Week 101

Sunday 21 February 2021

• Some things from previous weeks that have so far gone unmentioned:

  • I heard there was a moral imperative to eat venison, so I bought and cooked and ate some. Some of which turned out to have come from New Zealand, which I’m not sure there’s such a moral imperative to eat, and some of which was sausages cut with cranberry, which I usually avoid (but was OK), and pork, which again there’s less moral imperative to eat. I see a local butcher sells some cheap and actually local venison and things, so maybe I should go there. Interacting with a meat monger feels a bit intimidating, even though I know that in practice they’re some of the most cheerful people you’ll come across.

  • Something else? I can’t remember.

• There are some adverts on commercial radio that get one one’s tits. For example, I hope smug Timmy, or whatever his name is, chokes on his “finest steak for two”. He tells us he omits garlic, because “you know what I mean” wink wink nudge nudge, but, as properly cooked garlic is actually neutral to fragrant and doesn’t preclude canoodling, either the lad (who I hope is fictional, because I’ve just wished an obstructed windpipe on him) doesn’t cook garlic properly, or the wink wink nudge nudge is because he’s cooking for a vampire.

  I can choose not to listen to that, but then I walk along and find an outdoor advert – not a billboard, the wall of a bus shelter – with the prat’s smug face on it. There’s no escape from a multi-platform advertising campaign, oh dear.

• Something occurred that reminded me of the story about the guy having breafast with Jeff Bezos and Bezos eating some octopus. Turns out it’s not how I remember imagining it – Bezos eating the tentacles one by one, the tentacles representing his competitors, like Julius Nicholson eating the onion bhaji or something. No, Bezos was all, “You’re the octopus that I’m having for breakfast … When I look at the menu, you’re the thing I don’t understand, the thing I’ve never had. I must have the breakfast octopus” (explaining why he bought his breakfast mate’s company). And the octopus comes buried under more normal looking elements of the appetising breakfast menu item.

• Getting jabbed with the vax next week! Which is surprisingly quick. I do, technically, have an heart disease – one which has so far never caused me any trouble and I could have gone most of my life without finding out about, you could even galaxy-brainedly say my heart is normal and everyone else’s are weird – so I think that’s why the algorithm chose to send me the text message. Or maybe there’s been another mistake like the dude who was in the database as being six centimetres tall. Well, I’m relieved to have had some confirmation that my registration with the GP, some months ago, had been processed, and I look forward to standing in line with presumably older and poorlier people and feeling like a bit of a fraud.