Give it up, give it up...

It's that time of year again: Lent! And it doesn't have to have anything to do with religion whatsoever, other than the timing. It's a personal challenge, a test of your willpower & strength of character - no matter how trivial the thing that's being forsaken. If it's important to you, it will be hard to give up.

So that's why I've come to the conclusion that my ritual of giving up pretty much all of the lovely bad food (cake, chocolate, crisps) is a bit wasted. It's FAR too easy!! That doesn't mean I'm not going to give up some of the naughty food again this year; it's such a nice feeling to know you've succeeded at something, I'm not letting that pass in a hurry.

But this year I've decided that I need to do something different, something really challenging. Which is why I'm having a break from Twitter. This may sound stupid to some of you, but it really is a useful tool if you find out how to use it properly - and checking it & interacting on it does become addictive. It's a whole different community. Contrary to popular belief, it's not all about self-interested celebrities telling the world they've just been to the toilet; anyone can use it, and for any means. I mainly use it as a soapbox.

Anyway. This isn't about me trying to convince cavemen & women who read the Daily Mail that Twitter isn't Satan's invention... I was attempting to show why it's so addictive, but I've probably just made myself sound odder! Trust me, it is addictive and that's why the part of me that wants to compete with myself thinks it's a really good idea to give it up for Lent. I'm too competitive for my own good sometimes...

So. What exactly does Lent entail for me?

• No cakes, crisps, sweets or chocolate bars.
• I'm still allowed biscuits, as I'd like to keep baking.
• No Twitter. Only exceptions are tweeting links to any blogposts, and checking for contact on Sundays.

That sounds about right.

The challenge is set.

True faith?

I came across this bizarre comment on an article about the possibility that the moon could have an effect on our weather when it gets really close to us on March 19th:

"We don't know much about how the universe acts on our planet climate but we all seem to accept the theory of evolution that MILLIONS of MILLIONS of MILLIONS years ago, man originated from the ape. yeah right,... hand me the banana please. Just shows how gullible we can be when we are willing to have blind faith on science about evolution and trust me, its blind faith. Here we don't even know much about how the moon will effect us but years ago, the mayans knew about dec 21 2010 and how the planets will align. No hubble telescope, no space shuttle, and yet they knew it. One must ask, how? oh i forgot, its millions of years ago.... haha I really hope those who swallow in blind faith the theory of evolution are right."

Seriously, how odd is that?! I'm not going to waste my time going through it and picking out every single thing that's wrong with it (I could be here until Easter, or even Christmas, at that rate), I just wanted to share it because it is utterly hilarious!

All I have to do is dream...

Now I normally leave the bizarre dreams to a certain Sarah Noble, but after last night I think I could be inducted into the 'Weird Dreams Club' officially.

Basically. It could be set now or at some time in the future, but we know there is alien life - and plenty of it. (When I say 'we' I mean humans, in case you didn't get that.) We have a space station, not dissimilar in looks to the ISS, devoted to intercepting any communications from these aliens - and for some reason I found myself in the dissection wing... All of a sudden the alien messengers (which looked like skeletons mostly, but had some flesh & blood around the neck and torso) seemed to start bleeding, then they sat up and started melting. People seemed quite scared at this point (no idea why!) and started rushing about the place.

Still with me?

Next we cut to planet Earth. By the looks of what's on the TV we've found out what's happened on the space station, and it seems to suggest that the entire planet is at risk of invasion. So naturally the bigwigs start making evacuation plans and everyone else panics. Groups of people start leaving, and then it comes to my turn. This is probably the weirdest part of the dream: Stephen Fry was there, and he'd acquired the power of making people teleport just by saying a particular phrase of Italian. As soon as I saw that I decided I didn't want anything to do with it, so I stayed on Earth...

Now I'm walking around, in somewhere that looks a bit like West Somerset Community College. There's a man there who's been branded some sort of outcast (because he never used to join in with anything) and is just sitting on the steps feeling lonely. Then all of a sudden a group of his old schoolmates & family turn up as they want to include him in their Stephen Fry teleport group, but want to get to know him better first. So he decides that he should teach them his own method of 400m hurdles, and we (I'm now part of the group too, for some reason) start running & hurdling down Long Street in Williton, going past the old Vets... When he taught us his special method it involved running sideways, spinning, and running sideways again somewhere in it - but I was the only one who did it properly.

In the end I know for definite that I was left on Earth. There hadn't been an invasion so anyone who was left just had the planet to themselves.

THE END