vote twinkle

I got up on Saturday and looked out of my bedroom window. There was housemate Dave, collapsed on the lawn, looking like he could well be dead. Emergency reflexes kicked in: I reached for my camera. Of course he wasn’t dead, he was only sleeping off the enormous amount of vodka he’d consumed with Mat the night before (and he’d sensibly thought to put his coat on). Luckily the neighbours didn’t seem to be in. I wasn’t going to have to come up with some ‘innocent’ explanation (‘He’s been on very strong antibiotics.’ - well, he has.) The next thing I hear he’s giving up his job. I assumed that this was something that emerged out of his experiences in the wild, but he denies this.

So now I’ll be the only one in the house with a proper job. Except it isn’t even a proper job - and it’s changing. On Friday we were awaiting an e-mail to tell us that HMV/Waterstone’s are definitely taking over. I joked that when we restarted the computer the screen would go black and a big ‘W’ would materialise in the middle of it, to eerie music. But no word came at all. Now I’ve got a week off, so by the time I return they’ll all be in black, brain implants already fitted.

What to do with my week off? Even my days off are worryingly directionless. I am becoming far too involved in the children’s programmes I turn on first thing in the morning. The other day a cat called Twinkle was upset because her friend, Forrest, wouldn’t dance with her. ‘Of course he won’t dance with you’, said the smug (human) presenter. ‘He’s a bookcase.’ I couldn’t help feeling that Twinkle had a point. A talking bookcase with eyes, who’s friends with a talking cat, is not to be judged like any other bookcase. Maybe the macarena is out of the question, but surely a sedate waltz would not be beyond the pale? When I find myself shouting 'Twinkle's right!' at the screen, that's when I wonder if I'm really making progress.