100 Words competition results

I'm not sure I quite knew what I was letting myself in for when I agreed to help judge the recent 100 Words competition over at Her Melness Speaks. It was bloody difficult.

We got nearly thirty entries running the full gamut from letters about lost love, playful missives about a woman's relationship with her boobs or ones railing against the injustices of an unkind gene pool. Someone even managed to use 100 words to cover both Professor Brian Cox and fart gags, which takes some doing and probably deserves an award in its own right. There were also a few crackers which tragically crept just over the prescribed word count and couldn't qualify for the competition. That's 100 words for you; until you try it you don't realise just how little it is, and then when somebody does it well you realise just how much space it can be.

Getting it down to a shortlist of ten was hard work but sifting through a fine and varied array of stories to pick our winner and runners-up was every bit as difficult again. So, without banging on any longer it gives me great pleasure to announce the stories which finished in the podium positions. Oh, and just to stress (for rabid word counters like me), the salutation and sign-off don't count towards the 100 Words.

WINNER: Paul Kendrick, Wafers

Dear sympathetic nun,

A secular child at Catholic school; teased for being different. Too "unclean" to partake of the host during mass. "Demonic", perhaps (if catcalls can be relied upon). A hellish situation for a teaching assistant's first day, certainly.

Not for you.

You gave me a magic box: currency, a teetering pile of unconsecrated communion wafers to eat at break. "To shut them up," you said, with an unexpectedly impish spark, grinning... Those brittle discs carried more kudos than Quavers, I can tell you.

A soothing drop of compassion on the rough, cracked memories of my schooldays, even now eighteen years forward.

Better at remembering acts of kindness than I am names

* * *

1ST RUNNER UP: Travis Sloat, A Letter To My Wife

Dear Alicia,

The emptiness drives you mad, out of your senses with jealousy, anger, and rage. The emptiness clouds your mind, makes you bitter, makes you hate others for their gifts. It's something you've always wanted, yet you've been denied for eight years now. I want it too, for different reasons. I want it for you. I want you to be able to share the massive amount of love you've shown me over the years. However, the emptiness still exists, prominent in your mind, a barb that pierces your heart every time someone else gets to say, "I'm pregnant." I love you.

Yours forever, Travis

* * *

2ND RUNNER UP: Katy Scrogin, Contrition

Dear Soren,

A dozen years ago, floating on a confident wave of shared secrets and earnest discussions, you called to ask me for an official date. A dozen years ago, I tried to hid my freak-out, but you knew. Although I always say I have no regrets in life, that instance of caving to still-childish fears shows me up as a liar. I miss our friendship, and your goodness, and the lapsed possibility of sharing some of my life with you. I wish you joy and peace and unending abundance of the eagerness I spurned so flippantly. I've missed you ever since.

Katy

Congratulations to everybody who took part. I hope you like them.

Parallel universe

[Blue Italics Of Housekeeping: The ten shortlisted entries in the 100 Words competition I am helping to judge have just been announced. Check it out HERE. Congratulations to all the finalists, we now have a tricky job ahead of us narrowing it down to the eventual winner.]

My working day doesn’t really start until 9 o’clock. The alarm goes off, always too soon, always an unpleasant surprise, and then I grab another ten minutes of precious semi-consciousness, only slightly disturbed by the gentle rushing noise of the shower. Then, in a relay race, my wife returns to bed for ten more minutes of warmth and comfort while I traipse into the bathroom to try and wake myself up. By twenty past eight I am out of the flat, headphones firmly in place, making a half-hearted attempt at facing the world.

It is at least a comforting world without too many variables in it. I always see the same people drifting past me as I make my way to the bus stop. The crowds of schoolgirls, propelled by their impregnable self-confidence. The very large lady in a tent of chenille, walking slowly, as if on the verge of falling over at any minute. The man who was electrifying as Petruchio in an amateur performance of The Taming Of The Shrew a couple of years ago but, off duty, looks somewhat shrewish himself. That last one always particularly disappoints me.

Then of course there’s my throng of disaffected fellow passengers at the bus stop, reading the Metro or leafing through paperbacks, clutching rucksacks and coffee cups and, in Mikey’s case, the electronic cigarette he seems to have become so attached to. Sometimes the pretty Swedish blonde with the big nose is there, her spring wardrobe matching her yellow patent handbag, a flash of bright colour opposite the deep red Victorian bricks, urging the summer to hurry up.

Friday, though – well, Friday was different. On Friday, I experienced a parallel universe.

Forced into an 8.30 meeting I couldn’t talk my way out of, everything started thirty minutes earlier. It was me, not my wife, sent hurtling from the cosy paradise of bed. Not only that, but I had to get dressed in silence without the lights on, stepping out of the front door with nobody to kiss me goodbye. The streets, already bright with the morning sun, seemed empty as I picked my way through town. Everyone I would normally see was just leaving their house or getting on their train and this was an altogether different cast of characters. If I lived in another part of town, or had another kind of work ethic, these might have been my regulars instead.

When I got to the bus stop, it was much the same story. The drab gathering of men and women there were keen, like the ones who turn up at a gig hours before it starts so they can stand at the front, endure the support acts, and grab the set list at the end without elbowing people out of the way. I shifted nervously from toe to toe, aware that I was sharing a coach with an alien species; people who liked their jobs thirty minutes more than I did. Some of them gave me a look which might have been judgment, but was probably just a blank lack of recognition.

If I’d been on the half eight bus, this would have been a prime opportunity to say Don’t you know who I am?. But I wasn’t, I was on the eight o’clock bus, and so the words were magically rearranged into You don’t know who I am - and they stayed in my head, along with everything else. One of the passengers tapped relentlessly on his laptop, putting me to shame as I gazed into the middle distance and contemplated falling back to sleep. Sleep didn’t come, but the office – early on a Friday, the motorway only dotted with traffic – did. It came far too soon for my liking.

Reaching my desk and hanging my coat – badly chosen, far too heavy for a warm spring morning – on the plastic stand, I realised that my early arrival at work had made this a parallel universe for other people too. Gemma glanced up from her screen, saw me, looked back at her work and then, a split second later, had to look again. She seemed baffled, which made a pleasant change from the expression of diffident boredom which characterised most of our recent conversations. Sarah, who had probably already been in the office for more than an hour, stuck her tongue out at me on her way to the kitchen. “Decided to do a full day’s work today, have we?”

