It involves racing round and round in circles over the same ground, chasing after your pals. Every time it looks like one of them is getting ahead, you all chuck loads of crap at them to drag them back, not forgetting to drop plenty of obstacles behind you to try and hinder those still biting at your heels.

Yes! I’m talking about the 2012 Republican Presidential Candidate Race!

Wait! Did you think for a second I was talking about Mario Kart?

Invoke the hidden GOP mode by entering B-A-START D-U-B-Y-A on the menu screen!

Politics in America always seems so much funner than at home. Such drama! Such insistence on letting crazy people run! Such bloody long campaigns! Do you know how far in advance Gordon Brown called for the general election last year? One month. One month! How many alleged affairs with flip-flopping grizzly bears that you can see from your back yard in Russia from whom you have been taking backhanders can you really expose in that length of time? Hmm?

Fortunately, the cycle in America takes a very, very long time, which affords the rest of the world a great deal of entertainment, especially with such a field of all-star nutjobs they’ve assembled this time. As I grew increasingly absorbed by the tit-for-tat debates, flat-tax wars and bigotry one-upmanship, I could not help but notice how similar the merry-go-round of frontrunners was to the world’s favourite virtual karting franchise.

What happens as soon as you’re out front? You fall under intense scrutiny and attacks from every quarter- you get bombarded with everyone else’s homing shells and are given only shitty banana skins to defend yourself with. If only the candidates would pay attention to their karting counterparts they might pick up a few tips.

But who’s who in the ultimate Mario Kart GOP race? I will tell you who! Because I’m determined to make this analogy last all the way to the Rainbow Road, where all those gay-fearing plonkers will duly drive over the edge.

THE SPIRAL INTO MORAL DECAY

Newt Gingrich is… Wario!

At first, all the evidence was pointing to Gingrich being Mario: the pot belly, the affairs with a succession of damsels. Ultimately though, Mario is a good, down-to-earth guy; there’s just no way to reconcile this courageous working-class hero with perhaps the most grasping of all the candidates. Wario, on the other hand, is the only character with enough delusions of grandeur/evil to stand a chance of keeping up with Newt, and is probably pocketing a gold coin or two being “consulted” by the failing Mushroom Kingdom mortage lenders.

Rick Perry is…Donkey Kong!

Well, this was the easiest match up by far. They don’t look too bright, huh? But we shouldn’t judge people on how they look! No, we should judge them by their ability to string an intelligent sentence together, which is something these poor chimps struggle with. While most of the fleeting front-runners crumbled under increased media scrutiny, Perry merely slipped on a succession of his own banana skins.

Michele Bachmann is…Yoshi!

What? She’s not Princess Peach?! I will not fall prey to such lazy gender-based comparisons! No, I think you’ll find many more parallels between she-of-the-faraway-eyes and a dinosaur, that go beyond their prehistoric outlooks.

The amount of eggs that Yoshi spews out, he must have a similar level of fostering experience to Bachmann, but the deal-clincher here is in their personal lives. Michele’s hubby Marcus Bachmann is so into his gay conversion camps, and we all know that means he must secretly be very gay and very repressed. Romancing someone with a repressed sexual identity is something Yoshi knows all about, thanks to his dinoromantic partner, Birdo. I wonder if Michele has a lesbian tongue like Yoshi too.

Rick Santorum is…Bowser!

Just because a friend of mine said Santorum is pure evil. Santorum’s been bumping around in relative obscurity, but is starting to make a late surge in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. Everyone knows though that Bowser takes aaaages to accelerate, so it’s gonna be too late for him. Hurrah!

Mitt Romney is…Princess Peach!

United in their 1%-ness (Princess Peach is apparently worth $1.3 billion) are the only character with any real political power in the Mushroom Kingdom and the only character in the Republican race with any real chance of winning. It’s hard to pair up Mitt with anyone, because even virtual people have more personality than he does.

Honourable Mentions

Hermain Cain - It was a shame for entertainment’s sake when Herman Cain dropped out. If I had to pair him with anybody, it’d probably be Luigi for the Italian food connection. Although Cain may physically resemble Mario a little more, Luigi still has a ‘tache, and looks more like an alleged sexual harrasser.

Ron Paul – Excluded yet again! But my reasons are valid: just like in the GOP, Ron Paul doesn’t quite fit in with the Mario Kart drivers. Of the two main characters left, there’s no way he’d pander to aristocracy like Toad, and Koopa Troopa is definitely a communist.

