completely ignored by time itself. What a ruthless bastard. Time is maybe a wee bit like some poorly drawn cad from a Jilly Cooper novel who treats women badly and yet somehow leaves them wanting more. We’re all women now.

No, time is nothing like a lusty cad from a Jilly Cooper novel and I'm not entirely sure why I just said that it was. Plus, not only is the analogy rubbish – it doesn’t hold anywhere near true for the diseased. Time is our friend, not our tormentor, because it relentlessly takes us towards the place we so bitterly long to be. Far, far and still further away from the teeming hordes of potential disasters, with their careless lies, genocides, dodgy shoes and limitless capacity to wound. Plus some other stuff, of course. But yes, you.

There is no sense to this. None at all. So very far from being edifying that it perfectly takes the breath away, there is no honour here. How pathetically obscene to watch one's own mind racing in on itself, frantically scrambling for options, lurching to every outpost and finding dead ends. And then, with a relentless lack of originality, heading towards the opening at the end. It just feels so warm and soothing, though, to reach out to something tangible, terminal, terrible and real. It makes it feel okay to know that this option exists. It just does. Only it doesn't.

Each time feels a little bit closer - no point in pretending otherwise. Such a searing and filthily seductive temptation, whispering incessantly of how things could be. Goading, beseeching, demanding, insisting that this is the way. I’m trying not to feel embarrassed, but it’s a bit difficult.

Look, don’t be searching for reasons to hurt yourself, because they’ll find you soon enough, anyway. Trust me, it’s true.