Ah! This fickle race! The shelf-life of an idea is five minutes, and then it has run its course. Everything has its implicit use-by date, it’s five minutes from now, and if it’s not past yet, then you’re chasing it, hoping to see it off and land the next fix of fresher than fresh novelty. You’re getting bombarded by thoughts and aphorisms and lifestyle tips from all over the globe, and from any period in history when a quotable quote fell from the wise, or not so wise, but at any rate pithy. But, come on, who says a bottle of beer only lasts six months? Fine. Bad example. For many it only lasts as long as it takes to find the bottle opener, or till they snap the top off with their dentures. But that coconut milk I opened a month ago, it’s still as good as new now, though the label is telling me I should have ditched it four days after opening it, even if I stored it in the fridge. The soft cheese, the crème fraiche, that’s as good as new, but the packaging is telling me to start clutching at my stomach cramps in readiness now, because I’m surely going to die, and it’s going to happen very soon, because nothing waits around nowadays.

So, what am I to do with these ideas I carry in my head maturing for days? By the time they are on the page their validity is already under question, the rot has started, they are old and worn at the edges even as I type them. Any potential audience is flitting from impulse to impulse under the constant drive to capture the next novelty and be the first to it before the world moves on. So everyone is out in the meadow wildly chasing down butterflies with a net full of holes and catching nothing, or if they are lucky they will have a thing of beauty snared in their mesh, but it will be a thing of beauty with a life-span of a single day, and it will never feed but will see out its solitary purpose of laying eggs to produce ugly caterpillars. Whereas I, I will be over there in the corner of the pasture where the weeds have been left to grow, burying my ideas secretly, carefully under the sand, creating my own fermentation, a kind of hákarl of the mind for those who have time to wait. It’s an acquired taste by all accounts. It may make you spit and file your teeth. Or you may crave it to feed the worm that gnaws for this sort of thing inside your belly. Let’s hope that it, too, has a strong stomach.

(OK, so the picture’s a moth – give me a break)