PETER PANIC

My Diary - Page Two

01/04/07: A day in the slipstream of an imaginary ship.  I was the captain with the nickname, Nelson.  I made a garden with temporal strips woven together like a small bird's nest.  I drunk the afternoon sun in a cup and then spent the evening with an ex-soldier who was thinking of joining the army.
02/04/07: I woke suddenly, half dressed as a medieval jester.  After putting a striped school tie on a hairy spider which was hiding in the corner of the bathroom I sat at the breakfast table with a typewriter for a mouth.  In the afternoon I found the invisible door and knocked loudly.
03/04/07: In the morning I went out with my wife, who was pretending to be an automated hairstyle.  We both held up the world for a while before having dinner in a supermarket queue.  I bought two holes for the garden and June bought a string of sausages for the dog.  The first sausage played a tune when you blew in it
04/04/07: I decided to wear a bluebell for a hat this morning, the cold wind was blowing inside my coat.  I imagined myself being followed by giant ants.  The morning was spent counting holes and the afternoon filling them in.  The evening was unproductive as I pretended to be a feather boa.
05/04/07: I went out in the morning; to a country with gigantic weeds - I was going to pull some of them out but I was asked to stop by the kindly water rat.  On my return home I learnt of the death of a friend.  I built a teepee in the garden and contemplated the lost great herds of bison.
06/04/07: The start of the Easter Holidays - which doesn't actually apply to me.  I spent time among the rings and diagonal lines that mark the ground at the foot of an extinct volcano.  The volcano lit a pipe and mused about it's childhood.  I studied my footprints and spoke to Pam about the tiny cat that cannot hear the footsteps that follow it.
07/04/07: I was alone when I woke and had to stir the boiling cauldron on my own.  I cast a spell and flew to the shops.  I stood tall like an electricity pylon among raucous baby gulls.  They pulled at scraps and gave their lives good exam results.  I gave myself lines.
08/04/07: We went out to lunch at a premature noon, the meal table was attached to a tortoise's back - I nearly slid off several times while trying to make a clown face out of my napkin.  I was accidentally given the last drink of a Portuguese explorer which shocked the entire congregation.  The evening was spent going round the world - I frowned for half of the way and smiled for the rest.
09/04/07: After a great deal of thought I became the captain of a pirate ship; I wore medusa missiles instead of hair and gave each gun a pet name.  Fido and I had to parade with skeletons before retiring to an oceanic opera box.  Back on the beach in the afternoon, I weeded while burying my treasure.
10/04/07: I dreamt a very interesting dream and then woke up feeling sick.  Of the day itself, part of it was spent with a strange being, probably a fairy, sitting tightly on my head.  I struggled between fallen masonry as wraith like figures stepped in and out of the light.  For the night I was tied to a shark's back.
11/04/07: At the beginning of the day, rows of people walked by holding recently amputated dog's tails.  I helped as many of these misunderstood coat hangers as I could.  At the end of my tasks I pinned a note on a donkey which read, "Help!, I have been captured by diaphanous sea cows!". 
12/04/07: I went to the village of my childhood and spent an hour sitting under the table counting strands of hair that heroes had climbed up.  Back to Manic Town by noon, where spirits climbed down bed sheets from the fires in the sky.  I tied two sheets together and made the sign of infinity. 
13/04/07: I was out all day, partly in a huge hall where the talk of yesterday still reverberated around the walls and partly in the long tunnel where car headlights behave like the eyes of spiders.  I trudged back and forth with a plough in my bag and a shire horse on my shoulders while my alter-ego spent the evening in the form of a nebulous cloud growing inexorably heavier.
14/04/07: I was out again, the town was a bedspread disturbed by a violent sleep.  I  went down past Spring flowers and came back under a Summer sky of seagulls.  The girl wearing a lampshade for a dress allowed me to metamorphose into a red giant as the universe continued to expand.
15/04/07: I walked out into the garden quite early in the day, the ground was shaped like a fallen warrior's shield.  I spent a lot of the day doing non-important things while a stone crashed to earth with my name (spelt backwards) scratched into it's side.
