PETER PANIC

My Diary - Page One

01/01/07: Much of the day was spent sitting beside a celebrated giant head.  I felt compelled to emulate it's actions.  When it breathed in, I breathed in; when it breathed out, I breathed out.  When it went in, I made baby noises; when it went out, I clambered round in the dark thinking of the lost songs of the Cosmic Gerbil. 
02/01/07: Back to normality, which today took the form of a frozen lake as smooth as a shaving mirror.  I skated across it, seeing ripples in my own face.  I never cut myself once.
03/01/07: Out all day, spending part of the time with an old colleague of mine, an Egyptian princess.  Her hair was like a sacrificial pyre and her face had a launching ship written all over it.  She is renowned for tipping her dinner on her lap before commencing to eat it.
04/01/07: I had a lay in.  When I finally got up I found myself inside a gigantic suit of clothes.  It took a lot of scrambling down legs and across arms before I was able to escape, clasping something I found in the back pocket.
05/01/07: I went out today, followed by the world's first subterrafirma.  I could see it's periscope following me like a dog.  I came home with pointed ears and music emanating from a bouquet of dried flowers.
06/01/07: Back on the parade ground.  The young soldiers could talk in march like synchronicity while I barked like a baboon on a mountain overlooking the whole evolution of the human race.
07/01/07: Alone with my dog in a cavernous ice house.  We communicated with echoes while I lifted my hat to reveal a miniature Christmas Pudding.  I later scratched my head in bewilderment as I attempted to emulate (in chocolate sauce) an off road race track.
08/01/07: I was given a diary and discovered parts of my life already written down in it.  Of course, I knew I was the only dancer in the hall.  To save money, the orchestra was paper cut-outs pasted onto the walls.
09/01/07: Spent part of the day painting from a hang glider.  A brick was posted in the letter box to act as ballast.  In the evening I sprouted wings - which was considered by all as slightly ironic.
10/01/07: At home all day - which is unusual for the centre of the week.  I have come to accept that the house is old enough to need a blond wig.  However, today I caught it applying Mae West lipstick to it's door posts.  When the mail arrived it would pout.
11/01/07: Out with an apparition from the land of broken sticks.  We visited the fireside and came home inside an old black and white film.  Poppy discovered that the wind had blown the fence down.
12/01/07: The last full day in solitary confinement.  I got the one remaining picture out of my pocket and sat on a stop watch.  At the end of the day I finally worked out the secret of the farm tractor face.
13/01/07: I raced an early chariot.  Rain fell from the rising sun and a great luminosity appeared in the middle of big clouds.  I came home to skeletal applause.  June later returned from an epic Eighteenth Century sea battle.
14/01/07: Went to market in the slipstream of a pirate ship.  Bought a bandana and sang in the chorus of an imaginary opera.  I had to tap dance all evening.
15/01/07: Quite a comfortable day.  I brought a piece of railway track out of my pocket and drew a map on the bed linen.  The mechanical spirits had realised that the shapes in the sky mirrored the shapes in my head.
16/01/07: The sun shone only for the briefest moment.  When it did so I saw the silhouette of a hammer hitting an anvil.  Quite a busy day as I scurried about the headless chicken pen.
17/01/07: I was tenaciously clinging to the side of a whirlpool all day.  The only thing I could reach was a faithful copy of the back of my head.  Mirrors everywhere reflected a neon imagination - even those with moustaches glued to the glass.
18/01/07: A day in Hurricane City, dodging shards of glass and tear drops from robotic gods - Olympus was already a metropolis when I was just a peasant farmer.  I was stressed out like litmus paper.
19/01/07: Out to the cabbage patch citadel in the very early morning (rough tracks move from the present day to my childhood).  I found the room hidden in the cumulonimbus clouds and took out a flattened portrait.  I brought home grapes.
20/01/07: An early start, the sky was like a cloth cap.  I walked down the road carrying a ladder and came back with a snake.  In between I had conversed with characters from an ancient Greek story - we pretended to dabble our toes in a mythical stream
21/01/07: I went back to bed after taking my wife to work in a sack.  When I woke up I found the lock to the morning had a new combination, by the time I had learnt it, it was afternoon.  After dinner, I took a jet pack out of my back pocket and flew.
