"Dada fell like a raindrop from heaven. The Neo-Dadaists have learnt to imitate the fall, but not the raindrop"

	Tim Carver, one of our regular contributors, has kindly allowed us to re-print excerpts from his diary, by dint of not catching me when I stole it from his bag and photocopied it.
Third person background - NEW!	Tim met Hermione outside a news agents in Digbeth, Birmingham. He was looking at an advertisment for a flat, when Hermione took it out of its holder and slipped it into her pocket. Tim surprised himself by complaining to Hermione. He didn't usually do that kind of thing, being a meek kind of soul, and particularly not to women. Hermione didn't hit him, which was a good start. Instead she asked him what he'd been writing in his small red and black notebook. "Is it a story?" she asked. "I love stories." Tim was going to say that he'd been writing down the phone number on the bit of card, but decided he couldn't be bothered. See? He was meek after all. And especially with women. So he told Hermione that he was writing a story. Which was sort of true. In the same sense that the moon sort of orbits the sun. And he wasn't really lying, because the book did contain notes that one day might become a story. So it was really more in the sense that a tadpole might one day become a butterfly. Hermione naturally wanted to know what the story was about. She was like that - inquisitive, and full of energy. Tim would later say that he liked her 'vivaciousness'. He'd never say it to her face Ôthough, because even if he knew what he meant by it, Hermione would probably misinterpret it as making her sound like a middle-aged divorcee with her own teeth and hair. Tim knew the adjective was doubly-apt, because you could also take out the 'va' syllable. That's what Tim's like. Silly with his words. "It's about a young boy with a thin skin in a big world," he said, trying to get as many adjectives in there as possible. Tim had once been told that you should only write about what you know about. Which is why he always used plenty - some would say more than plenty - of adjectives. Tim knew loads of adjectives and felt really good using them. He wasn't too keen on adverbs - they smacked too much of action, and Tim didn't like putting himself into the world too much at the best of times. "Sounds long," said Hermione. She squinted at him. Tim didn't know how to act when squinted at. He thought he might have a wasp on his head, but didn't say so. That would be a bit weird. "I've not written very much of it," he said. "But it did take a long time?" she asked. Tim thought about this for a bit.
Bus Guilt	The bus man said that he drove the bus in that curious staccato style as a tribute to the late Jimmy Hendricks. "I've got a lot of guilt about Jimmy," he said, as I stood near the front of the bus. Obviously I made sure I was not too near the front of the bus. The possibility of hearing an interesting pop-culture anecdote should always be balanced against the stern rejoinder to "stay off the platform until the bus has stopped moving." In yellow, on black. Jimmy had died three years before, when he fell into a ricer and was sucked off by powerful threshing blades. The bus man had never quite got over it, and still blamed himself for the unfortunate (and pungent) incident. The rest of the anecdote began to bore me, with its usual talk of "end of the world", "free money" and "feathered whores". Taking my leave of the driver, I alighted from the bus and, miraculously, managed to make it to the pavement before it hit me. Everything was yellow. The world looked like it had been redesigned by a kitchenware manufacturer as part of a matching set. A yellow squirrel ran across yellow grass and climbed a yellow tree in a special yellow movement. I thought about the Eskimos, who are reputed to have over 200 words for "snow". Their subtlety and range of cold, white appreciation still doesn't stop them from being trotted out as a comment at the drop of a pants. 'This is all my fault,' I thought, mentally kicking myself for being such a smart-aleck. It either works or it doesn't. There is no bus station at the end of my road. This is a lie. None of it.
Cats	The house is surrounded. Surrounded by cats. I pull back the curtain and a feline face stares back at me. My new street is filled with cats, and when I opened my front door at 2am (to get some air, nothing more), I found the house surrounded. Surrounded by cats. A group of three of the little f*c*e*s were sitting practically on my porch. Now, I consider myself to be a friend of feline life, but even at the best of times I don't like being stared at. So I shut the door. You must understand, I had no other choice. Those damn eyes had forced it on me. Swift and immediate action was the only way out of the situation. It was bad. Real bad. I was in a bit of a funk, but couldn't stand the idea of all those - well, animals - being out there. Unsupervised. So I pulled back the net curtain in the bay window. A single cat had taken up position before the door. Its head slowly turned to look at me. And it stared. With its eyes. Those eyes looked deep into my soul. And I didn't like it. Not one bit.
Cliff	A hairline crack fracture skims across the surface of Hermione's windscreen as she hand-brake turns into the carpark, sending fishing rods flying. My head bumps viscously, in slow time, off the cream upholstery, with all the dignity of a ballerina pissed up on lard. Inside my head it's 1976 all over again, with little hope of release. Hermione has easily thumbed the red release of her seat-belt, and is already making her way across the gravel surface, chippings skittering left-right, left-right. "We'll come back later," she shouts, as I slam the car door behind me. "And the battery will be flat." I hurry to keep up as a thin grey wind grabs the words half-formed from her mouth and mixes them. "You'll push the car to get it started. And I'll make you stand over the exhaust pipe." "Where are we going?" I venture, knowing full well that any answer I might get would be verging on the incomprehensible, nay ridiculous. "We're going where the sun don't shine. Where the monkey shoves his nut. Where... Christopher!" I stop. "What?" "Listen! Listen to the sound of it. Just the words - the poetry of the words..." We take ourselves back out of ourselves and I look around. I see nothing of significance, and tell Hermione so. "Philistine!" she brands me, tongue whipping across lips made harshly lemon by the word.
