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Ooooooooooooooooooooo! I am a ghost, a ghost in the machine. The machine is David Eagle’s laptop. As mentioned in yesterday’s Dollop, David had had some potential paranormal activity occurring in his house. Therefore, he mused yesterday about whether the ghosts, who clearly enjoy interfering with electronic objects, would like to put themselves to practical use. And so David has left his laptop on over night to see if a ghost would type up today’s Dollop for him. And here I am.

Chances are you are probably just assuming that this is David doing a stupid unfunny introduction to his blog, but that’s where you’re wrong. You are being stubbornly sceptical, even though the evidence is right here in front of you. But you have blinded yourself to the truth. You wouldn’t know a ghost if it hit you in the face; although, in fairness, you wouldn’t really be able to feel much due to the fact that it would just go right through you. But that’s not the point.

Anyway, you might be hoping that, since you are now reading the words of someone from beyond the grave, I might give you an insight into one of life’s most sought questions: what exactly happens when we die? But I’m afraid I can’t answer that. David has given me a list of bullet points to follow, full of pathetic pithy little throwaway jokes and boring anecdotes about his daily life, but I haven’t been given any instructions to talk about the nature of life after death I’m afraid, sorry.

When I started writing this Dollop I was finding it rather difficult. Typing was severely impaired because my spectral fingers kept going straight through the keys. Fortunately, I’ve mastered it now. Jalfjjfjao. Oops, sorry, it happened again, I guess I spook too soon.

Anyway, I best crack on with making sentences out of the bullet points that David has supplied me with. I will write as if I am David, emulating his style to the best of my ability. Think of me as a ghost writer, if you will. That was my own joke, not David’s. I am clearly funnier than David, and I should have my own blog. Well, actually I do, but sadly it’s not available on your earth-based Internet, as you don’t have Ghoulgle. That’s another joke, although admittedly, it doesn’t work quite so well in print. But thank you, I’m here all week; well actually I’m not, I’m shimmering in and out of being all week, but let’s not get pedantic. Anyway, here is today’s Dollop, written by a poltergeist in the style of David Eagle.

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I am trying to restore my sleeping routine to something resembling normal. My sleeping patterns are terrible, waking up very late morning and unable to quiet my brain to sleep until 4 or 5 in the morning. I think this is principally down to the fact that I gig for a living. I did about 200 gigs last year, and most of these gigs didn’t finish until at least 11pm. By the time we’d got out of the venue it was nearly 12. Then often we had to drive somewhere, either to accommodation or back home. If we were driving back home then I might not get to sleep until 5 in the morning. Plus, I find that I get quite a lot of post-gig adrenalin and energy (take note wannabe groupies) and so this means that I can’t just fall asleep straight after a gig, even if we are staying somewhere close to the venue and got back at a reasonable time.

So far this year I’ve not gigged yet, but my sleeping patterns haven’t reverted back to sensible. This is not entirely my fault; I have been scuppered by the Australian media. I know, the old familiar Australian media excuse. In preparation for our Australian tour in March, I’ve been doing interviews with the Australian media. The trouble is that their day time is our night time, meaning most of the interviews have been when I would ordinarily be asleep. So I set my phone alarm to wake me a few minutes before the interview.

Assuming that I have managed to get to sleep before then, my alarm will wake me up at 5 to 4 in the morning, ready for a call from an Australian radio station at 4. I’ll then chat away with an extremely chipper and chatty presenter about the band, as well as a mind boggling array of incidental nonsense that these radio presenters like to bring up in order to be a bit quirky. There is often quite a bit of a delay on the line too, which doesn’t help my addled brain come up with answers, as I know that I have to answer as quickly as possible after the presenter has finished asking his question, otherwise there’ll be an even longer delay. Then, after the phone call, about fifteen minutes later, I’ll be trying to get back asleep.

To make the situation even weirder and more disconcerting, I’ve now started having odd reoccurring dreams in which I’m woken by the sound of the phone. It’s an Australian radio station. Even though I didn’t recall having an interview booked for this particular night, I assume that I must have forgotten. I am then put straight to air. I haven’t had a chance to wake up or have a drink of water or anything. The interviewer starts asking me questions, but I can’t understand what the heck he is asking me. I try to answer the question, but then the interviewer takes on the persona of John Humphrys and constantly interrupts me, berating me for not answering the question. I try to explain to him that I am answering the question but that there is just a huge delay on the line, but he just keeps interrupting me. I then wake up in a cold sweat, realise it’s a dream and then try and get back to sleep again.

Recently I did an interview for an Australian magazine. Baring in mind that the people reading it are unlikely to know who The Young’uns are, given that we’ve not played Australia yet. So you would have thought that the questions would have reflected this. When we first started doing interviews in the UK, everyone asked the same questions: how did the three of you meet? Describe your music? What are your influences? How did you get into folk music and start performing together? Why do you have such a terrible name? So I would have expected, given we are completely unknown in Australia, that these would have been the kinds of questions. But know. Proof that they obviously had no idea about who I am was demonstrated by their request that I kept my answers to a couple of sentences.

The first question this magazine chose to ask me was: What are you listening to right now? Nothing about who I am or who the band is. The second question was: What is your hidden talent? They didn’t even know what my actual unhidden talent was, so surely we should be covering all that before going down the quirky route. And then, their final question was: What is your claim to fame? My claim to fame is being in the folk band who are playing your country this year, but that you seem to be completely uninterested in talking about.

I don’t even think they ended up publishing the interview. I’ve searched for it and I can’t find it anywhere. Perhaps I annoyed them by refusing to keep my answers to a couple of sentences, although, in fairness, I did try, and none of my answers exceeded five paragraphs. Or maybe I just out-quirked them with my responses.

Question: What are you listening to right now?

Answer: I tend to work in silence, so that I can concentrate fully on what I’m writing. Amazingly high quality and inspired writing – such as what you are going to be graced with over the next few paragraphs – requires complete focus and unwavering concentration. However, my next-door neighbour is somewhat ruining that because she is listening to music rather loudly. I’ve no idea what it is she’s listening to. It sounds like fairly generic pop. I could Shazam it, but I really don’t think you’re that interested, and if you are then quite frankly I think you need to sort out your life. I’m sorry, I promised my therapist that I’d try and go for at least a couple of paragraphs before I started insulting you.

Question: What is your hidden tallent?

Answer: Answering questions for blogs. I think you’ll all agree I’m hiding that particular talent very well indeed.

Question: What is your claim to fame?

Answer: David’s claim to fame is that he is Britain’s most modest man. This is David’s friend typing this by the way; David was far too modest to tell you about this himself. He thanks you for reading. Oh, and incidentally, he’s also in a folk group called The Young’uns, who are touring your country this year for a month. But, no, you’re probably not interested in that!

