The weather seems to have given me a bit of a knock so I haven't been about too much. I've been spending far more time than is healthy lying down, wide awake, feverish and full of painkillers, with my mind wandering.

The chain of thought started with Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, which was dramatised on SkyOne last Christmas and which I recently bought on DVD. From there we went to the Coca-Cola Christmas adverts.

I also started thinking about the type of adverts that take a well-known song, and then put their own lyrics on it, like this Weetabix advert.

The next stage was how in school, up until I was about 13, we had to sing hymns in assembly each day, as well as any amount of carol concerts. Lots of songs we sang had "alternative" lyrics. "While sheperds washed their socks by night", and "we three kings of orient are trying to light a rubber cigar", "good king Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen, a snowball hit him on the snout and made it all uneven" and hundreds of others I'm sure you can remember.

And from THERE, final leap, I fell into a sort of half-sleep full of people in a church. A priest at the front burbling a sermon, congregation variously dozing, or fidgeting, or looking disapprovingly at those who were dozing or fidgeting. The bit where the priest says something and the congregation answer in a zombie monotone.
"May the Lord be with you"
"A n d a l s o w i t h y o u"
"Let us lift up our hearts"
"w e l i f t t h e m u p t o t h e L o r d"
(Catholic primary school, this crud is etched on my brain)
The organ plays a chord, people cough and shuffle to their feet. Upon which they launch into This Bloody Frosties Advert. Complete with jumping up and down.

My mind scares me sometimes.


Oh, and as this post has far too many YouTube links in it already, I may as well stick in another one. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Nintendo Opera.