There is an unerring design – perhaps design fault – of my character that rejects reality on the basis that the worlds I can create in my head sometimes prove the most attractive places to be.

I did this a lot when I was younger. I used to have stacks and stacks of ‘Horse and Pony’ books by my bed and would fall asleep imagining that I had won a gymkhana on a grey pony named Strawberry. Later, when the realities of being a teenager didn’t turn out to be the ‘idealistic journey of self discovery and romance’ I had envisioned, I lived my life through programmes like Dawsons Creek (sad though that is) as a substitute to what I thought should really be going on in my life. Now, at the grand old age of 26, I still find myself escaping into fantasy land, although (apart from the odd ‘Creek’ boxset in my DVD pile) my methods of withdrawal have become a little more sophisticated, manifesting themselves currently as copies of ‘Ideal Home’ magazines and films/books about travelling.

I think it is testament to the addition of more good things to my daily itinerary that my desire to escape has progressively become reduced, and for this I am glad. There still are times though, normally as a result of some trivial personal mental crisis that I still drift off into the never never lands I can so easily create for myself – pretty much because no one can touch me there. This is my coping mechanism I guess, not a very helpful one in solving any problems I agree, but it’s a darn sight cheaper than vodka.

So where is this all leading? I think I have just realised for myself today that whereas there are dreams that you aspire to and work towards achieving, there are some that should be left untouched for the simple reason that sometimes you need a place to go when you are sad or lonely or if things just don’t seem to go your way. Even if it is just in your head.

I’m not sure why I’m telling you this to be perfectly honest, and I think it very unlikely that anyone will care about the erratic nature of my brain. For some reason though I just felt the need to share this weird realisation with someone other than the office pot plant (see below)…..

Plus with numerous tales of working and Planning and mental boredom recently, I kind of felt I owed it to you to say something a little bit different.

I have been ‘HD ready’ for a while.

For about a year and a half in fact.

It was only until a couple of weeks ago however when I finally managed to book an appointment for an eye test that all became clear.

“Please read the letters on the board for me, right down to the lowest line you can manage”

“A….. is that an E?.. and an O?….I’m sorry that’s all I see”.

The nice optician lady handed me a card with some interesting looking numbers on it and asked me to bring in my old pair of glasses to compare prescriptions. From the look on her face when I handed back what had fondly become known as ‘my librarians’, it was clear that I was going to need to choose some new spectacles.

On Sunday I picked them up and ….wow.

It’s like opening the window for a couple of minutes to clear a misted bathroom mirror, it’s like the difference between VHS and DVD, it’s like finding the optimum focus on a zoom of a camera, like peeling back the protective layer on a pane of glass, like drawing a black line around otherwise anonymous shapes with a pencil, finally revealing their true identity.

I see the world now in HD and I like it.

Very much.

Have you ever had a dream so real that you can pick flowers and smell them, read a letter and recognise the hand writing or even have conversations so vivid that you wake up to the hear the last words resounding in your ears?

I did…. and I do.

Regularly.

I have always been the owner of a slightly overactive imagination, but lately it appears to be working overtime and mostly during my hours asleep. Whereas this doesn’t normally bother me – especially when unconsciousness places me in an exotic location or in the arms of Jude Law – but for the past week I have been experiencing the most disturbed sleep where often it has been necessary to wake me up. Indeed, in my torpid state I appear to have experienced the whole spectrum of human emotion over the course of 4 nights, from the most blissful euphoria to the most heart shattering depths of sadness, a feeling that stayed with me for the duration of the next day.

Whereas I have never been so encapsulated by the joy I experienced in these dreams, or so frightened by something that I myself had created, now that I seem back on track with a more restful sleep pattern – I can’t help but be fascinated by what my brain managed construct without my conscious authority.

In fact it has left me feeling all the more respectful of my body in general which manages not only its day to day maintenance without any personal thought required, can repair itself when I am careless enough to injure it, but effectively co-ordinates all of its different parts so that I am able to run, jump, laugh, cry, talk and play at will.

I need to look after it. It’s only fair really.

It does such a good job of looking after me.

Anyway – on a more light hearted note, I thought I’d share with you the fruits of almost a fortnights worth of e-mail literary creativeness that myself and Paul (house mate at university and treasured friend) have produced in the duller moments of our working day. Amongst the games of eye spy (played with more than 70 miles in between us), jokes, plot lines for ’24′, great adventures to all four corners of the earth, I have chosen to post the lyrical goodness of our ‘lymeric game’. The rules were simple – take it in turns to write the beginning of a rhyme and the other person would do their best to complete it. Here are few we came up with:

There was a big penguin called Doug,

Who, if honest, was a bit of a thug,

One day with his flipper,

He caught a big kipper,

And beat it to death with a rug.

———————————————–

There once was a gerbil called Frank,

Who one day escaped from his tank,

After drinking some tea,

He was desperate to pee,

And the smell was decidedly rank.

———————————————

There was a young duck called Pete,

Who did not have webbed like feet,

Instead he had toes,

And was thus asked to pose,

As a celebrity on the cover of ‘Heat’.

————————————–

There was a young woman from Slough,

Who ate a midget but didn’t know how.

She soon came to reason,

The midget was teasin’

And was actually the size of a cow.

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There was a young girl from Bahrain,

Who had a mishap on a train,

Her skirts got all sticky,

And as she was picky,

She didn’t sniff UHU again.

————————————–

There once was a tiger called Mike,

Who one day decided to hike,

But along the way,

He met a Tigress called Faye,

Who overtook him quite fast on her bike.

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Anyone up for joining in? Here’s one to finish – and if you fancy dropping it in my comment box sometime – I’d love it!

There was once an elephant called Ted,

who went for a cruise round the Med,

It was somewhere in Crete,…….