James Joyce time

Today I lack a subject, but I do have red wine, and so let us take a journey into the barren hinterlands of a place that is nowhere at all. Be warned, even though my avowed intent is to numb all my readers with egregious and unrequested nonsense, what follows will not even reach these high standards. May I take this opportunity, then, to give thanks to the anonymity I enjoy, albeit illusorily, as a nameless blogger.

Think then, as we walk down this curiously crooked lane, hedged by skinny trees and oddly featureless flowers that would spring into colour if you only knew their names, this lane that narrows into a cul-de-sac, a space betwen cheap restaurants, smelling of vegetables rotting inside tied-off black plastic sacks, as we get to the end of the alley and push through the the viscous grey brick wall at the end, into..

..Your local library. What!? Why aren't we in my local library? Well, improvise, improvise. Come, this stack over here, which in my continuum would be filled with the orphaned middle volumes of all the SF & Fantasy trilogies ever written, but in yours carries all the finest books written about regional cooking. Look, this recipe has a picture of the most delicate of all chillies, the chili padi, native to Thailand and Malaysia, small, concentrated, and almost unconscious of its rapier-like potency and narcotic flavour. And here, this one tells you how to use Jerusalem artichokes! Oh, so that's what you do..

I catch my breath. There was a sensation of falling, of vacuum. We're sitting in an English pub that never existed. There are beams of polished oak, an open wood-burning fireplace, and by the taste of the pint which I now sip on, no recycled slops. The landlord's face is friendly, but knowing, arch, but open. He subtly arches an eyebrow towards the grandfather clock standing opposite the fire. I look at the clock, then over at you. Your eyes are heavy-lidded, and it would do you no good to fall asleep here. I pay, and call a taxi.