Robot

The most depressing email I received this Valentine's day was from a robot vaccuum cleaner company:

'Show your robot some love!' it read.

However, here is a robot it would be easy to love...

It's a tiny robot to clean your desk

and/or rollerskate about the place in what is, frankly, an ostentatious manner.

And it only costs £2000 pounds.  Oh well

Random facts gleaned from here and there:

• One of the two brothers who founded the Laphroaig distillery, Donald Johnston, died two days after falling into a vat of partially made Whisky.
• Stewardesses is the longest English word you can type with your left hand only, Lollipops the longest with solely your right.
• The male Duck Billed Platypus has a venomous spur on its hind leg
• The Human body on average contains ten trillion cells. In those ten trillion cells, there are seventy five trillion foreign cells. Yes that’s seven and a half times more cells of different creatures living in or on you right now. So how can you call yourself you? (from Weirdimals)
• Albert Einstein's last words were lost to posterity as the night nurse attending him did not speak German (from Time magazine, 1955)

The Robin that perches on the bench where I meditate at lunchtimes. In my stillness, it comes and watches me, and when I open my eyes it is there by my side. Head tilted, chest puffed. I have taken to leaving, in the colder weather, little morsels for it to eat.

One time, I stood up from the bench and looked back to see my shadow cast down on the ground by the persevering winter sun, and the Robin then flitted down from the bench into the shadow, to rest on the place where my heart would be. Having just come out of the serenity of meditation, this moment struck me as poignant, and has remained with me.

There are also a couple of squirrels. The squirrels, in my unthreatening stillness have been known to play with my shoes in their curiousity.

The sheer silent magic of night time falling snow on the quelled streets of Soho - normally bustling with noise and traffic, instead frozen into stillness as if enchanted. The thick white crunch of fluff beneath one's feet. The search lights of a theatre revealing in their sweeping beams the flurrying butterfly swarm of fat flakes.

David Bowie
When I was six and watching Top of the Pops, I saw him dressed as Pierrot walking in front of a bulldozer in the Ashes to Ashes video, and I was utterly mesmerised. It was like seeing another planet. Inspiring, otherworldly, weird, brilliance.

Poetry. There is lots of terrible poetry in the world, a little more thanks to my occasional efforts, but when poetry is written well, it is sublime. From the anonymous voices of the past who have left their experiences writ in dead languages to the modern age, poetry is the complexity of human experience conveyed in language. Or, to be reductive, the most apt words in the most pleasing form to convey the thoughts and feelings of the poet. Some of my favourite poets, and poems, are: ee cummings; Pablo Neruda; TS Eliot; WH Auden; Apollinaire