peter morrison 2010

You’ll notice that i don’t call It by its right name. speaking its name might not actually bring it on but why take foolish chances. I’m talking about a certain sort of stoppage or ungoing, not infrequently an ongoing ungoing, that sometimes afflicts those whose trade is the writing of fiction. One of the strange truths about fiction is that practitioner writing with no difficulty on Monday may be utterly incapable of doing it on Tuesday. The poor blighter is suddenly rocked. ‘How’s it going?’ one’s friends ask cheerfully. ‘It’s not,’ one replied.

Can you pick it up from casual liaisons? Yes. From toilet seats? Yes. From reading the Sunday supplements? Watching The South Bank Show? Yes, yes. There are more ways of picking it up than not.

Various writers deal with it in various ways’ alcohol and frequent snacks, the traditional folk-remedies, do little to relieve the blankness of the page. Jogging has been known to result in the odd paragraph and a fair number of heart attacks. Hot baths and cold showers, travel and other forms of escape are unproductive.

One of the earliest symptoms is a growing dread of blank paper, and at this stage preventative action may still have some effect; certainly, in the mind-to-paper process, one’s choice of paper is important. I always use 80-gram yellow A4; it’s the kind of yellow the paper manufacturers call gold, and gold is what one is trying to refine the base metal of one’s thoughts into, isn’t It. While at the same time making a modest living if possible. Yellow paper definitely has less word resistance than blue; yellow-paper molecules are happier with blank-ink molecules than the blue paper ones are, and more susceptible to Brownian or even purpureal motion. I never use white paper - to intensity the blankness of a blank sheet by using white paper is to run to meet trouble considerably more than halfway.

from "Blighters Rock", The Moment under The Moment

the picture shows this year's quote on my work monitor, with post-it to prompt the sourcing of yellow paper.... the quote itself was then tweeted (in a chopped up, unfortunately messy fashion), though was one of those days where i went to work and had dinner at friends, so had little other option. and would help if twitter weren't blocked from work....and all the parts had actually gone in from my phone. so it goes.

Emmae Gibson 2009

4th February 2009. Snowed in this year, as it happened. In Appin, where it doesn't usually. Happen, I mean, snow, I mean. Which made it a doubly happy happening, snowing and 4quating, all wrappin'd up; left it in the rack of books and birthday cards in the village shop:

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: `This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: `This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.'

from Turtle Diary, ch 24.

Chosen with certain grown-up children in mind.

Struggled home and sent yellow cosmic paper to several members of a writers' group, quoting this other, familiar, wonderful struggle:

Right, said Kleinzeit. Enough. He opened the door of the yellow paper's cage, and it sprang upon him. Over and over they rolled together, bloody and roaring. Doesn't matter what the title is to start with, he said, anything will do. HERO, I'll call it. Chapter I. He wrote the first line while the yellow paper clawed his guts, the pain was blinding. It'll kill me, said Kleinzeit, there's no surviving this. He wrote the second line, the third, completed the first paragraph. The roaring and the blood stopped, the yellow paper rubbed purring against his leg, the first paragraph danced and sang, leaped and played on the green grass in the dawn.

from Kleinzeit, Picador edition 1976 p.108.

peter morrison 2008

i am so badly organised this year. but managed to leave the following quote in GFT in glasgow. it was gone when i came out of film. never sure what that means. i wonder... what happens to the sheet of yellow paper?

Max stands there for what seems a long time. The shapes of black keep moving and changing. The way they do it scares him. He'd like to think it's his mind playing up but this feels as this is coming from somewhere else. The black shapes are as sharp as razor blades. Max fears that if he makes a wrong move blood will come out of his eyes and ears and nose and mouth. What would be a wrong move? A wrong thought? He plays close attention to the shapes of black. The distances between them are not always the same. A Woman He can't see touches his arm and says, 'Are you all right?'

'I'm OK, Thanks' he says. 'I was just trying to remember if I turned off the cooker.'

'And did you?'

'Not sure but I'll find out when I get home.'

'Good luck,' says the woman, and she's gone.

Is one of the black shapes moving away from the others? Is it something recognisable? Suddenly the world comes back. With a stench of desolation. It smells like a backed-up toilet in an empty house with broken windows. Out of the corner of his eye Max sees something following him. Is it a dog? A cat? It's a little man, black as ebony, long body, very short arms and legs, large head, big ugly baby-face. He's inching along on his belly like a dog that's been run over. Max looks around. Lots of foot traffic but no one's stepping on the dwarf. Nobody is taking any notice at all. The smell is almost making Max throw up but he wants to do the decent thing. He says to the dwarf, 'Are you all right?'