22/01/07: I went to work astride a corrugated cardboard boat, much like the type the Vikings were burnt in.  I discussed multiple destinies with the Queen of the Capybaras and then came home in a suitcase carried by myself.
23/01/07: I saw a girl today who wore such large boots all you could see of her was the top of her head.  She gave me some good advice then promised to suck my blood.  It is bitterly cold.  I thought of holidays on Venus as I nursed a penguin.
24/01/07: Took Poppy to see the good witch today.  She had a spell cast on her and I regressed to a caveman state.  This was after I disappeared into a tree with a snake on wheels but before I hid in a cupboard while June rode a mechanical horse to the white wizard's residence.
25/01/07: Poppy and I are taking long walks again.  Today, we went to the reed beds where the space rockets are born - walking past Cerebus like two red uniformed soldiers.  I  marvelled at the willows in the sunshine as I leant against an old gate with a Russian lady on my head.
26/01/07: Out in the frying pan countryside before first light.  I had to get back early as I was the head jester at a banquet given by Henry II in the evening.
27/01/07: I have arranged to have a springy mattress, wall to wall at the bottom of the dungeon.  The smell of last night entered through the only window while I chatted with wood nymphs.  The Korean Master and I plan to walk between every animal name in the country.
28/01/07: I chilled in the morning sunshine before the guillotine blade of afternoon came down.  During the evening I had to be a figure from ancient mythology in a Nineteenth Century Parisian night club.
29/01/07: I took the green carpet to the place where the day is spent, filled up the computer with coloured liquid and sang a dirge by our long forgotten ancestors in the public library.  At home, in celebration of the day's events I dropped my dinner on the carpet and danced on it.
30/01/07: I spent too much of the day going to and from the various places  in town where the ritual fires are lit.  I lit my own candle and used it to paint.  When the paint dries it will grow dark.
31/01/07: In the large head that hangs over the town a pendulum swings backwards and forwards, underneath, a girl come forwards and a boy goes away.  I had to give a performance wrapped in sellotape.  It was called "I whispered my secrets to the ribbon of the wind".
01/02/07: A day of smudged spectacles.  I felt like I was living under a great sheet - when I moved the dogs pounced thinking I was a rabbit.  The giant rabbit trundles forward, cannons blazing from turrets hung either side.  I received my letters and I posted my letters.
02/02/07: I was out in the morning, across the bridge made from strands of childhood hair. I dressed as a monk with a helicopter landing pad on my head.  On my return, I stayed on the mermaid chair working until the evening; then I went out again, a cross painted on my forehead.
03/02/07: I spent my day on an imaginary hill in a mythical place.  The shepherdesses talked incessantly.  I spent my evening in an imaginary hole in a semi-mythical place.  The lights moved like pendulums.
04/02/07: I had to walk my wife to the house of old shadows very early in the morning, so early that the dawn was still creaking.  I decided not to go back to bed but cut open the morning with a mouth I had earlier framed.  I knew I would later have to walk on broken glass.
05/02/07: I hung my exhibition of bat wings today.  I hung them upside down so everyone knew what they meant.  When I got home I ate my dinner straight from the cauldron while the cardboard people cackled.  I then decided to do something about my Shakespearean stress.
06/02/07: I, and my cellophane second self, were worried about the future today.  It is difficult being relaxed while swimming among the tentacles of jellyfish.  I normally spin on  a record player in the evening but did so at noon today. However, I am still several termite mound shadows away from a High Noon.
07/02/07: Out to town today.  I stood like a maypole and worked like a horsefly.  I had a number of jobs to do before I accidentally appeared on stage in a scene with Queen Alison.  It was cold all day and the air was so close to crackly paper that I signed my name on it.
08/02/07: We all woke up to snow on the school tie that snakes it's way up to the mill on the hill.  It disappeared before I could question it about the white rabbit and the frown on the wall that never fades.  I contemplated making a bridge across the channel while hanging from a trapeze during the long throat lozenge afternoon.
