I'll leave that there.
* * *
Some news:
Now, those three statements may seem incongruous. It may seem like they do not seem to fit properly together. Death... and FLORAL BOARD SHORTS? The two things make no sense. Death is dark and sad and depressing. You see a hearse driving down the street, you want to take off your hat and hold it to your chest as a sign of sad respect. Yet board shorts are fun and brightly coloured and full of life. You see a guy - or shall I say 'dude' - walking down the street wearing board shorts (possibly with a backwards baseball cap and a Billabong tshirt), and instantly you want to take your hat off and throw it in the air, so excited and joyous are you with the jubilation of this young life. Death makes people want to cry. Board shorts make them want to party.
FACT.
So at first glance those three statements may seem pretty rediculous - in fact bordering on offensive. It's like showing up to a funeral wearing a clown costume, or something equally hilarious. However I think that when I have written the rest of this blog it will make some kind of poignant point about living for today or something, I don't know, I'm not a priest. But what I do know is that a week ago I was untouched by either mortality or board shorts, and now I am sitting here typing a blog about death while wearing some board shorts.
Something has changed in the past 7 days AND I WANT TO DISCUSS WHAT IT IS.
Anyway, last Monday I realised that what I was missing in my life was a pair of brightly coloured floral board shorts. Don't ask me how I knew this, I just did. It was like a lighting bolt of inspiration, I just sat up in my bed in the middle of the night and screamed "BOARD SHORTS!" I think that Isaac Newton had a similar experience when he invented the train. After that, for a good ten minutes board shorts were all I could think about. Fortunately I then fell asleep again and when I woke up I had become cynical and jaded to the whole concept of wearing brightly coloured shorts for boarding with.
After all, I haven't really been surfing since Boxing Day 2004; actually, I tell a lie, I was gonna go on tour with Kelly Slater in 2006, but that kind of fell through when he discovered that not only did I not own any board shorts at the time, I also had no idea how to surf. I tried to show him my bodyboarding skills on the beach in Cornwall but I fell off and knocked over some little girl's sandcastle and accidentally kicked a baby in the mouth so he we like 'Nah'. That's kind of the same story as my ill fated audition to play lead guitar for The Killers at Glastonbury. "So, you only know one chord?" "Yeah, G major. Check it out." "That's not G major." "Sure it is, the guitar's just really out of tune and I don't know how to fix it." "...". "So when do we play Mr Brightside?"
Sorry. I may have just slightly gone off the serious topic of death by typing a paragraph of complete shit. But anyway. When I woke up I was like "Maybe I don't need board shorts after all". That's what I do. I persuade myself not to do or get stuff, rather like Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's play 'Hamlet: Lust for Glory'. To quote further, and to prove that my three years of studying literature at A level were not totally wasted, I believe that my native hue of resolution (board short buyin' resolution), was indeed, sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought (do you really need board shorts, Thomas?). And thus I decided against it.
However , over the next few days I ran over two hedgehogs in my car. Repeatedly.
:-o
So that's something else to add to the list of things I have killed by accident: a cat, a goose, two hedgehogs. However, maybe not, as in fact in this case both of the hedgehogs were already dead when I ran them over. The fact that they were both dead in the patch of road that I have to drive across to get into my drive has nothing to do with it as I'm pretty sure that I wasn't the one that killed them. However, because of this fact, I drove over each hedgehog about eight times in two days as I went in and out my drive. As this went on, they slowly became less and less hedgehogs, and more and more 'paste on the road'. I was a bit surprised that their spines did not puncture the tyres, as I have seen in so many cartoons. Although, thinking about it, if cartoons had been telling the truth then I'm pretty sure that they would have simply waddled off after being hit by the car and would have returned themselves to their proper shape using an air pump of some sort. Eventually my mother got sick of seeing two squished hedgehogs outside our house so she got a shovel and put them in the bin.
This got me thinking about how I would like to be disposed of after I die of my injuries from single-handedly slaying all of the Neo-Nazis holding our new Prime Minister Gordy Brown hostage. [For future reference: Cremate me, then put the urn on top of a HUGE funeral pyre, like eight metres of solid wood, douse the whole thing in petrol and fireworks, then set fire to a pig and send it running towards the pile]. This of course set me pondering my own mortality. It is a bad idea to get me thinking about my own mortality as I am a pretty deep thinker and I pretty much end up either curled in a ball on the floor sucking my own thumb, or coming up with an amazing new philosophical way to view existence and the cosmos. Neither are good. In this case it was choice A, and after about ten minutes of lying under the desk, I realised - I have to make every day count. I can't let myself waste away my time living a life without brightly coloured board shorts. So I got up, took my thumb out of my mouth and I went to Kingston and I bought a yellow tshirt from Primark. And some board shorts.
Unfortunately when I got home I realised that, despite the fact that they were indeed brightly coloured and floral, what I had carelessly picked up from the rack at M&S without really looking were NOT BOARD SHORTS. They were in fact NORMAL SWIMMING SHORTS. They were like hot pants. Oh my misery when I realised that I had just bought some short shorts; it was indescribable. I gnashed my teeth and jumped about then I sat in my chair. Fortunately at this point the period of introspection about my own mortality had passed so I gave up on the board short idea again and went back to spinning around in my swivelly chair gleefully.