'Closer,' says the dwarf. His voice is like dead leaves skittering on the floor of that empty house with the backed-up toilet.

from Her Name Was Lola

Emmae Gibson 2007

You live in the country now. You lived in the country before, but this is the real thing. Mountains, stones and oceans, trees, green islands and untrodden valleys, and shortly before the 4th February you realise in panic that successful 4quating is an urban activity.

For a start, deer don’t read. Just have no idea.

Secondly, the amount of horizontal rain here lately would wash the profundities of Kleinzeit deeply underground.

Thirdly, you did bus stops last year.

Land and seascape so pristine, a shred of paper of any colour gets dirty looks from green people. Of which you are one, naturally. Yellow paper with black capitals fluttering on a tree trunk? Looks fine in a romantic movie, but you could get your name in the local newspaper; think of the ignominy in the same column as ‘Man Bites Diggs,’ you’d be ‘Woman Accused of Yellow Loitering.’

Out on the waves? Now there’s a pretty thought, a Riddley message in a bottle bobbing, bobbing. But - plastic or glass - Coke or Glenfiddich? Both death to turtles. You dare not.

So you find yourself in the city with your man, who’s always on business, the Saturday night before the Sunday 4th February morning, on the fifth floor of the Thistle Hotel, listening to the raucous voices of party-goers in the street below long after 3.a.m. In New York all you could hear were sirens; at least Glasgow still has its well-documented, human element.

You brought a carrying book, a spare paperback copy of the first Hoban you ever read. You remember another hotel, the one where you read it, how it took you by surprise on the long way home. You could throw it out of the window now and surprise someone else. Not exactly A4 in its presentation, not yellow in deed, but yellow in thought.

But no, it might hit someone and how user-friendly is that?

You go back to sleep. The yellow paper waits written and folded inside the book of surprise, with the golden words:

‘The ends of things are always present in their beginnings…. the ends are actually visible in the faces of the people with whom one begins something. There is always an early face that will be forgotten and will be seen again…. some aspect of the person that is always seen early and will inevitably be seen again, no matter how the seeing changes in between.’

from Turtle Diary

In the morning you go down to breakfast with your man and your book. You don’t leave it on your table for the waiter. You don’t leave it in the room when you check out, or at reception; no, she’s not the one. By now you’re getting desperate. You’ve failed to 4quate, you’ve let the team down, and soon you’ll be back in the car speeding guiltily towards useless, wide-open spaces again. Man asks if you’re okay - concerned - was it the steak last night?

You’re the one with the car park ticket and the money.

“No charge, hen,” says the man in the kiosk with the another-boring-sunday face. “Residents free!”

“Oh?”

You pause for a second as he turns away from his little window, to yet another-sunday-paper. The car starts to slide away. You know he’s the one. You slide the book on to his window ledge, the yellow folded bookmark sticking out.

You could have said something, given it to him, explaining, but that’s not 4quating, is it?

It has to be surreptitious. More fittingly Hobanesque, for the recipient, for the bored man in the green luminous jacket, you have to give him the element of discovery, surprise, the change of face.

You’re sure he was the one.

peter morrison 2007

the first paragraph below i left on paper in the arches in glasgow, and posted the full thing on my blog/journal here and here.

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: "The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup..." I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they're swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn't think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can't believe they'd swim, 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. Sea turtles can't shut themselves up in their shells as land turtles do. Their shells are like tight bone vests and their flippers are always sticking out. Nothing they can do if a shark comes along. Pray. Ridiculous to think of a turtle praying with all those teeth coming up from below.

Mr. Meager, manager of the shop and the source of Meager soup stood in front of me for a while. When I noticed him he asked me if I'd got something on my mind. Green turtles, I said. Was that something we'd subscribed, he wanted to know. No, I said, it was the source of turtle soup. He went away with a hard smile.

