That is the full extent of my artistic talent.

I am alone in the Tinhouse in having the drawing ability of a broken magnet. Our walls feature several paintings by Mrs Tin, all of which I think are amazing, all of which she thinks are crap (so she’s going to go mad when she finds out that I’ve posted this example):

Whilst children drawing on your walls is supposedly a bad thing, we did not think so when Tinson1, at the age of eleven, drew this mural on his bedroom wall of himself at the age of, well, eleven:

(Please excuse quality of photo – Tinson1 uses energy-saving light-bulbs, which save energy by giving out no light).

My own talents must lie elsewhere. My cake, as was pointed out, looked like a dog-bowl. An attempt at a dog-bowl would probably look like a jellyfish.

I must remember never to try to draw a jellyfish.

When our niece was about three we minded her for a week while her parents went on holiday. Thanks to parties, football matches and some meeting Mrs Tin had to go to I was left alone with her for three hours of the first afternoon, just when she was at her most bewildered and almost-tearful as to where her mum and dad were gone. In desperation I got some markers and asked her would she like to do some drawing.

“Draw Meemo,” she said.

Finding Nemo was out at the time so it wasn’t hard to guess what she meant. I drew a Nemo, coloured it in and even left a little white stripe along its back. (I also drew a Dory who, as you all know (or if not will have to take my word about, damn you SOPA) was blue. I coloured her in blue but my niece kept poking me with a purple marker. “No, Dory’s blue,” I kept telling her (my drawings may be rubbish but they are obsessively accurate rubbish). Anyway, the phone rang, I found my way out of this forest of brackets to the kitchen to answer it and when I came back she had scribbled over my blue Dory in purple).

After the longest afternoon of my life Mrs Tin and Tingirl returned home. Tin-niece showed them our page. “That’s a really good Nemo, Tin-niece,” said Mrs Tin. “I drew that,” I said. “Oh,” said Mrs Tin. “Seriously?” said Tingirl.

Anyway, I have an idea. Although WordPress’s daily topics are gone, it does still set a Weekly Photo Challenge. I’ve ignored it so far this year, but I’m now going to use an adapted form of it, the Weekly Drawing Challenge. Whatever they suggest I’m going to do a drawing that attempts to represent it.

Even if I write nothing funny all week, you’ll have that to look forward to.

I’m glad I did the 999 post yesterday, because it’s a more interesting number, with its connotations of emergency services, its subliminal programming that you’d really love nine 99-ice creams right now and the fact that it’s the number of the beast upside down.

One thousand, though, lacks the same interest.

Look it up in Wikipedia and you are told that it is the number between 999 and 1001. This is impeccably factually correct, though unlikely to come as news to many people. In any case, anyone who has doesn’t know what 1000 is probably won’t know what 1001 is either, so the above information will be of little help. It’s a bit like telling you that an aardvark is “an aardvark with a hat on, but without the hat”.

The article goes somewhat downhill thereafter, difficult though that may seem, and in this way it does perform a service. If ever you are feeling down about your blog, or believe that your writing is dull and uninteresting, read Wikipedia’s article about One Thousand and gleefully tell yourself “well, what I write is more fun than that”.

The only thing of note in the article is that it reminds us that there is a phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words”. If this is true then I’ve pretty well wasted the last four years when I should have taken up art instead , so I’ve decided to disprove it. I have counted and read (1000 posts written and still as thorough in my research as ever) the first one thousand words of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (up to the word “him” on the third page, in case you’re interested).

We meet Mr and Mrs Dursley, we learn that Mrs Dursley has a sister that she pretends she doesn’t have, we meet the delightful Dudley, and an owl flies past the window. Dudley throws cereal at the walls, Mr Dursley drives to work, passes a cat reading a map and thinks about drills (it’s because he works for a company that makes them, not because he’s mental). He sees a lot of people in cloaks, goes into work, yells at five people, makes phone calls and decides to buy a bun. He walks back to the office with his doughnut (they must have been sold out of buns), overhears a group of people mention the Potters and their son Harry, is flooded by fear (I’m hoping that’s not a euphemism), hurries back to his office and snaps at his secretary not to disturb the one-thousandth word, him.

