Where to go? The pub!

          For most of last year, Saturday was usually the best day of the week. There were green spaces, rivers, beaches, castles and a lot of being driven about nice places in Chilly Jockoland.

          Today I will be spending the day with Brian Wilson, aka the Old Toothless One. This is not a cause for future happiness in that it will involve lots of beer, but is a way of making up some of the social capital I lost by being exclusively with someone else over the weekend for the last couple of years.

           The Old Toothless One has been wearing Union Jack underpants since the Scottish Independence referendum. He only wants to talk about cricket and the Beach Boys, but he is a good example of what happens to the evil bourgeois when they are too dumb to meditate.

            For he took the plunge in his twenties with the TM people. They give you a secret, magic word. Because I wanted to learn how to meditate and because Brian Wilson refused to reveal his secret magic word, I had to invent my own secret, magic word and learn to meditate on my own.

            My secret magic word was Sussquehanna. I used that for nine years and sometimes still default to that in my meditations.

            I discovered that the TM folk recommended two twenty minute sessions a day. Maybe one before you go to the jobbie and one when you come back. Anyway, I always reckon the meditations really start to work during the third one, but twenty minutes twice a day doesn't seem like a huge burden for anyone.

           So you are invited to become a blissheid and they say two times a day should do it. You are being invited to join the bliss feast and you have been given two chopsticks. Faced with this sumptuous feast, Brian Wilson threw away one of the chopsticks and tried to eat the sumptuous feast with just one chopstick. Of course, I don't think from my experience that you will make much progress behaving like that and you will in fact end up throwing away both chopsticks, which is what he has done.

           But at least he had a go of some kind, and he did stimulate my interest in meditation, so here comes an afternoon with One Chopstick Harry. Thank God the Aussies were caught cheating at the cricket recently. Something to talk about that isn't how stupid and greeting faced the Scottish people are and how we should all be really happy to let the Conservative Party in England take all the decisions for us because we are too stupid to govern ourselves.