I have a couple of interviews with Australian radio tomorrow, but fortunately for my sanity they are during the daytime. One of them is at 1am Australian time. I am looking forward to getting my own back on the Australian media by being as over-the-top and garrulous as I possibly can, knowing that the presenter is probably really tired. I’ll also answer all his questions in a really quirky manner, even if the question is completely normal. That will show them.

Oooooooooo! It’s me again. The ghost. I think I managed to emulate David’s style quite well. Let me know how you thought I did by leaving a comment in the comments section. I’m not sure if David expects me to read and reply to your comments as well. If you have any questions about the world beyond yours then feel free to ask, and I’ll try my best to answer it, assuming David will let me.

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Yesterday’s Dollop about ghosts, science and the term “irrational” elicited the following response from Jools.

“Pretty sure ghosts exist, if you can say exist about something that has no corporeal identity. One used to walk about my friend’s cottage, outside the windows, just out of the corner of your eye you would ‘see’ her. Turn quickly and she was gone. She passed you behind your back but you knew she was there. I talked to her once or twice but she went as soon as she came. Not ‘seen’ one anywhere else but there. She had a real presence.”

I think one of the elements of Mr Dreadful’s tour that put the others off was that he would frequently repeat the same themes. But as I explained yesterday, I enjoyed the anecdotal nature of the tour, and surely if you are looking for evidence then it’s useful to note the recurring elements underlying the various stories. You could argue that this helps give these kinds of accounts more weight, as people are reporting the same type of experience, even though they happened at different times, in different places and by different people. Of course, many of these recurring themes are so well-known to us, that if we were making up a ghost story we would probably include them. Like with Jools’ account, Mr Dreadful’s tour had lots of mentions of the figure shimmering in and out of vision, being there one second and then gone the next, also there were lots of remarks about walking straight through physical objects, and a sudden drop in temperature. These are clearly common themes with ghost stories.

Perhaps we’ll discover in the future that these things are all hallmarks of some kind of neurological episode, like a hallucination, although, that doesn’t seem to account for why sometimes you hear the same story corroborated by more than one person, who say that they experienced the same thing in the same place but at a completely different time. Perhaps this is some kind of time loop, and we are just seeing things that once existed, almost like time is bending. Baring in mind that there apparently is no such thing as time anyway, then this theory doesn’t seem too far fetched.

Last week I was on the phone to a friend when the door bell rang. I went to answer the door, but upon opening it there was no one there. I closed the door and walked back into the room I’d just come from, at which point the door bell sounded again. I was only a few paces from the door, so it only took me a second to reach the door and open it. But again, upon opening the door, there was no one around. Surely there hadn’t been enough time for someone to have rang the door bell and then run away. If it was someone playing a prank then I’d definitely catch them the next time. I stood by the door, waiting. If the person came back and pressed the bell, I would be ready to instantly pounce.

My housemate’s came down the stairs to see what was going on, at which point I began to get suspicious that it was they who were playing the prank. But as they pointed out, they had been upstairs, and the receiver for the door bell was on top of the piano in the dining room. Plus, the door bell was playing the same tune. There is only one button to press, which cycles through the 100 door bell sounds, all as annoying and as jarring as each other, so if you pressed the button on the receiver in order to sound the door bell without having to be at the door, the tune would change. So there was no way that they could have interfered with the door bell.

We were now all stood at the door, waiting for the prankster to return, the three of us poised to instantaneously pounce. But the door bell didn’t ring. Defeated, we walked away from the door. I walked back into the dining room, and as soon as I did, the door bell chimed again. The three of us launched ourselves at the door. We were all impressively quick to act, perhaps a little too quick, as we all slammed into each other at the same time from different angles, our hands all noisily grappling for the handle. This perhaps gave the prankster a bit too much time to run away, and sure enough when we picked ourselves up off the floor and opened the door, there was no one to be seen.

Surely this had to be a person pranking us. They must somehow have known when we had left the door, and gone into another room. But they wouldn’t really have been able to see us. Perhaps they had been listening. After all, we were talking to each other in whispers, and I was conveying what was going on to my friend on the phone. So we decided to be silent. We stood there for another minute or so, still and silent. But the silence remained, and was not punctured by the sound of the door bell.

Once again we walked away from the door, although this time we did so as quietly as possible. I walked back into the dining room, only two or three paces from the front door to the house. Before I’d had the chance to restart conversation with my friend on the phone, the door bell rang.

This time Ben had barely moved from his position, still scratching his head about what was going on, and so he was at the door immediately. He flung the door open. There was absolutely no way that the prankster would have had time to escape, yet when the door was opened, there was no one to be seen.

The door once again was closed, and the three of us were back together, completely puzzled by what was going on. Logical explanations. That’s what we began to discuss. It was late evening, but there were three of us here and so it wasn’t particularly scary. Ordinarily, paranormal activity wouldn’t be the first conclusion I’d leap to, however the conversation to my friend on the phone had consisted of him telling me about his scary dream in which demons had possessed objects, and now here we were, being challenged by an errant door bell. Therfore, I think that my friend on the phone was more scared than us, as he was in the house by himself, and seemingly the very thing he had just been talking about was now happening to our door bell.

Logical explanations: the door bell battery was running out, and was just chiming randomly. Or the door bell was malfunctioning. That didn’t really explain why it never seemed to ring when we were standing at the door, but always sounded when we moved away from the door. But that could surely be dismissed as coincidence. Fair enough. We could help verify the coincidence argument by repeatedly walking away from the door and see what happened. So that is what we did. We all walked away from the door, with me returning to the dining room. And as soon as I walked past the piano, on which the door bell receiver lay, the door bell chimed. I walked back in the other direction, and sure enough the door bell rang again. I repeated this process, and every time I passed the door bell receiver, it chimed.

So then Ben tried it. He walked into the dining room, passed the piano, but the door bell did not sound. He tried this time and time again, but nothing happened. Similarly when Elsa tried it, nothing happened. But when I did it, the door bell chimed.

Was I the cause of the door bell ringing? or was it because I was holding my mobile phone, which was somehow working on the same frequency as the door bell? Well, again this was something else that could be tested. I handed my phone to Ben and he walked past the door bell in the dining room. But nothing happened. The phone was handed to Elsa, but the door bell did not chime. Then I tried walking into the dining room without my phone, and the door bell remained silent. It appeared that the only time the door bell would sound was if I walked past it whilst holding my phone.

But there was more investigating to be done. I hung up the call, and walked past the door bell, which elicited nothing. I called my friend back up, and tried again, but nothing happened.

So we had gone as far as we could with our investigation. We had gone against the advice of John Donne, and asked for whom the bell tolls, and discovered that it tolled for me, but only when I was holding my mobile phone while talking to my friend Matthew, and only for that one specific call.