Days passed and I still had no board shorts.
Then I heard some news which actually properly fucked me up; this guy who I used to go to school with was in hospital! Everyone refers to him as 'Will' now but when we were friends he called himself 'Billy' and that is what I call him. This is because I am a traditionalist in my use of names; I still refer to 'Starburst' as 'Opal Fruits' and 'Katie Price' as 'Jordan' and 'black people' as 'slaves'. I'M JOKING I'M JOKING I'M JOKING I'M JOKING I'M JOKING I'M JOKING. That was a piece of social irony. In fact I refer to them as 'coloureds'. Anyway, apparently Billy had something wrong with his liver or something - my source (being a hysterical girl) was not exactly precise on the medical details - but I knew enough that he was in intensive care.
This properly screwed me up. I don't know why, I haven't spoken to him properly for about a decade and I barely know the guy. But it was just like - he's somebody I did know, someone who I used to have bare jokes with, and he was now in a hospital bed somewhere. I tell you, there was a mournful hour of me just spinning slowly around in my chair wondering if I should send him a card or something. Fortunately, the next day the news came in that he was out of intensive care, which was a fucken relief. I did literally jump in the air when I found out. It made me so happy and also demonstrated to me a new side of myself. This experience showed me that after all, I DO have a heart, and I can learn to care about Kings boys. Or at least the Kings boys that I used to go to school with. So that was good.
However, I realised at this point that it was time for another long period of introspection about my own mortality. I realised that our time on earth is fleeting; none of us are Gods; we are all just little islands of moving tissue that float about, lazily interacting with each other until the time comes when enough factors pile up on us that it is easier to no longer be moving tissue and in fact break down and rejoin the great circle of life - after that, who knows? The afterlife? Reincarnation? The blackness of the abyss? Nobody knows, and I feel that it is for each of us to take that sole solitary step into the beyond to face the infinite coldness of eternity.
The upshot of this was that floral hotpants were no longer an option. I had to go out and complete my quest and get some proper board shorts. Lying in a hospital bed, would Billy be able to go and buy some flowery board shorts whenever he wanted? Would the hedgehogs? Would FARFUR THE HAMAS MICKEY MOUSE? NO.
So I had to do it for the hedgehogs. And I had to get a refund on the hotpants because I was certainly not wearing them. So I went to M&S. I was a bit put off because I bought them on the Monday and by the Sunday, the entire interior of the shop had changed. Like, the cashier's desk had pretty much uprooted and scooted across to the other side of the shop. This fazed me, however I checked the sign and saw that the refund desk was on the top floor.
I went up the escalators, and finally I clapped eyes on the refund desk, on the far far wall, way off in the distance. This was ok. However what was NOT ok was what lay in between me and the refund desk. Some joker had placed the refund desk strategically in the middle of the lingere area. And M&S doesn't just have some small little corner devoted to bras and other such fripperies, THERE IS AN ENTIRE FREAKING FLOOR filled with heaving bosoms and crotches and thighs. I took a few steps in then I clapped eyes on a poster that had some old woman in a bra and panties and it said "Each pair of these panties sold goes towards Cancer Research for women like Maureen" and I tell you I was nearly like fuck this I'll just give up on the twelve pounds I spent on the shorts. However, I thought again of the hedgehogs and I thought - the hedgehogs would give anything to be able to walk through the lingerie department of M&S to get a refund on their floral hot pants, I can't wuss out now. So I went in and oh, it was horrible. There were bras and padding and lace as far as the eye could see. I tried to just keep my eyes fixed ahead of me but I tell you, there was wavering. It was like walking through a crowd of zombies in Shaun of the Dead, all these fat women holding up panties and saying things like BREAST and CUP and glowering at me, the solitary teenage boy standing nervously next to the shear silk panties. I nearly walked into one of the mannequins and it looked like I was getting my kicks from her plastic bazookas. I would probably say that it was the worst day of my life.
FINALLY however I got to the refund desk. I kind of fell into the queue line, breathing heavily, covered in sweat and bleeding out of a small cut on my upper temple. "Oh god, it's terrible out there!" I panted. The man at the refund desk - who looked as scarred and jaded and desensitised to the whole thing as is possible to be, just looked sympathetically at me and gave me a refund. I fled the shop.
Then I went and bought some board shorts. PROPER ONES this time. They are so good, all red with a nice floral pattern. I can see why they are so popular because - as trousers go - they are FUN. I wore them today while writing this blog and I have to tell you, I feel more like going for a surf than I EVER had. HEY GUYS WHO WANTS TO GO SURFING? Another excellent feature of the board shorts I bought is that they came with a little plastic thing for scraping sex wax onto a surfboard. Unfortunately I have no board nor sex wax; however, the little plastic thing also works as a bottle opener. SO EVERYONE'S A WINNER. Board shorts: fun AND practical. I honestly can't think of anything I would rather be wearing.
I am going to go down a STORM at Henley.
Anyway. Get well soon Billy, from the random guy you used to go to school with.
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