Monday, August 23, 2004

Sluggy Mecca

Slugs are nicer than human beings.

No slug has ever played a practical joke on another slug, then emitted a braying laugh, spraying wet specks of salt and vinegar crisps onto a formica table. Drunken slug couples have never fought over a suitcase outside my window at 3.40 am, or if they have, they kept the noise down. No slug, in the history of ever, has actively chosen to wear a baseball cup.

So, it is empirically provable that slugs are nicer than human beings. Unfortunately, slugs do regularly insinuate themselves into my bathroom, and that is why it is their fate to be picked up in bits of toilet paper and flushed into oblivion.

I am starting to believe that my bathroom is some kind of religious centre for slugs, a holy site that at some point in its life, each religiously-observant slug must visit. (to be fair, there is quite a nice wood-framed mirror with a sort of wave motif, so perhaps that's it). I like to imagine slugs of varying professions banding together for safety, telling each other slow, moist stories as they travel down the hedgerows and across the back gardens to my flat. Where the chosen few (i.e. those slugs unfortunate enough to be at prayer when I'm just about to have my bath), are plucked by a mighty hand and dispatched to a watery doom.

If you're religious, there must be worse times to be killed by a mysterious omnipotent force than when you're praying. At least you're in the right mindset. If it turns out you're right about your chosen deity, I bet you go to the top of the queue.

I used to carefully pick up the slugs in a piece of toilet paper and shake them out of the window, where I always imagined a fat hedgehog sitting with its mouth open. But the only hedgehog in my garden sat outside for the shed for a week until I realized it was dead and let weeds grow over its body until I didn't have to look any more.

There was even a snail in my bathroom the other day. I can understand slugs creeping in through the gaps in the ventilation system, but how did a snail manage it? He/She (snails are all hermaphrodite) must have lowered him/herself down from the ceiling, like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, only with bits of spiderweb.

Flushing the snail down the toilet seemed overly dramatic somehow (and could have have caused a blockage), so I reverted to my older, kinder disposal method and dropped him out of the window instead. Sadly, I heard the small, sad 'crunch' that can only mean fatal shell damage. I considered getting dressed and going outside to put him/her out of his/her hermaphroditic misery, but I had run the bath too hot. A terrible sleepiness crept over and I slid slowly into the steaming water, feeling it rise up above chest, and then my chin, and from then on, the only life I was trying to preserve was my own.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

bearded ladies

While I'm banging on about GW, I should point out that the beautiful and talented Messina and Rusling, who make up 50% of the BEARDED LADIES are appearing now at the Edinburgh Festival. Go and see them now, and be edified, amused and entertained.

I didn't realise they wrote the Diet Coke ad where Tamsin Grieg scrawls her contact details on every available surface. Which made me laugh. Bless 'em.

JUST TESTING IF I CAN RESTORE ARCHIVES GW and evil weevils

Trailers have started for GW, and someone ripped off my Switch card for £650. I wasn't going to start blogging properly until something interesting happened, but I wasn't expecting it all at once.

I'm sitting at home waiting for phone calls from a) Falmouth constabulary and b) Natwest. Just hope whoever ordered a load of stuff off autotrader.co.uk at my expense was stupid enough to get it sent to their home address. You never know.

Still, the GW thing is much more fun. For the unitiated (and as it doesn't start till Sept 3rd, that's pretty much everyone) it's a comedy/drama/soap/don't know what it is really, going out Friday nights, C4, 9.30pm, and I wrote any scenes involving radio control cars, crossbows and conversations about adamantium. More details here

Right, back to waiting for the phone to ring. It's half nine in the morning, and I'm already fed up with waiting.