This particular Friendly Ghost isn’t feeling too great right now. It’s got the worst sore throat known to man, woman or ghost and as a result seems to be addressing itself in the third person singular. A sorry state of affairs.
It bought two books to cheer itself up on the way back from the doctors: Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the novel on which Blade Runner was based; and a biography of Isaac Newton by James Gleick. The former because it always wanted to read it, and the latter because it is fascinated by maths and physics and the people who can do it, mainly because it can’t.
So the ill ghost is looking forward to this, if for no other reason than it’ll hopefully be an antidote to the Guardian. For some reason, reading Saturday’s Guardian seemed different from usual. Perhaps it’s the illness, but it just seemd to be a load of clever dickery, an excuse for twee middle English educated types to show off their long words and keen sense of irony rather than anything genuinely fresh or original. Radio 4′s been going off the boil recently too. And David Cameron is starting to appeal. Either the Friendly Ghost is growing up, down, sideways, or just fading away into the ether…
