high concept

Monday Mat was over-excited about going to see Snakes On A Plane. Virtually everything he said was a variation on the title, inspired by whatever he happened to be doing, or looking at, at that particular moment. ‘Socks in a washing-machine!’ ‘Moths on a wall!’ I hoped that actually seeing the movie would calm him down and, after a while, it did. Not that he was disappointed. He could only have been disappointed by the movie (whose tagline should have read: Snakes! On a plane!) if it had not featured a plane with snakes on it. And it did. The villain came up with this novel method of assassinating a key witness after ‘exhausting every other option’. How many options do you have to exhaust before you end up with snakes on a plane? Ask Mat.

I was back at work this week. All the new systems are in, so we are forced to adjust to their little quirks. There do not seem to be quite as many wires as there were in Oxford Street. There, all the vital machinery is kept in the ‘EPOS room’, a space with the sacred air of a chapel, whose peace and quiet is interrupted only by staff kneeling down in front of the machines to replace back-up tapes (and give thanks if it feels appropriate). For some reason I was also reminded of Davros’ laboratory in Genesis of the Daleks, a Doctor Who episode of my youth. Though we have been threatened with uniforms, chips have not yet been implanted in our brains. Things would be easier if they had been.

In Sam’s on Saturday, Mat was dancing with such abandon that a girl asked him if he’d sell her pills. Briefly, he considered this as a career option ('Pills on a dancefloor!'), until I pointed out that his inability to talk to strangers might effectively rule this out. He would only be able to sell to friends and family, and he’d never do that because he ‘doesn’t approve’ of ecstasy use. I was reminded of this on a visit home today when my seventy-nine year old aunt said: ‘I could do with some e’s’. We were playing scrabble.