I wonder whether this Dollop will be eulogised in the same way as John Donne’s poem has. I doubt it. I think it’s more likely that I’ll be eternally remembered for my Dollop about my new kettle.

Perhaps if I was in the house by myself, then I would have reacted to this scenario differently, but it was easier to be more rational and level-headed because I was not alone. Of course, our investigation still doesn’t completely rule out a paranormal explanation, and the fact that the door bell has never chimed again during any mobile phone calls seems a bit weird. Presumably there was just something about the way that that specific call was set up, creating some kind of connection with the door bell, although the fact that I can’t repeat this or prove it means that this is merely a scientific theory, and is certainly not hard fact. Was our conversation about possessed objects in any way responsible?

So it could well have been a mischievous ghost. Perhaps it was a dead ringer. Hahahaha, I am so funny. Just to be on the safe side though, I have changed our door bell sound to the Ghost Busters theme, which should deter any mischievous spectres from messing with the door bell in the future.

Perhaps if the ghost wants to interfere with household objects then it could make itself useful in the process. It could fill our app controlled kettle with water whenever it becomes empty, so that we don’t have to go into the kitchen and fill it before we can then use our phone to set it boiling. Or if it wants to be really useful then it could possess my laptop on a daily basis and write these Dollops for me. I could help the ghost along by making some bullet point notes each day, and the ghost could type it up propperly for me. I’ll probably still do the audio podcast version, as I’m not sure how pleasant it would be for listeners to hear the voice of a dead person each day. Maybe it could do the Halloween audio Dollop though.

If there are any ghosts reading this, then give it a thought. I’ll type up some bullet point notes tonight with some ideas for subject matter, and leave the computer running throughout the night, which I understand is your most productive time. Hopefully I’ll wake up tomorrow with the Dollop all written. I’d appreciate it if you were a relatively modern ghost. I don’t want my blog to be written in old English, and contain loads of outdated jokes about Queen Elizabeth I. We’ll see what happens tomorrow folks.

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,One of Ben’s birthday surprises yesterday was a ghost tour of Sheffield. It was a complete surprise for Ben, up until the very moment, and even then it continued to be a surprise, for reasons which I’ll get to soon. The man running the tour went by the name Mr Dreadful. Ben’s girlfriend Elsa had organised the whole thing. She’d been told to meet Mr Dreadful against the wall by the town hall. These seemed like rather vague instructions. She didn’t have his phone number either, or any idea what Mr Dreadful looked like. Nor had he given her any description of what he would be wearing. Elsa seemed pretty confident however that we would easily locate him.

We led a clueless Ben down various roads until we reached the town hall. And then Elsa spied him, head bent against the wind, standing by the wall. Elsa linked arms with Ben, still none the wiser as to what this was all about, and walked towards Mr Dreadful. Except, it wasn’t Mr Dreadful. It was a drunken homeless man. I’m not sure who was the most confused by what was going on, the drunken homeless guy, who was trying to understand the question, “are you Mr Dreadful?” or Ben, who was wondering why his girlfriend had arranged a chat with an alcoholic tramp for his birthday. Assuming that Elsa knew what she was doing, seemingly perfectly confident, we had all followed behind, and were now standing around the poor perplexed man. I had no idea that there was anything wrong, and assumed that by this point Ben would be starting to realise what his surprise was. And so, I affected a spooky voice, and said to Ben, “Ben, meet Mr Dreadful!” Ben’s dad, who also hadn’t registered that there was anything amiss, joined in with an evil sinister laugh. We’d all been to the pub before hand and so were feeling rather merry. Sean was a few steps behind and joined us a couple of seconds later. He also had no idea that we had accosted the wrong person, and so he enthusiastically shook the stunned man by the hand and said, also adopting a sinister voice, “Mr Dreadful I assume.” But he, like all of us, had assumed wrong.

We apologised to the man, who was much too drunk to comprehend our explanation, guiltily all handed him coins, and walked away to meet the real Mr Dreadful, who was standing just a few metres away.

I’d like to think that this ordeal was so strange that it caused the homeless man to make the decision to go sober, helping him get his life together. Perhaps he thought that if he kept on drinking like he was then one day he might be as bad as us.

We then said hello to the real Mr Dreadful, although we’d sobered up a bit too much to do any of the evil laughter and sinister voices which we’d treated the homeless man to just a few seconds earlier. Before he started the tour we needed to pay him. Upon doing this, he produced a black top hat out of a carrier bag, placed it on his head and led us down the street. Why couldn’t he have stuck the black top hat on beforehand? Now it was clearly obvious that he was Mr Dreadful, and wearing the top hat would have saved us from the awkward altercation earlier. Or maybe the homeless man isn’t really a drunk living on the streets, but is actually Mr Dreadful’s friend and partner in crime. Maybe they have a scam whereby Mr Dreadful’s friend waits by the wall, and when people approach him assuming him to be Mr Dreadful, he pretends to be drunk and says he’s just a man living on the streets. The people naturally feel guilty for this mistake and so hand over money, at which point the real Mr Dreadful appears out of the shadows, and claims even more of their money. Perhaps I am the first person to have blogged about this, and this blog will therefore be Mr Dreadful’s undoing, as I start to receive comments from readers who have also been duped by this scam.

Whether Mr Dreadful is a con artist or not, I did enjoy his ghost tour. I think I enjoyed it the most out of everyone. I think the others expected that it would be more theatrical and that he’d properly act out the stories and draw you in with his way with words and style of delivery. I suppose it was more like a series of anecdotes, rather than crafted, well-delivered tales. But I enjoyed the fact that it was more conversational and anecdotal. I got the impression that Mr Dreadful considered the stories to have some factual merit, if not exactly true, then certainly accurate to the point of what he had been told and what he had discovered. I think he’d gone into the various places he was recounting stories about, and talked to people who worked in the various buildings about whether they had witnessed any ghostly activities. I was more interested in hearing people’s actual accounts of things they’d purported to have witnessed, as opposed to hearing something that was more polished, crafted and acted.

Obviously just because people say they saw these things it doesn’t mean they definitely did, but it’s still interesting to note that there were multiple versions of the same story that had been recounted to him by different people. I am not willing to merely believe that there are ghosts or that there is life after death on the basis of these kinds of stories, but I am not so ardently sceptical as to dismiss the possibility of such things. There are lots of ghost stories and it’s obvious that some of them are fabricated and untrue. It’s also obvious that many people’s spooky encounters have a rational, none paranormal explanation. But that doesn’t mean that every single story is bogus, or that everything can be rationalised. I think there are some people who immediately dismiss these kinds of stories as ridiculous, and they qualify this by saying that they believe in science or that it’s irrational. But most of these people who I’ve heard say this kind of thing haven’t got an amazing knowledge of science. And even science doesn’t really understand most of our universe. I mean, the big bang, black holes, dark matter, the nature of consciousness, infinite multiverses, gravity … What’s that all about then.

