Chapter 18

The Sun had taken it's annual roulette challenge in London and, this year, had settled on one week at the tail end of March. To make the most of this, Dail was indulging in one of his secret pleasures; donning a pair of headphones, grabbing a book and a notebook, then spending his day off on the top step of Nelsons Column. Whenever someone informed him that they hadn't tried this, Dail was always supersonic in recommending it.

Trafalgar Square was a space seemingly designed with people watching fimly at the core of it's design brief. It was also the reason that he had brought a notebook with him (that and lest he be 'caught short', so to speak, when stricken with sudden book inspiration). He enjoyed noting the varying techniques that people (let's face it, 'tourists') employed in mounting the Trafalgar Square lions; a phrase which Dail acknowledged the bizarrity of to anyone not overly familiar with London landmarks. He eventually managed to compile the following compilation of complicated cavortings:

Solo Efforts

• The Run Up Most commonly attempted by bravadic men or tragically over enthusiastic children.
• One Foot On The Tail and followed by trying to swing the other leg up to gain leverage. Possible if you're an Olympic gymnast or contortionist.
• Two Feet On The Tail & two hands on the spine. Jump and lift. The mark of a sound, logical mind - though not always successful.
• Flank The Lion! Attempt to climb the hind legs. Poor planning. Sign of stupidity. Also includes shimmying round the side of the lion onto the pedestal. Most return once there, sensing futility.

Team Efforts

• The Friendly Bum Push Climber usually adopts one of the 'foot and tail' techniques and is then pushed up from beneath. Success depends on the strength of the pusher. Also, to some extent, the size of the bum and it's owner.
• Foot Lift Climber adopts the 'One Foot On The Tail' position. Pusher then cups hands and pushes climbers spare foot to lift. Important climber locks knees or at least helps push back.

It was also interesting to just watch the various poses for photos that people used; though this was not something constrained solely to Trafalgar Square and the column. Dail's personal favourite, clichéd though it was, being The Philosopher. As if the sight of the column had triggered some deep, internal, philosophical quandary within the poser. 

Choosing which side of the statue to sit on was also important to Dail. His preference was the West or East sides. The roar of traffic on one side and the splashing of the fountains on the other which, under perfect conditions, sent over a brilliant and buttock clenchingly refreshing mist.

Then there was the 'Pop Game'. Whilst this was possible anywhere, the crowds generated by this kind of weather made the conditions ideal for it's deployment. The premise was worryingly simple considering the return it gave: pick a person at random. Anyone. Next, imagine or actually make a 'Pop' noise. At that exact moment, visualise your marks head turning into something. Literally anything. One woman's head had turned into a baby from the neck down so that both the baby and woman had an upside-down body for a head. The woman then fell over and had her baby head run amok - dragging her ragdoll body about behind it. Other standards included beachballs, balloons and goldfish bowls (complete with fish). It was a bizarre statistic that most of the good ones began with a 'b'. The next level up, in terms of 'Pop Game' proficiency, was to be able to maintain each transformation and to keep track of each person. To this end it was often a good idea to initially select people who were in some way distinctive from the crowd; be it a brightly coloured t-shirt or wholly unusual hat. After a while you ended up with a crowd of tourists interspersed with people who had all manner of things in place of their heads. Most would just carry on their usual business as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all. How little they knew, the fools.

So far, Dail had been in the square for about three hours; alternating between listening to music, listening to the square, and playing the pop game (as well as compiling his Encyclopaedia of Lion Scalers. He'd even got some drawing down, even if it was just a crude depiction of Nelsons Column with his exact location on the steps circled and marked "Happy Place". However, he suddenly realise that he also hadn't moved for three hours, which was significant for two reasons. Firstly, it meant that he hadn't actually eaten anything since breakfast seven hours ago and his stomach was doing its best to silently berate him of the subject. It was only a matter of time before its protests became verbal. Secondly, it meant that his bum was beginning to ache - as three hours spent nestled on hard stone is prone to doing to the untrained backside. And yet, he still wasn't moving. The Sun was still squatting over the rooftops and was due to make a strong return again tomorrow. But tomorrow was Thursday, a day which Dail had inconveniently scheduled in sitting in a dreary, overheated (it was still only march, after all, and the office thermostat was vigilantly narrow-minded) and thoroughly under windowed office. So there was no way in hell that some hunger or posterial discomfort was going to deprive Dail of at least one more hour of unprecedented sunshine. That and he had to still be there lest any of the friends he had text saying "In Trafalgar Square. Come chill out and have a chin-wag." actually replied. Of course, he has limited his pool of selected friends to receive this invitation to those who worked in central London and might be finishing soon. So far, however, nobody had bitten. And, thus, another waiting game commenced. So, to kill the time until hope of friends was abandoned and salvation finally came to both stomach and bum, Dail tracked the movements  of a man in a yellow t-shirt whose head he had metamorphosised into an oversized, but very green, roasted pistachio nut.

"Brilliant."  

