Taking The Pearce

Did you know they can grow grapes with alarm clocks in them? Or maybe they’ve found a way to make liquid clocks, which they mix into the wine. So far, though, they’ve only perfected this technique with red grapes, or red wine, and they can only set the alarms for 3am. I know this because it’s one of the universal laws of the nature that if you drink red wine you will wake up at 3am. I’ve stopped being amazed by this. I accept it as one of the cruel contradictions that fate mocks us with, like the pleasures of sex being balanced with sleepless nights, teenagers and the wet…

I’M lying on my back. The laptop is on my chest and I’m typing; it’s not easy because I’m trying to ensure my nose is the highest point of my entire body. Higher, even, than my forehead; which is why I’m on my back. It’s not hard for my nose to be the highest point of my body at the moment, swaddled in bandages as it is. It’s a veritable Matterhorn of a nose, or a Mount Fuji . These are particularly apposite analogies, considering the bandages are snowy white. Come to think of it, there are so many of them that my nose is probably the highest point in…

Shower curtains grow mould; gardens grow weeds; doctors’ surgeries grow magazines. It’s a natural phenomenon, like fungi popping up overnight in woodland. They build the surgery, they roof it, plaster the walls, lay the carpet and install the telephone network – and all the time, in a corner of what will one day be the waiting room, a small and flimsy magazine rack, or in some cases a coffee table, is manifesting itself, much like fungi, from proteins in the air. It’s the only explanation. If people actually bought them and placed them in there on purpose, they’d be different. There’d be a magazine about wood carving, for example; but…

Do you know how many batteries are sold every year? I do. About 12 billion. I’m talking about the dry-cell type, like the ones  in torches; as opposed to what I presume are wet-cell types that go in cars and dissolve your shirt and your skin when they spill on you. And I know how many dry-cell batteries are sold not because I’ve searched it on Google, but because I bought them all. Every single one. It follows that if I bought 12 billion last year I’m going to have to buy another 12 billion this year because the last lot will have run out. Indeed, they already have. It’s…

I’ve thought about hanging myself. With the clothesline. But I’d probably do it wrong. An alternative would be to garrotte my wife with it. But I’d probably do that wrong, too. As I wrung her neck her final gasp would be: “No, no; you don’t do it like that.” ‘Twas ever thus. I don’t mean to suggest my wife is unreasonable or obsessive compulsive or that she’s on a mission to drive me insane. In my experience she’s no different to any woman anywhere in the world. Women, that is, who consider clothes-lines-and-the-pegging-of-washing-on to be a part of the gender war. Not that I mind a bit of matrimonial warfare…