It's hard to believe they do it by observing the angle of the sun like a yachtsman with a sextant. Carr doubts it and he's about the biggest turtle authority there is. But that's what penguins do on overland journeys. They're big navigators too. I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn't seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be, swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind. And when they can't see the sun, what then? Their vision isn't good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith?

from Turtle Diary

i've only been reading hoban for a few years, think this is my 3rd sa4qe? i worked my way through all the bloomsbury books with the matching covers, not really realising turtle diary would become hard to get. but by the time i was ready to just get it despite it not matching the others, the only copy i had actually seen in the shops was gone. so i finally got round to buying it second hand about a month ago, and read it in the last couple of weeks. normally its the humour, the sense of the weird that creeps in that gets me with russell's work, though i acknowledge the darkness in his work. reading turtle, i guess it hit me in the rut, and turning that last page i was left with a sense of melancholy, a need to release my own turtle. since reading it the whole idea of "soup" has become a running gag between me and a friend - you have a choice, accept new ideas and keep moving, or become soup.

i avoided reading the related posts before i went out, not entirely sure why, but i didn't want it to influence me. very weird to then find that the same quote has already been used. and to think i nearly went for the one about the playboy in the shark cage and the parallels between fetishism, or william g's speculations about shamanism and the turtle as his spirit animal.

anyway, a good day to you all, and may you avoid being soup good and long!

Emmae Gibson 2006

Have You Heard The One About...

I don’t want to go to Hoban Square any more.

The other night I dreamt of bus timetables. The ones I’d looked up showed long strings of inseparable numbers, places, times dep. and arr., fares, concessions, symbols, exceptions; map legend heaven for any transport buff or tourist. I’ve been seeing this bus in town - not dreaming it - ice cream white, pink and blue no.417, destination board saying, HOBAN SQUARE, and I’ve let it be. Bus and I, biding each other’s time, nodding as we pass, until the day I would be able to get on it, the wistful cousin, perhaps, of FULHAM BROADWAY. February 4th fairly beckoned, but it didn’t happen, I was on the west coast.

Back in the region of Auld Reekie, I wanted to see Hoban Square, whatever it was, half an hour away in Broxburn, before I lose my eyesight straining after receding, FIRST buses, so I took the first rain-free morning off, parked the car between leafless trees and walked to the bus stop, my golden yellow papers discreet in a Harvey Nich’s bag. How happily they hummed, quotations, sources and links, all printed out in glossy black Lydian!

“Do you know why it’s called Hoban Square?” I asked a comfy-looking woman in the queue. She seemed to think I was from Channel Four News the way she looked round, before admitting she didn’t know.

“It’s jist whaur the bus feenishes up!” she said, fingering her Bus Pass.

“You mean – the end of the line – a bus station?”

“Naw, naw. Jista kinda turn, y’ken?”

I’d been tempted to research the Hoban connection, but refrained; rather wanted to meet the Square square-on, uninfluenced, the raw, gritty anti-climax I expected. As for Broxburn, it’s named from the Scots word, brock, meaning badger, and burn, meaning stream. Stones and oceans in miniature, with Frances and co! Couldn’t be all bad.

The single-decker came sprayed with seasonal chocolate. The driver’s name badge said, Archie McDowell. He looked as if he’d been born and bred in the driver’s seat and his grey eyes assured me I would ask for nothing but, “Hoban Square, please.”

“He was a Bishop,” Archie said, as soon as I opened my mouth again, (honestly, do I still look like a tourist?) “Catholic” he added benevolently, his eyes seeming to turn green, and white, football strip, home game.

“Oh?” and that curious word, ‘orangeism’ flashed across my mind.

The Bishop was a good omen, though, because I was carrying quotes from the most religious book, perhaps, that R.H. has written. (I haven’t read the one about the Actress yet.) Further, by the guttural voice level of the passengers, old, young, sheepskin coated or belly naked, all seemed to have known each other since Christ left Dunbarton.

Some blurb-writers do not romanticize: ‘Broxburn developed from a village in the 19th century on the Edinburgh-Glasgow road, into a centre-point for transporting people and goods. The discovery of coal, iron and shale resulted in an increase in population and the creation of gigantic waste ‘bings’ which surround the area.’ Top marks for real estate truth. The once mysterious ‘bings’ are apparently full of waste population.

“What d’you expect -” hissed the bus as it shoogled between roundabouts, cemeteries, supermarkets and lazy traffic lights, “- Elvis Presley Boulevard?”

