Dream Strides

Every night millions of people experience anxiety dreams in which they find themselves at work, at school or in some other public place without their trousers. This is a deeply humiliating and damaging experience, but thankfully it is one that can be avoided.

Introducing

The very best in somnolent trouser solutions

We are a team of fast response tailors who have set up an emergency trouser business in dreamland, just off Junction 5 of the M6. Wherever your embarrassing dream takes you, however excruciating your predicament, we can deliver a pair of emergency trousers to you in the rapid blink of an eye. Lucid dreamers will even be able to choose from a range of exciting styles and ethereal fabrics, all expertly fashioned from dreamdust, or something, and charged to your credit or debit card when you wake up.

Not convinced? Hey! Wake up! I said, not convinced? Well, listen to what one satisfied Kevin had to say.

Hi, my name's Kevin. The other night I dreamt I was at a meeting, addressing a group of very important potential clients from a major South-East Asian multinational - which is weird, because I'm a welder. Anyway, just as I was about to stand up to speak I noticed that I wasn't wearing any trousers. Crikey, not again, I thought! It's like our Sandra's wedding reception all over again.

Luckily I remembered the number for Dream Strides and quick as a flash they rushed over a pair of voluminous pink pinstripe pantaloons that turned about to be quite a talking point. Well, I went down a storm and, needless to say, we won the contract. Thanks Dream Strides! Incidentally, I noticed that my opposite number from South Korea was wearing a pair of glow-in-the-dark jodhpurs with red piping and a glittery motif on the hip - another triumph for Dream Strides?

Anyway, I must crack on - this axle mounting won't weld itself.

So don't get caught out. Sidestep the embarrassment of night-time trouser deprivation with Dream Strides

The very best in spontaneous imaginary tailoring

 

Mindlessness: An Introduction

Hi There

My name is Dick Smidgin, motivational keynote speaker, and I want to talk to you today about my take on mindfulness. 'What is mindfulness?' people say to me. Or even: 'Where is mindfulness?' Sometimes people ask: 'When is mindfulness?' But those people are just being difficult.

Now, I know that some folk say that mindfulness is simply a load of old cock, devised to pander to the paranoid egos of a bunch of pathetic snowflakes and provide a lucrative income stream for silver-tongued bullshit merchants like me. And this, of course, is quite true - hey, I've just bought a house! But I'm sensitive to the validity of the observation and this is why I have developed my own form of mindfulness, which I call mindlessness.

What is Mindlessness?

Mindlessness is similar to mindfulness in many ways, especially the spelling, but it's cheaper and there is less paperwork. Some commentators describe mindfulness as 'noticing the world around them'. This is clearly a terrifying prospect, which is why one of the key principles of mindlessness is to rigidly define areas of our lives that it is perfectly ok to ignore.

Obviously, this requires concentration. It's very easy, for example, to ignore the sound of an animal in distress or the appearance of a particularly ugly child, but there are other stimuli that we need to train ourselves to ignore - the smell of an old lady, perhaps, or the sensation of being on fire.

Mindfulness is all about being 'in the moment'. Mindlessness, on the other hand, teaches us how to be a week last Tuesday. The great advantage of this is that a week last Tuesday is done and dusted - there's nothing that can be done about it now, so you may as well forget it. And remember, a week next Tuesday will soon be what a week last Tuesday was two weeks ago. So yeah... that probably means something as well.

Becoming Mindless

So how does one go about becoming mindless? Well, there's hard drugs and alcohol but not everyone has the advantage of having a limitless income and a titanium liver. Nevertheless, there are two basic things that can help you.

Breathing

Mastering your breathing is one of the main mindlessness techniques. Breathing is an incredibly wasteful and time-consuming activity and if we can learn to do less of it we can save a great deal of time.

But be warned, if you stop breathing altogether there will be a number of unpleasant side effects, including giddiness, nausea and death. Instead, try building up to it in gradual stages by holding your breath for longer and longer each time. One good technique is to alternate breathing in and breathing out on successive days. So, for instance, do all your breathing in on a Monday and wait until Tuesday to breathe out again.

Awareness

Awareness, in mindlessness terms, is a double-edged sword. It's great to be 'aware' of some things - for example chips, television, shoes and so on. Sometimes being 'aware' means that we can avoid trouble - so, if you are 'aware' of a ten-foot hole in front of you, it can save you the trouble of being made brutally and abruptly 'aware' of your broken legs and an urgent need for medical assistance.

However, there are some things that we would prefer to remain unaware of - things like chickens, whiney little shits and Marmite. Unfortunately, the state of awareness comes with two problems. Firstly, it's automatic - it happens whether we want it to or not. And secondly, even when we're not aware of something, it doesn't mean the bleeding thing isn't there.

So, you think you're ready to start your journey towards mindlessness? It isn't easy, but it's not like you've got anything more interesting to do. Anyhow, here are some exercises that may help you on your way.

Dick Smidgin has a Level 2 Diploma in Mindlessness, Vapidity and General Disengagement and is available for corporate events, group sessions and one-to-one consultations as long as the money's right.

Ordinary People

Patrick Kraft is a cosplayer with a difference: rather than recreating the costumes of fantastic characters from comic books, movies and TV shows, Patrick chooses to dress up as a thirty-three-year-old data entry clerk from Braintree.

"I tried dressing up as a wizard once," Patrick admits with obvious embarrassment. "It wasn't for me. It just seemed so phoney, so pointless. Cosplaying as a real person is much more exciting - I feel like I'm really walking in this guy's shoes, living his boring life, eating his shitty breakfast. Lovely."

