Continuing Bill's 'eighties movies as a metaphor for life' theme, a particular scene has been flashing through my mind quite a bit recently. I'm sure you all remember that great film 'Short Circuit' where Robot No. 5 (or Johnny 5 as he becomes known in the sequel) gets struck by lightning and comes 'alive'. The scene that has been playing out through my brain recently is the one where he is in Stephanie's garden learning about grasshoppers and accidentally jumps on the grasshopper and kills it.

At this point Stephanie scolds No. 5 for its (his?) carelessness and complains that the grasshopper is dead. Death is a foreign concept to No. 5 who can't understand why the grasshopper cannot be fixed; 'reassembled'. I feel I have been having this conversation a lot recently.

The grasshopper is dead. You can understand why it happened, what went wrong and even how to fix it, but the thing is and will always be dead.

The grasshopper in this scene is a great metaphor for a wide variety of things..!

Well I think so anyway. And I'm sure we all have had occassions during which we have struggled to understand or explain the death of something or other to someone on the other side of the conversation. Works both ways you see?

The monopoly board pub crawl ended in failure, we completed 18 out of 26 pubs before we ran out of time, people dispersed and it all went pear-shaped. Was a bit ambitious to attempt it with that many people, was a good effort though...

Never mind, it was good fun trying. And after all; 'if at first you don't suceed...' so we shall try again soon.

Band practice tomorrow, can't wait!