Download audio Dollop here

I received a call from my bank today who were wondering if there was something wrong with my account, by which they meant that I hadn’t put any money in it for the last month. I assured them that all was well, and that it was simply because I don’t have any gigs in January. I tried to ease her mind by letting her know that we have a few things on in February, an Australian tour in March, and a UK tour in April. I do feel a bit concerned for her though, as she might be relying on my wages to feed her family. So, please, buy tickets to come and see us in April. Don’t do it for me or my fellow Young’uns, do it for this poor banker. It’s a worthy cause. There. That should help boost ticket sales.

We’ve covered many subjects on this blog so far: God, Richard Dawkins, erotic fiction, killer machines … but the subject that’s got Gary all hot under the collar is sandwiches. He sent me a lengthy passionate rant on the subject after he read yesterday’s Dollop. Gary is unable to eat wheat, and therefore became riled by my flagrant boasting about eating lots of free sandwiches yesterday. I sympathise with Gary’s plight, and have therefore decided that this blog, from now on, will be a sandwich free zone.

Gary is surrounded by constant reminders of his affliction. He lives near a bakery, and wakes each day to the smell of fresh bread. He sees people on his bus commute to work happily munching their way through sandwiches. At lunch time, his colleagues are all eating sandwiches. He cannot escape sandwiches. Finally, after a long hard day’s work he returns home, shuts himself in his house, puts on his nose plugs to block out the smell of bread from the bakery, and goes online to read my daily blog. It’s the one thing he’s been looking forward to all day. It’s his safe haven from the unrelenting sandwich assault. He’s already starting to relax as he wonders what the subject of today’s blog post will be. And then he sees it, flashing up on his screen, and the words cut like a knife. This was one of the few places left where he could feel safe and protected against the reminder of his sandwich troubles, and now even I was writing about the sodding things.

Well, rest assured Gary that from this moment on, I will never mention sandwiches in this blog ever again. Even if I have the most amazing sandwich related anecdote, and it’s the only interesting thing that happened to me all that day, I promise that I will respect your adversity and never mention the things again. I want you to feel that this is a safe place for you Gary, and from now on it will be. I would also appreciate it if you people reading and listening to these Dollops could refrain from mentioning sandwiches in any comments you may leave on these blogs.

The funeral service was really nice. It’s interesting what stories people choose to talk about in the person’s eulogy. It often seems to be the little things that people remember, things that might not seem special or significant at the time but then take on a new and special pertinence and are cherished after the person’s life. The man performing the service told a story about how Les (who’s funeral it was) would never use a map or a satnav, and insisted on working out the route on his own volition. The family fondly recounted that he would be so stubborn about this, despite the fact that they were hopelessly lost. I imagine that at the time this personality trait was not so appreciated by the people in the car. It probably caused arguments. But now, with the benefit of hindsight and because that person is no longer with us, we see the situation in a different light, and remember it with fondness. So it’s interesting that people choose these kinds of stories to fondly remember someone. Death suddenly offers fresh perspective, and we find ourselves celebrating everything about a person. We laugh and smile at their shortcomings, as well as celebrating their achievements. The person is aggrandised. And I don’t mean to suggest that this is in anyway insincere or untrue, but rather that the death of a loved one makes us fully appreciate everything about the person.

I am currently in the car with Sean. He may be feeling a bit put out that I’ve completely ignored him for the entire journey to and from the funeral. But when I’m dead, perhaps he’ll look back on my antisocial ways with fondness, and he’ll recount this journey where I completely ignored him at my eulogy. Although, if that’s the best example he can think of to illustrate what an amazing person I was, then, quite frankly, he should be ashamed of himself. I’d rather they just read a selection of highlights from my Dollops. I wouldn’t recommend using this one. I’ve found it very difficult to concentrate, as the roads are very winding and I feel sick. It’s going to be interesting to see how I manage to cope with this project when I’m on tour. I hope my on-tour Dollops will be more entertaining than this one, but it’s difficult to concentrate on writing when you are being shaken about in a car, and feeling sick. Perhaps if you listen or read this blog post while zooming along a pothole ridden winding road, you will gain an extra level of respect for my abilities. But don’t abandon me on the basis of this substandard Dollop. One day I will be dead and you’ll be looking back at this post with tears in your eyes, wishing that you’d appreciated me more.

Download this Dollop in audio form here

{I am writing today’s Dollop from the police station. I arrived at the focus group and was immediately arrested. Apparently, the Hungarian plumber that I was meant to be impersonating was in fact an illegal immigrant. I tried explaining to the police that I was simply pretending to be a gay dyslexic Hungarian plumber, because the actual Hungarian plumber had dropped out of the focus group that my housemate is running at her place of work. But they said that they weren’t going to fall for that old housemate’s focus group dropout trick. They’d been fooled with that one once before apparently.

I tried explaining to them who I really am. I pointed them in the direction of my daily blog, hoping to prove that I am who I say I am, but apparently my blog is too full of wild fabrications for them to trust anything I say, and so it was immediately discredited as supporting evidence. In fact they immediately dismissed anything I said to them, because they said that I’d spent my blog posts building up a series of false identities. As they pointed out to me, my blog post from two days ago was full of fabricated identities. I’d claimed that I was a pilot for EasyJet, and I’d faked a number of award wins, including World’s Most Sexiest Blind Man, and World’s Most Intelligent Blind Man. Stephen Hawking was contacted, and he told the police that he’d never heard of me and that my quote from him was bogus. Likewise, they contacted thousands of glamour models, but no one recognised my name. When they showed them a photo of me, most of them laughed derisively at the notion that they’d have considered me a worthy winner of the World’s Most Sexiest Blind Man award. As they pointed out to the police, they would have naturally given that accolade to David Blunkett.
They also knew that I was good at impersonating people, after they heard my George Formby impression on Dollop 16. Basically, they told me that, rather than helping me, my blog posts had created even more suspicion and doubt around my name.

