Sinister: Return of the Mac

[robin stout]

Oh, hello again

It's raining outside, my toes are soaking, so I thought I'd write to you. 
It's been a while since I've had anything to say. I thought I'd find out 
some stuff about Belle and Sebastian and astonish you with it.

So I watched some telly. We love 1997 didn't mention Belle and Sebastian at 
all. It started me thinking that in history books of the future, the sort 
you'd have beamed directly into your brain, most of the things that I think 
are important wouldn't make it in there at all. They wouldn't have a chance. 
People would be having their retro nineties parties and dressing up as H 
from Steps not Stuart Murdoch. And I decided that in a few years time when 
everyone's listening to their space music and eating moon-toast, sinister 
might be the only thing from my version of the world that's left. Then I 
thought I'd write to you.

Because Sinister’s a repository for our thoughts, isn’t it? It’s as close as 
we can get to carving things in stone these days. We carve things into 
electromagnetic bleeps instead. I remember reading somewhere, not long ago, 
about an ancient philosopher, and how he hadn’t written anything down but 
historians had still found out all about him and what he thought. The reason 
they knew, after his teachings had been lost for hundreds of years, was that 
someone the philosopher knew had kept a diary, and in this diary were all 
sorts of things about the philosopher and all of his ideas, along with 
shopping lists and moans about his wife. But the reason archaeologists had 
found this diary at all, with all its fascinating stories, was because the 
man had CHISELLED IT INTO HIS BEDROOM WALL, and the archaeologists had found 
the wall. It took that much. I wonder how solid this Sinister wall of ours 
is.

I started my new job recently. It's not bad, I thought it would be scary but 
it isn't. I share my office with someone called Paul and he told me he'd 
started getting strange stalker-like emails from someone he didn't know. She 
thought he was a poet, and kept telling him how she really liked the poem 
he'd written on a web-site. I suggested that maybe she'd got the wrong 
address and asked what his was.

"It's foxinthesnow at something.com"

"Oh. Fox in the snow? That's a good name."

"Yeah, it's a song by a band called Belle and Sebastian."

"Oh, I see."

Then I told him how I knew that already. I decided that I was going to like 
Paul. Thing is, there's a good chance his stalker's one of YOU. You freaks! 
Leave him alone.

Someone (sorry I can't remember who) sent in a story about a bloke who drank 
too much Red Bull. It reminds me of a court case involving a bewhiskered old 
colonel. The colonel was in the dock for assaulting his secretary. He’d 
never laid a finger on anyone before, unless you counted all the 
fuzzy-wuzzys he’d had up the Khyber, and since his moustaches had begun to 
droop and his military bearings were rusting up a bit he’d become a mellow 
old fellow. So what had happened? It turned out, as the case unfolded, that 
with all those long mornings and long afternoons of his retirement, and 
after they’d killed off Arthur Fowler in Eastenders, the colonel had begun 
to drink increasing amounts of tea. The usual two or three cups a day 
weren’t enough anymore, and by the time of the assault he was drinking fifty 
litres a day. That day the secretary hadn’t had his tea ready for him when 
he asked – maybe she was trying to get him to give it up – and he lost it, 
his mind was transported back to his time out East, and he attacked the 
secretary like she was a native weeing up against the tent. In the end he 
was acquitted, the official reason was that he had been suffering delusions 
as a result of his tea addiction.

My A to Z reading list isn’t going as well as could be hoped, I’m only up to 
D, and all the authors I know whose names begin with D, Dickens, Dosdoevsky, 
etc., write really long books so it’ll take me ages to get to E. Part of the 
problem is that some letters, like J and M, are going to be really exciting, 
but there’ll be a lot of other letters to get through before I get to 
Martine McCutcheon’s autobiography.

God, this was long, wasn't it? Sorry if you've fallen asleep. I should be 
working anyway.

bye

Stout Robin

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