Saturday 5 December 2009

Dream: I am witnessing the filming of a strange promotional video for the 2012 Olympics.  It is super nationalistic and basically it is taking the shape of a complete charge of the Valkyries.  With it various nations compete to be first as things get heated and in the end as Great Britain is actually made up of four countries it proves the strongest as the race for the finish begins to resemble a human tidal wave.  Of course it is not the sickening display of patriotism that offends people it is more the fact that at the front of the Great Britain charge is one of their Paralympics athletes being pushed in his wheelchair at 100mph akin to that guy that got hooked on the front of that truck in America a year or two ago.  It is a crazed scene but in a way I feel honoured to be witnessing it as it appears to be representative of the end of the world.  Will we even make it to the 2012 Olympics?

Foolhardily I wake up quite early after this mindfuck of a dream.  The time is around 6.15PM, which is no time to be waking at the weekend.  What really wakes me is the sensation of my glasses being crushed beneath my right shoulder.  I have fucked up and now the left arm of the glasses is as broken as the right arm and may require a Jack Duckworth-esqe repair job.  This is not the best of ways to begin the day.

Unable to resume sleep I slip on the BBC News and try to catch some headlines.  They spit out some news fodder but in earnest nothing has really happened in the world over the night.

With this in mind I decide to watch my Danny Baker football DVD which I bought yesterday for £14 in full realisation that after Christmas I will probably be able to purchase it at a third of that price (I’m repeating myself).  I have such great memories of the original videos back in the day, the first one was priceless but sadly the quality really did diminish afterwards.  This DVD is good though, I genuinely laugh a number of times and Danny really has put more into the writing and between clip skits than ever.

Around 8AM I head over to Asda to do my weekly thing there.  With my little trip to Sainsburys yesterday this comes as more of a luxury than necessity and with it only the minimum of requirements.  Eventually I get what I need, mainly the Saturday newspapers and a few drinks, and as I head to the self service checkout it is with horror that my card plays up and despite putting my pin in three times it does seem to take it.  Did I just pay for my groceries three times?  Finally the fucker spews out a receipt for me and I am done.  Really though, did I just pay for my groceries three times?

When I get back the Saturday Danny Baker Show is on Radio Five and as always I listen to it before starting my weekend properly.  Today all the news is concerned with the sentencing of Amanda Knox and while Harry Hill is in the middle of an interview the rolling news cuts to an Italian press conference spoken in Italian at which point you begin to wonder if the story is worthy.  Afterward the station gives up the ghost on the press conference the show returns with tension in the air even though Baker assures his producer (Issy) that he hasn’t got the hump even though he has every right to be considering the ridiculousness of cutting to an Italian language press conference.

Afterwards I continue listening to Five Live as Fighting Talk plays out in the background as I endeavour to write.  Today feels like progress as I genuinely appear to make ground on this stuff.

In the end the day flies by with my more or less writing for the whole duration of it.

Late in the afternoon I decide to have a break and so I put on my Big Train DVD that arrived a few days ago.  Much against its positive reputation it fails to register with me.  Is this a case of my belligerence towards anything that is popular or do I genuinely fail to find any of it funny?  I think it’s a little bit of both.

Things fail to improve any when news filters through that Millwall have lost 3-0 at Hartlepool.  With their strikeforce currently nursing major injuries this hardly comes as a surprise.

Tonight is Alan Bennett night on BBC2 which I proceed to watch with view to drawing inspiration from it.  Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work out that way as the slow pace of his work really fails to spark me and inevitably I find myself falling asleep eventually which in the end also results in my nodding during the first part of the Thick Of It season finale.  My loss.