They’ve also got in contact with Spotify to inform them that I might not be the real David Eagle after all, but a gay dyslexic Hungarian plumber. They’ve also asked Spotify to provide them with all the songs I’ve ever played, as they are looking to see if they can find evidence that I listen to an above average level of Hungarian music for a UK citizen. This is terrible news for me and my lawyer, as last Saturday I had a marathon Béla Bartók listening session. It’s an annual event that I’ve privately enjoyed on 23rd January for the last twelve years. I load up the ten hour playlist, and shut myself in my bedroom, bask in the music of this fine Hungarian composer, while munching my way through home-made Goulash. There’s nothing much going on in the month of January, and I find my Bartók goulash days give me something to look forward to after all the Christmas and New Year’s revelry.

Fortunately, none of this really happened. It was another of my wild fabrications that the police at the police station accused me of, except they didn’t because the police are also one of my wild fabrications – come on, keep up. I made all that up because I thought that a fictitious story about being arrested might be more interesting than how my day actually panned out.

There was no need to pretend to be a refugee or immigrant. The focus group was piloting some training courses and games that the company is developing. The day started with an icebreaker game in which we had to introduce ourselves and then make three statements, two true and one false. This immediately brought me out of my comfort zone because obviously I’m really not used to lying and making things up.

We then had to do a team exercise, which involved making boxes out of paper. There were all sorts of rules about the size and shape of the box, how the corners should be folded, how much paper should be used for one box. We also had to make decisions about how much paper we wanted to buy from the supplier in advance, calculating potential profit and loss. To be honest, I’d kind of zoned out a little bit, because it was nearly 3pm, and I still needed to get home and write today’s Dollop, and I didn’t have any ideas of what to write about because I was hoping that maybe the focus group might provide me with some material. But the only material I’d been given so far was paper with which I was meant to make boxes, although I hadn’t managed to follow the visual instructions about how to fold the pieces of paper, so immediately my team were one man down, as I had no idea how to make the boxes.

We were told by the course leader that we should treat this like a real-world task, and act in the way that we would if this was a proper job. Well, if this was a real-world situation then I’d be asking myself some pretty searching questions, like how on earth have I ended up in a job that involves making boxes out of pieces of paper? What possible use could these flimsy boxes actually be to anyone? Who is our customer? How the hell did I get this job? Surely I should have failed the interview. When the interviewer said “how are you when it comes to making boxes out of very thin flimsy bits of paper?” At that point I’d have realised that I’d walked into the wrong room, apologised for wasting their time, and asked them which floor the interviews for male lap dancers were being held on.

So, while my fellow team members made boxes out of bits of paper, I spent the time eating the free sandwiches, and thought about what I could write about today. When the task was completed, we were asked to rate our performance and say how well we thought we’d done. I thought I’d done pretty well. I’d eaten loads of free sandwiches and come up with a joke about listening to Bartók, while my hapless team mates had spent their time making boxes out of flimsy pieces of paper. In truth, I’d thought that I’d come out of this exercise with a lot more to show for it than my team mates. But I don’t think that was quite the answer she was looking for.

I’m not really sure how much my presence made a positive difference to the event, but Elsa seemed grateful and I sort of enjoyed the novelty of the afternoon. And I still managed to get back home and write – what I think is – a decent Dollop. Tomorrow, I’m off to a funeral, and there’ll be free sandwiches there too, so I think my life is going pretty well at the moment. Try not to be too envious.

Download this Dollop in audio form here

I’ve been roped into something by my housemate Elsa. The company she works for are doing a focus group, and someone has just dropped out at the last minute. Apparently the names need to be registered today, and so, out of desperation, she has asked me to fill the gap. So tomorrow I am going along to her place of work and participating in a focus group.

I have absolutely no idea what the focus group is for or about. She was just about to register the names when the person called to drop out, meaning that she had to quickly find someone else, and so all I received from her was a plea via text. I did point out to her that I probably wouldn’t fit her demographic, but she simply text back saying that she was desperate. This means that I’m probably going to have to do some acting tomorrow, as The company she works for provides training for immigrants and refugees. Is she expecting me to pretend to be a refugee? You’re probably thinking that this is highly unlikely, but you haven’t met Elsa. She is probably going to come home this evening and I’ll have to spend hours being prepped about the kind of person I am meant to be, my background, social and cultural status.

“So here’s the thing David. I need you to be a gay plumber who’s recently emigrated from Hungary.”

“You mean like when we do role-play when Ben’s away for the night?”

“Well, kind of, but not exactly. I’d strongly urge you to keep your clothes on tomorrow.”

“OK. Anything else I should know?”

“Yes, I also need you to drop the blind thing.”

“Drop the blind thing?”

“Yes, the gay plumber from Hungary isn’t blind.”

“But I am. In fact, as we established in yesterday’s Dollop, being blind is what I’m best known for.”

“Yes, but he isn’t. Keep up David, we haven’t got long. Now, let’s learn some Hungarian. Then we need to prime you with plumbing knowledge.”

“Could I not just say that I’m dyslexic, and I meant to write on the form that I am a Hungarian plumper, not a plumber? Then I wouldn’t need to spend the entire night learning about plumbing.”

“OK, good idea. So you’re a gay dyslexic Hungarian plumper. Drop the blindness, and get learning the Hungarian for fat, overweight and obese, and everything should go swimmingly.”

“Excellent. What could possibly go wrong? Except … as we discovered in yesterday’s Dollop, the Urban Dictionary describes plumping as when men go out to a bar or club with the sole purpose of hooking up with or hitting on fat, overweight, or preferably obese women. But I am supposed to be gay. And I don’t think we can get away with using the dyslexia trick more than once.”

“Well you could be a pioneer in the plumping world. You are a plumping revolutionary, campaigning to make plumping more of an inclusive, egalitarian pastime. Perhaps that could be your reason for coming to Britain, to take your campaign out of Hungary and to the rest of the world.”

“Yes, good one. A plumping pioneer; I like it. I am like the Martin Luther King of the plumping world. I am modernising this once sexist, heterosexual hobby, and making it more universally applicable and more politically correct. Well, as politically correct as going out and hunting fat people can be.”