Try getting a picture to paint all that.

Anyway, to mark the milestone:

(You can see why I didn’t take up art, can’t you?)

I’m not going to link to the list, but it includes things like cricket, Star Trek, Big Brother and (sigh) women’s bums (with a terrific photo of Yelena Isinbeyeva to show what I meant, in case any of the four readers I had at that time didn’t know what a woman’s bum was).

Eventually I decided that the post was finished and ready to go, but obviously it was number-specific, in that I could only use it for my 100th post or it was pointless. And I had only written 95 posts.

Oh, how I limped agonisingly towards the target. My 96th post was about cats or something, the 97th was as exciting as watching paint dry (it may well have been about watching paint dry), the 98th was written in Urdu.

For the next one I wrote a post called “Stuck on 99” in which I confessed that one of my first loves was Agent 99 from the original “Get Smart” TV series. I reported how as I got older I moved on to Emma Peel from the Avengers, then to Purdey from the New Avengers. I showed a photo of each of them, meaning that SOPA now have a file on me an inch thick (that’s true, I’d show you a picture of the file if they’d let me).

That was over three years ago, but each week I get three or four visitors here who arrive having typed “Agent 99” or something similar into Google Images. This is because, if you try it, the first picture of her brings you to my blog, so complete strangers hoping to read about her get instead  to read some bloke constantly writing about how he can’t think of anything to write about. I’d imagine few of them come back.

Thus my 99th post is more famous than my 100th, and that is why I have decided to make a bigger deal of today’s post, my 999th, than I will of tomorrow’s (yes, it will be tomorrow, anyone who has to skip a day because he can’t even think to write “today’s is my 1000th post” really does have Blogger’s Block).

It is possible that the title of this post may cause inconvenience to some people, but I doubt it.

Anyway, anyone who types “Dial 999” into Google instead of actually dialling 999 possibly deserves to have their house burn down.

*********************************************************************
It was another cloudless, scorching day in Greystones, proof already that we are in an alternate reality. Above the whirr of the air-con, as it struggled to lower the temperature in our house castle (sure why not) I heard our doorbell ring. I went to the door to find two men dressed in suits as black as their sunglasses. One of them flashed a badge briefly (very briefly, it could have been a Tesco Club-card for all I saw of it), then looked down at an official-looking  piece of paper.

“Mr Real-name-inserted?” he asked.

“Pardon?” I said. He looked momentarily sheepish. “Sorry,” he said, “we only know you as Tinman. We don’t know your real name.”

“Then how do you know where I live?”

“GPS in your pacemaker,” said the other one.

“Look, who are you? ”I asked.

“You can call me Mr Sopa,” said the first one, “and this here is Mr Pipa. We’re with the US Government.”

“And what are you doing here?” I asked.

“We’re here in Yerp to stamp out Foreign Intellectual Property Piracy,” said Mr Sopa.

“And you think I’m a foreign intellectual?” I asked (slightly proudly, I must admit).

“That’s the kind of thing we’re here to stop,” said Mr Pipa. “That joke’s already been used in a comment on Janie Jones’s blog.”

“I know,” I said. “It was my comment.”

“Nevertheless, it’s on a US website now,” said Mr Sopa, “so it’s under copyright in the US. You could be fined up to fifty thousand dollars.”

I was stunned. “I don’t have that kind of money,” I said.

“We don’t like hearing that,” said Mr Pipa.

“I didn’t like saying it,” I replied.

“And that’s only the beginning of your troubles,” said Mr Pipa. “You’ve stolen the three words ‘worth’, ‘doing’ and ‘badly’ from a Mr Gil Chesterton.”

“You can’t steal a word,” I said.

“Ever heard the expression “can I have a word”? Well, if someone can have a word then someone else can steal it.”

While I was trying to construct a smart retort built around the phrase “have a crap” he continued. “Worst of all,” he said, “you’ve stolen the name ‘Tinman’ from, well, the Tin Man.”

“He’s not actually a real person,” I pointed out.

“Yes,” said Mr Pipa, “but he’s an American not-a-real-person.”

I looked pleadingly at Mr Sopa. “Can you talk some sense into this guy?” I asked.