Heading for the adjoining office for my meeting, the lack of people was even more telling. The site is sometimes described as a campus, a lazy way of describing a few buildings with green space between them but one which, for me, conjures up different images; loafing on a bench pretending to catch up university work on the summer holidays, sneaking into the Student Union bar in my early twenties pretending that I was still young enough to belong there. There was an awful lot of pretence and pretentiousness, back then at least and maybe still now. The sun was uncommonly bright, illuminating even more clearly that there was nobody around. The scene was like a town in the Wild West thirty seconds before the bad guys turn up.

At the side of the building was a pile of huge plastic sacks, each one full of shredded paper. I wasn’t sure if that was what happened to all ideas and plans, just how many scrapped projects and how much wasted rhetoric was stuffed into those sagging transparent coffins. They were brighter than I thought they would be – not just beiges and whites but reds and deep blues, like streamers. They looked like they shouldn’t be there, like someone should be up on the roof shaking the sacks so they drifted down as people trudged into reception, an impromptu parade to try and celebrate the start of the day.

The high noon metaphor was repeated as I strolled through the car park. There, slap bang in the middle of the tarmac was a mallard, facing down an oncoming Saab estate. The surface of the road shimmered in the heat, and the Saab slowed down and stopped in front of the squat shape blocking its way. The duck had obviously wandered over from the nearby lake and decided to explore, and there was something about how it stood there, splay-footed and resolute, that said it was in no hurry to go anywhere. I admired its single-mindedness, even as I tried to work out whether it was even possible to play chicken with a duck. The Saab gave up and sloped off to squeeze its elongated body into another less convenient parking space and the moment it did so the duck walked away, its work completed. It had done a much better job of sticking it to the man in a single moment than I had in the last seven years.

The other building looked even more derelict and once inside, it took a full ten minutes of loitering in rooms, wandering corridors, sending texts and leaving voicemails to discover that I had been stood up and my meeting wasn’t happening. Outside and blinking in the sun again, I saw a battered metal bucket stood in front of the wall full of squashed cigarette packets and dog ends. It was evidence that only the day before people had congregated here to smoke and complain about their days; even though it was years since I had smoked you never lose an eye for those kinds of spots, and every office has one. In a parallel universe I would have lit up at that point, in fact I probably would have had a cigarette before going in, but fortunately that was a reality I could not properly imagine.

So instead I retraced my steps, zipping across the shadows, all the while thinking that the morning so far had been a complete waste of time. It would be unless I could somehow write about it, anyway, but that seemed unlikely; after all, nothing had really happened.

Glasses

Like a lot of things in my life, chocolate was the catalyst. That was the way that I found out I wasn’t the same as everybody else. I must have been about five years old, in a newsagent with my mother, and because I’d been good I was allowed a chocolate bar as a treat. That in itself would make the story noteworthy, as I was a troublesome child in general: always asking questions, full of opinions, horribly precocious. When I see children like that, chirping away on tube trains or acting up in restaurants, half of me finds them appalling and half of me feels oddly tender. I hope they have an easier journey to being a grown up than I have. I hope they know better than to read fantasy novels in a caravan on holiday rather than going out and exploring. I hope they make friends, talk to girls and don’t show off quite so much because really, nobody is impressed and one day they won’t be either.

“What bar would you like?” said my mother.

“That one.” I said, pointing in the direction of one of the packets on the counter, a paper wrapping in a primary colour with a cheerful explosion of letters on it. My mother wasn’t happy with that answer though, and this was back in the days when if my mother wasn’t happy there was probably a valid reason for it. Childhood is much more simple like that.

“What’s the name?”

I peered into the distance – except it really wasn’t much of a distance – and tried to make it out. I was a keen reader already by then, even if I hadn’t made huge inroads into the copy of The Odyssey I had won at chess club, and this shouldn’t have been difficult.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell.”

So it was very early in my life that I realised I was destined to spend it behind a pair of screens. My first glasses were the only sort of glasses you got back in the late seventies, aviator style with a thick plastic nosepiece. This was before fancy ultra-thin lenses, too, which is part of the reason why being bespectacled was such an awful tyranny in those days. It was all functional, and about as fashionable as a hearing aid or a leg brace. The exception – tragically – were the heavy tortoiseshell framed glasses you got free with the National Health Service. I wish I’d kept mine; they’d be all the rage today.

For better and for worse, glasses changed my life. I’ve often wondered about the link between needing glasses and your personality. Why are there so few nerds with twenty-twenty vision? Why so few shortsighted sports legends? Do we turn out that way because we wear glasses, or are the two things just an unhappy coincidence? Is there something about myopia we don’t yet completely understand that naturally draws the eyes to comics, liner notes on obscure records or the delights of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook? Or is it, like so many things in my life, just a convenient excuse for choices I made that didn’t work out quite how I wanted them to?

It certainly felt, at school at least, like the glasses wearers were the victims of natural deselection, especially during what were cruelly described as physical education lessons. They were an education for me, in that I learned that I didn’t want to do anything physical if I could possibly avoid it. The worst thing was that I could completely understand being so far down the picking order when the captains were choosing sides; after all, who would want to get into a scrum with somebody who can’t really see anything? During football lessons as the popular kids picked their friends I would stand there on the centre circle with the dwindling band of rejects until there were only about half a dozen of us left, human lost property nobody wanted to claim. Do I belong with this lot? I would think in horror, looking around me, Is this my tribe? Of course, they thought exactly the same thing. Why wouldn’t they? It's like the myth that ugly people are attracted to other ugly people, and nobody believes that.

As it happens, I was never picked last for football, which means that I was usually on the winning side. The last person to get picked was Matthew Smith, a puny kid who made me look like a beefcake. He didn’t wear glasses, but from his coordination you would have guessed that he used to own a very thick pair before losing them in a playground scuffle with somebody stronger than him. A paraplegic or somebody with ME, perhaps. He was always picked last and always given the least glamorous job of all, stuck in goal. The popular kids didn’t really care who won, as long as they got to score plenty of goals and play the hero, so it was an arrangement that suited everyone. My misfit friends and I were put in defence, where our job was to part like the Red Sea every time a specimen of physical perfection bore down on us. It played to our strengths and anyway, half the time we weren’t even paying attention.

Our school playing fields were right next to the train line, running from Paddington into Reading. At school we were taught about the feats of Brunel and his army of navvies, hacking huge passages through the hills to open up his great network, and we were taken to see Sonning Cutting and the nearby station at Twyford in a desperate attempt to bring the past to life. The train line ran along the very edge of our suburban town, its main contribution to modern life being that the bridge furthest from the tracks below was known as “Suicide Bridge”. One time as a kid my brother and I wandered over the fence by Suicide Bridge and picked our way delicately down the slope to the side of the rails, led astray by my grandfather. On his command we tossed a two pence piece onto the tracks as an express train zoomed past, and when we picked it up it was warped, smooth and flattened like a Dali creation. It’s one of the only times I remember having fun with my grandfather, and when we got home my mother told us all off.