16/04/07: The only day of this week I could rest on my slab of marble, as usual making small indentations with my bare feet.  I hung my hair in a fisherman's net as I tried to concentrate on making facial lines on the landscape that protruded through the window.  I made a giant's bed and became a dwarf.
17/04/07: I had to go to the dentist; this was situated in a white room right at the top of a tower of candy floss - I decided against treatment.  The dental nurse pirouetted with a chain saw as I remembered the quiet man who pulled teeth and planted trees.  On the way home I saw an apparition of Daniel in a hamster's den.
18/04/07: I was a chess piece on the urban chess board for all day and all evening, even though the evening was an old cruise liner steaming into the distance.  The distance wants to be a holiday rep and loves babies.
19/04/07: Another urbanised day and I hid like an artificial heart in a teddy bear.  I was away from the lip shaped sauna by mid-afternoon.  From then on I could become a pair of casual clothes.  The evening was lit by oil lamps as I worked in the sugar cane fields disguised as a stick of seaside rock.
20/04/07: I was home in the morning and the smiling part of the afternoon.  The house was shaped like an electric guitar and a column of birds ascended the central vent which in the age before robots ruled the world would have been called the chimney.  During the evening I went down the darkest pit.
21/04/07: I was out and about in the savage mist lands almost the whole of the pump handle shaped day.  All that could be detected of me was a voice coming from behind the cascading waterfall.
22/04/07: A good morning with the feel of a picnic cloth spread across it.  I was the sower of the future at noon and at the very aerial point of the day (when the daylight was covered up by chimpanzees) Ben and I worked out how to attach a butterfly net to a warship.
23/04/07: A thin streak of both yesterday and tomorrow lit the morning.  I nonchalantly touched the finger tips of the gigantic hand I was resting on and then wondered why the town clock had hands that moved slower than the grandfather clock on my wrist.  I rose up and an island followed in my wake.
24/04/07: A day spent with a bird cage as a hat and a cape draped round my shoulders.  Shadowman and I worked out a number of strategies to rescue Cinderella who was pressing faces onto pillow cases.  In the end we decided to build a channel from a remote farmhouse to the sea.
25/04/07: I fluttered to town quite early, feeling like debris in the spiral machine that rests on the ground and reaches for the sky.  The dinner time was spent discussing mutual ancestors with one of the cyclops and I came home in a mule train.  Ben gave me an American beer when I arrived dressed as a silk moth caterpillar.
26/04/07: This was going to be my "dance with white draperies day" but I ended up trudging along like an old digger.  I shuffled my own cards and dealt myself a deck which preoccupied my mind when I should have been just a silver flash on a knife bright morning.  In the later pages of the day I found a snail shell and went to sleep in it.
27/04/07: A trip to the magic allotments where old men till their memories.  It proved to be an eventful morning as a forgotten land was spied from the crows nest and starlings mobbed jackdaws at the top of the garden.  Later, I hung from the ropes of an army assault course reciting the poems I wrote as a child.
28/04/07: Today was as busy as a two headed day can be.  The morning was composed of strange knots which only the very youngest could untie.  The middle of the day was spent searching the urban wilderness for countryside riddles and during the female evening Ben and I discussed a film neither of us had ever seen.
29/04/07: I spent much of the day in the garden, where gibbons hung from croquet hoops and animal calls pierced the sky between the lines of elaborate stencils held up against it.  I met someone who abducted aliens, even though no one believed their stories after their ordeal.
30/04/07: Totally by surprise, I was picked up by a giant eagle this morning and taken to the tallest tower in the town.  I then had to grow my hair incredibly long so that I could climb down again - eating cucumber sandwiches on the way.  It was a long walk home.
01/05/07: Another day among the wood shavings at the feet of the ancient carpenter.  In the circus ring I met the crepuscular princess with spiders dangling on silk as earrings and a picture of the Sahara on her navel.  We both felt the heat of the t-shirt fire and both plunged our hands in the gold long ago taken from the foot of a rainbow.