“So you don’t believe in things you haven’t seen? so surely if you’re being rational then you don’t believe in gravity?”

“What? Well that’s ridiculous, of course I believe in gravity.”

“But you can’t see it? But you still believe it?”

“I don’t have to see it to know it exists.

“Fair enough, well, can you explain it then? Can you explain what it is? How it is? Where it is?”

I’m not being anti-science here. My beef isn’t with science. Rather my issue is with those people who say that things aren’t scientific or that they are irrational as an expedient way of immediately dismissing something that they don’t understand, especially given that most of these people I’m referring to haven’t really got the faintest idea about science anyway. So surely it’s best to be open-minded and quizzical, just as we should when trying to understand gravity, time, or any other weird phenomena.

Does time exist? Einstein didn’t think so, nor do most scientists apparently, yet we live our lives on the premise that it does. The fabric on which we build Our entire lives upon is completely irrational.

I’ve spoken to friends who are convinced that ghosts do not exist and that it’s all silly nonsense, yet refuse to do a Ouija board because they say that we shouldn’t mess with things we don’t understand. I thought we were being open-minded. “Yes but, I know someone who tried it and weird stuff happened.”

So I think that I’m more interested in uncovering anecdotal accounts of strange phenomena and investigating it, rather than just listening to a man tell stories in a spooky dramatic voice, while we all laugh and look down our noses at the kind of people who actually believe in this shit. I think most of us are sceptical about this kind of stuff because it’s more socially acceptable and fashionable than taking an interest in such things. The world is a fascinating place, and we should take more of an interest in it, but we spend our lives drinking crap, eating crap, listening to crap and watching crap, and believing it to be rational. We should all embrace science more, and we should maybe take an interest in at least disecting some of the paranormal stories rather than just immediately leaping to the conclusion that they are all rubbish. There are probably people reading this who think that the idea of ghosts is stupid and childish, yet believe in God and the words of some ancient book.

I hope that this has sort of made sense. I kind of know what I’m trying to say about this subject, but it’s such a big one, and I don’t feel as if I’ve really conveyed my thoughts about it very well. Feel free to pick it apart, reassemble it and tell me in the comments section what you think I’m trying to say. If it sounds impressive then I might just steal your words, claim them as my own and put them in this blog to make me sound more intelligent. Suddenly stories about my kettle don’t seem so bad, do they?

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So Cancer claims yet another celebrity this year, with the death of Terry Wogan. I’ve naturally been inspired by him, being someone who presents podcasts and has always been interested in radio. Sadly I never met him and so his passing does not afford me with any points in a game of Death Top Trumps. I have however met Dermot O’leary, so I’ll be quids in when he finally kicks the bucket, as celebrity deaths are worth ten points. Fortunately for Jon Snow, he’s not in work today, so he’s got an extra day to think up a way of trying to anger or upset Gaby Roslin and Ken Bruce on tomorrow’s Channel 4 news. I suppose at this point you might expect me to offer some suggestions of the kind of jokes he could possibly use, but I am not so tasteless and insensitive as to do that kind of thing. That is definitely the reason, and is clearly not because I basically can’t think of anything. I have lots of ideas about how to insult the memory of Terry Wogan in front of his friends on television news – I’m into the 31st day of Dollops now so obviously I’ve reached the habitual unstoppably creative stage – but I am too nice for that kind of thing.

Today is my housemate Ben’s birthday. We were out last night and didn’t get back til late, but I thought it would be a shame if Ben missed too much of his special day, and so, even though I knew he would be seriously hungover, I woke him up early with the gift of music, which was a Happy Birthday Benjamin megamix, courtesy of Spotify.

As mentioned previously on a Young’uns Podcast and in Dollop 22, there are people who have used the digital streaming and downloads phenomenon to try and make as much money as possible by doing as little artistic or actual work as possible.

One day I typed Hartlepool into Spotify, just out of curiosity to see what would come up. I found a song called Get The Goal (Hartlepool United.) I assumed it was an official song paid for and recorded by Hartlepool United, but it soon became clear that this was not the case. Firstly, the singers were American, which seemed to dilute the passion of the song somewhat, although it soon became very apparent that there was absolutely no passion here at all. Not only where the accents American, but the terminology being used was also transatlantic, using words that aren’t even used in UK football: set play, overtime, score zone … They’d basically recorded the exact same song for every football team, not just in the UK leagues but all the world leagues, with the only distinction between the tracks being that they inserted the name of a specific team, although the passion was even more impaired by the fact that they got many of the team names wrong, calling Peterborough United Petersburg United, and proudly proclaiming Derby Country instead of Derby County. There are hundreds of versions of this same song on Spotify.

Typing Happy Birthday Benjamin into Spotify also brought up hundreds of results. There were Happy Birthday Benjamin songs in every genre: country, reggae, jazz, dubstep, even a blues Happy Birthday Benjamin, which seems a little odd given the general nature and mood of the genre.

There are happy birthday songs for every single name, and hundreds of them. It would probably take you a couple of months of solid listening to get through every single happy birthday song for every name in every genre. Perhaps this could be a sponsored event for charity. Or maybe this should be David Blaine’s next endeavour. He may have spent 73 hours stood on top of a 72 foot pillar while having one million volts of electricity applied to his body. He may well have survived 44 days without food or nutrients. But I doubt whether even he would have the endurance levels to tolerate two months listening to every happy birthday song listed on Spotify. And I’d let him have whatever food and drink he wanted; he still wouldn’t be able to get through it. I heard about five of them, and it’s torture.

Well there you go friends, I think I’ve proved that I am able to blog about something other than the act of blogging, which is what Bill was intimating that my blogs had started to become. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I am too arrogant to let this intimation go unchallenged, while on the surface it may seem that my blogs have fallen into the habit of merely referencing my previous blogs, this is not at all the case. Bill has clearly not understood that I’ve been using my blog as an elaborate metaphor. So when I reference my blog, I am in fact not really referencing my blog, but rather constructing a very complex and intricate tapestry of allegory. It will all become clear in the fullness of time. I’ve been planning this project all my life Bill. I have great truths to tell, but you must continue reading and deconstructing in order to ascertain them. I suggest you meditate before reading to best ensure the optimum mindset for absorbing the Dollops fully. For best results, I recommend the Samadhi meditation technique for about thirty minutes beforehand, preferably whilst naked. Good luck in your search. If you’re really serious about uncovering the truth hidden within these Dollops, then I recommend that you might want to listen to all the podcast versions of these Dollops in reverse. But I can’t give any more away than that. I’ve already said too much; my masters will be angry.

