Kein Zurück für dich

I gather that there has been some comment from the unemployable community as to the dearth of posts from the equally indolent No Good Boyo.

This is due to his contractual obligation to translate the next chapter of Anti-Danube by the weekend.

I recently sought to encourage him by glancing at his work in progress. "It could never be completed after your death," I cooed.

He has not left his cellar since.

Bitte denk an nichts. Alles ist gut

One of No Good Boyo's little friends dreams at night of passing his lunch hour in the bar at work, drinking and talking nonsense with Boyo, "Kronie", "Dazza", "Fuel Rod" and other carbon sacks. The exquisite poignancy is that he spends every lunchtime doing little else.

No Good Boyo thinks this shows a perfect life/dream balance. For once the educated world and Boyo are in accord.

Freud said the key to psychological equilibrium is the Nirvana Principle. Some seek escape from stimulus in suicide and murder, but the well-adjusted achieve it through self-awareness, peaceful recreation and hence restful sleep.

I too have achieved this balance. At night I dream of wreaking vengeance on my current and future subordinates. Then I go to work and do just that.

A Man's World

Last night, during a television showing of No Good Boyo's favourite roll of celluloid, a "quite bright, at least on paper" friend texted him with the cinematic aperçu "Alien vs. Predator - what more could a man want from a film?"

No Good Boyo thought for a while during the ingestion of several glasses of Batko Voskoboynykov's choicest monkey juice, then texted back "more topless".

I blandly inquired whether this improvement ought to be essayed by a character in the film or a pliant female/ladyboy companion in a domestic/multiplex setting.

He considered this a little longer over continued refreshments, and concluded "during the adverts".

Irony and science fiction do not mix, and there is no need to attend a Star Trek convention to prove it.

Citoyens Sans-Culottes

Last night No Good Boyo decided to repair his culottes.

It says much about him that he owns a pair of culottes, and even more about my underrated liberalism that I tolerate this deviation.

I insist that he wear them only indoors, on the grounds that he is neither Pablo Picasso nor a Greek fisherman.

As most men grown older they sprout hair from ear and eyeball. Welshmen seem to develop bulbous knees. This leads to unsustainable contradictions with the individual culotte and inevitable rupture.

So, following days of unheeded pointing and whining at his threadbare garment, No Good Boyo decided to repair the rent.

After studying a sewing kit for a good few minutes he vanished in search of scissors, which I had concealed after his attempt to open a jar of gherkins with them.

Some time later he returned with a pair of nail clippers, and produced to cut off the bottom section of the culotte half-inch by half-inch.

He then proposed the resulting uneven flap of linen, with cider and gravy stains intact, as a summer halter-top for our daughter Arianrhod.

Mr Julien Macdonald may need to revamp his Spring Collection in order to retain the title of leading Welsh couturier.

Adam lay ybounden

No Good Boyo drove our car, Old Mossy, to a rendezvous at midnight this weekend. He was proud of the chance to use headlights, and had studied the car manual thoroughly to this end.

Sad to say he did not read the paragraph on the car's reading internal light, and fumbled in the dark for the switch. Like most Bernsteinian revisionists he was happy to settle for any switch, and so drove out into the night with the sun-roof open.

Into the freezing Berkshire night he drove. A pale moon backlit the snowflakes as they settled on his head, muffling his sobs.

Asbo Sprach Zarathustra

Performed on a chromatic array of hollowed-out teenagers' skulls.

Live teenagers' skulls.

"Affectations can be dangerous."

No Good Boyo took me for our first drive the other day.

He hit a drainpipe, scraped a wall, and drove into a ditch from which he extricated the car only by taking felt off a shed roof to provide traction. He then knocked over a fence post.

Fifteen minutes later, we emerged from our drive. I am not making this up.

The highlight of the rest of the afternoon was a u-turn ("I'm pretty sure this is illegal, you know!") in a narrow country lane, performed for reasons that still escape me.

Mentions are also due for the creative use of windscreen wipers to indicate a left turn and a long and agonised search for the back wiper on a saloon car that naturally does not have one.

The trip to Highgate Cemetery will have to wait.