in the post

hi there

well, how good and kind the postal system was partially towards me today. on the down side an item or twelve i fired off last Monday has yet to make it to the address indicated. hey ho, hopefully it is delayed due to the Easter holidays around the world. as it did not involve the SA Post Office and their hectic schedule of holidays and strikes i do have grounds to hope it lands.

the good turns out to be very good, in fact. good for me, and good for those of you looking for concrete, tangiable and very real evidence of just how sad, empty and shallow my life is.

here i am, with a bow to some strategy, waving off that which i got in the post today.

what is it? i think you might now. either you have been on this journey, odyssey if you like, of ambition and desire with me in spirit for the last ten or so days or perhaps you have simply scrolled down already to look at the pictures in order to glimpse at what nonsense i am bothering you with now.

but to clarify, yes. a gap in my life is there no more. a wish has been met - with unexpected generosity, i must add. i am now the exceptionally proud, very delighted owner / "winner" of one of them "i spotted Jimmy Hill" pencils off of the Viz. actually, as it happens, a bit more than that, and certainly a bit more than one.

yes, as that picture reveals (almost), i own 4 (four) Jimmy Hill pencils, 2 (two!) Viz pens and a lovely compliments slip to put in a frame and treasure.

i have no idea if this is standard for them or if they simply felt a great deal of pity and sorrow at the pathetic, sad letter i sent to them. i do know for a fact that i now presently have more Viz items than my mate Spiros, so in that sense i am better than him. but in another sense, my mate Spiros is currently living in a shed and throwing his soiled trousers over random hedges, so he is living the 8 Ace life and thus is ultimately much, much better than me.

not that the two of us are in contest, mind. far from it. we are fine and dandy bum chums and sort of egg each other on to greater heights of excellence rather than enjoy the plight and misery of the other.

but i do have more Jimmy Hill pencils than him. look!!!!

for those of you who are for some reason interested in exactly what i wrote to the Viz, and i am sorry but i cannot be bothered doing the italics thing every time with their name, here it is.

Dear Mr Viz

It was with sheer delight that I spotted Mr Jimmy Hill twice in edition 234 of your fine publication. He was in Nobby’s Piles on page 47, featured with a saucepan on his head for unspecified reasons, and then he cropped up again on page 50 in, as it were, Mrs Brady, in which he was seen leaving an optician wearing a new set of frames, square ones befitting the stature of Mr Hill in modern society.

On the basis of my victory in spotting him, I not only compose this letter of triumph, but I also enclose an SAE with a “LARGE” 2^nd class stamp affixed. I hereby claim my pencil as a trophy for doing this.

I respect the fact that Jimmy Hill spotting is the preserve of the socially inept and assorted basket cases. I boldly claim, however, to have raised the bar for this. Not only did I spend my Saturday night searching through your publication for sight of Mr Hill, but it has also taken me three days to pluck up the courage to write to you and tell you all about it. I am still unsure if I am brave enough to use a 1^st Class Stamp to send this letter to you or if I should go 2^nd Class to allow some time to pass between me sending it and you getting it in order to calm down a little bit.

Needless to say, owning a Jimmy Hill pencil is going to increase my sense of self-worth somewhat disproportionately from how you would presumably intend it to.

Many thanks

PS. I have a friend. He is called Spiros and he also likes your magazine, Mr Viz. But he is no good at spotting Jimmy Hill as he has no idea who he is.

whether the pathetic and troublingly true content of the above inspired their generosity or if they usually just bung a handful of things in an envelope i do not know.

anyway, i suspect you are wanting a close look at the pen detail, so here it is, in the best quality that my blueberry camera can deliver to the world.

the quality of the pens and the pencils is way better than the "el cheapo" image that the Viz like to portray themselves as masters of. i suspect they have been specially manufacturered somewhere unusual and exotic, to be honest - somewhere not usually associated with pencils or ink based instruments. perhaps Belgium, maybe Singapore, quite possibly Seaton Carew.

i trust that this blog post has been seen as being as much of a love-in for the kindness, generosity and apparent sympathy that the Viz has visited on me as it has been for a what a sad and frankly peculiar life and set of ambitions i have.



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!