Giles Broadbent receives a non-partisan political broadcast from a hotel sign
Across the dock from where I live is a Novotel hotel. I know this because its neon sign fizzes its midnight blue message through my window.
(Living here, it's like being a hard-boiled '50s gumshoe - only without the mystery, or the danger, or the femme fatales, or the guns, or the long coats, or the smokes - although I do have shoes but they're made of leather as opposed to, you know, Hubba Bubba).
Anyway, I was watching some abject MP on TV trying to offload his snivelling offspring of an excuse on us over some expenses outrage and I noticed a curious anomaly.
If I shifted my line of view, I could place the cross hairs of the window frame to obliterate a letter in the Novotel sign. I closed an eye and removed an "L".
Novote, it shouted at me from across the water. Novote. Novote.
First time I had noticed that. Weird, huh?
Yesterday once more
• Flicking across the limited terrain of my Freeview box to escape the by rote ramblings of these elected hydras, I came the channel formerly known as the History channel, now known as Yesterday.
But, with Freeview, Yesterday doesn't run in the evening so there was an olive green screen and a message. "Yesterday begins again tomorrow at 6am."
Wow. Yesterday does what now?
My brain lurched like a cross-eyed kid in a dodgem car.
Just think if that were true. If we could do yesterday again. The fights we could sidestep, the harsh words we could unsay, the thoughtless gesture we could correct, the gifts we could buy, the peace we could forge, the bridges we could build.
So I started making a list.
If I had a chance to do yesterday all over again I would:
1) Definitely, definitely not use that tomato in my sandwich. It was, like, all bloated and squidgy and the skin was all yukky and wrinkled and it just ruined the whole edifice of the sandwich.
I couldn't think of anything else right there and then so I headed off to make a reward snack.
But, hey, I was pleased with the tomato thing. I mean, it was definitely, definitely not right.
– First published in The Wharf on May 28