I love list-making in general, because while you are making lists, you are not yet involved in the arduous effort of doing what is on the list. Unless you made a list which said KEEP WRITING THIS LIST FOREVER!! in which case you would be caught in meta-list hell for all eternity!

WRITING A LIST OF FAMOUS BELGIANS HAD SEEMED SO EASY IN THE BEGINNING

New Year’s resolutions are a special kind of super-fun because they come only once a year which must make them more important I think. Also, sometimes it is fun to think ahead for a whole year, instead of never planning beyond the next cup of tea. I wouldn’t suggest using your NY resolutions to plan every cup of tea you’re going to drink that year though, that would boggle the mind! It’s like thinking about how big the universe is, or how we evolved from primordial ooze into The Cheeky Girls!

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

Last year I did exactly as I predicted on my resolutions, so this year I’m going to keep things simple again. I may further supplement these with some Advanced Level resolutions, which perhaps I can use in the future to rate myself on some sort of resolutionary league table!

Resolution #1: Work on “projects”

For a long time I said I was going to write a Mills & Boon. Guess what I have been secretly doing while I was away? No! Not writing a Mills & Boon! Almost had you there.

For reasons fascinating to me but probably to no-one else, instead of heterosexual romance I started writing a story about teenage girl-bands in space. Only a small genre-shift! Already this switch is paying amusing dividends: after my Mum telling my Dad that I was writing some “young adult” fiction, he started questioning me about this “adult” fiction I was supposedly writing and outright asked me if I was writing porn. Proof that you only need one pensioner to start a game of Chinese Whispers.

However, coming home has forced something of a hiatus upon me, and I am not sure how I am going to fire myself up to finish this cosmic adventure. It’s all about finding that perfect place to work, and I am struggling to create a peaceful environment here. I have scuppered myself with my own desires; in dreaming of a paradise where I would be supplied endless cups of tea, I failed to anticipate this would mean being disturbed every ten minutes by someone asking me if I want another cuppa. Sometimes twice, because they forgot what I said by the time the kettle boiled.

Such existential revelations are my bread-and-butter, now that I am an Aspiring Novelist!

I am plotting other projects too, but they are far too secret to talk about.

ONE OF MY MANY FAVOURITE "WHISPERING SECRET" STOCK PHOTOS

Resolution #2: Develop effective anti-distraction strategy

I confess, generous and frequent offers of tea are the least of my worries; when it comes to distractions, I am my own worst enabler. I do recognise the brittleness of my concentration and make regular, feeble attempts to shield it from the many enticing and perilous diversions that exist, winking at me from the internet.

Usually this means burying all my RSS feeds ever so slightly deeper, hoping each forced click stokes my guilt so much that when I finally reach that red-link district, I will be so overwhelmed by my lust for those brazen bookmarks that I shut the browser completely.

That never happens.

I cut out computer games, refuse to get a smartphone, got bored by most TV and gave away all my books. I am truly trying to steel myself against this world of modern distractions we have created, but I don’t seem to be able to convince myself to give up reading articles about cyborg beetles or cul-de-sacs or Mormons.

And I don’t think I ever will entirely, because then I’d have to completely overhaul my personal belief system and topple knowing random shit from being the noblest of all human goals. I just need to work out how to not want to know it right now. How to procrastinate my procrastination.

This will be my most difficult task for 2012, but when I have come up with a solution, I will call it my DISTRATEGY, which sounds like a kind of military tactic used by a robot army poised to overthrow the world, which makes it really cool, which means I will try very hard to do it.

Resolution #3: Not waste first five months of year

I have exactly five months before I must return to reality. Whereas I had a clear idea about what I wanted to do when I left last year (i.e. go quite far away for quite a long time), I’m a bit more uncertain now. I guess what I want to do is pretty location-independent. As long as I can be somewhere mildly interesting, with enough space and time to pursue my “projects” and a connection to the real world, I will be happy. So, building villages in Africa would be out, but part-time goat-herding in the Swiss Alps would be in. I bet the Matterhorn’s got killer wifi.

Any suggestions/requests for how I spend the next five months will be entertained. Just remember I am rubbish at most things involving physical effort.

