Equestrian exploits in Swansea = art on the brink of revolution

It was with interest that I read, in a moment of procrastination, of the Swansea joker who recently ordered a Big Mac and fries at a MacDonalds drive-thru, not from his Renault Clio, nor from his Yamaha, nor even from a humble bicycle, but – and this is entirely true – from the saddle of a horse. I welcomed this news with a mixture of trepidation and delight. Trepidation, because MacDonalds drive-thrus are rarely far from busy roads, and having been inclined to suppose that horses and busy roads went about as well together as, say, aeroplanes and explosive devices, I could not but picture a traumatic sequence of events in which the frantic steed deposits its unfortunate rider into the path of an approaching juggernaut and leaves him to certain death between tyre and tarmac.

But amid such cynicism there was also, as I have said, delight. Mostly because it is a rare and refreshing thing to see a pair of warm-blooded creatures, breathing real air, in a place more often frequented by beings so attached to their cars that nothing – not even bags full of ground offal and saturated fat – will entice them out. Further explanation for my delight is, I feel, superfluous. What a gesture. A horse! At MacDonalds! Sir, I salute you.

Naturally, questions abound. Who is this man? Where can I find his address so that I might send him my knickers? And most importantly, what was the driving force (no pun intended) behind so rash and reckless an act?

I have a theory. Our friend, I like to think, is no mere joker. No! He is an artist. An innovator, if you will, or indeed, a cultural pioneer. Let us imagine that this was his debut performance as leader of the Historicalists, a movement that is uniting eccentrics and oddballs the country over and is soon to burst onto the modern art scene with revolutionary fervour. Its aim: to challenge the sterile, corporate modernity of the myriad establishments that, like MacDonalds, may once have been quirky, innovative and individual but are now bland, generic and everywhere. What! you cry – attacking the nasty capitalists that are stamping on independent businesses and turning our towns into identikit replicas? How, pray, are they to do such a thing without sounding like whiny Guardianistas?

Why, with a dash of retro glamour, my dear reader, mixed with a little self-disrespect and seasoned with a pinch of lunacy. Perhaps the next time our friend goes to a MacDonalds' drive-thru, he will not only be on a horse, but dressed in breeches, tails and a top hat. Perhaps Starbucks will report an influx of Dickensian yuppies with ledgers instead of laptops, who scratch away with quill pens as they sip their cappuccinos. Perhaps the toilets at Pret will crowd with ladies adjusting their powdered wigs; East End eel sellers will loiter at the entrance to Primark; Greggs will ring with the sweet music of medieval minstrels and when the Daily Mail reports a handsome cab pile-up in a Tesco car park, the petit-bourgeoisie will rise and say 'They've gone too far! This must stop! Art has gone mad!'

What better way to highlight the madness of modernity than with a little historic charm? It sounds much jollier than signing petitions and writing letters to oblivious MPs. I don't know about you, but I, for one, have every intention of joining them.

The mystery of the school disco

If you, in spite of your relative youth and long-standing appreciation of bizarre British customs, are nonetheless bewildered by the sight of otherwise rational adults dressing like pubescent schoolchildren of an evening because it increases their chances of getting a shag, you have a friend in me. Why, you ask, does anyone feel the need to recreate a moment of their lives in which they were plagued by crippling paranoia, smatterings of pimples and the fear that they were loved by none but their own mothers? I hear you. And because nothing gives me greater pleasure than assisting my peers in their attempts to untangle the complex and tantalising mysteries that so blight their lives, I have imagined a scenario that may help you to understand the phenomenon known in these parts as the 'school disco'.

Once upon a time, the managing director of Costumez 4 U Ltd entered the conference room looking grave.

'Business is bad, my friends,' he said. 'Customers are bored. The nurse and the policewoman are not enough for them. The French maid is old news. We need something new, something better, something... cutting edge. Let me hear your ideas, my friends.'

And so brows were knit and brains were racked, and lo! there was an idea.

'I have it!' cried a be-suited yuppie. 'Let us celebrate the glory of youth with a smidgeon of adult naughtiness. Let us sex up the secondary school classroom!'

Heads turned in amazement.

'Fool!' spat a colleague. 'Do you want to get us sued?'

