This is an advanced warning to users of Reality version 7.81. A major upgrade is approaching, and there are going to be some very big changes. The new version 8.1 (because 8.0 exploded yesterday when we were testing it) will include the following differences to your current reality:

1 - Mondays will no longer exist. Instead, there will be two Tuesdays each week to make up for it.

2 - "The Weekend" will be renamed "Bouncey Time", whilst the individual days, Saturday and Sunday, will be renamed "Wendy" and "Ben". "Wendy Time" will be when the most bouncing will happen, whereas "Ben" will be reserved mainly for gentle skipping sessions around the garden.

3a - Time will undergo regular cleaning sessions every 4 weeks for a duration of 3 days each session. During such cleaning sessions, Time will be replaced by an additional Space dimension, to allow normal daily goings-on to still happen. However, whenever the change-over between Time and the extra Space dimension (let's called it "George") happens, everyone will be forced to stand still for the duration of a minute (or 5 meters if you're on the George side).

3b - There will be 25 hours in each day, except Thursdays when there will only be 7. The 11 spare hours gained each week under this system will be donated to charity (a different one each week - except on every 7th week, when people will use the spare hours to dance merrily on the hilltop). Some people will "save time" in special Time Bank Accounts. "Time Thiefs" will hide in multi-storey carparks, waiting to pounce on people walking around with "too much time on their hands".

3c - The concept of "abstract concepts" will be made obsolete when a new range of "strictly defined rigid concepts that everybody understands" are introduced. It will become illegal to state that "Time is an abstract concept," and such people will be locked in underground dungeons and beaten by watch salesmen.

4 - Cows will be replaced by dfsdmhfkjsdhfksdjhfjh. Yes.

5 - "Love" will be replaced by "Like". There will be no more lovers, only likers. People will fall "in-like" with each other, and send cards to people in hospital signed, "...with like from John & Jane at the cardigan knitting factory". Compilation albums will be sold with titles such as "50 Greatest Like Songs Ever". Confused mentally-ill religious fanatics will stand on street corners shouting, "Don't worry if your life is shit, God likes you...but not quite as much as Jesus, who he covered in Marmalade that one time when we all went to Cornwall for a week in August."

6 - People with buckets on their heads will be given free skateboards.

7 - Giant man-sized cats will walk upright on hills.

8 - The word "hello" will be abolished, and instead, people will greet each other by dancing manically in front of each other with big grins on their faces.

You all smell of weird, and your hair is like a cow. How can you sit there and pretend of the rocket, just like those days back in the shed when we used to bang the old wooden radiator. Oh how we used to laugh when Eric swore his socks on his mouth, and danced like the rain would never eat the fence, particularly when the window was wobbling. Sometimes, I think you only come here for the cheese, and even that's only on Friday's (or Wednesday when a Friday is hiding behind a bush). You make me sick, all of you. You wear each others underwear, and run around shouting about beef. Go away.

No matter how happy you are
Or how contented you feel
No matter how healthy you are
Or how balanced your mind
No matter how hard you try
or how high you fly
When something you thought would be great
Is a total dissapointment
A small cloud hangs over
And the rest of the day is slightly blurred

Hours
Sprial and coil into black
Some remebered, some forever gone

Tragic
We never get them all back
The relentless march of time must still go on

The tide is turning
Horizons burning
Your days are numbered
Your future has crumbled

Forgotten
Events obscured by the past
Without remembrance did they occur at all?

Losing
At best a tenuous grasp
And nothing below us to the fall

The tide is turning
Horizons burning
Your days are numbered
Your future has crumbled

Imagine
What moments hose last hours hold
Things we missed that might have changed our lives

Stranded
With no way to get home
The light around us starting to subside

The tide is turning
Horizons burning
Your days are numbered
Your future has crumbled

- Assemblage 23

This is the current (but constantly expanding) list of the strangest search phrases used to find my blog (there are much more than this, but these are the funniest in my opinion):

twister "more people die" game
ladies + bottoms
8zero8
"naked cousins"
only fools and horses "alright dave" sound
teacup chihuahuas england
"the big eye" meaning
spaggetti tree
nude hanggliding
naked nude posted
satan
do you know if you are dying
nude massage bath avon -office
private nude massage yorkshire
George Bush

I recently read a letter to a newspaper, which both made me laugh and also got me thinking. I can't remember the exact words, and the paper has probably been thrown away now, but it went something along the lines of this...

