Time Dan-bits

It's been a long day. This, like many other things we say to each other before properly engaging our brains, is a cliche. Except this time it isn't.

I first became aware that something was wrong at about lunchtime. I knew it was lunchtime because I was hungry, and had been working for roughly four hours. However, a glance at my PC clock told me otherwise. It told me that the time was 11.25am.

This, I was quick to bellow, was absurd. I realised that somewhere a mistake had been made. I was even willing to concede that the blame might lay with me (although I knew in my heart of hearts that this notion was as fanciful as it was ridiculous). So I continued with my day, and would have thought nothing more about it had my friend Stephen not sent me an email roughly an hour later.

'Seriously, is it me, or is today going really really slowly?' it read. 'Yes!' I replied promptly 'Yes it is!' Soon after, our friend Tom piped up with his agreement that the day was indeed proceeding at a peculiarly pedestrian pace. He didn't put it like that, of course. Nobody puts things like that.

So here we have three men, in three completely separate locations, all experiencing what can only be described as Perceived Relative Anomalous Temporal Slowdown. PRATS.

Now, I'm sure you've been on the receiving end of a nasty outbreak of PRATS before. Minutes ooze by painfully, like pus from a hippo's blister. A quarter of an hour seems doubled in size. You attempt something that you're sure cannot be done in less than ten minutes (smoking a cigarillo, perhaps, or taking a large dump), and you're finished in five.

This is by no means a new phenomena. Heidegger wrote a book about it - Sein und Zeit - which is widely considered to be his seminal work. I haven't read it, but if it's widely considered seminal then that's good enough for me. It's also in German, which isn't good for me at all. I only know the words 'Schildkrote' and 'Botschafter', and unless the book is about a tortoise who is also an ambassador it'll be lost on me. And it isn't - it's about Being and Time.

Neitzsche also had a few choice words to say about temporality, but these were probably German words too, so he's not much use to me either.

The crux of my problem is this: I'm not getting paid for all the extra time I'm experiencing. Let me cobble together an analogy. I'm buying some fruit in a greengrocers. Strawberries, for preference. The greengrocer puts all my fruit on his scales. Then he turns round, pulls down his trousers and curls out a steaming poo onto the top. He makes a note of the weight, converts it into the cost of strawberries, then carefully removes the poo and feeds it to his cat. I have to pay more for the strawberries, and I also have to eat them knowing that there has been a poo on them, and that nobody in authority would believe me if I told them that I'd paid more money for a poo that I didn't get to keep.

That, in essence, is what getting paid for 7 hours that felt like 10 really feels like. And something has to be done.

However, it's not as simple as that. It's not like getting over-charged for your gas bill. If you do, you just send a strongly worded letter to the gas company. If your electricity is cut off, you call the electricity company. If the space-time continuum goes all to cock, there's nobody who's going to come round in overalls and sort it out for you.

However, I can still try. Arguably, the place with the strongest ties to temporality in England is Greenwich. The home of Greenwich Mean Time. I mean, how many other places have a time named after them? Not lots. And Greenwich was where they invented the first clock able to tell the time at sea, which back then was quite a feat. Basically, Greenwich is in charge of all the time in Britain. So, if anyone's responsible for my inconveniences today, it'll be someone at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

So I emailed them.

From: dan'semailaddressathotmail.com (pseudonym)

Sent:
01 December 2008 18:02:19

To:
comments@nmm.ac.uk

Dear Sir/Madam,

I wish to enquire about some recent disruptions to my perception of time and the duration thereof.

As I understand it, Greenwich Observatory is the British home of time and all things temporal. It is therefore to you that I submit my complaint.

Today seemed considerably longer - to myself and to a number of my friends - than my watch would have given it credit. I would estimate (and I have always been a precocious estimator) that each hour was in actual fact roughly 15 minutes longer than necessary.

This would have been all well and good had today been a Saturday, or a religious holiday, but it was in fact a Monday and I was required to work. This meant that I was forced to spend a far greater perceived time in my office with my colleagues - many of whom are bilious and unsavoury - while only getting paid the usual rate.

I understand that this may seem rather outlandish, but then I have never had any problems with time before and was not sure of the correct channel to voice my disgruntlement. In fact, I'm not totally sure that disgruntlement is even a word, but that is the least of my worries right now.

My suggestion, if you don't mind me suggesting it, would be for you to arrange it so that the rest of my working week appears to go by more quickly than usual. I would consider this to be a fair way to reimburse me of the inconvenience caused by the very long day I have just been forced to experience. If you could also see your way clear to making the weekend seem very long as well, that would be very much appreciated.

