Ripped in two by your pain.
Blown silent by your unfolding.
And the hollow mystery of where you’re going.
Shocked, burnt and waiting..

And smells and sounds that grate like life.
And the quiet, profound silences.
Feeling bad because of me.
When this should be about you.

When night-time minutes and hours mean nothing,
The invisible massive sighs and changes.
All breathing gone, now alone, I sit shaking
In that slow and stupid morning.

A day of cars and calls.
Of paper thin thoughts and emptiness.
Of whispering.
You gone.

Meet my old friend. Let’s call him Andy. That’s not his real name. His real name is Rob Kendrick. But we’ll call him Andy for now to protect his identity. Andy believes the Earth is flat. He also believes a lot of other ‘theories’ but for now the Flat Earth (FE) one is what interests me. Here, in a nutshell, is how he justifies this belief.

• The Bible says something about the sun rotating around the earth.
• Scientifically gravity can’t work.
• The surface of lakes and oceans are flat.
• We can’t see the so-called curve of the Earth
• Planes fly at constant heights. If it was curved they’d climb continuously OR we’d feel them descending all the time.
• If it was a globe it’d slow its movement through space because of ether creating drag.

In the pub Andy’s misbeliefs are like a suit of armour. By simply denying all that I believe, nothing gets close to even troubling him about his theories. For example, I say, ‘but what about GPS?’ He says the globe doesn’t have to be round to enable triangulation. So I say, ‘but how do the satellites orbit?’ He says they’re geostationary, so I say ‘but how do they stay up?’ He says they rest on the ether.

So here’s what I did. I made up my own science. He says there’s ether, so I say ether puts us to sleep, which is why, at night, when it leaks down, we all get tired. Nothing he can say will dissuade me from this tack and he gets annoyed. I tell him the holes in the ozone layer are letting ether leak through in the day, which is why we’re tired during the day. I can ignore everything he says about ether as he tries to disprove me. I’m wearing the armour now. When he says I’ve got it wrong about ether, I answer that he won’t open his mind and accept the truth, and his blinkered ignorance is harmful to reality. All things he’s said to me.

Of course, I don’t feel triumphant. All I’ve done is made meaningless noises at someone who has been making meaningless noises at me. But one result is that we and my ‘normal’ friends have a new word. When someone makes a particularly stupid comment we now say they’re talking ‘Robbish’.

Spam was invented in 1937. There's a museum in Austin, Minnesota you can visit to see it, too. But let's not be cute - we're talking about Spam the food. What I like is the fact that they've held on to the massively excellent www.spam.com and although they're clearly profiting from selling Spam-brand T-shirts and stuff just to web-users, coders and developers, they don't make any mention of the fact that the majority of the population use their name to mean something else. I mean, why don't they even send out bulk e-mails to people? That'd be the marketing trick of the decade.

But no. They're happy that to them Spam means meat in a can and to everyone else born after World War II it means spam. Could you imagine if to 'Nike' became a word meaning to cold-call people on the phone? If, by 'Disneying', you were dropping litter in public places? Those corporations would go mental. But the Spam people don't care.

The company that make Spam are called Hormel Foods. Let's start calling unwanted e-mails Hormel Foods;

"Four days off work and I come back to find 223 Hormel Foods in my Inbox!"

"Dude, if you Hormel me once more with that dancing camel I'll shatter your skull with my monitor!"

"Buy HormelFoodsGuard™ to stop unwanted Hormel Foods clogging your computer!"

Yeah, much as I love the makers of Spam, they're too cool about their name. And that goes for the hundred-year-old family-run company who make carpentry tools for craftsmen. What were they called? I remember. h4xx0r.