The reason why playing on the opposite team to Matthew Smith was a ticket to victory had nothing to do with his slight stature, but something even more surreal. He was a keen trainspotter. And so every time a train approached, on its way into town or off to the capital, he would run - at a speed he could never even approach when it was strictly necessary, during athletics for example - out of the goalmouth and to the wire fence at the edge of the playing fields. Once there, he would watch bug-eyed as the carriages clattered by, desperately trying to memorise the number of the train for later on, when it could be deposited in the notebook that saw more attention than his homework. As a goalkeeper he was a liability, but as a performance artist he couldn’t be faulted, and it was an early reminder that there are worse handicaps in life than being shortsighted.

In any case, the glasses seemed to be the perfect accessory to round off some of those awful childhood photos. There I am in my cub scout uniform, holding a trophy and gurning with something that might be pride. In another one I am scowling over a chessboard, hair combed brutally into meek submission. I was a very serious child; kids with glasses often are. My theory is that the pressure of keeping those heavy frames and thick glass lenses perched on your face makes it much easier to frown than to relax. If you could reach into those photographs and take the glasses off the picture would no longer make sense, because nobody with twenty-twenty vision would be caught dead doing those things. It’s a bit like covering the cigarette in the picture of the Hollywood idol and spotting what difference it makes.

It's taken me many years to be at peace with having four eyes. Some of it is about the way glasses have changed - from the popularity of tiny John Lennon spectacles in the sixth form to the kind of rimless frames I wear now, which would have been unimaginable then. There have been some missteps along the way - the rectangular television-shaped lenses I wore when I first went to university, or a rather natty set of plastic frames my friend Dave told me "make you look like a hairdresser". Thinner lenses have helped, too, so I don't have to peer through fishbowls at the end of my nose.

But really I think what changed is more about being comfortable in my own skin now and recognising that there's no longer any shame in it. Oddly enough, the best way of summing it up that I ever heard came from my friend Daniel. He was an inveterate spectacles wearer, the sort that gave us all a bad name, and many years later he grew a beard (he looked a bit like Gerry Adams, which is not a look anyone aims for) and gave all beard wearers a bad name too. He probably even gave people called Daniel a bad name, and a lot of them don’t need any help with that. But he said something about glasses that has always stuck with me. “It’s great being shortsighted. Because any time I like I can take my glasses off and the world looks just like an Impressionist painting.” I like that, but not because it sums up what needing glasses is like, or because only somebody who wears glasses would say it. That last one is just stating the obvious. No, I think like it because I have a sneaking feeling that only somebody who needs glasses would think that way at all.

In with the new

It's odd how periods of our life come to be defined by physical possessions.

My iPod finally gave up the ghost last weekend, the thick white brick that, for a while at least, was access to every record I ever owned. It was until I bought more records, anyway, and then - as often happens with gadgets - it started to look physically bigger and bigger as its memory got smaller and smaller. About two years ago I thought it had died, appropriately enough on New Year's Eve, but it was just a minor collapse. Eventually the apple logo glowed feebly again and it chugged back into life, but it was never the same after that. It would run out of juice after seemingly no time at all while I was out on walks, like an elderly and much-loved pet. The problem is that it was so big and capable that I couldn’t bear to let it go. Besides, it was engraved on the back with my name and the words "Music Snob" underneath, and I figured that counted for something.

I know this is a pretentious thing to say, but by the time I had to put it down it was more than just a music player to me. It was a link to the recent past, too; I bought it around six years ago, not long after getting married, just after I moved into this flat. It kept me company throughout countless journeys to work, bus and train trips all over the country, sessions at the ironing board, even slow lazy afternoons on a sun lounger on holiday. It provided the soundtrack to hundreds of tiny moments that, taken together, made up a huge segment of my life; the era of mortgage, marriage and happiness.

One time I went to Bournemouth for my friend Glenn's stag weekend, an event I couldn't have been much less genetically suited to without different chromosomes. The Friday night was spent sitting in a very townie bar listening to the sort of songs which a crowd that wasn’t mine might have described as crowd pleasers. All around me orange women weaved past in varying degrees of intoxication and undress carrying giant test-tube shaped glasses full of luminous cocktails. I found myself wondering what my stag weekend might have been like, if I’d had one instead of eloping, and decided it would probably have involved a wine tasting and a seven course menu. This was very similar in some respects, except that instead it offered all the WKD Blue you could stomach and a branch of KFC which appeared to stay open until three in the morning.

Back at our accommodation, I was sharing a room with the groom and his brother. This was in many ways a great honour, but the facilities were best described as basic. I had the saggy single bed by the window, leaving them to battle over a small double bed and a duvet which was smaller still (one of them shivered in t-shirt and pants on the former, the other got a bad back sleeping on the floor covered by the latter, I can’t remember who did which). I didn’t realise the real benefit of my sleeping arrangements - being stationed underneath the open window - until the following night, when the horrifying consequences of the groom’s brother eating his own body weight in curry became brutally clear.

I drew the line, though, at the events planned for the following day. There are certain rules about what you must do, it seems, on a stag weekend. Riotous drinking, naturally, and probably some kind of curry. A nightclub of some description. Either a strip bar or a casino or, if you’re feeling really devil-may-care, both. But then during the day there have to be some kind of manly activities to keep the energy levels high, and I’m afraid a nice tour round a local vineyard wasn’t going to cut it for my fellow celebrants. They were going paintballing.

I feigned a foot injury to get out of it, proving in the process that not only wasn’t I man enough to go paintballing but I wasn’t even man enough to grow a pair and tell them I didn’t want to go paintballing. I remember waving them goodbye as they got into cars and headed off to don camouflage gear, bond and shoot one another to primary coloured smithereens, and then I went back to my room (at that stage clear of the flatulent fug that was to envelop it later that night) to make my plans for the day ahead. I had Bournemouth to myself, for the next six hours or so at least.

As I walked away from the grubby bed and breakfast and through the residential streets, in search of the seafront, I headed through a park - climbing frames naked and sad, roundabouts and swings inert and forlorn - and Rainy Night House by Joni Mitchell struck up in my headphones. I think it might be my favourite song of hers: glorious, beautiful and enigmatic. I’m not even sure the song is about much at all, but it does have a terrific line in it where she sings ‘You sat up all the night and watched me, to see, who in the world I might be’ which has always summed up completely for me that sense of wonder when you’re with someone new, and where there is far more about them which you don’t know than that which you do. It seems to capture that wonderful point at the beginning when you have glimpsed the cover, picked up the book and are starting that first chapter. But now I will always associate that song not only with that feeling, but also with that park, and my solitary walk into the centre of a town I had never really planned to visit.