“Sorry,” said Mr Sopa, “he’s on a higher pay-grade. I have to answer to him.”

I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help it. “You mean you’re Pipa’s bum?” I said (and I know I shouldn’t show this -> photo either, but let’s face it, I’m in enough trouble already).

“That’s insulting a Federal Officer,” snapped Mr Pipa. “You’re under arrest. Sopa, read him his rights.”

Mr Sopa began to read from a book. “You have the right to remain silent -”

“Hang on,” I said, “did you write that?”

“Er, no,” said Mr Sopa.

“Then you’re breaching the copyright of whoever did,” I said. “You could be fined up to -”

“Yes, yes, we know,” snapped Mr Pipa.

“Keep reading me my rights,” I said calmly, “if you can afford it.”

Mr Pipa stared at me for a long time. “You really are a foreign intellectual,” he said (this is, remember, an alternate reality). “Come on, Sopa, we know when we’re beaten.”

The two of them turned and got into a long black clichéd limousine. I watched it drive away and kept watching until it was out of sight.

“Hasta la Vista, baby,” I said.

Because today is today, though, I want to write about alternate realities anyway.

In an alternate reality somewhere my heart is fine. I would not have gone through 18 months where my heart-rate would drop suddenly to zero causing me to drop suddenly to the ground, invariably hitting my head or face against radiators, corners of walls or any other hard surface available on the way down (though falling forward to the ground and having my face land on something soft would probably have involved dog-shit in some way, so on balance I came out of it pretty well).

Alternate Me does not have no feeling on the right side of my forehead and scar tissue on the left side that will not tan, though since I live in Ireland this is rarely a problem (though Alternate Me probably lives in Bali and is the colour of caramel).

One theory about my derealisation (which incidentally is really bad at the moment)  is that it started as a defence mechanism to protect my mind from the fear that must have been going on inside it during this time, while on the surface I was quite calm and even joking about it. If that was true then Alternate Me does not suffer from it, though we will give him depression since that started before any of the blackout episodes (in an alternate alternate reality there is a Me who doesn’t even suffer from that but we’re going to ignore this Me, since there is no way that I can get to him to punch him in the face).

To sum up, Alternate Me is as fit as a fiddle (why “fiddle”, by the way? As fit as a chair, or a lampshade, or the left-rear door of a Nissan Micra would make just as much sense), tanned and fully mentally alert. He is a smug , jammy git.

But is he a blogger? Or is he too busy running in-and-out through the X-Ray machines at airports just because he can? Would he have been able to think up a suitable blogname? Does he have blogger friends all over the world?

Does he have a Tinman tattoo on his arm? I think not.

My pacemaker is four years old today, and I’m happy with the life that it has given me.

I had no post yesterday nor the day before not because of time pressure or overwork, but because I couldn’t think of anything to write about. I’ve sat down here now and forced myself to write anyway, in the unlikely-to-be-fulfilled hope that what I produce, with absolutely no ideas in my head, will turn out to be brilliant.

I am effectively casting myself in the role of one hundred typewritered monkeys.

What far more likely is that what emerges will be the height of waffle, if “the height of” and “waffle” even belong in the same phrase. It may well be the lowth of waffle, and I apologise to Spellcheck for that word, I’m put it in deliberately to annoy it while its still trying to recover from the word “typewritered”.

Things are bad when you’re reduced to relieving your writer’s block by poking a spelling-aid with a stick.

I could write that Tingirl and Mrs Tin went to the stage show of Dirty Dancing on Thursday, but there you go, I’ve written it. I didn’t go so can’t say a lot, except that both of them arrived home with huge smiles on their faces, apparently it’s great fun.

I could write that I have spent the afternoon dividing copper coins into one, two and five-cent coins, part of the proceeds of a bag-pack that Tinson2 and his friends undertook, but that would probably be as tedious to read about as it was to do.

In the absence of daily WordPress prompts I could make up a typical one on their behalf (“today is January 21st, how do you feel about that?”) and then slag it.

Or I could just accept that I have temporarily lost my mojo, and will recover it again soon.

Once I find out what a mojo looks like.

