so this is the future

Instead of remaining in 2007, bits of which I liked, I decided to go forward along with everyone else into 2008, implausibly futuristic as it sounds. A party at our house sealed the deal. Our preparations were few: we laid on some nibbles and sexed the toilets. The gents’ downstairs was designated by a close-up photograph of a crushed wasp; a flower served to illustrate the ladies’. After the three of us had spent quite a long time sitting around staring at crisps, people began to arrive.

Unlike last year, there was no nudity and I did not experience missing time. After a while people started asking me to make cocktails for them, a sure sign that they were very drunk. Nobody remembers what these things taste like but they are invariably blue. There were no casualties except for Rhys, who had been suffering anyway from some sort of virus. I encouraged him to down a shot, saying that it would ‘settle his stomach’, although in fact his stomach was not in the least pacified. It was outraged. It dragged him out of the room and proceeded to beat him up in the downstairs toilet while we all stood outside laughing, to make him feel less alone.

The next day I had a new experience. No, nothing like that. I played a ‘computer game’. Actually not for the first time ever, but not far off. Dave and Helen and Paul Jones were in the living room battling this enormous demon with a mouth in its belly that belched fireballs. The sacred controls were handed to me, and in spite of only pressing buttons randomly (and by no means all the buttons available to me) I was mysteriously able to defeat the monster… one time out of about forty. Still, I’d expected to be turning lazy somersaults in the air; or running off to investigate a distant land mass, as would no doubt have happened in ‘real life’. ‘You’ve done this before’, said Paul. I agreed that I had pressed buttons before, ‘but probably not this quickly.’