Understand Sherlock? You must be dreaming

It may have been a whole week ago, but my New Year got off to a baffling start when I watched “Sherlock” on TV, and started doubting my own existence.

I hope you had a delightful Christmas, and that 2016 is off to a great start for you. Congratulations if you’ve already successfully finished all that cheese.

Having viewed the BBC’s most-watched festive edition of “Sherlock” on the very first day of the year, I now have a rather odd problem - I’m not sure if I actually did watch it, or in fact just dreamed I did. Maybe I’m still dreaming that I’m thinking about whether I dreamt it or not.

If I’m making no sense at all (probably a regular problem for you), then perhaps I’d better rewind a little an attempt to explain why I’m so confused. This may not go well, as I’ve pretty much no idea myself.

The modern re-imagining of the Conan Doyle detective, Sherlock Holmes, sees a very current version of the sleuth deducing all manner of marvels from clues invisible to the regular man-on-the-street.

The New Year special saw the pipe-sucking genius attempting to solve the mystery of how a murderous bride carried out her rampage whilst apparently dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. All fine and weirdly dandy, except for the fact that Holmes & Watson were wandering around a 1890s landscape.

It later transpired that all of this was, in fact, a drug-induced dream, in which our tetchy hero was attempting to solve a vintage case in his ‘Mind Palace’.

I had an experience like that once myself, when I overdosed on Lemsip and imagined I was dating both Sheena Easton and Kylie Minogue at the same time. Coming down from a cold-cure high can be a terribly depressing experience.

Anyway, this plot-twist was an interesting one, but shortly after that point my brain waved it’s white flag, as the Victorian Sherlock started describing to Watson what the future looked like. Following that, I think there was some stuff which involved a dream within the dream, but by that time my grey matter was gently rocking itself back and forth in a corner of my skull whilst humming a pretty tune repeatedly.

Having discovered, by chance, that some people in my local cafe were relieved to hear that they weren’t alone in their Sherlock struggles, it transpired that some Twitter-chums were also suffering from Holmes-related bemusement.

On the plus side, being unsure if everything is real or not does mean that I may actually be dreaming all this, and I’m actually a Lottery-winning playboy enjoying a quick snooze to recover from a particularly heavy champagne and Aston Martin-purchasing session in my mansion.

The alternative is that I have yet again been out-foxed by a TV show before the year was even 24 hours old, and I have a Scrumpy problem and a Mitsubishi with creaky suspension.

Pass the Lemsip.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 8th of January 2016. You can view it on the paper's website here

Two weeks off from writing. It was an interesting experience, and whilst I was tempted to blog, I decided against it and ate chocolate instead. Mind rested. Body several pounds heavier. The circle of (my) life.

My neglect of this blogzone rapidly reversed the giddy experience of having the second best month ever for views in November, as December saw the stats slump to a low not equalled since Feb '14, with a number only a little more than a quarter of the preceding month. Ah, well. What was I expecting eh? I neglected you.

With studying to contend with, some quality doing-sod-all time was a blessing for recharging the mental batteries, and I actually made it until almost 10am on my first day back in the office before getting irrationally angry about something.

Assuming the NWEM don't finally decide I'm using up valuable column inches with my inane ramblings and cut me loose, 2016 will see my 200th column for them appear in early April. For the maths nerds amongst you, that will mean I have rearranged 100,000 words into a vaguely structured format for the purpose of entertainment. Cripes.

Maybe I should do that book after all...

(2016 continuation of the CD A-Z sees me at the Eagles, and the really rather splendid Long Road Out Of Eden from 2007.)

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog