An IYH Podcast blog from, 2012, yet also a remix of some 2004 Neal’s Belchs.
Back in the early to mid two-thousands, in my then regular online column entitled “Neal’s Belch” on my then website MatchstickCats.com, I started to tell you about a colony of Anteaters who lived off the coast of Rwanda. At the time I somehow got sidetracked onto the subject of macroeconomics, then got into podcasting and have just passed my five hundredth episode of Into Your Head. So let’s pick up where we left off.
After he got back from the launderette that day, William’s outlook on life had, of course, changed forever. No longer did he waste his day lying on the beach watching the waves float by. No. Instead William determinately set to work on the new railway that would bring peace and prosperity to his homeland. So anyway eight years later the railway opened, but sadly ticket prices were uneconomical and everybody had cars by that stage, so it was all a flop. William didn’t give a crap though. He had his golden handshake.
William had acquired his unique golden hand when he was fourteen, after a bout of glandular fever. At nineteen he had floated it on the stock exchange and made his millions. But nobody was able to help him find a way to liquidise his millions of hands, so he had been sitting on the stock ever since. The refrigeration and manicuring costs alone were massive, and he ended up transporting them across Russia by train to somewhere cold enough to not need refrigeration. There he dumped them and left the useless little bastards to fend for themselves.
This brings me to my point. Several years ago I boarded a train here in Ireland and sat down, as is my habit, in the front seat of the front carriage. I find that from there I can get a good view of the tracks ahead, which is important because I need to navigate and watch out for red lights, for which I am obliged to stop. Also of course I have to watch out for stray cats on the line. If I see a stray cat, I have to gently guide it back onto the tracks, and then call for a locomotive to come and tow it back to the station.
The staff there are always very kind to the stray cats. They sometimes take them out for a ride when they go to raid a house. Cats love being taken out in police vans. Cats like to imagine that they are criminal masterminds, who have tricked the cops into giving a ride to the very criminal for whom they are supposed to be hunting. Cats are funny. Anyway I’m out of steam. You should go read something else. Or alternatively I could just carry on driving this into the ground.
I’ve always enjoyed driving things into the ground. I think it’s because I have happy childhood memories of camping holidays, where driving a tent peg into the ground meant it was almost time to go to bed, and make shadow-puppets of cats with my knuckles on the inside of the tent. Those were happy days. Just me and my teddy bear Bowsy and my torch and my parents and my eighteen brothers.
Pardon?
No, no cats involved. That’s becoming a bit of a cliché. You can overdo the cat thing, you know. I know when to stop. So anyway I’ve changed my mind about marmalade recently. I think you should only put it on one side of the toast, thereby halving your chances of a total loss if it falls on the ground. That’s of course assuming a hygiene insistence level of only thirty percent. I think that’s about right for most of my readers. Personally, I have higher standards than that. But only because I have linked my cleanliness level to the NASDAQ index, which happens to be doing well at time of writing (several years ago). Next time there’s a financial scandal or something, I go back to three pairs a week.
And I can’t do anything about it. That’s the free market economy at work. If you’re going to complain about marmalade toast falling face-down on the floor, you may as well hand the nuclear briefcase over to Saddam Hussein, and throw him the keys as well.