A Yorkshireman displaced

I’m off to Yorkshire now so won’t have internet access for a while but I would like to wish everyone a happy christmas and new year.

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I guess it’s the Christmas winddown right now for most people. The double edged sword of my life is that during the busy periods of my life I have plenty to write about but no time and during the quieter periods (like now) I have plenty of time and nothing to say. I apologise once again if you are a regular reader of this humble blog but feel short changed by me.

I want to write about something that happened a few weeks ago now. We orchestrated a tea crawl. I dare say it was the largest tea crawl that merseyside has ever seen. I can’t be sure of that though. T’was a rainy old day and a few of us gathered at liverpools docks, near to the Tate. It had seemed like a good idea at the time (most things seem like a good idea when they’re on Facebook). We hadn’t factored the weather into account but still managed to acquire one friend per teashop (our total was around seven toward the end). I lost track of how much tea I actually drank, but it was enough to give me that frantic feeling, like my frontal cortex was trying to escape from my head. That feeling happens to me more often than you might think.

I managed to try The Rarest Tea In The Whole World. It was called silver needle tea and was picked for only one day of the year in one remote province of China (or so our helpful teashop assistant informed us). It tasted a bit like bitter warm water. Other curious teas we discovered on that fateful day were Water Fairy tea (which looked and smelled suspiciously like a certain organic drug), Gunpowder tea (which was black and sutty but non-flammable) and Blue Saphire Earl Grey (which tasted like normal Earl Grey, only more so).

I think between all of us we tried 17 different varieties of tea. By the end of the day, my head sang like a hummingbird and I got no sleep that night, but it was strangely satisfying.

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I’ve been struggling to write a lot recently, it’s difficult at times. I’m sorry about that if you are one of my regular readers (ie the ones who check to see if theres been an update even when I don’t write). I have been writing but I don’t want to show you it.

I’m trying to start a new website (which will be publicised in good time) which might act as a springboard for the other stuff. I want to start selling people ideas, in the same way that you can go to Ikea and buy a flat-packed bookshelf, I think there should be a place where you can buy flat-packed ideas. Mental furniture that you can pay a small fee for and then set up inside your headspace. I think this might be a good way of putting my seemingly useless philosophy degree to good use.

I’ve also been attending christmas parties recently (I managed two in one day yesterday) and drinking my own body weight in mulled wine. I watched Polar Express yesterday. Brief synopsis: small child who doesn’t belive in Father Christmas gets abducted by a creepy train conductor and a disturbing hobo and taken to see the Big Man. The moral of the story, the best present you can give is the gift of friendship. This year I intend to give the gift of friendship to all my friends in order to save money.

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I was thinking the other day about how difficult it must be to be newborn, violently shoved into a world of light when you’ve never used your eyes before. The government should issue pamphlets to newborn children to guide them through the world. It’d be less traumatic this way.

I decide to write said pamplet in the style of Kurt Vonnegut/Douglas Coupland:

Hello

This is the world. You are now a part of it. You will soon discover that the world isn’t just one thing but lots of things all clumped together. You remember in the past how you saw (or rather felt) your umbilical cord stretching away into dark nothingness, did you wonder where it led? Did you think that on the other end there might be another person? Older and able to take care of you. Thats called "Mother".
"Mother" is one of the clumps of things that makes up the world. Another clump is called "Father".
Still other clumps are called "Cars" and "cows" and "The Sun". You will like cows.
Above all these clumps of stuff there other things, sometimes unseen, which make things happen in this world. We call them (amonsgt other things) "Taxes" and "Divorce" and "Longing". With any luck you won’t have to deal with the first two for a long time.
Time – thats another thing you should know about. Because of the way you are built, you only get to stay in The World for a brief period. It won’t be enough time for you, but you will still waste a lot of it watching television. Oh and one other piece of advice, you should try and love as many people as possible because that way you will have the most chance of having it reciprocated.

That is all – Enjoy your stay

– except it should be written in picture form so that babies can understand it.

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Rhetorical question obviously.

If anyone is reading this and is on Facebook then I’m trying to orchestrate a tea crawl on Saturday – please join "December the 8th is Dave Weaver Day" and post a review of your favourite teashop in the thread provided. Proper blog entries will recommence shortly, thank you.

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