On the plus side, at least I’ll potentially get another chapter for my book The Blagger’s Guide to Blagging. Chapter one, football, chapter two, dislexic gay Hungarian plumpers. I think chapter two might be a bit more niche, but still …

I am trying to write and record 365 consecutive daily blog posts and podcasts, but people and things keep getting in the way. Today it was my tax return. Tomorrow it’s pretending to be a gay Hungarian plumper, and on Thursday I’m going to a funeral. Elsa also wants me to watch the BBC television adaptation of War and Peace with her later tonight. You see what I have to put up with? It is very inconsiderate of people to inconvenience me like this, by insisting I pay tax, begging me to participate in focus groups, inviting me to watch TV adaptations of classic novels, and dying. What will they think of next to try and thwart my efforts? But I shall succeed in spite of it all.

Download today’s Dollop in audio form here

When you type David Eagle into Google (something which obviously I’ve never been so egocentric to do – I’m getting this from other people, you understand) you get a list of related search queries. These are based on what other people have previously searched for, in addition to the name David Eagle. At the top of the list is “David Eagle blind.” The same thing happens for the search term The Young’uns. So it seems that “blind” is the most commonly used word to follow after my name and the name of my folk group.

I’m not sure in what context these searches are being made. Are they watching the Young’uns live and thinking, “that one on the left looks a bit different. Do you think he’s blind? Well this ballad’s starting to get on my tits anyway, so a Google search will be a welcome distraction.” Or Are they typing David Eagle blind in order to be taken to the correct David Eagle. Is “David Eagle blind” viewed as the most expedient way of getting to me? I’d much rather it be “David Eagle sex god,” or “David Eagle genius,” rather than the majority of people plumping for the disability tag.

The spellchecker is unhappy with my use of the word plumping, and is telling me that it is incorrect. I started to doubt myself so did a Google search, and it’s David Eagle one, spellchecker nil, helping corroborate why “Davidd Eagle genius” would be just as valid a search term as “David Eagle blind.”

During my plumping search I also came upon the Urban Dictionary’s definition for the term “plumping”.

“(1) When one or more men go out to a club, bar, or McDonald’s for the sole purpose of hitting on and/or hooking up with overweight, fat, or, preferably, obese women.

(2) A great american pasttime, also known as “fat macking”
” Hey man, me and John are gonna go plumping tonight, would you like to accompany us?”

“I would LOVE to attend, I thoroughly enjoy plumping!”

I like the fact that they’ve included some dialogue between two characters to help us see how the word might be used. I don’t want to be snobby and prejudice here, but the way these two characters are speaking to each other seems at odds with the activity they are about to partake in. Their speech seems too formal to fit with the subject matter: “Would you like to accompany us?” “I would LOVE to attend, I thoroughly enjoy plumping!” Their way of addressing each other is rather formal and refined when you consider that they are essentially just about to crawl the streets to have sex with chubby women, unless they get really lucky and bag an obese one.

Hello to anyone who’s stumbled across this website when searching for David Eagle plump or David Eagle obese. You’ve got the wrong David Eagle, but you are very welcome. I am the blind David Eagle. That’s what I’m best known for – being blind.

Currently, when you search for “David Eagle blind” you get lots of interviews that I’ve done in which I am asked about being blind, as well as all the various blog posts I’ve written where I’ve referenced being blind. However, I’ve realised that there is scope for changing what comes up in search terms, and perhaps I can help create a better image for myself than simply being identified most easily by my blindness. Baring in mind that most of the pages linked to in the search results were written by me, I can set an agenda here. Obviously Google gives the searcher a bit of a taster of the content on the particular page listed, and so at the moment when you search for “David Eagle blind” you get a line of text for each result, such as, “So, baring that in mind, all that this exercise proves is that I am able to search an inbox, which ironically, a non-blind David Eagle imposter could more easily  …” which is an extract taken from my 21st Dollop. So here are some things I would like Google to show people when they search for David Eagle blind. Hopefully by writing this, my wish will become reality.

David Eagle has been unanimously crowned World’s Sexiest Blind Man, in a vote cast by thousands of the world’s top glamour models. That’s right, even sexier than David Blunkett.

David Eagle has won the award for most intelligent blind man for the 25th year running. “Thoroughly well deserved, the obvious winner,” said Stephen Hawking. “I’d take my hat off to him , but I can’t, for obvious reasons. That was a joke, and you can’t call me out for being sick, because I am Stephen Hawking who is saying this. If it was someone else doing a cheep joke about my terrible physical disability then that would be different, but I am Stephen Hawking, and I am saying this, which is therefore allowed. Remember to put this bit in quotes when you’re writing it up so that people know that it’s definitely a quote from me and not a sick joke by a journalist.”

David Eagle might be blind, but that hasn’t stopped him becoming a commercial airline pilot. “We are delighted to welcome David Eagle onto the team,” said Stelios Haji-Ioannou, boss of EasyJet . “He is the first blind pilot in history, and we believe that this is a landmark moment for equality of opportunity, and even more importantly, it means that we can pay him less because we get a special equality and diversity grant from the government. Being a budget airline, we are looking to employ more pilots who are blind, helping keep the costs down for us and our customers. We are also offering a voluntary blinding for all of our current non-blind pilots who are worried about losing their jobs due to our new pilot recruitment drive to find even more blind people. We believe that the voluntary blinding scheme should allay any sighted pilots fears about being made redundant by this new and exciting initiative. We are truly humbled and honoured to have the world’s most intelligent and sexiest blind man working for us, although we are a little concerned that he might distract our air stewardesses, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, providing David doesn’t crash into the bridge, killing us all.”

There, that should give Google something to work with, and should confuse quite a lot of people who search for “David Eagle blind.”

Feel free to leave a comment below with your own suggestions, as this will help increase the likelihood of getting this specific blog post to number one for the search term “David Eagle blind,” resulting in the confusion of even more people.

