Lurking on page 123

I have been ‘tagged’, though not in the same way in which a crim­inal is tagged in order to track their where­abouts when they’re released on early licence. No, not that sort of tag­ging. Instead, I have been tagged with a meme. Gosh, in all my years of blog­gery I don’t think I’ve ever been meme-fied. I have come to regard it as a badge of hon­our, to be hon­est. I’m too good for memes. After all, this isn’t so much just any old web­log, but more a way of life. Or something.

Except. Not only have I been tagged, but I have been tagged by The Gold­fish, and it’s with a lit­er­ary meme that allows me to finally post some­thing new in this rather neg­lected corner of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness. Some­how, it is too good an oppor­tun­ity to resist.

1. Take the nearest book and go to page 123.
2. Go to the fifth sen­tence of the page.
3. Copy down the next three sen­tences and tag three people.

“The glow of real life was miss­ing. My make­shift, phoney muscles were only going through the motions. I was a pup­pet, to be used in some sacrifice.”

Those lines are from Blind Wil­low, Sleep­ing Woman, the latest col­lec­tion of short stor­ies by Haruki Murakami. Yes, I know, I’m far too pre­dict­able; it’s him again. It’s a book that, sadly, I haven’t yet got round to read­ing, because cur­rently resides atop one of the two huge pile of nov­els I’ve still got to catch up on hav­ing not read a single thing dur­ing my five months in hospital.

Under the inter­na­tional rules of blog­ging memes, appar­ently I now have to, er, ‘tag’ three other people. And because I am delib­er­ately awk­ward, I am going to nom­in­ate a trio whom, like me, I sus­pect wouldn’t nor­mally be seen dead doing such things. So step for­ward Andre, Cheer­ful One and Jack.

I’m just not play­ing the game, am I? Sorry about bring­ing this par­tic­u­lar meme to such an inglori­ous end.