827 Miles

03.04.14 (Day 102)

00.42

827 miles is the distance (by road, via AA recommended routes) from Penzance to Wick. Why? Because it is. And because I'm leafing through a road atlas we've acquired from our neighbours (an abandoned funeral parlour. The atlas was used by the hearse drivers way back when), looking at places I've been and others I'd like to go to: first stop, Sidcup.

People often wonder about me. Usually I tell them to worry about things which are easier to fathom. Incidentally, a fathom is six feet and the generally accepted depth of a grave (six feet) isn't entirely fact: six feet is the depth measured from the top of the coffin, so a grave-digger's measuring stick is seven feet long: we know as we have one; and a grave-digger's shovel which we use as a clothes hanger. Gilbert House has been described as cool, morbid, funereal and having us in it.

I'm up writing this having just woken from a two hour nap. I was in McDonald's and literally falling asleep in my office, so I walked one of my young friends to her bus stop, saw her safely on her way home, then came home myself. Before I crashed I did some housework: cleared up after a house guest who'd been unwell in bed and laid a carpet next to his bed in the form of a reclaimed body bag. Other jobs and installations followed, then I died.

Tom's out, having been charged with food duty. The fact that he's not back yet would suggest that he won't return at all tonight. So I'll give it an hour and a half until the last train has been and gone, then go back to bed after securing the front door, which I'd left open in case he returned. He got food duty and I got housework. Now there's a clean bed with no-one to sleep in it and the housemate who should be in the bed and having brought food home but he and it aren't here. I think I drew the short straw.

As an aside, my mum has asked that she not be mentioned in the blog any more. She's a private lady by nature, so I respect her wishes.

More work to do for him upstairs later, so I'll get me head down. Gilbert House is a little like the castle in Trap Door, making me Berk. Tom would therefore be Rog. Bony, Drutt et al are still to be cast. And my many tormentors would be something down there. If anyone tries to re-make Trap Door using CGI, I will personally shoot them; in the face; repeatedly. Look what happened to Winnie the Pooh and Will O The Wisp. And if Willie Rushton, Tony Hart or Johnny Ball are ever implicated in the whole Savile scandal, I shall personally shoot myself; repeatedly; in the face. Some hope they will, which makes lives interesting.

The journey from Penzance to Wick takes 14 hours and 17 minutes, in case anyone wondered.