I spent the morning, if my memory serves, loafing in the gardens watching the teenagers and pensioners go by. Bournemouth, it turned out, was a city where, unless you were on a stag or hen weekend you seemed to age overnight from the former to the latter. I half-heartedly did some shopping. I swapped texts with my wife, who was at the hen do (they were in Alton Towers, I had tried to get permission to be treated as an honorary girl for the weekend, without success). I explored until I realised - and it didn’t take long - that there really wasn’t much to explore. Despite the very attractive green spaces, it was a strangely unlovely town with very little going on before nightfall. There was a miniature golf course which I briefly considered as an option, but I didn’t have the courage to play on my own. After all, little looks more paedophilic than a stubbly thirtysomething man going round a miniature golf course unaccompanied.

Later on, I sat on a bench with a milkshake and had a long phone conversation with my friend Anna about why the man in her Frankfurt office wouldn’t leave his girlfriend for her, which consisted of six instalments of a single ten minute segment of conversation, on a continuous loop, analysing the same five minutes of non-exchanges between the two of them. I didn’t have the patience or the persistence to just explain that he was having his cake and eating it, and even if I had she just would have carried on as if I hadn’t said anything. So I just slurped and ummed and aahed, and wondered whether paintballing might have been the soft option.

Later still, my wife’s friend Sally, who lived nearby, took pity on me and came to pick me up in her insane jeep that looked like a toy car. It rattled me all the way to an unfashionable suburban carvery where I sat in the sun drinking orange juice and lemonade and enjoying talking in person to someone with ovaries and most of her marbles. And of course, far later still came the delights of being reunited with the rest of the stags, boasting about their bruises in that macho way where it’s disguised as a complaint, followed by the horrors of all the gyrating Eastern European blonde skeletons in Spearmint Rhino, the place you go for no other reason than because it’s the place you go.

But that’s not really what I remember about Bournemouth. If you asked me to sum up Bournemouth, and you only gave me a split second to answer, I would tell you without hesitation about Joni Mitchell’s perfect voice as I drifted past that playground, or maybe Brand New Friend by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions playing as I wandered through the once-grand arcades, not entirely convinced of the appeal of my own company. My iPod was responsible for that.

My new one is sleek, beautiful and black. It has a gorgeous screen, no scuffs or marks. My name isn’t engraved on the back. It has been trying ever so hard, randomly picking happy songs when I need them most and unearthing old favourites I haven’t listened to in ages. I still believe that random play is nothing of the kind but simply the choice of the genie that lives in these boxes, and my new genie is keen to please. But it’s not the same. And I say that knowing perfectly well that, all things being equal, I am likely to be speaking in equally glowing terms about this iPod six years from now.

Often these endings and new beginnings come in phases, and another era ended this week when our new sofa was due to arrive. The outgoing sofa was one of the very first pieces of furniture we bought as a couple, for our first home together, the second floor flat overlooking the river. We both loved it the moment we saw it, a grey felt loop on legs, simplicity itself. Because of my wife’s background, she loved it just that little bit more when she found out it was reduced - a value I’ve come to share as my in-laws have, over the last seven years, stopped being somebody else’s family and have completely become mine. I still remember her going up to the shop assistant, tongue firmly in cheek, and asking “Is there any movement on the price?” This was probably the raciest thing anybody had said in the Reading branch of John Lewis for decades, but it worked, and when we snuggled up on it on its first night in our first flat everything felt as if it had fallen exactly into place.

I’m still rather attached to it - even if it’s not quite as plush as it was that day, and it’s not quite long enough to stretch out on your own on a sick day. I love it even if, increasingly, we don’t snuggle up together but one of us retreats instead to the chair by the window to tap away in peace and quiet. I remember it as the first concrete evidence of our commitment to a life together, long before we bought a new bed, and wardrobes, and hung pictures and blinds, painted and re-carpeted and hunched swearing over endless mysterious piles of flat-packed particleboard. Dozens of people have sat on it - some I still see, some I like and miss, some who dropped me and some it just didn’t work out with. And somehow, the way objects do, it absorbed all of those events, changes and personalities and became more than the sum of them. But all good things come to an end, and we decided we needed something bigger, something new.

This week we were both at home on Wednesday, her to await the arrival of the new sofa and me for another trip to the hospital for another tick in a long checklist all doctors seem to use when declaring me beyond the reaches of conventional treatment. Lifting the sofa onto its front we unscrewed its tiny feet and Kelly labelled them underneath with a marker pen.

“The back ones are slightly longer, you see.” said Kelly. “Do you remember? When we first moved in, we had them in the wrong places and we couldn’t understand why it kept wobbling.”

“God, no, I had forgotten that.”

“And you were convinced that this living room was the same size as the one in the old flat.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember.” I smiled. Kelly never lets me forget being wrong about that. “And this room is much bigger and when we got our wobbly sofa into the living room I couldn’t believe how much more space we had.”

I remember that as clearly as if it was yesterday. My friend Glenn - he of the stag weekend - was off that day and he helped us haul all our stuff the short distance from the old flat to the new. I remember us carrying the sofa up the stairs, round all the sharp and treacherous corners, and plonking it on the brand new carpet, facing the empty alcove where we already knew the television would wind up living. The room was huger than I’d remembered, all right; so much space, with nothing in it, and now everywhere you look there are things we’ve bought along the way. I wonder if I will miss any of them quite this much.

“I’m going to miss this sofa, you know?”

“I know, but the new one is going to be lush. Come on, help me move this out of the way so we’ve got the space for when the delivery men arrive.”

Struggling between us, we moved it over to an empty space by the doorway to the kitchen and looked at the things we’d been storing underneath it for ages, out of sight and out of mind. Her laptop, my laptop, an art set she got for Christmas many years ago but had lacked the discipline or time to use. One era ends, another era begins, I thought to myself, and then I had to smile. There on that virgin patch of floor, glimmering in the sunlight, were what must have been half a dozen white feathers.

Goodbye, Natalie

I was on the bus at the end of the day when I found out that Natalie had died.

