His master's voice calling...

The shop I work in was just refitted. We were there for the last week, helping to reassemble it. Throughout the first day we had the builders’ choice of music: terrible 80’s soft rock anthems, all of which sounded familiar, though I couldn’t have named a single one. Next day Sam brought the Shins and the Magic Numbers in. Or, to be more precise, CD’s by these bands. It was an improvement, and I got to ruin yet more people’s enjoyment of the recent Magic Numbers single by pointing out that it sounds like Only Fools And Horses at the beginning.

The door was left open a lot of the time, so people - usually elderly - wandered in, oblivious to the workmen and the empty shelves. When you pointed out their mistake it was like you’d woken them from a dream. One old American guy had sunglasses so huge they made him look like he was wearing a virtual reality headset - which perhaps accounts for his assumption that it was business as usual. ‘Looking good’, he said of the shop, but who knows what he was seeing? Goblins with eight arms probably.

We could be having to do it all again soon, since HMV/Waterstone’s may be taking us over. There’s panic on the intranet. Talk of ‘going over to the Dark Side’. The level of hysteria is such that people are actually suggesting that every employee give up a day’s wages to help keep the chain in the hands of its founder, James Heneage. Well call me old-fashioned, but I kind of like the tradition which dictates that companies pay you (however little) to work for them. Let’s not reverse that trend.

Looking on the bright side though, we could all soon be annihilated by a nuclear blast anyway. IRAN RAISES NUCLEAR STAKES, says a headline in the Mail. ‘Nuclear stakes’? What are they? They sound quite primitive, but then, they are nuclear… I think we should be worried.