Why are so many health rescources put into keeping old people alive? Many old people are given health treatment which keeps them alive at such an old age that their life becomes a burden both to themselves and the people around them, because they have no quality of life any more, whilst they drain rescources and waste everyones time. A limit should be set on living, and compulsory euthanasia should be given to people once they reach a certain age.

As I say, I can't remember exactly how the letter went, so the above text is merely my impression of it. It's a bit of an extreme idea I know, but it does raise some interesting points. Let's look at the facts:

• Our planet is over-crowded
• The UK's National Health Service is stretched to its limit
• Old people smell, can't walk properely, and shit their pants
• The space used to care the elderly could be used to build skate parks for the young
• The money saved could be used to fund research into how to clone our planet so that when it dies we can simply move house
• Old people could be forced to live in a different dimension, where the new rules of logic mean that they can ride unicycles unsupervised
• Mass storage of old people in large multi-storey buildings, where they are blindfolded and then connected up to machines which continually inject them with halucinogenic drugs, meaning that the last few years of their life are the best, without causing any danger to anyone else. The cost of the machines and the drugs would be more than covered for by the money saved by not having to pay people to look after them by the previous method.

Further money could be saved by:

• Making use of all the really fat people in the world, by connecting disabled people up to them via synthetic umblilical cords. Each of the fat people will be pared up with a new disabled friend, who feeds off them, allowing the fat person Government permission to sit around and eat food all day. Extremely obese people (bigger than the size of 2 normal healthy people) will be linked up to multiple disabled people, saving yet more costs.
• People who are totally normal apart from not having any legs, will be surgically attached to armless midgets, whose heads (which would otherwise get in the way) would be surgically relocated to shelves attached to their abdomens.
• Cows and sheep would have buckets (with a day's supply of grass) attached to their faces, allowing them to freely walk cities giving people rides on their backs, therefore saving money on taxis.
• Recycle more paper
• Use those new type of energy-saving lightbulbs

It's getting rediculous how many people have cosmetic surgery these days. For example, take Priscilla Presley. I saw her on a couple of talk shows recently, and she barely smiled once, probably because she's physically unable to anymore.

This culture of people in constant pursuit of physical perfection, seams to be rooted in Hollywood, and radiates outwards towards the rest of the world. Everyone in Hollywood wants to look beautiful. The problem is, 9 times out of 10, it just makes them look like what they are: an old person in with their skin stretched. Also, in the film and TV industry, somebody's always got to play the older person. Normal people on normal wage packets can't afford cosmetic surgery, and TV characters need to have some kind of basis in reality, so who's going to play a the main character's grandmother if all the 70-year-old actresses are trying to look 25??!!

Let's move this a step further, towards the subject of sex changes. This is where things get even more rediculous, because when a man has a sex change, he then dresses up and acts what he thinks is a typical woman - wearing dresses, having long hair, wearing make-up. The problem is, he over-does it, and doesn't really look like a real woman at all, but just looks like what he is: a man in a dress who's had his genitals mutilated and hormones injected into him. I don't know about any of the other men who might be reading this, but one thing's for sure, nothing in the world will ever make me willingly consent to having my penis removed!

I wonder if again it all comes back down to what people think is expected of them. If a man is of a feminine nature, maybe he feels like he's not living up to the role he's been born into, or rather, the body he's been born into? Maybe he then thinks to himself, the way I feel inside doesn't match up to what people think a man should be, so he thinks, well I must be a woman on the inside then, better make myself a woman on the outside too. To me, this all has echoes of what I mentioned earlier, about people trying to look younger. They feel young inside, so they make themselves young on the outside too. What if it's okay to be young on the inside and old on the outside, and what if it's okay to be male on the outside and female on the inside?

Okay, so maybe I'm simplifying it all to a certain degree, but mutilating yourself just seams too extreme to me. Isn't it far more healthy to concentrate on what's on the inside, to try and get that fixed? What's the point of loads of people with super-smooth skin, perfect teeth, large inflated breasts, surgically extended penises, chemically-enhanced muscles, and large pouty lips, if they're all suffering from crippling mental problems that cause them to be addicted to buying room-fulls of really large sculptures and being on a constant cycle of binge-eating and fad diets.

I really think, that if everyone was healthy, and treated each other with love and respect, outward perfection would seam far less of a priority...

I was almost in tears at work today when I read this story about a boy who survived being hung from a tree by a gang of older kids. That always gets me, when I hear about horrible things happening to children. The poor defenceless little kid, he must have been scared out of his mind!

At 8:40am on Bank Holiday Monday, whilst most people were still in bed, I went for a walk on the hill with my camera. Oh the joy of being an early riser...