Jeremy Clarkson and Stuart Maconie both have bees buzzing in their bonnets about high visibility vests: Clarkie's lip turns up since he thinks they're nanny state, PC, etc, etc - everything you might imagine would raise his ire basically; Maconie, on the other hand, or at least from what I've inferred from his Radio 2 evening programme, reckons they've become more invasive than kudzu vine or grey squirrels - they're everywhere and no one knows why.

Me, I can live with high visibility vests. See them so often now that I don't see them - the visual equivalent of background noise. It's tattoos that set my teeth on edge.

The pain, and surely there is, of that raw, red, inflamed slice of skin impregnated with ink. I knew someone who had their back tattooed a few hours before they returned to the UK from Las Vegas; ten or so hours of exquisite agony sitting bolt upright too terrified to lean back against the airline seat. Why?

And it does n't go away. Once tattooed, it stays; the ink will fade and skin shrivel, but it does n't go, even the high tech surgical sandblasting leaves an indelible imprint behind. A high visibility vest is for the moment, and a tattoo, yup, it's for life. So why do people do it, inflict a whirring needle staining their epidermis ?

Someone I know: a fine gazelle of a woman, spiritually centred, supple as a new born through years and years of yoga, holistic, organic, and on the right side of New Age (an enthusiast, not a zealot), has had one. It's not a delicate, tiny rose, or sprightly dolphin, coyly hidden away either, it's huge; from shoulder to elbow, something a sailor overwhelmed by drink might have done on shore leave. A swirling mythological character writhing down her arm. I don't actually know what character it is - I have real difficulty looking at tattoos. Why would she do this to herself, why would anyone? I can't, however ever hard I struggle, rationalise this. I just can't.

I can understand - just - the notion of wanting to visibly pledge allegiance to something, but inject yourself full of ink...why? I'd rather wear a teeshirt, or a high visibility vest. At least you can take it off.

"The final liberties of the freeborn Englishman torn away by Boris's killjoy Nanny state. No longer will the honest working man be able to enjoy a quiet quarter bottle of vodka or can of lager on the tube. A thousand years of freedom gone..." Headlines on the Evening Standard you'll never see. Ever. Except we all know they would have appeared, and with corwumphing relish, had Ken Livingstone proposed a ban on alcohol on public transport and not ol' BJ.

There's three types of thinking: vertiginous, vertical and lateral.

Vertiginous is an old favourite; there I am dizzied by the height, dazzled by an idea, which is usually insubstantial and so unable to support either it's own weight or any worthy scrutiny, nevertheless there's an obligation in me to check it out. Chasing chimeras, I simply have to. Thus I step off the precipice and find there's absolutely nothing to cling on to, the idea or whatever notion it is I'm chasing is as concrete as snowflake, and I land with thump. Take the Shepherds Bush plague pit I wrote about a few days ago - what an illusion that turned out to be.

So that's vertiginous, what about vertical, what's that? Well, that's straight up, linear thinking. Problem oriented, heavy on the reality of an issue, but featherweight on daydreams (that's the province of vertiginous). Vertical thinking is a foundation layer of business: there's a problem, this is the solution, and it will be pushed through at all costs. It may not fit, or even fix the thing at hand, but it's what has been decided upon and that's all that matters. Debatable whether this works, my experience is mixed here, sixty forty against.

My preferred thinking mode is lateral. The brainstorm. Get a clean sheet of paper, tell everyone to disengage their vertical thinking, ignore those boundaries, let loose whatever ideas pop up, and watch that pristine sheet fill up. This is idea generation at it's finest. Everything is a candidate, even the most peripheral and far-fetched can help.

I'm pretty good at lateral thinking. Partly because I've read a lot about it, partly because I love it's contempt for prescription (there's no: "don't do", it's all; "this might well work". I can't get enough of that openness); then partly because I need to be. Circumstances, the unexpected happening, they're why. Something utterly unexpected occurs and it needs fixing. Let me give you an example from Archimedes's life. I had an hour or so in a coffee shop with a friend on Saturday. We left and marched straight in to dust-storm roiling through Shepherds Bush. Clouds of builders sand and tree pollen. I swallowed most of it and what I did n't went in my eyes - I wear spectacles by the way so that's quite an achievement. Anyone enjoy the sensation of something stuck in your eye ? Painful twinges every time you blink ? Did n't think so. Seeing should be visual not tactile.

