By: Patrick I call the bingo at a local community centre every other Tuesday. Always the same people sat in the same places having the same chats and telling the same jokes. I often wonder what it would be like to break the unspoken rules, to pause for an extra few seconds at one point,…
Category: Patrick
Yes Man 2?
By: Patrick Having recently found out about the 2008 movie, Yes Man, starring Jim Carrey in which he says ‘yes’ to all propositions that come his way, I started scheming about writing the script for the sequel to this movie with a view to improving upon the original. Having not managed to watch the…
A Little Piece
By: Patrick I rarely feel strong bonds to people I have never met, especially not those who were dead before I had even heard of them. Yet the other night, I got this lovely image in my head of the late comedian Bill Hicks and the late writer David Foster Wallace sat in a…
Boredom
By: Patrick It seems that as a society we do not take boredom very seriously. I recently went to a conference on the theme of boredom, and when I mentioned it to other people, most of them chuckled. “Was it boring?” was the standard response. Fair enough. For most people, boredom as a mood…
A Little Thought
By: Patrick Written 25 April 2012 Fernando Torres broke his long-standing goal drought last night, scoring Chelsea’s winner in a crucial European match. It was interesting to hear the discussions afterwards on the radio. Apparently some psychologists had suggested that his goal drought may be ‘fatal’. It seems interesting that psychologists feel able to…
Introducing ‘Panning for Soul’
By: Patrick I am thirty-one years old. I seem to have reached a stage in my life where I am struggling to find meaning in a lot of things that once seemed so important. Not all things. I do not feel depressed, but rather I am finding that in most crucial areas of my…
New 6-blade razor unexpectedly brings about overnight demise of global capitalism
By: Patrick In a move that slipped under the radar of even the most shrewd economic analysts, yesterday’s launch of the new 6-blade ‘Synthesix’ razor by UK-based company Wilkinson Sword inadvertently led to the overnight collapse of global capitalism, it has been widely reported. Bemused and shame-faced economists, including formerly smug author of The…
Time and Overconsumption
By: Patrick ‘Time is not money; time is life.’ This sentence is from an article written in the 1960s. The article quotes a recent passage from ‘The Times’ in which it was shown that Americans in fact work just as hard in the 1960s as they did in the 1850s despite the introduction of machines and…
How quickly memories fade
By: Patrick How quickly memories fade: Neurons fired, then decayed. Once I looked into your eyes – They darted and dazzled Like fireflies. Now we’ve become strangers. Memories from a different life: A very brief past. Our weakness exposed When once we laughed. Ripped at the seam, Shattered remnants of a dream And everything that…
Working Life #2
By: Patrick It had been another long week, another week when Jon had spent his time dealing with the suffering and grief of his traumatised clients with a professionalism that was beginning to trouble him. Something had come between him and them of late – a barrier that allowed their stories, entreaties and breakdowns…