It seems strange to us that someone would actually want to experience that level of everyday tedium, but when you consider that Patrick is by profession a stunt pilot, who risks his life every day, it starts to make sense. And he's not alone: there are plenty of others who feel the same way, including Formula 2 racing driver Colleen Vee, who relaxes by adopting the persona of a divorced, middle-aged cleaner from Huddersfield. Colleen is a regular at many of the specialised cosplayer conventions that take place around the country. She recently attended a two-day event at a plush hotel in Manchester, where she spent most of the weekend scrubbing out the toilets.

"It was great," she told us, still smiling joyfully and smelling of bleach. "My day-to-day life is full of fast cars, glamour and excitement, so the opportunity to spend a few precious days up to my elbows in shit was not one to be missed."

It's a sentiment echoed by many - such as Super Explodoman, for example. By day he is a regular superhero: righting wrongs, leaping tall buildings and doing all that superhero shit that you people seem to like; by night he revels in anonymity by becoming 'Gavin', a mild-mannered car park attendant with a limp, an official-looking hat and an unfortunate habit of reducing you to ash with his laser eyesight if you make the mistake of parking in a reserved bay. Hey, each to his own.

Four Holes

Holes are great, probably. Here are four you might be quite interested in. Sorry, should have put a bit more work into this introductory paragraph.

An Unexpected Hole

Builders renovating a property in Gloucestershire discovered a previously unknown doorway that had been bricked up for nearly four centuries. Oddly, although the doorway dated back to 1652, the building where it was found was an eighteenth century farmhouse.

"The building, the wall, even the doorframe - these were all definitely eighteenth century but the hole in the middle was much, much older," explained site foreman Duncan Grout. "It smelled really fusty, so it had to be."

Ellie Hinge, an expert in holes from Durham University, was called in to evaluate the extraordinary find, primarily by measuring it with a special ruler. At the time of writing, she has still not committed to an explanation.

"Some people claim that this must be some sort of time portal," she laughed scornfully, before getting a grip and turning all serious. "And of course, this could be a possibility. However, I think that it's far more likely that this hole comes from a much earlier building and was reused here. Builders are always doing that, the crafty gits. The bloke who did my kitchen extension used a cavity taken from a derelict bingo hall down the road, and I strongly suspect that the hole for the boiler flue was nicked from the town hall."

Despite refusing to the drawn on the doorway's origins, Mrs Hinge promised an announcement soon. "I've been taking scrapings from the masonry surrounding the hole," she said in her most recent statement. "Tonight I'm going to boil them up and take a look at them through a microscope. I don't get out much."

A Prototype Hole

It may surprise you to know that the first ring-shaped doughnut wasn't developed until as late at 1932. Industrial dough-making techniques were in their infancy at the time and the brittleness of the raw materials meant that the original prototype was around twelve feet in diameter - much too large to get into the paper bag.

Successive refinements were able to bring this down to roughly the size of a car tyre - although these doughnuts also had the same taste and texture as a tyre, so they didn't really catch on. It wasn't until 1948 that doughnuticians managed to perfect a product that was small enough to hold in one hand, and which your teeth didn't bounce off when you tried to eat it.

Meanwhile, although the first prototype had crumbled to dust many years earlier, the hole in the middle survived, fetching a cool $42,000 when it was auctioned in New York in 1995.

A Revolutionary Hole

The phonograph record is one of the most enduring inventions of our age, remaining popular with people who want their music in a physical format rather than a stream of ones and zeroes - even if they don't actually have a record player and never take the thing out of its sleeve. It is, they say, more permanent than a download, which is ironic since early records were certainly not.

The problem arose because the first commercially available records did not have holes in the middle: they simply rested on the turntable, trusting to luck and friction to keep them in place. They rarely did - stay in place, that is. Those early discs revolved at 78rpm, which meant that they spun off the turntables at some speed; and they were made of shellac, which meant that they shattered into pieces when they landed. And when we say 'landed' we mean bounced off the dog, shattered your favourite china or got lodged in your face. This was why the recommended attire for listening to a gramophone record was sturdy goggles, a crash helmet and, for the serious music-lover, a cricket bat.

That all changed in 1961 when legendary blues singer Fats Porker released Get Off My Damn Porch, the first LP to feature a hole in the middle. Within six months all records had them, and record-player-related injuries were significantly reduced.

A Fraudulent Hole

Not many people are paid a fat load of somebody else's cash to sit around all day, eating junk food, knocking back vodka and watching crap on TV. Professor Godfrey Manners certainly wasn't, and yet this was exactly how 'Spanners' Manners chose to spend his time after being given an eye-wateringly massive grant by Oxford University to further the frontiers of cosmology and unlock the deepest secrets of space and time.

He would have gotten away with it too, had it not been for those pesky university bosses who, after five years of not hearing a peep out of him, decided to pay him an unscheduled visit to find out why he had never published anything. He had nothing to show them, obviously; no papers, no research, no theories - not even a complex-looking but ultimately meaningless formula chalked up on a board. But what he did have was the guile and low cunning of an expert fraudster. Rat-arsed he may have been, but he was quick-thinking enough to lead them over to the window, point up at a singularly uninteresting patch of the evening sky and tell them that he had discovered a black hole.

They, of course, said that they couldn't see anything. He, of course, said that of course they couldn't, it was a black hole.

Many years later, proper scientists who didn't spend days on end smashed out of their skulls on hard liquor happened to discover an actual black hole exactly where Manners had been pointing. No doubt the Prof would have been delighted by the discovery, had he not expired in a Vietnamese crack house several years earlier.