The personal website of Sam Burnett
Nothing really happened, so I’ve not got anything to report.
I could tell you something the cat did, but I’m now fairly determined not to become a cat blog, so I’m not even going to mention her.
I am reading a fun book though, I’ve managed over 150 pages of it today.
I’ve been trying to explain to the cat that her mum comes back tomorrow, but I wonder whether she has any concept of the days passing. Certainly not the months and years racking up, maybe a notion of seasons.
So I told her just one more sleep until her mum comes back, but then I don’t actually know what she considers a sleep, she has so many of them a day. Is her main one of the day even at the same time as mine? I can’t be sure, mainly because I’m asleep, so I’ve no real idea what’s going on. She’s coming back in five sleeps then.
Or is it one more night sleep before she gets back? Perhaps she is able to comprehend the notion of night and day separating each other, even if today’s night belongs to tomorrow’s day. I’m not even sure if she actually starts her day at the same time point I do.
Given that the cat is diurnal – mainly active at dawn and dusk – maybe her day starts as the sun goes down. Or when it comes up. Bit bonkers that we split all our nights up come to think of it. Why even is part of the night today but the rest of the night is tomorrow. Unless it was this morning.
No wonder the cat is confused. Actually, she’s sleeping.
We’ve been trying to train the cat to use the flap that’s in the back door of the place we moved into back in September last year. In fairness to her, it was fairly well sealed up for the first few months of our residency, so we are asking a lot of her to suddenly change her relationship with an object she was getting on perfectly fine with by sitting next to it and yelling whenever she wanted to go through it.
I didn’t think she’d be bright enough to manage a cat flap at all, she’s a bit of a thicko in many ways. But to her credit she has mastered the art of entering the building. Leaving it is a whole different kettle of ball games, we have to use the door for that. But coming in? Sorted.
Apart from this last week. I should point out here that the cat flap is meant to be activated by a collar, but we don’t have it, so we’ve taped over the little catch at the bottom. It could in theory be a free for all in the house with neighbourhood cats coming round to help themselves to the sofa, but it’s been fine so far. Until the tape got a little loose just one time and the door wouldn’t open and now the cat refuses to enter through the flap.
It feels excessively mean to just leave her out there until she figures it all out again, but now I type that the house is refreshingly calm considering it’s past her dinner time. Fine, I’ll let her in.
It’s weird when time doesn’t quite flow properly, isn’t it? My morning coffee felt like a Monday, but work felt like a Thursday and the evening has felt like a Friday, but then I’ll go to bed feeling like it’s a Tuesday.
It’s like there’s been a power cut and my internal clock is just flashing 00:00 over and over. Which is very much how the last 15 years or so have gone by, so at least it’s on point.
I often wonder whether people in the Seventies knew what the Seventies were going to feel like, or was it just the people who wrote books about it all and that who got to decide? Because sure not everyone was walking around in gangling brown flared trousers and listening to ABBA.
What will this decade be known as after the fact? Whatever it is I’m fairly certain I’m missing out on it…
Running the country is such a piffling business, I can see how politicians could get bored with trying to make people’s lives better and indulge in a spot of bun fighting. There’s really nothing more thrilling in politics than watching a leadership mandate implode. Sag, really, like someone’s opened the oven door too early.
Will he, won’t he – the prime minister seems to have made it clear that he’s not packing up the furniture in the Number 10 flat until someone has the decency to stick the knife in his front, which I think is eminently respectable. If people are going to gang up on you they really ought to feel it. Except – and this is a canny calculation on the PM’s part – no one with any clout will actually be brave enough to do the deed, so the prime minister can squat in Downing Street as long as he likes, basically. I mean he actually can now that Labour has changed the rules on no fault evictions. Someone will have to give him six months’ notice, but I don’t know who actually owns the building. Would it be the king?
There have been a series of ‘dramatic’ resignations today of the most junior and inconsequential ministers who will have emailed their letters over (CCing in various media outlets of course) and then panicked afterwards that nothing will actually happen. It’s been a real who’s who of who’s that – not because no one wants the top job, but rather because some of them want it too badly, and it’s not really good for the old image to have been the one who betrayed the boss.
It’s not a conundrum, in the classical sense – you know, like whether the chicken or the egg comes first. In this case the chicken won’t make a move until a series of minor eggs have been smashed in a speculative fashion. Like vultures, the big names only circle once the whiff of decay has started to emanate. You have to feel for all of these MPs who worry for their jobs come the next in election in – checks notes – over three years. Perhaps this uncertainty and stress could be channelled into some sort of sympathy for the general public? Crazy thought. Just as I type, the minister for victims has stepped down. Who’s going to speak out for them now?