I am going to have to leave this Dollop here as we are going out for a meal and some surprise activities for Ben’s birthday. What amazing friends he has. Most people would be completely satisfied to simply receive a ten minute compilation of Happy Birthday Benjamin songs, unless they weren’t called Benjamin, in which case they might find it a little odd.

Back tomorrow, as we enter our second month.

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Last night I had a dream in which I was receiving blog comments on my phone, reading them and then thinking up replies. In the dream I was also aware that the day was drawing on, and that I really needed to think about something to write about for today’s Dollop. Then I was awoken from my dream by an alert on my phone. It was a comment on yesterday’s Dollop. Both my real world and the dream world are centred around this daily blog project. There is seemingly no escape.

When I do go out with friends I often find that the Dollops are still a factor of the evening. Last night I was out with some friends. There was a lull in the conversation, my brain was feeling a bit foggy, I realised I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say. The only thing I could think of to talk about was what I’d written about in yesterday’s Dollop. I started to talk about the weird game of Death Top Trumps that I’d played in the pub the day before with a completely different set of friends, but I only got a few words in before I was interrupted by my friends who told me that they already knew the story as they’d read the Dollop.

“er … right, OK. Well, what else. I’ve got this new kettle …”

“Yes we know, we read the blog.”

While I was glad that my friends were reading these Dollops, I realised that this meant I now had no actual conversation topics to bring to the table. Anything that was interesting that had happened in my life over the last few days they would already know about. I used to be bristling with anecdotes and conversation topics, but now I am bereft of anything interesting to say that hasn’t already been said in Dollop form. I also don’t feel as if I’m engaging properly in conversation. I am always assessing the merit of a person’s story or conversation topic on the basis of whether it can be used in the next day’s blog. If the story isn’t worthy of being written about then I’ll stop fully listening to that person. I’ll be trying to listen into the other conversations around the table, in case there is something more Dollop worthy being said somewhere else that I might be missing by listening to what the person talking to me is talking about. This project has really started to dominate my life, and it’s turned me into someone who I’m not sure I particularly like. Still, the one thing that hasn’t changed about me is my stubbornness, and so despite all of this, I will still persist with this for the rest of the year.

The comment that awoke me was from Bill.

“I am going to create a new art form. The new art form will be exclusively about the new art form.”

OK, point taken Bill. I know that I seem to spend a great deal of these Dollops deconstructing previous Dollops and talking in detail about the challenge of getting them written and released in time. But as I’ve illustrated earlier in this Dollop, my life has kind of become centred around this project, to the point that I’m even having dreams about writing them and replying to comments, before being woken up by the sound of a blog comment coming through on my phone which I then read and reply to, fall back asleep and have another Dollop dream. Also, because the process of writing these Dollops and releasing them can be so fraught with challenges, the Dollop creating process is probably the most intense activity of my day. Hopefully, the novelty of these challenges will wear off and I’ll get more used to writing and recording on a daily basis from a variety of distraction-laden locations. Then hopefully I’ll be able to just get on with it without feeling a need to talk about the process as much. Or maybe I’ll find myself more and more bereft of things to talk about, and the Dollops will just become more and more meta as time goes on. Is it worth sticking around to find out? Of course it is. That was obviously a rhetorical question.

Apparently it takes 30 days to build a habit in the brain. This should mean that this whole exercise will be habitual as of tomorrow, and in theory should get easier. But I’m wondering what habit I have actually appropriated. My hope was that I’d develop the habit of overcoming writer’s block and being able to quickly get into a mindset of thinking of entertaining, interesting things to write about. I hoped that I would build the daily habit of being creative and I hoped that my creativity would increase with practise. But perhaps this isn’t exactly the habit I have instilled with in my brain. Perhaps I have merely learnt the daily habit of sitting down, typing 1000 words of any old thing, and hitting publish.

Perhaps my creativity hasn’t increased at all, or maybe it has suffered. Or maybe this creative fog I’ve felt over the last few days is part of a neurological process. Maybe my brain is fighting against this new habit, knowing that if I reach the thirty day mark then it will be forced to do this habitually, and I’ll be neurologically wired not to give up on the challenge. If this is the case, then fortunately I have weathered the storm, and come tomorrow I should wake up, spring out of bed, switch on the laptop, my hands trembling with anticipation, barely able to control the urge to type, ideas seeping out of every orifice. I’ll have to clean up the mess that this has caused, but there’ll be time for that later, but right now my entire mind and body is configured to blog. Tomorrow, my friends, David’s Daily Digital Dollop will enter its next stage, one where you’ll be provided with even more spellbinding topics than my new kettle, hard as that might be to conceive. Until tomorrow friends\235/,=:,,=:=,!

Download this Dollop in audio form here

Yesterday’s Dollop posed the greatest challenge out of all the Dollops so far. Firstly, I was in a car with Sean Cooney and our friend Graeme. It was difficult therefore to not get dragged into conversation. I hadn’t seen Graeme since September, and ordinarily I would have spent the journey catching up and chatting, but I was also aware that I really needed to start getting to work on the Dollop. I thought that it would have been a bit much to spend the entire funeral service typing a flippant blog post about wheat intolerance. If I was chastised by anyone, I suppose I could have always claimed that it’s what he would have wanted, but I doubt that anyone would have really bought this. Perhaps if Les had been an avid Dollop reader or listener then this statement might have held some weight, but sadly Les died at the beginning of the year and so probably never really got the chance to read or listen to many of my Dollops, which makes his passing even more tragic. I hope you realise how blessed you are to be alive and able to benefit from receiving daily updates about my kettle, and my wrangles with music streaming services. You are truly blessed.

The difficulty was further increased by the pothole riddled winding roads, causing me to feel sick, as well as my laptop shaking to the point of nearly falling off my knee, plus I was frequently mistyping things due to my hands being shaken up and down while I tried to type.

Then there was the issue of recording the audio version. I had ten minutes at Sean’s house before our taxi came to take us to the pub where we were meeting with some friends. I didn’t have time to set up the tripod, and so I just slumped over the bed with my braille machine and digital recorder, and quickly read the blog post which I’d barely had time to proof read. The recording quality was pretty bad, the reading wasn’t my best, but I managed to get the audio uploaded just as the taxi rounded the corner and arrived at Sean’s.

In the taxi I realised that I’d made some mistakes when adding the link to the audio version of the blog. I then had to spend the taxi journey ignoring everyone and correcting this, which proved very difficult using such a small touch screen device. I had just about succeeded in making the correction when the taxi arrived at the pub. I left the others to sort out the money situation, while I republished the blog post with the correction made.