02/05/07: A flower petal morning which quickly transformed itself into the centre of a giant unblinking eye.  I was merely a mote floating across the lenses.  Talking to myself while listening to others I jotted down the instructions for the life machine I had recently purchased.  I was thinking about taking it back when the eye closed and I went home to become a lobster pot.
03/05/07: I had to go to London this morning.  When I found it, seated on a launch pad of old rags, it was wearing a strange hat with feathers curling like claws.  I held on tight as we all rocketed into the sky, me with my newly purchased network card in my pocket.  Coming back to Earth, I smiled at a venerable old tree and it smiled back.
04/05/07: Today had a parting like a youthful head of hair on an old man.  I walked along it like Moses, getting paid in army rations.  I caught the wild cat home and waited for wise words as I slipped the evening on like comfortable clothes.  At the end of the tired day, as I was drifting off to sleep, the cat caught me back - I said nothing. 
05/05/07: Out in the morning, travelling by maggot train.  I had a good time making and breaking things before catching the beetle bus home again.  The afternoon was spent in a dream state with the songs of the Shetland Isles in my brain and the evening was spent in a whale.
06/05/07: I was free in the morning to escape, like the missing part of a jigsaw puzzle, although I did not spend my time as wisely as I should and the afternoon was a sailing boat with my multiple shadows caught up in the rigging.  I played scrabble with a peg legged parrot and then went off to work again in a fools gold mine.
07/05/07: I had the whole day in the Tinkerbell garden.  After a slow start wrestling snakes I ballooned and blossomed like a sea anemone.  I filled my rucksack with accomplished tasks and then hid a sofa and matching chair in my head.  I played a holiday tune on the path of bones that led into an enchanted picture.
08/05/07: After a brief period growing a tail and then chasing I had to take the long trip to Dungeon Town (again).  The shopping centre looked forlorn with big black cows chasing each other overhead - frightened by the screech of credit cards.  I took my position on the dance floor, standing as usual with limp arms among the lithe puppets.
09/05/07: Away from Dungeon Town for a day although I did have to put a pair of tights over my head and deposit some money in the bank.  I painted a picture with glove puppets on my hands then took them off to rub it out.  The evening was taken up playing a bouncy toy on the bottom of a budgie cage.
10/05/07: I went to see myself in future years this morning. Catching an early bus as easily as I caught chicken pox earlier in the year.  We pulled our respective beards and a garden cultivator shot out, it's tines moving at twice the normal speed.  I spent the evening attaching a sofa to the ceiling using my shoe laces.
11/05/07: Back on the convoluted race track of urban life.  I raced along trying to feel my pulse as the hens cackled behind reinforced glass.  I longed to replace street lights with wild flowers - using both common and Latin names.  With some hesitation, I pulled out a card at random from my breast pocket and it read Venus' Looking Glass.
12/05/07: We all went to the land of ships today.  I drew lines round pebbles cast aside by retreating pedestrians while the babies stormed a castle.  The door step, which I sat on like King Canute, murmured to itself in several different languages at once.  I sharpened my pencil and cut a line through the brightening sky, the land subsequently unzipped and a knight of old came riding out holding a cheese and tomato sandwich in each outstretched hand.
13/05/07: I was looking forward to spending today in a subtropical garden but the weather was the dreaded dirty sheets on a rusty frame.  I pulled back the bedding to see the outline of a figure.  I put coins where the eyes should have been and went out to buy some milk - losing my umbrella in the process.
14/05/07: I got my cough back, after a week of only seeing it fleetingly as it ran to get a bus.  I coughed my way to town and back, saluted the pixie girl and made a modern housing estate from scraps of old newspaper.  When I got home I didn't feel like working so I dissected the television and watched the school room worm.  My old science teacher was called Mr Reason.
15/05/07: My cough has got worse, not only did I open my mouth and an express train hurtled out, but the white doves which traditionally form a halo over my head had been changed into raucous crows.  During the day, I talked with the black crow girl about the future of Christians in test tubes.
