Haven’t done one of these for a while. Enjoy!

(Simon’s also managed to capture what mornings are like here, too.)

When you do have to face death head on, usually there is no dress rehearsal; it is a literal bomb of sadness and time for questioning everything that goes on.

When I was seventeen or eighteen the time the phone rang early one Sunday morning, around 7am. Waking me up, this could have of course been a wrong number or the curious adventures of a drunk seeing how many people he could upset. Looking back at things, these scenarios would have been better than the impending information I received of being told my granddad had died of a heart attack.

Being the first death in my family to deal with, this was of course upsetting and took a while to get over.

Pushing it to the back of my mind, life had to carry on and for me it was during a time when exams were being revised for in order to go to university and learn my limit on how many cheap pints I could shovel down my neck. So I did all the revision about exciting theories on social decay, the Italian revolution and the history of da Engliz language. After all that, it was time to wait and see what a man in a suit would mark me down as having.

A week before results day I had a dream, but not in a Martin Luther King way.

Instead, I could see my granddad sitting in front of me in his living room. He was speaking to me but no audio reached my ears. The dream didn’t last long but it was slightly distressing to vividly see a family member who I couldn’t quite communicate to properly, especially because he had passed away.

I told my mother about everything as I thought she’d get some comfort in what happened. Still, it bugged me about the meaning behind everything.

Turning to my idiot friend whose sister had a dream book, I asked what the meaning of everything meant and awaited the result and was told “I was going to receive good news.” Normally, I don’t believe the whole messages from the afterlife side; however I did stop everything I was doing, exactly one week later.

I’d passed all my exams and gotten in to my first choice for uni.

Weird.

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This Curious Thing was submitted by that nice young Matthew Laidlow off that Hecklerspray.

You can read more Curious Things, or find out what this Curious Things thing is all about (and perhaps submit your own).

Dream well.

Eurocamps were a bit like Butlins, but with tents. But cool tents. Tents with beds and fridges (often with strawberry yoghurt drinks, yay). And the usual holiday park gubbins – bar, swimming pool, bored teenagers. Nice ones though, not like kids now who throw bricks at you (yes, once a kid threw a brick at me, what’s your point?).

Holiday fun was had, holiday romances were had and then forgotten about and too many drinks were drunk by teenagers who could not hold their beer as well as they liked to think. Everyone promised to write forever (yes, 12 years ago when you had to write with pens and paper) and then promptly forgot as soon as they got home. It was awesome.

But in out last couple of days, there was a trip to the forest.

Some of the kids had arrived before us, and decided to spend the night drinking in the forest behind the campsite. After drinking most of their beer, they chose to leave the rest behind. So we decided that we’d go find it, bring it back and drink it. Excellent plan. Except the forest was big, and the directions were rubbish. “There’s some trees, and then a big clearing”. So we walked around, for what was about two six packs of lager if I remember rightly.

The first curious thing? The house.

The house in the forest that was tiny and had a shell of a torched car parked outside. A little French classic. One of those ones that looked like a Morris Minor, but French. No one lived in that house, and hadn’t done for years, but we had no idea why there would be a house there either. We had no idea what happened to the car, but thought it safer not to think about that. Cars don’t get torched for nice reasons, do they?

The second curious thing? What looked like the shell of a disarmed bomb.

We don’t know if it was one, and alas, this was a time many years before camera phones. But I’m pretty certain it was a bomb. No we didn’t touch it. My brother made a “BANG” noise behind me. I decided to hate him for the rest of the day.

Bombs, little houses, torched cars. Not the strangest things by a long way. And we still hadn’t found any beer. Dammit.

But the most curious curious thing? The smell of vegetables. A strong stench of rotting vegetables.

Then we started spotting them. Just along the path. A corn cob here, a (purple) cauliflower there. We had no idea why they’d be there, they weren’t growing. They were just on the ground. Nothing had had a nibble on some corn. And then we came to the clearing.

And the concentric circles.

Rings and rings of vegetables. About four or five deep, alternating between cauliflower and corn on the cob. About the same size as a school classroom. Two, maybe three in the clearing. Just all laid out, rotting away.

Why?

Why would someone lay all of those vegetables out? Where would you get them all? Who would do this? The same person who disarms bombs and torches classic French cars? How many more were there?

We got freaked out, it got a bit cold and started to rain. We decided it was a good idea to go back. We couldn’t tell our parents because we weren’t meant to be in the forest.

I’ve never found out what the concentric vegetables mean, but I do sometimes double check the news for cases of scary vegetarian druids living on the west coast of France.

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This Curious Thing was submitted by the superhumanly ubiquitous Sian Meades – writer, blogger, cocktail drinker, cake baker and founding editor of Domestic Sluttery. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll follow her Twitter feed – so good they named it thrice.

