Dazed and Confused

I apologise in advance if this week’s thrilling momentary diversion is a little disjointed, because the last 12 hours has seen me slightly unstuck in time. This is because last night, at 2am, the clocks changed, and while I thought they were going forward an hour, it turned out that they were, in fact, going back.

So, I went to bed at 12:40, putting my clocks forward an hour so it was 1:40am, then when I awoke, it was 9:15. A quick shower later and I turn my computer on to find that it’s now 7:30. So while the rest of the UK population was gaining an hour in their sleep, I’d somehow managed to first lose an hour and then gain two.

I now feel a little jet-lagged. I don’t know how many hours of actual sleep I got, nor can I quite work out what time zone my body thinks it’s in. You know how it is when the clocks change, you spend the next few days feeling slightly out-of-sync, always thinking that it’s an hour ahead or behind what your body is telling you. I, on the other hand, feel like I’ve just fallen out of an episode of Quantum Leap.

This is how I imagine those characters in GCSE maths exam questions must feel; the characters who are seemingly forever getting on trains at odd times and travelling at a specified average velocity over a specified distance and need to be told by 15- and 16-year-olds when they’ll arrive at their destination instead of looking it up on National Rail.

Titular

I actually bought an issue of Dazed and Confused, the magazine, the other day. What an odd magazine that is — I can see why they call it that because I came away not actually sure I’d even read anything. It’s quite a sturdy, substantial magazine but I keep on flicking through it and all I can see are adverts for jeans, or fragrances, or both at the same time. Sometimes I’ll run across several pages of photographs of unhappy-looking young models who appear to be dressed as if they’re going clubbing but have, for some reason, found themselves in the middle of a forest instead. Perhaps that’s why they’re unhappy.

There’s some sort of feature on Sofia Coppola, who appears to be ‘cool’ these days, though I’m not convinced her portfolio to date entirely justifies that. She’s on the cover, at any rate, but when you flick through to the feature it seems to be just arty photos of her lying on a hotel bed. I don’t know why. Am I supposed to? Is she? It is not clear.

The magazine came with a free book, CoolBrands: An insight into some of Britain’s coolest brands. I open it to a random page and find that ‘Pringles’ is one of the coolest brands in Britain this year. Did anybody realise this? I’m obviously out of the loop because in my mind, Pringles is just a cheap snack food that lines supermarket shelves — moreish but ultimately unsatisfying. Yet here they are, nestled between Pret a Manger and Raymond Weil, who apparently makes watches.

Flicking further ahead, I find that Starbucks is listed, and described as being ‘ethical, caring, passionate and transformative’ — I can only assume they ran out of space before they reached the bit about them ‘serving coffee that tastes like ten kinds of burnt arse’. Curiously, the picture they choose to accompany this fluff piece appears to be of a Starbucks’ employee gobbing into line after line of drinks — which is what I assumed happened there anyway, so it’s nice to see some confirmation.

I’m very, very tired. But I don’t know whether I ought to be or not. How much sleep did I actually get?

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