EVADING PURSUIT Hold icicle in front of mouth while running and shout over your shoulder, "Ill lilies lift little." The frozen words will pepper your pursuer as ice-darts, and make slippery the paving-stones Duck into a canyon Affix a false beard while running, and suddenly turn to run towards your pursuer. They will think you are someone else Leap 200 feet into the air. Your pursuer is unlikely also to be able to do this Pedal much, much faster Monday I think Debbie likes me. Her friend, Alison, says she said she fancies me but I'm not sure if she's just winding me up. It's really hard to tell from her face whether she's having me on or not because of the boils. I think I may have flushed when she told me, but my own lumps should have disguised it. Boils cut both ways, fortunately. Tuesday Helping clear up the week's dead from the street again, and asked Mama about Debbie. She said I should forget girls and just concentrate on trying to avoid the discharge. She simply doesn't understand. In her day you merely paired up with the first member of the opposite sex you found without potentially fatal abscesses. Dental science has come on a good deal since those days, though, and now everyone below the age of twenty has some functional teeth. It's a different world. Wednesday Davey and I went to Bedlam for the matinee. Bo-ring. The usual suspects rolled around flinging handfuls of their own waste at each other for practically the full ninety minutes. You simply can't rely on eye-candy effects like this any more, not without decent motivation for the characters. Davey says he likes the bloke who sits in the corner rocking rhythmically backwards and forwards while he drools into his crotch, but I think he's like that in every performance - he's just playing himself. He's merely doing his turn regardless, I don't know how he keeps getting the work. Trouble is, there's a much larger gene pool nowadays. People are breeding outside their immediate family so the new talent just isn't coming in. Thursday Me and the lads did some milk. This woman Baz knows has some four-day-old stuff she cuts with the run-off into the Thames and sells from a stall down Camden. He said he'd had some from her before and she strains the lumps out and it's really good gear. We clubbed together and bought a pint. Baz and Davey both had really huge E Coli hits and were totally out of it - Baz says he could actually, like, see the lute solo this minstrel was cranking out, the notes were swirling around in the air, all iridescent and that. I must have had a bad slurp, cos I just got cramps and sicked up on the vicar on the way home. I managed to pass it off as a minor possession by demons, but then I had to spiel the vic about how I'd thrown it off by the purity of God's words. I got a bit carried away, and by the end Baz and Davey were cracking up behind the vic's back, but it seemed to impress him, and he made me promise to repeat it during service on Sunday. Davey reckons we should get Loz and Tedger and form a band and set it to music. Excellent! Our first gig already. Friday Just heard Debbie's going out with Baz. Bitch. I'm going to sea, signed up this morning. I'll be eaten by some totally gross Leviathan. Then she'll be sorry. Saturday Baz died of a plague during the night, so Debbie was stood up. Ha! Ha! Ha! Good job the naval recruiting officer was expecting me to be illiterate, so all I had to do was sign with an X, but I'd better stay away from the docks for the next couple of weeks. Went to see Baz's family to see if we could get one of his brothers to play in the band instead, but the house was in quarantine. Davey shouted that Baz was waving to him from a window, but it was just Boz jiggling the body around from inside for a joke. We all laughed, then threw stones back and forth until the neighbours came to board everything up. Boz wants us to go round when they get the all-clear, cos he wants to audition for lead reed-blower. We said okay. Round to Tedger's house to practise for tomorrow, and we lost track of time, so had to run into town and missed the start of the hangings. Still, we're pretty pleased with how it's coming together, especially the brilliant way I've rhymed "demonic" with "bubonic." Sunday Bah! Bah! Bah! The gig didn't come off. The vic wouldn't even let us set up the instruments. I told him we'd be popularising church attendance, but he said everyone attended church anyway, and music was the Devil's work. We've been banned from playing, and he told our parents, and it looks like we're going to be tortured in Hell for all eternity. Bah! On the plus side, Alison said that Debbie likes me again because she thinks I'm cool and rebellious. We've got a definite date for Wednesday at a new Goth club where you see them burn the witches. Yes! EAT ART Figurine / Tangerine Brocade / Lemonade Origami / Pepperami Aquatint Etchings / Some Pork Scratchings Triptych / Sandwich advocate feature   archives   corner shop © the weekly science combine