The first in an occasional series of weekend posts. Like you don’t have enough to read already..
I can hardly let the weekend pass by without some mention of the momentous decision recently taken by roughly half of the population of my home country. No I don’t mean whether to have curry or pizza on Friday evening. I mean the surprise vote for the so-called Brexit – a farewell to the European Union.
It caught many of us by surprise, since although there has always been a strong anti-EU sentiment in the UK, few thought it would actually result in us getting ourselves unhitched. Sure we’d bitch and moan about it, but not actually file for divorce.
Most of us Brits had some reservations about certain aspects of the EU. There were few fans of the unwieldy bureaucracy of this lumbering machine. It certainly got no love from the right wing Press who waged a campaign of hate against it from the start.
We instinctively recoil from people in authority who are publicly exposed as liars, feeling cheated and seeing them as tarnished individuals. Yet whether we like to admit it or not, we all have an intimate relationship with lies, fibs and tall tales.
The dystopian world of the undead is a truly terrifying vision. They shuffle along mindlessly, all grotesque faces and guttural grunts, falling upon any flesh they find and devouring it in an horrific display of terrible table etiquette.
I’m a health nut and a borderline alcoholic. I enjoy science documentaries and art-house cinema, but I also like watching UFC fighters knock seven shades of shit out of each other. I’m a fairly empathetic person, but sometimes wish I could see my upstairs neighbours eaten slowly by wolves.
Evolution has brought about a spectacular abundance of plant and animal life that we are trying our very best to eradicate, perhaps so we can have the planet all to ourselves. Of course the interdependence of humans and the flora and fauna of Earth makes this behaviour slightly baffling. It sometimes appears we are like a cartoon character, sawing through the branch that it sits on. Or in our case chopping down the whole forest.
I’ve been trying out this amazing new universal animal translation software and thought I’d give it a go. Here is the result.
Halfbananas - humour, short fiction & verse 