The Writer

'I'm a writer now!' yelled Douglas Patrickson, jumping excitedly out of bed one morning. But before he'd had a chance to knock out so much as a word or two, he developed a case of writer's block so severe that it killed him there and then. So that was the end of that.

A Regrettable Thirst for Sandwiches

One gloomy afternoon, I found myself standing at the front window of the house eating a sandwich and waiting for my mother-in-law to bring the children home. I ate hurriedly and somewhat disgustingly, as I knew that I'd have to rush to the bin to dispose of my snack as soon as I saw them rounding the corner of the street. Any alternative course of action would have been inconceivable, as it wasn't an appropriate time of day to be eating a sandwich.

As it happened, I had ample time to finish the sandwich and, still feeling a little peckish, decided to risk making myself another one.

It later transpired that my mother-in-law had been held up in traffic on the walk home (she has always been a firm opponent of pavements), and during the three quarters of an hour she was delayed I managed to eat a total of seven sandwiches. I was preparing the eighth when I was overcome by a powerful nausea and had to run to the toilet to throw them all up.

And this, of course, was the very moment my mother-in-law and three children arrived home, finding me on the floor of the bathroom cradling the toilet bowl with sandwich vomit all around my mouth. This scene fully justified my mother-in-law's cliched prejudice against me and created for my children a lasting image which encapsulates the disappointment of having me as their father.

I learnt nothing, and still eat shitloads of sandwiches at the expense of my dignity.

Two Men Talk On The Internet

"So who's a cunt?"

"I'll tell you who. That Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He's a right cunt."

"Well of course, that goes without saying. So who else is a cunt?"

"That the Dalai Lama. He's an awful cunt."

"He certainly is. So who else is a cunt?"

"I'll tell you who was a cunt. That Leonardo da Vinci. A terrible cunt."

"Without question. So who else is a cunt?"

"Robbie Williams."

"No, you're wrong there. He's fucking brilliant."

One Night

One night, in complete despair at his inability to sleep, Wilfred Jones fetched his pistol from beneath his thermal underwear in the bottom drawer of the bedside cabinet and shot himself in the head, leaving his wife to clean up the mess.

A Tiring Day in the Modern World

And so at half past nine, almost inevitably, I woke up again. I rolled over for a moment in bed and when I next glanced at my watch on the bedside table, it was half past two in the afternoon. I knew it was afternoon because it wasn’t dark, and I’ve had a firm grasp of the concept of night and day since I was a relatively young man.

Seeing as it was half past two in the afternoon, I thought to myself, ‘Well, if it’s half past two in the afternoon I suppose I’d better get up. I expect a lot of people will have been up for quite a long while already.’ So I got up and headed over to the computer on the other side of my room, in order to find out what all my friends were up to.

I have a lot of friends on my computer. I know some of them personally, but others I don’t even know at all. Whilst I was waiting for the computer to load, I drummed the fingers of my left hand on the desk, and used the index finger of the other to remove dry crows from my left nostril. This was a satisfying diversion that helped to pass the time.

I eventually arrived at the page where my friends were. It turned out that one was combing his hair, another was laughing out loud for no apparent reason and another was pretending to be a cow, by typing the word ‘MOO!’ at half hourly intervals. I found this rather amusing, and it was at the very moment I was displaying my amusement by way of an almost invisible smile, that a strange man, surely well into his thirties, with orange hair and extraordinarily pointy features entered my bedroom.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What are they up to?’

I calmly told him what they were up to, particularly emphasising the cow impression which had so amused me, in the hope that he too would be amused by it. It didn’t seem to me that it was yet time to bring up the fact that I’d never set eyes on this man before and to ask him what he was doing in my bedroom.

‘Yes,’ he said, with a very sober expression on his face, ‘that is rather amusing. Imagine a cow typing ‘MOO!’ on her computer. It seems very unlikely. That’s why it’s so funny.’

Whilst he’d hit the nail on the head with his summation of the cow impression, his response greatly irritated me, and I suppose that was why I jumped up from my computer chair and rolled it towards him at extreme pace. He seemed unsurprised by my surprise attack and easily stepped out of the way of the chair, which rolled out of my bedroom door and crashed pathetically against the banister on the landing.