You can read more Curious Things, or find out what this Curious Things thing is all about (and perhaps submit your own).

I’ve been compared favourably and unfavourably to the following people:

• Neil Morrissey
• Fred Savage from The Wonder Years
• Gary Neville
• Spurs chairman Daniel Levy
• Johnny Depp
• David Schneider
• Hank Azaria
• Former EastEnders character Tariq
• John Cusack
• Ray Vecchio from Due South

This list is in no way a comprehensive one.

According to people who know me or meet me, I look like every dark-haired man who has ever been on television (for those of you who have never seen my face – the person I look most resemble on that list is Johnny Depp. For those that have seen my face – shut up).

The person I actually look the most like is my doppelgänger. I don’t know if any of you have ever seen your doppelgänger (how would I? I don’t know even who you are), but it’s an unsettling experience. A doppelgänger, as you no doubt know, is a person’s exact double, a replicant of them. They are supposed to be harbingers of evil, of doom. Spot yours and apparently, terrible luck or even death is heading your way. Which can be a real shit for twins.

Luckily I was with a friend when I saw mine, so I could get confirmation that I wasn’t imagining it. It was ridiculous. The man had the same build as me, same height, skin tone, high forehead, everything. He had the same shit haircut and fifties-style glasses. The man was even dressed liked me, cheap grey plimsolls, the lot.

Was it some sort of joke? Had Ashton Kutcher run out of Hollywood celebrities to Punk that he had to get his kicks winding up ordinary blokes from Reading now? Is that what this was?

Had someone spiked my drink and I was now hazily and incredulously staring at some poor elderly woman, simply imagining that she looked like me? Perhaps this was all a figment of my imagination brought on by experimental electromagnetic stimulation therapy, causing the left temporoparietal junction of my brain to simulate dislocated self images?

Or was I just looking at a man who looked a bit like me?

It was that last one – the man looking a bit like me one. But still… It was pretty weird.

If you enjoyed these ramblings, you should be ashamed of yourself and go out and buy a fucking book or something. Or follow me on Twitter.

Oh, and who do I look most like? I’ll let you make up your own mind:

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This Curious Thing was submitted by Steve Charnock, or someone very like him.

You can read more Curious Things, or find out what this Curious Things thing is all about (and perhaps submit your own).

Via Twitter.

As I was nearing the end of my walk, I saw a woman at the top of the hill on Eastbourne Ave. Her brown hair was pulled back into a tight bun and she was sitting on a low wall as if waiting for a ride. I approached and I noticed that she was wearing essentially the same outfit my mother wore to Saturday morning Sabbath services: black cello pants and a gold and black striped, tunic-style top. It happened to be an overly bright and cheery Saturday morning.

I passed before her head down, trying hard to pretend I hadn’t just been staring, and she asked me, ‘How is it going up that hill?’

I said, turning back toward her, ‘Gotta do it if I want to eat what I like to eat.’

She laughed. I saw her face and froze. She smiled at me.

We could have been related.

She was about 65 or 68. My mother would have been 70. Her eyes were blue and not green like my mother’s, but the cheekbones, the dimples, the eyebrows, even her earlobes were so familiar. She could have been my aunt (the nose!) or my grandmother (the jaw line!) or my great-grandmother (the light in her eyes!).

How could one woman I had never seen in the neighbourhood or in my life look like four of my female relatives? I was spooked and said goodbye. Then I ran away home. Didn’t dare turn back to see if she was really there.

I still wonder if grief made me hallucinate this woman and her question. I think of it often. My response flew from my mouth as if I’d known her my whole life. Would someone across the street have seen me talking to an older woman waiting for her ride to Saturday services or to thin air?

*

This story is from the downright uncanny polymath Rachel Rhodes. You can listen to her music on Virb, and follow her on Twitter.

You can read more Curious Things, or find out what this Curious Things thing is all about (and perhaps submit your own).

The Electric Brae is a place where, seemingly, the laws of physics have gone bye-bye. On a fairly nondescript stretch of the A719, locals need to take care when driving about their business for fear of crashing into tourists dicking about in the middle of the road. Why do fools from all over the world come to do this dicking?

It is because, if you turn off the engine of your car and release the handbrake, it will roll uphill. If you drop a ball onto the road, it will bounce up the incline. Pour some liquid onto the surface and it will duly trickle away – up the slope.

This is thrilling enough for adults. It achieves that result magicians aim for, recreating in their cynical, jaded husk of a body the ability to gawp and grin with glee at something which just shouldn’t happen. In children, it almost literally makes the brain implode. It would be interesting to know how many mischievous nippers have attempted to push the pram/buggy containing their younger sibling up the hill, in the hope it will continue rolling and eventually just take off and fly into space. Not that I ever did that, you understand.

