Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Carpe Diem


Mel Blanc - Voice of Bugs Bunny and now lying underneath
the finest epitaph of all time


These last seven days have not been good for me. A dead PC, a severe bout of flu and showing house guests from New Zealand around London, whilst worrying about lost data and hallucinating under the influences of the flu all combined to turn me into a most unhappy bunny; even unhappier than usual.

But that’s all behind me now. Aside from a head full of mucus, the flu is but a memory, I managed to salvage all my data and my PC is resurrected and now protected by a small orchard of applets.

Our houseguests seemed to enjoy with London. We did our best. In spite of my instincts, I showed them virtually no urban squalor and their visit was filled with trips to Buckingham Palace, Madame Tussauds and Camden Lock. That sort of thing.


Personally, even though I haven’t spent much time in Tourist London recently, I didn’t encounter much that was new or interesting to me. I did however come away with the sneaking suspicion that the London Dungeon is mostly populated by Madame Tussauds’ cast-offs. ’Hmmm, nobody’s posed next to Richard Chamberlain’s statue for a photograph for weeks. Send him across the River to the Dungeon along with Cyndi Lauper for ritualistic torture and beheading’.

I also couldn’t help thinking that there is a significant gap in the waxwork museum market. Somebody really should get round to opening one filled with statues of people who were famous, stopped being famous and became famous again through Reality TV shows. Obviously you’d have to reattach their heads and limbs after their stint in the London Dungeon but that shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.


Anyway, PC better, flu passed, houseguests 35,000ft over somewhere in the Central Pacific. Admittedly, I am unshaven and packing a matched pair of cold sores the size of marbles but that’s actually a good thing. All I have to do is fish an empty can of lager out of the rubbish and I’ll be able to blend into streets of London like the Invisible Man.


I’m now finally ready to pursue my new policy of ‘living each day as if it were my last’. Sharon Osbourne was on Tele a few days ago and quoted that as her life’s motto. In the past I’ve blown off this expression as being so much bollocks. Let’s face it, if you really lived like that you’d probably wake up the following morning in a police cell, bruised, unemployed and insolvent. ‘Live each day as if it were the day before your last’ always seemed a more sensible line to take, but ‘Damn’, I thought, ‘if it’s good enough for Sharon it’s good enough for me. She doesn’t seem to spend her life in prison, broke, bleeding and poor. I’m going to give it a try’.


None of us, particularly me, are getting any younger and there are so many threats out there that even hoping to reach a modest 65 seems to be a mere pipe dream these days; global warming, International Terrorism, global epidemics. Christ, the Satan Chicken might even be sitting in his business class seat, flying over to Heathrow from Shanghai and sipping on a complimentary Bloody Mary as I type. Time may very well be running out.


Yup, definitely time to get a real Carpe Diem thing going here. A little light opera in the morning maybe, a glass of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice to perk up the senses (remember grapefruit juice doesn’t really taste vile, it’s refreshing)....


And then, fully charged with Rigoletto and citrussy breakfast drinks, I can get on with the task of ‘living each day as if it were my last’.


Now what would anyone do if they really believed that? So far, I’ve come up with the following:

  • say something nice to the people close to me
  • empty my bank account
  • run up some rather large credit card bills
  • tell my boss what I think of him
  • tell lots of other people what I think of them
  • start mailing poo to people on my shit list who I won’t be able to meet personally in the time available
  • aside from parcelling-up excrement, not do any work
  • take out some rather large life insurance policies
  • smoke and not bother too much about what I eat
  • leave the washing up for tomorrow
  • engage in a series of extremely obscene public acts, carefully judged to balance the satisfaction they give me with the risk of being imprisoned for the rest of my last day
Actually, on reflection, with the exception of the light opera, grapefruit juice and life insurance policies, that’s pretty much how I usually spend my days anyway.

I must be happy then.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At the end of your last day, don't forget to put clean pants on, and leave a fiver on the sideboard to cover funeral expenses.