This created an awkward situation between us for a moment, but he didn’t dwell on it for long. He strode towards me and gripped me in a firm headlock. This really eased the tension and I immediately began to relax.

‘Would you mind at all,’ I asked, ‘if I wrote down what we’re up to here so all my friends can read about it?’

‘Not at all,’ he replied, and shuffled us over a little so I could reach the keyboard.

‘A man with orange hair and pointy features has me in a headlock. LMHDTS!’, I typed, before explaining to the man that ‘LMHDTS’ meant ‘laughing my head down the street’, but that it wasn’t necessary to actually do this, as it was just one of those humorous abbreviations used to fit in with people on the computer.

The man understood this perfectly, which further enhanced my opinion of him. I had already concluded that he was of above average intelligence.

‘So,’ he asked, ‘what do we do now?’

‘We just wait,’ I said. ‘The more comments we get, the better things will be for us.’

And so we waited there for a while, but received no comments. Then the man with the orange hair released me from the headlock and suggested that we should perhaps venture outside to pass the time before returning to look at the computer. As I’ve always enjoyed passing the time, I readily agreed and we set off out of my first floor flat, down the dark, untidy stairway, through the dark, untidy hallway and out of the ordinary looking front door.

However, upon reaching the pavement, we realized that it was a disgustingly sunny day and our faces and eyes were burning right up. We bowed our heads and ran straight over to the cellar bar across the road to avoid going up in flames.

We made it fairly easily and passed a good time in the bar drinking beers, lagers, spirits and wines for forty minutes exactly. I can say now that those were the best forty minutes of what turned out to be a busy day. We frowned upon other people in the bar, ate fistfuls of Bombay mix, had not an altogether uncomfortable chat with the barman about his social background and discussed serious matters with earnest expressions, making ‘but what can you do about it?’ hand gestures.

By the time it came to leaving the bar, I had become firm friends with Emmanuel Goliath (for he said that was his name, and I believed him). As we stopped by the door to steel ourselves for the dash back across the road through the sunshine, I wondered aloud what kind of comments we could expect from our computer friends when we got back.

‘If you don’t mind,’ he said carefully, ‘I won’t come back to the computer with you. It appears that I’d forgotten all about it and it’s quite possible that I’ve lost all interest now. I think I’ll just go home to bed so I can be fresh for things that may or may not occur in the future. But don’t worry,’ he continued, sensing my disappointment, ‘I’m sure we’ll bump in to each other in your bedroom very soon.’ This last part may have been a joke, but it was difficult to tell due to the constant sternness of his pointy face. He shook my hand and left, leaving me to face the dash home alone.

After legging it back to my flat and locking the door behind me, just in case, I thought it would be best to follow the wise Goliath’s example and go straight to bed. By now, it was half past three in the afternoon, a clear hour since I’d got up.

I sat in bed for a while smoking a cigarette before throwing myself down to sleep. Unfortunately, the cigarette had left me agitated, and I tossed and turned for a good two and a half minutes before deciding that there was absolutely no way sleep would come.

With a certain amount of frustration, I threw the bedclothes off and briskly tip-toed over to the computer. I’d have a quick look, just to see what people were doing now and to find out people’s reaction to the thing I had told them I was doing earlier.

I was pleased to find out that I had received a total of twelve comments, and only one of them was negative (‘What do you want?! A medal?! GWFA’ (grimacing with furious anger) from David K, who is an instinctively negative person). It obviously wasn’t as many comments as the cow impression had received, that was only natural, but it was still a good number and made me happy.

I finally returned to bed at a quarter past four, thoroughly exhausted by the day’s exertions. I drifted off with memories of the forty minutes in the cellar bar and the good reception for the thing I had written on the computer filling that happy period immediately before sleep.

Sadly, I haven’t seen Emmanuel Goliath since that wonderful day, although it’s true to say that I still occasionally hang around in my bedroom in the hope that I’ll bump in to him.