16/05/07: On waking I tended my wounds received fighting the faceless hordes that crawl down the open curtains at night.  I pulled an arrow from my side and watched it bleed.  I needed to visit the Green Queen before noon and rowed a boat up the High Street - tripping over the rapids on my way home.
17/05/07: I was alone on the watch tower for the happy part of the day - I was high enough to feel sorry for the ants that scurried to and fro.  I eventually pulled a jigsaw from my pocket and attempted to lose a piece - I was coughing too much to draw straight lines on a naked woman sat in the armchair.
18/05/07: A busy morning gliding on the smiling skating rink.  The classical Greek girls hummed songs of the heroes of their youth while I faded away in the colours of old age.  Later I was the tall  lighthouse lighting the way for lost ships as Ben told me the story of his friend the Lion Jellyfish.
19/05/07: A busy morning gliding on the smiling skating rink.  The classical Greek girls hummed songs of the heroes of their youth while I faded away in the colours of old age.  Later I was the tall  lighthouse lighting the way for lost ships as Ben told me the story of his friend the Lion Jelly fish.
20/05/07: In the hopeless garden most of the day.  This comprised of miles of imaginary roadways with parts of cars cemented into place like faithful guards at Pompeii.  Among the twists of steel a mirror sat, preening it's feathers and singing forlorn songs.  I dug three holes and filled in two of them sometime later.
21/05/07: I was feeling depressed all day - in a waking dream a frog came in and insisted on a kiss, after which I turned into a prince and a hand emerged from the quicksand and grasped a red rose before being sucked back down into the depths.  All the men on the horizon were hunched and grey.
22/05/07: Still depressed I swam in the blonde lady's coffee cup in the morning before donning my superhero costume and hanging from the ceiling like a coat hanger.  I was feeling strangely dignified until someone came in out of sunshine and hung their coat on me.  I felt myself as I would feel my wallet.
23/05/07: Right from take off from my private launch pad I was the Toby Jug Man who could eclipse all other toby jugs.  They pulled the apple out of my mouth and I was found to be holding old pins, washers, boiled sweet papers and date stones.  I went to town as a paper yacht and came back stuck in a plastic bottle.
24/05/07: Dismal Times - this was originally named after a newspaper written for people of little hope by an old man in Eighteenth Century costume - which I read sitting on a slice of toast with shackles on my wrist like a plastic dummy in a library.  Afterwards I turned into a butterfly as the room flew away.
25/05/07: Today (as I woke tied to a tent pole) I wanted to navigate a new river like a vein in my head.  Instead, I painted two thousand  portraits of myself, only one of which was smiling.  After flying my flag at half mast I went out in the evening to be a false tooth in an open mouth.
26/05/07: I sat early in the day on the divan called the English countryside.  Unfortunately I had to come home to wear the urban fur coat.  I managed to tie a number of rubber bands together before going out to cast shadows in the bright light.
27/05/07: I woke to a sky full of jelly fish tentacles, some with stinging cells and some with boiled sweets.  I couldn't attempt to find the source of a mighty river so I stayed inside painting pictures with seaside rock.  When I went back into our bedroom to find the time I was surprised to see a mannequin wearing my pyjamas.
28/05/07: Terrible weather again.  I planned to clean the teeth of the crocodile I call my garden but I had to stay inside the old Arab's tent for most of the day.  The invisible ones played the ancient games while I painted a realistic portrayal of flying camel droppings.
29/05/07: I trudged to town with a sack of biscuits on my back for the eleven o'clock tea break.  I soon became the slave of the stickman and placed grey holes across the alphabetical floor according to size and seniority.  I came home with a flower pot on my head (hiding my straw ears).
30/05/07: I was as busy as the face of a clown all day, with only short breaks to climb the straw out of the milk shake.  After a day digging coal in the larder I was annoyed when the business man in his railway track suit criticised my imaginary guitar playing.