09/02/07:  A bad weather day.  I spent most of it with women as thin as pencils - writhing like stooks of corn.  I had to go out in the evening, all of a sudden, to examine the teeth of huge cavernous mouth - like the presumed gates of hell
10/02/07: We went to a religious ceremony on a warship today.  I looked round at all the pipes.  We went down through a sea of hands and came back through a meadow of blinking eyes.  It didn't rain all day.
11/02/07: A more leisurely day today, lying on my back among big cats on an African plain as flat as a bed spread.  I spent the morning in the garden with smoke coming from my hat.  The evening was dark.
12/02/07: I was up early and out of the house before my wife could crawl out of the giant sock she was sleeping in.  I stuffed Poppy the dog into a sausage roll and left for the bus - which was late.  On my return, I only had time to pace the decks of the Scharnhorst a few times before having to go out again.  When I finally got in, I talked to long dead cowboys and then went to bed.
13/02/07: The days in the enchanted forest go fast; although I did fit a lot in - inside the glass bottle that held the air from primeval swamps.  I went to town, dangling from a coloured cord like a spider and I gave blood.  The nurse was a community of worms working together as one.  I split into two and remembered my late mother's birthday.
14/02/07: At sea on an ark without animals - another of my childhood dreams unfulfilled.  I then spent most of the day working in a shop buried deep within a great pyramid.  Very few people braved the sleeping snakes.  The evening was spent in an upturned pyramid that spun like a children's top.
15/02/07: I wanted to go to the cowboy badlands early in the morning, before the weather changed and I had to paint pictures of plants pulling their roots up and running away.  Unfortunately Poppy doesn't like geese so, instead, we sailed up an old road in a South American tribal longboat.  Despite this, I was quite content today - mainly because I didn't have to go out (like a candle) in the evening. 
16/02/07: I was feeling depressed this morning - now that Theseus has passed over the horizon - so I took dragon dog out for  long walk.  We went to a big pond shaped like a fish.  I thought about feeding the ducks, but  didn't.  When I came back, King Kong was half way up the floral curtains.
17/02/07: This was one of the renowned "lumpy" days.  After a long walk on a snail's back I slipped into my role of ancient sentinel like a glove slips into a hand.  I stood as a venerable oak man in the chicken roost - I named the chickens and then went home.
18/02/07: I was back to the tame wood after a short absence, the dormice were asleep under chairs and a pile of logs had been placed on the dinner table.  A man called "door post" wanted to take all the wood home with him.
19/02/07: I drew the curtains, the window frame was composed of shop mannequins.  Across the road there was a sign saying, "the world is a writing desk".  I wrote a note to myself from The Wise and Wizened Sea Goat. 
20/02/07: I had an early visit to the doctor with curly hair.  Later I became the wristwatch of the day.  I didn't have enough time to unfold the flag of an imaginary country but licked several furry postage stamps.  I was humming a song I thought I had written years ago when the telephone rang.
21/02/07: I walked the sticky flypaper to the place of work.  On entering I proclaimed, "behold, the Great Ant Eater!", I then settled down to being a piece of pinball furniture.  It was a fairly quiet day as I stood with a rainbow coming out of my head.
22/02/07: It was not as good a day as it should have been.  I am still attached to the elastic band that pulls me back into the spinning dancer box.  At least the music is better than it was.  I had to put on my space suit helmet and watch the goldfish nibble my eyelids for a lot of the day.
23/02/07: A quiet day as the Easter Island family stood around like discarded thimbles.  The floor was littered with lipstick and unread notes.  Becky hung from a giant kite while she introduced her mother.   I almost did a lot of things.
24/02/07: Today was a long day - the dragon's tale extended the whole length of the escalator with twig people going up and down.  I met the fox cubs in the secret grove and we recited strange mantras about nepotistic editors and poor chefs in flames.  I pulled a burning match out of the freezer and showed it to them.
25/02/07: A Sunday morning spent in the garden of Stalingrad.  Flowers sprouted  like incoming shells.  I  did odd jobs on a see saw while June made paper smiles on a to and fro swing.  The old plum tree in the centre of my memory burst forth with machine gun bullets.
26/02/07: I did a slow motion dance on a floor of papier mache while holding up the roof of a derelict gothic mansion.  I subsequently managed to glue together the hands of ribbon people with an artist's palette for a halo.  I finally discovered the secret of the reptiles who live under the floorboards in childhood house.
