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Date: 27/05/17
Pictures In The Mind
What? Oh, nothing really. Just an episode of cantbearseditude, that's all.
It's rather difficult in the current climate to get enthused about anything. I mean, I should have reviewed Penguin Café's rather excellent new album The Imperfect Sea, but I can't seem to get my thoughts in order. This may be of a piece with my typing falling off again, coupled with a worryingly prevalent inability to remember words, names particularly; a sign, perhaps, that the finely-tuned machine which is Yer Judge's mind has started to grind alarmingly in its gears.
There is still amusement in the world for all that, and I am still giggling over this supposed Tweet that someone sent to the Scottish police force:
The beguiling thing about this is, under what sort of circumstance would one slide-tackle a goth? Is the query the result of an incident at some sort of bizarre football tournament, in which the winners of the first semi-final between the Goths and the Punks would go on to meet the winners of the second semi where the New Romantics faced off against the Soul Boys? One could certainly imagine the recipient of the slide-tackle sitting there on the ground, all morose in black, with his mascara running and his skull amulets deprived evermore of their jolly jingling.
The picture forms most vividly in the mind.
As does the tableau conjured up by a story once told by the novelist Leslie Thomas, of The Virgin Soldiers fame.
One of his neighbours was very proud (for some unfathomable reason) of his collection of garden gnomes. One night, the entire tribe of lawn ornaments vanished. He reported the theft to the police, who came back to him after a couple of days and said that they'd found them. They didn't, they said, think there was any malicious or malign intent involved, because whoever had taken them had lined them all up at the bus stop. Imagining the expression on the bus driver's face when he pulled in to the stop and found he had a dozen or so potential passengers, none of whom was taller than ten inches (and none of whom almost certainly had the correct fare) brings a smile to the face.
