You know a Friday night is going badly when you start absentmindedly wandering into the kitchen, standing there blankly trying to remember why you came out there in the first place, and then giving up and returning to your seat unfulfilled.

While it would be nice to think this was just another sign of impending dementia, I fear it may just be a particularly graphic illustration of the art of having nothing to do. About an hour ago I stood in the kitchen and decided that I might as well make the most of the occasion and ate a small piece of cheese. Sadly it seems that this cheese, already mature according to the packaging, has now passed on to a better realm albeit leaving behind a particularly toxic carcass. I do not know if it is possible to die of cheese poisoning but at least it has turned the evening into one of discovery. I shall gauge the toxicity of the cheese by how many words I can write before I slump face down on the keyboard and start making strange gurgling noises unheard since the last time I forgot to clean the coffee machine for a week.

I did originally intend to judge the poisonous nature of the cheese by seeing how much of the Star Wars Holiday Special I could sit through, unfortunately the appearance of Bea Arthur of Golden Girls fame pouring alcohol into the top of somebody’s head caused me to hit the fast forward button in disconcerted despair. When I restarted the tape she had taken it upon herself to start singing… cue fast forward again. I restart the tape in the middle of one of the many ungodly wookie Christmas segments… I fear the most important button on my video may wear out soon. I briefly paused it to watch Harrison Ford, riddled with a thinly disguised hatred for his agent and the contractual obligations the evil swine had blackened his life with, appear on screen, hug the smaller of the rolls of carpet that passed for wookies, and then perform the festive act of throwing somebody to their death from a balcony. I suspect that if Alec Guinness hadn’t managed to escape the whole nightmarish debacle he would have volunteered to be the one to hit the ground in a heap… hell, he would have pleaded and offered up his immortal soul if only the experience could have been cut short by a tree branch in the skull.

I think I managed to last through the first ten seconds of Carrie Fisher’s heavily medicated appearance, right up until the point where she started “singing” and I started looking around for something to set myself on fire with. I did restart the tape briefly for another fleeting appearance of Mark Hammill wearing enough makeup to ice a respectable wedding cake, my desperate hope of being able to spot quite which bits of him had been mangled in the car wreck that preceded filming… actually a car wreck roughly sums what happened after they started filming as well. The best part of the experience was discovering that the credits had been cut off on the copy I was watching and thus I was saved an extra minute of grinding my teeth and cursing randomly at my childhood and its frankly pathological faith in the wonders of Star Wars… Kids, one day learn that it is not a good idea to put your faith in the judgment of an (alleged… although well documented) drug fiend, a bloke who can’t drive a car very well, an actor who spends his four minutes of screen time looking as if the cat’s dumped in his cereal, and a seven foot tall growling man clad in the kind of car seat cover material that would make the interior of a 1977 Ford Fiesta seem classy in comparison.

So in the long run I managed to last for an aggregate total of eight minutes before the tape ground to its end. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on quite how sadistic you are) I had yet to succumb to some exotic form of lactose poisoning… The only minor problem was I now have to find something to kill the time until my looming cheddar coma kicks in… So I thought I’d pick the most random thing I could find and then discuss it until at least one of us is unconscious.

If life were a longer experience I might review the superglue which is causing my left index finger to adhere to every key I press after I took a few minutes out to repair the mug I just knocked off the table… but I think sitting and reviewing a solvent would merely come down to a lot of cursing the manufacturers inability to create something that will adequately repair a Smarties mug, that has only gone downhill since I melted down the Easter egg that came with it to make icing, and yet was quite successful in adhering my finger to the G key with such effectiveness that I had to use a screwdriver to prise it off.

Instead I shall write a short children’s book… of the ilk that were designed to float in my childhood bath for about a day and then grow the most fascinating variety of moulds and ever onwards turn what should have been a cleansing experience into a half hour of immersion in a wide range of toxins… It may explain a lot.

While it may not be the highest form of literature it does have the advantage of rarely requiring more than ten sentences to complete a masterwork and seeing as it has just gone 4am I probably should go to bed.

Here you go…

Frank The Rabbit and His Soulless Adventures.

Frank The Rabbit lived happily in a small dustbin somewhere off the A3.

He spent his days drinking and occasionally throwing himself out in front of cars he felt sure would swerve to avoid him and crash off the road into a ditch.

Frank funded his numerous petty addictions by stealing the wallets of these victims before they regained consciousness.

One day Frank decided it was time to make himself a better rabbit and make a good life for his 6000 children, realizing that if he didn’t hurry up and pull his life together his wife would have eaten them all before he had the chance to set a good example.

Frank set out to earn a decent wage and support his rabbity family in their rampant acquisition of spacehoppers, mobile phones, small shoes, soft drugs, and whatever other crap a rabbit needs to feel fulfilled in our modern capitalist culture.

He put on his best rabbit suit and best rabbit tie and set off for the job centre. Hop, hop, hop, he went as he bounced merrily along the pavement, a new sense of pride beating in his little rabbit heart. Frank was the proudest rabbit in the land.

Unfortunately on the way Frank caught myxomatosis and was subsequently eaten by a dog.

The End

Side note: The amount of bloody effort it took me to find the right spelling of myxomatosis… the history page of my web browser now makes me look like an even stranger person than usual… I also had to scroll through so many damn pictures of rabbits that I have lost all will to live… We don’t need so damn many photographs of rabbits in this world… as far as I can tell they now make up 90% of the internet… For the love of God… RABBITS ALL LOOK THE DAMN SAME GIVE OR TAKE A DROOPY EAR OR A DIFFERENT PAINT SCHEME… WE ONLY NEED ONE DAMN PICTURE TO SUM UP THE RABBIT… IT HAS EARS, A TAIL, BITS INBETWEEN... WE GET THE GIST OF IT ALREADY.

Ah stuff it… I’m going to bed… If the cheese is going to kill me at least let it give me some freaky dreams first.