I had worked late – one of those rare occasions when I did so – and I took my seat next to Phil as the 5.45 pulled away from the office and out onto the motorway, packed with people getting back to the bits of their lives they liked (or in some cases, I guess, the bits of their lives they didn’t). The journey dragged so badly that we came off a junction early, trying a different route to avoid the clot of cars going nowhere fast. As we drove past the multiplex cinema selling dreams to the suburbs, my phone blinked with the fateful email. I read it, I read it several times at least, but I couldn’t take it in. It’s not as if I wanted to try.

“Christ.” said Phil, looking round. “It’s all going on here in Winnersh, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” I said, on autopilot. More accurately, I wasn’t on autopilot but I was saying the sort of things I would have said if I had been. I found myself wishing I had an autopilot switch but, looking at that mail again, I might have just turned it on and left it that way forever. In the failing light, the bus coasted up the long straight road lined with nasty looking off licences, dental surgeries, the bastard offspring of garages and supermarkets. We were caught up in nearly stationary traffic but they were quieter, less frantic vehicles with calmer, more complacent drivers. Hadn’t they heard the news that Natalie had died? I wanted to get off the bus and bang on a gridlocked window, take issue with them all for their indifference. I wanted to shout at somebody. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. My phone sat in my hand like a smoking revolver.

“I’m sorry Phil.” I said, “I’m not really with it. I’ve just found out that one of my friends has died.”

“Oh, sorry mate. Were you close?”

I realised the answer would be difficult to put into words, but then everything seemed to be; this was a very recent phenomenon. I mentally counted how many minutes it would be before I could get to a place where nobody could see me and my face could have the expression that came naturally, instead of the one you have to wear when you’re on a bus with people from work. It was too far away, I wasn’t sure I could make it.

“It’s a funny one. Yes, we were very close but we never physically met.”

Some people, I realised as I said this, would instantly understand this concept. My life is full of people who would. And here I was, stuck on a bus, with a mail on my phone I couldn’t reconcile with everything else about the world, sitting next to somebody who never would, not if the traffic backed up for hours and I didn’t get home until midnight and I spent the rest of the trip explaining to Phil who Natalie was and what she had been to me.

“You never met?”

“No. We got to know each other on Facebook, years and years ago. There used to be this application, you see, called ‘iThink’, and it was sort of like a virtual debating society.” I said, increasingly aware that this probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone. “We got to know each other through that, and we‘ve been friends ever since.”

“Sort of like a chatroom for toffs?”

Natalie was very far from a toff; it just wasn’t worth telling him that, he didn’t mean anything by it.

“Yes, sort of.”

“Right.” said Phil and we stopped at a junction, waiting for the car in front of us to get a move on. “Jesus, imagine living in one of these big houses.”

Inwardly, I smiled. Natalie would have liked the randomness of that conversation. She took a bus to work, too, and I knew from the messages we used to exchange that she heard things as odd as that every day.

Phil’s response, if anything, should have made it slightly easier. He had acted as if I hadn’t said it, and so I thought I could follow suit and do the same. It would have been nice to act as if I hadn’t heard the news either, but further emails on my phone filled out the picture and made that impossible; it had happened a few weeks ago and the funeral had been yesterday. It was her heart, her friend said, she’d always had problems with it, maybe I hadn’t known (I had).

Then I made my big mistake, looking on her Facebook wall, the virtual equivalent of the flowers at a crash site. Such beautiful tributes, every one showing that she was properly missed for who she was, by somebody who really knew her. Every one made it harder for me to pretend everything was the same as it had been when I finished work, what felt like a decade ago.

I had to be someone else getting off the bus, thanking the driver and telling him to have a good evening. I had to be that same person as I parted company with Phil on the corner, leaving him to go home to his wife and his little boy, and I had to keep that mask in place as I walked home through all the disinterested extras in my crowd scene. It was only when I got home, took off my coat, took off the mask, and Kelly hugged me that I could be me. Only then could I cry, and when I could form a sentence it was the sentence I would say over and over again that evening, the only one I seemed capable of.

”I always thought that I’d get to meet her one day, you know?”

“I know.”

Later that night I stared at the wall of her Facebook page again and again, half expecting her to turn up and respond to the things people were saying. But life doesn’t work like that, and death certainly doesn’t. I tried to sum up how I was feeling in a few inadequate paragraphs; as if she could hear, as if she could read it on the other side, a side I had never really entirely believed in. There, stuck in the middle of my inarticulate efforts, was the only line that seemed to be worth anything at all: I was a little bit in love with you Natalie, I think we all were.

The next morning, just the latest in a long string of mornings Natalie would never see, I felt more and more like a fraud as the day wore on. The arbitrary horrors playing out on the other side of the world were so fresh and visceral, the outcry so vocal, that I became increasingly aware of my tiny unuttered screams of protest drowned out amid the laments of the whole world. There is no disaster relief for human earthquakes.

In any case, it seemed odd to mourn for somebody I’d never met. All I knew of what she looked like was a few pictures I had seen online. In one, she was sitting on a chair in her back garden, straight fine hair, heavy glasses, all elbows and knees with her arms around Freddie, the dog she loved so much and cleaned up after so regularly and without complaining (“I ended up doing very little today.” she once told me, “I did give a bath to a stinky dog - that was fun. It was my stinky dog, by the way, not a random one off the street.”) In another picture, she was wearing a deep red cloche and smiling; the photo that had cropped up so regularly in my timeline, on messages or on chat conversations. It wasn’t the face of a dead woman, it was the face of someone with plenty to look forward to. It bore no hint of her disappointments, and now it was a constant reminder of mine.

So I’d never seen her face move, never heard her voice either. And yet her voice had jumped off the page in every mail, every message, every chat conversation. How could that not be knowing someone? She never wrote a dull sentence in her life, and I was as much the beneficiary of that as anyone. She was always wry, frequently self-effacing and occasionally bitchy with the same gleeful reluctance of a dieter giving in against their better judgment to a whole packet of biscuits. Our correspondence was very English, we always danced around doing our best to hide our deep admiration of one another. I soon learned that you could pay Natalie a compliment, but you were best off hiding it a couple of paragraphs from the end of a long email. If you were lucky she wouldn’t pick up on it, or maybe she did and she let it pass.

And yet when she finally left the family home and moved into her own place, I was as happy as I could have been if it was somebody I saw every day. I remember looking through the album of photos, a guided tour of all those rooms waiting to be filled up with life, and hopes, and stuff, and feeling a palpable excitement about her independence, something she had almost given up on. I sent a card and it was an easy one to write, one where you really mean it and aren’t going through the motions, struggling for something to say.

“I have another friend who lives near Exeter.” I told her once. “You’re going to have to start thinking of excuses not to see me, because one day I’ll come and visit.”