Chapter 8

 Several months had passed, during which many, many interesting things had happened. The kind of things that Dail felt someone might consider interesting and worthy of mention should they be writing a book about him. But this, of course, was preposterous. Outrageously absurd. Nobody was documenting the everyday happenings of Dail’s life; the ins and outs. Hopefully not the ins as they were too boring and personal. And the outs were only exciting when juxtaposed by the ins. Many people probably went to South America to do some travelling; trying to recreate the fun of a long past journey. Most people learnt how to just about juggle, spent days painting, bought a hamster, lost a hamster, learnt that hamsters aren’t the kind of animals that you should take for walks in the park (the tiny wheel was evidently in the cage for a reason). Any thoughts about the book had taken a temporary hiatus, but they would be back soon; ready to pounce unexpectedly, like a child hiding in a cupboard.

It was now June and the weather had taken a turn for the better, so Dail had been sitting in his garden, noodling around on his guitar until two bees had briefly distracted him by circling around his head; the different pitch of each buzz momentarily harmonising the other at roughly a major third. This set off a chain of thoughts that led to the pondering of how well evolution had set up the bee for suicide. Should things get far too depressing for the bee and it wished to take its own life, it could potentially sting itself with a lethal dose. But then again, bees are probably impervious to their own particular brand of venom. Snakes must bite their tongues all the time and don’t die (the ability of creatures to bite themselves was one of the things that cemented Dail’s belief that there was no god). So, should this fail to work, it has a back up plan - an ace in the hole. When a bee uses its sting, it dies. Brilliant. The animal equivalent of a cyanide capsule. Right, tangent over. Get a drink. From the…sink. I think. Dinosaurs are extinc…t. Nachos.

The niceness of the day then led Dail to cycle to Yosh’s house, whereupon they set about banishing boredom to the nether-regions of sanity, leading to the kind of discussion that would give a psychiatrist a stroke if they were to stumble drunkenly into the room in half-way through.

“We need more Babybel’s…”

“That’s your answer to everything!” 

Yosh, to an extent, is right. Recently, ‘We need more Babybel’s has indeed been my answer to the past three situations. Yes, we put one in Yosh’s microwave whilst it was still in its waxy cocoon just to see what would happen (an odd shaped, gloopy mess that looks like a fried egg gone wrong, as it turns out). Yes we then made Babybel and Nutella cakes (essentially, Nutella spread on a Babybel) with the last two and, thus, the tiny cheese purveyors of madness ran out. So the idea of a red, stop-motion Pac Man video never quite came to fruition, but how we managed to get from there to trying to throw a small bouncy ball into a glass cup on a worktop from opposite sides of the room, I’m not sure I want to know.

“So” throw…miss, “book still on hold then?”

“Yup.” New approach, bounce it off the floor. Miss.

“How come?”. Same technique. Worse miss.

“Still don’t have any ideas. Bugger!”. Almost broke the glass.

A few minutes of uninterrupted ball throwing (unless you count the Ooh’s and Aah’s and Eee’s as the ball came perilously close to either entering the cup or destroying it) and conversation had turned to other psychiatrist slaying topics.

“Dail…”

“Yes…?”

“If you tried to clone cheese…could…could you end up with…a cow?”

“Yosh?”

“Ye-e-e-es?”

“I have no idea. Your throw.”

      

 Later that day, Dail had gotten quite introspective, as quite often happened when he had consumed an odd number of Babybel’s. He had never been a religious person and saw god more as an adjective than a basis for a belief system. On paper he was Jewish, but on the ground and in planes and on chairs and everywhere else he was an atheist. True he’d had a bar-mitzvah, but in all honestly this was more because the prospect of a large injection of cash (which, he repeatedly insisted, probably made him more Jewish than anyone who might have done it for reasons aspiring to being religious) would have been tempting to any thirteen year old. But for the most part, something about religion had never quite sat well with Dail. He remembered doodling in a bible at school and subsequently being reprimanded by the teacher. But then he also remembered thinking that if god was so concerned about a doodle in a book whilst all the other evil in the world was going on, Dail wouldn’t want to spend an eternity in his ‘glorious presence’ anyway. It’s the equivalent of discovering that your house is on fire and, when the fire brigade does finally turn up, rather than putting out the fire they just berate you on why exactly you chose that colour for the walls. Bastards.

Maybe it was the way that the god that people had suggested existed appeared to be a bit of a needy and pathetic creature. Nobody likes it when someone passes something off as being theirs and then demands to be praised and thanked for all the hard work they put into it. Yes, we get it, you think you made some stuff. Now take these pills, they’ll help calm you down and then someone will show you back to your room. Tha-a-at’s it. Feeling better? Good.

Ultimately, though, it was that Dail was made to wake up every Sunday morning to attend religious classes, instead of laying in bed and dreaming of custard and sheep (not together). Dail loved his sleep, and he’d be damned if any supposed cosmic entity would come between him and an extra two hours of the stuff.