No stranger to the P45, Dan W.Griffin [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

to set-out on such a project again. But like many things past and like many more to come, I would yet again be quite wrong about that.


Postage stamps and beans. And a handful of cress

If I was to be encouraged to list each of the things that I am actually any good at, it would be necessary to provide me with a postage stamp on which to compose that list. Of course, it wouldn’t be a postage stamp known of this world: because it would instead be one used by the Nanomen, the little people of Nanoland whose messages are so microscopically minute that they’re only just barely visible to the mystical Gnum-gnum beast, a creature with sight so sharp that were it ever possible to develop a digital camera as good it would have a squillion pixels and be about the size of a headache. With the list dictated (by me) to the cousin of the Gnum-gnum beast, a badger-like being named Whoops, it would then be transported through the ether in the wallet of an invisible bat, and read by the Gnum-gnum beast before crumpets. With a bark the sound of fog he’d read the list aloud for the Nanomen to shrug their shoulders, grumble a harmonious lack of interest, and then melt into the floor. Er... At least, I think it would be something like that.
Anyway.
One of things that would be on that list is that I tend to be quite good at anxiety-related episodes of self-doubt and paranoia. Another would be that I’m particularly proficient in getting drunk and failing to be in the slightest bit appealing to anyone. There wouldn’t be even the remotest mention of this mangled sludge of words and stuff (see Book), but I’m pretty competent at wasting time and I’m also rather good at making sandwiches. Actually, I’m really very good at doing that.
Dear Reader, please accept my sincerest apologies for that brief drenching in überpiffle and gobbledegook. It’s the smoke and nonsense of a Friday. I’ll now try to make some sense...
Today I was, in fact, inspired by a sandwich. It was for sale in a café in Bath, a cafe in which I sat cowering from the rain pounding the pavement outside with all the ferocity of a bag of angry crickets. My almost-tweed jacket doesn’t like the rain. It fluffs like a Jackson Five haircut and makes me feel as though I look like a pimp, even though I probably don’t. Anyway. I noticed the sandwich not simply by the fact that it was a sandwich (which it was) but by its name. It was called ‘The Bogart’ and I leaned in towards it to take a closer look. ‘That’s got to be one cool sandwich,’ I thought, somewhat inappropriately and with flawless idiocy. Only, it wasn’t a cool sandwich at all. It was instead a vegan sandwich with beans and organic grass and it got me thinking about the movies. I thought about Dear Old Humph and how mortified he’d be with his name being attached to a sandwich produced primarily for a bunch of pale-faced hedgemonkeys. And then I thought that I was taking this ‘being inspired by a sandwich’ thing a bit too far and decided to battle the wind and the rain instead. I stood up, shuffled to the door and braced myself. I buried my hands into my pockets and my chin into my neck and I thought: One, two, three... It’s as easy as A, B, C…
Er... sorry again about that.
Oddly, not only did my discovery of The Bogart encourage my brain to flood with thoughts of the movies and a whole bunch of other nonsense (together with thoughts of the Gnum-gnum beast and his cousin named Whoops), somewhere floating on the surface of the frothy gloop of those thoughts was also one about my getting a job in a sandwich factory. It was a job that I’d gotten because I was absolutely broke and up to my eyeballs in debt. It was a job that I took with the conscious thought that I would be able to last it out at least a few weeks. Not surprisingly, I was quite wrong about that.
Of the many employment experiences that I have had the type that I find more unpleasant than any other is that requiring me to work in any kind of factory or production environment. Experience has shown me that factory work is only slightly less unpleasant than having one’s tongue nailed to a wall and so, sure enough, signing up to a temping agency in Trowbridge I was immediately offered a job in one. Because things were becoming rather desperate, and the idea of nailing my tongue to anything wasn’t a particularly good one, I accepted the job with my usual reluctance. I’d probably have had more fun had I spent a week trying to Blu-tack a frying pan to a horse. Or so I’d imagine.
Anyhoo... In my observations there exist three types of sandwich production facility:
The most obvious is production in one’s home where one can place anything one has available between slabs of bread the size of the Gideon’s Bible. Next, there are sandwich shops where one’s filling of choice is shovelled into a freshly-baked torpedo roll, sometimes to the degree that the second you take a bite the filling falls out the other end and into your lap. The third type of sandwich production facility is one that maximises production efficiency by making sandwiches on a production line. It does this in what is known as a ‘sandwich factory’. Sandwich factories are staffed by sandwich-making zombies. A sandwich factory staffed by sandwich-making zombies operates thus:
A team of zombies stand at a conveyor belt and for hours on-end the first pastes a miniscule amount of butter onto slivers of bread. The second along the line will then dollop a pile of egg mayonnaise onto the bread and the next will dump a handful of cress onto it too. Another zombie will then paste another miniscule amount of butter onto another sliver of bread and yet another zombie will place said sliver of bread on top to complete the sandwich. One more zombie will place the sandwich into a packet, one more will attach the label, and finally a whole team of zombies will deliver the packets to Littlewoods. I lasted less than ninety minutes in this job.
Quite simply, I was bored stiff within ten minutes and so being me (as I am) I determined that I had to come up with some way to entertain myself. I was on ‘egg-mayonnaise’ duty and so every two or three slices of bread that passed me by I ‘forgot’ to add the egg mayonnaise. Since each of my co-workers were so zombied-out no one noticed my little game. And for that hour and twenty minutes before I could bare it no more and fled I simply entertained myself with the thought that at some time in the next day or so someone would walk into Littlewoods for an egg sandwich, chomp into a handful of cress and be thoroughly disappointed indeed.

Biscuits, bullets, Monster Munch and Yop

Many years ago I had a dream that I was in a war torn, Balkan-like country. I was running along a potholed track and as I began to round a corner I was suddenly aware of thunderous engines and the squeals of caterpillar tracks up ahead. I took this as something to be cautious of and immediately launched myself behind a burnt-out vehicle, hiding from the oncoming convoy by diving into a puddle of mud. As I peered through the rusting frame of what was once the rear window (of said burnt-out vehicle) I noted a convoy of a couple of armoured personnel carriers followed by two or three troop-carrying trucks. I waited a few moments and with the coast clear continued on in the same direction as before.
I remember that to my left was a fairly steep mountainside sparsely covered with tall evergreen trees. Patches of white visible through the scrub may have been snow, but because it was sunny and fairly warm those patches may equally have been outcrops of chalk-based rock. I think it was about lunchtime because I was hungry. It may also have been a Wednesday... but I may have been wrong about that.
Anyway...
It must have precipitated heavily in recent days because I remember that the track consisted of a great deal of gloopy mud. It was a bit like the Glastonbury Festival, but for the lack of Predatoresque drug-pushers and hedgemonkeys waving joss sticks in the air and chanting about organic beans, and there were deep furrows and grooves formed by the wheels and tracks of all the military vehicles en route to blow things up. To my right was a not-so-steep ravine and in its floor a small river winding its way through rocks. Trees and bushes scattered the slope together with some boulders and perhaps the odd shrub. I can’t recall whether anything was on the other side of the ravine but there may have been something... although on the other hand, this being a dream there may equally have been nothing there too. No matter. After running for a short time along this muddy track I arrived at a junction in the road at the same time as a second convoy rumbled like thunder into view.
For one reason or another I felt completely at ease with this particular convoy as a soldier manning a gun-turret of a tank asked if I had recently seen any other vehicles. I told him that I had, because I had, at which point he yelled something incomprehensible over his shoulder toward another soldier in an armoured personnel carrier behind, and with a roar of engines, each one coughing a cloud of thick grey smoke from its exhaust into the air, they set off in pursuit. I decided to take