I'm sorry to take up your time with this, but then there seems to be much more of it about today than usual.

Yours very faithfully,

Dan

I'm very much looking forward to hearing from them.

All Dolled Up

Just a short follow-up to yesterday's shenanigans. Unfortunately I had to go out before 7.30pm - which is when Tim arrived home - so I didn't get to see his reaction.

However, he later informed me personally that it scared the absolute crap out of him.

Inflatably Droll

Hello, and welcome to Dan's Step-by-step Guide to (hopefully) Scaring the Arse off your Flatmate.

I say hopefully, because he isn't home yet. So I will be typing this quickly, and probably not have time to employ all those snazzy little linguistic tricks I know you enjoy. Like correct spelling, for example.

1 - Get your flatmate's hilarious oversized blow-up doll out from under his bed.

2 - Marvel at the box.

3 - Look up the name 'Fatima' on the internet. Learn that it translates to the Arabic for 'she who weans'. Wonder what the hell that has to do with anything. Realise that the manufacturers probably chose the name because it has the word 'fat' in it. Laugh knowingly. Notice you have become diverted and a slave to your own thirst for knowledge. Return to the task in hand.

4 - Inflate doll.

5 - Become dizzy.

6 - Discover several air-leaks, one in the rectal region. Try not to think how this may have been caused.

7 - Shove one sock up doll's simulated anus in order to stifle leak. Realise that at some point in the past your life veered completely off course, and that by rights you should probably be a lawyer or something by now. Try to forget about it.

8 - Tape up other leaks.

9 - Dress doll in your own shirt and trousers, and add a blonde wig for good measure. Try not to imagine what the act of dressing a lifesize doll might look like to a casual observer or the ghost of a dead relative.

10 - Take picture.

11 - Try to hang the doll by a belt from the light fixture in the living room.

12 - Fail. Curse all things light-fixture related. Kick doll.

13 - Try desperately not to think about how good kicking the doll actually felt.

14 - Attempt to suspend doll in the doorway to the kitchen, using first masking tape, then gaffer tape, then lots of both, then staples.

15 - Fail each time. Kick doll again. Consider spending an evening kicking a doll. Remember you have plans, and are not a mental.

16 - Position doll on toilet. Turn off the light and shut toilet door.

17 - Role play. Pretend you are Tim getting home from work and needing the toilet. Open toilet door.

18 - Actually scare yourself, even though you knew what to expect.

19 - Lock the front door with the key, and turn off all the lights. This will make it appear to a homecoming Tim that you have already left to go and watch Dreadzone at the Waterfront, whereas in fact you will be hiding in your room like an elfman. The house will appear empty.

20 - Post blog and shut down laptop, then gleefully await hilarity.

Happy Meal

Now, I'm hungry. I'm usually either hungry, sleepy or horny. I'm often at least two of them at any one time (then the other one straight after if I get what I want, and I normally do, know what I'm sayin' fellas? Yeah you do! High Five! Anyone?). But right now, I'm hungry.

I'm also in a bit of a bad mood, for reasons best left between me and all the dickheads who've put me in a bad mood. Which are everywhere, incidentally, and likely to manifest when you least expect it and shove a shit sandwich down your throat before you can say 'What's your problem, numb-nuts?'. But I digress.

I thought to myself inside my brain (which is colossal, by the way), 'How can I fix my irritation and my hunger in one fell swoop?' And then it struck me. I had it, by George, I had it! And I thought it only fair to share it with you. I give you (drum roll)... Dan's Recipe for the Happiest Meal in the World... Ever!

Ingredients:

100g Happy-Face Luncheon Meat

1 Bag Birdseye Potato Smiles

1 Tin Alphabetti-Spaghetti

Season with Hundreds'n'Thousands to taste.

Recipe

Take the Happy-Face luncheon meat and rub it all over your naked body until thoroughly tender. Once you're feeling tender enough, put it on a plate and dissolve into hysterics. 5 minutes should be just about long enough.

Then, open your bag of Potato Smiles and laugh raucously at their lobotomised grins and dead, empty eyes. Turn your oven up to 220 degrees, and resist the temptation to stick your head in it. If it is electric, you will merely end up with a very hot head. Instead, place the potato smiles on a baking tray and gleefully fling them into the oven using a backhand frisbee throw.

While these are cooking, I like to go and put some clothes on upside down and pretend I have hands for feet and a head poking out of my flies. Of course, this is completely optional.