Brown winter fields and three golf courses later, came Ardbeg storage, Outlet Crystal, many Italian restaurants, churches, hairdressers, banks and pubs. We had just passed one called the BADGERS BROOK, when Archie suddenly took a sharp turn off Main Street Scotland and we trundled up a hill. Expectation rose in the climb through the evergreen tended pages of Homes & Gardens. An incredible sun came out, the sky showed blue. I could see at the top of the hill, another bare, red-brown hill beyond the rooftops - and knew at once it was a bing. I’d never been so close to one before. In no time at all I was about to alight, the last visible passenger, at Hoban Square.

Where was it?

The comfy-looking woman was right. And the Bishop, if he were alive, would not be writing home about it, unless there is a language of papal graffiti. I had hoped I would be wrong, but I was right too, about the nitty-gritty, suburban realism. In the burst of midday light, one green-framed bus shelter in a dull lay-by. A man and woman appeared from inside and got on the bus, which left immediately. Apart from any aesthetic concerns, where would I stick the yellow paper?

The sharp breeze seemed to belong here, in what constituted the Square; adjoining the pavement, a three-sided row of grey, single-storey dwellings, the kind they build for elderly people, one central tree, concrete slabs, no sign of human life and the bing waiting eerily on high. I walked to one end where a green park began with paths leading round the back towards open fields, the reddish layered heights of the man-made mountain beyond. It reminded me of the skirted mesa hills between El Paso and Las Cruces, only they were ochre and sunbaked.

Leaving Hoban Square behind I tightened my scarf and made my way up the sloping field, the wind upscaling as I went. At that point I heard a whistle. A little brown dog barking in the distance, running towards me, figure of a man some way off. His pet looked like a cross between Corgi and Jack Russell. Fearing for my ankles and cursing Diana Slickman, I tacked sideways, but the dog changed direction too, ignoring his master’s voice.

A swinging choreography ensued, which eventually brought the three of us face to face in the middle of the field. The dog continued to dance on the grass, the man who was comfy-looking and almost elderly, but had escaped waste population, obviously thought I was lost.

“Can I help you?”

I usually get on well with older men, so I entered into the swing of the bing thing. Which pleased him no end. If I had wanted a tour guide…in a sheepskin deerstalker…. We stood surveying the alien landscape while he answered my questions. This bing was shale, which had been mined here, paraffin oil extracted from it, then dumped to the side, ever higher and higher. Deep, deep mines, thousands of men, millions of tons of shale. Wild horses run around on it now, and optimistic trees struggle on the top of the “red ash.”

“No’ very nice, is it? There’s no saying what else might be buried in there,” he said grimly. “You’re actually standin’ on a smaller bing. The Council put grass on it.”

Underfoot was close enough. The sun had vanished and we walked back down to escape the icy bing-wind. He blamed the Council for the poor amenities, the vandalized signposts pointing in the wrong directions, the Square of senior citizens’ homes being bought up. As other dogs, leads and people began to appear on the path, he took a biscuit out of his pocket for every dog.

“One more question,” I said, before he and his dog crossed the road. “The Hoban connection?”

“Oh, he was a Canon. In the parish here. About the 1930’s.”

Canon Hoban! So much for your Bishop, Archie. Then he asked me a question.

“Are you… a tourist… or have you come to live in Broxburn?”

I told him the whole truth, though not the whole canon of Hoban, which didn’t faze him; I think his lunch might have been waiting on the table. Tomorrow if he passes the bus shelter, he might see the yellow page I blutak’d inside, and wonder at the colourful word-pictures of Amaryllis Night And Day:

A bus was coming. No numbers on it, only the destination, FINSEY-OBEY. Not a place I’d heard of. The bus was a tall and delicate thing of bamboo and rice paper, sheets of yellow, orange and pink pasted together and candlelit from within like a Japanese lantern. It was much bigger than a double-decker, towering so high above me that even when I tilted my head back I couldn’t see the top of it.

I went back to the lopsided signpost and put one there for passing dogs, masters and mistresses. If the gold withers away, the words will still be written on the wind:

Sometimes between two people it’s as if one is a lock and one is a key and they take turns at being lock and key; but at other times it’s as if both are keys or both are locks and nothing can be done.

I hope someone else will ponder one of the personal favourites I left on an empty seat in the return bus, driven by a replacement Archie. Out of Pilgermann context it might not seem to be about what it is really about, but to me, is part of the essential R.H:

The miracle has happened, no explanations are necessary. With a miracle one is immediately thou and the rest follows, the rest has been going on before one arrived, the moment is prepared and ready.