'On the contrary, it will be a triumph!' the yuppie continued. 'Sex and nostalgia! A more successful combination there never was! What woman doesn't remember a period when she wished with all her heart that she could expose her buttocks to her slavering male classmates without a pasty spinster giving her detention? What man hasn't, in his time, dreamed about taking the hand of a freckled sex-bomb in a Tipp-exed blazer and holey stockings and whisking her away from the restrictions of corridor decorum? For the sake of all that is good and profit-making, let us reawaken those torturous hormones and put them to good use! And this time they shall be heeded. This time their demands will be met. No more the suppressed urges of yesteryear! No more the regulation skirt lengths that once impeded our pursuit of happiness! This time there will be micro-skirts and non-existent blouses, suspender belts and six-inch heels, and when it is all over everyone will go home and have sex!'

There was a stunned silence, and then the conference room resounded with deafening applause.

And there, readers, is your answer.

On house spiders, newspaper and window boxes

I was sleepy, pyjama-ed and climbing into bed not long ago when a fearsome sight met my eyes. Crouching in all its octopodian majesty on the wall at the foot of my bed was a house spider of epic proportions. There are, in my view, two types of house spider, the first of which I have no objection to: they are sedentary homebodies who bask away their lives in celestial havens of bouncy silk, moving only when unsuspecting bluebottles disturb their reverie and subsequently require mummification. The second type I find more perplexing. The gap-year backpackers of their species, they are errant wanderers prepared to risk their lives trekking across vast plains of wallpaper and challenging deserts of carpet, all the more formidable for their tendency to materialise out of nowhere and ability to cover four times as much ground per second as a creature of their size realistically should. The spider on my wall fell firmly into the second category. It was clearly mid-voyage, trying to decide on the route for the next leg of a journey which, for all I knew, could have led it over my pillow and into my hair. Into my throat, even, if – as is, admittedly, doubtful – the widely propagated claim about spiders crawling into open human mouths as the latter lie in slumber has any basis in fact.

Something had to be done. I generally favour humane methods of dealing with unwanted spiders, repatriation being my usual way of taking care of those that get too close for comfort. But even if I had had a glass jar and some junk mail to hand, this one was so high up the wall that any attempt to capture it came with a serious risk of it falling onto my head, which would have been a traumatic experience for all concerned. And it was late. Bed was calling. Sorry, spider, I thought. Your time has come.

The weekend newspaper was my weapon of choice. In order to avoid getting spider remnants all over something I was likely to want to read later, I carefully extracted the sports section and fashioned it into something vaguely cylindrical that could be wielded with a flick of the wrist. I gave it a test run, smacking it into the palm of my hand like a riding crop. It crumpled in the middle and bent in half. With the crucial part of the weapon flailing about like a limp wrist, the spider would survive the ordeal with nothing more than a set of bruised knees, its natural self-defence and/or revenge mechanisms nevertheless compelling it to scurry towards me at 50 mph and perhaps to launch itself at my face. Anxious to prevent such a freakish turn of events, I reinforced the weapon with the more meaty finance supplement. Happily, subsequent testing showed it to be ready for deployment. I took up my position of attack on the end of my bed, brandishing the improved weapon. Whoosh! it sliced through the air, making a breeze that stirred my hair from roots to unkempt ends, and – whack! met the wall with a slapping noise I felt sure must have woken the neighbours. Alas! I hadn't accounted for my poor sense of spacial awareness, which now came spectacularly into play. It was the fault of my subconscious, perhaps, trying to stay my hand in protest against these hitherto unnaturally sadistic urges, but in fact only managing to make everything worse. The weapon landed off-centre. It was the wall, not the target, that took the full force of the attack. Instead of the neat clout over the head that I had pictured flattening the victim to the wall in a gory but instant death, the unlucky arachnid nose-dived intact towards the carpet with starry vision, concussion and several broken legs. Its fall was broken by the corner of a picture frame, from which it dangled, stunned, hooked into place by one of its four pairs of gnarled limbs, twitching in agony, until – whack! a gentler attack this time, so as not to dislodge the picture frame. Its legs folded beneath it as it plummeted, helpless, to the floor, where it lay consumed in death throes until – whack! a final battering brought its misery to a belated end.

Throughout the proceedings my overwhelming feeling had been one of cruel determination. I had been focussed and single-minded. I had had one purpose, and one purpose only: to kill the damn thing. Yet as soon as the deed was done I was consumed by guilt. I stood over the mangled little body thinking remorsefully of Charlotte's Web, and thought, you did this. You just bludgeoned a spider to death because it was easier to dispose of it than to find it a new home. This is not okay. And resolving to never again rob an honest arachnid of its right to roam wall and carpet as and when it pleases, I picked up the corpse (with my bare hands, to atone for my sins), shrouded it in a tissue, and buried it gently in the window box.