Welcome to 9:47am. I’m sat in a lecture and look like I’m writing notes. I’m not. I’m here, in this article, between the lines. You can see me if you look closely; stood on the line below, holding up the line above. Keeping it together, just. I am going mad and invite, urge, implore you to join me. For God’s sake get out there and be ridiculous.

Lets face it life is pretty silly. It’s not extremely silly; that would be far too profound. No - it’s pretty, ever so slightly, rather silly. Some guy once said that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. What a clever chap.

Carried by the current of vacant expression you march with empty intent down the street. I don’t care if you’re talking to someone; you’re probably talking a load of rubbish so that’s still vacant in my rather tired eyes. Where are you going? To a lecture? For a coffee? You know very well that you’re a nobody; jetsam, driftwood, debris drowning in a sea of mundanity, you’re boring face just managing to float above the surface. You’re so predictable.

Stop telling bad jokes, stop feigning enthusiasm, just stop following the crowd, the herd, the insipid hoard of faceless morons. Be somebody, be pretty, ever so slightly, rather different and most of all be silly. If you’re going to get drunk don’t spend your time shifting from side to side in some crap club; embrace your capacity to be completely and utterly absurd. If you’re going for a coffee why not make it two sugars and a teaspoon of ground camel penis. If you’re the guy who walks through town wearing the cat ears and tail I salute your downright stupidity (apologies if this is for religious reasons).

Marcel Duchamp was a silly man and all the better for it. In 1917 he took a urinal and put it in an art gallery not before signing it R. Mutt. Apparently, according to Duchamp, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act”. I don’t really care to be honest; it’s the most ridiculous piece of art I’ve ever seen and that’s what I love about it – not the piece itself but the idea or lack of. It was even named the most influential modern artwork of all time in a poll of 500 art experts; a urinal – how completely and utterly absurd is that?

Even sillier than Duchamp was Salvador Dalí. He had a ridiculous moustache and once put a lobster on a telephone calling it ‘art’. He often spoke of lobsters and telephones in his book The Secret Life wherein he demands to know why, whenever he asked for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, he was never presented with a telephone. Don’t you just love that? The bizarre, the surreal, the totally and irrevocably odd. Don’t go for that coffee, skip your lecture and visit the Baltic Art Gallery in Newcastle. There is nothing more refreshing than having all of your preconceived ideas and beliefs stripped from you; standing naked in a room that you simply cannot understand. It’s why we get drunk; we love stupidity, there’s a childlike freedom in it. Don’t waste it away in that crap club. Be ridiculous.