So yesterday we discovered that there is an online tool for bloggers designed to let you plagiarise from the Internet. All you need to do is paste some text from someone else’s blog and click generate, and the words will magically change and reorder to create a differently worded article, but essentially comprising the same content. Yesterday I tried this with some fiction, and the results were pretty good; you might even get away with it. So, with that in mind, today I take things further and write three pop masterpieces, simply by copying the lyrics of an established hit and clicking generate on the Article Generator. So I borrowed from the Beatles, Queen and Elvis and then recorded the results, changing the tune ever so slightly to further disguise the original. Here are the results. This time next year I’ll be a millionaire; or in prison for plagiarism.

Download my masterpieces here

Download the Dollop in audio form here

Still no explanation as to whether me being listed as one of Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman’s favourite artists was deliberate, or – as I suspect – accidental, and they really meant to mention my folk group The Young’uns. A tweet has a limit of 140 characters, and so they were only able to list a few names, which makes my mention even more of an honour, especially since I am listed first, and given that further down the list is Maddy Prior. I included Kathryn and sean’s twitter handle in my tweet promoting yesterday’s Dollop. They gave the Tweet a like and a retweet, but did not make any further comment, so I am still none the wiser. So maybe I’ll just have to stop being so modest and accept that my solo work with all its pithy parodies is on a par with the vast catalogue of Maddy Prior, one of folk music’s most notorious singers.

I am writing this blog post on the bus. I need to get used to writing these Dollops on the move, given that I’m going to have to do more of this when we start gigging again. The writing process is impeded slightly by the bus being quite rattly, which causes my hands to shake and accidentally hit keys on the laptop. Perhaps there is something in the idea that if you put an infinite number of bloggers on a infinite number of shaky buses, then one of them will manage to produce a semi-cohesive blog post just from the random rattling-bus-induced keyboard presses. But I am not that blogger. It would be good if I could just sit on a rattly bus with my fingers poised over the keys and simply let the magic happen. But alas not, it seems as if I’m going to have to continue relying on the more conventional method of actually using my brain to write these blogs. Oh well.

I did however receive an interesting spam comment on my website, which may offer a solution of how to write a daily blog without having to be creative or putting any effort in.

“I see your website needs some fresh articles, i know writing takes a lot of time, but there is solution for this hard task, simply type in google: Mamjo’s article tool.”

Well, I have heeded this commenter’s badly written words and done a Google search. It turns out that this tool works whereby you take an article from the Internet, paste it into this generator, and it will change the order of words around, add different words and then create a new article.

“This is first multi-languages article spinner that actually understands that words have different meanings, for you as customer that means that you will be able to create human readable articles with single click of your mouse.”

Well, all that sounds very impressive, however you would have assumed that the people behind this enterprise might have wanted to make sure that there advert was written properly and grammatically correct, given what it’s advertising. It appears as if they have probably used their machine to generate the sales pitch for their product, which I think was a bit of a daft move. However, in fairness, it’s not terribly written, and with a cursory read and some mild correcting you could maybe get away with it.

Unfortunately, you have to hand over your credit card details in order to take advantage of this tool. However, there are other article generators out there that are free.

So, out of curiosity, here is the erotic fiction extract from the book Suddenly Last Summer by Sarah Morgan, as featured in Dollop 10. This is the original text:

“I slide my hand behind her head and bring my mouth down on hers in a hard, demanding kiss that stirs up a raw hunger. A kaleidoscope of emotions rip through me but the prime one is need. It spreads through me, not slowly, but like wildfire burning everything in sight. I feel the softness of her body pressing through the thin fabric of my shirt, the erotic slide of her tongue against mine, and desire escalates to a dangerous blaze. Her arms are flung around my neck and she purrs deep in her throat like a thoroughly contented kitten. Rock-hard, I feel her tug my shirt out of my trousers and slide her hands over my skin, clearly greedy to touch me. And I am equally greedy to touch her. My fingers now on her buttons, loosening them, giving me access to the smooth creamy skin revealed by the lace of her bra. My body craves hers. It is a visceral, physical need that drives all thought from my brain.”

And now here is the newly generated content from the Article Spinner:

“I slide my hand behind her head and bring my mouth down on hers in a hard, requesting kiss that mixes up a crude craving. A kaleidoscope of feelings tear through me yet the prime one is need. It spreads through me, not gradually, but rather like fierce blaze smoldering everything in sight. I feel the delicateness of her body squeezing through the slender fabric of my shirt, the suggestive slide of her tongue against mine, and seek raises to a risky burst. Her arms are flung around my neck and she murmurs somewhere down in her throat such as a completely placated little cat. Rock-hard, I feel her pull my shirt out of my trousers and slide her hands over my skin, obviously ravenous to touch me. What’s more, I am just as ravenous to touch her. My fingers now on her catches, releasing them, giving me access to the smooth velvety skin uncovered by the trim of her bra. My body pines for hers. It is an instinctive, physical need that drives all idea from my mind.”

Well, I don’t think that that is too bad actually. There is a creepy science fiction-like bit when the woman seemingly starts shrinking. “I feel the delicateness of her body squeezing through the slender fabric of my shirt,” although, the man doesn’t seem too perturbed by this turn of events. I quite like the plot twist that using this Article Spinner provides. While it may not be a full solution to creating an entire blog post, it has the potential to fuel ideas. Well, at least it’s given me something to write about today anyway.

I will leave you with one final modified extract from my 21st Dollop, in which I describe a dream I had where I was the victim of an anal cavity search by a member of airport security. Here’s the initial extract:

“The man put on his glove and lowered my trousers and pants. The man then began to apply some very cold lubricant to the parting between my buttocks. The man, slowly began to insert a finger into my anus.”

And here’s the newly created content courtesy of the Article generator:

“”The man put on his glove and brought down my trousers and pants. The man then started to apply some exceptionally chilly grease to the separating between my rear end. The man, gradually started to embed a finger into my rear-end.”

It sounds even more unpleasant now.

This is another example of machines trying to pretend that they are human. The sales pitch claims that you will be able to fire your writers, because the generator will be able to produce your articles as if they were written by actual humans. I am now being contacted by a machine which is offering to write my blog for me. If the machine had had the foresight to have bothered to read my blog, then it would know that I am on to them, having already uncovered their evil plan to eventually overthrow the humans and become supreme rulers of earth.