She never needed to, as it happened, but I always thought there would be enough time. That’s the trick time plays; you always think there‘s enough and then one day there isn’t. The opportunities have run out and you have wasted it doing something else, something unimportant like tapping away at a screen or arguing with strangers or playing pointless games on a mobile phone. And so I never got to sit in her garden on a warm day, and dodge Freddie, and find out how her voice sounded, or what her smile was like and it’s a rotten, rotten shame. It makes me think about all the other people I’ve never met, yet feel as if I know, and makes me want to buy them all a drink on a summer evening, while we all still have time.

She was a huge supporter of my writing - when I got cards printed for the blog she made me send her one. “I’ll sell it one day, when you’re a published author” she said. I remember her comments on my blog, too, always elegant and complimentary but not too complimentary. And I’m struck by some of the ones she commented on and how similar we could be. I wrote a piece very early on about not fitting in with the cool kids at work, and she told me that I could have joined her in the library at school for a Connect Four tournament. It so summed up a shared feeling of not belonging that ironically brought us together, a connection far more important than living in the same town or drinking down the same pub. Another time, I wrote about what a fearful child I had been, scared of everything: success, failure, girls, the unknown, my friends, not having any friends.

“It made me want to hug the six year old you.” she said, “But in fact I’d quite like to go back in time and hug the six year old me too.”

“I think if the six year old you and the six year old me had got to sit down and play Connect Four together, it would all have been okay.” I replied, and the funny thing is that I think there might be something in that. If nothing else, it’s a lovely image - and we never got to do that but she beat me at Scrabble online time and time again. If we had crossed swords at Connect Four, even as children, I don’t think it would have been long before she had suggested playing for money.

When her mother died last year, of the same condition she had, I remember sharing her devastation. We swapped lots of messages around that time, and she read a piece I wrote about going to see a medium shortly after it happened, which I wrote the day her mother passed away. She said it sort of helped, and she told me a story about a feather. She said that ages ago a psychic told her that finding a feather could be a message from a dead loved one letting you know that they’re okay.

“That’s bonkers in itself, isn’t it?” she said. “Why a feather? Who figured that one out? It’s just someone trying to comfort another by making up a story, right? All I know is that I found one in my garden - I’ve never found one there before. The next day my dad found one in his garden. My sister was upset she hadn’t and actually looked. She didn’t have one. I got a call today from her - her friend took her to the park. As she was there, sat at a bench, loads of feathers landed at her feet.

“I know it’s 99.99% coincidental and us just wanting it to be true, but how much do I wish that 0.01% is right.”

Reading that again I do too, more than I can say, and I hope she’s reunited with her mum. And I don’t care what anybody says, I can mourn someone I’ve never met who told me a story like that, and if I can’t then somebody needs to explain to me why this has all been so hard to put into words.

Four strangers

i

He wears an unremarkable sweatshirt; the only thing that’s remarkable about it, I suppose, is that he’s wearing one. It feels like ages since I’ve even seen a sweatshirt. They are the leisurewear that time forgot, superseded by fleeces in the pecking order of things you wear over a t-shirt when you don’t feel like making any effort. He has chosen to team it with dung-coloured cords; if he jumped into a slanket the moment he got home I don’t think it would represent much of a step down.

The overall effect is the sort of outfit thousands of men wear every weekend to meander like zombies around DIY superstores. Only the bright orange lanyard round his neck and the A4 pad folded under one arm give you any sign that he considers himself to be at work. His face looks good-natured, his sideburns neat and there’s product in his hair. His eyes flick from left to right as he walks, so I think he’s lost. I’ve certainly never seen him in this building before. Or, more damningly, maybe I have and he just didn’t register with me. Ten minutes later I know full well that, if it wasn’t for his outfit, I would have no chance of picking him out from a lineup.

ii

It’s Aaron: I’ve been in meetings with this man. Looking at him in passing like this you don’t get the faintest idea of what he’s like, he almost seems normal, but in a meeting room he is like an autistic savant. He sucks his teeth, pulls faces when other people are talking. When he does deign to talk it’s all too quick to understand, as if the only person that needs to hear it is him. And I sort of assumed he knew it already but maybe he doesn’t, perhaps it all comes out of him from a place he doesn’t understand, like he’s speaking in tongues.

His shirts usually have stains on them and are coming untucked at the waist, which like the waists of most men in this office is bigger than it ought to be. In the last meeting we were both in, he spent ages fidgeting with the three pin piece of plastic you find on the end of plugs when you buy a new electrical appliance. I’m not sure where he’d got it from but he folded it over, an act of plastic origami, until it looked like an X-wing fighter. While someone talked about operational readiness testing he flicked it gently across the pine veneer in front of him, oblivious to everybody. Somehow the way he did it took me back to my childhood, pushing a tiny metal car across a road atlas and imagining that I was seeing the British Isles, all while sitting in a corduroy beanbag that would one day be far too small for me.

He has no patience with anyone and no people skills at all. “No, I’ve already told you that.” he interjects in meetings, regardless of whether the person he’s contradicting is important or not. In some sessions he grimaces from start to finish and you’re never sure what’s behind it. Most people in our company have a Blackberry and fidget with it incessantly when other people are talking. Not him - he has the most battered Filofax I have ever seen in my life. God only knows what is written down in there, scratched out in his spiky handwriting. I like to think it’s a philosophical tract, a manifesto or the rough workings of a cure for some terrible disease. I would never invite him to a party but somehow, at work at least, I trust him implicitly; he knows his stuff.

None of this is apparent as he ambles across my field of view, his hair brushed down for a change, clean shirt on. His face looks unnaturally serene.

iii

She is dressed all in black, and has a weak chin. She has lost a lot of weight in the past few months, I’ve noticed that several times as she’s passed by. She looks as if she is the only person who doesn’t realise; her head tilts downwards and her eyes are trained on the floor. I wish we lived in a world where it was okay to tell strangers that, I think it would cheer her up.

One time, we were idly sat at our desks killing time at the dog-end of a Friday afternoon, surrounded by work it was barely worth starting and things we had been avoiding all week, and we got to talking about our guilty pleasures in the office, people we fancied even though we knew we probably shouldn’t. And Iain ummed and aahed - clearly worried about whether it was too much guilty and not enough pleasure - but then he mentioned her. None of us agreed but for what it’s worth that wasn’t the point. The pessimist in me thinks that sums her up well, only ever the first choice from somebody’s reserve list.

But I’m not always pessimistic and I can see the bright side to this too, that everyone, however unlovely they might feel at times, has one person out there whose identity they would never guess, holding the tiniest flickering candle for them from a great distance. I wish we lived in a world, too, where she could somehow find that out. She looks as if she needs it.