I doused my eyes with water to try and flush out the parts of Shepherds Bush that were stuck in them. Nothing. Sneezing and blowing my nose as I'd done on numerous other occasions. Nothing.

So what I did next was leverage Mother Nature's bounty; I bought an onion. A basketball sized onion. If there's one thing that can make me weep, it's one of these. I chopped this monster up as finely as I could, imploring the fumes to do their worst. They did. I wept me a river. Eyes in full flood can dislodge anything. To exaggerate the effect peeling onion can stimulate, I hovered millimetres above it, so both eyes were smarting and stinging; it's how I imagine driving through a cloudburst must be, I could barely see anything, in fact I'm surprised I've any fingers left, but it broke the log-jam. It did the trick. I can see again

Thank you Edward De Bono for the lateral thinking concept; thank you Nature for onions.

Plague Pit, Shepherds Bush? Not a thing. Another urban myth

For an average Brit, I'm quite unusual, I've got three names you see. There's my real name, which stays in the shadows for blogging purposes, then there's my blogging handle itself - Archimedes, and on the heels of those two there's my Native American name. Yeah, I've got one of those too. A special one, just for me, apparently it reflects my spirit, my inner self. So up there with Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and Dancing Bear is... Wild Goose Chase... or me.

Very apt. I do get all too easily distracted, get an enthusiasm stuck between my teeth and that's it, I'm away. Straight in, up to my neck, chasing an idea, a fragment that's all it takes, the faintest scent, even the spoor will do. There's one now, chafing, waiting to be scratched. It's about Shepherds Bush. Find a scruffier part of West London than here if you can, (it's difficult, believe me); right now though, it's got it's charmingly bedraggled fingers around my shoulders with absolutely no sign of letting go either.

One of my yoga classmates and I were mulling over Shepherds Bush, what makes it what it is, whats it's character. For her it's as cheerless and dilapidated as they come, overwhelmingly dodgy; people lurk, they skulk in and out of strange looking shops which never seem to have anything to sell. Above all there's an odd, dispiriting aura about it, something she finds intensely disquieting.

Me, well, I'm of the view that Shepherds Bush has a mad sense of being down at hill and yet rakish at the same time; it's a madcap example of endless kinetic motion, there's always something happening, good, bad, neutral, whatever, there's something going on. And I like that energy

I imagine there's a number of reasons why she finds it the way she does, no doubt a mixture of minor and major key factors I suppose, that's how it seems to work for most people. However, there was one thing she mentioned that I have to follow up: she wonders whether the reason she finds so dank and cold-hearted is that Shepherds Bush Green is on the site of an old plague pit...

Anyone who knows me realises that I'm never happier than when there's a tangential scrap of information blown into my face, wrapped around so tight I can't see anything but a tantalising tidbit that is crying out to be followed up on. I love these moments. This is hog heaven.

After I've posted this entry, it'll be a big deep breath then a swan dive straight into a search engine. Wild Goose Chase simply has to find out if 300 years ago plague victims were carted out of the City of London through what would have been countryside and then interred into a pit in Shepherds Bush.

"Write about what you know" that's what the all the how to books on writing say, or at least that's the message all those I've leafed through over the years have pushed.

So, what I know best is small yet perfectly formed: there's books, a big part of my life; a touch of wanderlust in there, I've always enjoyed traveling, cinema, art, the odd spot of football. These then ought to be my front line shock troops, a mere snap of the fingers, and they're lined up, prepped and ready to be written about.

Except. Life's full of excepts and but's. I find, there's another topic, one I'm more familiar with than I'd like to admit, my dark secret - dust. Damn dust, my flat is full of it. I'm shovelling it out. Where the hell does it come from?

Some words can fall out of the tree and land fully formed as stunning phrases. I run around collecting these whenever I found them. Notebooks full of them and a flat full of notebooks, it's that sort of thing.