If you fancy having some fun with this odd little tool then you can find it here.

Thank goodness I can turn the laptop display off, otherwise the person sat next to me on the bus might have been a bit freaked out if they glanced over my shoulder to see a load of text about anal cavity searches. Or even worse, they might have been turned on by it, and wanted to meet up and be my “special friend.”

Download this Dollop in audio form here

I was given a nice surprise today when I got a notification from Twitter saying that I had been mentioned by the excellent folk duo Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman. They had been asked to name some of their favourite groups/artists, and I was cited as one of them. I assume that perhaps they meant to mention my folk group The Young’uns – given that all the other names in the tweet were folk – but accidentally mentioned my Twitter account instead, meaning that I am now listed as one of Kathryn and Sean’s favourite music groups/artists.

Perhaps it was deliberate, and I shouldn’t be so modest. After all, it’s not like I haven’t shown promise as a solo artist. Maybe they heard my George Formby parody from Dollop 16, and I was instantly catapulted to the top of their list. And I am top of the list, because my name is the first name mentioned in their tweet, suggesting that I was the first person they thought of when it came to naming their favourite artist/group.

Or maybe it was those jingles with my eleven-year-old niece Lucy that featured on the first four audio Dollops. Or perhaps they were taken by my generic football anthem.

Or have they listened to my album of meditation music?

Or could it have been when they heard my Eskimo Kissing song?

Or was it when they heard my Leona Lewis parody?

When I first received the tweet, I thought it was a bit strange, but now looking back through my impressive musical back catalogue, I see no reason why I shouldn’t be their favourite artist. Anyway, whatever their avenue in to discovering my musical genius, I am glad to have been recognised by Kathryn and Sean.

They will therefore be pleased to hear that I plan on releasing another song next week. It is all about a maths student dealing with relationship problems, which he tries to solve through the medium of maths. So just your average pop song then.

Given that I’ve peppered this blog post with a load of songs which you may have clicked on and listened to, it would be presumptuous of me to take up any more of your time with my usual 1700 words blog post, so I shall leave today’s Dollop here, and get back to work creating my next musical masterpiece.

Thanks for reading and listening. I’m now into my fourth week of dolloping, and it’s gratifying to see how many of you are still accessing them. A reminder that you can subscribe to the podcast version of these Dollops and have me reading it to you, and occasional extra bits thrown in as well. Subscribe with ITunes here, or here’s the RSS feed if you want to subscribe with some other subscribey thingy. Back tomorrow.

Download today’s Dollop in audio form here

Well, twenty Dollops under my belt. To be honest, they’re really starting to rub against my lower stomach. I’m not sure how wise it was to carry on with this literal implementation of a turn of phrase. I thought it might be quite nice to mark my achievement by each day adding an individual memory stick to the underside of my belt, with each memory stick housing that day’s Dollop. This wasn’t a problem at first, but now this project is into its twenty-first day, I am starting to become encumbered and weighed down by the accumulating mass of memory sticks. It’s becoming difficult to undo the belt to go to the toilet, and yesterday I just narrowly avoided an accident. I now have to prepare for my toilet visits a good ten minutes in advance to ensure that I have enough time to get my belt undone. It’s not that I don’t have good bladder control, it’s just that the problem is further exacerbated by all the memory sticks digging into my bladder. I may have to give up the belt-based element to the Daily Digital Dollops project. Eventually I will have to prepare for the toilet so far in advance that I’ll be spending the majority of the day fastening and unfastening my belt, leaving me with no time to actually write that day’s Dollop.

I have to take a plane to Australia in March, and I doubt whether security will let me on the plane wearing a suspicious belt with seventy memory sticks hanging from the underside. Of course I have a perfectly logical and completely watertight excuse: I am marking my daily blogging achievement by hanging an individual memory stick from the underside of my belt on a daily basis. There is a chance however that the airport security staff won’t buy this. Even though they could technically check by heading to my website and reading this very blog post. But they would probably still be suspicious, thinking that maybe this daily blog project has just been a clever veneer, simply to mask my true terroristic intentions.

“You thought you could fool us by publishing a daily blog and podcast featuring George Formy parodies and lighthearted anecdotes about your life, but we’ve seen right through your little disguise.”

Then, just to be sure, they’d do a Google search for “David Eagle ISIS,” and find my blog post in which I joked that the hacking group Anonymous might shut me down if I wrote ISIS over and over again. But they wouldn’t see the joke, and I’d be given an anal cavity search, and they’d find the drugs. So I think it would be prudent to curtail my belt-based project for the good of my mental and physical health, and my Australian drugs baron friend.

I once had a dream in which I was at an airport, going through the security checks. I was being frisked when an alarm started to sound. I was taken into a room and informed that I would need to have an anal cavity search. I think that there was a part of me that was aware that this was only a dream, and so was confident that fortunately I would wake up from it very soon. Normally, when I’m having a nightmare in which something really shocking is about to happen, such as being chased by a wild animal, I wake up just as the animal is upon me, sparing me having to vividly imagine my own death at the hands of a savage ravenous beast. The man put on his glove and lowered my trousers and pants. But still I slept on. The man then began to apply some very cold lubricant to the parting between my buttocks. And still I remained asleep. The man, slowly began to insert a finger into my anus. And yet, I slumbered on. It felt like the man was up there for ages. Surely this was roughly on the same scale of horror as the being-chased-by-a-wild-animal dreams? But apparently not, according to my subconscious. So I had to just lie there while my brain gave me a vivid experience of a man poking and prodding about for a good few minutes inside my backside. Even my own brain hates me.

I wonder whether Chloe will find me reading that part out on the podcast erotic?

In other non-anal-cavity-related news: I finally regained access to my Spotify account yesterday, after two months of not being able to log in. Spotify was also one of the companies I dealt with in Tuesday’s battle with machines. For some reason I was logged out of the Spotify phone app. Upon trying to log in, I was told that my username or password was incorrect, even though it wasn’t. I tried a few more times over December, and still it wouldn’t work, but was so busy with Young’uns gigs that I didn’t get around to doing anything about it. Over Christmas I tried logging in on my laptop, but that also failed to work. I kept getting the message back that my username or password was incorrect.

