I is well red (sic)

I have been tagged. Need­less to say, this is not because I am lying on a slab of gran­ite in the indus­trial con­crete sur­round­ings of a freez­ing cold mor­tu­ary, with a piece of yel­low­ing card attached to my big toe and a frown­ing patho­lo­gist lean­ing over my corpse to exam­ine the con­tents of my stom­ach — thereby dedu­cing that I ate toast and Mar­mite a few short hours before I was bru­tally beaten to death in a fren­zied attack with a breezeblock. No, not that. Not that at all. This means that he accom­pa­ny­ing pic­ture is noth­ing more than a taste­less and prob­ably highly offens­ive joke, for which I apo­lo­gise unre­servedly. Well, almost unreservedly.

So, yes, to elab­or­ate fur­ther, I have been tagged by Jess, who main­tains a rather splen­did men­tal milk­crate, and whose sil­ver bottle tops I have been avidly col­lect­ing for many years. One day, when I have enough of the said items, I shall exchange them for cash and send Jess a pony in the mail. The pony will be small and cute and emin­ently use­ful for the trans­port­a­tion of light­weight gro­cer­ies from the super­mar­ket. Or maybe I am har­bour­ing too many linger­ing child­hood memor­ies of char­ity appeals on Blue Peter.

Now, as a rule, I don’t do memes, not least because the word itself is so excep­tion­ally infuri­at­ing. The Ger­mans have always had it so much easier. They get a word like — oh, I don’t know, let’s pluck a ran­dom one from the Wör­ter­büch — ‘Eigentums­wohnung­shaft­p­f­lichtver­sicher­ung’, and they pro­nounce every single let­ter and syl­lable in full. Without even paus­ing for breath. That’s Teutonic effi­ciency for you. Yes, it’s true that to say it out loud requires a hefty mouth­ful of saliva and a par­tic­u­larly agile tongue (stop it, you filthy-minded people), but at least it makes sense in lin­guistic terms. The word ‘meme’, how­ever, makes abso­lutely no sense what­so­ever. It’s pro­nounced ‘meem’, for heaven’s sake, which is just wrong in so many ways.

To digress still fur­ther — please stay awake at the back, because I’ll get to the point even­tu­ally — I have always been of the opin­ion that the word ‘meme’ should in fact be spoken far slower and more delib­er­ately as ‘Me Me’. Not only is this inter­pret­a­tion reas­sur­ingly self-centred, but it also inev­it­ably makes me think of pandas.

I’ve really lost you now, haven’t I? Let me elu­cid­ate even more tangentially.

Ima­gine, for a moment, that you are watch­ing the even­ing news and, after depress­ing you with stor­ies of death, dis­ease and destruc­tion, the presenter’s stern face breaks into a beatific smile:

“And finally — Me Me the panda has given birth to a boun­cing baby, the first cub to be born in cap­tiv­ity since 2003. Me Me joins the roll call of fam­ous pan­das such as Ping Ping, Chi Chi, An An, Ling Ling and Chan Chan, all of whose par­ents simply couldn’t be bothered to do the decent thing and make the panda with two backs on week­day after­noons when there were no camera-wielding tour­ists around to catch them in flag­rante delicto. Me Me’s mother is repor­ted to be doing well, but has retired to a dark corner of Chez Panda to stuff her face with bam­boo, drink gin, and swear viol­ently at her hus­band for put­ting her through all that agony. She has also vowed never to indulge in panda sex ever again, thereby con­trib­ut­ing to the almost cer­tain extinc­tion of these cute, heart­warm­ing, fluffy-wuffy anim­als. Aw, bless.”

Pan­das. Memes. It all makes sense, if you think about it. But before you finally lose the will to live, let’s return to the real mean­ing of the word ‘meme’. And this meme, in par­tic­u­lar. The meme in ques­tion. The meme you assumed you would be read­ing about some eight long para­graphs back. Meme. Meme. Meme. You’re say­ing the word over and over in your head now, aren’t you? It’s going to haunt you in your dreams, I prom­ise you.

The rules of this meme are as follows:

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.
4. Tag five people to pick up the meme baton.

So I did as instruc­ted, though with an added dra­matic flour­ish. I closed my eyes, stretched out my right hand, and groped in the dark for a book. I found the remains of a mouldy sand­wich instead. I tried again. Suc­cess. My fin­gers alighted upon a book. Open­ing the hefty tome at the pre­vi­ously spe­cified one hun­dred and twenty third page, I scanned down to the fifth sen­tence and dis­covered the following:

Oh. Oh dear.

Yes, it seems that the ugly rumours about my syn­onym addic­tion, long peddled by dis­rep­ut­able blog com­ment­at­ors, are entirely true. The lofty and fre­quently ridicu­lous descrip­tions con­tained within the excess­ive ver­biage on this site don’t simply appear out of thin air — I really do keep a thesaurus by my side at all times. (It’s a hard­back Cham­bers edi­tion — a vital fact that I’m sure all you thesaurus fans out there were des­per­ate to know.)

Hav­ing com­pleted this task to my sat­is­fac­tion — if not yours — all that remains for me to do is tag five people to com­plete the same meme, in the know­ledge that they will undoubtedly appear far more intel­li­gent and literary-minded than me. This is dif­fi­cult, since just about every online writer I know and respect has already flicked to page 123 in their chosen book. So I’m going to aim high. Point­lessly high. Step for­ward, 17th cen­tury Lon­don diar­ist Samuel Pepys; St Paul, author of that endur­ingly pop­u­lar Chris­tian blog, The Pau­line Epistles; Pope Bene­dict XVI, even if he will be utterly pre­dict­able in grabbing the Bible as his nearest volume; Mr Stephen Fry, whom I’m quite sure must have the time to com­plete all such requests sent to him by non-entity blog­gers; and last but most def­in­itely not least, a Big Dog. Because dogs read books too.

That is all. We now return you to your reg­u­larly sched­uled obfus­cat­ory non­sense. Please do not adjust your brain.