Recently in Whimsic Category

I remember, back when I cared about these things, that I was asked to categorise my blog by someone who wanted to bung it in a list. That was when I discovered that there are a zillion different categories of blogs - from political blogs to mommy blogs to blogs about collecting knicker elastic. And each of these categories has its own internal hierarchy and elements that definitely think they're better than anyone else and that anything else isn't really blogging.

This is of course, nonsense.

Mind you, at the moment, I am at something of a loose end of what to write about, partly because I don't want to suddenly become a categorised blog. It would be so easy for this to have become a blog about the OU course that I did, or about the job hunting that is going on at the moment, or about the sheer hell that is, at least this week, my current job.

All of which leaves me wondering what I'll write about. So, in the mean time...

Yesterday, after the polite rejection from the Sontarans (they wanted me but couldn't afford me, apparently), I was hijacked in a meeting room by two dachshunds. These are crackberry addicts, small and wiry, with faces you wouldn't tire of holding in the sink. They nipped away at my ankles and thighs, caused me a lot of pain, and I couldn't kick them because I'm bigger than them.

The next rejection is due on Thursday.

That would be silly, wouldn't it?

If you eat beef, say, it doesn't make you a cow.

If you're going to be human, surely that means you have to be a cannibal.

But if the human you're eating is a vegetarian, say, then can he (or she) really be called a human, because surely he (or she) is what he (or she) eats in the first place?

Oh, my head hurts.

Here's the stuff that's in my head that I might have written about recently. But didn't.

• Falling asleep after dinner in people's homes.
• The pizza delivery guy slipping across the tarmac.
• Meat is murder.
• Meeting up with old friends
• Framing and shipping art.
• Crossing London
• Carefully positioned bald men.
• Michael and Emma.
• Total Eclipse of the Moon.
• Taking pasta to Sicily
• Late dining.
• Telephone voting.

Laters.

Your face is breathing, you are old but still alive. Your curves are spreading, thinking back in time slowly. The ever-changing shorelines, changing times, situation sprouts the most beautiful but sad daffodils. And there is some very beautiful but ill-fated woman climbing over your face.

Discuss.

"What are you doing down there?" asked Laura.

I must have made a ludicrous sight, crawling under the table on my hands and knees, trying to find the one Euro coin that had slipped from my wallet.

"Nothing," I replied. "Just trying to look up your skirt."

"I wish," she said. For a second, I believed her.

We were in the beer garden at Scholars. Scholars being our local, a car crash of a pub, where bad taste meets worse taste in a crazy mishmash that ought not to work, and doesn't.

Back in the day, it was a School. I think it was St Kevin's National School, but being a foreigner, I neither know what a National School means, nor do I really care. Then, as is the way with all old public buildings that fall in to disuse, it was turned in to a pub. They called it Scholars because of the School connection, you see. They're clever like that round our way. They kept most of the structure, the wood panelling, had pictures of old school sports teams on the wall. It was quite dark, and it was quite quaint, and it sold bottles of wine for take out at two in the morning at ridiculously over-inflated prices. It had a food section that didn't serve food, and looked like it hadn't for years. That's how posh it was.

Back in January they closed for refurbishment. When they reopened, everything was cream and beige, the bar had moved, and the beer garden had been expanded. Less of a garden, though, more an ugly patio with a sun-shade and a few hardwired braziers. Televisions everywhere inside so that people can watch sports, ashtrays outside so that people can enjoy the delights of the smoking ban in comfort, although they have to peer inside if they want to see who's thrashing who at the Hurling. Now, after a shaky start where they attracted those poor unfortunate souls who rely on the scent of sawdust to achieve arousal, they are now doing great bsuiness with people who don't have Sky Sports, or funeral parties who want to go for a damn fine knees up.

And we go there too. Because it's local, and because it's sometimes quite quiet, when the local kids stop throwing empty cans up on to the awning and asking us why we're sitting outside when we're not smoking.

So I was down on the ground, trying to pick up this coin while retaining as much dignity as I could with my arse in the air. Mr Twinky and Laura were talking - as usual - about architecture and employment, and for a second, just for a second, I realised that I was looking at the world from a strange angle, seeing shoes and ankles, looking up through the wire mesh of the table top at the braziers and canopies.

Crawling around on the floor is a shit place to be. It's not anywhere that I'd really choose to be, but at that point in my life it was the culmination of every choice that there had been up to that point.

What the hell, I thought, make the most of it. So I tied her shoelaces together.

odd·verse noun (òd-v�rs')
The less conventional of two possible alternatives, cases, or sides: the oddverse of science is, more often than not, pixies.

Childrens' books are full of magical shops that appear in alleys, act as a gateway to adventure, and then disappear again. In real life, we often find places that have a magical charm to them, but then fail to find them ever again, no matter how hard we look. Has this happened to you?