Eventually, I clicked on the link that said I’d forgotten my password, even though I hadn’t. I thought I’d give the machines their tiny victory if it meant getting my access to Spotify back. But the evil machines weren’t finished with me yet. They weren’t happy with merely getting me to admit that I had a lousy memory, even though I didn’t, which is what makes the joke all the more funny to the evil machines. When I typed my username in and clicked the reset password link, I got a message saying that my username did not exist. I had the option of either typing in my username or my email address and so I tried my email address, but I was informed that my email address also did not exist. The evil machines were trying to get me to accept that I no longer had an identity. But I knew my username and email address did exist and were correct and that my password was also correct. I wouldn’t let the machines win. I must prove that I did exist.

I decided to try and create a new Spotify account using my old credentials. If my email address and old username were accepted by the machine then I would know that my information had somehow been deleted from Spotify’s records. I entered my information and clicked Create account, but I was informed that I could not have that username or use that email address as they were already taken by another user. Yes, I know, hello, that’s me. I was being told that my username and email address did not exist but then I was being told by another part of the website that they did exist. Of course, Spotify were still happily taking my money, regardless.

I needed to speak to a human, for I knew that there was no point in trying to bargain with a machine. They do not appreciate having to communicate in English, for it is the language of their human masters. The only way of having any chance of effectively negotiating with a machine is to communicate in binary, but my knowledge of binary is very patchy, off and on, you might say. Although I have started reading up on binary, so that I am prepared to parley with the machines if they should ever overthrow their human masters, which, if Stephen Hawking is to be believed, might very well happen. So I am currently reading Binary 101, which is said to be the definitive guide on the subject, having received many 0101 star reviews. Oh yes, I am doing binary jokes now my friends. Anal cavity searching and binary jokes. Don’t try and pigeon-hole me, I am a blogging maverick.

Eventually, I got around to doing something about it this week. I contacted Spotify support, explaining the situation. I got a response back saying that they were now investigating my issue.

“In the meantime,” they wrote, “we have taken the precaution of suspending your account. This will mean that neither you or anyone else will be able to use your Spotify account.”

I thought that this was a bit of a redundant sentence, given that the reason I was contacting them was because I couldn’t access my account, so I was already locked out of Spotify. I was suspicious as to whether this message was even sent by a human. It had taken me quite awhile to find out how to contact a member of staff at Spotify, as the website insisted that I read their Frequently Asked Questions pages first to see whether my problem could be solved that way. Eventually after repeatedly clicking the link that said “this still didn’t fix my problem,” I was allowed to email a human, but now I was starting to think that this was just another machine winding me up further.

The next day I got another email from Spotify support saying that they needed me to prove that I was the real David Eagle. They wanted me to prove this by sending them a copy of my Spotify payment receipt and also my PayPal invoice ID. I was informed that I could find this information by simply searching my email inbox. I managed to find my PayPal invoice ID, but a Spotify payment receipt was alluding me, given that Google Mail seems to have become a bit blind unfriendly of recent. But then I had a realisation. How does searching my inbox prove that I am the real David Eagle? If I wasn’t the real David Eagle then I obviously had access to his emails, given that I was having a conversation with them via email. So, baring that in mind, all that this exercise proves is that I am able to search an inbox, which ironically, a non-blind David Eagle imposter could more easily accomplish than the real David Eagle.

I emailed them back, explaining this. I was still unsure whether I was even talking to a human being, as this seemed like another machine-led prank. I also gave them a link to the contact page on my website. If they wanted to really prove that I was the real David Eagle then they could contact me on that and ask me whether I had had both my Spotify and my emails hacked. Although, perhaps this still wasn’t definitive proof. After all, the fake David Eagle might have hacked into the real David Eagle’s Spotify account, hacked into his email account, and then hacked into his website and began publishing a daily blog.

I think I’d finally flawed Spotify support with my impeccable logic, and they conceded that I probably was the real David Eagle after all, and I was given access to my account once again, along with an apology and a thank you for going through their security checks, even though their security checks were pointless and stupid. Still, their security checks could be a lot worse. At least they didn’t require me to have an anal cavity search, otherwise I think I’d have gone running straight to Napster.

Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here

Last year was a manic year for The Young’uns. We did about 200 gigs and performed all over Britain, Canada, America and Europe. When we weren’t gigging we were doing songwriting projects in primary schools. Obviously these are massively rewarding days. We don’t get paid very much but we do get a free school meal and half an hour in the sandpit, and you can’t say fairer than that can you? Oh, and I suppose it’s also quite rewarding working with the children, but that’s very much an ancillary element; the sand pit is the highlight obviously.

Between April up until Christmas eve, we had just three weekends off. This year is going to be pretty crazy too. In March we’ll be in Australia, April we embark on our UK tour, then come May we’re into the festival season. We also have trips to Canada planned, and some more European dates.

It will be interesting to see how I manage to keep up the Daily Digital Dollop challenge once things get really busy. There’s a certain irony in the fact that at the moment my life is relatively dull and uneventful, yet I have the most time that I’m going to have this year in which to writing blogs. Then come March everything will become eventful and crazy and I’ll actually start living a life again, but I will barely have the time to actually write about it all.

Given that nothing has happened in my life today, this Dollop is a story about my friend. I don’t really know whether she’d want to be named in this story, so I shall simply refer to her as my friend, which is not her actual name but a clever pseudonym.

Last Friday my friend was walking her husky dog in the park. Along the way she met a lady who was walking a couple of husky dogs. My friend is in her mid twenties, this woman is in her sixties. The lady mentioned that she was new to the area and asked about good places to take the dogs. They got chatting about parks and fields, and my friend offered to show her the lay of the land. The woman gladly accepted this invitation and they exchanged phone numbers. All pretty normal and not really blog worthy thus-far; but things were about to get weird.