I opened one of them a moment or so ago, and a liberated phrase flew straight out to dazzle me. A Bob Dylan humdinger; in one of his Theme Time Radio Hour programmes, in his oaked, smoked, throaty sing-song growl he let loose this "...refuse to concur, conform or submit". Whether there was a "we should..." in front or even behind I've no memory. I cannot remember the context at all, maybe it was a commandment, or an admonition, or said light-heartedly, but it's that easy facility with words that has me awestruck. Again and again. It's anyone who has that gift of assembly, who can pick and choose words out of the mixed gravel of language and make 'em sing.

Reno has gone! My barber, the shepherd of that forlorn flock of follicles I call hair. The man I trusted to patrol my head looking for errant hairs to clip has gone. I'm in shock.

There's new sign above the door and it's different; it stings of modernity and gell and spiky hair, Jazz's Barbers. In screaming black font on a lurid, acid-drop, orange background. Jazz's....first Boris Johnson, now this....

Oestrogen, we need oestrogen where I work, and we need it now. It's a 10 desk office where I work; first there were two of us there, both male, then on came another two - again male, followed by another pair a little later, and late last week another two guys came wandering in looking for somewhere to sit.

I'm a man, fully Y chromosome, likes chewing the fat about football and all that, but this is the first time I will ever have worked anywhere where it's likely to end up (there are only two more free seats left in this 10 seater office, and how many women want to work in the midst of eight middle aged men...?), exclusively male. It's not for any civilising values that women are reputed to bring - I've worked in some places where toe to toe arguments broke out regularly amongst some women - I just want balance. Ying and Yang; North and South; salt and pepper. See where I'm coming from here. Symmetry, that's what I'm pushing for.

Back to basics...or something I've not done for a long time...umpteen hours stood up, footsore, hungry, the ultimate mind over bladder experience, yup, an open-air festival. Clapham Common this August, headliner - the balladeer, Iggy Pop.

The health benefit of open air festivals is that sound has nothing to bounce off, no walls or ceiling to reflect a yammering solo or a throbbing reverb back into my tinnitus riddled eardrums. Rock 'n' Roll the new Aspirin?

I'll be there with my aged buddies...but not at the front, somewhere nice instead with seats and a pleasant young lady asking if I'd like my glass of Sancerre topping up. There's got to be a gentlefolks enclosure surely...

We are complex, we humans, capable of holding contrasting ideas that if they were expressed on the page would surely seem irreconcilable, science and faith, the obvious candidates here. Nevertheless, this is what we are capable of us and what I aver makes us 'us'. It's the "je ne sais quoi" that as far as we are aware no other discovered species has, which is the ability to handle contradictory thoughts concurrently, and still be able to walk in a straight line.

So as a man of the enlightenment and devotee of rationalism, I can still admit a penchant for horoscopes. Check mine every day, usually online, and in whatever freebie paper I've found strewn across the tube carriage.

I'm an Earth sign, Capricorn in fact; the characteristics of this piece of astrological grit are those of being mean, moody, miserable, and magnificent, on occasions all at the same time (not done that yet, but stil trying, don't write it off).

Capricorns must challenge boundaries and break out confines, or that's what we Goats have pumped at us. Today I did; moved straight out of the comfort zone, through untrodden pastures, broke new ground, terra incognita. I went to Kilburn.

It has been many years since I walked along Kilburn High Road. A well 'ard place, full of street-life, raw, with no doubt plenty of draw hidden away. Lots of men in vests, unshaven, not doing too much, a touch edgy at time, but I've not wandered into such a bustling, vibrant, deliciously aromatic area in ages (where I live is, but I'm part of it and can't stand outside and look in), and what I love more than anything else about London, a true United Nations sensibility. Roll on, Kilburn.

IQ tests. If I took one, I'd fail it. I know that. So I don't bother.

And anyway, what would it show other than I can't do standardised IQ tests. Important to some people maybe, not to me though. My fire has other irons: my forte, my strength as it were is raw abstract thinking. As some men excel at arm wrestling, or chess, or changing a tyre on the hard shoulder, pure, focused tasks, this is mine: thinking around the edges, putting it all into perspective, contextualising, that's where I step in.

