Saturday, January 27, 2007

[meme] six unusual things about myself

Tiberius Gracchus dropped a meme onto me some days ago and the reason I’ve been tardy in posting is that I simply couldn’t think of six unusual things about myself. Plus these exercises induce you to be self-indulgent. Well, as there’s no other way but to be self-indulgent, here is an end of semester report on James Higham:

1] At any given moment, Higham doesn’t know what he’s doing. For example, if he’s in Finland and he’s met a Finnish drinking buddy on the boat and agrees to be the man’s navigator on the journey to the Arctic Circle and if they stop at a roadside cafĂ© and the man asks if Higham knows where they’re going, he’ll answer, reassuringly, “Trust me.” With a lady, if it doesn’t seem to be working, he’ll try something else until it ‘takes’. This is one of the best arguments for fidelity - you learn the other. He also knows nothing about trade, education or blogging.

2] On a road journey somewhere, Higham lacks ‘reversability’. There’s something missing from his brain, perhaps due to things imbibed in earlier days. He can always find his way somewhere, even without a map, weaving in and out of the traffic and mounting footpaths but once there, he has no way back. The route just fails to implant itself in the brain, having been a creative and lateral route in the first place. “Do you, James, in fact, have any idea how to get back?” she breathes, evenly. “No.” “No?” “Not in the least. I was deliberately wasting your time,” he adds, pythonesquely. “Let’s just make love and I’m sure something will come.” This sort of thing loses him marriages. He did find his way home that day though, miraculously, she conceded.

3] One of his favourite tricks, alas no longer possible in the modern office, was to have two phones on the desk, of the bulbous receiver/microphone, horizontal handset type and when they’d both ring at the same time, he’d shout and rabbit chop the ends of both receivers so they’d spring up into the air and then he’d catch them in mid-air [quite often]. Another trick he loves and still practises, is to crack two eggs simultaneously, breaking them enough for the contents to go into the bowl and then flinging the shells, with a flourish, into a bin three metres away. That was the old hamburger shop gambit and it had to be three metres exactly. As age has crept up, he’s ceased bowing to an imaginary audience and increasingly tends to drop one or both eggs.

4] Higham is fanatically punctual [actually – early] for any appointment, even Blogfocus but when it comes to a lady, he loses all sense of time and proportion, the lotus syndrome. The uni girls know that if he’s ever late, it’s either because of a five car pile-up on the road or else he’s with a lady [well, actually the lady]. The former is more common and whilst on the topic of ladies, he doesn’t understand why he appeals to those under 16/18 or so and romantically to those over 30/32 but never to those in the 18-30 range but it’s always been so. He’s never got far with this intermediate range. Recently, he’s been experimenting with arriving late for appointments, with ready-made apology but that doesn’t feel good so he’ll probably drop the idea.

5] Higham suffers from what he thinks is Wilson’s Syndrome. The body temperature drops and the complications begin. People ask: “Do you have a temperature?” as if that’s the sole criterion for illness and he replies: “Yes, 35.5.” The thing is then, he can’t be idle for long – the body has to keep moving and working and sleeping-in is usually followed by glugginess. Better not to do it. Plus he doesn’t feel the cold unless it’s very cold. Anything over 25 degrees Celsius and he’s in trouble. People don’t say: “The iceman cometh,” for nothing. Actually, they don’t say it at all.

6] What people are usually struck by, given his blogging and working persona, which sometimes resorts to role-playing and manic acting to make its point and in his occasional lovemaking which usually gets a bit more physical and exploratory than bargained for, given his fine, upstanding character, is that when at home, he’ll suddenly switch to extreme, prosaic passivity. He can lie on a couch for two hours, reading or get up at 12 noon on Sunday, something he has in mind for tomorrow. As Eric Oldthwaite was once accused of by that pigeon keeper, Higham can be a ‘boring little tit’.

So, over to you, Russ and Don, Pete the Latic and Melanie P.

2 comments:

  1. Great list James- sorry about lumbering you with it but I thought it appropriate!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Enjoyed reading your list. Quite different from the others I`ve read. I tend to hate those things and luckily have only been nabbed to do them twice.

    tea
    xo

    ReplyDelete

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