She is a few sizes smaller than she was, but that top isn’t and it swamps her. She walks past my desk today as if nobody has ever loved her.

iv

The hairstyle says professional footballer. The voice, audible from some way off as he barks into his mobile, says professional footballer. The suit is the sort of shiny number which is either very expensive or very cheap, I can’t quite decide. It, and his build, say ex-professional footballer who now runs a wine bar or a nightclub and drinks there most nights, possibly with his former teammates.

Marc exudes confidence, but I know something about him that the others don’t.

Many years ago, my friend Darren was at the Christmas party when he was propositioned by Tash, a woman he used to work with. She was about as subtle as she was attractive, and you can get a pretty good picture of how attractive she was from the fact that she staggered up to Darren and slurred at him “I want you to fuck me over a sink.” (Why a sink? was his first, unspoken reaction, he told us as he regaled us with the story down the canteen, back in the days when he used to come to lunch). He turned her down of course; he had a wife and a girlfriend back then and another woman would have been altogether too much trouble. Besides, she really wasn’t a looker and this, in Darren’s own words, “was before her ‘bingo hair’ phase”.

The following year Christmas was approaching again and Darren was down the pub with Marc, the man who looks like an ex-professional footballer. It was one of those drinking sessions that begins on an afternoon at the dog end of the working year when your to do list is almost done ready for the festive period and the pub starts beckoning at around three pm. I imagine if you work in London a lot of days must be like that. There was a wasteland of empty pint glasses around them as they got to talking about the Christmas parties of years gone by and Darren regaled him with the story of Tash and the sink proposition.

What happened next was something Darren did not expect. When you watch someone break down who you don’t know that well, in circumstances where it really isn’t the done thing, it’s difficult to know how you should react. And not only didn’t Darren know Marc that well, he also hadn’t known – as in fact nobody had – that a little while before that Christmas party Marc and Tash had started an affair, left their respective spouses and moved in together.

What happened was, most probably, something Marc had not expected either. I suppose he thought it was serious. I suppose he thought that even though she had betrayed her husband it was a one-off and that he could trust her. You give your heart to people and you always feel like this time it isn’t a risk, and you’re so often wrong. I also suppose he never for a moment thought that less than a year later he would be single again and destroyed, blubbering in a down-at-heel pub not far from Waterloo Station to a virtual stranger who had just told him a funny story which had horribly misfired.

When Darren told us the story, it was hilarious and we all laughed and he was laughing too. I must have changed in the last few years, because when he crosses the corridor in front of me and my eyes pass over him, despite all of his swagger and irritating geezer mannerisms, I feel bad for him. He doesn’t know that I know, and I feel bad for that too. Maybe he shrugged it off, maybe he was drunk, perhaps I’m in a sentimental mood and crediting him with substance that he just doesn’t have. I would say so, based on the suit alone, but judging on appearances does nobody any credit.

I can’t remember whether he had kids.

I look around my fellow inmates on the first floor for the rest of the day, trying to figure out what tragedies are hidden with great care underneath their surfaces.

The Blue Italics Of Housekeeping

Some of you may be interested to know that I am one of the judges in a 100 Words competition going on on the internet at the moment being run by the enigmatic Her Melness of HerMelness Speaks... The brief is to write a 100 word letter to anybody you like and there are a choice of two prizes, either a ticket to Cybermummy - which seems to be the UK's equivalent of BlogHer and will probably be brilliant fun if you are a mum, a blogger and you live in the UK - or alternatively a £100 cash prize, which will definitely be brilliant fun whoever you are and wherever you live.

More detail about the competition can be found HERE and I really hope you consider entering. It's a great writing competition and I know a lot of people who pop by here are great writers. The competition closes at the end of Sunday 27th March UK time, so there's plenty of time to get your thinking caps on. I look forward to reading your entries, and do spread the word!

Two old friends

One of my favourite things about friends is the way that if you pick the right ones, and on many occasions in my life I have, every time you see them it feels like you only saw them yesterday and at the end of the evening you wish you could see them again tomorrow, even though it could be months between meetings. You pick up where you left off and the time you have is never enough, but it’s also the perfect amount. I want to be that kind of friend, though I tend to worry that I’m not.

I was due to see a friend exactly like that this weekend, and so Kelly and I did the things we only do when a friend is coming to stay. The bed in the spare room was made up, a towel folded at the foot hotel-style. A selection of interesting magazines was placed on the bedside table, and all sorts of clutter was hidden away in cupboards or – in extreme cases – thrown away. Books we will never read again (many of which we’re disappointed we read at all) were bagged up, along with clothes we no longer wear and CDs I bought many months ago that didn’t even seem like an especially good idea at the time. All those bags were deposited at charity shops across town, staffed by cheerful enthusiasts in some cases and dead-eyed volunteers in others.

We cleaned the flat; properly cleaned it, in the way neither of us can usually be bothered to. Surfaces which are never dusted were dusted and came up clean and I scrubbed the sink in the bathroom until it gleamed, something I never notice when someone else does it but which I automatically assume will register with a guest at my flat. Incense was burned everywhere, filling the flat with exotic smoke and reminding me of some of the beautiful places I have stayed in the past, in the heart of the Marais or in a flamenco guitarist’s elegant townhouse in Seville.

Tables were cleared of junk and bag after bag was hauled down to the recycling bins out the back. The hoover – only a slightly more frequent visitor to the flat than Halley’s Comet – growled around the carpets like a dog that hadn’t had walkies in days. Finally, it was done and we could sit back and admire our handiwork. The flat looked lovely; I could almost imagine myself living there on a regular basis, though I had to try hard not to think about the fact that most people’s homes probably looked like that all the time. Other people’s homes don’t have a scale replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa made entirely of bank statements, or a frying pan in a wok in a salad bowl in another salad bowl on the work surface because there is nowhere else for them to live.

My friend cancelled on me by text message as I loped through the sidestreets, late for my acupuncture appointment. He’d got all the way to the station before giving in to the vomiting bug that was determined to make other plans for his weekend. My sigh was almost audible over the music flooding into my headphones, but I knew I ought to see these things as an opportunity, even if it didn’t feel that way at the time. So I texted Kelly instead: Dave can’t make it and I have a table for two booked at LSQ2. Fancy joining me for lunch?

