I ought to get out more

First, I'd like to thank all those people who've literally inundated me with enquires about how I am after my recent experience of coma land. I won't name names, because you know who you are. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that my 316 so-called 'friends' on facebook are not real friends at all, no more than the sort of so-called 'girlfriend' who holds you hostage in your own bedroom for four days (including two days on the roof) and then cracks you on the head with a hammer. I've not heard from her either, by the way in case you're wondering.

Anyway today I went out for the first time for quite a few weeks. My hair's growing back a bit weird, so I wore a balaclava and my dad's panama hat so nobody would look at me. It was good practice for when I'm a hostage negotiator, which I've definitely decided to be, either that or a Samaritan, as I reckon that the advantage of being a Samaritan would be that if it all goes wrong you could just put the phone down and pretend nothing's happened.

It's funny you know, when you see something every day you don't notice it, but today it was like I was seeing everything for the first time. Like all the shops in St Ives that you know aren't going to last five minutes that never reopened after shutting down for the winter. My favourite one is the one in Fore Street in the house where John Knill, who was a famous bloke in St Ives a couple of hundred years ago used to live. If he'd been Spanish his name would have been Juan Knill. If he'd gone to my school everybody would probably have called him Fucky Knill. He built a big pointy mausoleum for himself and more or less invented Steeple Hill at the same time, but then died in London so his mausoleum's been empty for like two hundred years, and would probably make a good Affordable Home for somebody, instead of just being danced round every year by fifty virgins who get ten pee for doing it out of his will. Anyway his house got turned into a shop that at first used daringly to call itself tiny penis (sic) but then obviously got cold feet and changed its name to tiny p. It sold crappy t-shirts, with unfunny and faintly offensive slogans, to emmets. I say sold, actually you never saw anybody buying any of them but it encouraged the sort of emmets who've come to St Ives by accident, thinking they were going to Newquay, to hang around outside the shop blocking the street and pointing at the window and reading the stupid slogans out loud to each other and laughing in that self-justifying way people do who can't see what's wrong with Benny Hill, the comedy equivalent of UKIP voters. Anyway, tiny p finally put on its 'HAVE I HAD A WET DREAM OR JUST GONE INTO VOLUNTARY LIQUIDATION?' t-shirt, and shut its doors for the last time, to be replaced by what I can only describe as an Emporium of dark and complicated antiquities that were remarkable for their self-evident lack of desirability. Despite this, I really wanted them to succeed, because they were so obviously not in it to make any money, and yet went to the trouble and expense of installing CCTV which is still there now, its tiny black and white screen flickering high up in the corner of an empty shop like a post-modern parody of itself, monitoring the passers-by as they pass by without looking in the shop windows it was installed to watch over and protect. It's exactly the sort of CCTV monitor that one day unexpectedly captures the image of a ghost. Today though, all it caught was a lost-looking kid in a balaclava wearing a panama hat. We looked at each other for a good couple of minutes before I got bored and walked away. As I walked back down Fore Steet he was walking away as well.