And I mean that in the literal sense, she manages to create holes in the soles after a very short time. Perhaps she is a fakir, walking on hot coals. Perhaps she water-skis, without skis, behind a speed-boat. Perhaps she is secretly in Riverdance.

Young folk today, you just wouldn’t know what they’d be up to.

Anyway, she needed new shoes for school so yesterday she sent Mrs Tin to buy them. The advantage of this was that she didn’t have to go herself. The disadvantage of this was that her shoes were now being bought by her mother.

Now, there are certain rules pertaining to school shoes. They cannot have high-heels, or peep-toes. They must not have the Nike Swoosh anywhere on them. They are not allowed to be pink.

They must not be in any way attractive. The term “sensible shoes” was invented with school shoes in mind.

As a rule of thumb, if any one of the Sex and the City girls would wear them then they are not suitable.

So Mrs Tin bought these shoes:

She left them outside Tingirl’s door, waiting to see her reaction when she got home from school. She heard the front door open and heard Tingirl, after the briefest of pauses, head into her bedroom (it’s right beside the front door, we live in a bungalow). After a minute or so Tingirl’s door opened for a few seconds, then closed again.

Mrs Tin crept upstairs (yes, yes, bungalow, but there are three steps up from the sitting-room to the hallway and that part of the house is always referred to as “upstairs”). The shoes were still outside Tingirl’s door, but now looked like this:

They are going today to buy shoes together.

I realise that since I live in Ireland the rest of this sentence is not a real surprise, but last Thursday morning it rained.

And what rain it was. It fell downwards, it blew sideways, it may even have rained upwards for a while. It lasted for only five minutes or so, but they were the five minutes during which I walked from my bus stop across the river to my office.

I had an umbrella, but an umbrella is simply a hat with a handle, it protects your head but little else. My shoes, trousers and for some reason the hair on the back of my neck (I may have been slapped by an unintentionally flying fish as I crossed the bridge) were all soaked by the time I arrived at work.

I sat down at my computer. It was not a pleasant experience. My trousers were cold and damp, and I could feel my legs rapidly becoming the same.

I was in danger of drowning by osmosis.

Then I had this idea:

I typed standing up for an hour, by which time my trousers were dry and I could once again let them touch my delicate skin.

It’s the kind of thing you can only get away with if you work in a room with just one other person, a girl who has known you for over seven years now and is already well aware that you are nuts.

I’m really proud of myself, though. It surely is the ultimate example of thinking outside the box.

It is cold outside, the weather is if not frightful then certainly something that rhymes with it, but here indoors it is lovely and warm. On the radio in the kitchen a lively and interesting conversation is taking place among the guests on the always interesting Marian Finucane show.

In the sitting-room the press of a button on the TV remote would reveal not one but two Premier League soccer matches, one after the other. Saturday’s newspaper is only half-read, you still have Terry Pratchett’s latest book to finish and Game of Thrones to start. The couch is stretched out along the wall, waiting for you to stretch out along it and have your customary Sunday afternoon snooze (no, you’re not getting old, you’re just getting tired).

And where are you? You are sitting in front of an ancient computer that has less memory than a politician at a corruption tribunal, and because you can’t remember what its called you are typing the words “Davy Crockett’s hat“ into Google.

Blogging leads you to the strangest places.

*****************************************************

It was the hat of hats.

It was Ladies’ Day at Ascot, and this time young Lady Brigadier-Smythe (her grandad had played in the football match in No-Man’s Land on Christmas day 1914) was determined to win the Best Dressed Lady award.

Last year she had turned up in a flowing dress, immaculate gloves and shoes the beauty of which were matched only by the pain they caused to wear them, and her hat had let her down.

She had laboured under the misapprehension that a hat is to protect a lady from the worst of rain or sun, and so had come in a sensible wide brimmed affair, like a flying saucer but with a bow at the front.

But other ladies knew that hats were, on this one day at any rate, literally one’s crowning glory. One had worn a wire coat-hanger curled into the shape of a question mark. One had worn a hat made entirely from chicken-bones (and to Lady B-S’s delight had been attacked by a cat). One had worn what appeared to be a cat.

yep, this

The winner had worn a hat in the shape of Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid, bare bosom and all. She knew that the competition was judged by men.