In the end, Kelly and I had a lovely relaxing Saturday doing a lot of the things we often do. Wandering round the bookshops trying to find that elusive third book in a three for two offer, a skill I’ve never managed properly to master which is almost certainly a metaphor for something important. Looking round the clothes shops wanting to be bowled over by a new acquisition, readying yourself for disappointment. Buying fish from the fishmonger on Smelly Alley, watching a boy young enough to be my son slashing swordfish into slices, weighing cod and haddock. Reading doesn’t have enough small independent places that love what they do and when you find them, you want to make sure they’ll still be trading in a month’s time. This won’t taste like anything you get in supermarkets, said the older man last time I went in. This time yesterday this bugger was still swimming around.

It would have been even more like the previous weekend except that the sun was everywhere for the first time in what felt like forever, making the red bricks shine and the shop windows shimmer. People bustling from A to B kept getting caught in shafts of it and looking confused: underprepared and overdressed. When we went into town again for lunch the following day I cast my eye over the tables out on the pavement, all empty, all waiting for the first person to sit down. I’ve always fancied being that person, the one who starts a trend, the tentative clap that becomes an ovation.

”Shall we sit outside?”

“No way! It’s too cold.”

“But it’s not going to be too cold for too much longer, is it?”

Kelly smiled.

”No, not for too much longer.”

So after all that fuss and tidying I did spend the weekend with a friend that I hadn’t seen in ages, and I think he came along and brightened the world just when I really needed him to. Things look different in sunshine, the world is more hopeful and there are more possibilities to everything. I should have learned that years ago back in Oxford, where the buildings could go from gloomy and oppressive to warm and welcoming just by turning up that dial. And best of all, the return of the sun signals something else; that this week won’t necessarily be like last week, and that next week might be different too. After the last few weeks, stuck in a tunnel, obsessed with the little things and convinced they will never change, I badly needed to be reminded of that. I’m glad it happened, even if it was thanks to the friend I wasn’t expecting rather than the one I tidied my flat for. I hope he comes back soon. He can stay as long as he likes.

A world without edges

Kelly and I part company in the waiting room and they take me through to fill out forms on my own. They want to know all sorts of things about me before they start what I am repeatedly told is an innocuous procedure. I spend ten minutes categorically denying that I have a heart condition, false teeth, glaucoma and all kinds of other health problems. I suppose technically speaking it should be reassuring. They don’t ask me “are you shitting yourself?” - which is a shame, because I definitely know what the answer would be to that. Even so, I still feel like volunteering this information in response to every question, instead of answering it.

Next they take my blood pressure.

"It’s perfectly normal." says the nurse with an easy smile. "It’s nice to be normal sometimes, isn’t it?"

She seems to have hit the nail on the head but I come out with a bland pleasantry in response, fighting back the urge instead to say Chance would be a fine thing. I’m shitting myself here. Even if I had it wouldn’t have made any difference. There wasn’t a tick box on her form for temporary metaphorical incontinence; I know, I checked.

My consultant ambles through with a sheaf of notes under one arm and heads for the theatre. She’s a big, friendly lady, the sort you might choose as an aunt if you had a say in that kind of thing. Hunched and fidgeting in the armchair I can hear her voice and the nurses’ voices carry down the corridor as they talk about their mornings and discuss getting the tea in. "I woke up in the middle of the night, which is unlike me" says my consultant and, not for the first time, I worry about her passing a tube down my throat. She goes on. "They seem to be all gastros and no colons on the list lately."

Funny how the short distance down a corridor can shift perspective so drastically. This is the biggest event in my week, I have been worrying about it for hours, but for them I’m just the first of four names on a to do list for the afternoon. It makes me think about all the things on my to do list every day that aren’t that important to me but might matter to other people, but only momentarily, because it’s all about me. There aren’t going to be any epiphanies today, I don’t have enough anxiety left in me for one of those.

They usher me into the room and I slip off my boots. "They’re even bigger than your feet!" says the consultant, and I respond "Only just", too nervous to realise that the whole discussion makes no sense at all. Of course your shoes are bigger than your feet, if they weren’t you would never buy them. Maybe this is how she puts people at their ease.

I’m sure this is the same room where I had this procedure a few months ago. Just like last time they get me to sit on the bed and put an unflattering blue bib on me before getting me to lie on my left side with my knees slightly raised. Just like last time they put a monitor on my finger. But this isn’t like last time, because Kelly isn’t sitting in the corner, looking on worried, staring at the back of my head. I feel lonely, again, and hope she is thinking about me. There is, however, another way that this time is different from the last.

"You’ll just feel a small scratch." she says, rubbing the back of my hand, "Sweaty palms and nice big veins, just how I like it."

I don’t remember anything after that except coming round flat on my back in another room, with no idea how long I’ve been there. The nurse comes in and I can dimly make out her face. For a second I worry that I really am out of it, and then I remember that they took my glasses off. There’s no panic, anyway, everything is moving far too slowly for panic.

"Don’t try sitting up yet, I’ll come through in about fifteen minutes and fix you a hot drink."

The next time she comes through might be fifteen minutes later, it could be three hours, I couldn’t say with any confidence at all. They wheel another trolley in alongside me and park it the other side of a curtain, the second person on the to do list. We have a long, cordial conversation which I’m pretty sure that within minutes neither of us can remember. Then the nurse comes through and takes my order for tea; three sugars, I decide, because I’m convinced that I’ve earned them. Then the crucial bit of becoming human again - she reaches under the trolley, hands me my glasses and the world slowly comes back into focus.

They take me through to the other room, where Kelly is sitting desperately trying to wring another five minutes out of a magazine which has run out of mileage. She looks up and there is a flash of recognition. Relief, too, I’m not sure which of us is more relieved. It feels like I haven’t seen her in ages. But I can’t touch her until we’ve concluded the rest of the formal business, which hurts more than the procedure did.

Later on I realise that although the world is in focus, it’s not entirely so. The edges of everything are nicely blurry, or maybe there aren’t edges at all. We walk into town to do a spot of shopping and I feel a bit like I am floating through a painting, or a dream. I am unfazed by everything; I imagine some people don’t need a sedative to feel like this a lot of the time, and how I envy them. But it’s nice to visit such a different place from my world, if only to feel as if it’s possible. Maybe one day I could even aspire to live there, some of the time at least.

The next day I am back in the office, telling everybody how much fun it was to be knocked out. One of my suppliers is waiting in reception for me and when I go down and collect him I shake his hand, genuinely pleased to see him. Then I get something like a flashback.

"I phoned you yesterday to confirm it was okay to come in today, didn’t I?"

"Yes, you did." He gives me a sympathetic grin.

"I hope I made sense. I’d been sedated, you see."

His grin broadens into a beautiful, unforced smile.

"You told me that. You sounded as pissed as a fart mate, I thought you’d had about four pints of Old Speckled Hen."