The Museum of Text Messages

I've been keeping hold of some text messages on my phone but they're taking up too much room and must be purged. So I thought the best place for them to live on is here.


Woolly pigs! Primroses & green loveliness! Big contrast with last night..
The better-half had spent long winter months in London and is nourished by spring in the countryside.

I'm here by mistake!
Bongo Tom said he wasn't going to Bonkerfest on Camberwell Green but somehow manages to turn up there.

Am lying here with gorgeous joseph Kyrle sparks on my chest! All v happy! Joe has big hands, big feet & other bit bits. He's a cracking 9lbs 4oz!
Took me a couple of reads to work out this was Helen announcing the birth of her son.

Just found something in Natural History Museum that is about 18" long, reddish-brown, head looks just like it's tail and shaped like a frankfurter...
I've realised that none of my friends have gone metric yet. Bongo Tom again, this time he's either getting all crypto-zoological or he's going through the bins and found someone's hotdog.

The smell was my hamster, it smells nice now
A text sent to me by mistake as I have never been driven from someones home by the stench of rodent. The way I read this is as reassurance from one teenager to another (who else can be bothered with hamsters?): They were planning an afternoon of cider and mutual fiddling but were driven out of their lust-nest by a vile odour. This message also says "the smell wasn't me! Please come back! I has best pants on!"

The Doors of Ikea

The new Ikea adverts are doing my head in a bit and not in an “I must buy furniture now” way. There’s this poor girl I’ve seen on tube posters: she’s sat on her Ikea chaise-langue starring, in abject, lysergic, terror, at a small toy crocodile that is glaring at her from the edge of her Ikea carpet.








Where are the girl’s friends here? Why isn’t her best mate holding her hand and soothing her with words like “it’s ok, you’re just tripping, it’s not a real crocodile and it’s not going to get you and we’re all friends here and we love you, you’re ok”. Meanwhile her boyfriend should be bashing the cuddly reptile over the head proclaiming “See me! I defeat croc! Ha-HARR! I is mighty!”



But no; boyfriend, as I saw on the false-cover of today’s Metro, is in his bedroom burning out one retina at a time while staring at his Ikea globe lamp shadethrough his telescope. He is cackling “I stare at suns with telly-scope and I no go blind. It night time now no sun.”







The friend who should be comforting her is doing herself less physical harm: as seen in the television advert she’s wandering her own living room with a magnifying glass “oo-ing” and “ah-ing” at all the lovely Ikea things in her house until she lights on a very shiny lamp.



It’s so shiny that within it she can see whole worlds and new worlds and worlds within worlds until, at the heart of this multi-verse she sees an eye, blurred and concave, staring back at her. The eye does not flinch. She never sees it blink.



She is found by her mother three days later still staring into the lamp. She speaks, after a fashion, but she never uses a recognisable word ever again.