[I have written twelve articles of between 500 and 1,000 words each today so I am too tired to do a comic strip. They’ll be back tomorrow.]

A long while back, while I was in my faintly delirious “holy shit my life has just fallen apart, I need to distract myself in any way possible” phase, I composed a series of fever-dream blog posts that I have a feeling might have actually been relatively amusing. (Or at least I found them amusing. Your mileage may, as always, vary.) One of these posts was Things I Thought Were True, But Aren’t, in which I explored a selection of things that I had ingrained into my brain for various reasons — either I’d overheard my family or friends say them and gullibly believed them, or I’d simply never seen anything to prove my opinion wrong.

So, in the spirit of that original post from way back when, here are some more Things I Thought Were True, But Aren’t.

1. Taking a drink into the bathroom is forbidden.

You just can’t do it. You shouldn’t do it. I never questioned why this was — I believe the somewhat vague explanation of it being “unhygienic” may have been bandied around at some point — but over time I just sort of gradually grew to make up reasons why people didn’t take drinks into the bathroom, unless they were attending a house party, in which case everyone must take their drinks into the bathroom.

My favourite explanation of why you shouldn’t take drinks into the bathroom is because of all the “poo particles” floating around in the air as a result of whoever last had a dump or did a really big fart. If you take a drink — particularly a hot one — into the bathroom, then all the poo particles are naturally attracted to the drink and infect it with poo. So when you start drinking your drink that you took into the bathroom, you’ll then be drinking poo. And no-one wants to drink poo. So don’t do it.

2. You can make yourself dream about a thing by thinking about it really hard before you go to sleep.

I’m actually in two minds as to whether or not this one is actually true. Because certainly when you do something intense (get those thoughts out of your mind, hentai) before going to sleep, you’ll often dream about it. See: playing too much Tetris/Klax/Dr. Mario before bed and consequent surreal dreams. (My favourite was the one where I met the lady who said “Klax Wave!” before every level and “Ooh!” every time you got a 4-tile Klax in Klax on the Atari Lynx, and she was like totally fit and into me and we… wait, what was I talking about again?)

For a long time, though, I was utterly convinced that lying there with your eyes shut trying to picture something really vividly would influence your dreams. Of course, it doesn’t; your brain occupies itself too much with trying to picture something really vividly rather than actually attempting to shut off and get to sleep, making the whole exercise a fruitless endeavour. I’ve also found that as I’ve got older, my concentration span for lying awake trying to think of things has lessened considerably than it was when I was a teenager. This is perhaps a side-effect of the build-up of depression and anxiety over the years.

3. The first time you see something is the first time it ever happened/existed.

I genuinely believed this as a kid. The first time I got a copy of Fast Forward magazine, I thought it was the first issue. The first time I saw things on television, I thought it was the first time they’d been broadcast. Kind of silly, now that I think back on it.

This attitude did sort of perpetuate itself even after I left home, though. When a friend referred to baseball cap and tracksuit-wearing white trash as “chavs”, it was the first time I’d heard that word and I thus assumed that it had originated in our social group. Of course, it transpires that the word “chav” is very much in common usage to mean exactly what we thought it meant. It must have spread around the country somehow. I wonder where it originated? I’m pretty sure it didn’t originate from my friend Cat on the No. 11 bus heading to Safeway in Portswood, Southampton.

4. If you fart when you’re not ready, you’ll shit yourself.

I have no doubt that in certain circumstances, this may be true, but for the most part, the act of farting and the act of shitting are two distinct motions — unless, of course, you’re attempting to force out the fart, which carries a significant risk of following through. Let it come naturally and you’ll be safe. Probably. Right? OH GOD NOW I NEVER WANT TO FART AGAIN.

5. If you sleep on your back, you’ll…

To date, I’m not entirely sure if this actually happened or if I dreamed it at some point, but I am absolutely convinced that for a sex education class at secondary school, all the boys were taken to the library while all the girls went off to talk about periods, and we watched a video of a 1950s-style very British man explaining how if you slept on your back, you’d probably spunk your pants in your sleep. He obviously didn’t use that exact terminology — I forget the exact words he used, probably “nocturnal emissions” or something — but I vividly remember it. At the same time, though, I also have the strongest feeling that I might have made it up. Because it just doesn’t seem very likely.

That said, I used to have a recurring dream where I was going to have sex with someone on the London Underground, but couldn’t go through with it because I didn’t have the sheet music for it, so… wait a minute, that doesn’t really help at all.

I’m off to bed now. To sleep on my side. I have a hellish week coming up. See you on the other side, and apologies in advance for any day’s entries that are just “AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH”.