Lady B-S stepped from her taxi and walked to the bar where she had arranged to meet her three lifelong (she was 23) friends. Their names were Tabitha, Portia and Constance, but what passed for wit in a girls’ private boarding school had given them the nicknames Catty, Vroom and Prunes.

Her own name was Fleur.

“Hello, Bloomers,” said Vroom. “Nice hat.” The other two nodded in agreement.

Catty's hat

Considering the efforts of these three this was high praise indeed. Vroom wore a hat in the shape of Noah’s Ark, with toy giraffes and elephants peering out of the little windows. Prunes had gone for Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, complete with vase. Catty had chosen Carmen Miranda’s famous fruit-hat but hers included not just the hat, but also the head of Carmen Miranda wearing it.

Fleur’s own hat was in a league of its own, though. She had, as I’ve said, wanted the hat of hats and suddenly she realised that was exactly what she should make. Her hat was every famous hat from film and literature all clipped together. There was Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker, Indiana Jones’s fedora, Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap. There was Daisy Buchanan’s summer hat, Harry Potter’s sorting hat and Robin Hood’s whatever-you-call-that-hat hat.

She looked totally ridiculous, which is why she was going to win.

The four wandered ostentatiously around the winner’s enclosure, as did all the other ladies, eager to be noticed. They were so busy trying to spot who might be the judges that they did not notice that the sky was growing darker and darker.

Suddenly the skies opened in sheets of stinging torrential rain.

The effect was catastrophic. Vroom’s Ark filled rapidly with water (with open windows it was always going to, I don’t now how we have any animals at all) and slid sideways off her head. The sunflowers’ bowl filled with water too, getting heavier as it did so and causing Prunes’ stiletto heels to sink into the grass like tent pegs, leaving her pinned to ground which true racegoers would now describe as “Good to Soft”.

Catty’s hat now looked like the guy in The Scream wearing a squid.

They were not the only ones struggling. Question-mark girl from last year, now with her coat-hanger bent into a map of the Solar System, was struck by lightning, undoing four hours of painstaking hair-straightening. A lady who’d come in a hat made from spaghetti now looked like the Medusa.

As Fleur stood transfixed in horror, a man ran up to her holding out a banknote.

“I’ll give you fifty pounds for one of your hats,” he said.

Wordlessly Fleur unclipped Popeye Doyle’s pork-pie hat and handed it to her. A woman approached with a similar offer.

Fleur had never considered a career in retail millinery (indeed, she had never considered a career at all) but over the next twenty minutes she cleared her stock. Captain Hook’s hat went for forty pounds. The Mad Hatter’s hat, despite having an actual price tag on it, fetched over twenty-nine pounds more than its advertised ten shillings and sixpence. The hat worn by Ilsa during the final scenes of Casablanca went for one  hundred pounds after Fleur told the buyer that it was the actual hat from the actual film, since she was a fast learner.

All this time the royal procession of carriages had been passing by, the occupants waving bravely at the dwindling crowd. Suddenly a man called from one of the carriages.

“I say,” he said, “could I buy a hat too?”

She squelched over to the railing and the man handed her his card. “One doesn’t of course carry money on occasions such as this,” he said, “but one is willing to pay sixty pounds, plus one would like to take you to dinner.”

She wrote her phone number on the “10/6″ label and handed it to him along with her last remaining hat, the kerchief worn by Mama as she settled her brain for a long winter’s nap on The Night Before Christmas. He put it on, winked at her, and his carriage resumed its journey along the racetack.

Fleur looked at his card. He was the Duke of some county so small it didn’t even have a cricket team and he was about four-hundred and thirty-third in line to the throne, but who cared, he was royalty.

She stood in the pouring rain with a huge smile on her face. She hadn’t won the Best Dressed Lady prize (a gorgeous girl with a stunning figure had won it, the rain had rendered her dress clinging and almost see-through, and as I’ve said the judges were men), her make-up now made her look like Alice Cooper and her hat now consisted solely of the wide brim, making her look like the Patron Saint of Really Big Halos, but she was six hundred pounds better off and had a date with a Duke.

It really had been the hat of hats.