Generally speaking, I don't get memes passed on to me. This is either because my evidently inexhaustible imagination and flabbergastingly proficient writing style immediately marks me as a blogger of weight and importance who would scoff in a really rather dismissive fashion to be presented with such trivialities, or simply that no-one much cares whether I prefer cats to dogs or to list fifty terribly interesting things I remember about being twelve. I am prepared to accept that it's the latter, and am happy with this arrangement.

Vaughan however appears not to subscribe to either of these reasons and as such as tagged me with the first meme I've had in years. He offered the following advice on how I should cope:

Try and suggest that you've always really wanted to be offered a meme, and wouldn't really prefer to gnaw off your own left hand, one finger at a time.

And so it is with an excess of cheer, grace and absolutely no evidence of chewed fingers whatsoever that I give you the following:

1. Take the nearest book and go to page 123.
2. Go to the fifth sentence of the page.
3. Copy down the next three sentences and tag three people.

I happen to be at work at the moment. There are no books within immediate reach, but there is a newly-arrived copy of the Health Edco - Bringing Health Education to Life catalogue. Did you ever wonder where your school bought those life size dissectable plastic organs from? This is where. Everything you need for terrifying schoolchildren and adults alike into a lifetime of sobriety and visiting a doctor every other week. Six foot high plastic cigarettes containing a year's worth of tar sloshing around inside. A table top display showing eight different models of cervical dilation during labour. Giant foam yellow Ecstasy pills with every possible consequence of drug taking listed on them except 'having fun'. Realistic globules of fat that can be attached to a special belt to show you what eating burgers for breakfast for five years solid might feel like (buy two get a plastic set of clogged arteries absolutely free).

And on page 123, the penultimate page of the catalogue, five sentences in:

This model simulates the feel of a scrotum containing two lumps, one in each testicle. Made of BIOLIKE 2^TM, Mini-Testicles models are individually boxed. Box measures 5cm X 5cm.

I regret that the catalogue hadn't yet arrived while I was still making up my mind what I wanted for Christmas.

In this time of Festive Cheer (though not too much; page 34, set of ten fake alcohol bottles with names such as Southern Discomfort - "combining humour with hard hitting facts") I cannot bring myself to pass this on to anyone else. Let all chain-breaking curses fall upon my head for ever more. Alternatively if you have an altogether more impressive book than I did lying casually to hand and would like to impress your readers with your literacy and all round, lovely bit of stuff attracting good taste, feel free to carry it on and say I sent you.