At the Machine Where you Buy Tickets for the Parking

And so I found myself at the machine where you buy tickets for the parking. It was the one at the hospital. I wasn't planning on going in to the hospital, because there was absolutely nothing wrong with me, but surely the machine can't have known that when it started spitting my money back at me instead of giving me a ticket. By the fourth time it did this, and having given it two stern verbal warnings, I launched myself at it repeatedly with flying kicks until both I and it were rather the worse for wear.

As I stood there, bent over with my hands on my knees gasping for breath, waiting for renewed energy to continue my assault on the machine, I felt a finger prod on my shoulder. I straightened myself up to be greeted by a scruffy man who smiled at me subserviently, showing all three of his teeth and a wall of gum. He was wearing a dirty, formerly smart jumper, black tracksuit bottoms with a pink stripe down the side of each leg and a pair of grey trainers with their fronts cut off to reveal his toes, in the flip-flop fashion.

'Excuse me my friend,' he began, 'I don't suppose you'd be able to help me would you?'

I gave him my very best crazy stare to try and scare him away, but he was completely undeterred. He scratched his spiky, greasy, grey hair, sniffed his fingers and continued.

'I'll tell you what it is mate, I've come out here today right and I've had a terrible day and now I'm stuck. See I've got my wife and eight children in the car round the corner there and I've run out of petrol, and to get here today has taken a really long time because I've come from a place that's really far away, you know?'

'Where have you come from?' I mumbled.

'Where have I come from? I'll tell you where I've come from. I've come from fucking miles away mate, if you'll pardon my French. I haven't come from France though, no. I've come from somewhere much further than that, I'll tell you that much for nothing. You really want to know? I'll tell you where I've come from. Up there,' and he pointed up at the clear blue sky.

'I mean, you can't see it now obviously; you can't see it in the daytime. It's only there in the night isn't it? I just forget that because I live up there, you know? I mean you've probably guessed it now like, but I've come from the moon I have. D'you know it? You know that black cratery bit you can see on the moon there in the night? We live just near there, me and the wife and the kiddies. It's a bit of a shithole like, but we don't mind it too much. It's quiet, you know? But we have to come down here see, to do the big shop.'

'So yeah, that's it,' he went on, 'we came down to do the big shop we did, and I don't know if you know this, but petrol's quite cheap on the moon so it's alright to get down here like. But if we run out down here, we're fucked! Because petrol's pretty expensive down here isn't it mate? It's the government it is. They pump it up their arses don't they? It gives them the energy to do all the stuff that they have to do, so because of that, because they use so much of it, it's more expensive for the rest of us isn't it? The greedy bastards.'

Sensing my indifference to petrol matters and my increasing impatience, he came quickly to his monologue's inevitable conclusion. 'So anyway, I don't like to ask you this, and I'm not a beggar or nothing like that, but if you could spare me say four or five hundred quid, that'd really set me on my way, you know?'

Now I'd like to stop here for a moment to assume that you'll be having serious doubts as to the validity of this man's story, and you may even be getting angry with him for telling these terrible lies and asking for such a large amount of money. But there'd be little point, because he doesn't exist. I made him up.

What really happened was that the police showed up and carted me off to the station for vandalizing the parking ticket machine. I ended up in court and, after pleading guilty, got a four hundred pound fine for damaging private property.

And I suppose you'll be thinking to yourself now, 'Well I guess the real story was quite boring and I can perhaps forgive him for making up the man from the moon bit, just to liven things up.'

But there'd be no point doing that either, because I made the parking machine bit and the police bit up as well. On the day all of these things didn't happen, I didn't even get out of bed.

So here's the real story: One day, I didn't get out of bed. I just stayed in bed all day.

The Great Buzz About Town

I was out walking one day when there suddenly came a buzzing sound in my right ear. I waved my hand in the general area in an attempt to get rid of the irritant, but the buzzing continued and my hand struck something large and hairy. It was not, as I had suspected, an insect buzzing about my ear, but a great big fat man with long dark hair and a big dark beard.

'Excuse me,' I asked him, 'but why are you making an irritating buzzing sound in my right ear?'

