Category: Bitesize

This lamp is a thing.

The love of my life is made out of steel. It has 21 gears. Three don’t work. Two I don’t use. And one is my personal favourite. My gear. The middle chain ring, two down from the top on the right lever. The gear I’m always in when life is singing to me.


I love my bicycle for one reason above any other. It puts me in places that make me scream at the sky. But for the birds who scream back or scram because the screams scares them, they go unheard. My bicycle takes me to places far away from humans.


It shows me the world in a way that nothing else in the world can. A reciprocal agreement. Without me it gathers dust in some darkness in need of air for tyres and oil for parts. Without it I’m more ignorant, more angry, more narrowminded, more impatient, more stubborn, and definitely more sad.


Staredowns with sunsets, high-fiving daybreaks with frozen fingers, struggling to the tops of mountains, free-wheeling into ravines, getting lost and found and lost again. Of silence you can hear. It takes me places and gives me experiences and happinesses I can’t find anywhere else. All of this from the simple revolution of pedals, the teamwork of man and machine.


My bike is my favourite teacher. Lesson one: go and see the world. It is not a second wasted. It is an extender of time. It is food for thought. Oxygen to lungs. It is seeing the back-end of other countries and their cultures, seeing the turn of nature, in the continual throes of movement. So much more than crossing a land-mass on a bicycle.

Someone call an ambulance.

Glow in the dark Jordan 4s.

It’s fair to say the only thing keeping Cristiano Ronaldo in the greatest of all-time debate is his ability to double as an underwear model.

With his marble-carved abs and otherworldy lats the Portuguese man of underwar has got it all, he’d knock M&S’s star man David Gandy clean out the water.

But when it comes to pure footballing artistry, one can look no further than the left-footed dwarf from Rosario, heir apparent to El Diego, but with a nose like a cartoon character and resolutely the kinda dude you want to take to a concert just so he can stand in front of you, Lionel is hardly going to set the style pages of any fashion magazine on fire any time soon.

And just as was really, it means he can concentrate on the one thing he does best, play football.

Oh wait.

These shoes man.

Are you a wearer of these shoes?



Please never talk to me



For I will never talk to you



Not that I have that much to say



Or if you only want the time



Or date, or day



Or merely ask to know the way



Save your breath



I will not answer anyway



My wish was never to be rude



It’s not so much to do with you



It’s just the shoes



Your shoes



I hate them



I hate your shoes

Find whatever it is you love, and become a master of it.

Alan Watts

Someone told me yesterday goatees were back in.

Bruh they never left.

Sir Dave doing what he does best.

Senior Citizen in tha house.

Hemingway wrote the below in a letter, aged only 24, to a friend living in Paris.

‘We can’t ever go back to old things. Or try and get the old kick out of something. Or find things the way we remembered them.  We have them as we remember them, and they’re fine and wonderful. And we have to go on. And have other things. Because the old things are nowhere, except in our minds now.’

*

Which I find kind of heart-breaking, because transience affects me, but all of life is there in his words, and the lines in the face of the old man silhouetted against the fire are catching the light like tiny incandescent branches, and he looks a lot like I might if I ever make it that far, and he is shrugging his shoulders and leaning back in his rocking chair and smiling imperceptibly, and his smile is saying that this is the mysterious way of the world, and it doesn’t need to be heart-breaking, it can beautiful too.

When something goes well it’s nice to get all TopGun about it from time to time.

But you can have too much of a good thing. Like saying sorry all the time, the more you repeat something the more it starts to lose meaning and resonance. The below is God’s way of telling Americans to calm down and stop seeking out some physical manifestation of their relentless need to affirm the fact they feel good. Notice that every single one of the below takes place in the States. Except for the Aussie wicketkeeper which merits inclusion because it’s incredible. Colin Jackson’s aunt is blatantly American.

Missed high-fives

One of the most beautiful things on God’s earth.

If the BBC weather forecast was a type of mindset.

*

Men

Women

Dude at the local Turkish 7-Eleven

Suicide Watch

Love’s Young Dream

Schoolboy

Seasoned Pro

Forgive Me Father

Campeones

Blade

He walked with a limp, half dragging the longer leg in an outward oval, bringing it back round to scuff the nearside of his heel. A mark he went over with polish and spit. His laces extended out from the bowknot precisely the same amount on either shoe. On rainy days he left the front door of the tenement with a smile. The sun was too much and it pierced him. The clouds were friends, but most of all he liked the rain. While others ran from it he paced, in measurements, splashing his shoes in the puddles in the wells of the concrete. Glorying in it. Love was not a language he knew, he couldn’t speak and could not understand. Had only been made to feel unsafe by eyes that wouldn’t love him. Most days it broke his heart the world. But not the days of rain, the rainy days of gifts, for splashing through, for arching back one’s neck to meet the rain face-on, to taste it on one’s tongue and listen. The sound of the rain falling to fill the hole that love left empty as an echo.