2. Go on the charity celebrity versions of quiz shows, where they always make the questions easier, thus rendering me genius-like

3. Be interviewed by journos/columnists that I love reading then spend the whole time asking them questions

4. Create a decade-long fashion frenzy for looking plain

5. Finally fulfil my resolution to blog more regularly by employing a social media assistant to do it for me.

This means I have had a whole extra 24 hours to spend parading up the I-205 Multi Use Path and relaxing in my cheap motel room, to reflect upon my time of wanderlust. To be fair, it wasn’t really wanderlust, more wandermildlyinterested.

Although there are some things I will miss (that I will get to, eventually), I feel it would be more positive to list the things I am looking forward to. Though thinking about it, this is probably just an inverse list of things that have pissed me off recently, so sod positivity.

1. HUMAN-SIZED TOWELS

While serial hotel-dwelling has many perks that I cannot for the life of me think of, among the worst things are the distressed wafers that hotels like to pass of as towels. On the spectrum of human size, I am nestled down the fairly petite end, so if I can’t manage to enrobe enough of myself to prevent a public indecency charge, should I fall out of a motel window, perhaps after being startled by a lizard, then how is a regular grown-up sized person meant to manage? (That really happened by the way. The lizard in the room, not the toppling out of window semi-naked.)

THE STOCK PHOTO LADY TRIES TO LAUGH OFF THE VERY REAL DANGERS HER POORLY-COVERED VAGINA IS EXPOSED TO

Would an extra inch or two be too much to ask for? Let’s leave that question there. I’m going to start lobbying the international hotel industry to demand they implement a minimum boob-to-vagina towel measurement standard, as a matter of urgent safety.

At home, there will be towels large enough to encompass my whole body at least twice around, head-to-toe. Towels big enough to live in, which is something I occasionally like to do for several days at a time.

I FOUND A PICTURE OF THE LIZARD THING

2. SAUSAGE ROLLS

Possibly spurred on by that Lovely Eggs video that I have on almost constant repeat, I have been longing for this monarch of British bakery products. There was a very strange stretch of the upper peninsula in Michigan that seemed to be lined exclusively with pasty-selling huts, where I temporarily sated my savoury pastry craving with an excellent over-sized replica Cornish pasty. Yet once I crossed the pleasingly-named Mackinac bridge into the larger, mitteny bit of the state, the huts vanished.

I am baffled at this extreme culinary localisation, and am very glad to be returning to a place where mulched up meat in flaky pastry is worshipped nationwide.

THIS SAUSAGE ROLL APPEARS TO BE AUSTRALIAN

3. X-MAS

Probably because I haven’t been shopping or watching much TV, the X-Mas spirit has been fairly late coming to me this year. However, that spirit has come perilously close to being quashed entirely by the horror that is American X-Mas radio stations. What started as a pleasant festive musical diversion rapidly spiralled into deep, psychological torment with violent shaking triggered every time some crooner starts reciting the names of Santa’s reindeers.

Now I’m pining for British X-Mas, with its comfortingly crap TV and superior Christmas #1 back catalogue. Not to mention over-cooked turkey, weird presents from family and, most importantly, beating everyone at Trivial Pursuits.

One thing the USA does get right is the very tasteful decoration that adorns its suburbs. I desperately want one of these inflatable light-up nativity scenes, but there’s simply no room at the inn/my suitcase:

And, not to get all sappy, I’m looking forward to seeing my family. I guess half a year’s absence intensifies the rosy hue of remembrance, but I really did enjoy X-Mas last year, with its deluge of snow that was probably annoying at the time but now seems rather charming. One of the things I like about my parents is that they have never got out of the habit of being providers. Whether spurred on by parenthood or not, they have this magical ability to always have stuff around, the kind of stuff that I never think about needing, but when it’s there I realise is really great. Like clean human-sized towels, functioning heating systems and more food in the fridge than two-week old leftover curry and milk that has about half an hour before it goes gloopy. Sometimes I look around at my friends to see who has managed to achieve this level of adulthood, and wonder how they got there. I feel like this is something I could maybe achieve, but it would require such hard work and re-wiring of the brain to connect it more directly with reality that it isn’t worth it.

4. A SINGLE TIME ZONE

While I do love that time zone shenanigans means you can download The Good Wife straight after it’s aired on the east coast and finish watching it before it airs on your telly on the west coast, I fear this is outweighed by more serious drawbacks. Specifically: fucking with your mind. Although I’ve rarely had to be anywhere at a specific time while I’ve been road-tripping, it’s still nice to have a sense of both where and when you are. Mrs Satnav, under some duress, took care of the geographical side of that but, left to its own devices, it appeared America had little interest on informing me when I was hurtling an hour into the past or future. That’s just rude.

