The ghosts of my life blow wilder than before

It’s Tuesday so that means it is ‘Japan band members quiz’ time!

Answers via the blog comment feature. Prizes may be theoretical.

If the masked man below had been in the cult 80s band Japan, then a) which member of the band would he have been? and b) how many fingers is he holding up on his right hand?

Now follows a clever indeed seamless linkage to one of yesterday’s blog themes (yes, I am a highly trained blogger).

Uncannily I genuinely actually truthfully saw Gary Numan today in Essex when walking the dogs. Gary has not aged well as he has no hair now and only one eye but he is significantly taller than he used to be at over 6 foot tall! Gary’s blank toothless grin greeted my calls of ‘Gary, Gary, show us yer car!’ as if he could no longer recognise his own glorious name. Which is Gary. I went right up to him and got into an argument with his carer who insisted he was not Gary, that he had never been known for his distinctive voice and androgynous “android” persona, and that he routinely felt unsafe in cars.

I know who I saw. Gary, your memory and looks may have gone, but like Take That, I will Never Forget,

I nearly got up at a proper time today but did in fact leave the house at 8.30am in order to get a long over due blood test about my big fat sausage-shaped finger. Pointless really as I have of course since established that it is caused by displaced belly fat. I was ticket number 16 so I used my time waiting just people watching. Try it, it’s addictive. In about 45 minutes I saw about 5 people, one of them three times. There must have been another 30 people in the waiting room but brains don’t grow on trees, oh no.

One of those I observed was local celebrity Danny Dyer (pictured below at The Last Post pub afterwards). He may be a ‘geezer’ but he was a lovely man.

This blogging is hard as I realise that so much happens on a day but you can only distil a small amount into your visual landscape for your millions of readers or you lose the audience.

I will not therefore be able to share with you my outplacement webinar experience with my big red tick; meeting Gizmo the non-stop jiggy jiggy puppy; or the cuppasoup vegetable plughole enquiry.

I can however tell you about a big issue that came to my attention today.

In brief, I was watching an old Stewart Lee comedy sketch the other night whilst still feverish (All things bright and beautiful) which got me thinking about the first three lines of Zoom, a classic classic song that I love.

Work with me here.

Zoom, just one look and then my heart went boom
Suddenly and we were on the moon
Flyin’ high in a neon sky, oh oh

For a love song, it is a devastating opener. Larry, or Fat to his friends, is clearly potentially at risk of having heart problems, but he simply had to glance once at his sweet and his pumping love organ burst out of his chest cavity with more attitude than Alien.

[N.B Pumping Love Organ is described here in the traditional John Donne sonnet interpretation, not the more recent ‘ooh, a wobbly willy’ childish way]

Anyway, is he married or co-habiting as I reckon they are after his life insurance and knew what they were doing,

Whatever, how can the song begin with violent death (and I never knew?)?

Immediately though, it is like Fat has gone straight to some sort of alternative funk / R&B Heaven – or “the moon”. Not alone, but with his loved one too who has either died of shock, or being flattened, or has been punished for killing him.

But wait. Now they are flying? I mean “flyin'” in a neon sky too. So may issues – gravity / lack of; are either of them to qualified to fly particularly as Fat at least is dead?; the neon suggests Vegas or Times Square or what used to be Londis just down the road here in Loughton – well surely we were only just on the moon?; and what with the flyin’ being high. If Fat survived the heart explosion then surely flying at altitude would be very ill-advised medically? His partner is either definitely trying to kill him or they are a skilled heart specialist.

Enough I know. Just go and look at the rest of the lyrics. FFS line 4 sees someone try to shoot Fat who manages to get to a bell tower to sound an alarm – it is like Jason Bourne or Biggles.

My point here? I can’t remember now, but let’s say that the point I was trying to make was ‘Look behind the obvious – see the cry for help’. Oh yes. Deep.

STOP PRESS: Just realised I have done something clever (again) – Ghosts by Japan / Fat Larry dead – you see, it is like a Ronnie Corbett shaggy dog story. Dull, endless, but at the end the start links to the end to make up for it.