We entered the pub and were greeted by our friends. I didn’t offer to pay for a round of drinks, because I still needed to put a message on Facebook and Twitter about the fact that the new Dollop was now up. So I let someone else buy the drinks, even though I hadn’t paid anything towards the taxi, and it was therefore definitely my turn to contribute.

Perhaps I still had the poor banker in mind who I spoke to on the phone yesterday who was concerned about the lack of money going into my account this month. Perhaps subconsciously I was avoiding spending money, fearing that it might result in her poor children having to go hungry. My friends might have thought I was being stingy and ignorant, not paying for anything and spending all my time ignoring them and typing on a touch screen device. In reality I was doing all this through pure altruism. It was important that I didn’t let the banker’s children starve, and I was also imagining all the forlorn people sat at home at their computers, constantly hitting refresh, hoping with increasing desperation that today’s Dollop would land on their screens and provide them with that one thing they need to make life seem worthwhile.

After another five minutes of me being antisocial, I sent the Facebook and Twitter posts, and then was able to relax. Given that we’d just been to a funeral, we spent the first half an hour playing an odd but strangely therapeutic and enjoyable game of Death Top Trumps, in which we went around the table and counted up all the people we knew who had died in the last year. Because we’re on the folk scene, we know a lot of people who are in their fifties and older. I think it’s probably quite unusual to be thirty, and having about twenty of your friends die in the space of a year. Still, the advantage of this fact is that you can enjoy a lovely evening playing Death Top Trumps. You can play the straight version where you merely award a point for each dead friend, or you can award more points dependant on age of the person or type of death. I started to enjoy the evening and the game so much that I really began to relax, and wrecklessly bought everyone on the table a round of drinks. Perhaps this was my subconscious trying to get me to kill off the banker’s family, so that I could score some more points the next time we play a round of Death Top Trumps.

I really must go now, because I am once again being very antisocial. My housemate Ben’s parents have arrived from Bournemouth, and I have been ignoring them in order to write this. Fortunately, if anyone feels aggrieved by my ignorance, all they have to do is visit my website, read or listen to these Dollops, and they’ll soon see that the quality of what I’m writing is worth being ignored for. Surely, they will feel honoured to have been an integral part of the writing process, glad to have been snubbed in order to facilitate such quality work.

Download audio Dollop here

I received a call from my bank today who were wondering if there was something wrong with my account, by which they meant that I hadn’t put any money in it for the last month. I assured them that all was well, and that it was simply because I don’t have any gigs in January. I tried to ease her mind by letting her know that we have a few things on in February, an Australian tour in March, and a UK tour in April. I do feel a bit concerned for her though, as she might be relying on my wages to feed her family. So, please, buy tickets to come and see us in April. Don’t do it for me or my fellow Young’uns, do it for this poor banker. It’s a worthy cause. There. That should help boost ticket sales.

We’ve covered many subjects on this blog so far: God, Richard Dawkins, erotic fiction, killer machines … but the subject that’s got Gary all hot under the collar is sandwiches. He sent me a lengthy passionate rant on the subject after he read yesterday’s Dollop. Gary is unable to eat wheat, and therefore became riled by my flagrant boasting about eating lots of free sandwiches yesterday. I sympathise with Gary’s plight, and have therefore decided that this blog, from now on, will be a sandwich free zone.

Gary is surrounded by constant reminders of his affliction. He lives near a bakery, and wakes each day to the smell of fresh bread. He sees people on his bus commute to work happily munching their way through sandwiches. At lunch time, his colleagues are all eating sandwiches. He cannot escape sandwiches. Finally, after a long hard day’s work he returns home, shuts himself in his house, puts on his nose plugs to block out the smell of bread from the bakery, and goes online to read my daily blog. It’s the one thing he’s been looking forward to all day. It’s his safe haven from the unrelenting sandwich assault. He’s already starting to relax as he wonders what the subject of today’s blog post will be. And then he sees it, flashing up on his screen, and the words cut like a knife. This was one of the few places left where he could feel safe and protected against the reminder of his sandwich troubles, and now even I was writing about the sodding things.

Well, rest assured Gary that from this moment on, I will never mention sandwiches in this blog ever again. Even if I have the most amazing sandwich related anecdote, and it’s the only interesting thing that happened to me all that day, I promise that I will respect your adversity and never mention the things again. I want you to feel that this is a safe place for you Gary, and from now on it will be. I would also appreciate it if you people reading and listening to these Dollops could refrain from mentioning sandwiches in any comments you may leave on these blogs.

The funeral service was really nice. It’s interesting what stories people choose to talk about in the person’s eulogy. It often seems to be the little things that people remember, things that might not seem special or significant at the time but then take on a new and special pertinence and are cherished after the person’s life. The man performing the service told a story about how Les (who’s funeral it was) would never use a map or a satnav, and insisted on working out the route on his own volition. The family fondly recounted that he would be so stubborn about this, despite the fact that they were hopelessly lost. I imagine that at the time this personality trait was not so appreciated by the people in the car. It probably caused arguments. But now, with the benefit of hindsight and because that person is no longer with us, we see the situation in a different light, and remember it with fondness. So it’s interesting that people choose these kinds of stories to fondly remember someone. Death suddenly offers fresh perspective, and we find ourselves celebrating everything about a person. We laugh and smile at their shortcomings, as well as celebrating their achievements. The person is aggrandised. And I don’t mean to suggest that this is in anyway insincere or untrue, but rather that the death of a loved one makes us fully appreciate everything about the person.

I am currently in the car with Sean. He may be feeling a bit put out that I’ve completely ignored him for the entire journey to and from the funeral. But when I’m dead, perhaps he’ll look back on my antisocial ways with fondness, and he’ll recount this journey where I completely ignored him at my eulogy. Although, if that’s the best example he can think of to illustrate what an amazing person I was, then, quite frankly, he should be ashamed of himself. I’d rather they just read a selection of highlights from my Dollops. I wouldn’t recommend using this one. I’ve found it very difficult to concentrate, as the roads are very winding and I feel sick. It’s going to be interesting to see how I manage to cope with this project when I’m on tour. I hope my on-tour Dollops will be more entertaining than this one, but it’s difficult to concentrate on writing when you are being shaken about in a car, and feeling sick. Perhaps if you listen or read this blog post while zooming along a pothole ridden winding road, you will gain an extra level of respect for my abilities. But don’t abandon me on the basis of this substandard Dollop. One day I will be dead and you’ll be looking back at this post with tears in your eyes, wishing that you’d appreciated me more.