There’s only one time zone I need. GMT: the original and best.

5. SHOPS YOU CAN WALK TO

Oh, corner shops! How I have missed thee.

There is little in life as disheartening as being able to see a place a short distance away, then realising there is no possible way to walk there, owing to the intervening 10 lanes of traffic. Not only that, there’s no way of even getting to the 10 lanes of traffic, because there are another six lanes running parallel outside it. That’s my idea of hell. Or, Texas.

While cities are pretty similar in all the countries I’ve visited (which is almost every country in the world with passable toilet facilities. Plus France), it’s out in the sticks that you can get unstuck. The car-centricity of America outside of its urban centres (and, I would argue inside a fair few of those urban centres) is so notorious because it is entirely true. I was startled, when driving through some suburbs after dark, to realise that there is a complete lack of streetlighting. But that makes sense: streetlights are largely to aid pedestrians, and no-one walks anywhere. Pavements and paths peter out unexpectedly, as though roadworkers gave up halfway, overwrought with the futility of it all.

Obviously, people must get used to driving for several miles just to get to the nearest shop. For me, however, when I’ve shuffled semi-dressed to the kitchen, having summoned all my energy to make a cup of tea only to find the milk is off, I can just about hold it together enough to bundle up into some overwear and stagger the thirty seconds to Sainsbury’s to buy a fresh pint. If I had to get into a car and drive across town, it would be that nanometer too far, it would break me.

Ironically, there’s no corner shop for miles where my parents live, in a particularly obscure location in rural Wales. But, as I mentioned above, they have sufficient restocking magic that this will never be a problem.

6. VEGETABLES

This may be a surprising entry. You may also be surprised to know that my current belief is that as humans advance, we should aspire towards vegetarianism, even veganism, for environmental and economic reasons. However, I am far more selfish than principled, so I continue to feast on bloody steaks.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for fans of cows living beyond toddler age), my trip has been low on steak and high on cheap filler. I think prolonged ramen consumption would make anyone get misty-eyed over the verdant allure of a broccoli floret. I am sure this feeling will pass very quickly.

7. NO MORE PHOTOS

Like with any new toy, when I first got my camera I was eagerly playing with it at every opportunity, snap-snap-snapping away at anything that moved, or didn’t. Which is to say I have a lot of pictures of sheep.

This enthusiasm persisted throughout much of my trip and, when my camera stopped working after a run-in with some aggressive spray at Niagara Falls (I probably should have seen that coming), I was most distraught. It eventually dried out and came back to life, and I continued my inept photo-documenting with renewed vigour.

Under pressure from friends and family that weren’t convinced I wasn’t just spending half a year sat on a sofa in Britain somewhere, I began to upload some pictures. Uploading photos on a crappy (but beautiful) netbook using intermittent hotel wifi is perhaps one of the most soul-destroying activities to emerge out of western technologisation. Day by day, I found myself increasingly reluctant to take photos, until my quivering trigger finger refused entirely to shoot, so distressed it was by the prospect of having to do something with the many thousands of pictures that digital cameras goad you into taking.

Even after I had expended great uploading effort, when my sister (who had been one of the most vocal in demanding evidence of my travels) started to browse through my flickr account, she said to me: it gets a bit boring after a while.

You don’t fucking say.

So, this X-Mas there will be no family photos. At least not taken by me.

EGG COMEDOWN

But even after that decision, I found it hard to know where to begin. Every time I thought I had pinpointed the beginning of my egg fascination, I found trails leading farther and farther back into my undergrowth of half-remembered eggy anecdotes.

Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, we are all ex-egg-dwellers, or maybe ex-eggs, or maybe both. Egg philosophy, like life itself, is brimming with such cyclical conundrums. The most famous, of course: what came first, the chicken or the egg? I like to think it was a tie, because I hate to see anybody lose.

AN EGGALITARIAN VICTORY

So, like that guy that wrote that long series of books then died to get out of finishing them used to say, this isn’t the beginning, but it is a beginning.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 1 – AN EGG IS LAID

One day about ten years ago, I was round at Robert’s house at uni, waiting for something monumental and life-changing to happen. Then we watched Pink Flamingos.