The centre of time is, as I have said, the waiting. This is now off the centre, this the motion of the everything, the action of the universe, the destined world-line of the soul, the living heart of the mystery.

Back in my hometown car park, I pinned a leafless, young tree with the news:

Loneliness… is the essential human condition. Everything else is gravy.

Thank you Diana. Bings of blessings on you and the unfolding worlds of your brainchild, sa4qe!

peter morrison 2006

hello all. happy russ's birthday.

i sat last night and wrote out my SA4QE on one of the nice sheets of yellow paper i liberated from work. carried it around all day with me. took me awhile to decide where to put it. then as i headed towards HMV it hit me. leave it in the world cinema section, and given the nature of my quote, preferably with a horror film. i opted for the japanese ring trilogy box set, i felt given the themes of linger awhile that was a very appropriate place to leave a quote about a video-generated hopping thing...

Everything was going round and round with the ground sometimes tilting up and sometimes down while out of the corner of my eye I saw some great big hopping thing coming after me. I sprinted down Cecil Court, dodged through the traffic in St. Martin's Lane with the thing close behind, made a sharp right towards the Coliseum, then left and left again and so on trying to lose it but when I reached the lab it was still hot on my heels. Once I got inside I phoned the police while the hopping thing did its best to come through the wall. Scared? I didn't know whether to shit or go blind so I just closed one eye and farted and hoped for better times. It took about an hour and a whole lot of black coffee before the thing left off thumping and squelching and went back to wherever it lives.

from Linger Awhile

peter morrison 2005

i left the following quote at the UGC, Renfrew St, Glasgow, left in a cup holder during a showing of the film Closer:

More and more i find that life is a series of

disappearances

followed usually but not always by reappearances;

you disappear from your morning self

and reappear as your afternoon self;

you disappear from feeling good

and reappear feeling bad.

And people, even face to face

and clasped in each other's arms,

disappear from each other.

from Fremder

-that is actually a somewhat apt quote for Closer, though on reflection, i can see it being the perfect choice of film for Russell, being so london based, but while watching it i became struck of the parallels with her name was lola. the opening sequence of the film shows a writer dan (=max; also in search of "page one") spotting his destiny girl alice (=lola), but then he is distracted by anna a photographer (=lula mae in a gallery), and then there is nice reliable dr. larry in the background (=basil lawyer). really it is a vague comparison, but for me the core idea really is the discovery of dan's destiny girl and his subsequent inability to hold on to her and remain true to her.

which is perhaps ironic given that my second quote is from her name was lola, though this is a virtual quote rather than physical quote, so that might be cheating?

He's looking for page one.

This is a bit like trying to retrieve a coin that's

fallen down a grating.

Is that it, that faint gleam in the darkness?

Not sure.

He lowers weighted strings and chewing gum and brings up bottle caps.

'Blighter's rock?' says Max's mind.

'I am not rocked,' says Max.

He avoids the proper name of that condition in which writers are unable to write.

from Her Name Was Lola

which should have been posted on my blog as a nice yellow back grounded image that I made specially. However, thanks to my poor internet/modem connection, I've had to opt for just a text post for now - but I am determined to post this image at some point! Anyway - its posted here for the moment (and my review of lola for anyone interested is posted here) and was posted while my image loading doo-daa was working...)

happy birthday russell

peter


ps: i also found this comic strip on the 4th appropriately enough - and thought they might be a suitable gift for celebrants of tentacles:

http://www.chrisbishop.com/her/archives/her2.html

http://www.chrisbishop.com/her/archives/her61.html

-enjoy :)