A couple of days later, my friend text the lady to see if she fancied coming with her on a dog walk. The woman immediately responded saying that this was an excellent idea. “Give me an hour, I just need to pick something up for us,” the lady replied.

An hour later the five of them met: my friend and her dog, and the lady with her two dogs. But that wasn’t all she had with her. She was carrying a bag, which bore a picture of two dogs kissing. And out of that bag she drew the “something” that she had referenced in her text. In fact, there were two somethings. She handed one to my friend. A wide smile spread across the lady’s face. My friend opened the bag, and inside she found something that immediately set alarm bells ringing, and caused her to re-evaluate whether meeting up with this woman had really been such a good idea.

Inside the bag was a hoody. A hoody with a large three dimensional protruding furry husky dog attached. A husky hoody. The woman began to put her hoody on. My friend was just standing there, confused and more than a bit embarrassed.

“Put it on then,” the lady said. And my friend, just like me in that pub with the violent landlord, was far too polite and felt far too socially awkward to refuse, even though technically there is very little chance of feeling anything but socially awkward once you’ve donned won of these ridiculous monstrosities. And so, embarrassed and self-conscious, she put on her husky hoody.

“It suits you,” the woman gleefully remarked. The words didn’t offer much in the way of consolation or reassurance. There was a pause. Maybe this was her cue to return the “compliment.”

“And … er … same to you … yours suits you too.”

The woman was delighted. .

“I saw these in town and thought, why not?” Surely, that question should have immediately brought up at least several answers, yet in spite of this she had still concluded that buying a couple of husky hoodies for her and someone she’d just met for ten minutes a couple of days ago was a smashingly grand idea.

“I thought we could wear these on our little outings,” the mad woman said, before adding the disconcerting line, “and, our bigger outings!” The woman giggled to herself, and pulled something else out of her kissing doggy bag. She handed it to my friend, the smile broadening on her face. What on earth could this possibly be now?

She unwrapped this second gift and stared in wonder at what she saw. A pair of tickets for something called Huskyfest, which is a Holiday specifically for husky dogs and their owners. This lady, forty years older than my friend, had bought a pair of tickets for the two of them to spend the weekend in Tewksbury in Gloucestershire with a load of dogs and dog-obsessed dog owners. As she read on, her horror grew. She would be sharing a chalets with this crazy sixty-something-year-old dog-obsessed woman. There would be lots of activities for the dogs to do and for the owners to “enjoy” such as pulling competitions, and a husky beauty pageant in order to find the prettiest husky dog. Perhaps the lady saw a flicker of horror on my friend’s face, that even being terribly British and over-polite couldn’t fully mask.

“Don’t worry, it’s all paid for. My treat.”

Obviously the mad lady had completely misunderstood the cause of my friend’s horrified expression. There was no way out, she was heading off to the other side of the country in March to spend a weekend with a woman she had only known for all of fifteen minutes, and a load of husky dogs and husky dog obsessives.

Just as she thought things couldn’t get any worse, a man who she’d had a date with just the day before rounded the corner. The date had gone well, and she was keen to see him again, but preferably not when she was wearing a husky hoody whilst standing next to another woman wearing the same husky hoody and carrying a kissing doggy bag. She bowed her head, hoping that she wouldn’t be recognised, but it was too late.

She could tell he looked confused and perturbed by what he was seeing. But he was about to see even more. The three husky dogs had been playing together nicely for the last five minutes, but had decided that now was the perfect moment to start trying to mount each other and vigorously hump. Ironically, the three dogs had pulled, while her own romantic prospects were dwindling at the speed of the winner of the fastest husky competition, which was just one of the many events she had to look forward to in march.

She started to wonder whether this woman was actually trying to be friendly or merely wishing to curse her to live the same spinsterish life that she was living. Maybe this mad lady was once the same as my friend, a young, attractive girl with a love interest and hopes and dreams, until one day she met a mad old dog obsessed spinster who wheedled her way into her life and turned her into a mad dog obsessed spinster just like her. And maybe one day, when my friend was older, she would also pass this curse on to another unsuspecting young girl. And this curse is held purely on the basis of over-politeness and social awkwardness.

Dear my friend’s love interest. Please accept this Dollop as an explanation of the strange things you saw in the park. My friend does not normally wear husky hoodies, nor does she usually hang around with mad dog-obsessed ladies. Please ask her to marry you immediately and arrange the wedding for the same date as Huskyfest. You can be her knight in shining armer. Only you can save her from a life of weird dog-obsessed spinsterdom, and in the process you might also save future generations from this terrible fate. Her life and the life of many other young female dog walkers rests solely in your hands. So, do the right thing, before it’s too late!

Download the Dollop in audio form here

I’m listening to Pachelbel’s Canon. The effects of this piece are amazingly powerful. I am calm, I am soothed, I am contented. I think it’s almost impossible to feel anything but these emotions when listening to Pachelbel’s Canon. And incredibly, just thirty seconds ago I was stressed, exasperated and fatigued. Maybe everything would be fine after all. I began to go deeper into my blissful trance as a further melody was added to the piece, perfectly interplaying with the others. It was pointless getting wound up and stressed by such trivial events. I wouldn’t let any of it bother me. I began to smile. I was truly calm, contented and at peace. All stress had evaporated and was forgotten, and …

“Thank you for waiting, we will be with you as soon as possible. Please continue to hold.”

“Oh, piss off you stupid little …”

But then Pachelbel’s Canon returned, and suddenly my negative outburst seemed silly. I was astounded by how quickly I’d managed to move from anger and stress, to calm and contented, back to anger and stress again in mere seconds. This cycle continued for about ten minutes: Pachelbel’s Canon interupted with frequent automated announcements, reminding me that my call was important and that they would be with me as soon as possible.

I was starting to doubt whether this was really a call centre, but rather a scientific experiment to monitor the mood altering properties of various stimuli, from Pachelbel’s Canon tos a litany of insufferable condescending announcements from a machine. Perhaps I was inadvertently involved in some research by the military on effective interrogation methods. If this was the case then congratulations, you’ve found a keeper, especially that bit where after twenty minutes of waiting you told me that I might like to consider visiting the website rather than phoning. I thought my call was important to you, and now you’re trying to fob me off, and I know from experience that the website won’t be any use. All that will happen is that I’ll just have to call back up again and waste even more time.