27/02/07: June and I took the Snake Boat to the city today.  We had the water melon coach on the way there and the aubergine coach on the way home.  As is often the case, we were chased by red indian rain drops.  In the city we traced are traditional path and, as usual, ate our meal in the place where canvases have their throats cut.
28/02/07: Back to Mouth Town today.  More red indians on the way down the descending grey carpet.  This trail is where the memories of naked horses reside.  Once in the round house I communicated with all the guests, human and machine, and was glowing like a burning fish until the power was suddenly cut.
01/03/07: I hid my studio inside a spinning cup and then dived in for the day.  However, most of the time was spent with me reclining on a digestive biscuit with ticker tape issuing from my mouth.  My great friend, the bull frog, swallowed a worm.
02/03/07: I spent the early hours in the Great Countryside; this resides on the other side of the temporal waterfall.  I came home sitting on the lap of the biggest Aunt Sally in the world.  A stream of black birds followed the bus.
03/03/07: A very busy day,  I tried out the costume of Hydra but then decided to play Hercules.  The drama opened and closed with arms and legs protruding from small fluffy clouds.  Words were written on the clouds; the biggest cloud had the smallest word - ouch!
04/03/07: I felt unnaturally tired all day (like I had been fighting mythical monsters all night) and did little more than write messages on a tent the size of a postage stamp.  I felt unwell in the evening and went to bed early - in an Etruscan monument.
05/03/07: Ill in bed all day.  The bed was a giant animal's jaw with columns of hot air and steam.  I decided I was a sinking ship and swallowed ice cubes.
06/03/07: Still very bad,  I hardly got out of bed aa day and trees started to take root on the duvet.  A hunting part of long tailed tits raced among the branches.
07/03/07: I discovered I had got chicken pox - just as I volunteered to become one of the Argonauts.  The black ship sailed away over the horizon like a giant tooth.  I put the Golden Fleece on my head and scratched it.
08/03/07: The chicken pox got worse. A giant furry octopus dangling over the bed and incessantly tickling me.  I read about ruined palaces where paintings became invisible and the old towers escaped with young servants.
09/03/07: There was a slow improvement in my health today.  I haven't been in my studio hardly at all this week.  When I got near the door I could hear strange laughter and the crackle of paint brushes burning on the heart shaped palette.
10/03/07: I pottered around on the edge of doing things all day.  Like the edge of a volcano, I could look down and see the vast energy below.  I drew a red eye on my forehead and drunk from cupped hands.  The antihistamine tablets appear to be working.
11/03/07: As the weather was nice I decided to spend the day in the garden, standing still in the pose of a German Expressionist and transferring messages from my old self to the new.  I saw Mansfield Park again.
12/03/07: I am beginning to feel better and returned to my studio as a bedouin arab.  I didn't produce a huge amount of work as a sand storm blew fiercely and I narrowly missed marrying a camel.  However, I did manage to dress a number of paintings in the latest fashion - including the essential accessories.
13/03/07: I felt more like my normal self today.  I contemplated life in a land of cognizant potatoes and I set sail for the land of fruit flavoured milk shakes in an anthropomorphic boat.  The boat is kept tethered to the Ancient Briton chimney protruding from the roof.
14/03/07: I felt even more content as I sat on the huge disc of a visiting craft.  My three eyes followed a line, drawn with flowers, from my discarded hat to the round tower on the horizon.  Light left the tower millions of years ago.  The hat had three feathers in the brim.
15/03/07: The morning was laid out like a carpet as I pushed all the new scenery down the hill - having bought it with my old credit card.  Dressed as an Inca warrior, I opened the wardrobe (which I want to replace with one shaped like a Tyrannosaurus Rex) and found a number of cardboard cut-out personas - one had got a bit bent round the edges.
16/03/07: A better day, as wings sprouted from under my jacket and I was able to preen my feathers from one of the tall conifers behind the flour mill.  The small birds in my head fluttered industriously but I wondered if I should have followed their migration routes more diligently.
17/03/07: I was out in my past in the morning.  I was Jack and climbed up the beanstalk, through the clouds, to the land where all the curtains have tears in them.  I came home in a chariot pulled by swans.  The afternoon was spent in green-fingered bliss.