Emmae Gibson 2004

Two weeks of all our lives ago it was Yellow Paper Day and my appointment at DOCTOR HOOPER'S HAND CLINIC was for ten past ten. Gray day, sleeting slightly. My gloved Hands and I got there early. Negotiated barriers, muggers in disguise of ticket machines, the remotest of car parks and Hospital signage designed to enforce prolonged, lethal exercise. Then the initiative test, locate O.P.D.2, by way of the vast, scaffolded heart of a building site which seemed to be edging dangerously close to completion; a common architectural feature of the N.H.S. In the waiting room there were other hands, twice as many as people, waiting in a variety of poses and states of good and bad nick. Naked, bandaged, mittened, tied up, plastered, ringed, pierced, dangling, clasped, slung, pocketed, fidgety, still, hidden in long sleeves... Doctor Hooper had his work cut out. Predictably, not one hand rose in greeting, recognition or kinship. You don't expect much in the way of words hereabouts, but a few fingered letters of the deaf alphabet might have broken the ice. The coffee machine gasped occasionally in French, "C'SSHEURDRE!" A malaise of magazines grew on coffee tables. Posters portrayed the labelled parts of the hand, wrist, fingers, thumb, bones, arteries, nerves and digital joints, of skeletons; I made mental notes. Apparently everything gets a name in this world, yet the body remains a joyous mystery to me. We were all beginning to think in our universal hand consciousness that Doctor Hooper may have hurt his hand jumping through hoops for the N.H.S., when the Sister called my name. Twice, actually. I was surreptitiously 4quating. Sister pointed an index finger in the direction of the Door, upon which Hand felt obliged to knock. Doctor Hooper was a tall, square-cut man, square-shouldered, square-faced, fit and smiling, nothing hoopish or rotund about him at all, except thick glasses. I popped off my coat, popped on to the chair, popped my bag with the yellow paper popping out, underneath. His hands looked at mine as if they'd seen them somewhere before. My right wrist, to be exact, dutifully, infuriatingly painless in time for this moment. His had very thick skin, I noticed. How many hands had his hands held! If anyone knows about the hand of Christ it will be Doctor Hooper, I thought.

"Jesus!" he said, looking at my notes. Ah, maybe he is approachable, throbbed Hand under the moment.

"Surely not that bad," I said, tendons trilling like escaped budgies.

"Slurks?" he asked, squeezing a little.

"Jarrow full of mocks," I nodded fervently.

"Crickles and flegs when you trachlitt?"

"You bet," I said, "like kindling." Three lumps in a chorus line below the ball of the thumb swelled to the occasion and flegged their fire-dance there and then from 1 to 10.

"Can't be skelped," Doctor Hooper said, letting go. "More common in women than in men. No known curse."

"What about the Sinistra?" I asked. "And the Ulna - the Carpals and the Olecranon -?"

"Too close to the Gangliocampus for surgery," he said, unimpressed. "Trubba being, it would only come back."

"Does that mean -?"

"Exactly. Gangles panfully for a while then pans out. We don't cut dastardly any more," he said and furrowed his square brow.

""Don't I have to curtail my - my eating, drinking or maggidigifrolicking?"

"Not even that," he said. "Just keep an eye on El Bow."

My arteries arched. "How come Gynaecologists don't share your reluctance to scalp?" I asked suspiciously.

"Buggered if I know," he said turning round, "it's about all we rhinos can offer."

"I think you've gone far enough with this plagiarising."

"More common in men than women," said Doctor Hooper, still with his back to me. When he birled to face me again, he held in his dexter something that looked like a manual pogo-stick. "Try this for a month," he said. "It works by Revere Perpetual Motion."

"Enough is enough," I said. "Time is my boss," and I popped off.

On the waiting room coffee tables the yellow pages still blazed with black block caps as I passed - FOR ANYTHING LIKE REAL CONVERSATION YOU HAVE TO GO TO STONES AND OCEANS, they said, complete with bibliography, www, etc.

From there we three drove to the Mall, along the lines of Dave Awl, slipped some yellow in the tourist brochures, right beside Dewar's World of Whisky Tours, all folded to the same size, DON'T EXPECT ME TO BE HUMAN, SAID GOD.

Popped along to Boots and bought a tube of pain relief cream called UCANBLEEV-Plus, then Hands and I continued along the M8 to Edinburgh Airport to meet others of the same ilk, to 4quate randomly in the designated areas, (tricky in the presence of police cradling long black guns hand on heart across their white-shirted chests,) and to depart for sunnier climes, mountains and streams, stones and oceans.

Guess who was on the plane.

No, yes, really!

"Hand", a sketch by fellow Krakenite Catherine Milne.

With the quotes [in YELLOW CAPS], I was aiming for depth and brevity (the soul of wit, according to Shakespeare) and for the quick-fix reader. Imagining how someone might be fleetingly diverted. From Kleinzeit for their succinctness and wider implications, for the alliteration of the first, (stones and oceans...kissing almost,) and the rhythm and present-day relevance of the second, and for the love of the spirit that is in things and places. Good tools for getting through the waiting rooms of life. Blame the sinister sound of Doctor Hooper's Hand Clinic for the rest.

Dr. Hoban comments: Well popped, Emmae! Keep taking the stones and oceans as prescribed.