After about 15 minutes, open up the tin of Alphabetti-Spaghetti. Remove all the letters that are not either H, A, P, another P, or Y. These are the only letters you will be needing. Pour the correct letters into a saucepan and place it on a heated hob. Use a wooden spoon and proceed to stir it up. Little darling. Stir it up. Ohhh oh.

By this time, your smiles should have gone all golden and ruddy-cheeked in the oven, and your luncheon-meat should be on a plate, grinning happily at you. At this point, try and resist the temptation to pop a couple of valium and lie in the bath with the taps running, and instead decant the smiles from tray to plate with a supple flick of your wrists (which you haven't slit yet).

Splat that Alphaspetti-Baguetti onto the side of the plate, and hurl on a handful of hundreds'n'thousands, which will remind you of a time when you were a child and you went to a park to get an icecream with your mummy and daddy and it was sunny and you felt loved by your family and were hopefully going to get a puppy for Christmas if you were a very good boy but that didn't happen because daddy slept with a lady at work and mummy started drinking all the things in the big wooden cabinet and then you got taken away and given another mummy and daddy who were quite nice but definitely not the same as the old ones and you grew up bitter and unable to trust*.

Now eat it, being sure to wash it down with a nice vase of hard liquor whilst staring goggle-eyed at a television that is stealing every precious moment you have on this earth, as you drink yourself into a stupor and eventually shit yourself because you're too drunk to get up.

And all for less than a fiver!

Feel happy and have a great weekend everybody!

Buried in Pomposity is written by Dan, to whom * this never happened. He feels perfectly cheerful, although prone to extreme bouts of dramatic hyperbole, which he insists upon pronouncing 'Hyper-bowl'.

Gastro-tastrophe

Hello! New blog. About time.

Do you know what I like? Food. That's what I like. All sorts of food, of different shapes and sizes and tastes and colours and varying levels of morality. Shove a goose full of grain until you have to install a conservatory to house its gargantuan distended liver, and I'll hurl that down me until the baby cows come home. And then I'll hurl them down as well. There's nothing more delicious than food.

Now, as some of you might know, I live with a Frenchman. And the French have a reputation for doing two things: losing wars and cooking lunch (often in swift succession). Yes, the world's most renownedly gastronomic country has an ambassador living right under my nose. Quite literally, for he is far shorter than I.

So, you might expect our evenings in the flat together to feature nothing but sizzling pans, white aprons, and me running around saying 'Yes Chef'. After all, I am a competent cook, and under the right Gallic guidance I could be shoving Michelin-starred desserts into anybody who dares knock on our hallowed door.

Sadly, this is not the case. In the 20 months I have lived under this roof, I have seen Tim prepare a total of two different types of meal for himself. The first is simply an apple, which he slices into segments, cuts the skin off, and then eats with a fork on a Saturday afternoon at about 2-ish. The second is a heap of salad and chillies, drenched in Encona sauce (the really hot red one) and mustard, and quite literally sandwiched (hah!) between two slices of brown bread. No butter. Haute cuisine, this ain't.

So, having watched this peculiar pantomime for almost two years, I decided to have a look and see what kind of crap Tim keeps in his food cupboard. Actually, this is a bit of a lie, because I've been sneaking in there for months to steal food and then arrange it to look like nothing's been stolen, but for the purposes of suspended disbelief, lets go with my first story. Here follows a list of my Five Favourite Stupid-Ass French Things found in my Stupid-Ass French Flatmate's Food Cupboard.

#1 - Salt

Not just any salt though. An entire one-kilogram bag of 'Gros Sel Marin', which my GCSE-level French skills lead me to believe translates as 'A Fucking Huge Bag of Sea Salt'. If you look closer (which you can't because it's a picture, but I can because the stupid great sack of it is here right in front of my face) you will notice three alarming things:

One- The salt is actually a browny-beige colour, implying the presence of mud, sand, pebbles and maybe a lobster or two lurking under its salty surface. Two- It's still wet inside the bag, making you think this has just been hoiked out of some godforsaken French salt-marsh by some godforsaken French combine salt-harvester (hey, I don't know how these things work) and dumped into this godforsaken bag for my idiot flatmate to put on his chips. And three- It's a fucking great big bag of wet, brown salt.

#2 - Herbs

Herbs, as we all know, are very important in French cuisine. There's nothing more French than a bit of chicken with a gentle spattering of green flecks all over it, and no chef is going to disagree with that. They look nice, they probably affect the taste in some indistinguishable way, and you can sound sophisticated while talking about shoving handfuls of rosemary and thyme up some unfortunate bird. I'm still talking about cooking here.

