Loofah in the Lamplight

There has been a loofah in our lamp for the past six months.

For six months we slept mere inches from the bedside lamp, completely unaware that there was a loofah inside it.

We packed it up when moving house, and at no point in the intervening six months did either of us notice that the light was being, quite significantly, blocked by the presence of a (still-packaged and unused) loofah.

There's a song called Sweet Leaf of the North by Leeds band Mik Artistic's Ego Trip. It's about a leaf that was caught on the windscreen of their van as they were driving down to London for a gig, and which stayed on the windscreen not only for the whole of the journey down south, but the entirety of the journey back north as well.

At a swimming competition in Inverness sometime around 2010, a crisp packet floated up on the thermal current of an air vent and remained hovering like a kestrel, half stuck on a ledge, for hours and hours. It may even have stayed there overnight, but that might be my memory embellishing things.

My friends and I thought this was the best thing ever.

Spotting ordinary things trapped in extraordinary circumstances can be a provider of great joy, or of great sadness. Powerful emotions either way.

The Twitter account lost footballs shares photos of footballs which have been lost, abandoned, or otherwise become tangled in the net of modernity in a way for which they were not designed.

Earlier today my basketball became caught in the basketball net and I had to use a pool cue to knock it down. These Burger King footballs were not so lucky.

In the case of our lamp loofah, the beauty comes not from the noticing but from the not noticing. Or the delayed noticing. How did we manage to go half a year without spotting the loofah that was in our lamp?

How does any loofah in any location go unnoticed for so long, let alone one which was literally being lit up on a daily basis.

But finally spotting the loofah brought with it much amusement. At ourselves, at the obscured light we'd been living with for so long. At the general absurdity of a loofah being in a lamp.

Observations

So my request for you, dear reader, is to look around. See whether you can spot any similarly strange combinations of objects and resting places. It is unlikely that there will be a loofah in your lamp, but there may well be something else equally intriguing.

Let me know what you find, but for now, let's move on to another endeavour driven by the insatiable curiosity of the human spirit.

If you want to watch the episode before reading the rest of the review you can do so here.

Here's your first starter for ten...

Nash gets Durham off the mark with Harare, an answer which also popped up in the missing vowels round of Only Connect, in combination with DLWR in the category 'places that don't rhyme'. Their bonuses are on glass, and they smash two of them, dropping the third.

Matrix gives Ancell another ten points for Durham, and they took a single bonus on pirates. Maving hit back for Open with Picaresque, but they couldn't manage any bonuses on electric circuits.

Nash proves his expertise as a twitcher on the picture round, being quickest to recognise a silhouette of a peregrine falcon, narrowly missing out on the full set of bonuses by giving goshawk instead of sparrowhawk.

With her trademark blue hair and clasped hands under the chin, Open captain Westermann gets in on the action with first-round, but again they blanked on all of the bonuses. They did very well on the five-pointers in their first-round match but are struggling here.

Another for Nash wins Durham a bonus set on classical music. Ancell says 'Rite of Spring. 100%' for the first of these, which would have been embarrassing had he been wrong, but he was not. Phew.

The Northern side led at this stage by 75-20.

Open Season

Picking up a starter on Czech new wave cinema, Payne wins Open a set on geography. They miss the first two, and it looks like they're on for an ignominious 0/9 run, but after some deliberation, they opt for the correct stan on the third (Kyrgyz).

Open took over now, closing the door on Durham. Six starters in a row, including three from Maving, put them in a commanding position. And they put their earlier woes on the bonuses behind them, getting extremely lucky with a random guess of a monarch.

By the time Ancell finally broke the rot with the Qing Empire, Open had been on a 125-0 streak, and the gap between the sides was now 70 in Open's favour.

A streak of their own, with three starters in a row, brought Durham right back into it, but Westermann came in clutch with Hail Mary to seal the victory for Open.

Durham 115 - 180 Open

Another good match there. Durham looked to have fallen asleep but made things interesting in the last few minutes. Open have a chance of making the semis, but will need to come out the blocks quicker than they did on this occasion.

Next week sees Exeter vs Bristol - if you enjoyed this please subscribe for more reviews, even if the loofah is no longer in the lamp.