Raptus Regaliter

My girlfriend is very demanding in bed.  She often wakes me up in the middle of the night to demand that I stop snoring.

Now I admit that I do snore.  I recently had the problem that I kept dropping off, and waking myself up as I began to snore.  But Her Maj is a bit of a window-rattler as well.

What is interesting is the number of strange noises that people make in their sleep.  I was up last night, listening, and then she started.  Initially you get the heavy-breathing Darth Vader impression, although sometimes it starts with her making a noise like a sleeping dog chasing rabbits.  It then moves on to a cautious growl, then to the fully fledged snore.  This continues until she gets to the point of snoring, even though no airways are open.  This is always a stressful time, as you wait to see if she's going to start breathing normally or if her head is going to implode.

It hasn't imploded yet.

Her Maj works for a Bank.  It's called Sal Oppenheim, and it was the oldest private bank in Germany.  It was, until recently, run by the likes of the Graf Von Krokko (probably misspelt, but can't be arsed), whose banking qualifications, as far as I can tell, were marrying into the family.  Being a Graf, he's what the germans like to call an "Adler"(eagle) or what the British like to call "an inbred upper-class twit".

Anyway, the Graf has recently had to make a "hard" decision.  He sold the entire bank to Deutsche Bank, due to the ridiculous amount of debt that Sal Oppenheim was in.  No, that wasn't his hard decision.  His hard decision was to stand up at a meeting and tell all the employees that he'd made the decision between saving his scrawny little neck and saving their jobs, and guess which way the cookie had crumbled?

So, Her Maj has been busy, because she was sent to a conference in London about the crisis.

As far as I can see, the majority of this "Conference" was a bunch of bankers sitting in a very expensive London Hotel, wringing their hands and saying "what is to be done? What is to be done?" until someone came up with the idea of having an expensive lunch at the Hotel Restaurant to try and kick-start the world economy.

She came home, tired and irritable, from a hard day's kick-starting.  There's only so much smoked salmon you can stomach, you know.

As has been mentioned on these pages before, there are times when, as a comedian, you just can't rival real life.  I've often said that God is a comedian, and that we are all his punchlines, and the following fact is proof positive of this.

Bob Dylan has made a Christmas Album.

Bob Dylan has made a Christmas Album.

Bob Dylan has made a Christmas Album.

(I think it's worth repeating this three times with differing stress for you to appreciate the full horror of the concept)

Now, I've just been ill, and I've been having some fairly weird fever dreams, but imagine my surprise when I surfaced from my mildly hallucinogenic state to find that the one absolute corker of a nightmare has turned out to be fact.  Bob Dylan.  A man whose singing voice is used by those studying speech impediments as a catalogue.  A man whose singing voice is used to frighten kids not to smoke, not to mention scare away birds on freshly-planted fields.  A man whose voice was actually IMPROVED by a motorcycle accident where he broke his neck - although I've never really accepted that it's Dylan singing on "Lay Lady Lay" - which sounds more like a basso profundo Kermit the Frog impression to me.  (incidentally, did you know you can sing "Lay Lady Lay" and "The Rainbow Connection" to the same tune?  Time for a mashup, methinks)

When I was in a band, we used  to try and think of the worst possible cover songs.  For example, The B52's doing "Yesterday".  Bob Dylan doing "Frosty The Snowman" beats them all fair and square.  I mean, it even beats William Shatner doing "Mr. Tambourine Man", or even Leonard Nimoy doing "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins", which we had to ban, because no-once could top them.  Besides which, "Baggins" isn't a cover.  "Sunny" is, and hearing laughing Lennie croaking his way through this standard is enough to win the entire season of bad covers, but it's nothing in comparison to Dylan's "Frosty".

It makes you wonder, is Dylan deliberately burning his own Iconography? He's had several critically-applauded albums, he runs a radio show, and, all of a sudden, it's "Dylan is back!", and he thinks "hang on, I didn't like this the last time it happened in the 60's" and so he goes to the record company and they say "What's next, Bob?" and he says "The Christmas Album".  Either that or he's going senile, and he's decided if Phil Spector and the Beachboys can get away with it, so can he.  I'm going to stop now, before I turn into A.J. Weberman.