'If you had the capacity to understand why I'm making an irritating buzzing sound in your right ear, then you wouldn't need to ask me the question in the first place,' growled the big fat man, in a big, fat voice.

This was an infuriating reply and one I could not counter without making myself even more ignorant in the eyes of the fat man. I would have to ponder my next move as I went about my usual business, trying to pay as little attention to the man as possible. He continued following me, walking sideways like a crab and bending down a little to buzz in my ear.

I went to the butcher's and bought a sufficient amount of minced beef. Then I went to the corner shop to buy tinned tomatoes, tomato purée, an onion, some garlic, a packet of spaghetti and a bottle of red wine. We got a few strange looks, the buzzing fat man and I, but people were generally too polite to ask any questions.

'I'm making spaghetti bolognese,' I told the fat man when we were back out in the street.

'If you were making spaghetti bolognese,' said the fat man, 'do you really think I'd be buzzing like this in your right ear? I'll answer on your behalf: No, I wouldn't.'

Again, this was hard to reply to. Had I thought about things for a moment, I would have realized that the only thing I had to do to get rid of the fat man was go home and begin cooking my spaghetti bolognese, but I was blinded by exasperation. Instead, I decided that I deserved a pint or two for completing my errands, and for putting up with the fat man with minimal protest. So I headed to the Blind Drunk and ordered myself a pint of bitter.

'Would you like a drink?' I asked the fat man.

'No...bzzzzz...thank...bzzzzz...you.' he said. 'I'm...bzzzzz...driving.'

I drank off my pint quickly and ordered another, but the alcohol did nothing to ease my predicament. I decided to go about the pub and ask people whether they knew why there was a big, fat, bearded man making an irritating buzzing sound in my right ear. I had to do this quietly of course, because I didn't want the fat man to think me ignorant for not knowing the reason in the first place. It was important to me that I didn't make myself appear stupid to him.

I talked to several people, but nobody could help me. I was about to give up hope when I spied a small, thin bald man sitting alone in a corner by the window drinking what appeared to be petrol.

'Is that petrol you're drinking?' I asked him outright.

'The finest petrol in town,' he said without turning his gaze from the window, 'I'm celebrating.'

Ah, so he was celebrating. Now it made sense.

'May I ask what it is you're celebrating?' I enquired.

'I am celebrating everything,' he said, 'but mainly the fact that I can see again after having the hair removed from my eyes.' As he said this, he flicked his head several times, presumably forgetting that he no longer had to get the hair out of his eyes. He was completely bald now, so whoever it was that had removed his hair had done a very thorough job.

'Can I get you another petrol?' I asked him politely.

He turned to look at me: 'Thank you very much,' he said, 'that's very kind of you. But why are you shouting?'

'I'm sorry,' I said, 'I'm finding it rather hard to hear myself speak because this gentleman here is following me about and buzzing in my ear.'

The thin bald man, seemingly noticing the big fat man for the first time, sat up in his chair.

'Ah, it's you is it? You great big buzzing Jemima.' The big fat man ignored him, and concentrated fully on his buzzing.

'Excuse me,' I said, 'but do you know this man?'

'Of course I do,' replied the bald man, 'that's my cousin.'

'So, why is he buzzing in my ear like this?' I asked him excitedly.

'It's really very simple,' said the man, 'he has serious mental health problems.'

With that, the big fat man stopped buzzing, shook his cousin's hand, gave me a hefty slap on the back and went over to a ruddy-faced gentleman who was sat with his wife at a table nearby. He bent down to the man's right ear and began to make an irritating buzzing sound.

I thanked the bald man profusely, bought him a big glass of petrol and went home to cook my spaghetti bolognese.

Later that evening, as I sat in my comfortable old armchair sipping a glass of red wine, I was suddenly struck by the terrible silence. It was unbearable, and I had to put on some loud music to ease my nerves a little. My thoughts then turned to the ruddy-faced man who was sitting with his wife in the pub. I felt insanely jealous of him. Not because of his wife, she was an old boot, but because of the fat man making the buzzing noise in his right ear.

The next morning, I got up very early and went in search of the big fat man.