It was fairly obvious that I would love this film: students are programmed to enjoy weirdness and I will never stop loving bowel movement-related humour. But there was something more going on. Where other people saw a deviant comedy about aspiring to be the flithiest person alive, we saw one of cinema’s greatest love stories. A pure-hearted romance between star-crossed lovers: Mama Edie, penned in her wicked daughter’s trailer, The Eggman, her suitor and would-be saviour. Maybe it’s more like Rapunzel than Romeo and Juliet, but I’m sticking with Shakey for a better egg pun caption.

MONTEGGUES AND CAPUOMELETS

Naturally, I have spent the last decade of my life looking for my eggman to sweep me into a wheelbarrow and whisk me off to a better life, but this never happened, so I became a lesbian.

Like with all self-discoveries, this egg-piphany has triggered great introspeggtion (I am going to hold off the egg puns now, don’t worry). I have come to believe that my id is an egg, but to find its origin requires swimming a few lengths up the fallopian tubes of the great chicken of life.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 2 – CAN’T BOIL THESE EGGS

The other great influence on my life, from a very early age, has been computer games. One day I may write My Life in Computer Games, which can’t possibly be as odd as this post. The very first game I played on anything more substantial than a Game and Watch was Chucky Egg on the BBC Micro at school. It was that game, in conjuction with Granny’s Garden, that started me down the questionable path that life has taken me. But what if, as well as opening the gateway to geekery, Chucky Egg had cracked the shell of another, more insidious influence?

CHUCKY EGG, FAST FOOD, SUPER MARIO WORLD, FINAL FANTASY XI

Prime ovum and self-proclaimed King of the Yolkfolk, Dizzy was my anthropomorphic hero-of-choice on the Atari ST. While best known for puzzle platformers such as Treasure Island Dizzy and Fantasy World Dizzy, I had a soft-boiled spot for his Pac-man-esque outing, Fast Food. The player directed Dizzy around a sequence of outdoor mazes, hungrily gobbling up burgers, pizza and soft drinks, while avoiding getting devoured himself by various enemies. Power-ups came in the form of condiments, that unleashed certain effects that made the runaway fast food less, well, fast. I credit this game, with its nightmarish visions of evasive high-speed fried-chicken and a food-chain-gang gone wild with giving me enough mental resilience to side-step the eating disorders suffered by all the other girls at school.

Far removed from this constant threat of being scrambled, the Final Fantasy series chose to take a more nuturing view of egghood, making it central to gaining control of the recurring chocobo characters in many episodes of the franchise. Final Fantasy VII had a notoriously tedious/weirdly addictive chocobo breeding side-quest, that although technically peripheral to the main game, is integral to the whole RPG ethos of maximum time-consumption for dubious rewards.

This was taken to a new level with Final Fantasy XI, the series’ first online instalment, where it requires four whole real-life days of staring at an egg before so much as a hairline fracture, and a couple of months total before you can actually ride the blighter. I suppose it’s not much different from an in-game tamagotchi simulator. But there’s a reason that tamagotchis eventually tanked in popularity: they were fucking stupid.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 3 – SURE AS EGGS ARE EGGS

The truth is that I needn’t look so deep in my analysis of egg obsession. Because, you see, eggs are everywhere. Not just what we eat and where we come from, but how we speak. Is there another foodstuff that lends itself so often to idioms? You can be a good egg, a bad egg, a rotten egg. You can have an egg-head, a nest egg or egg on your face. You can egg someone on, tread on eggshells and put all your eggs in one basket. Just to name a few.

They can be a form of transport (per Lady Gaga’s ovoid sedan chair), housing, musical instrument or sex toy. I’m sure there are many varieties of egg porn if I dared to look – maybe Two Eggs One Basket?

IT'S THE HAT THAT KEEPS HER CLASSY

I am not the only one consumed with all things egg – many ancient cultures believed that the whole universe was one giant egg. That’s a religion I can get on board with. Even the most important festival in Christianity has been co-opted by a lot of jiggery-eggery, which I can’t complain about, because Cadbury’s mini eggs are perhaps my favourite seasonal confectionary.

Long ago I envisioned collecting all of humanity’s egg experience into a masterwork of literature: The Ovossey. It would be part novel, part onslaught of egg-related facts. Such as: when General Franco was serving in the Spanish army in North Africa, he invited a fellow officer to dine with him who he considered cowardly.  He instructed his chef to serve his comrade mountains of eggs; in Spain huevos are slang for balls and he was implying the officer could do with some.