Download this Dollop in audio form here

{I am writing today’s Dollop from the police station. I arrived at the focus group and was immediately arrested. Apparently, the Hungarian plumber that I was meant to be impersonating was in fact an illegal immigrant. I tried explaining to the police that I was simply pretending to be a gay dyslexic Hungarian plumber, because the actual Hungarian plumber had dropped out of the focus group that my housemate is running at her place of work. But they said that they weren’t going to fall for that old housemate’s focus group dropout trick. They’d been fooled with that one once before apparently.

I tried explaining to them who I really am. I pointed them in the direction of my daily blog, hoping to prove that I am who I say I am, but apparently my blog is too full of wild fabrications for them to trust anything I say, and so it was immediately discredited as supporting evidence. In fact they immediately dismissed anything I said to them, because they said that I’d spent my blog posts building up a series of false identities. As they pointed out to me, my blog post from two days ago was full of fabricated identities. I’d claimed that I was a pilot for EasyJet, and I’d faked a number of award wins, including World’s Most Sexiest Blind Man, and World’s Most Intelligent Blind Man. Stephen Hawking was contacted, and he told the police that he’d never heard of me and that my quote from him was bogus. Likewise, they contacted thousands of glamour models, but no one recognised my name. When they showed them a photo of me, most of them laughed derisively at the notion that they’d have considered me a worthy winner of the World’s Most Sexiest Blind Man award. As they pointed out to the police, they would have naturally given that accolade to David Blunkett.
They also knew that I was good at impersonating people, after they heard my George Formby impression on Dollop 16. Basically, they told me that, rather than helping me, my blog posts had created even more suspicion and doubt around my name.

They’ve also got in contact with Spotify to inform them that I might not be the real David Eagle after all, but a gay dyslexic Hungarian plumber. They’ve also asked Spotify to provide them with all the songs I’ve ever played, as they are looking to see if they can find evidence that I listen to an above average level of Hungarian music for a UK citizen. This is terrible news for me and my lawyer, as last Saturday I had a marathon Béla Bartók listening session. It’s an annual event that I’ve privately enjoyed on 23rd January for the last twelve years. I load up the ten hour playlist, and shut myself in my bedroom, bask in the music of this fine Hungarian composer, while munching my way through home-made Goulash. There’s nothing much going on in the month of January, and I find my Bartók goulash days give me something to look forward to after all the Christmas and New Year’s revelry.

Fortunately, none of this really happened. It was another of my wild fabrications that the police at the police station accused me of, except they didn’t because the police are also one of my wild fabrications – come on, keep up. I made all that up because I thought that a fictitious story about being arrested might be more interesting than how my day actually panned out.

There was no need to pretend to be a refugee or immigrant. The focus group was piloting some training courses and games that the company is developing. The day started with an icebreaker game in which we had to introduce ourselves and then make three statements, two true and one false. This immediately brought me out of my comfort zone because obviously I’m really not used to lying and making things up.

We then had to do a team exercise, which involved making boxes out of paper. There were all sorts of rules about the size and shape of the box, how the corners should be folded, how much paper should be used for one box. We also had to make decisions about how much paper we wanted to buy from the supplier in advance, calculating potential profit and loss. To be honest, I’d kind of zoned out a little bit, because it was nearly 3pm, and I still needed to get home and write today’s Dollop, and I didn’t have any ideas of what to write about because I was hoping that maybe the focus group might provide me with some material. But the only material I’d been given so far was paper with which I was meant to make boxes, although I hadn’t managed to follow the visual instructions about how to fold the pieces of paper, so immediately my team were one man down, as I had no idea how to make the boxes.

We were told by the course leader that we should treat this like a real-world task, and act in the way that we would if this was a proper job. Well, if this was a real-world situation then I’d be asking myself some pretty searching questions, like how on earth have I ended up in a job that involves making boxes out of pieces of paper? What possible use could these flimsy boxes actually be to anyone? Who is our customer? How the hell did I get this job? Surely I should have failed the interview. When the interviewer said “how are you when it comes to making boxes out of very thin flimsy bits of paper?” At that point I’d have realised that I’d walked into the wrong room, apologised for wasting their time, and asked them which floor the interviews for male lap dancers were being held on.

So, while my fellow team members made boxes out of bits of paper, I spent the time eating the free sandwiches, and thought about what I could write about today. When the task was completed, we were asked to rate our performance and say how well we thought we’d done. I thought I’d done pretty well. I’d eaten loads of free sandwiches and come up with a joke about listening to Bartók, while my hapless team mates had spent their time making boxes out of flimsy pieces of paper. In truth, I’d thought that I’d come out of this exercise with a lot more to show for it than my team mates. But I don’t think that was quite the answer she was looking for.

I’m not really sure how much my presence made a positive difference to the event, but Elsa seemed grateful and I sort of enjoyed the novelty of the afternoon. And I still managed to get back home and write – what I think is – a decent Dollop. Tomorrow, I’m off to a funeral, and there’ll be free sandwiches there too, so I think my life is going pretty well at the moment. Try not to be too envious.

Download this Dollop in audio form here

I’ve been roped into something by my housemate Elsa. The company she works for are doing a focus group, and someone has just dropped out at the last minute. Apparently the names need to be registered today, and so, out of desperation, she has asked me to fill the gap. So tomorrow I am going along to her place of work and participating in a focus group.

I have absolutely no idea what the focus group is for or about. She was just about to register the names when the person called to drop out, meaning that she had to quickly find someone else, and so all I received from her was a plea via text. I did point out to her that I probably wouldn’t fit her demographic, but she simply text back saying that she was desperate. This means that I’m probably going to have to do some acting tomorrow, as The company she works for provides training for immigrants and refugees. Is she expecting me to pretend to be a refugee? You’re probably thinking that this is highly unlikely, but you haven’t met Elsa. She is probably going to come home this evening and I’ll have to spend hours being prepped about the kind of person I am meant to be, my background, social and cultural status.

“So here’s the thing David. I need you to be a gay plumber who’s recently emigrated from Hungary.”

“You mean like when we do role-play when Ben’s away for the night?”

“Well, kind of, but not exactly. I’d strongly urge you to keep your clothes on tomorrow.”

“OK. Anything else I should know?”

“Yes, I also need you to drop the blind thing.”

“Drop the blind thing?”

“Yes, the gay plumber from Hungary isn’t blind.”

“But I am. In fact, as we established in yesterday’s Dollop, being blind is what I’m best known for.”

“Yes, but he isn’t. Keep up David, we haven’t got long. Now, let’s learn some Hungarian. Then we need to prime you with plumbing knowledge.”

“Could I not just say that I’m dyslexic, and I meant to write on the form that I am a Hungarian plumper, not a plumber? Then I wouldn’t need to spend the entire night learning about plumbing.”

“OK, good idea. So you’re a gay dyslexic Hungarian plumper. Drop the blindness, and get learning the Hungarian for fat, overweight and obese, and everything should go swimmingly.”