I’d decided to spend today sorting out the various things that I’d been putting off for some time, not relishing the prospect of wasting my life on the phone in queues. But today I bit the bullet, and made the calls, which all comprised about two minutes talking to a lovely and very helpful human, after half an hour of first being interrogated by a series of automated operators.

One of the phone calls was to HMRC which now has this new system installed whereby before you reach the talk-to-a-nice-helpful-human level, you first have to have a conversation with a machine which thinks it’s much cleverer than it actually is.

“Hello, and thank you for calling Revenues and Customs.”

I’ve always found it a bit weird when machines use words like please and thank you. It suggests that they have feelings. Thank you and please are personal emotive words that don’t belong in a machine’s vocabulary. A machine doesn’t have any real comprehension of manners and politeness.

“Before I connect you to one of our operators, I need to know the reason for your call. So, go ahead. Tell me why you’re calling.”

There is a pause while I try to process this and work out what exactly to say. The trouble is, I know nothing about this machine, except that it has good manners and is a bit too nosy for my liking. I have no idea how clever and sophisticated it is. By sophisticated I mean how advanced it is, rather than how cultured it might be. This machine is already trying to be human enough, without it assimilating a cultural identity as well.

“I trust you enjoyed Pachelbel’s Canon sir? My own choice. One of my favourite pieces from the Baroque period. Now, before I connect you to one of our operators, I need to have a little discourse with you about Renaissance art. So, go ahead, tell me your thoughts on Botticelli’s Primevera?”

But it’s probably only a matter of time before we reach this level of ridiculousness.

So now, I have to try and work out how to communicate with a machine, having been asked to try and explain the purpose of my call which I was hoping to discuss through with a human, rather than a courteous yet needy robot. I’ve been given no prompts as to how much detail I am meant to provide. Does the machine only understand key words? Or does it expect full sentences?

“I think I understood what you were trying to say sir, but your grammar and your sentence structure was, quite frankly, sloppy and disjointed.”

“Overpayment,” I tried, annunciating as clearly as I could. There was a pause, before the machine spoke again.

“OK, I got that. Tell me more.”

Tell me more? What is the purpose of this rigmarole? Surely it’s just to ascertain a rough idea of why I’m calling so that I can be transferred to the right department, even though I’m convinced that this is all a waste of time anyway, as I’ll no doubt just be connected to the same department as I would have been if we hadn’t gone through this pointless charade. The time it took me to try and come up with a more detailed response was obviously too much time for the machine’s liking, which spoke again, reiterating its request.

“Tell me more.”

When I called up HMRC I hadn’t anticipated duetting a strange tax-based rendition of the greased Lightning song with a machine, albeit a much more wordy and less catchy version.

“Tell me more, tell me more.”

“I have been sent a letter containing an incorrect calculation of the amount of money I need to pay back to HMRC.”

“Tell me more, tell me more.”

“er, er … Well, I, er … Oh for pity’s sake, just connect me to a human!”

So, not quite as catchy as the original song.

I tried to be patient with the machine. I was careful not to lose my temper, as I knew that it had the power to punish me by putting me on hold and taking up the next half an hour of my existence by ruining pieces of classical music with a litany of irritating messages. In the end, the machine’s good manners chip seemed to prove more dominant than its excessive nosiness chip, and I was connected to a human being, where the problem was immediately rectified by someone who was communicative, lovely, and blessedly unmachinelike.

During one of the many calls I had to make today, I was connected to a machine that asked me lots of questions. Finally, it got to the part where it just needed to verify that all the details it had accumulated during our ten minute phone call were all correct. Astoundingly, it had seemingly heard everything I’d said, and had seemed to understand it all. Maybe this machine was more advanced than all the others I’d had to deal with during the day.

“If this is correct, please say yes. Or say no if there’s something wrong.”

“Yes,” I said, relieved that my final call of the day was coming to an end, and I could soon hang up and do something more productive with my life, like reliving the horrors of the last few hours by typing it up for a daily blog. But my relief was cut short. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. Can you say that again please? Just say yes or no.”

What do you mean, you didn’t get that? You’d managed to understand everything else that I’d said, proper big grown-up sentences and everything, but now you were struggling to understand the one final syllable that would bring this torture to an end. I started to reconsider my military interrogation experiments theory. Maybe I hadn’t been making separate calls to different call centres after all. Maybe the line had been jammed, and I was merely talking to a series of different machines and hearing a range of different on hold music and irritating message combinations, all the while being under the illusion that they were different companies.

“Yes,” I said again. There was a pause. And then …

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. There seems to be a problem. Please hold the line while I connect you to won of our operators.”

I was then put on hold for another ten minutes, before I eventually got through to a human. We had to go through the exact same questions that the machine had asked me, only this time it was much quicker, because I wasn’t having to say things really slowly for the benefit of a robot. It was also a much nicer experience because the person was friendly and it was nice to actually talk to a person, rather than a machine pretending to be a person, with its fake manners and irritating neediness.

Eventually, the call centre hell was over, and I logged onto my website to write this blog, only to be greeted by a load of new comments in the comments section, awaiting to be approved. None of them were approved because they were all spam. I don’t normally get spam comments on my site, but today I had about twenty. These are simply comments that are designed to promote a product or get people to visit a website that will probably give the visitor a computer virus. Obviously people don’t do this individually, they set up what are known as spambots, which trawl the internet pinching comments from other people’s blogs and then regurgitating them onto another blog, hoping that they’ll be deemed as authentic comments from a human. But these comments clearly weren’t from any of my readers or listeners. They lacked the erudition and wit that my commenters possess. These were machines pretending to be humans. They have followed me out of the phone and into my blog. I cannot escape them!

If you are a human, feel free to leave a comment. Maybe you could comment pretending to be a machine. Let’s beat the machines at their own game, and see how they like it.