By the sea	It was the year that we moved to the seaside, and took up residence in a first-floor flat overlooking the sea front. Out of season the penny arcade machines would flash dolefully in the wind, next to boarded up stalls of no ice-cream and bucket and spades. But we knew that these rusty green iron railings had a place in our heart, whatever the season. We always came back to the railings. They earthed us to the ground, their metallic weight drawing us as inevitably as a lodestone. No authoritarian railings these - incomplete they stopped no-one entering the short dead park, with it's sickly sweet rotting foliage. These railings had draft-dodged during the war, hiding themselves to avoid being turned into Spitfires and bombs, now just siting here in slacker chic.
Transit	We stopped in some doomy, blighted place near the seat of the industrial revolution. The sky was darkening, but still glowed slightly behind grey clouds. Railway signalling equipment loomed out of the night towards us. I was frightened, but Hermione shrugged it off. A middle-aged woman a few seats away continued to knit, her needles moving in sympathy with the sound of the train's clattering wheels. If we didn't go over points soon, she'd have to turn that sock into a scarf. All for the want of a left-hand bend.
Hermione Nudge makes an appearance...	I first met Hermione Nudge in Dudley's fashionable Dudley, on a late May afternoon in early June. It was the constant tuba playing that first attracted my attention to her. "I'm just seeking my metier," was her terse response to my quickly-mouthed question. I do hope she'll go away soon. Now Hermione covers tarts with sour cream, and it's a really sour cream, until the end of the world. At least, that's what she tells anybody who has the misfortune to come close enough to her works of "art" to be also within earshot of her constantly screeching voice. A screeching voice that sounds very much like a scratched record, but, strangely, a record that only plays in a vertical aspect. But then it would fall off the turntable. And maybe that's the point.
New art, new catchphrase	Hermione's newest piece of art consists of sixteen sticking plasters, mounted on an old baking tray, heavily encrusted with burnt fat. Each of the plasters is stained by a residue which could be blood. Hermione said that she was initially planning on fixing a label beneath each plaster, naming each of them after a BBC technician from the early 1970s. But she couldn't be arsed, so she now she claims the work is a reaction against the aesthetic of business. I can't even begin to understand it, as even the title provides no hint. The piece is called "finding a (safety) match". When I quizzed Hermione as to the meaning she said only this: "A safety match moves the inflammable substances onto the board down the side of the box. Snowball. Snowball. It's mine."
	I spent the evening with Hermione, both of us humming softly as the strains of Steve Davis Eyes wafted through the net curtains. Each note was sliced into a hexagonal cylinder by the pattern of the curtain and fell to the floor like a soft worm, rolling away gathering fluff. And then there was the "leather pancakes". Hermione had recently taken to playing the Bosona, a musical instrument of her own devising. Long and strange were the notes which emerged from the square black box with dark green felt inserts. Each night she would walk around the little square, amongst the damp trees and rusting iron railings, punctuating each step with a note from the Bosona. The instrument itself sat on a small trolley, which she would pull along by the machine's control wires, fashioned from the brake cables of an old bicycle. One of the wheels on the trolley had a slight squeak, which she repeatedly refused to oil. "Counterpoint, my dear boy," was the only explanation she would offer.
Memento morrissey	Hermione & I turned off the Rue Flageolet (been there) and walked left into Magnesium Way. In the weak rays of the dying sun the canal seemed to glow with heavy elements, its surface bending thickly as it sluggishly went nowhere on no tide. A few hundred metres down the towpath we saw a figure approaching, carrying a long thin package under his arm. With no way to exit the path, left or right, I wondered what the package could be. A snooker cue or... a rifle? Something that vaguely resembled my life flashed before my eyes, as I considered what it would be like to die suddenly, and without meaning. As the figure came closer I saw that it was a snooker cue, which did my state of mind no good at all. All my defeats at the hands, and sticks, of pool-cue wielding ignorami came back to haunt me.
	I knew what was happening as soon as I woke up on my living room floor, face down in a pool of my own vomit one Sunday morning. The vague stain is still there, like some latter-day acidic Turin shroud. That afternoon I wrote: "As I lie here, surrounded by the detritus of my "cultural" life, I reflect. Is it the port and cigars - or is it Tizer and Pot Noodles? Either way, I've had far far too much to drink."
A walk in the woods...	Hermione spent the afternoon in a klatty shop, buying bits and pieces for the art she would spend the evening making. From the electrical section she bought a clip-on lamp with trailing flex and plug. Once she'd fitted a 60-watt bulb to this, she immersed the unit in water in a screw-topped jar, similar to the frightening specimens that lined the walls of her school biology lab. Hermione was going to use diet lemonade that she'd had blessed by a priest, but once again couldn't be arsed. She calls it "the same drawing back from the edge that society tries to force on us." Sounds more like an excuse than a reason. The structure of this new piece, which Hermione has titled "Geoffrey Jones" reflects the structure of the light-bulb. Vacuum is replaced with water, and the whole thing becomes useless, except for electrical bath suicide. As Hermione says, "nature abhors a vacuum, which probably explains why it's so untidy in the woods."