But in Tim's cupboard, we have this monstrous pickle-jar sized aberration, calling itself a 'Melange d'herbes pour salades'. It is no such thing. It is 25 grams of dry leaves in a jam-jar.

The handy label says 'le contenu de cet emballage est equivalent a environ 285 g d'herbes fraiches', which basically means they've dried out a third of a kilogram of fresh herbs and put them in this pot. This 25g pot. That's a waste of over 90% of their original weight, and I bet that 90% had all the good bits in. This jar contains the detritus of hundreds of poor, unloved, unsung 'herbes', and it should be ashamed of itself.

Also, the first thing on the ingredients is 'Persil'. That's a detergent. I rest my case.

#3 - Chocolate Santa

I don't know why, but this thing scares the living crap out of me. Actually, I do know why and I'm now going to tell you, because if i went round not knowing things then I wouldn't make for very entertaining reading would I? No. That's right. Well done.

I don't like this because it has lived in our flat for longer than I have. It lives on top of the fridge, and every time I go to get some milk it looks wistfully at me with its alarmingly sad eyes. Look at them. He's smiling with his mouth, but his eyes betray his true thoughts. Dark thoughts, of drinking himself to a stupor on stolen sherry, then rigging a hosepipe to the back of one of his reindeers and shutting the garage door.

Also, if you can tear your gaze away from his tearful expression, you might notice what he's doing with his hands. Yes, one of them is holding a small bear, and the other is holding his massive sack. Except, as the sack is the same colour as his coat, from a distance it looks more like he's reaching for his massive 'sack', if you know what I mean. And if you don't, I mean his genitals.

He's a depressed, onanistic purveyor of children's toys, and I think we were all taught from a young age to avoid these types of people, and not put chocolate icons of them on our fridge. Unless, it would seem, you went to school in France.

#4 - More Salt

Yep. More salt. As if one kilogram of flotsam is not enough to satisfy your salty needs, here is some more. Except, wait a second! This is 'Sel Fou'! What does that mean?

It means 'crazy salt'. That's what it means. To illustrate the point, they've illustrated the point by illustrating a court jester with an extremely suggestive expression right there on the label.

'Look at me!' he seems to leer, 'I've just had some crazy salt, and now I'm ready to entertain some drunken hen party by taking my costume off and repeatedly cock-slapping an intoxicated bride-to-be.'

So, how does this salt qualify as crazy, I hear you ask? Well, a quick look at the ingredients let me know that as well as containing salt, it also contains onions, parsnips and garlic. Mental! If that's what qualifies as crazy, then whenever I cook a spaghetti bolognaise you should lock up your womenfolk because I go certifiably deranged. 'Look out, Dan's putting parsnips on that roast! He's a veritable R. P. McMurphy!' Although McMurphy wasn't actually crazy, and neither is this salt.

#5 - Tinned Pâté

Oh for crying out loud. Pâté. In a tin. That's like taking the Mona Lisa and sticking it on some teenage boy's bedroom wall so she can watch him masturbating, repeatedly and vigorously.

Pate (sod the acutes and circumflexes) is one of the greatest things ever to be invented by man. It's bloody lovely. Words fail me. And to stick it in a tin, like some common sardine, that's just low. That's like a war-crime. If there was a war of deliciousness, this product would be Heinrich Himmler.

This pate has four different bit of pig. Liver of pig, meat of pig, fat of pig and jelly of pig. This is all well and good. It also has the other things you get in pate; onions, egg-whites, wheat-flour, seasoning etc - and that's all good as well. It also has milk proteins, which is somewhat grisly, and 'aromes', which I can only assume means 'smells'. Although why you'd need to put an artificial smell into something is beyond me. Anyway, all of the above is okay, and I don't really mind. What I do mind is that - when you're ready for deliciousness, toasts akimbo, one hand on knife and the other on belly - you need to grab a little steel ringpull and open it up exactly the way you would do with a can of cat food.

This is wrong. I don't care how many 'Qualite Superieure's you have spattered about the packaging. If I want pate, I'd rather go and cut it out of a goose myself, rather than suffer the indignation of seeing it in a tin. After all, I don't think that's not how it would like to be remembered.

Buried in Pomposity is written by Dan, who really likes France and French food and his French housemate Tim, no matter how much he may have convinced you otherwise. He also plays in a pretty good band. Called Buried in Pompeii. Check them out sometime.