A better shade of grey

When I lived in Durham you could stand on Prebends bridge and see this view of the cathedral. Etched into the stonework are Sir Walter Scott's words

"Grey towers of Durham

Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles

Half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot

And long to roam those venerable aisles

With records stored of deeds long since forgot."

Since moving from a southern-like city in the north to a northern-like town in the south I have been in search of an equivalently evocative poem about Didcot's very own grey towers.

Kit Wright has put forward his attempt to the BBC's verse competition. Check it out here, It starts with

"What vasty thighs outspread to give thee birth," and gets better with lines like

"DIDCOT, thou bugger!"

It's certainly a source of much inspiration, find out more about Didcot through Demontrout's piece here and longtalljohnny's post a while back.

I can't stop thinkin', Thinking 'bout sinkin', Sinkin' down into my bed

It's a bad obsession It's always messin' It's always messin' myyyyyyyy mind....I can't stop thinking 'bout white bears! one more time. Ah but no, actually now I'm more thinking about how much I used to like that song aged 12 without ever reading the lyrics. You can find them here if you're interested.

Anyway, the similarity between white bears and what Axl is calls his mum, is that they are both things I have been trying quite hard NOT to think about this evening. This brings me to a fantastic book, 

You can test one of the wacky experiments in here by sitting in an empty room and trying NOT to think about white bears.

Ha! not as easy as you thought is it

Better still get yourself a copy of Alex Boese's book and see the other tricks that his great conversational writing can play on you.

This experiment is fully documented in

Wegner D. M., Schneider D. J. "Paradoxical effects of thought suppression" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (1) pp 5-13