CABINET OF CURIOSITIES (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

I was just about to complain to Amazon when I noticed

[Mick Harper]

My new £13.50 (away with mad experimentations with quality) Logitech keyboard arrived less than 24-hours after complaining to Amazon. This time it came with no instructions at all. Luckily I'm an old hand and guessed the wire thingy had to be plugged into the computer socket thingy. The computer is an old hand too and told me in successive pop-ups, "Mick, you've just pulled out the old one and put in a new one" and "Stop kvetching and start typing." Or words to that effect, they had vanished before I could jot them down verbatim.

The only problem now is to learn how to use a QWERTY keyboard after my exile in the land of AZERTY.

[Mick Harper]

Back-to-back unexpected impresario dreams last night (they usually feature a rather hapless Mick Harper wandering lost around some near-familiar landscape). The first one had me as the proud designer of some sort of Tudor Torture Experience (I had been watching Wolf Hall ). It was a mock-up of an idealised Tower of London and the only feature I can now remember is that it had an unmarked door positioned in such a way that schoolchildren were sure to nick off from the official party to go over and open it. Whereupon they were confronted by a figure thoroughly disfigured by torture (I hope played by an actor) and which clearly suggested this was a real, working torture establishment, not a mock-up at all.

The next one had me as the builder of the Dharma Bum Railway (its actual title in the dream). This was a single track tourist railroad that wound round a mountain in India. Two steam trains chugged up and down sufficiently slowly that whenever they met something or other happened quite safely. On the opening day I was standing proudly on the footplate of the first train going up and it was only when I observed the train coming down couldn't see us because it was always going round a steep curve that I realised I had miscalculated. I was charging up the track waving my arms in the air when I woke up.

Obviously they were about sex but more than that I cannot say.

[Mick Harper]

The Post Office are up to their tricks again. First they told me

[Mick Harper]

Or maybe not. I have received another email. Harper delivery duties have been shifted from those ooh-it's so-inaccessible fainthearts at Notting Hill DO to those all-terrain, all-weather, pony express-style people at Paddington DO

[Mick Harper]

To nobody's great surprise, they signed off at 18:30, dropping the rhyme or reason

[Mick Harper]

I will though offer up a tentative explanation for the difference between Royal Mail and the commercial carriers. The latter get paid per parcel delivered so once they get to my house they have a fairly high motivation to unite me and my parcel. They are companies that occasionally sack employees. Posties get paid for completing their round, and have a high motivation to finish the round in the fastest possible time irrespective of delivered or undelivered parcels. They work for a company that never sacks anyone.

They are also regulars. My house is on their round. As regulars they know it takes them a bit of time to climb the steps to my house and and then more time waiting for me to climb the stairs from my basement. It is easier to just skip my house and claim I wasn't in, and which is why they never leave a We Called card. But it also means they have no way of reminding the next postie (or maybe themselves some days later) not to use the same dodge again lest I get vexed.

An ordinary commercial company would take notice of three visits in rapid succession by three different employees to a person who didn't hear the bell each time. Employees who rang all the other bells and none of those people heard their bells either. Employees who didn't leave a We Called card to commemorate their visits, to tell the would-be recipient what to do about it. It would be, however small, a meaningful event prompting, however small, an action of some kind.

You have all dealt with the Post Office, what do you suppose will happen if I complained? (As I have had to do occasionally in the past just to get the wretched thing delivered at all.) The reasons change (it will be 'the strike' this time, I imagine) but it will certainly not be treated as a meaningful event. It is entirely routine.

[Mick Harper]

The son of a cousin of mine (is that a second cousin?) is featured, large as life, on the front page of the Guardian. There is no merit involved, it is a stock photo of him watering a plant at Kew, where he works, being used to illustrate a report from the world diversity conference in Canada. Why there, they've only got spruce? But that's not the point. About my second cousin, I mean. I'd give my eye teeth to appear on the front page of the Guardian. I would die happy after appearing on the front page of the Guardian. And he's already done it.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

My parcel arrived today which, to be fair, is a day ahead of the (re)schedule. I also got an email to that effect

[Mick Harper]

Good new game this Christmas -- and by God Christmas needs one. Someone says some monotone words. Let's say "I won't be afraid". If no-one guesses the song, he loses a point for being too obscure. If someone does, both get a point. Then someone plays the answer (Ben E King's Stand By Me) on his Spotiphone (or whatever, I leave these things to the young people) and everyone has a thoroughly good singalong (except the young people). And then it's on to the next one!

Good for a whole hour. Especially when one of the oldies gets up and starts dancing to Marvin Gaye but crashes through the coffee table. I'm also available for bar mitzvahs.

[Mick Harper]

Royal Mail have decided to shaft me on a new front.

[Mick Harper]

Ever heard of oud? 'Course you haven't because I hadn't. It's perfumed wood that's created by a couple of south-east Asian tree species that produce an anti-something when being attacked by pests (or just nature). Valuable is it? Put it this way: a Japanese consortium offered twenty-three million dollars for a single tree and got turned down.

[Mick Harper]

I think Royal Mail must have taken over the French postal services. This morning I got this

[Mick Harper]

Unless word is out and every major cultural institution in Europe has instructed its concierges to refuse delivery of any package that might contain Revisionist Historiography. It's fifty-fifty, I'd say.