Alas, I was never to complete or even begin this oeuf oeuvre; reality hit, I got a job and life got boring. My dreams were as crushed as a fresh meringue beneath the buttocks of a failed Weight Watcher.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 4 – GOLDEN EGGS

It’s not just their metaphorical properties that are overwhelming, but the sheer joy of the physicality of eggs. Next time you open a box to hastily crack an egg or two into a pan, I ask you to pause for a moment, and consider that egg in your hand (if you are averse to real ova, I suggest getting the rubber variety from a National Trust gift shop of your choice, or ebay).

THIS IS NOT MY HAND. I'M NOT SOME EGG-FEELING PERVERT.

Let the egg nestle perfectly in the centre of your palm, feel how its shell pleasingly curves along the contours of your flesh. I am feeling relaxed just thinking about it. I am sure eggs are like an ovoid incarnation of the golden ratio, I can’t think of another form that looks and feels so right.

Believe me, my interest in the oviform is entirely innocent, though the same cannot be said for others. One of my all time favourite literary experiences was when Robert took me to the library one day and handed me a book to read. The library was silent back then, when mobile phones were still new enough that people didn’t think they had the right to keep them on everywhere. It was in this atmosphere of reverent silence that I dutifully read the first chapter of the book, seemingly a coming-of-age story about a boy and a girl, then happened upon the first line of the second chapter:

“That was the period when Simone developed a mania for breaking eggs with her ass.”

I jiggled as wildly as an egg in boiling water, but I kept it together and did not erupt out loud with laughter. The book was Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, which regularly makes must-read lists, and I can heartily recommend for the whole family.

Perhaps the best thing of all about eggs is their plentiful nature. There is no rarity – eggs for all! Why some of us can even make them, as evidenced when one pops out every month, heralded by a crimson fanfare. I am not sure what those tiny sort are good for, but I hear the NHS is so enamoured they’re upping what they’ll pay for them.

MY LIFE IN EGGS PART 5 – HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR EGGS?

MY LIFE GOAL

I’m not going to talk about the multitudinous ways to cook with eggs because, really, there are as many ways to cook eggs as there are personalities and also I’m shit at cooking. All I will say is that everyone should eat them, because that’s what Shirley Conran told me. I understand that vegans may object to this, but I’m not sure I fully understand why. After all, chickens keep laying all these unfertilised eggs, surely it’s our duty to spare them the emotional scarring of endless phantom pregnancies? Obviously, I only advocate buying the free-est of free range eggs with nauseating pictures on the box of multiple generations of the family that farmed them, who are so nice to chickens that that guy probably mistook the one on his knee for his own son.

THESE CHILDREN WILL CRY IF YOU DON'T BUY THESE EGGS

When it comes to the pinnacle of haute oeuf cuisine, there’s only one contender. A creation so grand in scope that I took a 400-mile diversion to go and see it, forget Saturday Kitchen’s two-egg omelette, I’m talking about the 5027-egg omelette at this year’s Giant Omelette Celebration, in Abbeville, Lousiana.

If 5027 sounds like an strange number, that’s because they started off with 5000, then add another egg each year, ensuring it’s always going to be bigger and better. The omelette-making was quite a spectacle, but just one of many egg-themed events that took place over the weekend celebration. Possibly my favourite was the tractor egg-cracking competition (where you had to reverse a 1950s John Deere into an egg and try and make the smallest crack possible). I made a promising start on my attempt, managing to touch the egg without cracking it, however, I overshot it on my retry, resulting in a messy eggy double-tap.

IMMINENT OVICIDE

I was in good company on the tractor, featuring several local beauty queens, a priest and a Grammy award-winner. The priest narrowly lost out in the end, but I think the biggest losers numbered in their dozens.

EGGY MESS

MY LIFE IN EGGS EPITAPH – EGG-NOG

I was going to finish this post with a short story entitled A Very Short Story About a Very Large Egg, but I decided to do a poem instead, because rhyming is fun, also it could be sung to children to give them nightmares about the end of the world.  Maybe this will be the first in a series called Apocalyptic Nursery Rhymes.

