Sunday, January 14, 2007

A Broken, Discarded Umbrella, Publicly Displayed in a Public Lavatory

A slightly bizzare title for this blog post you may well think Dear Reader, and you'd be quite right. The above title refers to something strange I saw whilst walking back from the centre of Cardiff today. I'd just got past the swanky-looking sushi restaurant (still haven't visited that restaurant. Don't even know if I like sushi to be honest, but it looks quite interesting nevertheless) and soon after that there's one of those 'experimental' public toilets like they have in France where you pay money to get in, then get a set amount of time before the door locks and the place 'cleans itself'. Now going back a few years I have a funny story from Uni about a friend getting stuck in one of these contraptions after a trip to the Welsh Club (hopefully some readers may remember being there), but that's a little aside. What drew my attention was that the door to this public lavatory was wide open, and someone had thrust their defunct umbrella in the bowl of the toilet, so that it looked like some form of modern art; a metaphor for mankind's continual second placing to nature? What really struck me was that someone had gone to the attention of actually sticking the destroyed umbrella in this toilet in such a manner, as it looked as though someone had given it real thought. Bizzare.

So I suppose at this point I should lead the discussion from this opening anecdote into a further abstraction of the above, whereby I discuss something like creating beauty and art out of everyday things? Or perhaps lead in to a discussion of climate change as a result of the blown-out umbrella? Unfortunately, neither of these things will be discussed. The truth is that this incident was one of a number of strange occurances I seem to have been witness to lately. I'm not going to list them all here, as I'm sure some of them aren't nearly as funny or wierd as I seem to think they are, but it seems as though there's a lot of funny business going on with the public of Cardiff at the moment. Perhaps those Krillitanes have been invading again. Last night one fell in to my pot of yoghurt. That, Dear Reader, was a careless mistake.

Is anyone else slightly scared by the fact that it's mid-January already? I mean, seriously, last time I looked it was New Year's Day and I was watching entire series of (the hilarious) Peep Show. Ah well, time flies when you're having fun. Or reading about discursive psychology. One of the two.

CyberControl's Top 5 Points of Stability in a Strange Universe:

The Cooper Temple Clause - Waiting Game
The Long Blondes - Giddy Stratospheres
Roxette - Dressed For Success
Jimmy Eat World - Polaris
Rufus Wainwright - Agnus Dei