I saw a video on Instagram earlier of US television’s Dan Levy appearing on Claudia Winkleperson’s eponymous chat show, where her and her celebrity guests tried to explain the 1990s phenomenon that was Mr Blobby – a truly harrowing cultural blip, this pink foam character with a bulbous round head and yellow spots was a fixture on Saturday night telly juggernaut Noel’s House Party and wrought carnage with every appearance.
It’s hard to explain the Blobby saturation – there was a number one Christmas single, beaucoup de mercy and at one point a dreadful money grabbing theme park that mercifully tanked almost immediately. Mr Blobby had a life and career of his own – the original plan had been to pop a different celebrity guest in the suit every week, but Blobby quickly gained sentience and ruined that idea.
Of course he appeared on Claudia’s show and scared the crap out of Levy, who hid behind the guest sofa chanting under his breath whatever motto his therapist has given him for moments that surface his deepest traumas.
It reminded me of my own Blobby experience – I did GCSE art at school, and there was a double lesson on a Wednesday afternoon. Mr Clarke would let us have control of the CD player in turn, which in the late 1990s meant all Greenday all the time, until it was my go and I played Mr Blobby’s single on loop for the entire hour and twenty minute lesson.
It was something unpredictable, and in the end was right – I really did have the time of my life. I never did get to use the CD player again, but it was worth it.
No you’re lying in bed at 10pm desperately trying to think of something to put on your blog because of an arbitrary quest you’ve committed to that’s meant to involve posting something every day that’s essentially meaningless but has actually turned out to be quite a useful discipline on the days when you actually have remembered that that is indeed what you’re doing and have prepared something reasonably thoughtful rather than dashing off any old meaningless crap in a vain attempt to meet said challenge even though no one cares and there will be zero actual consequences were you to not write something every day as evidenced by the fact that you forgot yesterday and the world has maintained its axis.
The biggest country visiting my blog at the moment is Brazil. I couldn’t tell you why I’m so popular in Brazil, because I don’t believe I’ve mentioned the place in any of my various ramblings.
Now I’ve been to Chile and Argentina, but perhaps I need to make my way to the land of the samba seeing as the notoriously friendly and irritatingly handsome folk have taken me to their collective bosom.
It could just be that the rest of my numbers are so desperately low that it’s artificially highlighting the Brazilian fandom, or perhaps I’ve inadvertently offended the nation and been cancelled in my absence. Who knows, I shall enjoy the mystery for a little while longer.
I took great pleasure today in voting – not because I think my ballot paper will have any effect, especially not in the treacly mess of local politics, but because it’s the one time you can feel particularly engaged in the machinations of your country.
There are other civic touch points – paying your council tax, renewing your passport, getting arrested – but none of them have quite the same sense of occasion.
I also hold the mutually exclusive viewpoints that 1) local politicians should be not seen and not heard, and 2) that you really can’t complain about anything if you haven’t voted.
Both are a nonsense of course, but in practice we only ever hear from our tinpot local council members every four years when they deign to shove a pamphlet through the letterbox filled with pictures of them pointing at all the things they’ve not done anything about.
And neither would we find it acceptable for any elected representative to claim that they only represented the people who made it out on polling day and ticked the right boxes. This isn’t America, for goodness’ sake.
And now the calm period before the storm of finding out who’s won what, which parties have had a nightmare and who’s going to be walking round for the next week or two with an unbearably smug smile on their face. Though we mostly know the answers to those questions already, to be fair.
It was my grandad’s funeral today – he was a lovely man, full of integrity and eminently respectable, he set a high bar for me live up to personally and I’ve got lots of fond memories, but there was one in particular that I shared with people at his memorial service.
I remember staying with grandma and grandad when I was little and getting up early because I knew grandad would be up watching television.
All the curtains would still be drawn and the house would be dark, but we’d sit and watch Flipper or Skippy or Lassie or whatever else was on channel four that early on a weekend morning.
After that he’d make me some Ready Brek in the microwave, with a bit of grandma’s fancy mixed sugar sprinkled on top (she had a sugar bowl with brown sugar mixed in with the white stuff.
It’s an inconsequential memory in many ways, but to me it feels ineffably nostalgic and cosy, a little snippet of a way in which he shaped my early thinking.