I looked back with no sense of mirth
To see the space where once was earth
To glimpse the ruins that remain
Of our great blue and green terrain

Or floating fragments of the crust
Where we once stood with faulty trust
So obssessed with climate change
But blind to what was really strange

From ancient rumblings in Minoa
Vesuvius and Krakatoa
Right to Eyjafjallajökull
There’s something geological

That hints at our bleak ruination
Each earthquake rends a new striation
Too late did our great minds begin
To see the cracks came from within

Volcanic belches boil and flare
Bright in the incendiary air
The fuse lit on this powder keg
Our primed, explosive giant egg

A scaly creature shaking loose
Its albumen of magma juice
And bursting through its birthing gates
That we’d known as tectonic plates

The crack felled a world population
Except for us out on this station
Now we seek somewhere new to dwell
As dustmites on a frail egg shell

If Hollywood makes a disaster film about the Earth really being a giant space-dragon egg that starts cracking and kills us all, I am suing.

THIS IS WHAT WILL REALLY HAPPEN IN 2012

BUT WAIT!

You don’t think I’m ending the world’s-longest-post-about-eggs without one more treat, do you? I think I’ve already shown this video to anyone that is likely to read this, nevertheless, it bears rewatching.

Ok, I think I’m spent. Only comments with bad egg puns allowed.

At this point I should probably mention that I quit work for a year and shifted my inactivity to a different continent, just like I said I would.

In truth, I had a series of plans for what would happen as I travelled America, each one involving decreasing amounts of me doing anything useful or productive.  However, after a fortuitous meeting with my friend Evelyn, resulting in a free hotel stay, two weeks’ worth of stolen breakfast items and a pig race, I was persuaded that I should make some comment about what I’ve been up to.  I respond well to in-person harrassment.

Life on the road is almost exactly the same as life at home: a series of baths and lies-in, except punctuated with 13,000 miles of driving.  There are often people that talk in varying degrees of strangeness.   I try very hard to impress upon these people that my own strangeness is in fact quaint British charm.  This works worryingly well.  The two most important people in my life are not in fact people, but a car called Eugene and a small navigational aid called Mrs Satnav.

I am the happiest I have been for almost ten years.

I wish I had some grand statements to make about the state of America or the cultural climate but my mind is frequently consumed with more pressing issues, such as whether being able to watch The Good Wife as it airs is worth having to endure the adverts and the inevitable and inexplicable hiatuses, or whether a map of the United States looks a bit like an udder (my opinion is yes, and I intend to use MS Paint to prove it).

What I am trying to say is that I will make more of an effort to comment on what is going on with me.  Just don’t expect that to have any bearing on what is going on in the real world.

I am peripherally aware of this emporium of bad food served by waitresses in skin-tight, skimpy clothing. Naturally, I find this horrific – why not just have good food then go to a strip club?

Anyway, I am not happy at being felled by these lowest common denominator tat-peddlers; the celebration of breasts aplenty should be about quality and diversity as well as quantity.

Thus it is time to take arms and engage in full-frontal BOOB WARFARE!

What better way to instantly infuse this ultimate tit-for-tat struggle with a bit of sophistication than to show a classy and intelligent French superstar utilising boob power for the benefit of women everywhere!

(link courtesy of my friend Dan’s wife Becki)

Number one!

I am strangely moved by this.  I have never been number one at anything. I remember bemoaning this fact to my friend Jo in the pub one night, that even the things I am quite good at, such as sitting down or being messy, I’m not anywhere near the best at them.

Now I have hit this pinnacle, I am overwhelmed by both power and the fear of losing it.  I’m starting to empathise with Mubarak and Gadaffi.

So, I am faced with no other choice but to start inserting random breast-related imagery into posts, in order to maintain my number one status.  There can be no better way to get this ball rolling (or pendulous orb swinging), than with this excellent video, linked to me a couple of weeks ago by my friend Yuri.

Never will you be able to hear a “whoop” noise again without it triggering some…happy thoughts.

I dearly hope all of Japan is recovering ok from their recent and ongoing disasters.

On a final note, if anyone even contemplates making their own breasts aplenty blog to topple this, I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND CUT YOUR FACE.

And I meant it, I really did.  Sometimes you are describing things to people, things like how this is a great company to work for or how these vegetables are good for you or how yes, everything in my life of privilege and plenty is going swimmingly.  And you mean it but you don’t feel it; it’s the truth but not your truth.

So for the most part the month passed drearily and with so little incident it probably created an incident vortex and will suck the life out of March too.  Really, when people start complaining at the end of Autumn about how quickly the year’s gone and how soon Christmas is coming, you should turn round and scream at them well that’s what happens when you waste the first 60 days of the year doing fuck all.

