Balloons

Bit of a tough night at the club. A hen party had block booked and I performed my balloon dance. Normally there's not much to be said. I’ve done the routine a hundred times. I cover my lower half in balloons and pop them to the music, sometimes handing a member of the audience a pin to pop the last couple. Unfortunately, one of the bridesmaids burst out in tears when I picked her out for this honour. It seems I'd unfortunately chosen a poor girl whose boyfriend is currently suffering from giganticism in his loins. It was the sort of thing that pours a bucket of cold water over the whole evening.

I wouldn’t mind but I’d been having a good day. I got up at lunchtime and stayed in my dressing gown for the whole afternoon, squeezed in the armchair by the fire. I’m reading H.G. Wells’ The War in the Air and recommend it to anybody who wants a bit of well written escapist fare. It's probably what put balloons in my mind in the first place. With his reputation as a visionary and prophet of technology (a self-heating can of hot chocolate stood out in this respect) it’s easy to forget that Wells writes some wonderfully twisted prose. I do like writing that can appear florid yet controlled. It’s like a well trimmed privet hedge, a perfect embodiment of the early 20th century England. Just picking something fairly randomly,

Of all the productions of the human imagination that makes the world in which Mr. Bert Smallways lived confusingly wonderful, there was none quite so strange, so headlong and disturbing, so noisy and persuasive and dangerous, as the modernizations of patriotism produced by imperial and international politics.

I particularly like the awkward ‘confusingly wonderful’ and the repeated use of ‘and’ lodged between the commas. It’s a bit long winded but has a charm that even now, cheers me up despite the trials of my evening.

Now there you go: a man with giant testicles and an analysis of H.G. Wells’ use of the comma and comparing it to hedge trimming. How many blogs give you that on a Saturday night?