31/05/07: Another big black spider day with multiple arms and legs for disgruntled people to crawl along.  I took the Tightrope Express to town, taking care to keep my bat wings hidden under my bobble hat.
01/06/07: Before I started my straw in mouth trip I accepted the challenge of a tug-of-war contest against myself - I won.  I spent my dinner on a revolving wheel and then took the bus to the place in the country still inhabited by cognizant string vests.  Once there I took a king crab for a walk
02/06/07: This was a bronze frog on a lily pad day.  I watched as myriads came in for names and numbers.  I let the pixies play.  Later, Ben and I pulled mermaids out of cans of lager as the sun picked at the tree tops with a dustpan and brush.
03/06/07: A day in the smiling garden, it took a little while for me to pull the limousine out of it's pyjamas but once the net had lifted it was a very hot day.  Flowers shimmered on the burning coals and as I didn't have to talk to the subterranean dwarves that night  I was able to pick up the loops of silver with ease.
04/06/07: I had a summer walk in the late morning to the town that stood on stilts in the valley.  I remembered a similar walk as a child carrying a steam locomotive (which I called Clive) on my back.  I dropped the white handkerchief as planned but was never picked up.
05/06/07: A bad day said the water vole to the vacuum man.  I had to claw my way up the looking glass mountain while Dorothy flew with wings coming out of her satchel.  I, reluctantly, put bunting up over the gaping wound that had appeared in the sun wall and, equally reluctantly, spoke multiple truths to the mindless mouth.
06/06/07: After my long trek to the Sixteenth Century town wrapped in an old sock I found it necessary to hang upside down in a heavily merchandised sack for a short period.  I read the adverts already sewed to my clothes while I dictated a message to my future self - I only hope I read it.
07/06/07: I went to Window In Time Land very early in the morning.  Far earlier than I would normally contemplate peeling myself from the subconscious fascia boards of the sleep store.  While in the West of Eden I put in plants that immediately ran away when I revisited them with a container of holy liquid.
08/06/07: A day spent to the east of the land I lived in yesterday.  It went too quickly even though I danced a slow dance and divided myself up for the adverts.  Like a monitor lizard pretending to be a dinosaur I passed through a mist of red paint where the tropical forest of my imagination met the desert of everyday existence.
09/06/07: A day that needed a large piece of paper to cover everything, I played yo-yo inside an apple during the sunlit part of the day only to find that the apple had been turned into cider during the snail clock evening.  In between I amused my neighbours by standing outside holding a watering can in the pouring rain.
10/06/07: I had part of the day in the urban oasis that reaches out like a handshake to the countryside (where everyone has nails protruding from their coats).  I smeared myself in sunshine like the celebrated "Lardoman" - at a supermarket near you soon! - and pretended that midday would last for ever.
11/06/07: I had to go to Rupert Bear's ogre town before noon - when the sun is directly over the man with a Union Jack baseball cap on his head.  I compared tans with a young girl who intended that evening to consume at least one balding man with a bushy beard before trying to find out who she really is.
12/06/07: I went to town again in the middle of the day.  After everyone else's lunch had sailed away over the horizon I was surprised to find two mermaids still living in the hollow of my head.  I retrieved them wrapped in yesterday's newspaper which I read in the manner of a military interrogation.   My other self refused to say anything other than his name and number.
13/06/07: I was in Tintin's yeti town yet again.  I had to remove all signs of the "Thinking Hamster's" Tarot from the laughing computer in the Franz Hals corner of the office.  After this I had to walk around with an apple on my head waiting for an arrow.  The pixie girl laughed and hung her washing from her earrings - this was after two courting budgies had used it as their love perch.
14/06/07: A relaxing day in the house that used to reside under the sea.  The day went too quickly as I counted the barnacles on the doors and put words to the song sung by the seagulls soaring overhead.  I pulled a pen out of the quiver I borrowed from Adonis and sucked it - Venus was seen in the distance riding a wild boar.