I’d also love to know who first discovered the phenomenon, and whether they managed to survive the inevitable ensuing accusations of witchiness.

There’s a frustrating lack of decent video of the phenomenon on OoToob, but this in-car snippet captures it quite well, I think:

How does this enchanted A-road work? Well, the stretch is called The Electric Brae (”brae” meaning slope) because for many years it was thought to be some kind of manifestation of electromagnetic jiggerypokery. You know, like Lost but without the whispering and polar bears and murderous black vapour.

The truth, as truth will often insist on being, is a bit more drab. The Electric Brae is an example of that magic-trashing spoilsport, the “optical illusion”. You can’t imagine how disappointed I was to learn this, especially since for many years I’d been telling my schoolfriends that while they may be going to Disneyworld that summer, I’d be frolicking in a magic road thankyouverymuch.

Thankfully the truth is as difficult to understand as if the phenomenon was caused by spectral dragonflies pooing on gravity. Every time I try and get my head around the explanation – which you can read here – my eyes glaze over at the mentions of degrees, perspective and topography.

In my version of the world, if the truth is too hard to understand you’re fully entitled to use your God-given ignorance to disbelieve it. I think it is such wilful ignorance that will allow magic to exist FOREVAAAH. It might also mean David Blaine becomes president, but that seems a small price to pay.

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This X-File was submitted by that nice, young, eerily calm Stuart Waterman from LOLsome music blog My Chemical Toilet. You should read it, then follow him on Twitter, cos he’s reet funny.

You can read more Curious Things, or find out what this Curious Things thing is all about (and perhaps submit your own).

These were the days of slam-door trains and compartmentalised carriages. Like many commuters, my mother had a preferred compartment, which she shared with her “train buddies” – an unlikely band of prim secretaries, wispy academics and well-fed city gents who scratched and farted behind their newspapers. Despite their disparate natures this was their compartment and they all loyally saved each others’ seats on both outbound and return journeys.

At the time my mother was a young liberal with a head full of ideas and a spirit entirely unbroken by years of office drudgery. She regularly worked long hours, skipping lunch then belting across London to catch the last train back to Sussex. Unsurprisingly, once she’d greeted her train buddies and kicked off her shoes, she was generally asleep before the train left Victoria Station.

One rainy night, on the train home from London, my mother had the oddest dream.

She dreamt she was in total darkness – upright but somehow dangling, with a fresh breeze on her skin and whispering all around her. She couldn’t move much, just hung there limply – for some reason this didn’t frighten her and she began to realise she was in motion.

The darkness ahead of her broke up into lighter patches and soon she found herself emerging from a thick line of trees into an open field under a rain-soaked sky – still hanging in the air, a couple of feet above the dewy grass, quietly becoming soggy with rain.

My mother looked around herself wondering, with that absent, semi-aware dream-sense, about how odd dreams were in general.

Then she heard a noise and fixed her gaze on the other end of the field. Which is when she saw the train.

Her train.

A long dark bar lit with carriages, shuttling from left to right, parallel to the line of trees form which she’d just emerged.

My mother thought something like, How curious. This must be an actual field I see every day from the train and I’ve never consciously realised it.

And with that thought, she started moving forwards at an increasing, impossible speed.

Her hair whipped out behind her and the grass slapped damply against her stockinged toes with a fast, memorable fapp-fapp-fapp noise. The side of the speeding train grew larger and larger in her field of vision, until she was sure she was going to be squished against it – and then she was somehow being delivered gently onto the train – she remembers very clearly landing daintily on the lip of an end-carriage door.

And then she was inside the train – in a corridor outside some compartments.

Some moments later, and then only after some fierce self-pinching, my mother realised three things:

1. She was awake.
2. She was soaking wet.
3. She was shoeless.

Sheepishly she found her usual compartment and sidled into it to find her compartment buddies gaping at her. Where have you been? They demanded. Apparently at some point during the journey, my shoeless, previously deep-asleep mother had disappeared from the snug compartment.

Without any of her six companions noticing.

Nominally my mother puts this all down to sleepwalking into the corridor and leaning out of the window. Once when she was a young teen she awoke, fully dressed in school uniform, outside her school gates at five in the morning.

“But,” she will tell you at any of her dinner parties to this day, “That doesn’t explain the wet grass on my feet.”

I have no idea if that last part is true or not. But I have met two of her erstwhile train buddies who swear up and down to the meat of this story.

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You can read more Curious Things, or find out what this Curious Things thing is all about (and perhaps submit your own).