So I can't change a tyre on the hard shoulder (not that I've actually had to)...but find me anyone else who can come up with reasons why the tyre blew in the first place, and not just first level thinking (it was a nail), but below that to the sub-levels (poorly made tyre, quality of rubber these days, but that nail, how sharp, and is n't that craftmanship, eh). That's the kind of finessed thinking I'm talking about.

An over developed capacity for abstract thinking, so what. Believe me I can weave a spider's web of connections, allusions, inferences, associations, a twinkling nervous system of ideas in minutes. Just now for someone to fall into that spider's web, adore it for what it is, be delightedly enwrapped by it all, this thicket of intellectualism I can spin, and ignore the facts of Archimedes's unorthodox looks.

L'esprit d'escalier. A woman who I was wooing several years ago said to me that she liked "men who were slightly arrogant".

" I'm not arrogant", I replied, "...far from it, I'm imperfect...it's just that I'm the best imperfect man you're ever going to find..."

If I only I had said that, we might have had something going....I did n't . Open-mouthed, probably, like some winded guppy, but no speech bubble wafting out. Nothing.

BJ has had a couple of days, which is long enough in my book, to get the Tube sorted, and what have we had so far? Other than some fatuous grandstanding about banning alcohol on the tube, which as we all know is simply for the benefit of the toothless, bigotted dodderers who live in Middle England and never come into London, sweet FA. Keeps his claque happy and that's all.

Well, that's not good enough, something needs to be done to improve the Tube and I've seen nothing happening since he took over. Nothing. Over two hours to get a home tonight...! Two hours, man, it's enough to make you want to crack open a couple of cans on the Tube. The Evening Standard promised Heaven on Earth with ol BJ at the reins...I'm waiting...

He should only have the same chances as the Tory Truimphalists flung at that Ken...except that will not happen. Not now they've morphed from Pitbulls baying for meat into lapdogs. They're telling me he can walk on water. Prove it to me...show me some rapid-fire changes after all that's what I'm expecting now...

.

What's this about France being a place of legendary fertility? They got that wrong whoever it was who came up with that. On my less than analytic assessment, but still useful in it's own way, then it's got to be London. Every corner I turn, every bus I board, every shop I enter, there's a hale, hearty, and very pregnant woman there. Matters have reached such a state that today I found myself silently logging how many I'd said, not voluntarily by the way, it's just that I caught myself thinking that was the fifth I'd seen.

Is it London's air or some baby inducing perfume wafting off the Thames? There has to be something. We must be the most fertile place in Europe. I know I wrote about this last year and the year before that, but I still can't shift the sense of wonder I have about this.

The Evening Standard has given London a BJ. Every one of us in turn. In the usual run of life I'd never turn one down (like so many men I've implored them to occur, begged.). In this instance, I politely defer the opportunity. Boris Johnson, imagine...ol' BJ...

In our one newspaper city, The Evening Standard has proven one thing: it's still possible to buy a successful candidature. Christ, Boris Johnson as Mayor of London...

The Jeremiah card is n't one I normally play anywhere, in my external life, or here in blogland; still, it's going to be difficult not to today. The sense I'm getting is that the Evening Standard candidate for the London Mayoral elections is leading the pack, and that I don't think bodes well should he break the winner's tape before anyone else.

A charming, professional near bungler, he may be, and graced with an easy touch for a classical Greek bon mot, attributes amongst others that make him endearing to...some. The clunky pause in that last sentence points out that I don't.

London is too big a deal to be run by someone whose judgement in public is suspect: remember the "watermelon" gibe, or then there's the poke at Liverpool ? Politics is I understand the art of appealing to everyone, nevertheless true blue that he is, he's a keen one for derision, the fellow sentiment of exclusion and finger-pointing; less inclusion, more exclusion.

I have this notion that should he get in power and have the Mayoral ermine wrapped around his shoulders that even the Tories themselves will be sweating privately at just what this unguided missile may do for them. Ok he'll gain them kudos (provided he gets in), but then what comes under scrutiny is him, ergo them. I'd not be too unsurprised if he becomes their George Bush - a figurehead whilst scurrying in the shadows trying to make it all happen are the Tory party's Dick Cheneys.

Interesting times as the Chinese say.