Anyway, now I will attempt to dredge the sewerage of the mundane for traces of gems, or at the very least some cubic zirconium that fell off an Elizabeth Duke necklace.

BAD THINGS

- Spent probably over 50% of the month in bed, in order to avoid doing anything. Sometimes I wish I had a viable reason for being in bed so much.

I used to think the song that best described my attitude to life was Waking Up by Elastica.  It mentions cups of tea and playing records and has the line if I can’t be a star I won’t get out of bed. Which sounds perfect, as I was mentioning only last time about the allure of horizantally-based employment.

But now I am wondering: what if I really did make a living working in bed (salaciously or otherwise)?  Then it would stop being the refuge of inactivity that it currently is, and I’d have to do stuff, and it would lose its lethargic allure.  I don’t really know what else to say about this, other than if I ever have to turn to sex work, it would have to be lap-dancing only (although I am way underskilled for that).

NEUTRAL THINGS

- I just noticed that someone found this blog using the search term “breasts aplenty.”  I don’t think I have written those words anywhere, so I am now concerned that GOOGLE CAN READ MY MIND.

GOOD THINGS

- Went to performance of Ravel’s Mother Goose suite courtesy of Robert (thank you my sassy man).

- Discovered, via my father’s boundless handyman skills, that the cause of my washing machine woes was a tiny allen key, of the sort I use at work for rank-mounting machines.  I wonder if maybe there is a voodoo doll of me somewhere, that someone is poking millions of those allen keys into.  Also I hope that by using the words “rack-mounted” I attract some more boob-loving pervs.

I’m not sure if my appreciation of the romantic genre has crossed the line yet from sarcastic fun-poking to honest indulgence, in the way that my passion for Eurovision has. I doubt the word “romantic” would feature in a list of top ten adjectives to describe me, as written by anyone that claims to know me, however I would argue that I very much am, then probably lose.

The first rom-dram I remember seeing on telly was Barbara Cartland’s A Hazard of Hearts, a TV movie that was truly incredible. Incredibly dire that is, so even a ten-year-old could relish its deliciously overwraught mawkishness with the precocious, ironic taste that all Brits are born with. I was obsessed with this film, for reasons I can’t quite comprehend; perhaps this was my root for taking so much pleasure in rubbish things, like a kind of entertainment-specific schadenfraude.

Some very persuasive producer had bagged the talents of no less than Diana Rigg, Edward Fox and Helena Bonham-Carter, in the lead role of Serena. HBC was very young then, so we can forgive her, though I particularly like how one IMDB reviewer chose to praise her performance:

“her eyebrows are more active here than anywhere else.”

THOSE EYEBROWS LOOK ACTIVELY LESBIAN TO ME

Repeatedly, I would watch this taped-off-the-telly treat, savouring its sub-Austen tropes and Regency clichés. Also, I am sure that the mansion it was set in had a secret passageway that was at the crux of literally several plot twists, and I love a good secret passage, in a totally non-euphemistic way.

I subsequently learned all about Barbara Cartland, and viewed her eccentricities and riches as very aspirational. Reclining on a chaise-longue while dictating your next write-by-numbers masterpiece to a dowdy typist with whom you probably have all sorts of sexual tension sounds like the perfect occupation to me, and certainly a lot safer than other horizontally-based employment.

For many years I have harboured a not-so-secret, yearning desire to write a Mills & Boon, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, much in the same way I can’t fathom why I delighted in A Hazard of Hearts so much. I don’t know if its a perverse pleasure in writing in such a stereotypically heterosexual genre (although obviously there are a great many dire lesbian romance novels out there, none of them have the recognition and cachet of M&B), or the challenge in working within such a delineated structure.

However, despite having a rough plot and even a first line, I have never progressed with the book, because I just cannot settle on names for The Girl and The Boy (or at least that’s my excuse).  And things will sound very different coming from the mouth of a Troy compared to a Hawk compared to a Rock, don’t you think? (M&B hero names should typically be mono-syllabic embodiments of pure alpha-manliness, it seems)

So until I resolve this issue, so many bosoms will remain un-heaved, so many members un-throbbed, so much love so un-un-requited that it double-negatively cancels itself in, and everyone realises who they’re meant to be with with no fuss at all.

And that wouldn’t be very romantic, would it?