Thinking Strange Thoughts


My grandfather was a wonderful man though a little eccentric, he would often sit amongst a flock of sheep and tell them that the hole in the ozone layer was getting larger, and that there was little chance of sustainable peace in the middle east. He was later charged with sheep worrying, but that’s a story for another day.


This month I wish to talk about a strange phenomenon that I noticed when I was up in Perth recently, there seemed to be graffiti everywhere, in fact if you stood in one spot for too long, there was a good chance that you would be spray painted, I was reliably informed that it is the work of “bored teenagers”. Now I find this hard to believe because I was never bored when I was a teenager, mainly because I was far to busy inventing things to get bored, and that’s a good bit of advice to all young people who happen to feel bored, just invent something.

I first came to prominence when I invented the “Solar Powered Suntan Lamp” which was a great success. Unfortunately my inventing came to a tragic end when I was working on a prototype for the “Three Speed Working Stick”. I had hoped that this would be the greatest aid to the elderly since the “Nasal Hair Remover”, but disaster struck when I sent my Great Uncle Cyril out for a test drive on the cliff top near our house. Uncle Cyril was a strange man who seemed to have been in training for dementia his entire life but I was still devastated when the walking stick got jammed in 2nd gear and he was catapulted into the sea below.


Now obviously this was very unfortunate but the point is when I was young if people got bored they did something about it. Take for example , Sir Edmund Hillary”, when Hillary got bored she climbed Mt Everest, and that’s just the sort of thing that the youth of today should be doing. Now I know some whinging teenager will say “I cant climb Mt Everest because I haven’t got any boots" or, “ I get asthma whenever I climb above 8,000 meters” or some feeble excuse like that., but there are plenty of other things that you can do. For instance , on the very rare occasion nowadays when I get bored, I try to think of all the great Lithuanian trombone players whose surname begins with a ’W”. Its not as easy as it may first seem, of course there’s the easy one that everyone knows, Giorgio Wonaplenski and the Lithuanian Big Band”, but after that it gets pretty darn difficult.


The main thing is to keep the mind occupied at all times. A good example of this was Albert Einstein. His mind was full of stuff and you seldom saw him wandering aimlessly around town causing trouble and putting graffiti everywhere , unless of course he was testing out a theory on graffiti .
One final piece of advice for when you are feeling really bored, read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” from cover to cover . Then you will realize that you only thought you were bored , whereas now, you really are.
Copyright of Stephen Ainley