15/06/07: Out in the morning, I had to go along the tunnel which continually divides, ending up in the lungs of the country.  I swept swifts out of my hair.  I had to take a chance to draw a pencil line along a multitude of branches before going out in the evening to be produced from a pocket like a conker.
16/06/07: This was my first full weekend at home in my gothic mansion for some time; all the pieces of Medieval armour in the great hall took partners for the dance.  I spent all day in the Elizabethan garden overhearing the gossip of past ages as I pulled stones from the wounds in the earth.  I tended the plants that I rashly considered as true friends.
17/06/07: Another day in the jungle although cars taunted me with intimations of an evening coming home in torrential rain.  I made the most of the sun which shone on the rows of green tumuli underneath which lay the life forces I hoped to nurture.  Hands came through the soil to touch my feet as I tiptoed round the verdant dream world carrying a cross of beetle grubs.
18/06/07: I was, surprisingly, summoned to the court of the playing card lady where I could be Jack, Queen or King and had to whisper secret instructions to the car radiator which held all the strange stories of childhood.  I remembered when I wanted to keep a picture reference of all the car faces in the line of streets between my open  house and the sea. 
19/06/07: "This", said the stone owl in the lone pine tree, "was a very long distance day".  I never stopped for dinner as I watched the boat I built sail into the distance.  It was manned by countless children all of whom can be traced back to my own childhood.  I talked to David about people named after every day of the week.
20/06/07: Today was long, like a double barrelled surname.  I breathed out to the Art-Shop for a time, I then breathed in for an afternoon at home with sprites washing their underground clothes in the cathedral I call my studio.  I was finally Batfrog in the evening, fighting crime in the wettest places of the town.
21/06/07: Most of today I was able to exist on the divan of imagination where grey bearded dwarves ride bare back on tree fern fronds and I joust with a pencil instead of a spear.  The evening was a ladder that disappeared into a dark hole in a dark cloud.
22/06/07: I went out in the morning over the dragon backed bridge - my umbrella had missiles attached to it's underside.  I kissed my past while forced to embrace my future; i.e. the little toys with automated actions march in line from their hiding places.  I march in time with a weeping violin for a hat.
23/06/07: I woke with another person's name in my head, I pulled teddy bear ears from a secret pocket in my coat and went to town under an assumed name.  The day was biblical and everyone appeared to be dressed as Jesus. I gave my umbrella to the first young girl I met.  She and I wanted to open an animal home. 
24/06/07: I had a morning in the dolls house where, sadly, every piece of furniture I sat on I broke.  I then went through the waterfall to the water garden; every flower replaced with a droplet of glistening liquid.  Later I drunk my wine from an old troll's hat.
25/06/07: I travelled down a mouse hole today.  When I saw daylight again everyone had hands burnt out of their clothes, sometimes in the most inappropriate places.  I smiled as a very large dollop of cheese dropped from a passing black cloud and covered my head - where a skyscraper hat would have traditionally been placed.
26/06/07: I had to walk the sellotape path again; slowly pulling my feet off the adhesive on each long stride.  All the younger people, who these days have wings, flew by while reading upside down newspapers.  Some even made hats from the paper - although I prefer to eat my chips directly off the top of my head.
27/06/07: I was a fixed wing aeroplane going to town through a sea of flak which rocked the invisible people I have kept in my pockets since my childhood.  I had to change into a seagull to get home, I then laid an egg before going out again.
28/06/07: A very early start to go to the land shaped like a fish; I buried eggs and a flame that had burned for centuries.  Coming back through the dense jungle I made contact with a family of pygmies living on the dark side of Mars.
29/06/07: By a strange fluke I lived today in the early Seventeenth Century; on a wide lawn with birds spiralling like Catholics.  I ate off my ruff and sat for a portrait which would remain undiscovered for three hundred years - during which time my scowl was transformed into a laugh.
30/06/07: I went out with the constellation lady to an old market town that circled the blackened sun.  The glove puppets that poked their false heads out of very long sleeves (winding like pavements) called this the past.  We ate brunch in a department store with flames issuing from my open hands.