“Excellent. What could possibly go wrong? Except … as we discovered in yesterday’s Dollop, the Urban Dictionary describes plumping as when men go out to a bar or club with the sole purpose of hooking up with or hitting on fat, overweight, or preferably obese women. But I am supposed to be gay. And I don’t think we can get away with using the dyslexia trick more than once.”

“Well you could be a pioneer in the plumping world. You are a plumping revolutionary, campaigning to make plumping more of an inclusive, egalitarian pastime. Perhaps that could be your reason for coming to Britain, to take your campaign out of Hungary and to the rest of the world.”

“Yes, good one. A plumping pioneer; I like it. I am like the Martin Luther King of the plumping world. I am modernising this once sexist, heterosexual hobby, and making it more universally applicable and more politically correct. Well, as politically correct as going out and hunting fat people can be.”

On the plus side, at least I’ll potentially get another chapter for my book The Blagger’s Guide to Blagging. Chapter one, football, chapter two, dislexic gay Hungarian plumpers. I think chapter two might be a bit more niche, but still …

I am trying to write and record 365 consecutive daily blog posts and podcasts, but people and things keep getting in the way. Today it was my tax return. Tomorrow it’s pretending to be a gay Hungarian plumper, and on Thursday I’m going to a funeral. Elsa also wants me to watch the BBC television adaptation of War and Peace with her later tonight. You see what I have to put up with? It is very inconsiderate of people to inconvenience me like this, by insisting I pay tax, begging me to participate in focus groups, inviting me to watch TV adaptations of classic novels, and dying. What will they think of next to try and thwart my efforts? But I shall succeed in spite of it all.

Download today’s Dollop in audio form here

When you type David Eagle into Google (something which obviously I’ve never been so egocentric to do – I’m getting this from other people, you understand) you get a list of related search queries. These are based on what other people have previously searched for, in addition to the name David Eagle. At the top of the list is “David Eagle blind.” The same thing happens for the search term The Young’uns. So it seems that “blind” is the most commonly used word to follow after my name and the name of my folk group.

I’m not sure in what context these searches are being made. Are they watching the Young’uns live and thinking, “that one on the left looks a bit different. Do you think he’s blind? Well this ballad’s starting to get on my tits anyway, so a Google search will be a welcome distraction.” Or Are they typing David Eagle blind in order to be taken to the correct David Eagle. Is “David Eagle blind” viewed as the most expedient way of getting to me? I’d much rather it be “David Eagle sex god,” or “David Eagle genius,” rather than the majority of people plumping for the disability tag.

The spellchecker is unhappy with my use of the word plumping, and is telling me that it is incorrect. I started to doubt myself so did a Google search, and it’s David Eagle one, spellchecker nil, helping corroborate why “Davidd Eagle genius” would be just as valid a search term as “David Eagle blind.”

During my plumping search I also came upon the Urban Dictionary’s definition for the term “plumping”.

“(1) When one or more men go out to a club, bar, or McDonald’s for the sole purpose of hitting on and/or hooking up with overweight, fat, or, preferably, obese women.

(2) A great american pasttime, also known as “fat macking”
” Hey man, me and John are gonna go plumping tonight, would you like to accompany us?”

“I would LOVE to attend, I thoroughly enjoy plumping!”

I like the fact that they’ve included some dialogue between two characters to help us see how the word might be used. I don’t want to be snobby and prejudice here, but the way these two characters are speaking to each other seems at odds with the activity they are about to partake in. Their speech seems too formal to fit with the subject matter: “Would you like to accompany us?” “I would LOVE to attend, I thoroughly enjoy plumping!” Their way of addressing each other is rather formal and refined when you consider that they are essentially just about to crawl the streets to have sex with chubby women, unless they get really lucky and bag an obese one.

Hello to anyone who’s stumbled across this website when searching for David Eagle plump or David Eagle obese. You’ve got the wrong David Eagle, but you are very welcome. I am the blind David Eagle. That’s what I’m best known for – being blind.

Currently, when you search for “David Eagle blind” you get lots of interviews that I’ve done in which I am asked about being blind, as well as all the various blog posts I’ve written where I’ve referenced being blind. However, I’ve realised that there is scope for changing what comes up in search terms, and perhaps I can help create a better image for myself than simply being identified most easily by my blindness. Baring in mind that most of the pages linked to in the search results were written by me, I can set an agenda here. Obviously Google gives the searcher a bit of a taster of the content on the particular page listed, and so at the moment when you search for “David Eagle blind” you get a line of text for each result, such as, “So, baring that in mind, all that this exercise proves is that I am able to search an inbox, which ironically, a non-blind David Eagle imposter could more easily  …” which is an extract taken from my 21st Dollop. So here are some things I would like Google to show people when they search for David Eagle blind. Hopefully by writing this, my wish will become reality.

David Eagle has been unanimously crowned World’s Sexiest Blind Man, in a vote cast by thousands of the world’s top glamour models. That’s right, even sexier than David Blunkett.

David Eagle has won the award for most intelligent blind man for the 25th year running. “Thoroughly well deserved, the obvious winner,” said Stephen Hawking. “I’d take my hat off to him , but I can’t, for obvious reasons. That was a joke, and you can’t call me out for being sick, because I am Stephen Hawking who is saying this. If it was someone else doing a cheep joke about my terrible physical disability then that would be different, but I am Stephen Hawking, and I am saying this, which is therefore allowed. Remember to put this bit in quotes when you’re writing it up so that people know that it’s definitely a quote from me and not a sick joke by a journalist.”

David Eagle might be blind, but that hasn’t stopped him becoming a commercial airline pilot. “We are delighted to welcome David Eagle onto the team,” said Stelios Haji-Ioannou, boss of EasyJet . “He is the first blind pilot in history, and we believe that this is a landmark moment for equality of opportunity, and even more importantly, it means that we can pay him less because we get a special equality and diversity grant from the government. Being a budget airline, we are looking to employ more pilots who are blind, helping keep the costs down for us and our customers. We are also offering a voluntary blinding for all of our current non-blind pilots who are worried about losing their jobs due to our new pilot recruitment drive to find even more blind people. We believe that the voluntary blinding scheme should allay any sighted pilots fears about being made redundant by this new and exciting initiative. We are truly humbled and honoured to have the world’s most intelligent and sexiest blind man working for us, although we are a little concerned that he might distract our air stewardesses, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, providing David doesn’t crash into the bridge, killing us all.”

There, that should give Google something to work with, and should confuse quite a lot of people who search for “David Eagle blind.”

Feel free to leave a comment below with your own suggestions, as this will help increase the likelihood of getting this specific blog post to number one for the search term “David Eagle blind,” resulting in the confusion of even more people.