There Is No Means of Testing This Hypothesis, but the Fact Remains That the Dog Has Three Ears.

Please, do not worry. No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog. There was no animal experimentation. No canine extremities were grafted where they did not rightfully belong. No canidaen genetics (whatever that might mean) were in any way modified.  “So what then,” you might well ask “Is this all about?” And I will answer “I really do not know.” You see, when I awoke this morning, there at my bedside lay a tiny scrap of feint lined paper, and upon it, not neatly written exactly, but certainly not illegible, I had written ‘His effete resistance was futile – the monkey, after all, knew its own way home’. The pen was there, the handwriting was my own. It’s not exactly an unusual thing. It happens often enough, although I seldom recall getting out of bed. I do not recall getting pen and paper and I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it down.

Anyway, I left the paper with my laptop, in case it ever came back to me (to date, it has not) but before I left the room I found another piece of paper, roughly folded and nestling on the other side of the desk, filled with several such epigrams – none of which I remember writing, none of which I fully understand. The handwriting, whilst undoubtedly my own, takes several forms from neurotically neat and precise to psychotically drunk and barely legible. I seem to have used a range of pens and, occasionally, a pencil when, I can only presume, I did not feel able to trust myself with a ball-point. I appear to have deliberately kept it with a view to making use of it at some time, but I have no idea how that might happen.

Top of the list is: ‘“Sometimes” said the man in the red plastic nose, “I forget what it means to be funny.”’ I can almost see the sense in that, but I have no idea why I wrote it down or what I intended to do with it. ‘Either I have consumed mind expanding drugs, or this hat is too tight’ is a little bit Woody Allen, but I think it rather points to the fact that I might have partaken of an ill-advised chunk of late-night blue-cheddar or similar because a little further down the page, in the same pen and with my handwriting in the same state of undress, I have written ‘We no longer share our lives: we co-exist – like Dhobi’s Itch and Anthrax’. It was obviously a maudlin night because further still down the page, in a hand that slants in all directions, as though written aboard the Kon Tiki during a force ten hurricane, I have written ‘Life ebbed away from him; unidirectional, double-speed; all tick, no tock…’ And finally, no less disconcerting because it is written in red pen – an implement I do not appear to possess – I have written ‘There is no means of testing this hypothesis, but the fact remains that the dog has three ears’. And if you think that I might have an explanation to offer, I’m sorry, but I don’t…