18/03/07: Another day in the garden.  I felt tired in the morning and spent some time curled up in a blackbird's nest.  In the afternoon I felt better and marched plants around the parade ground.  At the end of the day, flowers were cast at the feet of the magazine person when I finally went along the path to the retirement home
19/03/07: This was the first day of my magic week.  You can guarantee it will go too quickly.  I made a number of resolutions (which I must keep) while following the calligraphic path of the Sleep Angel.  I perfected the art of levitation and ascended through the sewers in the sky - "come with me sky birds" I was heard to say.
20/03/07: The wind was extremely cold today - as you read this, the cheese wire cuts through the mature cheddar in the shape of an early Celtic god.  I kept indoors as much as possible, wearing my sorcerers hat.  The few occasions I did venture out I donned a lion outfit.  I saluted the zoos in the large jars in the old fashioned sweet shop.
21/03/07: A blissful Wednesday, playing among the coloured spider webs that stretch from one corner of the house to the other.  Whenever I touched a strand, church music played - in a dream I walked naked down the aisle while the choir sang.  I pulled several lengths of spaghetti from my head and knitted a jumper.
22/03/07: It snowed this morning, while I travelled to the land of daisy seeds.  While watching the midget soldiers march by I hoped for a rope to descend through a hole in the ceiling - it didn't!  I need to make the jigsaw pieces fit together in a different way but I haven't got the tools to make this happen.  I had a crust of bread for breakfast.
23/03/07: I had fun in the morning rearranging all the strands that were entwined round the maypole protruding from a hole in the living room carpet.  I danced a jig with two hammers in my hands.  Pink clouds hung in the air of my studio - I sat like a red indian with smoke issuing from my hat - while a grey squirrel won the local ploughing competition.
24/03/07: Back to the Coliseum today to walk to and fro like an angry gorilla.  I spoke to the girls made from rose petals and listened to old people carried around in shopping bags.  I said a prayer for all the animals that ate Christians.  I escaped the volcano in the evening by carrying my wife across a sea of ice.
25/03/07: I spent most of today in the garden, where giant bearded lizards made sinuous paths through the gravel.  I excavated an ancient burial mound and found bright red bones.  It took a little while to find a small patch of bright green grass to rest them on.  A robin chased a blackbird.
26/03/07: A new week, with me a school boy caught wearing a wreath of spring flowers.  I had a joke with the trainee undertaker before shaking her hand.  She was dressed all in black with bright pink underwear.  When the doll's clothes were cast on the floor they spelt another word.  I did arithmetic with spilt milk bottle tops.
27/03/07: I was still alive all day with the undertaker, she, still in black and hiding a tomato sauce bottle in her top pocket.  We talked of the shadows of giant birds wings and the snippet of a song which was heard on the breeze as old animals walked slowly into the diminishing distance.  I came home to find my home transformed into a windmill.
28/03/07: The last day for a little while as an initialled handkerchief (a red indian handkerchief joked the upright piano I never learnt to play).  I  exchanged long words with short people before drawing big red lips on a white t-shirt.  Messages hung from the ceiling like moth cocoons but I refused to notice them until it was time to go home.
29/03/07: A casual, hole in the ground, kind of day.  I walked around with a slipper on my head while pretending to be a cricket umpire..  I didn't have to go out at all although I did draw a number of knobs on the front door just in case.  The bell wouldn't ring when I pushed it but instead elected to die by hemlock rather than suffering the humiliation of banishment.  In the evening I wrote letters to myself again - Oh well!
30/03/07: I walked the old farmer's rope in the early hours, tying knots at regular intervals so I could find my way home again.  However, I couldn't find the glove puppet I went to school with and came back with telescopic arms.  Whenever I laughed a single decker bus drove out of my mouth, every time revealing a different destination.
31/03/07: I stepped out of the door quite early, I was already two miles high and grew more during the day.  I surprised the girls I was working with by wearing one hat on top of another.  I lifted them in turn when I said hello.  Under the bottom hat was a rabbit with three rows of cannons running down each side of it's body.  The evening was spent in the lion's den.