It’s almost certainly an indicator of my lack of sophistication that I am not yet entirely immune to the occasional amusement value offered by the subject lines of spam mail. They are so consistently febrile and unhinged, and their occurrence so frequent that mentioning them seems as tedious as telling people about the crazy dream I had last night. Despite this I sometimes experience a pang of regret as I’m deleting them, a sense that I’m throwing away something of real poetic or comic value, a key to an entirely different way of seeing the world.  Clearly my heart isn’t sufficiently hardened yet. Here are two that caught my eye recently:

1) ‘Your dick size will be stamped on your forehead’

There’s little to say about that really. It’s hard to make out if it’s a threat or a promise. An interesting idea though.

2) ‘Your little friend is watching you tie your shoes’

I think this is a good title for a song. There’s something very menacing about it. When one realises (as you do after receiving 30 similarly titled variations on this theme) that ‘your little friend’ refers to your penis – then it takes on a whole other dimension – kind of dreamlike and melancholy. Does the penis feel left out of this exchange between your fingers and your shoelaces?