Valley of the Trolley Dollies

Yesterday, I watched a living creature fight for it’s life, struggle and fail; and, on a suddenly bright and warm spring day, its demise brought a smile to my lips.

No, I’m not some sort of psycho-in-the-making. I don’t keep wax effigies of long deceased relatives in the attic, I don’t have a cupboard full of trophies - hair, teeth, that sort of thing - and I don’t even trawl the internet searching for victims; these days, it’s an achievement if I can clear out my emails twice a week, let alone groom the impressionable.

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…and hold the doors closed.

Phil, who has spent the past six months chez Trollet Dollet in the role of “The Lodger,” awaiting the finalisation of the purchase of his fab new pad in swinging central London Town, has finally moved into the vast(ish) and empty space.

So, what’s the first thing a self-respecting home-owning homo purchases? Tables? Chairs? A wardrobe.

Well, we can always eat out, at the very tasty Gourmet Burger Kitchen(we can recommend the chicken, cranberry and camembert burger with chips and smoked chili mayo; almost beyond delish), and why worry about sitting, when standing is so good for developing the calves (if not so good for keeping the varicose veins at bay).

But when your travels have provided you with an enormous selection of choice garments from the best sale racks and factory outlets that the North American Continent has to offer, there’s only one piece d’immeublethat is truly vital. So where does one purchase ones closet? Armani Casa? A small, family owned woodturners in the West Country? An importer of Indonesian Cherry Wood work in deepest darkest Sussex?

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In his current Oprah-fuelled bestseller “A New Earth” (subtitled ‘Awakening to your Life’s Purpose’) Eckhart Tolle (who, apparently, lives in a little shack by the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere - a sort of Tolle Booth. Oh, my aching sides) seems, so far, to be spending an awful lot of time discussing the Ego’s insatiable hunger.

“The thought forms of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ of ‘more than,’ of ‘I want,’ ‘I need,’ ‘I must have,’ and of ‘not enough’ pertain not to content byt to the structure of the ego. The content is interchangeable. As long as you don’t recognise these thought forms within yourself, as long as they remain unconscious, you will believe in what they say; you will be condemned to acting out those unconscious thoughts, condemned to seeking and not finding - because when those thought forms operate, no posession, place, person, or condition will ever satisfy you. No content will satisfy you as long as the egoic structure remains in place. No matter what you have or get, you wont be happy. You will always be looking for something else that promises greater fulfillment, that promises to make your incomplete sense of self complete and fill that sense of lack you feel within.’

Nice, Eckhart. Lovely.

See those shoes? Up thar. The baby blue soft-as-the-down-on-a-teenagers-upper-lip suede ‘plimsols’? See ‘em? I want them. I desire them. I neeeeed them. So you know what? You can take your ego, Mr high-and-mighty Ekhart Toll and shove it up his chakra.

Kidding, it’s not a bad book, if a little new-agey (in the way that the pope is, say, a little Catholic). But I want those shoes soooooo bad.

And backstage passes to Duran Duran on my 40th birthday.

Does that make me a bad person? Or just one with slightly retarded taste? Now how do I switch off ‘comments?’