welcome to long words

I am not Catholic.  Which is not a problem or a solution.  It’s simply a statement.  It’s probably for the best if we steer clear of religion.  Even though a lot of them are very pro forgiveness, their biggest supporters seem to practice very differently to what’s been preached in their direction.  I’m just saying, before we get into this, that I’m not Catholic.  I was married in a Catholic church, but I’m fat and privileged with a beard.  Which is probably why I was taken to Church of England services.  Fat, white and bearded is basically their mascot, after all.

There’s magic in a bookshop.  A palpable, near hypnotic, almost blissful sense of wonder.  Which can, if I let my guard down, led to me leaving with a pile of books and my wife pointing out the restricting mathematics of shelf space.  I suppose it’s fair to say it primarily exists in the second-hand variety of the bookshop.  First hand bookshops are very nice, don’t get me wrong.  All those uncracked spines.  All that shiny furniture.  The sale tables grouping together all the books that're now the cornerstones for TV shows or movies.  The recognisable brand coffee shops with free wi-fi and the illusion that their chairs might be comfortable.  Still, there’s something antiseptic about those places.  Something clinical, in a private healthcare sort of way.  

We live in an age of fast acting paranoia.  Horrendous car crashes become intricate webs in which to snare a woman who was once married the heir to the throne.  Lone gunman become the front for a speakeasy of unhappy assassins.  Every mention of certain names or countries on the news can cause us all tense, as the Doomsday Clock ticks over our shoulder.  Our dreams are tinted with nostalgia.  Our nightmares are shaded in paranoid gloom.  A gloom that can be trigger by the littlest of triggers.

Some weeks, you just can’t win.  It’s not right, it’s not fair.  They're the horrendous traffic jam when you're already late.  They're the one email or customer that is going to totally derail your plans to get through Monday unscathed.  The large, slow moving spider that appears as the shampoo starts to sting your eyes.  It’s basically some sort of event horizon conjured by statistics and chance.

Ah, summer bugs.  I still they’re the closest we’ll ever get to seeing the true start of the ever-impending zombie apocalypse.  If only because germs make sense in winter.  They belong there, where the clocks have changed and afternoon becomes night before we can even finish work.  It’s cold, it’s dark.  We all get a streetlight tan and ice scraper’s wrist.  We’re all rushing to some end of the year, family tradition that has to be as perfect as it can be.  Especially when it stands no chance of living up to the greetings cards around here.  We can’t afford to be ill.

Before Fluff became available to buy.  Before May Day appeared in Britain and mysteriously brought with it the one thing we British were never expecting, sun.  Before I walked out of a cinema and declared Infinity War to be one of the best blockbuster experiences I’ve had the pleasure to enjoy, the universe taught me a valuable lesson.