I found a young bird in the front garden, this evening. It's just too young to fly, so I tried herding it over towards one of the trees with low set branches, in the hope it'd get the hint, climb the tree and get off the ground.
Fat chance.
It sat there and looked at me like I was an idiot.
So I left it to it.
Sometimes the best way to help is not to help, even though that seems like a perverse way of thinking, and is a really hard thing to do.
The bird didn't want help, so I can't help it, well I can, by not helping it.
Now I feel confused. Sometimes life gets a bit too Zen, for me.
I'm at that half way serious point of contemplating the idea of draining the fish pond.
It's half full of water and leaves and probably mozzies.
I might give it a go, I'll see. It's getting a bit warm, today, but I think if I don't make an effort it'll rain on Boxing day and fill it further and I'll have twice as much work to look at with a view to getting around to doing something about it when I feel up to it.
I hate the "Customise - your text here" option.
My mind goes blank. I haven't the first clue as to what I'd have written there.
I don't want my name there, I already know what my name is, I don't need reminding.
My family's not posh enough to have a motto, or a crest, and I really struggle to think of something, anything, that I'd be happy seeing, day after day, written on the knife handle, so that reduces my options.
After some months of writing things down that were "less than 32 characters", so they'd fit on the handle, and then reading and re-reading them, and for the most part deciding that no, they weren't what I wanted, I hit on something that worked, for me.
"Another perfect day", is a perfect expression for some of my days.
On the good days, it is another perfect day, and on the not so good days, it's delivered with a bitter, sarcastic tone of voice, and it works just as well.
So I chose that.
This all started because I was browsing through a catalogue and the handles caught my eye.
Well, not quite.
It was the accompanying text that appealed to my off beat sense of humour, and that sealed the deal, for me.
Few things beat owning a Victorinox Swiss Army knife.
Except perhaps a Swiss Army knife that's darker than a pot of tar soup in a coal mine.
And more Satanic than the Satanic Verses read aloud by a two-headed serpent on the
Autumnal Equinox at Stonehenge.
If you've banged a few heads in your time; if Lemmy is your true father figure;
if your ultimate company car is made by Harley... this knife is for you.
Dark Skallen (that's Swedish for skull) is for those who march to a different beat.
People like you who love the metallic echo of a Motorhead guitar solo, the whiff of burning oil
and the feel of a ZZ Top beard against a cracked-leather jacket.
Or maybe you just like skulls on everything.
For extra darkness, you can have your name - or whatever else you want -
inscribed in a blood-red Gothic script so scary it can be read only from behind the sofa.
I thought it was a very clever, tongue in cheek parody, and that appealed to me.
The bit about the script being so scary that you could only read it from behind the sofa made me chuckle, too.
